Friday, June 4, 2010

the fashionable dead



"we are a dying breed."

"Yes, and thank god."

now the clincher of this mind game, of this superfluous chatter, is the eye of the son. He is a giver and a taker, a child, and a fucker, and a lover among men and women alike. He is a beautiful freak with long legs and greasy hair and a shit little mustache that has no soul. He is a man, for sure, he is a feminine man. He is a man that girls, girls who look like little boys, like to go to bed with. And the rest of us try to forget about him. The rest of us with our muscular arch and our bare naked perception of how the raw dogs of lust are suppost to be rutting in the street. Like dogs, first of all, and not like delicate flowers. Certainly not cocaine dusted - this isn't the 70s. We are not players of mirth or dulcet sin. In this time we are all a pale reflection of the life that reverberated through the bare knuckle walls of our parent's bodies. When we forget the son we forget ourselves, which are equally as damaged.

"are we safe in here?"

"no, I doubt it."

Then let us make waves. Because the deep sea will never forget your face. The deep eternal blue. It will eat you up and leave you slumbering beneath the folds of fat and fidgeting follicles of demented organ. You will be coated in mucus and slowly your exterior features will be washed away leaving a very soft, very smooth, bag of skin and bones. Deep digital blue. It never forgets your face. Traces of your dna will be found a thousand years in the future, a million years, decades of secrets that anyone could scavenge if they only held the interest. Luckily you are a puzzle piece that is meaningless without the whole. Luckily you are unimportant to mostly everyone. Unluckily your life does not revolve around those people, it revolves around those who care about you, for better or worse, for evil or mercy. 

the son holds no light and sheds no power. he is a figment of all our imaginations put to rest. he is recirculated hot garbage, a recycled martyr, a veritable forget-me-not of kind and culture. his coat is wove of many years of interest, his armour is gold and he sleeps on a bed of roses (like the sunset a bed of roses). he is love but it is the love of empires rusting at the bottom of the ocean, it is the love of decay. It is not the love of animals (the only sacred love) it is not the love in the temple of eden. That particular kind of love only lurks behind closed doors and in the corner of the eye. It is strictly on the peripherals and it is rarely mentioned much. Hardly discussed (even as I write these words I am not discussing but merely bringing it to some sort of attention). It is a love that is not thought nor committed to speach, but it is acted on. It is action. It is pure and it is simple and it is clear. Like britta water, or something similar. Whatever we drink these days that is not natural but clean. Clean, whatever that means. Whatever it means, its taking over. Symptoms of a dialogue, I ramble, you read, you get bored, you put down the book, you come back and maybe turn the page without finishing the last paragraph. I do it all the time, I forgive you.


"there is nothing lost between us."

"just the days that kept us alive."

those days are golden books in a memoir of hope. I hope indeed to read them some day, and when I read them I hope that I look up and scan the horizon and hear a gull cry and see the tide slip and feel that even in this day and age I can relate to it. That there is still a little bit of something left. I don't see it now, but I sometimes feel it when I stop thinking in the middle of the night about the oppressive hole in the sky, and begin to merely glide on greased heels and embrace the street. have you ever felt that all the science fiction stories that you read are starting to quickly come true? Suddenly the only alternate reality that seems too far fetched is star trek and that's only because humans as a species are still sickly bastards who could never play the hero. Apostles of rotten apples. Cannibals are we, marching drunken down a soiled dirt road. Where does the road end? At the beginning of a novel by someone or someone else. In the dust of your horror film society - in a blood bath or something more sacred still. It is fashionable to excess, to exist as the living dead. We are so marked by death that we fear it in all forms of reality. It may only come to us in dreams and in the form of warped violence on a celluloid screen. Maybe if we butchered our own meat or eviscerated a young man in his prime as his comrades clean their bayonets all around you and the air barks with gun fire, and in the sky bombs fall as if stars. Maybe then death would hold no allure and romance for death would be left in the stains of our fatigue. People die, yet the more ridiculous the death the easier it is for us to laugh. A dog dies and we weep and we cry and we damn the mind that put it into our path of vision. Our culture is a breeder of crazies. What pathogen, what poison, what energy emitted from the waxing of the moon? There is no need for it. People turn to murder all on their own. Maybe death requires a little more sanctity. Maybe the realization that we are nothing but bags of skin was the worst thing we could have ever done to ourselves. I don't wish to alarm anyone, but a soul with no strings attached is better than that cool abyss that turns men and women into monsters.

"free sex, free violence, free rock and roll."

The son feels (as does the daughter) that to suffer through the dimension of orgiastic violence (as viewed through a video screen) is worthy of his time. It is a test that he will be subject to because it will make him harder, more real. Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions. In a manner of speaking he is no more real than the splash of red food colouring that is running down the hot blonde's castrated face. We don't learn things from film we relate to it, and through our relation come answers that have already come to pass in our own lives. That is the power of art, to unearth what already lies within you. So what is art? Forget about it, it doesn't really exist as anything more than a word. Forget about love for that matter, or god, or Jean Paul Sartre, or democracy. The real thing is chemical vapour that circles some distant sun. But the son is being tested by other brothers and sisters who rely on his power of regurgitation. It is not a sin. He absorbs and then he opens his mouth and vomits up society into the chirping mouths of the lesser thans. His friends. So he must take from this cornucopia of media and he must recite it and memorize it and spurn those who have not read from this same plastic bible. This is what it is to be fashionable.

One thing I will say for the fashionable is that they have a tendency to be extremely life affirming. They fuck and fight and live life as if they were trying to fill some bucket that has no bottom to it. Their vapid faces are a testament to a lack of knowledge, knowledge is a testament to suffering. Suffering is how one is aware that blood is really coursing their veins and that thoughts are not just fizzling out like shot fuses in their mental circuitry. The fashionable do not suffer so long as they remain the fashionable, so in this sense they are not truly alive. How then are they life affirming? Merely hold up the mirror. This is not to say that they are happy, but happiness has never been a true reflection of anything but the passage of time. Sadness will never give you a soul for sadness means nothing. Especially not sadness that is meant for the video camera. What is life is mere the absence or presence of satisfaction, your feelings on the matter are superfluous. Your feelings on the matter are what make you human, as such superfluous. Your feelings on the matter merely mean you are thinking, as such superfluous. Living in the moment makes satisfaction obsolete. This is what it is to be dead.

Speak no evil toward the son, for soon enough he will either come back to life or he will be as forgettable as the rest of us.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

closer to the bone




There are lone cemeteries,
tombs full of soundless bones,
the heart threading a tunnel,
a dark, dark tunnel :
like a wreck we die to the very core,
as if drowning at the heart
or collapsing inwards from skin to soul.

There are corpses,
clammy slabs for feet,
there is death in the bones,
like a pure sound,
a bark without its dog,
out of certain bells, certain tombs
swelling in this humidity like lament or rain.

I see, when alone at times,
coffins under sail
setting out with the pale dead, women in their dead braids,
bakers as white as angels,
thoughtful girls married to notaries,
coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead,
the wine-dark river to its source,
with their sails swollen with the sound of death,
filled with the silent noise of death.

Death is drawn to sound
like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer,
comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless,
comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat.
Nevertheless its footsteps sound
and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree.

I do not know, I am ignorant, I hardly see
but it seems to me that its song has the colour of wet violets,
violets well used to the earth,
since the face of death is green,
and the gaze of death green
with the etched moisture of a violet's leaf
and its grave colour of exasperated winter.

But death goes about the earth also, riding a broom
lapping the ground in search of the dead -
death is in the broom,
it is the tongue of death looking for the dead,
the needle of death looking for the thread.

Death lies in our beds :
in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets,
lives a full stretch and then suddenly blows,
blows sound unknown filling out the sheets
and there are beds sailing into a harbour
where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral.

P. Neruda