Tuesday, September 13, 2005

And then some.


(Dec. 26. 04)
Yesterday, the day of the ‘immaculate deception’, finally exhausted of all its possibilities and expectations. A daylong Diaspora of false emotional excoriation, encouraged, so it seems, by this once a year exhumation of familial love and care. The great seasonal eclipse, this lacuna, hidden, as it is, underneath the skirts of a whorish and forbidding moon, exists under false pretenses, so it seems, so unseemly, as it is. I, whom am I, who love with a skull-full depuration those who love me, or make such claim, but have an odd and obfuscating manner of expressing it, find myself, (whom am I?) quite exhausted from it all. I picked up a copy (what else would one do?) of William’s literary biography of Borges. The histaminic redness that overburdens my eyes, eyes, so I have written, that are crossing-in on themselves most inhospitably, are scratchy with anticipatory delight; these scarab-blistered eyes of mine.
Those with ‘the’ riches have a convenient amnesia for those that have no such richness. What makes things even worse, cuntishly worse, is that as they swill at the trough, bellies pleasured, livers raged with toxins, an abject blindness, a sightlessness that is most abhorrent, cleverly abhorrent, makes everything go away; disappear into thin air. This dioptric blindness, foresworn, as it is, to an alchemic secrecy, a sightlessness that Borges himself would have envied. It is not true that we covet only those things and facilities that we have not. This, I have come to learn, but perhaps yet understand, is not the case at all. When you start with nothing, or the very little, things worthy of coveting, as such, are so beyond one’s reach, so unimaginable, that they cease to exist, never having existed at all. I covet the capacity or permission to be covetous, nothing more. I covet to be covetous. Ana called to tell me that there has been a horrific earthquake somewhere in Asia. Some 10,000 people having been decimated, gravel and earth, bricks and mortise, concrete and super-structures, caving in on this poor, uncared about humanness.
The world as we engage it, all of us, is nothing more than a magic trick, one poorly executed, yet magic just the same. This illusion, this actuarial accounting, prepares us, all, for the final reckoning, the end to beget all ends. This algebraic confluence of the ‘real’, sulfurous with putrefaction, with the yet to be imagined, all magic. Nothing less, yet far more than we bargained for. The death of us all, hanging, livid with bruises, swaying in this yet to be imagined infinitude, all the while claiming, with childish insistence, that we are not, nor have ever been, corpses at all. Through red-scabby holes, jagged, like a caesarian scar sutured tight, I smell it, the acrid burning, brittle cakes of it smoldering, ashen and gray weighing, this mortuary of the yet to be. A pox on you all says he, a malediction too frightening to even imagine, yet, he supposes, imaginable just the same. It’s all in the magic, he says, once you’ve mastered that, all illusions fall neatly into place. Again, we, we self-proclaimed, self-important poets, have no claim to a voice, yet we stammer on, enamored, as we are, with the inanities we excrete with such impunity from the shit-holes at the top of our throats. The headaches, once again, muddying, as they do, a most unsanitary mind ratted with indelicacies. Perhaps sleep is all I have, this unconsciousness that encourages silence. A mouth, this gore-hole, sutured shut, a punition that only a charlatan could possibly understand. Septic with our own excrement, yet still mouthing words, we silly false-poets will never come to the magic or the yet to be imagined of this world, this world of tricksters and marauders.
(Dec. 27. 04)
There will be no births today, should there be, those given birth to will be swallowed back up between the bifurcation that expectorates all life. There is no magic to all this, just a simple actuarial logic. Death is genome (ed) into life, and as such, as always such, awaiting that propitious moment to put an end to it all. This ending, however, can be circumvented by simply putting an end to the birthing procedure that starts the entire process to begin with. Suturing together, seamlessly, the bifurcation that expectorates all living things. This septic (ness) that has over-ruled the living, the diseases that just won’t go away, need to be given a good, hard boot in the arse-bottom. The sky today, two days in declension of the greatest birth of all (so it is said) is sunny, warm and inviting. I, however, have no such sunniness nor warmth or kindness of heart. It is a most difficult thing, so it is, to sit quietly by as the gun is stuck like a cock in between chapped lips oily with minted-balm. Such is life, diseased and unpropitious as it is.
The afternoon grows light because at last
Abruptly a minutely shredded rain
Is falling, or fell. For once again
Rain is something happening in the past.
Whoever hears it fall has brought to mind
Time when by a sudden lucky chance
A flower called "rose" was open to his glance
And the curious color of the colored kind.
This rain that blinds the windows with it mists
Will gladden in suburbs no more to be found
The black grapes on a vine there overhead
In a certain patio that no longer exists.
And the drenched afternoon brings back the sound
How longed for, of my father’s voice, not dead.
Jorge Luis Borges
This aching head of mine, nailed, as it is, to the scaffolding of a poorly constructed neck, is as toothless as a whore’s kiss, lips chewed purple, ragged with spirants and crack-worms. No medication, yet to be purged by alchemic hands, can subdue this persistent hammering. As such, as is the case, with me, I will trudge on, head clasped tightly between wood-hewn fingers callused and bitten red, through winter’s taunting icy world. Today I will purchase a copy of Imre Kertesz’s novel Liquidation. As I scale over bodies, soul’s brittle from the cold, I will remember a time, not so long ago, it seems, when I too was purged of body and spirit. The gun-metal taste, pressed hard, jarred, between lubricious, greasy lips, teeth clenched in the white bone of my jaw, creates its own inhibitions, so I have come to learn, slowly, parasitic with fear. Borges lived with his mother up until her death, then well on after.
That Infinity of the Rings, whatnot, is on television, that tallow-larded screen extravaganza, a celluloid wastefulness that cataracts the eyes, of which I have middling to no interest in whatsoever. Instead, I am listening, acutely, to Ernest Bloch’s The Two Piano Quintets as played by Ivan Klansky and the Kocian Quartet. I borrowed the CD from the Biblio Ottawa Library, as it is inscribed on a white piece of parchment epoxied to the CD encasement. Also, I am smoking, fierily, one after another acrid-stenching Gauloises with pulmonous impunity. Ernest Bloch was of German ancestry, as myself am not. I, on the other hand, am a crudity of all the miscreants and lollygaggers that booked passage by ship from the United Kingdom of equal miscreantism. On the topmost left-hand corner of the CD encasement there is a further white parchment, on which is written in semi-bolded font, CD 785 .28195 B651. This scripture, I assume, forges a numerical/alphabetic identity with the music therein enclosed and the Biblio Ottawa Library encouraging and allowing, one such as I, to borrow these indented items.
The word, or noun, or whatever you may, Gauloises, can be traced back to the Gaul’s appearance in France. Never having been to France, or off this continent, I can only guess at the veracity of this statement, taking into consideration, as one must, the magic trickery of this inhospitable world we engage in at our own peril, I must add. All volitional acts, or engagements, in character, are nothing more than masterfully executed magic tricks indented with coded inscriptions, some, as would have it, in Sanskrit, that forge a unity with the outer layers of reality.
Today, also, I purchased, at small cost, a copy of The Diaries of Paul Klees, 1898-1919, edited, with an introduction, by Felix Klee, his son, Paul Klee’s son, the Germanic artist, Paul Klee’s son. For dinner I ate festive-stuffing mollified with peas, carrots and whipped mashed potatoes. As an aside, I had one chocolate cookie filled with some unidentifiable hard, sugary filling that left food-worms indentured in my teeth. Tomorrow morning, after two heaping cups of dark-roasted coffee, dripped, as it will be, through a reusable plastic membrane, I will clean my teeth, ridding them once and for all of those nasty food-bits and worms. As you read, and I write, the two almost synonymous, I am preparing to light yet another Gauloises cigarettes from France, once smoke, it is reasonable to say, by a Gaul enfilade with a wing-arched scrapmetal helmet.
That is not a whorecorpse, my dear man, but poor Stephen’s dear dead mother, intrans Bloom, had Joyce not written Ulysses. Strikingly plump Buck Mulligan reproached the slaving mirror and carefully, incautiously, decanted his razor-strop stroppingly. With care and patience unfrockable, he mitigated his thoughts with those of Stephen, who is, so chance has, dead-at-last, no more is he. The cunttighteningsea, where the dogsbody rest at rest, mulled and scalloped by the fiercely Faeroe waves, crashing, as they do, with glorious abandon on Molly’s soiled undergarments crumbed with Plumtree’s Potted Meat. The nasty, most unkindly Fafnir marches Norse to the land of fagends and lemon-scented soap, for bathing, in water scalding hot and murky with scallion-green greens. Thank the lemon-scented sky in-transubstantiate for the cataract-white eyes of the most inimitable James Aloysius Joyce, adman extraordinary.
(Dec. 28. 04)
My dear father attended high school with the inimitable William Shatner, who himself is fat. I have seen a picture of them, the two of them, my father and William Shatner, posing in a photograph with other young high school football players. They look very old, as boys do in photographs taken back in the forties, yet trimly fit, almost skinny, though in preparation for the amassing of fat and enlardments. William Shatner, so I have been told, read, or heard, has or has had a drug problem, which, from the frequency with which I see him on television as an adman he must have shrugged off. This pleases me, as I do not like to see, read, or hear about anyone having or having had a problem with drugs. Dylan Thomas was a drinker of spirits and of the vine, his liver most certainly attests to that. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to write the Irish potable famine in stead. Distemper fades unhurriedly, so I have learned. The lye-scars in my mouth have yet to scab-over, so it seems. Nothing, nothing whatsoever, is what it seems or how I have learned it to be. Of this I am reasonable certain.
Today’s sky is scone-white, graying at the edges. If there are clouds, they are hidden in the pastry folds of a baker’s apron. There is a smokestack which I can see from the aerial view of my bedroom window, from which there is never issued smoke of any sort: corpse-smoke and skin-lice, none of which I can see from the copse of my window-pain, so it seems. Sheep die throat’s cut deep to produce an extortion of arterial bloodlines. They are then eaten with relish, with mint and marjoram that is kept dry and temperate in closed kitchen drawers. My uncle has such drawers and cause to eat mutton and lamb beneath the granite-topped counters of his kitchen. Stone dust, from Portugal, one would assume, motes the air stirred about in the cooking area of the kitchen sanctum. I do not eat mutton or lamb as I find they’re cut throat’s most unsettling. Pork and chicken, and some hues of beef, are amenable with my palate. Bacon-rinds score the soft tissues in the abattoir of my mouth, so those I do not eat. Anything yellowed with fat, or such marbled, I find abhorrent. Drippings and goose crackle are for the weak of mind and incontinent. Any texture or scalloping of skin I deny access to the digestions of my stomach. A scrotal neck-waddling, as always, encourages bile to form in the farthest reaches of my throat. As such, I only eat turkey when custom demands it, and devoid of all volitional pleasures. Stuffing is viscera’s, and therefore an entrail messiness best left to the weak of mind and incontinent. If William Shatner and my dear father had taken lunch together, they most likely would have eaten such bilious fare. William Shatner’s face, so I have seen in television commercials, is red splotched and bloated, the sure signs of intemperance. I soon will have used up my cache of Gauloises, and as such, will need to replenish the encachement. At sixty- five dollars a carton it is a most expensive life sustenance. All the same, I will disburse the monies required for there purchase and get on with the day. This being one of the paltry few volitional activities I am capable of, all things being considered, as they must, I will not give it a second thought, none whatsoever.
I once heard tell of a man who de-fingered himself with a skill saw, exhibiting, I would say, a lack of skillfulness in his haste to dismember a length of wood.

Whatever you think truth or fable
That in a thousand books you find
It all remains a Tower of Babel
Unless it is by love combined.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found myself in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell,
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.
Yet, to discourse of what there good befell,
All else will relate discovered there.
Dante Alighieri

I said yes I will Yes.
James Aloysius Joyce (Or as he was apt to call himself, ‘James Joyless’).
It is no chance of happenstance as I have before alluded to, that my Christian name is ‘Stephen’, as it is. Perhaps yet to be ‘dead-at-last’, but well on my wayfaring way. These strangeness (es), as they appear in my life, are far from discomforting, more so, perhaps, are they enlivening and gamely omniscient. Hedonism never settles a hungry heart, bitter and insatiable as it is, but furthers the illusion for love. This so says I, Stephen ‘not-quite-dead-at-last’, with parchment-thin lips, mint-balmy and chewed purplish, awaiting the final vaulting that will expiate this mien most scurrilous, that is I, sutured, as I am, to a cross most unbecoming with a stick thrust angrily in the socket of my eye. I have, so I must, an impetigo of the self, so much so that I have lost all exactitude to reason with impunity. This, I believe, is the root cause of most all of my troubles, at the moment, at least, so it appears.
I must tell you, as I must, that in the photograph depicting my father standing nearby William Shatner, William’s football tunic is neatly laundered and pressed, unlike my father’s which is wrinkled and threadbare, so it seems to be in the picture. The other boys, as they are just that, mere boys, yet giving off the aura of men, are appareled in similar haberdasher’s tunicary. I, having no such tunic, can only extend this thought beyond the confines of an already solipsistic mind. Obfuscation’s are merciless, at the best of times.
Antecedent to what is now about to be disclosed, I made the pronouncement that philosophy had been the ruin of my life. I now wish to recant that statement and move forward. Philosophy, as a principled learning, is not at issue here, but those who eschew the simple Dionysian pleasures afforded those who refuse the unprincipled logicism of the ‘old schooled’ Oxonists. Moore being a fine and scatterbrained example of this type of eschatological nonsense. As remitted earlier, I suggest that this ‘thing’ called, with such misplaced hostility, deconstruction, has been, and always will be, part of the fabric of all so-named philosophical inquiries. Enough said, for the moment. Derrida being a fine and immitigable example of this ‘new school’ of thought adventuring (the word, immiscibly adv. not being appropriate in such circumstance of language usage, sadly enough, as I’m quite certain Derrida would have approved of it).

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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