Just so you know the coordinates are porous
So nobody remembers anybody traveling with a donkey
Exclaiming their gold and musk, what if I
Can’t close the window? ask me another one
The fields fall together, you want to pull
Out the stuffing, fight over real grid examples
What else is a person who’s never been allowed to
Be a subject supposed to do?
When I speak it’s clear that I don’t reject
The [way the world] world[s]. Its witnesses
Coincide with this.
At the park
A shuddering infant watches the leaves, a child
Floating on an inflated dinosaur
Slowly crosses the lake – I mean,
If we thrill to low hills because they are not composed
they are “composed to our liking”
They say there is no defining that but to say that is
defining that, living in context
One would think of all the social forces traveling with a show
of indifference over a crowd or sound
brought to a sound
A good person would be starred ill and well in a life he or
she couldn’t know how to refuse
Every day we may never happen on the object hung on
a mere chance
When and where one happens it will surprise us not in itself
but in its coming to our attention not as something
suddenly present but as something that’s been near for
a long time and which we have only just noticed
When we might ask did we begin to share that existence
What have we overlooked
Nostalgia is another name for one’s sense of loss at the
thought that one has sadly gone along happily
overlooking something, who knows what
Perhaps there were three things, no one of which made
sense of the other two
A sandwich, a wallet, and a giraffe
But, then again, maybe no. I am befuddled. Not by this work, but by life in general. And then there was a woman sitting on the steps, she was an MTA worker joining us and I used to drive buses, my nickname driving buses was Auto because I was young and sold mushrooms on the side and connected to the mentally challenged passengers I drove. It’s a wonder they all were transported safely and I believe a higher power wanted me to see that I am just as much a star as the stars are a bazillion miles away ... as I’ve watched enough television to know that people like me die and even our friends forget the atrocities. Like in 2006 when I lived in China a white middle age male American architect of the World Trade Center came on CCTV and explained to viewers that the greatest moment of the modern world was the fall of the World Trade Center. He explained that ever since their demise the world has been free to create a new trading system. Free at last! Free at last! What an idiot. Yes we’re engaged. No we never dated. I swear it’s really not that weird. Before I woke I banged piano out in a field the floodrotten shed in the distance. I composed for you w/ ham & wire. It sounded good at the time so what if it came out sloppy. And why shouldn’t Kevin Killian be able to marry Evo Morales if he wants to, and still stay married to Dodie Bellamy too, why not? Evo Morales has a coke-can cock we used to say to each other after watching Democracy Now together, an old love and I. Then I met a Bolivian hostile to the land policies of Evo Morales. The Bolivian hostile to the land policies of Evo Morales said, Really? You don’t think Evo Morales has a choad? What’s a choad I said sincerely ignorant. You don’t know what a choad is? No I don’t I said, but I hear the word constantly. It’s a cock thicker than it is long said Patricio. Never seen one of those in person, I said. Look online said Patricio. Your effen rad, said Shahid’s first text, and then, Your a beautiful soul. [Sic]. So is he. Saying I don’t even have a fucking GED. It’s not like Kevin Killian ever said anything to me about Evo Morales. The lady who loves the Eiffel Tower married it. In Haiti I was told it’s Jupiter and Mercury I’ll marry, in addition to persons. “You must understand, it is difficult for me to die.” “And it is easy for us to go on living?” ––Bukharin to Stalin, Plenum of the Central Committee, 1937. Or maybe the other way around; I’ve lost the thread: Something about Evil Days, Evil Ways, Business as Usual, and the Infernal Machine. The epigraph is from the transcript of the proceedings of the plenum of the Central Committee, February 1937, as presented in William Kentridge’s installation I am not me, the horse is not mine (at SFMoMA a while back); a very different transcription occurs in The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932-1939 by J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov and Benjamin Sher (Yale University Press, 2002). “At last an answer: William did indeed knowingly change the dialogue from the actual transcript. He said that he was thinking about a letter Bukharin sent from death row.” (Mark Rosenthal, curator of Kentridge exhibit, in response to questions re the discrepancy. October 29, 2010.) For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me Food, I Was Thirsty and You Gave Me Drink, I Was Homeless and WTF You Drenched Me With Sprinklers To Drive Me Away. But though Negarestani refers to capitalism as “the most recurring politico-economic figure of speculative thought,” and Srnicek has written about it, they conceive of it in philosophical terms, as the great engine of “correlationist” thinking: the problem with capitalism, for these thinkers, is that it creates an echo chamber that makes our minds small. The capitalist problem that speculative realism seems best equipped to address, in other words, is not an actual dynamic of accumulation and exploitation, but the epistemological problem of capitalism’s reduction of all phenomena to its own image. However revolutionary it may be in philosophical terms that these thinkers respond to capitalist epistemology not with a counter-epistemology but with an ontology, and however enthusiastically they may imagine subjects who think (or exist) entirely differently than the ones we know today, their anti-philosophical and anti-hermeneutic gestures are just that: anti-philosophical and anti-hermeneutic, not anti-capitalist. But even if we agree with this reading of Mallarmé’s poem as encoding a secret Christology, we needn’t see it as unprecedented: there have been Future-Christs for a very long time.
Krystle
Krystle Cole
you’re all I thought about sometimes
I watched you while our daughter slept
your Sissy Spacek ways
your laconic demeanor in relaying
either ecstasy or trauma
& the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed
on YouTube
which is our loving cup
the solution of butter
& DMT you took
anally that really made you
freak the fuck out
& your friends just stood there
watching you
as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels.
[…]
I was going always to the mall
in those months,
the young century’s rainiest
April & May, to walk the
baby & to understand my art.
I didn’t understand.
I would move the stroller
through the halogen, over
grooved tile & across those
smooth marble expanses meant
to simulate floating & gliding
[…]
[like (tho I was unlike)]
Bradley Cooper, in Limitless
who takes this little pill, which
in its candy dot translucence
looks a lot like a tear plucked
from the cheek in Man Ray’s “Larmes.”
Which is to say, like many of his fellow detainees at Guantánamo, Ould Slahi has always been a migrant. The son of a nomadic merchant, he won a prestigious scholarship in 1988 to study in what was then West Germany. From there, he made several trips during his winter breaks to Afghanistan, joining the jihad against the Soviet-backed government in the years before al-Qa‘ida declared war on the United States. He spent most of the 1990s studying and working in Germany and moved to Montreal briefly in late 1999. In these countries, Ould Slahi’s milieu consisted mainly of other working-class Arab and Muslim migrants, some of whom would come to attract police attention. His wife’s sister was married to one of Usama bin Ladin’s close aides; he met Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the accused 9/11 conspirators, for one night. In the eyes of the U.S. government, these acquaintances, kinship ties, and patterns of traveling while Muslim must have been dots crying out to be connected. In order to do so, it tried to turn his itinerant nature against him, by targeting him at his most vulnerable: while in transit. In January 2000, he was arrested while passing through Senegal on his way home. Several days later, the U.S. put him on a charter flight to Mauritania for several more weeks of interrogation. “It was the first time that I shortcut the civilian formalities while leaving one country to another,” he said. “It was a treat, but I didn’t enjoy it.” In both countries, Ould Slahi was questioned by the local authorities and U.S. agents, each capable of pointing to the actions of the other to excuse their own behavior. In a way, the book’s title is a misnomer, for a third of his account takes place in prisons other than Guantánamo. Ould Slahi’s experiences of detention in at least five countries are a reminder that the internment camp in Cuba is more than simply an offshore aberration from U.S. justice, but part of a global web of shadowy detention practices that predates 9/11. Ould Slahi knows he is not alone in this experience (this passage is taken from Ould Slahi’s manuscript rather than the published book, but the text is virtually identical): I thought about all my innocent brothers who were and still are being rendered to all strange places and countries, and I felt solaced, and not any more alone. I felt the spirits of [u]njustly mistreated people with me, I heard so many had heard so many stories about brothers being passed back and forth like a soc[c]erball just b/c they have been once in [Afghanistan], Bosnia, or Chechnya. In November 2001, he voluntarily presented himself for yet more questioning in what may have seemed to him a never-ending “round up the usual suspects” ritual. He has not seen his family since. After eight days he was put on a plane to Jordan, “treated like a UPS package” and dispatched to one of the CIA’s most trusted and reliable proxy torturers. In an extraordinary passage, Ould Slahi recounts being personally handed over by Mauritania’s secret police chief at the time, Deddahi Ould Abdallahi, to Jordanian intelligence officers at the Nouakchott airport. Quickly realizing that the Mauritanian and Jordanian torturers had difficulty communicating across their very different Arabic dialects, Ould Slahi jumped in to explain that the Jordanians needed to refuel their chartered plane. “I had an advantage over both of them,” he recalled with pride in his resourcefulness. “There is hardly any Arabic dialect I don’t understand because I used to have many friends from different cultural backgrounds. I was eager to let my predator know I am, I am.” He spent the next eight months imprisoned at the headquarters of Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate in Wadi al-Sir, on the outskirts of Amman. Between long interrogations and occasional beatings he observed the misunderstandings, breakdowns, and tensions in the outsourcing of torture. His Jordanian jailers confronted him with intercepted emails and demanded that he decipher suspicious passages, mistaking their own misapprehension of multiple translations from German to English to Arabic for some kind of coded language. In Ould Slahi’s telling, the Jordanians came to realize that there was no reason to hold him but nevertheless needed to convince their American patrons of their earnest attempts to break him. When they finally recommended his release, Washington was only further angered and eventually decided to cut out the middleman and take Ould Slahi into its own hands. He was flown from Jordan to Bagram and soon thereafter to Cuba. He arrived in the New World after having been stripped, shackled, and crammed into a vessel with other men and sent across a distant ocean [same old story, right?]. Upon arrival, the detainees were subjected to an interrogation process that the book illustrates as a kind of forced labor, with repeated performances aimed at producing a curious commodity called “intels.” Ould Slahi shows us how much sheer work goes in to the process of confession: Had I done what they accused of me of, I would have relieved myself since day one. But the problem is that you cannot just admit to something you haven’t done b/c you need to deliver the detail, which you couldn’t when you hadn’t. It’s not just “Yes, I did!” No, it doesn’t work that way, you have to make up a complete story that makes sense to the dumbest dummies. One of the hardest things is to tell an untruthful story and maintain it … The perversity of torture lies not simply in the possibility that tortured prisoners will confess to anything to make the pain stop; it is that the torturers will also demand that you perform your subjection with creativity and enthusiasm. That you will fill in the details they want corroborated and make up new ones to be tested on other prisoners; and that you will continue to fail and retake those tests.
[Note: Sources: “Last Examples (5)”, at A Seated Pigeon Turned Makes Sculpture, 25 Mar 015; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, image text embedded in Jean Donnelly, “Lyn Hejinian, from Book of a Thousand Eyes”, at Jean Donnelly, 25 Mar 015, “Happily [excerpt]”, at Poets.org; JBR; Stephen Boyer, “Gangbang For Democracy”, Frank Sherlock, “Love Letter November 15”, Ariana Reines, “I Do”, Bill Berkson, “Anhednia”, at The Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology Compiled by Stephen Boyer, Filip Marinovich, Kari Giron, Jackie Simmons, Sarah Sarai, Eliot Glassheim, Jackie Sheeler, Chris Cobb, Ofelia Del Corazon, Sarah E. Robey, Rami Shamir and the Poets of Occupy Wall Street; JBR; Good German, “For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me Food, I Was Thirsty and You Gave Me Drink, I Was Homeless and WTF You Drenched Me With Sprinklers To Drive Me Away”, at Disinformation, 25 Mar 015; Christopher Nealon, and Dana Ward, “The Crisis of Infinite Worlds”, quoted in Nealon’s “Infinity for Marxists”, at Mediations, vol. 28, no. 2; JBR; Darryl Li, “Empire Records”, at The New Inquiry, 25 Mar 015 (a discussion of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary)]
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