tRANSCENDENTAL nONSENSE

Being and Rhyme

(March 25/06)
I live in an implosion, a collapsing variableness, an incontinence, a rhizome without a warren-hole, a way out or back in. I live one step behind the step that encouraged the first step forward—now a backward incontinent atomizes. I have a headache, a warren-pain in the subcutaneous coetaneous. All things, myself included, are coeval, simple rhythms in the greater logarithm. The Being-in, the Being-there, the being-thrown-in-there, that’s all that matters when the metaphysical is removed, excised like a suppurating boil. This thrown-into: a tatting of the inner and the outer, the internal barrister that supercedes the simple Id-eology of phantoms and ghostbodies. No more no-nothings, no being here nor there nor either or. One insufferable primal scene, the coital naysay, the perpetual inking machine fading in and out, no-nothings nor neither or.

Who am I but the dilemma of dissolution and dimwittedness? The Ego left in the cellars of the ID, the truculently remembered remembrance of that first remember. When one is none, no further calculation’s logarithms or algebraic fistulas need be tried and trued. All is silliness, bad manners and couch-sitting, bringing forth, through hermeneutic and cajolery, the deepest recession of forgotten forgets. A trumpeting cacophony of repressed this and re-repressed that, a nonman’sland of Id-eulogizes and re-interments. Freud was wrong, there is no way out of the cellar, no rabbithole, no (Kafka) door through which to make that great Heideggerian leap, leaping into the ontological fray in excelsior glorious. Being-in-time is Being disguised as Being, nothing more nor, I suppose, less.

aPOSTaTE gLANd

Poor of Mouth

(March 20/06)
Penury is for the poor, the poor of mouth--the penuriously poor, poor. I am poor, penurious, financially defrocked. And grandma ma’s hastily hopped coppers, which never quite fell into the cusp of my hand, but fell through into the sewer at the tiptop of my feet, unshod and unholy souse’s soulless feet, feet. Flan has no-nothing on me, nor two-boirds at swimmy. Molly, that Liffey-laughy bogslut, now she I have a particular shinning for, as all men with a bird in their brain see fit to fiddle flummox betwixt the hunker of her legskin skin. And the wretch of poor Paddy Dingham, all dead and roiled in buttersoil and lime twists. Sad bastard he. No lemony scented lavations or up the end-out for the likes, or not, of he, as worms make ferrous wheels in the ocular obits of his scumskullskittle. Ah, but that I should be so lucky to have a drill bore in the labial ligneous of me headspore. Parricide butter, pads ends-up, to avoid an unseemly sebascone. Blackberry Alma tarts with wee-seeds and caraway on the sideplate. She was a sure fine one, with her apron trail and headscarf. And Uncle Jim, with the one cockeye and the other mulled in a tarn of puddle blood. Poor Uncle he said verily nothing when green sprouts and vegetables were heaped on the skid of his dinnerplate: not one for the verdigris or the parsimonious root, or a wedging of stale ends with Alma’s applebutterspread unevenly on the heel and croup. I must say, this poorman’s mouthing is none too wearying and saddlesad. Now, if time permits a permission, I will see fit to a cunning lingual in a wean the corrupt of dear dearest Molly’s bogslutted leggy leg legs. Adman or not, I see a fitting cloture in the mucking.

pHICCIOnES

Marrowbone Soup

(March 19/06)
I
Have a photo
Of
Jorge Luis
Borges
--on
My Desktop
Top

And
The concussiveness
Begins
Like marrowbone
--soup
Left to chill
Into
Gazpacho

tECHnOPOMORPHIC hORrID(NESs)

Damnable Turing Machine

(March 16/06)
I live in a technopomorphic noman’sland compliments of my insufferably dimwitted Turing Machine. I dare say an abacus would be a step up in technology. One of those orthopedic lifts would certainly quell the arrhythmia in the catastrophe that is my horrid analytical engine, so horrid, in fact, that no algebraic panacea could ever-possible put things right. 16 rams’bottoms aren’t sufficient enough to motor a simple calculator, let alone a CPU with a laggard’s penchant for sluggardliness. Perhaps if I whisper ever so softly in the conical ear of the Turing Machine god a new and improved remembering machine will appear through a fugue of oily alchemic dust, or not, I suppose. For the time being—time, as you know, being a poor judge of time and happenstance—I will plow furrows of pixel dust with the uneven keel of my damnable Turing Machine in excelsior glorious amen. Good night and may clods bless.

aUGUST1993-2 wEEKS iN

Johnny’s Dead (part-one)

(March 11/06)
The rain swept down from the sky and ran on pelican feet across the top of the water. The gulls paced restlessly on the embankment beneath trees heavy with whirly-tops--and underneath benches where bits of discarded food and wet cigarette butts littered the hard ground. Rain fell like glass from the middle of the sky, twisting and reforming the horizon into a sleeping child, knees bellied into it’s chest, eyes pressed tight behind heavy lids. I slipped Johnny’s upper plate from his mouth and lay it on the floor next to his arm; I had to thump him hard on the side of his face to loosen the lowers. I figured Johnny would look pretty stupid with only his bottoms in if he died and the ambulance people came and saw him like that. I figured it’d be better to have a mouthful of nothing then just have of nothing. A cobble of blood ran from the corner of his mouth and dribbled into the hole of his ear like chocolate syrup. Johnny looked so funny, so out of sorts and relaxed lying there on the floor, his eye all gouged out and clouted with blood. And these little pinpricks in his ribcage that made him look like some sort of ornament or a cheese grater and his mouth all flaccid and devoid of teeth and just sort of puffing little ounces of air while his chest gurgled and spurted like a defective engine.

When Johnny and I were teenagers we used to spend a lot of time at the pumping station fishing off the concrete ledge for crappies and small mouths. Once, when Johnny caught a fat yellow sunfish, he cut it’s fins off with his pocketknife and popped it’s eyes out with his thumb then threw it back into the water. We watched as the poor fish floated all fucked up on it’s side, a little gouty hole where it’s eye had been, trying to right side up itself and swim. It just fluttered and shook like it was having an epileptic. That same day another kid we were sometimes friends with got his eye pecked out by a seagull when he tried to stab it with his fishing rod. Actually his eye didn’t really get pecked out, just a piece of it near his nose. He had to wear one of those the Man in the Hathaway Shirt black eye patches, all the while thinking he was better than us because he wore a patch over his eye and had only one good one left. Johnny and I could care less, more than less. We stopped being his friends and put more effort into stealing cigarettes from the Dominion.

I tried combing Johnny’s hair except the comb just kept snapping off his head. I figured since he didn’t have any teeth in he might as well have a combed head of hair when the ambulance people came to take him away in the back of the ambulance. It would be terribly embarrassing for the ambulance attendants to find him lying there all fucked up on the floor like that. Least this way he’d look somewhat presentable, even for all fucked up like that.

I asked Johnny if it was still a fish if it didn’t have any fins. He said that it still had gills and that’s what makes fish, fish. As long as they have gills they’re still fish. That’s what sets them apart from other things and animals. How come they have gills, I asked? I don’t know, he said. I guess because they’re suppose to—that’s all, they’re supposed to have them otherwise they couldn’t really be called fish I suppose. Without ‘em, I don’t know, I guess they’re just another thing or animal or something. How come you cut its fins off and popped its eye out, I asked? I don’t know, Johnny said, just seemed like the thing to do at the time is all. It’s only a fucking fish for Christ sake, its not like I’m a murderer or something. Just shut the fuck up and give me another worm, will you? I don’t feel like talking about it anymore—fucking fish.

Johnny could skip a rock seven, eight--sometimes even ten times across the top of the water if he put his mind to it. We’d spend half an hour looking for good flat ones, sometimes nice chips of shale or real smooth ones that were the colour of beer bottles. Standing shoulder to shoulder on the concrete ledge of the pumping station, we’d position ourselves—Johnny usually preferring the side-foot stance, his throwing arm loose at his side fisting a rock—and challenge each other, best out of ten. Johnny, when it came down to it, always won, even though his knees were all bony and cockeyed and his head was real sharp looking and too small for his body. That’s the way it was, always, skipping rocks and shale off the pumping station.

I resign myself to the fact that there’s not much I can do for Johnny, cause the bleeding won’t stay--and the other internal shit that’s coming out of him is too much to bear, and it looks like his chest might cave inside him and crush the breath out of his lungs, which are, I’m pretty sure, as fucked up as the rest of him. And with me as I am kneeling beside him like a beggar looking stupid and tired out because I don’t know what to do, and even if I did, I’m not sure I’d have the courage to do it anyhow. I just wish he’d die and get over with it, it’d make things easier for the both of us. I’m sorry, that’s how I felt, not bearing up as good as I’d wanted to.

Why’d you have to go and play around with that shit to start with? Christ almighty, Johnny, you knew it was fucking dynamite and could blow up in your face anytime, anywise, Johnny, you should have known better, Christ man, your smarter than that. Should a left it to the pros--and look where it got you, fuck man, you’re better than that. All fucked up and bleeding, you’re missing a fucking eye, a fucking eye, man, an eye for Christ sake. They must a given it to your real good this time, probably even gave you a second warning, but you just wouldn’t listen, never have—so they decide to make an example out of you this time, a fucking example man. They fucked you up some good this time; they did, didn’t they? Fucked you up and took your eye, Johnny, your fucking eye, like that kid with the Hathaway patch, fuck man—your fucking eye. Christ, I mean you weren’t much to look at to begin with, but now without an eye, I mean this is fucked man, real fucked. Now I mean you’re a real ugly sonuvabitch, really. You’re a fucking ugly sight; one fucked up ugly sonuvabitch, Johnny. Bet you wish it was only just a couple of teeth and all they’d have to do is wire your jaw shut for awhile. Fuck your mother man, she was never worth a piece of shit to begin with. Remember that silly fucker went and got his eye pecked out, by a seagull man, what a silly fucking cunt he was—wearing a man in the Hathaway shirt patch and stumbling on his two feet like a drunk, fucking crazy shit, Johnny, remember. I mean the fucker thought he was Errol fucking Flynn, some kind of hero or a pirate or some shit like that. Deserved him right, lousy bastard. Christ man that was funny, remember Johnny, so fucking funny we almost pissed out pants, that fucking funny.

And answer me this, why’d you have to go and start chucking it in your arm, Johnny? Didn’t you have anything better to do, anymore sense than that? Christ Johnny, you could have at least snogged it up your nose like everybody else—but then you aren’t like everybody else, never one for convention, were you Johnny. Always having to do this your way, the hard way, the opposite way of everybody else. Always trying to make things as difficult and complicated as ever, always one step out a sync with the way things are suppose to be. But that shit, Johnny, that shit was way out of your league. A big mistake, too much out a sync. Shit got your head all scrambled up man, and look at you now, they took your eye; your fucking eye’s gone Johnny, nothing there. Fed it to a dog, some sonuvabitch dog ate your eye man, like fucking Alpo. Your bitch of a cunt mother would be proud of you—laying here on the floor all fucked up, bleeding with a hole where an eye’s suppose to be. And we thought that kid got his eye pecked out was funny. Well let me tell you, Johnny, this shit sure beats the hell out of that; pales in comparison.

THE WALK

Assorted Wherewithal

(March 08/06)
I am up but not about, as the barite and corns on my feet disallow such bipedal musing. Time permitting, which it seldom does (see Hegel for an exegesis on this point) I will reengage my feet and bustle through the day, or that which remains of the day. Perhaps I will don a paper mashie cap, on which I will append an assortment of stamen, or a bullfinch’s wingspan with feather and quill-bone intact. Or an ornate and fluffle of posy blooms, as spring is just round the corner, or so the meteorologists say. I seldom pay heed or merit to weather reportage, as it tends to be of the kind that is seldom accurate or worthy of umbrella and saffron slickerage.

This conjoining, I must say, is symptomatic of a far greater neuroticism—obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, a swooning and stuttered fainting that people such as I, the be-heathen, are subjected to against out better judgment. Judgment, as you will no doubt see, has very little to do with repetitious repeating, very little indeed. Nor barite and corns, one may suppose, or bipedal musings and reengagement with the engaged. I seldom, if ever, pay much heed to musing, as it tends to unseal the envelope of my already pointless a-musings. For the time being, however—time being a most unsavory barometer of ups and downs—suffice it to say that should you take notice of a recklessness most unbecoming a person of my meager talents, please feel free to take me to task and bring it unchastely to my attention. Thank you all in advance for your persistent patience, courage and assorted wherewithal. I bid you good night and most savory dreams.

KaNT'S tHOuGHT and lIFE2

Thoughts Thought

(March 06/06)
I’m sitting here thinking about thinking, thinking of what I’ve thought and not yet thought. I’m thinking regardless of the process of thoughts thought or thinking about thinking those thoughts and those thoughts not yet thought but thought about just he same. I have a stomachache, perhaps from excessive thinking, or thoughts that I thought I thought yet are just thinking in abstensia of a thought yet to be thought. Perhaps this signals a slight shift in thinking or a thoughtful though about the sentinel of thoughts and thinking. I am a thoughtful thinker of thoughts and thoughts not yet thought or thought about. Thinking is quite complex, as is the thought of thinking about the complexity of thinking thoughts all together, or in single file, as in a sentinel of thoughts being thought thoughtless of the complexity of the thoughts thought. This is indeed confusing, if not far too complex for a mere thinker of thoughts and thoughts not yet thought regardless of the thought process of thinking thoughts, even in abstention of a first or originary thought, thought. Why, then, think when you can thought I ask? Why indeed?

tHE iDIOTILiAD

Cuirass Asses

(March 06/06)
Here is a fine example of the purblind leading the stone-blind. The commander and saucier of the Canadian military said the following—and here I paraphrase—we are in Afghanistan to establish peace in the region and then to enforce it. How, one might ask, does one enforce peace? When two adversaries are at peace there would be no need to enforce it—peace means peace, not almost-peace or just-about-peace. If one needs to enforce peace, there is no peace at all, but ongoing adversarial not-peace, or peace-lessness. It would appear that war is being mistaken for peace. This, I fear, is but one example of military strategy, Canadian-style no less. Perhaps the blue-helmet has been replaced with the olive drab Bush tincap or worse, a storm trooper’s cuirass. It’s a shame that Dialectical Materialism is an impossible political ideal. Cursed MacCarthy knockabouts. Perhaps the bitterness of my morning coffee will bring peace to the litigant in my stomach, if not, a salvo of Rolaids or Tums to enforce peace in my ad nausea.

LOs 7 MADmEN

Sortilege Fantasticalism

(March 05/06)
I purchased a copy of Roberto Arlt’s Los 7 Locos this afternoon. I will begin reading it when time permits. Arlt influenced what has become known as the Magic Realism School of South American Hispanic fiction. He was a fine and gentlemanly fellow, a nice chap indeed. A gentlemanly fellow with a stern brooding stare, an Agnostic Magic Partisan Non-Catholic Bolero’s gawk. I will highly enjoy the read, of that I am certain. His influence touched Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, all four of whom I find most appealing indeed. He was a contemporary of Juan Carlos Onetti, and a friend of some other magic Latin writers with consonant names that are most troublesome to pronounce. I will keep you, indeed, posted indeed.

SPINNERETS and CELLOS

Flutes and Flagella

(March 05/06)
There is a colophon perched roosting on the tree branch outside my windowsill pane. It is, as to its repertoire, making beautiful music, a symphonic cacophony of flutes, flagella, trumpets, oboes, violas, spinnerets, and cellos. I am of a mind to count them all, one by one and then from back to front. And Mozart made a trumpet of his ass, trumpeting a toot-tooting toiletry. When I was a boy there was a sign exclaiming for all to read and ponder, To Let, which to my eagle eyes read, Toilet. Eye marksmanship not being my strong suit, or the proper parsing of letters or words. And March came in like a Mayan, all rice-sticky and ready to toss a hymen into the mouth of the volcanic furnace. Headgear and plumage, and faces painted with rosin and cup-ash. No never a slighted moment nor a shimmer of the cursed impetigo. It is somber day, March 5th two thousand and six. When I played the jewsharp, my tongue would flail the mouth organ like a peal of orange rind or a pinch of the creamery. Never once, to my recollection, did I make a harmonious sound or a toot-tooting from the trombone of my ass. And he freely associated a disassociation. Not so free, but disassociate nonetheless.

rEPETITION rEPULSION

Repetition Repeating

(March 04/06)
The answer is in repetition, all in the repetition. All things repeat, from the first to the last, in a sequence of repetitions that have neither a start nor an ending, but a constancy of repeating ad infinitum, or until death due us part. To repeat is to start anew, to begin at a new start, a new repetition of an old repeating. All things in they’re repetition, repeating to start anew, to begin to repeat again, repetition upon repetition. The number one is the first repeater of all formal numbers, all sequences and further repetitions. One repeated twice, three times until the repetition repeats itself. Once repeated, the repetition repeats itself without any further need for a first place repetition. To repeat is to repeat the repeat, the repetition of the first place repetition, the repeating of the repetition.

I am a repeater, not an ad hoc repeater, but a fist instance repeater, a first repeat repeater. I repeat without reason or rhyme, nor with a goal, aim or end to the repeating, a constant constancy of repeating. The repetition to repeat, ad nausea, etc. ad infinitum ad-add another repetition to the repeating repetition. The compulsion to repeat, to repeat the repeating of the repetition, the repetition to repeat with repetitious repeating. One is the integer of the repetition of one to the first power one. One is the one and only number that valiances the repetition of one and not one, two times one times one times three, etc., etc. Anon et al excreta Exeter, and so forth, ad asinine hoc ad. Perhaps I will, should and must valiance sleep, and with fleetness of foot, arch, toehold and in excelsior goriest, aurora Borealis finger-tapping on the pane of my windowpane pane ad infonauts.

sIR pAUL'S lOBSTERsKIN cOAT

I AM Not the Walrus

(March 04/06)
I am just to the left of you, a wee smidgen out of the frame, the frame of reference, the ontological cadre, if you will, which you mightn’t, but just the same, there I am, or not, as the case may or may not be. I am frame-less, having neither a point of reference nor scaffolding on which to erect myself, had I a self to erect, which I don’t, nor could I imagine having if I did, have one, a self, an ontological point of reference. I have no jumping in point, no entrance into the ‘into’, the ‘thing’, the me but not me, the other but not other, the otherly.

I have neither an other nor an other, other, the other-ness of others. I have neither other nor others, nor have I one of each, all or a coalition of all others. I have neither either or, nor or either neither or, or not or, no-nothing, nothingness, a flat paneled screen, a tabula raga. I am neither this nor that, or those or these, I am none and all of these. I regret nothing, except having nothing to regret, regretfully so, I regret regretting that I neither regret nor regret the regretting. Perhaps I am regretful, yet don’t know that I regretfully regret regretting ad nausea.

I am a seal pup clubsman, crackles and graylings of gray marrow gray bone, like chattering teeth, cutting swaths in the crisp eastern ice-flow flow. I am not Sir Paul, nor am I a walrus or an eggman, I am none of these, or them or him, or a Sir, a Sir Paul, the walrus, the eggman man. Sir Paul is a walrus, has the brain of a walrus, albeit a rich, paunchy all-knowing walrus. Sir Paul has the answer to poverty, hunger and shoelessness. He will, Sir Paul, save the economy of the Eastern flow with his harsh rich man’s blathering about the improprieties of clubbing poor baby seal pips. He will soar homeward, leaping the pond in one fell swoop, home to orchards and castles and dogs fed on grade A meat, the flesh of other poor animals, but no seal pups, who by virtue of their pelts are poor helpless creatures.

Paul, no longer Sir Paul, but the walrus, is a rich man with a rich man’s attitudes and beliefs, having never had to eat millet and grain seeds and wrap his frost bittern feet in sac cloth and boxing twine. He has not stood by, hopeless, as his children cry and wane for proper footwear and meat, any meat, animal flesh, fish flesh, a bean soup with day-old bread, cusps and heels of dry hard bread. So long Sir Walrus, and be wary of what you cram down your gullet, your rich never hungry rich man’s gullet, fed on Macadamian nuts and apple crisp Chardonnay. Tarry forth clubsmen, and may the gods be with you, and your children’s bellies brimming to the full, and their feet shod in Librium rubber and saltless calfskin hide.

bEING as bECOMING

Analysis Interminable

(March 02/06)
Six years ago this month I started a most incredible journey, an invasion, a tarriance, a mountainous trek into the innermost recessions of my self: psychoanalysis. I have pillage, plundered and marshaled salvos deep into the darkest crannies of my self, my unconscious self. Some were successful, others the cause for more excavation, further exhumations. I lost myself often, resurfacing in places and thoughts as yet unknown to me; places that needed to be explored and understood. Capturing moments, instances of substantiation, perhaps a second of blissful recognition of what it would be like to be ‘one’, at one with the autonomy of the self. My diggings brought me fear, happiness, anxieties, and peace, though often fleeting and undecipherable repose. I searched for beginnings and ends, moments and things in between, and those yet to become, those things on they’re way, those becomings.

Being is a fractious term, one Heidegger, with his cunning linguistic inversions, left unfound and still becoming, being becoming Being. Freud has taught me much, tutored me in the salience of self, of ego, id and the self-destructive nature of the super ego. How to punish myself in lieu of a punisher, as a proxy to the punishing ‘other’, the paternal voice that reverberates and pounds one into sycophantic compliance. He showed me how to be more understanding, empathetic, seeing and listening for the slightest nuances in others tone, speech and feelings. A facial movement, a grimace of pain yet uncovered, concealed beneath years of repression and fear. Freud showed me the way out of the warren, the self-destructive coffer where I had lived a meager unfulfilling existence, a not quite there existence, a not being there.

There is never a right time, the perfect moment to end analysis, as it has no ending, no beginning, but a timelessness that ends with death, with the death of the self. After six years searching high and low in the tallow light of Plato’s Cave, I have learned much, those things and yet to be things that are indispensable to me, the becoming of me, the me as me. To Doctor M I offer my greatest thanks and warmest sentiments. Of hope, some fear, understanding and a feeling of autonomy, a sense of what it is, and could be, to be a self bereft of self-loathing, self-punition and fear of not meeting the expectations that were never expectations to begin with, but phantasies and a feeling of childish exclusion. No longer am I an Ego-less Id, I am that which Is, a self, me.