But now, nothing was the same as it used to be. Centuries had passed. It is said that there had been a time during which people had actually seen the sun, when the three heads of Cerberus had not yet been sacrificed to Erebus. I knew we were in a place built of stones taken from the Tower of Babel. I had heard the masked clowns and the executioner talking about it. The stones of a tower that had caused the deaths of thousands of slaves were now causing thousands of souls to evaporate. I had heard that from those souls themselves. Again the same footsteps were heard in the passage. This time I had no strength with which to resist. I let my arms, wrapped in their rusty chains, fall to my side. I consoled myself with the hope that what was to happen would happen without delay. When I came round again it was nighttime. Actually it was always nighttime. Every cell of my skin had been tattooed with divine verses engraved by the clowns. “It’s time,” said a voice. The time had come. I was going to be taken out of the cell into the passage and from there to the well. There was no time to ponder upon these things. Because of the war’s devastation — millions of dead, entire countries created from the carcasses of old ones — a slew of filmmakers latched onto the dead body as the chief symbol of the age, the “numerous iterations of rotting corpses.” The movie, which contains a dream within a dream about a mad doctor and a murdering somnambulist, and, unless I’m confusing it with another film, is full of occult symbols, including documents written in the Enochian language of so-called angels, which touch on multi-faceted depravity, colonialism (and its literary offspring known as the colonial adventure story), and strange islands. And what a story it is. Connell’s award-winning adventure tale is one of the most anthologized yarns in the English language. It might also be the most … shall we say … dangerous stories of all time. The melodramatic tale and the cinematic adaptation inspired real-life predators like Robert Hansen, the Alaskan serial killer who dropped his victims off in remote locations so that he could hunt them like animals, and the Zodiac Killer of San Francisco, who mentioned the 1932 film in one of his first letters to the Examiner. Or, to quote Georges Bataille, “I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed, we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.” When I was young, I learned handwriting analysis, and I used to study people that way or read people’s handwriting when asked, with strangely often correct readings, but no face stuff, and I don’t enjoy looking at my own face casually, so I definitely don’t analyse it. I probably did when I was on acid ages back ‘cos that’s something one tends to want to do while fried. You? We could be locked back inside over here by then. I had my first temperature check the other day. Well, I suppose someone knows. I’m way, way outside the situation. Such a fucking drag that it has shit smeared all over it. And on the app? Fuck knows. These overlaps of industry, agriculture, drought, and dispossession show how the Anthropocene is not experienced equally across all areas. The copper mine might provide the perfect example, through the stripping away of earth and the slow-decaying waste left in tailings pits. Zoom out to just outside its newly erected fence and you will see the homes that are becoming vacant, the former cattle farmer who can’t find a job, and the cattle that have become lost and either starved or died of thirst.
And the bees made honey in the lion’s head. Back when there were bees, that is. And
a fern grew out of the earth and astonished
the remaining senses, form grew into a night tree—
a “truly exceptional case” said the court. In which
the night tree’s blossom became fallout
of some unseen but omnipresent conflict &
cracks began to scale the walls,
each one spawning derivatives
crisping in the pavement’s
piss-streaked sun, kicked
out of shape by the advance of
Eventually wondering
not, ‘Who should I vote for?’
but, ‘Is this incompatible with my existence?’
Those who were apprehended given a case number,
handcuffs affixed to each leaf—
Safety cannot be found in the magic 8 ball alone,
E throwing up in the flower pots, still reeling
from the tear gas. I wanted to be this, and then I wanted
to be that, then finally I wanted to be what I could
no longer, and so here I am.
And the ravens brought [her] bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and
flesh in the evening; and [s]he drank of the brook.
Now, with one appendage turn round or press the black plastic button again and again. Get it to eleven if you can. With two others peel back the high-end pink covers. With one more, click play on a secret link to a video depicting a group of nymphs eating a trout whole, while a middle age man wearing Milano slacks and a leather jacket donuts a scooter. You have four limbs left to do with what you will, hybrid video, sculptural, performative, Murano-blown-glass-titted work. Although perhaps being asked to define FLANDERS is not the same as being asked to define LOVE. Better though, would be to keep it as you would a reference dictionary in your workplace and ask it, ‘What was it that IDEALLY means again?’ How easily a line from a pop song (eee gee ‘if you tolerate this then your children will be next’ — Manic Street Preachers) is sliced from context and sewn onto a cotton backdrop, available in three sizes. To what extent is there power in that? Its level of gloss is perhaps testament to the subjects or products on offer, whereby the cheap, photocopied political tract weighs less than the sleek brochure. Whether those bodies are human or not is tricky to tell. I look in your eyes and see pools after pools in which I cannot swim, for they were already beyond depth, like the (remember when they called it the) world wide web. Is there a pleasure here (or there)? Is this urban rewilding manufactured by Instagram fitness trends (I’m looking at you, the pavement jump-ropers of lockdown) or a bemusing image of pathetic masculine yearning, raised to a pale sublime which is lyric poetry’s ironic shrug of submission? Why are the wilderness saints, these deep ecologists, observing the fitness rituals of their kin? Who is the sparrow imagining as ‘you’ here? I feel queasy by association, and yet completely seduced into joining the speaker in her suggestion, ‘wanna stamp on something expensive / for sex reasons,’ which makes me think of waitstaff stabbing balloons with steak knives after a particularly irksome birthday party they have just spent twelve hours serving. A sort of collective erotics, camaraderie and release in destruction, the divine comedy of hot air stabbed BANG BANG BANG in the formerly teeming room. Oh, and in ‘the evening sun licks a single tear.’ Where does this line come from, an algorithm or? And what of the ‘pink-winged’ cats? Your brain is always up to something. It’s thinking or whatever so much stuff that there simply isn’t time or space enough for it to process itself. That would require a separate brain, with the sole task of interpreting the first, which would require, etc. Does that make sense? Of course, this also means that you will never know whether every terrible thing that happens to you is your own fault, the result of poor decision making, or is the fault of quote unquote things beyond your control, or is, rather, no one and nothing’s fault. At all. [SPOILER AHEAD. Do you want to continue?] Yes: keep reading No: close the page > You are doomed. Eventually you have to move on and begin a new course of treatment. Like a dot-to-dot where every dot links up to every other dot. In other words, the calm before the storm became the calm beside the storm and the calm that came after it. Let it out the door and down the marble stairs and back down Independence Avenue, or someone’s avenue, past the Botanical Garden and the museums to another river crossed over by another bridge. Someone posts my words about forgetting on Instagram; they’re words I don’t remember writing, emerging like a stunt double from the screen to push me out of it. Reverse imagination, this erasure, taking colors down from a painting until the canvas remains like a yet-to-be advertised grave site or burb. One friend says the place was upstairs; I don’t remember that. Another says he was there for Game 6, but I don’t remember seeing him. A little boy asked to touch the scar on his head and John Lewis knelt to offer it. Fast forward to 28 July 2020. “I am happy to inform all the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood … Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!” So tweeteth the Trump.
In this image, Mak Muji stands on a mound of cloth, her head torch beaming upwards like an aerial searchlight. In one hand, she grips a rope attached to a makeshift shelter; in the background: a mountain of debris. She could be a rescue worker, excavator or … In reality she is the only midwife serving a community of 18,000 based around the largest landfill site in Indonesia. She has lived near the site, which sits just outside of Jakarta, for 13 years, helping thousands of women through pregnancy and labour free of charge. She is not photographed performing her caring role, but rather helping to sustain herself: trawling the rubbish for valuables to sell. In other words, if mangrove trees had blood, the 54,000 km of Indonesian coastline would be indelibly stained in red. In the last 25 years, this massacre has reduced this complex amphibious ecosystem by more than 50%. Among many other unique qualities, mangroves are capable of storing four times more carbon than any other inland tropical forest and are home to a biodiversity that has few equals on the face of the earth. Java island has already lost at least 70% of original mangroves forests. Until a century ago, coastlines of Indonesia were crowned by 4.2 million hectares of mangroves. Today they are about 3 million hectares. 40% of this loss is due to the blue revolution: the booming of aquaculture. But economic growth may come at expenses of the poorest who are exposed to loss of local resources, climate and environmental hazards increase. Particularly in the coastal valley of Sawah Luhur, on West Java Island in Indonesia, the soil has been burned up, fishing nets are empty and the water has become a massive grave. Everywhere you look, strange signs of a sick Earth are appearing and fishermen no longer know how to decipher them. In short, everything is upside down: the night sky shines golden from the perpetual dawn of villages lit and above, the stars have all but disappeared. Below them, the tree(s) of life is dying under a fierce blood moon. The vital yet invisible network that inextricably links the life of every being on Earth has been torn apart. We all have lost. The mind is replaced with what used to be called television snow. It extends to infinity. How sad it is, in this haunted house, the house the old woman sold because she had lost her ability to contact her dead husband in the attic. The portal closes. The violins. I can’t believe you’re gone. Gone. Your mutilated body is revived, in a dream, to speak the words: It’s a long way down the river. The void is groaning. The imprint of you lives in the dream. On the recording, it’s almost like a mouth opening. The low hum is the voices of ghosts with their mouths agape but all that comes out is an unfocused and floating murmur, a melody that won’t cohere — there’s no way to make the sound coalesce into semantic meaning. So I sleep on a bed of rocks now, waiting for a single word to appear in the clay of the dream. Caught in the nervous system like a plastic bag in the branches of the ash tree. The truth emerged only slowly, and was, in its own slippery way, stranger than the fiction. Careful observers discovered that what had long been taken for several different kinds of animals were in fact just one. The eel was a creature of metamorphosis, transforming itself over the course of its life into four distinct beings: a tiny gossamer larva with huge eyes, floating toward Europe in the open sea; a shimmering glass eel, known as an elver, a few inches in length with visible insides, making its way along coasts and up rivers; a yellow-brown eel, the kind you might catch in ponds, which can move across dry land, hibernate in mud until you’ve forgotten it was ever there, and live quietly for half a century in a single place; and, finally, the silver eel, a long, powerful muscle that ripples its way back to sea. When this last metamorphosis happens, the eel’s stomach dissolves — it will travel thousands of miles on its fat reserves alone — and its reproductive organs develop for the first time. So of course no one could find those organs in the eels of Europe — because they did not yet exist. And so I quit my job as an engineer, rustled up some savings, bought a one-way ticket, and flew to Paris in the early winter of 1999, with no other plan than to become a writer. A few days after arriving, however, and checking into a seedy hotel by the Église Saint-Lambert de Vaugirard, I fell terribly sick. I spent the following days and weeks walking around Paris in a haze. I would wake up with body aches and a growing fever but would still force myself to go out into the cold and sit in café after café drinking espressos, feeling dreadful, scribbling down my first and extremely poor attempts at stories, and reading long novels. So there I was. I now had a mysterious and constant taste of iodine in my mouth. I’d lost so much weight that the pants and shirts I’d brought with me hung on my body as though on a clothesline. I would only feel somewhat better when I escaped for hours into a book. Ironically, though, that same unquenchable appetite for fiction was possibly making me even sicker, or at the very least a bit manic. A virus, said one French doctor, and gave me a bottle filled with small tablets of belladonna. Complications from the flu, said another, as he lit an unfiltered Gauloises in his office — it was still the Nineties — and prescribed antibiotics. Nothing worked. And then, one night, I almost passed out in the Metro. I hadn’t been sleeping or eating well, if at all. And as I stood inside the train, one hand clutching the metal pole, I started to shiver. Everything around me became blurry. My legs went numb and I dropped to the floor. I was drenched in sweat, sitting there surrounded by the legs of so many Parisians. But no one around me seemed to notice or even care. I don’t recall how long I sat there, on the verge of passing out. A couple of stops, maybe more. Eventually, I started to feel my legs again and waited for the Metro to come to a halt. Somehow, I managed to get up, stagger out of the train and slowly make my way through the crowded Cluny La Sorbonne station. Unable to speak Russian, I wandered a hot and humid Red Square with my Olympus OM-1, “everything tinged with Dostoyevsky and Tarkovsky.” Of course. Standing in front of the Lenin Mausoleum, two women passing by smacked me on the ass, laughed, and became my guides. Wonderland, the first book of the trilogy, opens with a pigeon resting on a cradle in a quiet room — an ominous symbol in the local folklore. The tale continues: three women weep in an open field; a black horse lays on its back in what looks like a fetal position, somewhere high in the mountains; the severed head of a cow rests in a cart; there are weddings, dances, and marches; ballerinas backstage; burnt out buildings; a man playing trumpet for his cat; young people exercising; a couple sleeping in the tall grass. The woman in the first frame of Wonderland reappears thirty years later in the last frame of Departure Lounge. One custom, then, is to observe Amanohashidate via the mata-nozoki position: leaning forward to see the landscape upside down through your legs. This inverts heaven and earth and turns the pine-forested sandbank that winds through the water into a dragon that flies across the sky. This is known as hiryūkan, or the “sight of flying dragon.” Dew had become a fragrant vapour that hung fertile in the air. Her Bantu friends would say that you could throw carpet dust in this kind of weather and something plump and juicy would grow from it. She laughed to herself at the sight of the fallen jungli-pears covering half the ground. It was only when she moved halfway across the globe and ate the jungli-pears brought over from still further across, that she realised ‘avocados,’ although expensive, were actually quite delicious. One fell with a gentle thud by her foot. Crouching, she turned it over in her hands and decided it would be pickled later that afternoon. The breeze combed through the papaya tree’s leaves and the banana flower prepared to drop its daily petal. Easing pods from stem, her hands became quicker as they remembered the choreography and she tuned into the surrounding birdchatter. “Good morning, pitru.” She wondered how, in the flocking journeys between realms, they greeted each other before exchanging messages from the Has Been and Yet-To-Be. In the early years in London, when this North London garden was more of a dreamforest, the mocking, mournful birds would guide her to the medicine. The mung pods filled the wide basket now, and she swung it across her hip to go and sit in mango shade. Beginning to sift the pods, her attention was pulled to whistling somewhere over her shoulder. She turned and saw three red bulbuls chasing one another and circling above a strangely clear patch of land. The soil under the calling birds was warm and wet, and as she sunk her fingers, she felt a beating. Absently looking for a dismembered root or seed, her searching fingers went deeper as the beating grew loud and fast. The bulbuls were becoming frenzied as the midday sun scorched and echoed the soil’s pulse. Straining their trilled throats, more like screeching now, she was elbow deep. Feeling desperately for something to hold onto in the pounding soil. The sun raged on her scalp, down her parting. Tears streaming and breath growing ragged, she dug her heels into the ground, praying for it to open under her. The sun doubled down its efforts to split her in two. Eyes clasped shut, her fingers scratched at something underground and finally held on. The erratic beating was now in the middle of her chest. Her right hand and heel still deep in soil, she was pulled spinning through the sky, vermillion, then three silver eyes like stars on bread. When you bite into the dough, what emerges is music, tin-chu chu. Someone is waiting (the moon is broken) for the moon to come out.
Where are you closer to everything?
In the plants? Or the little heart?
No. There’s no man in the lighthouse.
There’s no woman there, but there is
a light there; it’s a bulb.
And how do you become a thing,
molt into something tender,
oddly lumpy, imperfect,
maybe-not-young? Look—
you’re making honey.
Listen—you’re getting ready for bed,
the carrots
turning a wooden shade of brown.
So. As the Guajiríos waited for a response from the government, work on the dam continued, and the floodgates on the dam were closed in early July. On Thursday, López Obrador will head to Sonora, where first he will officially apologize to the indigenous Yaqui people who were subjected to a genocide in the 19th century —to paraphrase John Lewis, easy-peasy because it doesn’t cost a peso to do so — and then to officially inaugurate the Bicentenario-Los Pilares dam. The rising water has already cut off the Guajiríos’ route to their herds of cattle and nearby roads. Alongside farmland and homes, the Guarijíos history and heritage also faces obliteration: pre-Columbian petroglyphs, ceremonial sites and a swathe of riverside territory rich in medicinal plants will all be lost beneath the rising waters, as will the graves of their ancestors. “Our holy places have already been flooded,” said Wilfrido. “Our village is dying, our culture is dying — and our hope is …” Well, let’s just say that López Obrador has also said he will only wear a mask when the country eradicates corruption — a pledge made the day after Mexico surpassed the UK in total COVID-19 deaths. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the IPCC’s most extreme projection of the impact of global climate policies is tracking within one percent of actual results. The RCP 8.5 CO2 emissions pathway, long considered a “worst case scenario” by climate scientists, is the most appropriate for conducting assessments of climate change impacts by 2050, according to a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the study, conducted by scientists at Woods Hole, “Not only are the emissions consistent with RCP8.5 in close agreement with historical total cumulative CO2 emissions, but RCP8.5 is also the best match out to midcentury under current and stated policies with still highly plausible levels of CO2 emissions in 2100.” The paper concludes, paraphrasing Voltaire: “Indeed, if RCP8.5 did not exist, we’d have to create it.” Oh, and while we’re at it, why don’t we just store 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate in some old warehouse and let it sit untended til it blows up half of Beirut? In this story, there are two Shaye Saint Johns. First, the supermodel who’s disfigured in a freak accident and subjected to a series of horrific mind-control experiments by the CIA. Second, a rubber mask and deflated costume draped over a wheelchair. Words are repeated and flashed cross the screen, dolls are destroyed, mannequin legs tap and drag across the concrete. The birds — who knew them? — erred. At times, a wet day brought on the senses of purgatory. One contemplates an ornamental rain barrel, seen from up close, and concludes that it is not a thing of God, at least, though it is easy to imagine a workman’s ladder falling from grace like a rose from a white cloth, or a phantom ten-petaled rain barrel descending at an angle to the pole on which it is suspended, for this is the world, and all things have their procedural order. The light that showers on the page also lubricates it, deepening as it runs down the page, to suggest that the present might be the sum total of all the contingencies that might befall, or that a single blizzard announcing the onset of summer meant, in any case, that it was best to back away, to retreat to a lower perch that did not speak to you, a secret lane of water between the lofty, leafy heights of the sky and the minuscule, leaf-shaped structures of the earth’s surface. I mean, I moved 11 times in my life … each time terrified of the amount of things I had to pack. I decided I needed to face the value my own belongings in total honesty. Therefore, for 2 years, 15 hours a week, I isolated myself and staged and photographed all 10,532 objects in my house. Then, in order to rigorously confront myself with everything I own, I classified everything by material, color, their frequency of use and their emotional value. As if we needed more confirmation of his functional illiteracy, today Trump demonstrated that he could not pronounce “Yosemite.” Trying to read it from a sheet of paper, he tried twice to come up with the right pronunciation and instead settled on “YO-se-MIGHT” and then “Yo-se-min-NIGHT.” This, after assuring Jonathan Swan in an Axios interview, that he reads a lot, adding “I comprehend extraordinarily well. Probably better than anybody that you’ve interviewed in a long time,” less than 24 hours earlier. And it gets better, or worse, or something. According to today’s Guardian, Sean Hannity’s Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink wasd released Tuesday. But as Business Insider pointed out, the Latin motto it uses as a subtitle has been quietly changed from the original jacket. At first, the cover featured the Latin tagline “vivamus vel libero perit Americae” — a phrase that Hannity told viewers on Fox means “live free or America dies”. But as IU Bloomington classics student Spencer Alexander McDaniel laid out on his blog, it doesn’t. “It is clear that whoever came up with this motto does not even know the basic noun cases in Latin or how they work,” wrote McDaniel. “The words in Hannity’s motto are real Latin words, but the way they are strung together they don’t make even a lick of sense.” McDaniel tells us that Hannity’s Latin actually translates as “Let’s live or he … passes away from America for the detriment of a free man”. He then inferred that the incorrect Latin had been arrived at by putting “live free or America dies” into Google Translate. Since it was possible the change had been made after someone at Hannity’s publisher had read his article, McDaniel went on to address the television presenter directly: “Sean Hannity, if you’re reading this, I want you to go on your show and publicly admit that you’ve done nothing on air for the past 11 years but peddle lies, nonsense, and conspiracy theories. Then, I want you to disavow white supremacy, misogyny and xenophobia, acknowledge the reality and seriousness of climate change, and tell all your viewers to take Covid-19 seriously and wear masks in public at all times.” Sure you want war? the person dressed as a tree said. The person dressed as a tree was standing with its branches up in the air like someone with his or her hands up. A man with a gun was pointing the gun at the person dressed as a tree. Are you threatening me? the man with the gun said. No, the person dressed as a tree said. You’re the one with the gun. I’m a peaceable person, the man with the gun said. I don’t want trouble. That’s why I carry this gun. And it’s not like I have anything against people like you generally. What do you mean, people like me? the person dressed as a tree said. What I said. People dressed in stupid pantomime tree costumes, the man with the gun said. But why? the person dressed as a tree said. Think what it’d be like if everyone started wearing tree costumes, the man with the gun said. It’d be like living in a wood. And we don’t live in a wood. This town’s been a town since long before I was born. If it was good enough for my parents, and my grandparents and my great grandparents. What about your own costume? the person dressed as a tree said. (The man with the gun was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap.) This isn’t a costume, the man said. These are my clothes. Well, these are my clothes. But I’m not calling your clothes stupid, the person dressed as a tree said. Yeah, because you wouldn’t dare, the man with the gun said. He waved his gun. And anyway, yours are stupid clothes, he said. Normal people don’t go around wearing tree costumes. At least, they don’t round here. God knows what they do in other cities and towns, well, that’s up to them. But if you got your way you’d be dressing our kids up as trees, dressing our women up as trees. It’s got to be nipped in the bud. The man with the gun raised it and pointed it. The person dressed as a tree braced him or her self inside the thick cotton. The little grassblades painted round the bottom of the costume shivered round the painted roots. The man looked down the sights of his gun. Then he lowered the gun away from his eyes. He laughed. See, the funny thing is, he said, it just came into my head that in war films, when they’re going to execute someone, they stand them up against trees or posts. So shooting you is a bit like not shooting anyone at all. He put the gun to his eye. He aimed at the trunk of the tree, at roughly where he guessed the heart of the person inside the costume was. “So. That’s me done, Daniel said. You can’t stop there! Elisabeth said. Mr Gluck! Can’t I? Daniel said. Elisabeth sits in the anodyne room in the hospice next to the sleeping Daniel, holding the book open, reading about metamorphoses. Round them, invisible, splayed out across the universe, are all the shot-dead pantomime characters. The Dame is dead. The Ugly Sisters are dead. Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother and Aladdin and the cat with the boots and Dick Whittington, mown down, a panto corncrop, panto massacre, a comedy tragedy, dead, dead, dead. Only the person dressed as a tree is still standing. But just as the man with the gun is finally about to shoot, the person dressed as a tree transforms before the gunman’s eyes into a real tree, a giant tree, a magnificent golden ash tree towering high above waving its mesmerizing leaves. No matter how hard the man with the gun shoots at this tree he can’t kill it with bullets. So he kicks its thick trunk. He decides he’ll go and buy weedkiller to pour on its roots, or matches and petrol, to burn it down. He turns to go – and that’s when he gets kicked in the head by the half of the pantomime horse it’s slipped his mind to shoot. He falls to the ground, dead himself on top of the pantomime fallen. It’s a surrealist vision of hell. What’s surrealist, Mr Gluck? This is. There they lie. The rain falls. The wind blows. The seasons pass and the gun rusts and the brightly coloured costumes dull and rot and the leaves from all the trees round about fall on them, heap over them, cover them, and grass grows round them then starts growing out of them, through them, through ribs and eyeholes, then flowers appear in the grass, and when the costumes and the perishable parts have all rotted away or been eaten clean by creatures happy to have the sustenance, there’s nothing left of them, the pantomime innocents or the man with the gun, but bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them. Which is what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we’re here or we don’t. So. While we’re here. I mean, while we’re still here. Daniel sat on the bench with his eyes closed for a moment. The moment got longer. It became less of a moment, more of a while. Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. Mr Gluck? She jogged his elbow. Ah. Yes. I was, I was — What was I? You said the words, while we’re here, Elisabeth said. You said it twice. While we’re here. Then you stopped speaking. Did I? Daniel said. While we’re here. Well. While we’re here, let’s just always hold out hope for the person who says it. Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said. Sure you want war? Daniel said. “Read the manuals, read the books,” replied Trump.
Smoke is forever
wafting up
through the floorboards
from all sides,
I felt dissolved
by the strobing numbers
and signs,
I lean up against the sagging doorways
of my million pores and proteins, this evening we are going to sit down with our household budget and imagine that our pensions get taken away. We spoke about making things from the materials we have at hand — or available at the market. She said “turmeric.” On pieces of cardboard mined from remnants of packaging. I’m thinking of Louise Bourgeois’s late fabric works — she started using her own wardrobe to make incredible quote unquote paintings, aware of her imminent death and thinking “I don’t need these clothes.” My colleague and friend is making videos of how to make yarn to weave with out of
brick and cement
rain and hot piss, glass
and steel beams — chipped
paint and mushrooms
“Quarantine” was a period of forty days after death of the body that the spirit wandered. Similarly, as described in the Quran’s very first revealed verse, forty days pass before the clot of tissue in the womb has life breathed into it. Someone leaves a note on the door: Are you saving the plumeria branches in the driveway. I draw a jackal-headed woman in sand … seeds scatter, that’s what they are made to do. I am reclaiming myself as soil.
Since the restaurants have closed down, the rats marauder
sharing a secret code with the ravens who eye from fire escapes
our infected city, yes, no, depending
this is how the stock market could be going up
my foot is already asleep I have sat on it again
yad ihāsti tad anyatra yan nehāsti na tat kvacit
(‘what is here is there; what is not here is nowhere’)
[Note: JBR; Çağdaş Erdoğan, Control; Benjamin Welton, “Strange Islands”, at The Smart Set, 20 Jul 020; JBR; Georges Bataille, quoted in Richard Marshall, “beirut 12 / 11: maurice blanchot and georges bataille”, and Dennis Cooper, in Cooper’s “Spotlight on … Maurice Blanchot The Last Man (1957)”, at DC’s, 29 Jul 020; Justyn Huckleberry, “When Climate, Cattle, and Copper Collide”, at Edge Effects, 21 Jul 020 (dunno who the photographer is); Reverend Gary Davis, “If I Had My Way” (memory quote); JBR; Lotte L.S., “Des Matons”, at Tentacular 3, mixed with Daisy LaFarge, “Siphoning”, “What Genie Got”, at The White Review, Sept 016; JBR; Rosie Roberts, “PULPO MOTORINO: pounding the pages of Laure Prouvost’s Legsicon (Book Works 2019)”, at Map 50; Maria Sledmore, “(REVIEW) Shia LaBeouf, by AK Blakemore”, and Dan Power, “(REVIEW) I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) by SJ Fowler”, at Spam, 29 and 24 Jul 020; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Meditation 83”, "Meditation 82”, and “Meditation 81”, at Susan M Schultz’s Blog, 28, and 21 Jul 020; JBR; Donald J Trump, 28 Jul 020 tweet, quoted in Heather Cox Richardson, “29 Jul 2020 from Letters from an American”, email sent me by K, 30 Jul 020 (Richardson: “This is no longer even coded racial language: the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH) was explicitly intended to end racial segregation in housing.”); JBR; Elisabetta Zavoli, image and Ravi Ghosh, text, in Ghosh’s “Wellcome’s Photography Prize Takes Aim at the Pandemic of Mental Health”, at Elephant, 31 Jul 020; JBR; Elisabetta Zavoli, “The Tree of Life”, at Elisabetta Zavoli; Jackie Wang, “the absence of shape”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 31 Jul 020; rooke Jarvis, “Where Do Eels Come From?”, at The New Yorker, 18 May 020; Eduardo Halfon, “A Few Seconds in Paris”, at New York Review of Books, 1 Aug 020; Charcoal Book Club, “Announcing August’s Book-of-the-Month”, blurb for Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, email rec’d 1 Aug 020, approx. 11:16am PDT; Anna Cabrera, quoted in Marshall Contemporary, “New Artist Interview with Albarrán Cabrera”, email rec’d 1 Aug 020, approx. 11:53am PDT; Priya Jay, “The moon waned in Capricorn as the Medicine Woman was sleeping”, at Auto Italia, 3 Jul 020; Himali Singh Soin, “ancestors of the blue moon”, at Whitechapel Gallery (where Soin is Writer in Residence 2020/2021); JBR; Joseph Ceravolo, “Lighthouse”, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Joseph Ceravolo Collected Poems (2013)”, at DC’s, 3 Aug 020; Caroline Parkman Barr, “You Could Do Anything You Wanted: a found poem using language from the NYT Minus Context Twitter account”, “Still Life with Broken Flower Pot on the Kitchen Floor”, at Entropy, 3 Aug 020; JBR; Analy Nuño, “‘Guajirío culture is dying’: Mexican dam poised to displace living and flood ancestors’ graves”, and David Agren, “Mexican president Amlo says he will wear mask ‘when there is no corruption’” Guardian, 4 Aug and 31 Jul 020; JBR; “‘‘Worst case’ emissions scenario is best match for reality”, at Climate and Capitalism, 4 Aug 020; JBR, but all over the news, 4 Aug 020; Dennis Cooper, quoting somebody, in “Shaye Saint John Day”, at DC’s, 4 Aug 020; “The Prophet Birds”, in Brian Ng, FRAGMENT after John Ashbery, at Gauss PDF; JBR; Barbara Iweins, Katalog; Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American … August 4, 2020”, email sent me by K, 5 Aug 020, approx. 8:57am PDT; JBR; Alison Flood, “Sean Hannity removes ‘gobbledygook’ Latin motto from book cover”, at Guardian, 5 Aug 020; Ali Smith, Autumn; Donald Trump, Axios interview with Jonathan Swan, 3 Aug 020; images: Samuel Fosso, SIXSIXSIX, at Walther Collection; Wendy Xu, “Fragments for Höld”, Jill Magi, untitled, Sahar Khraibani & Kat Pongrace, “Seven O’clock in New York”, in Echo 1, Kazim Ali, “Quarantine Diary”, Erin Langley, untitled, Gillian Conoly, “unconditional”, in Echo 2, and Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, “Every Night from 11 to 1, A New Love, or: An Incomplete Play, with No Dialogue, Only Narration, in Three Complete Parts”, in Echo 3, at Nightboat Books; Nisha Ramayya, “The Lexicographer-Priest”, at Tank, Sept 019 (the quote is from the Mahabharata)]
