And then a small flame turns large and outside the fat squirrel shoves loquats into his good natured cheeks. That fucking squirrel, who doesn’t love him? Flesh dissolving off the bones, and the hordes of people who’ve walked this earth brave brave brave setting their good selves on fire to let a greater good emerge. This plane – this snow globe I’ve skated around while wearing a perfect red sweater, it will explode and seek out the email, phone number, or Twitter account of administrative personnel and remind them that, in the words of Fred Moten, “this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfuckers.” If this doesn’t work, hide old soft-boiled eggs under the floorboards of their offices. And remember, the mutes required by Scelsi for the strings in certain works do not function as ordinary mutes; their forms are different as is the material with which they are made. They are metallic objects that rub against the string or strings and produce grating, buzzing sounds and resonances. Harmonics are added, not taken away. Appropriately enough, then, the epigram “structaque sunt nostris barbara verba modis”, written by Ovid about his attempts (no longer extant) to write in Getic (the language of his place of exile, corresponding with present day Romania, but which may have more generalized affiliations with the “gothic” — a productive engine of “added harmonics”, as we’ll see in future posts.) Metamorphosis, exile, drift … the translational gothic creates not merely new texts, but also new beings in process, who are untranslatable, or at least untranslatable back to their origins. Which is of course just another way of saying “One taste, and the deadly process is activated: digestive juices concentrate and churn, eating the body away, leaving the pearly cream testicles, the crispy penis that yields with sweet reluctant delay and the quintessence of delight residing in the juice of the Adam’s Apple dissolves to ingest the living brain, quivering like a great oyster, from the softened skull … oh! oh! La la la … slurp … blub … It was time to act – Using the drug the doctor had given me, I took over the priest’s body, gained access to the room where the codices were kept, and photographed the books – Equipped now with sound and image track of the control machine I was in position to dismantle it – I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of image and the changed order would be picked up and fed back into the machine – I had recordings of all agricultural operations, cutting and burning brush etc. – I now correlated the recordings of burning brush with the image track of this operation, and shuffled the time so that the, so that the, so that the, I serve the lentil soup naked.” Where do the green frogs winter that look so old? We watched so carefully our eyes became vacant, our minds Hoo! Hey! Today the four decades of sculptures in her loft cohabit with hundreds of succulents and cacti, some of which have their roots embedded in the welcoming art. What these museums and landscapes and other sites and materials must appear to consent to is the possibility of being structured along the lines of cognition that are themselves structured along the lines of language which was at first structured itself along the lines of the material world but having met a point at which the question was slow decay or fast oblivion, chose oblivion and loosed itself into what other possibilities were detached from what could be seen or felt or heard. One of these things you did with your hand: one of these things you will do with your mouth. There are other motivations you might suffer, all of them equal. It’s like Madeline Gins said: “Its subject matter wraps around you or around the referent of any member of your ever-available suite of pronouns and would-be pronouns and counts as you or one or another of these referents and follows you or such referents wherever you go or they go.” Sure it’s hard to give up what pointed and bended and soared all at once: A ghost sat in it. A child wept in it. It turned into a turtle. When added to a barricade, it probably saved the world. There were infinite amounts of untruths about chairs and also all the new truths you could tell about chairs, the ones that no one had yet discovered. There were also the truths that had been discovered but might require some reminding and the truths of chairs we held in common then and in the saying these truths we could say what brought us together, what we held in all our hands. IT IS EASY TO GO FROM BEING A CHAIR TO BEING A POET, IT’S AS EASY AS TAKING YOUR HAND. Which reminds to tell you that the 2 magnetic Immortality Rings on your small fingers function as a turbine, which increases the whole body’s chi flow, thus increasing the healing process. So you heal faster than you age. Therefore, you stay young forever. And yeah, ban cruelty to animals and stop people from selling fur or bear bile. And as far as my saying, “Alicia Silverstone is so beautiful. She is the example of a perfect human blend. I shall endeavor to make everyone as beautiful as Alicia with my inventions. My inventions are to help people reach perfection,” like, I wrote that almost 20 years ago. But I keep it up there because I am a loyal guy and plus very traditional. I like to keep my website old school. So where did I put it? Can I get there across the untethered plank? How old are the planks of the rotting walkway? How about these nails sticking out? How to find out the overgrown trails they had to have used? How about the shiny commercial mixer on the counter of the abandoned kitchen where the roof had fallen in, except on that part, that looked like the kitchen was still in use? The truth we often know is that the US America never started. And about what they’ll say of how we lived, if we’re lucky enough to engender a speaking they in a future, if that’s what luck is. Cradled in concrete loopshafts, ruled by people who pray to reptiles. Unwilling — the terror of the zero eye — And what you see as insignificant [indecipherable] And surprising, because it’s pretty much the only part of the song where the vocals haven’t been run through what sounds like the hair-dryer from a space hotel, and that’s so wonderful, and could religion be that? Plants’ speaking? There’s a graffito Jan Assmann writes about a lot, written around 1340 BC (the middle of Akhenaten’s reign) on a doorjamb in the tomb of a man named Pairi. The writer, a blind man named Pawah, addresses a suppressed god: My heart longs to see you, Lord of the Persea-trees, when your neck receives garlands! You give satiety without eating, drunkenness without drinking. My heart longs to see you, that my heart may rejoice, Amun, you fighter for the poor! You are the father of the motherless, the husband of the widow. Which is an awfully sweet thing to say. At the end, the voice seemingly splinters and becomes someone else speaking to Pawah: “To your Ka! Spend a happy day in the midst of your fellow-townsmen!” Except sometimes you start to forget things. You know you’re in the centre of town, but how did you get there? What town? You don’t remember waking up in the morning. Haven’t you always been here? It’s England; this could only be England. Soot-stained bricks chipped to bleeding red. Trees in wire mesh. Chewing-gum and plastic pigeonshit grit. Not a big town, nothing here is big enough to be in a big town. It isn’t anywhere. The roadsigns tell you nothing: this street is marked ‘This Street’, across the road ‘That Street’ plunges down to Costa Coffee and payday loan infinity. The centre of town might stretch out forever. You could pick a direction and start walking, up the road past the JD Sports, past the Co-op with its petrified pears gleaming against the window, past the multi-storey car park that bloats in the afternoon mist, keep walking for weeks and years without ever seeing green fields or even houses, until eventually you’d round the globe and arrive back here again, still on this damp Wednesday that never ends and never began. The sky is bright. You can’t find the sun. But you’re so hungry. You know what to say but the words won’t make their way past your lips. Just a gasping whine. ‘Please. I’m hungry. I’m so hungry.’ It’s not like any hunger you’ve ever known. Correction: it’s the only hunger you’ve ever known. Visions swirl of you bursting into the battery farm, tearing chickens from their cages and ripping through their necks, burying your face in all that purple screeching food. You’d pull the creature apart from its cloaca. Feel the metal tang of blood smeared from ear to ear. The hunger’s not an absence, it’s something you need to expel, a tight shining dead ball of weight in the pit of your body, a cluster bomb. Everything is so heavy; your limbs tremble, you can hardly move. You want to tear yourself out of your own skin, just burst right out, gleaming and skeletal. You want to fuck the Earth bloody. You need to eat. ‘I’m hungry. I’m so hungry.’ There are other things you should have noticed. Like the women: shouldn’t there be women, somewhere? You have a vague sense that this is why you’re here, because there might be women. Shouldn’t there be people? You’re in the centre of town, but the streets are empty, and silence roars eternal fury in your ears. Shouldn’t there be cars? Somewhere, somehow, everything has gone terribly wrong. Your friends are talking, muffled honks drowned out by the void; you don’t understand them. All you can see is the flesh stretching and rippling around their mouths, the moist meaty flick of tongue, the haze of saliva that hangs motionless in the air after it’s sprayed from between two teeth. These faces, the ones you’ve known for as long as you can remember, the ones you’re poured all your secrets lies and braggadocio into. What are these creatures? Who sent them? What do they want? The hoary old Turing Test is dismissed right off the top, and replaced with something better. Mary the Colorblind Scientist gets a cameo in the dialog. When Ava finally makes her move, we see more than a machine passing a post-Turing test: we see Caleb failing it, his cognitive functions betrayed by a Pleistocene penis vulnerable to hacks and optimized porn profiles, trapped in the very maze that Ava has just used him to escape from. There are glorious entertainments in this miserable world, could we find them out. The ancient mask looked astonished before the man sledge-hammered it. The penal colony's deathly invention kept me awake at night. Later I was told it’s funnier in German.
[Note: Sources: Ali Liebegott, “Final Poem”, at Enclave, 19 May 015; The New Order Of St Agatha, Kenneth Goldsmith Is Reading at My ______. Now What?, at Anne Boyer, 19 May 015, Anne Boyer, How to Go from Poetry to Art / How to Go from Art to Poetry, at Anne Boyer, 20 May 015, Arakawa + Gins, “Biotopology”, at Reversible Destiny; JBR; Durand. Salabert. Eschig, Giacinto Scelsi 1905-1988, at Durand. Salabert. Eschig; JBR; William S Burroughs, quoted at William S Burroughs 1914-1997 R.I.P.; Bernadette Mayer, “First turn to me. . . .”, at Poetry Foundation, “The End of Human Reign on Bashan Hill”, in Mayer’s Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer; Lenore Malen and Mira Schor, “In Memoriam: Jackie Brookner (1945-2015)”, at News Grist, 20 May 015; JBR; Alex Chiu, quoted in Brian Whitney, “After All These Years, Immortality Ring Inventor is Still Immortal”, at Disinformation, 20 May 015; JBR; Sesshu Foster, “Q & A Postcard”, at East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, 20 May 015; Ian Dreiblatt, “Stone Stair New York, Part 3 by DB Guest Blogger Ian Dreiblatt”, at Drunken Boat, 5 May 015; Sam Kriss, “Cheeky Nando’s, or, what went wrong?”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 20 May 015; Peter Watts, “A Mirror”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded), 20 May 015 (re the movie Ex Machina); Thomas Traherne, and Susan M Schultz, quoted in Schultz’s “80”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 20 May 015]
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