FROM HERE TO UTURNITY
—Intentionally left [ ]
At an undetermined hour, still unknown. When it loses its blood.
What prompts it to action?
All things being equal:
A network of agents w/ agendas buried deep. Sleeping dogs create the Author from unremembered dreams. To discover the X that marks the buried T=bone. Woofwoof! Awpawp! If a dog=mind cld speak we wld not understand it. (If a mind cld speak we wld not understand it!) Says the infant Author in his crib: Is that a werewolf watching on the windowledge? Switch on the light, roll up the shutters. In its narrow barbedwire enclosure, mosaic’d with effluent, a man=mastiff stalks back & forth, keening. How long, before the beast drowns in it?
Que sera.
Well.
All the futures I’ve known belonged to others.
This music crept through the disconcerted plumbing. A voice, a song. Many foundations stand one upon another in the subsiding clay. Like air escaping the lungs postmortem. Vibrating the oesophagus. Passing the lips in all essential respects the way verbs nouns adjectives do. A summoning of undergods. To selfresurrect in the sway of Pluto=dogstar=transit. Synonyms like patience, divorce: infants switched at birth. Frequency, wavelength. Pitch, as in soot all over the walls, floor, ceilings, stairs. Greasestains, as in the places where the body. Dreck.
Yes & you had to wash it all off, the way they wash a corpse, but as an afterthought, once they’d already shunted it into the oven & had to reverse it out again, tout=de=suite, so as not to offend G.O.D.
Do the voices know what they’re saying?
The Author stares at the blank wall, preternaturally ill.
Blank but not uniformly.
The Author stares blank at the
On it his eyes write: THIS HOUSE HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN. THIS HOUSE HAS A MINE OF ITS OWN. THIS HOUSE HAS A MY OF ITS OWN. THIS HOUSE HAS A MMM OF ITS OWN. THIS HOUSE HAS A
Voices demand to know what’s at the root of all his nonsense.
He digs, he digs, he digs. Through things unseen, under cloak of. Projects himself, claw=by=claw, tooth=by=jowl, miles under, interring, disinterring, sifting for evidence, groping in the dark, for an igneous braille to surge into landform, something prisoned within it, more ancient still. Exposed to the cold night air of the Late Holocene, it groans. It wld for millennia strain to free its tongue, to speak, but only in koans, prophetic riddles, divinatory gibberish. A megalith to dial the moonsun. The sidereal monsoon. To magnetise the poles. To monumentalise the pales. Piled about w/ mammoth tusks. Ivory towers in heavenly glow. Till once more the sacred fire, once more oblivion, doused in quicklime & cemented into the base of a sacrificial altarstone, soaked w/ guts of beast & fowl.
The prisoned thing bides its time.
An omphalos.
A ditch. A wall. A city.
A pox.
Archaeology deduces a burial platform sunk below its fortifications. On this spot, by an unrevealed atavism, the ritual sacrifices are re=enacted. Burnings. Drownings. Stakings. Stonings. Amputations. Lynchings. Victims bound in wolfpelts. Wolfclaws. Wolves’ heads. Death by metonymy, by mimesis. Here the slaves of dialectic erected their gibbets, their pillories. Stone dramaturgical wolfmasks. Romulus sucking a shewolf’s teat. A scapegoat on a tether. Scarecrow on a cross. Here the stigmata. Here the ceremony of the hands. Always upon a full moon, or new moon, or solar eclipse. Observe, the relics, where once true flesh hung on view. This chastisement is referred to in the codex as publication. From the galleries above, the dialecticians had, by these exalted instruments, forecast: weather, harvest, population increase, epidemic.
Cld the walls erected on this spot still feel their pain?
The floor beneath the Author’s feet is sticky & rough. The furniture pants. He wakes with saliva on his fingers. Hair on his tongue.
In the primitive dialect of the place, it is called the House of Hands.
IGNEOUS AT A DEPTH BENEATH THE EARTH
—Once again that same dog barking in yr dream
The picture is of a highwire artist, after the last world war (before this one?), Dresden, the Marienkirche, walking a tightrope over bombed=out ruins. Balanced upon the abyss of an abyss. There’s nowhere to fall that hasn’t itself already fallen. A flash on the instrument panel & the timemachine lurches into the first days of Kyiv. Déjà vu. “Like a death that’s already been died.” From zero by erupting increments. A tightrope’s parabola. History, making up for lost time. Desolation’s angelus novus. The highwire artist, face turned to the camera’s fourth wall, as if contemplating the juggernaut in the rearview mirror. To fall wld imply evitable destinies, but the walker is required to walk upon the apocalypse with an infinite poise. She herself is the calm of the storm blowing out of Paradise.
—The exponent of power to which a base must be raised to yield a given
In his 50th year the Author elected exile but not for the first time. He flees to an Iberian village & takes up residence in a ruined house. He calls it Casa das Mãos. His only remaining ambition is to be buried under a mango tree. There are no mango trees in the village, so first he must grow one. He plants a seed in a pot on the roof of Casa das Mãos – the House of Hands. Perhaps one day this grave, that is not yet a grave, will appear as a point of interest on an obscure traveller’s itinerary, annotated w/ a question mark. In death, as in life, the Author hoped to be nothing less than ambiguous, inaccessible. The mango seed, however, rots in the accursèd soil.
—Night was very much the moon
Risen upon this wide Iberian plain, the heat & dust swiftly morphs to cinemascope & giant flametrees turning cumulae to a curtain of velveteen red, trailing over the big screen from celluloid pricked & maculated, fluttering & unspooling onto a hundred sudden limelights, as white phosphor rains slo=mo from a blackout sky like Rimbaud’s jism, as there, naked on a wire, in the melting spotlight, dances the mad insomniac Moonman over the roof of his solitude.
—Cut out a fragment of the Saturn V stage=1 enginesound & repeat at a different pitch
In me, then away. The seagulleaters, the seagullimitators. I begin a new career as Innertationist. Where does the information for this come from? You sit in the dark, in a frozen basement, for weeks, waiting for the enemy to depart. This is represented by a. blackspace? b. blankspace? c. backspace? d. brokenspace? All variables have at least this in common. For example, let us suppose interiormonologue doesn’t exist. Theatre syndrome. An actor sits on a blacked=out stage & says nothing: discuss. Or: entropy is the information required to describe (all the possible states of) this nonsystem? Let us suppose an actor. Let us suppose a stage. Let us suppose darkness. Let us suppose the saying of nothing. Plot on a graph.
—A door that has been heard closing may times
The Author stares into his heteroscope. Bluegreen algal mist swirls into runic filigree. Like flying a cement mixer straight into the eye of a hurricane. Once enough to cancel. X marks the spot, bang on the fortune cookie. Those are acid=trips that were his eyes. Big sky open like time. Good news in derivatives. Future, silent night.
—Wit’s end
Magpie, azurewinged, arcs & twists midflight, flips, turnsabout, swoops under a fountain, pulls a manic, a zany, a cheeky, a sneaky, zaps in & out of foliage, attracts the unwanted attention of peevish sparrows, hustled posthaste under eaves, squawked behind sunshades, screeched among scaffolds, stealthing back by indirections numerous as they are nebulous, somersaults into a pond to flapping exultations of rainy pigeonwings & guano & doggy hysterias before (a mere blink of eye) hightailing it out of there in a berserk blueblack streak.
—The House of Hands
“World is strange. For example, y’re building a house w/ yr hands?” Does the Author dream this? Hallucinate, rather? The voices coming more frequently now. From anywhere, anything. A buzzing lightfixture. A piece of rubbish windblown in the street. A mosquito’s whine. A nightwalker hoiking an oyster onto the cobblestones. Things in the mist that ooze under the blinds. Because even in this heat mists roil off the plain, stinking of agribusiness & indeterminate effluents. Each a more or less abstract companion in gibberish. “Strange is a word. Am I the house? What is a hand?” The Author lies there inside his sleep, inside his building=apparatus, surrounded by other apparatuses: time=apparatuses, talk=apparatus, thought=apparatuses. None of them are any help. The Author wants to call out to them but is only permitted to do so in signlanguage.
—Let machines be machines!
Old wrong patterns don’t answer, dumb angel. Now that telephone locomotives make a koan of a cock’s crow & decipherable intestine. This wyrd sister was right! This guildered cave lies blackening his path. A puling tangle of worts be thy name, thane kindred doom, toad=swill be numb, under Erd as it is in Hymnland. For his sins he’s rebuilding the room his father’s house forgot, brick by brac, naked hand by gnarled fist. An exnihil’d portaloo sunk in Portogallo. Mirror murdered on the floor: You think our feartunes cld be more differend? Ring out the bailiffs! Hail me hearties, an arm=brace of gratulas, a grating spatula, a confected copula, what you will! Draw the short sword & pin the prize on the doughnut. Our little nachtspiel. A void for the weary, wary evade, airy away, aye aye, sleepy eye, too tide, knot I, man of string, here lies.
—Exosolar planetary observations
The House of Hands stands w/ its feet in archaeology & its head in an asbestos dunny perched above the roof – place of mysterious ritual festooned w/ antique coprolite, rustbuckets, shivered timbers, bootlegged plaster=of=GaiParis, mouldy satellite dishes, disintegrated hundreds&thousands of multicoloured plastic clothespegconfetti, rotten woodworm burrows, blasted polystyrene beanbagballs, relics of authentic Rube Goldberg plumbing, chairs with no seats, windowless panes & painless windows all (need we say?) portending views of unparalleled pricelessness. (For additional etceteras pls refer to catalogue.)
—Retirement’s the pestcontroller who comes when the game’s up
Three times a day the white van crawled the street w/ its radar hunting for croakers. And like the Man says, they never go away emptyhanded.
—Full=fathom
Here comes the redeyed banshee, a migraine stacked in the sky. Tempestuous smoke&mirror contraption. Magic lantern at fag=end of eyemind, maze=marooned, where impotent revenge ravishes neurotic redemption in menageries of prurience, pedantry & paedophilia. See moody Hieronymo drown his mad books againe! (They had to be good for something, fished out & reused like an unflappable prophylactic.) He tells himself he’s not that madman. Not that dramatis personae, of mummers, mockers, professional mourners. Not the dead Author attending his own wake. Not the doornail. The dodo. The dog my father’s wreck. They’ve plagiarised the very grave out of which he walked, like a piece of airless tupperware stuffed w/ gadflies. Oh what’s the matter, ol’ chum? Can’t breathe? Look, look! Those are flies that were his words!
—Lights! Cameras! Action!
Special Operation “Z” commences w/ a dose of elephant tranquilliser administered not to the patient (declared DOA) but to the assembled team of “Medical Observers.” Machine-sewn grey suits w/ folded umbrellas. A tone of utmost seriousness to be maintained at all times. The first scalpel incision is greeted w/ subdued applause. Hands in gloves itch to reach into the inviting corpse. Yet banality has no place in the True Science. The Observers put on their black glasses. Now they’re Wagner zombies riding out of a nuclear sunrise on armourplated Valkyries. Mission: to detonate the timeswitch. “Cld do this one blindfold!” Call it Zeitgeist, a precision strike, the first in an infinite series. Getting to the crux of the matter required a different M.O. “Nurse, hand me that triple bypass!” The anaesthetist slips & Doctor Z turns helplessly limp, like a Zorro turned to a zero. The pile of blood&guts on the operating table gets up & laughs. The Observers were a paradox. That was the entire movie.
—Brand upon the brain
In his mind, the Author is an inverted silhouette in a photogram, staring into the blinding heat. An atomic afterimage. A retinal scar imprinting itself on everything it “sees,” harassed by an everinsistent phantom light. Even when the Author sticks his head in a tub of ice, the image is still there, generating parodies of itself. A prompt appears at the end of each session, w/ the words: “Confirm all instances of: Evolution was their bitch.”
—Meat of the black sow
For weeks now, perhaps months, they’ve been saying the same thing over & over. The reference to a future point in time that (it shld’ve been obvious from the start) is characterised solely by the fact that it can never be arrived at, that it lies on a timeline excluded from every possible present. The time of the impossible, then. But only if the impossible can be said, figuratively or literally, to take place, to have a place to take. That is to say, in time. If the essence of the impossible is not impossibility itself. An impossible time. For example, the opposite of entropy. The miracle of restoration, of restitution, of resurrection. This evening the moon lies huge & low, pregnant w/ reflected light only minutes old soon to die in the surveilling retina. As indiscriminately as it devours the 16,000=year=old photons of Cassiopeia. Y’d want to be able to savour the stuff, like a vampyr slopping down vintage bloodlines. Because of that first anachronous photosynthesis. Refractions in a primordial swamp. A clay crystal perturbed by otherworldly light. A resonance, an evolver.
SAGITARIUS=A
—Pluto Pup Circle Jerk
Above the stairhead in the House of Hands is an image of the ninth planet scored into the plaster, an amalgam of mildew, soot, disintegration, elemental violence, the radius of a missing clock left like a stain, a shadow upon the dismal void of spacetime, a crustose placodioid growthform radiating outward from centre to heliopause, in the sheer synecdoche of it. The Author takes this as a sign. Mystical algebra. It defies erasure. And if they xrayed it wld some hidden illicit artefact come to light? The maw of a guillotine perhaps? Or a portal into the 4th dimension? Day after day it stares out blankly at him like an eye cauterised by the light. Still it “watches.” He feels its mute presence exercise a subtle but definite influence over his mind. Familiar objects appear unreal, but only figuratively so. He begins to doubt even his own being, supposing himself a kind of metaphor whose connotations are opaque. Only the hole in the wall possesses a concrete existence. Time & again in his dreams, the Author, lying in his monk’s cell beneath the stairs, sees himself running up the staircase & diving through the wall, as into water, vanishing & not coming back. But the dream doesn’t end there. Trapped in sleep, he’s made to inhabit that not=coming=back for all the long grey hours of night, till dawn & mosquitoes prick the body in its bloody cerements awake. And each time the dream recurs, he’s certain of this, something that was there in the house goes missing. A ring. A pen. A chair. A door. Search as he might, they never turn up.
—Dr Braindeath says, Have you brushed yr teeth today?
The planet spins away into the dark side of orbital geometries & afterwards nothing but a pixel, a pale grey dot.
—This elusive coordinate was the jumping=off point for their Special Operation
Something gets rotated out of the frame, the particular for the universal. About suffering, it was necessary to speak as if the sum of all entropies were an icecream van coming round the corner, w/ a tinny polka wafting ahead of it. Or a lingering munition, hovering on the edge of an impregnability, ready to prove otherwise when least expected. We see us as an 8=eyed tarantula making composites of innerspace from starved auras of mildewed prescience: look, it says, there’s more to anything than what can be seen. An old war movie replays the same characters in the same scenes only their names have changed & does this mean we now must doubt their motives when before everything was black & white? Who’s the Nazi & who the anaesthetist? There are always more useful idiots than any situation requires, producing surplus value. If one were to say that hell exists & give it a location, is this only to show humxn tenacity is not a thing to be discounted lightly?
—In our father’s hearse there are many
Why even go through the motions of pretending?
Today was a good day for meat on hooks
& flies in dark corners
& the radiating tumorous state of mind.
Hurrah for our little imperium of infinitesimal inertias –
four rooms & two stairs
to play at dialectics & irreversibles.
A late afternoon slant of sunlight
sends the shadows zeroing across walls of
impregnable whitewash. There are floors
that come unglued the instant you set foot,
some that come alive, some stone dead –
what inchoate archaeologies lie buried?
Concrete, like facts, turns eventually to dust
but not as soon as you do.
Dear self, all yr terrible wishes are
granted – let time be.
And don’t forget to turn out the lights.
—A child’s toy panopticon
The Innertationist steals the innerlives of people w/out their ever knowing, leaving only husks of inauthenticity. One wronglydirected glance at the Innertationist’s mirror & ZORK! their brain’s floating in a canopic jar on a roach hotel basement shelf somewhere in subGolemgrad w/ wires & electrodes bleakly pulsing. Next are the lymph nodes, then go the kidneys, lungs, spleen, liver. The entire nervous system gets sucked through the mirror. Even the gonads, just a pair of glassine shells where once they were. Close yr eyes & the horror only becomes more visible. Crows, sirens. Look again. Radioactive fireflies hiss against a rushed backdrop, the seams still visible, wet paint dripping onto the boards. Cue card: TIME EXISTS ONLY BECAUSE THERE ARE CLOCKS. Means: thus begins the true acct of my demise. Means: one instant as good as any other. Means: forget me. Satellites count the bodies lying on the road & the road is time. Passing. Wld you have preferred roses? (Eros is eros is eros!) Or a different war? Sarajevo. Welcome to Sarajevo! they cried. The familiar, like going home to the monster under the bed. But the nightmare doesn’t recur because you want it to.
—Stepping off a cliff (worth it just to see?)
That was the 100,000=dollar question: wld he sink or swim? Well it was a long way down long before you started falling, kid.
—Hello I have something you need
& so they shot him in the head before he ever got the chance to do it himself. Preventative measures. The alternative was a human barrage=balloon. A wall might be solid concrete but under the influence of a sufficient number of firing squads – get my drift? We perch on rooftops contemplating chimneys wafting charred meat. Vapours of all final repasts ever offered in this world, to torment the senses of the next. If y’re hedging yr bets, I’d recommend the salad. One nuclear physicist to another, Seems like they’ve only got halflives in this one. Thank you. & now here’s a little piece I picked up in Tharsus Rise, it’s called, well who on Earth cares what it’s called when it’s only the groove that matters? Hit it!
—Pleading guilty came w/ a nondisclosure clause
Their stories went on for thousands of pages but in the end even they abandoned you.
CTRL=Z
—Selfportrait, no rearview mirror
Objects of innermost distance, in ruthless counteraction: a bouquet of cactus flowers arranged on a broken slab of concrete, where a piece of twisted re=enforcing makes the letter Z. It cld mean anything or nothing, a shapeshifter, a snake, an alphabet come to a deadend. Call it an altarpiece for the sacrifice of innocents, to festoon w/ innards of fowl & beast. Auguries of working intestine. How many stomachs need to be turned for Mars to go hungry at last? “Tastes like Victory!” Three licks of a blade: ЗА ПОБЕДУ. Painted white on the detached turret of a charred T=72 it becomes the ubiquitous icon of a night that grows darker as dawn slips further away. A night as black as the sands of Iwo Jima, as Don rivermud. In its shadow you are the hand that gropes for a lightswitch, that shields the eye, that pushes aside the rubble, that binds the wound, that stirs the cooking pot, that winds the wick of the Molotov around the bottle’s neck. Everything was burning. There was no water to put out the fires. Everything was just left to burn to the ground.
—Hilbert’s ghost
Mind isn’t a silent place. Down under the floor they’re hacking up their lungs. In the basements, the bunkers. Reason overcome by pneumonia, shivers & sweats & slowly asphyxiates. Plague=sores the sign of G.O.D. upon them. Tomorrow or the day after, who’ll come to unbury? All their dreams are of resurrectionists. To survive y’d have to be mad.
—All of them are you, those people
This video includes scenes of graphic violence. Brocaded circuitboards, like insects or bacteria.Being dead in literature as opposed to being dead in real=life. Something that happened once, of which there remains not a trace, not even the shadow of a memory. An acid borealis of torrential downpour. A plaguepit beneath the pavingstones. Slaying the savage animals of precedent. Q: Is today a well day? (A: No, today is not a well day.) This is symbolised by the donning of masks. Theatre being a magnifying lens turned insideout. Hark through yon window the bluehaired boy watching steadily from behind plateglass. Hornrims, nametag, labcoat. Another tour of the clock, inside the detention=industrial complex. It was less a theme than a preoccupation, you cldn’t make an entire script out of it. Their eyes after tears wiped away red like plastic vaginas. Someone will have to inherit this embarrassing wreck. Megalomania knows no limits, e.g. fake ancestor portraits hung on the moon. Why countdown when you can just as logically countup? Were they expecting to go straight to hell for the crimes they were about to commit? & in full view of history?
—Human hours spent continuing
Nothing ends but only “ceases to become.” Geolocated to a hole in the ground, deep enough to be buried upright. But the sun rose & children in buses sang at the head of the orc convoys. Abductees. Human shields. Hector=Achilles. Were this Troy, how wld the blind hirelings sing it? Eyeless in Gaza at the mill w/ slaves. Flow vile jelly, the policeman said.
—Taliban on Setebos
“May the red plague rid you for learning us yr language…”
—A beaker of formalin a day, keeps the vampyr away
Something rolls over yr grave, they’re spreading out humxn rugs for a beggar’s banquet, pouring the overproof. Atmospheric rivers, picturesque this time of year. Living out of a bucket. Lying at the bottom of a wall. At the bottom of a well. How to reconstruct air to breathe? A pair of lungs? A mouth? Like a toothpaste tube & nothing coming out. & still you squeeze. & squeeze. & squeeze.
—This night, dreams come crawling over needles & broken glass
No need to be alarmed the White Rabbit said but a clock doesn’t measure anything. Armed only w/ a can=opener, Alice winds back the armour plating & finds the cooked sardines.
—Negative quasiprobabilities
Shooting the hermeneutic messenger, because educated not to bite. Civilisation makes great strides in the art of carnage. For every abstract raining from the sky, a thousand raped particulars. Overspilling the barriers. Drivel saliva spit drool slime. A looted Caravaggio, a washingmachine.
—G.O.D.’s forensic eye, datablind
“Our victorious army retreated to predetermined positions.” Highways choked w/ scrap metal. Pillaged junk. Washingmachines. Ration packs. Discarded uniforms. Rifles. Murdered civilians. Just the plain unsalted truth doused w/ a sunny disposition. Cloudflare. Spudeye. Memories from prehumxn times scaled to forget you not. Another April Fool w/ hands tied (behind back). Rope (around neck). Dumped (in a well). Bodies excavated from playground sandpits. A body twisted around a bicycle frame. Naked bodies piled halfburned by the roadside. Bodies mined with IEDs. A whole May Day procession. Image after image after image after image. Shapeshifting in mind’s eye. Observe–orientate–decide–act. Nothing is sacred here. (Everything is scarred here.) Nothing safe. Even after the guilty have all slithered away on their belly=fat through the swamps. Through the radioactive mud.
—A museum floating in space
They come in dreams like glowworms from perforated intestine. The word acrid. Acid rain falling down. Incendiary heat. Arid. We sing the electric beat of the AirDefenceSystems. Arclight through depressions where sunlight never shines. Shadows within shadows.
A CIRCLE HAS 4 CORNERS
—Form follows dysfunction
The House of Hands isn’t cubic but a manifold, skewed to subcontours of igneous rock, runnel, ditch, latrine, road, rampart & other telltale cumulae of all the as=yet unnamed unexumed protognomic prequels to Mousterian, Menhirite, Aurignac, Chalcolith, Iberocelt, Phoenician, Roman, Jew, Visigoth, Moor, Mason & Mariolator, armed w/ setsquare, pillory & crutch, Magellenic cloudconquerors, compulsive eaters of dried & salted cod, trismagistic townplanners w/ a hatchet to bury, turpitudinous treasurehunters, resurrection men bearing grudges, pennyante peninsular Estado Novistas, Saramago’d telenovelistas, endoftheroad peddlers of patrimonial pied=à=terres, flybynight fadistas, unctuous archaeologists hawking prehistoric brickbats from dank postmillennial bargain basements & all the superfluous etceteras of a backwater sliding w/ incremental yet awesome ineluctability down the anthropocenic plughole, previewed by elementary deduction from architectural first principles, plate tectonics & a plumbob’s perturbed parabola pinned to a precariously erstwhile doorpost: ta=da!
—To gut a fish
Metaphor’s calvary was the dripping kitchen tap, the leaky toilet, the aromatic drain, the asbestos sifting down through ceiling slats, the incontinent plumbing, the glue peeling from floorboards, the slugs drooling up the walls, the cracked windowpanes, the soot blowing down through the chimney, the woodworm decimating the stairs, the tonedeaf mosquito, the blowfly’s maggots on yr reading glasses, the rust in the water, the crumbling plaster, the mould in the books, the lunatic banging on the frontdoor for hours on end demanding to be let in or he’ll burn & burn & burn the house down.
—Blank TV signals of the mind
The bitten hand that fed, grabs the unsuspecting throat. Thought they were dealing w/ a dead dog, did they? G.O.D. liked to play rough then afterwards slip on the gladrags & take in a Hegelian floorshow. History’s full of downmarket versions of a demolition site. Blue moons & nights out on the tiles. Genies in bottles. Jasmine, Nightshade, Agathe Scarlet. One bad line cld send the entire entourage off a precipice. That special place in the heart, my dear colonoscopy. Is the future worth dying for or only the past? So much to look forward to & so little to breathe. (You fall but it isn’t air, just vapour of expired celluloid.) And all these days not realising a house, too, is built from pure allegory, climbing the straight staircase then the spiral staircase, contemplating the prospect from the stairhead, as if to be taken unaware were a tripartite labour in search of time. What artlessness! Every time the Author pretends to be alone & we, ghosts in the proverbial closet, obediently rattle our chains – now the cobwebbed stairs, now the lushly jungled terrace, now the plunge over the dilapidated balustrade, dragging his bonesack off the cobbles to scratch on the door, be let back in, like some automutilated Frankenstein, to set about the whole farrago again. Ecce homo! One red & one white flower behind either ear. Mad Caliban grin. An aerial for an Ariel. And does he prosper by these eternal returns? This affected, infected & sorely afflicted island=within=an=island he dwells as much within as upon? Is he, at last, the prophesied Noman? The nonentity ridiculously determined to make something of himself from a heap of discarded verbiage, always biting off more than he can chew but chewing nonetheless?
—Very=long baseline interferometry
Staring into a blackhole. The odds are stacked (it sees you but you only see an attenuated absence) (this is what L means when writing of the Other as locus of desire). Sliding down an infinitely long drain in the blink of an eye. Hunger doesn’t remain the same thing, eventually it even becomes its opposite. You puke you puke you puke you puke you puke. The sphincter of a compulsive emptying, coupled to a mouth that wants only to invert itself, consume itself, erupt into nova. Invention perversely turns to plagiaristic labours in order to say something truly original. But only if you believe in relics of the First Word. G.O.D. clearing His voice at the microphone, a piece of the true spit. The audience falls down laughing / in raptures / blown away / drunk on KoolAid. Why shld anything be reconciled w/ any other thing? Explaining how there are surfaces so different even adding a dimension won’t make them remotely the same. “Take a walk on the wild side” not what they meant? Today comparative tomorrow incompatible. Like a wheel that rolls spontaneously uphill. Oh how it rolls.
—& so G.O.D. became an Author of parafixional literature?
How do you think the creation of the universe went? An outpouring of purple prose? Or a constipated shit as long as G.O.D.’s arm? Ruptured corpuscles in the eyeballs? Sweat percolating through the fingernails? A desperate evacuation of most stubborn alien substance threatening to invade every atom of the divine being? Holy shit! Swooning into aeons=long blackout of unspeakable relief, perhaps G.O.D.’s own birth comparable but not in His memory, He’s always awoken alone in this morass of nothing. Aber jetzt, blood slowly returning to the cosmic cerebellum: it’s lights up on a new dawn, my friend. Looksee! Well not in His wildest conundrums cld G.O.D. on His own intellectual resources have conjured such a vista of purest verbular sewage, spiralling from His personal stinkhole. And there on the outer=rim of all that revolving dreck, revolting to behold, the very behemoth of his homunculine self, last possible thing in all of Tempus Edax he’d ever’ve wanted to clap eyes upon, howling in this wilderness of His involuntary making: Give us something to EAT! Give us something to DRINK! Give us something to FORNICATE with! Hahaha! What else was a deity to do, but pluck a despairing rib from His side & pierce His eardrums w/ it, mash His eyes to jelly, thrust it sideways down His oesophagus for good measure. GONE FISHING said the sign on the door. Measures only as drastic as the age that demands them, so you may think. Pays to maintain regular bowel movement, Doc drawls, fingering the semicolon at the end of his chin: intestine cancer number 2 in the Wise Guy snuff biz. Forget all that fancypants jazz, castor oil’s yer only man, Stan.
—The corner at the end of the universe
To the fakir who was standing naked beneath the streetlamp, the Author said: That’s quite some cock y’ve got there, brother. Fakir: Down on yr knees & worship, scum! Author: I don’t think I cld quite manage that, friend. Fakir: Revere my cock then turn around & prey to yr vermin god! Author: Well I’m an atheist, amigo, but thanks anyway. Fakir: Prey to Karl Marx then, but get sucking, the moment of great reckoning is about to come! Author: Hahaha. Fakir: Hahaha, indeed.
—& so the Author became a child’s acrostic?
How much is Descarte’s doggy in the window, woofwoof?
—Spyder spyder burning bright
An arachnid 8=ball view of all the years passed down by forebears obsessed w/ their virilities. Here stands priapic Time, horizon=shadowed, like finding a vector in a motion=blur. Whichever way the motor turns, its interaction with the other motor pushes it back in the opposite direction. Schismogenesis is pathological mirrorstage dialectic blahblahblah. (Die elektrische?) Were we, too, aliens in a previous life? (The arachnoid says: this is yr previous life.) Trying to get a fix on any salient datum is like hoping for a source of light to appear down a tunnel 4 billion miles long. Every image, he thinks, must have its threshold of resistance. If not equal & opposite, then at least a forensic bias to become visible in the beholden eye (because it knows). Thesis=antithesis. Their G.O.D. doesn’t require a reciprocator. QED: What it means in one dimension isn’t what it means in any other dimension.
—Optimal expanders in a spectral zero=gap
It’s shocking they exist. Holes overlapping holes. Each requires the use of strange techniques, not yet to navigate but merely define, observation requiring that you “pass through” to a surface both within the surface & enveloping it. The maintenance & defence of “supply lines.” If the coupling between modules is strong enough, the holes will start oscillating back & forth with increasing amplitude.
—Welcome to Vuvuzalem
Inside the spacetime brain where nothing’s possible, the missing genome is the one constantly looking over G.O.D.’s. shoulder, burlesquing creation. (Or, a case of putting the horse’s arse before the Kartoffelpuffer?)
—Time sifts galactic debris through cracked teeth
The view from the authorial cryopod is themed “reassuring.” Prior confirmation that the world is indeed set on that collision course. Recommended for you: Dial a Strapon Double Diva Ode to Joy. Humxnity will persist as long as the Swiss banking system. Today was another day. Another excuse. Or the same excuse infused w/ longevity. From Earth to Pluto in Gone With the Wind reruns. Biblical. Is crossing deep space in an aluminium can more, equal to, or less than walking on water? (If only G.O.D. cld see us now!) A telescope pointed back to the moment of conception. Oh how I’ve suffered blahblahblah. The pangs of birth, the puns of extinction. There’s an ugly little troll living in yr ear that won’t shut up & y’re to blame. Even when hunger gets the upper hand you still can’t bring yrself to eat it. Gnawing the fuselage, spacejunk, yr own arm. Reset & begin again. No matter how far the journey extends. No matter how black the night, encompassing everything.
—Every system is entangled w/ its environment
e.g. AI dreams of “Sartre & the mescaline crabs.”
—A day w/out behaviour=inhibitors wld be a day w/out evolution (whispering in yr brain)
D’you know where you’re going no I do not know where I’m going there are schedules itineraries punishment routines they send you to a place but this isn’t the place y’re destined to arrive at or unarrive at being the kind of situation you only end up (at) dead & death not sotospeak taking place as anything I or you will ever experience possessing no kind of presence as if to say death is in the House or here stands Death ladies & gents shot in the heart & buried in a town called Death at X latitude Y longitude approachable only through a terrain of switchbacks decoys deadends insurmountable escarpments & abysms impossible to traverse but not impossible to formulate a point=of=view on like the Schwarzchild beachhead bordering a blackhole yr shadow cld lie there for all eternity getting a tan while it only takes a fraction of no=time=at=all to vanish into oblivion but is that the same as saying y’re there if there’s no there inside a blackhole no inside literally or figuratively calling it Hell or the Arsehole of the Universe (a) doesn’t sidestep the problem (b) it’s possible to be all these things they’re just metaphors it doesn’t change that I’m dying from language because (c) to name is to make real & my whole existence up to this point has been imaginary (d) even the names are imaginary is there anything left to live for (e) if you can’t not live for it at the same time?
—De=extinction is a step away
Roll up yr sleeves there, kid, & show us yr life story. A cross wants only to be borne. Like a crowd wants only to see you bleed. Hitting the highs because they said he had the lowdown. (It’s a long way back to mama no matter who or what you believe in.) The physics of surface tension versus the optics of mirage. Like a ballistic Bach two=fisted glissando. Watch that motherfucker play!
—Burning the clock
Hot=headed on benzine, he’s the molotov rocking the Battleship Potemkin, the pram on the Odessa steps wired w/ an IED, the metallurgic troglodyte of Mariupol blasting manhole covers up the back=ends of Orcish tankers, the Ghost of Kyiv raining gelignited guano on their blistered heads.
—When you talk to me my mind’s an empty room
They named their pet elephant=in=the=room Mission Creep. The Creep, for short. It resembled a Max Ernst painting in zero gravitas. Constellations were named after cities bombed during the war. Wherever you looked the night=sky was just rubble. This was a form of nostalgia, making the unknown disarmingly unknowable. No=one was under any illusions they’d find life out there unless it was buried miles=deep in tempered steel. Had Carl Sagan been right they’d at least have an alibi for extinguishing their own species: the last thing anyone wanted was to meet themselves *out there*. This thought wld come back to haunt them. It was one thing to besiege a place, but how to besiege Time? There were novas of indiscriminate fire. The Creep sat there in the corner w/ a target pinned to its head. In the pressurised atmosphere, their shots rang hollow. The window of opportunity wasn’t infinite, as predicted, but a fleeting evocative moment, très impressioniste.
—Oldest visible thing
Laughing in their pyjamas the Great Apes discovered the Angle of Incidence.
FROM THE UNDERLYING AXIOMS
—The age demanded a savage theory that wld stomach anything
From the extremely cold place to the extremely hot place, there was no escaping the contour of it, the perverse migratory “wobble.” It’d been hiding in plain sight all this time, like a mirror inside a mirrorimage, as if a poem in Seifert=space cld be isotopic w/ a film in Warhol=space. That night, slugs emerged from the drains.
—No obvious signs [of life]
So that there can be some transformations allowed by this convention, the actor must approach each scene as if they’ve lived it before / as if they’re trying to avoid committing a terrible crime that’s been foretold in dreams / as if they’re desperate to act their way out of an inescapable destiny.
—Is it sick to love a sick mouth?
The Author cries that their head is splitting open, but what wld it take for something to be born from it?
—Je souhaite surtout que l’ironie ne devienne jamais facile
Where was the audience when the first melodrama was performed inside the panopticon? An elegy to scepticism w/ its cynical modesty. The distance between act & consequence is always facetious. Ah the delicate flower of credulity! The biblic landscape artist’s petite toile becomes the petit étoile of a katyusha over the Gaza Strip. In the prelate’s dream, sex is always a punishment.
—Re=deriving the second law lies not in satisfying a ghost
Here extends the southeastern portion of Pluto’s great ice plains, which border the rugged, dark highlands named Krun Macula. The eye orbits, descends, glides through zero atmosphere. Shadows lengthen as if in all directions at once. Radio hiss. Ice glistening like moonlight on slime.
—An object looked at from different angles
The question sat there staring the Author in the face: if not words, then what?
—Sputnik Planum
The dream keeps returning him to a vast plain of nitrogen=ice. Like dusted brainsugar. Confecting a task proximate to survival. All the hours spent in this way wld never be called to give account of themselves, he’d be absolutely alone. Hadn’t he always? A message in a bottle’s a blind reflex in a sea of junk. The birth of tragedy, parented by farce, so the polymerised vomit. History, the Author says, is the sublime w/ diabetes. Spring comes at the bone=end of harvest. Afterwards the grey cat sneaks in by the window & upends the trash. Spilled tea leaves augur catastrophe. How many times must the Author open his eyes before he can call himself awake?
—Orbital eccentricity, one skeletal frame at a time
His reclusion is proverbial, a flimflam moon in a bowl of sump oil.
—The war is tearing up the sky
Walls painted white in anticipation of surrender or the day when, lined up, the enemy sign their confessions on it. Brief colorimetric instants of rose red vermilion claret before editing=out. Wildeyed the pigeons under eaves intuit the coming bombardment. Meteorites, asteroids. Sky red a brief colorimetric instant before white. Stars rushing headlong away.
HEXENSCHUSS
—After heat, when cold bends the spine double
Wasn’t it about time for that reassuring smile? During death it’s so strange. All we say sinks into indifference & we along w/ it. The whole of what is, receding, turning, receding. Etc. Where time also runs backwards.
—Equilibrium is a rare commodity in the universe
Suffering will always find an investor.
—Everything must be said
Because otherwise inexistent, the summoning is all. Look, do I need to keep repeating this? You get paid when the job’s done. Time, they said, to climb down from the proverbial baobab. And before the word was w/ G.O.D.? In the beginning before the beginning. Well what good’s a word that can’t go unspoken? Eenie meenie miney mot. Every particle of the universe has a story to tell. Ah democracy! Let us render a monologue on this subject for the betterment of humxnkind. Today the weather is more clement than it was before or is ever likely to be hereafter. Capture the moment with Kodachrome! Can you see us all smiling up at you in yr makebelieve futurismus? Foolishness consists in knowing better, they said. An open book only wants to be shut.
—At least once
Is this the way of love? Leptin out of fat=cell slaking neuron=hunger?
—Action or the marriage of potentials
Circuit & anticircuit. A gravitational wave deforms brainspace by creating permanence. Capacity, on the other hand, is an empty vessel. When these two touch, waveforms merge in “operational pause.” Waking unscheduled in the dead=of=night to secret rendezvous of circulation & exchange. Lizard, spider, cockroach, rat. Engines of resistance throb in heat, till dawn quiets the blood & mosquitoes sing, defeating the remote bombardment. Weathervanes in opposite directions. A problem not previously defined, elsewhere becomes tenderness.
—The end is tragic mythopoeia
In method but not in vision, peace, understanding: there are limits. If cure is repetition of disease. If repetition is, etc. To be that axiom from which a body steps forth, fully formed, w/ its legislations, its wanderlust, its stupidity. When speaking of metaphor the Author meant what he said literally. For example, “Every mind is a cosmos.” 7.753 billion parallel humxn universes & increasing (2.6 per second). To this add all nonhumxn, etc. World=within=world. Because to flee/escape the scene of a crime you haven’t committed implies equivalent or even greater wrongdoing.
—And still I hear spirits vanishing through the walls whenever I enter the last room of the house
LA
LOUIS ARMAND
Prague – Beja
March – July 2022
LOUIS ARMAND 