Anyways, I was set to write something of this sort. It fit neatly into many other senses I had, for one, my dislike of Christopher Nolan films, which are pure quantity without overarching quality. A brute marveling over the technological prowess of some guy, Christopher Nolan, a ‘Christopher Nolan’ film, a complete inversion of the artist, of anything resembling poetry.

Maybe around this time last year, perhaps a few months later, like October…I had this idea which I communicated to a friend that I wanted to see the world like a snake sees the world, or the way some adjacent kind of animal sees the world. This idea I had, that certain ‘types’ of organic creatures perceive the world in fundamentally different manners—that a predatory animal naturally sees the world as abundance, as opportunities for joy in the hunt, in the chase, in great eruptions of energy. While the prey animal sees the world as threats, everything beautiful hiding some horrible reality just beyond. Everything, therefore, for the prey animal is cause for skepticism.

I have also realized, just harboring this idea that it goes a little deeper–the world is also smaller for the predator animal. Reality is massive for the prey, for the being always afraid of annihilation and return to the great substance of nature. It is thus a qualitative sense of size; the predator animal can easily imagine the world as its ‘thing’, it’s theatre for motion, expression, while the prey animal must understand the world in Lovecraftian way as an unfathomable ocean of horrors. The human being is prey and predator both…and in this is the possibility of an intensity which the purely predatory animal cannot even fathom. The human can imagine the world, the universe, as enormous, and also as its play thing—this is the true logic of the sublime, the sublime originally re-affirms our capacity of creation, imagination, directs us inward to our own unfathomable depths, our own golden abyss within us, history, the universe, but now the sublime has become crude. It is obscured by a prey-like skepticism in the human animal, horror, mass murderers, evil at every corner. It has seeped into our arts, our movie. Everything is either paltry moralization or else shitty horror. In both ways we are re-figured as neo-liberal cog subjects. Whatever

What I like about predatory animals is that they express the total unambiguity of nature. Once, I was there when a snake struck and every animal within two hundred feet could sense it and was thrown into a dizzying panic. It was marvelous. Art is something like this, and that is why in our current society art must be made perpetually understandable, lest it dizzy the over eager museum goers and the enjoyers of culture and finery.

—

Now I have my photographs, oh yes, I should add, I am a loser—it is important that I say this, that I am a loser, altogether dead to the world. Oh yes, now let me begin I’ll keep it all short.

This is my first photograph. I like it cause it is very simple. Just flowers against a wall. The flowers are fake and I enjoy fake flowers. Of course, real flowers are ‘better’, more intense, more sensual, because they bloom and die but good fake flowers I like a lot cause the remain, endure. There is something about this which interests me. Like in the fake flower the mystery of the real flower can be explored, the mystery of life can be, if not touched, seen. A real flower what I like is the texture, the soft dewy life of a petal, and of course, the fragrance. This mist of floral aroma. In the midst of a real flower much can be thought that is nothing of the flower itself. I realize now it is a bit too hazy. And it is pretty obvious it is fake flowers.

Also, I should add, I have taken more pictures of these fake flowers than anything else. Upwards of a hundred pictures even though they always look exactly the same. In them I am looking for something, something though I do not know what yet.

Nobody seems to like the photographs I like to take of this old green fabric on this even older, vaguely golden, couch.

There is something ghostly in my sense of the couch, and luminously alive in the green fabric. I also like the green fabric because it reminds me of an 18th century painting of Madame de Pompadour by Francois Boucher. In it the the fabric of her dress is a very unique blue green mixture and obscures almost the entirety of her body besides a sliver of chest, her neck, and her disinterested face. What is interesting is how the detail is entirely in the fabric, typical of Rococo painters. I recall something by Sadakichi Hartmann on colors in visual imagery, how the reoccurrence of specific colors in a certain age signals mass bodily disorders. The body at large, the societal organism coping with some latent disease…he used this to describe the use of purple in French impressionist painting, attributing it to heavy metal poisoning from mass industrialization.

I don’t have anything more to say about this idk.

This is my last image. Like I said I’m a loser. I’m a loser with a pile of dirty clothes in his room. I saw my reflection and decided to take a photograph, I think, maybe this is proof that I exist. I think all art, maybe at its most basic level, is the claim ‘I am’, ‘I exist’ in this space, and this time. It is the universality of the I and the particulars of space and time, or something alone those lines.

I wish to return to what is small, or rather, in what is small I wish to find that space in which the small and the large are indistinguishable. I wish to find a pure air, a pure life. But I am a loser, I serve little purpose…ahh..and now I am sleepy, I find it hard to take myself seriously. Goodbye

—

I thought of a story at the end of evening news. The news, telling of every disaster across the wide wide world in places I’ll never see, and then—a ‘bit’ of good news, which was that a high school football team that had lost 150 straight games was allowed to win one by a merciful opponent, even the good news is on the backdrop of total defeat. What else, someone with a week left to live gets to have a ten minute zoom call with The Rock? Literally this stuff brings me to the brink of psychosis, and then, at the end of the news I heard the fateful words—"Thats another day in America” and a story was born.

The story was about a man, or, more generally a person. It was a story I decided not to write cause it was really, really depressing. The main character, Ivan, hears those words “That’s another day in America” and the sudden realization of space and time brings about an existential shock where he is unwittingly conscripted into the silent revolt of all things existent. The silent revolt against the absurdity of time and existence itself, the silent revolt of simply being in its most banal, mute, form. He thus becomes mute, he becomes nothing, will-less. Yet, he can’t help but be momentarily excited by illusions of grand meaning in very odd things—first, is in the old boisterous names such as Bataille, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, he reads them without understanding them in any measure (like many on here might I add, something which depresses me greatly) and consequently develops extremely vague but strongly held ideals of terrorism which he can only express to co-workers (because he has no friends) until, finally, he kills himself.

I realized this describes too may people I’d rather not immortalize through the act of writing. Besides writing should not come too close to what is too real. Me and my friend the other day were talking about girls who get perfect ACT scores, and I said, “guys who get perfect ACT scores end up committing suicide”. It turned out the only guy he knew who got a perfect ACT score killed himself his sophomore year at Harvard. I could explain why this is, but I’m not going to. It already makes sense to me. Only that this guy was like many many people who completely cede their will in the world so that they can merely exist. Although it does not seem like it, he too was part of the silent revolt of all things, the silent revolt of merely existing. Life, if it has any definition, is the revolt against this silent inanimate revolt. But I’d like to forget about these people, it is sad and pathetic. Forgetting is a kind of knowing.

—

First, he says, take notice of the things around you. The ‘things’, not ‘objects’. This is supposedly important. Well, okay, there is a pile of unfolded clothes where a maroon plaided button down is splayed atop blanketing the disordered mass, there is a bike and to my right a smaller pile of dirty clothes, socks, underwear, a white Lasko fan I use for white noise at night, a box with some books. Okay, what else? Well, there is light, filtered through thin blinds, and how the light falls in this shapeless, liquid kind of way, a coincidence of conforming to shapes, the coincidence of light and form, shadow and shape. I marvel at it, everyday, like I do the sky. It is very simple, but wondrous. Then there is an old indian blanket I don’t like to wash balled up besides me. I’ve had it for years.

There was a girl I used to know who I firmly believed did not have a soul. Now, I look at old pictures of her and think she might have had too much of a soul. I don’t know which is worse. There is a lot I don’t know.

I don’t know how much of a soul I have. I don’t know what is quite real and what is an illusion and whether the difference is a matter of degrees. I like colors. Red and white. Pure petal, soft, snowy white and in its center purple crimson red flowing, dripping in luscious spots upon white’s pure flesh. One thing can be many things.

So instead I walk, weirdly not nearly as much as when I live on my own. One, it is hot as shit outside. The absolute worst time of year in south Louisiana. Genuinely an unbearable heat. So I try to wake up early and go out, and then later around 6:30 I go back to the rocks and watch the water crash. I can sit there forever, watching the water break, and recede, swell in the distance. You can not tell me that is not life, or else some form of life. It is movement, rise and fall, power— looking beyond I see that great indifferent expanse and it fills me with awe. And lately, i have been thinking, well I do not have much feeling for women. The waves are erotic enough…comme la vague…the sound of it, like an orgy of lips and tongues and skin…but then I sit up from the rocks, walk towards the setting sun where in shadow is the unmistakable silhouette of the female form, wide at the hips, pinched at the waist, long hair in the darkness the veil of desire until…in the light, a smile, at me! well I could have married her right then and there

—

I tend to spend all of my time in a single place. Even on the rocks I realize there is a specific place I like to watch from, a perfect distance, even there is a particular rock with a golden undertone. Each time I go to the sea I know it is the same, but each time it is different, and I feel I will never see it again.

Looking either direction in the distance, a scribbled line seeks to hold back sea from shore, chaos from order, the infinite from the finite. There is no true way to measure a shore-line, and there is no true way to determine where in fact the sea ends and the shore begins. The line is always moving, shifting. The fact that it is rocks gives me some comfort, the rocks are like stalwarts against the call of the ocean. Each one looking out onto the distance examining the swells, each one pushing back the ocean. The water has a way of gathering beneath rocks, pooling in mysterious transparent gold, or amber, glittering as a wave comes in. It is like a little secret beneath the rocks, like the rocks have themselves collected this infinity, this pure life of the water and performed some secret alchemy…

I must admit I have wanted to jump into the ocean, to surrender to the waves, their strange incomprehensible motion, swallowed by some great unfathomable darkness. I will admit, this mysterious and wonderful stirring in my stomach as I stood upon a large silver rock in the morning marveling at all below. It is not suicidal. It is freedom. It is fate.

One reason I have chosen to be a NEET aristos for some time, and not simply an aristocrat of the soul braving the wide wide world, is that it did all become a little too much for me. It was great, ecstatic, wonderful joy and love, tidal swellings of pathos, extreme at times, unforgiving narcissism. Really, out in the world, on my own, an indescribable love would sometimes suddenly come over me, but it was too much, I’d feel like a swoosh at odd moments in the day when the light would appear in that beautifying, magnanimous way, like listening through a seashell, this great incredible swell, this great contraction of the world. But it is a madness, or rather, realizing all is madness and sense is only the thinnest film holding it back.

I wrote sometime months ago about having to be miserable, having to suffer, to feel the dark hardened coal of human existence to ground me again. I have felt that now. Spontaneously I will simply hate something, someone, usually imaginary, and this grounds me. I will feel stupid kinds of guilt, make myself suffer, purge myself of my excess joy, to remain in equilibrium. This is fine, honestly.

—

People think I am joking when I call myself an aristocrat. Likely because I say it in a mildly mocking tone, not because I am mocking aristocracy but the very fact I exist in a moment of history where I even have to call myself an ‘aristocrat’ or assert my ‘superiority’—superiority over what exactly? Cause, let me tell you, it is absolutely absurd I have to do that. But it is an absurdity I find a lot of fun in, yes, I see from heights most can’t even dream of, heights of rarest, ecstatic, heavenly disinterest over the great strife and toil of the world…and peering down below it is sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, but always comical.

One thing I have found comical, indeed, hilarious is the absurdity of stated ‘mystical’ ‘experiences’. There is nothing more absurd to me than being ‘a’ mystic. Or having an experience which ‘is’ mystic. Or otherwise some experience which finds a way to defy the logic of the everyday with its excessive power and luminosity and brilliance…it is bullshit. People resort to mysticism like the poorest monad in the web of a language with a faulty death drive… ‘Mysticism’ or, otherwise, the ‘ineffable’ is language’s way to transgress itself, violate itself, punish itself for being simply what it is. In effect, to prove to itself it is real, the first distinction language draws is between itself and all that is supposedly beyond itself which it then captures, takes unto itself, gives form to…has power over in an essential, immutable manner.

Now I like silence. To hell with words. Fuck your poem and fuck you short story and fuck your essay. I like water, I like light, I like motion, I like ascent, I like love. In a single quiver of light in morning is all the pathos of humanity expressed, all its joys, its sufferings, its beauty, its innocence, and the infinite forgiveness of every self-annihilating moment…I wont be a NEET aristos for long, soon I’ll just be another aristocrat of the soul wage slave

It was maybe my first time being totally conscious, like, for a boy there are many firsts; the first time your balls drop, then the first time you touch a girl in that special way, the first time your lips meet hers, and then the first time you lay down together to have sex, and then, in the midst of all this there is the first time he is conscious. That was this moment as the sun fell. The orange was life and the purple was death, then it was all purple, and violet and blue. But it was not dead, the light was not dead. Then I realized while yes I was thinking of life, I was really thinking of the faint mesh which allows us to see it–the idea of death, of an end, of a final absolute closure of life. What happened next was days later, I don’t remember the interceding period, my friend had a bunch of blue klonopin and I took one, and then a second, then I took a third, fourth, fifth, sixth one until one small fraction conscious I woke up in a strange dark apartment in the middle of the night where, had I not been under the influence of drugs, I would have been terrified. Instead, I walked out through the door into the hallway and down the elevator to a rainy downtown scene, where, still barely conscious I somehow caught a bus or a taxi and ended up passed out in the morning on the levy three blocks from my house.

It was an absolute calamity when my parents found me, unconscious in the grass. And for a week I felt still not totally conscious as they did everything but pray over me as I stayed in bed and waited for the drugs to wear off. I have no idea how many I took. Too many because I did not feel right until a week later where the full horror of what had happened dawned on me. I made promises, never to do anything stupid again, to never even touch a drug or hang out with the wrong people. All of this I might add took place during winter break and after finding me my parents were afraid that I had suffered from some kind hypothermic shock. But the next school semester began and with it life once appeared in its many large opaline, glittering crystals, pretty girls, friends, big plans for the future…it was wonderful, ecstatic, all was forgotten and all was forgiven.

But then, in late February approaching Spring weird thoughts and states of total consciousness began to afflict me once again. Of life, and death, and the meaning of this or that, or everything. I had a girlfriend, or I should say, just a girl, really. And she didn’t bring much happiness although she was quite pretty. I thought, what’s the point, so I can have kids, have a job, live like my parents. I began to have nightmares, of my life ten years from now, horror, and then before I’d fall asleep on certain nights I’d see something much worse. It was a vision of sorts, one I could not write off on the irrationality of dreams though it had no reason–a stream of colors, or oranges along a space I could only understand as eternal. Endless directionless stream of orange, maybe it was just the back of my eyelids, but it was terrible for one because the orange was not quite orange, but also not quite red, or not quite yellow, it was a color suspended in some horrible state of ambiguity. It was also depthless, layered, multiple, voluminous, this orange color, like a great luminous fog of life that might blind me and swallow me. And then when I’d fall asleep I’d dream of something similar, only, it was animal life again not in any distinct images but just of a life before life, a time before time, a thing before the thing for eternity, endless. I started to take whatever I could find to eliminate the visions and sleep totally without dreams. I started taking klonopin and then xanax and then vicodin and then oxycontin until one day I decided I had to leave, go someplace far away where no one knew who I was. Before my parents got home I grabbed whatever money I could, from wallets, purses, hidden away in drawers, in clothes, closets, debit cards, cashback and exchanged almost all of it for drugs—baby blue oxycontin, pristine white vicodin, hulk green xanax, and sparkly virginal powdered heroin. I stuffed it all in a suitcase where at a Greyhound bus station I bought a ticket for the first bus going anywhere.

—

On the greyhound I quickly lost any and all sense of place and time. Day turned to night and night turned to day, and sometimes I fell asleep and sometimes I watched it all pass. By this point I had enough of a tolerance with the pills that what I was taking by the hours was not able to kill me but make me totally indifferent to anything but how long my stash of drugs would last me–but even this was not a well thought out consideration.

Somewhere I had to wait for a bus exchange, at a greyhound terminal. I had to wait for hours, and, having to piss I went to the bathroom and got some chips from the vending machine where returning I could not find my suitcase. Assuming I misplaced it I looked around for 30 minutes until a shaggy long haired white guy with torn grey jeans told me “It was gone” I was so high still that even as I registered it, it didn’t bother me. I felt I’d still somehow be high forever. He told me some skinny black kid with picked it up and left and he didn’t know it was mine, or else, he said, “I would haven’t beaten his fucking ass”.

We ended up boarding the same bus where we sat next to one another. He was just out of jail with no place to go, only a trashbag of clothes and toiletries and, feeling he’d be cool with drugs, I told him what was in that suitcase to which his eyes widened and all the panic I should have felt was transferred to him for all of five minutes. Then he told me if I went with him he could find us heroin, but we’d have to ‘fence’ for money. I didn’t know what this meant and didn’t care, I knew it meant dope and that sounded good.

–

Life, I suppose, is a complicated endeavor. Though I can’t really explain how it gets to that point. Life in an abandoned hotel off the highway without electricity or running water where our only concern was getting enough money to get high and a bit of money for sustenance, this life was actually quite simple. Life was not complex at all.

In this simple life there was an ever revolving cast of people appearing like faint apparitions to the shadowed haze of junkie life. There was one girl, though I can’t remember her name now, though her hair was a fierce fiery ride, her eyes light blue and her elegant white body an exciting reminder of the life beneath the blue sea of drugs. And then she died of an overdose. She would also only eat hot dogs, and when I told this to a friend at a time where I could remember her name, he attributed this to something Freudian. But such complexity could only get tangled in the innocent simplicity of our lives at that time.

Basically life was this—we’d wake up in the early stages of withdrawals, sniffles, our stomachs already turning, and we’d hop on the bus at a precise time like working men. The bus would take us to the suburbs where from various box-stores we’d ‘boost’ everything from electronics to shirts and shoes. Once even an entire grill from Lowes. Then we’d ‘fence’ the items to Korean markets where just around the corner would be someone willing to take our money for drugs.

If it was a good day we’d get coke, then we’d get needles, then we’d shoot up with great ceremony. Ritualistic as the mid-day sun would create four pristine lines of light along the boarded up window, offering just enough of a dusty haze that we could see our hands, our arms, and our veins..Then at night we would light candles like a medieval dwelling, otherwise it was the flick of a lighter, the rush and bubble of dissolved heroin, then blood exchanged for life, and then, finally, nothing mattered–everything then made sense. And it was like that everyday for uncountable years, although it was certainly less than five years because at one point too many had died, too many bad things had happened and I endeavored to return to the shore of everyday life sometime at 19

—

Apparently everyone had been looking for me all those years I was gone. Which didn’t make sense at the time. Everything suddenly became very complicated, as with drugs and ending them I had to be sick for a time, a couple weeks, sick in both body and mind, and sick with a guilt I didn’t know whether it was mine or others.

Then, there was a GED, community college, then, university. Blinding, noxious life. A girlfriend, and another, then a degree, then another and an engagement, marriage, how far ‘I have come’ and so on and so forth. A normal job, a kid, and then another until I was thirty-something, making seventy-something a year, with kids who go to saint-so-and-so’s and a wife with this and that trifle, concern, anxiety, until every moment was sanded down into an even, matte, dumb surface.

Every once in a while someone would mention what they would call, ‘my past’, ‘my’ ‘past’, as if my ‘past’ was simply those four or so years gone, as if that was all that belonged to me, nothing before, or nothing after, the murky matter of life which was mine and mine alone yet transfigured by the humdrum of complex life into an image only others could see. Responsible adult, father, husband, associate. That was all somehow me.

—

I suppose I wondered, at times, what might become of my kids, whether they would have a similar fate, or worse. Sometimes I wondered what happened to the many characters of that life, I assumed they had all died, because they were essentially dead to me–they had to be.

I worked for a financial firm. I was quite good and soon was in the role of a manager. I was making more than 100k a year although I didn’t really care. My wife handled all the money. Plus, my job was easy. Another guy, in a similar role as me, slightly older started to walk weird one day, complained of odd pains, in his joints, in his right ankle. On his desk was a picture of him and his wife, he was smiling, a stupid toothy smile while his wife with an expression of such indifference one could only guess that she hated him, with eyes staring into the soul of whoever took the picture, hating them most of all for raising their relationship to the level of an image,or an unsavory fact. Consequently I hated the guy, cause his wife hated him. Whatever his condition was, it got worse, until he was out for a few days, and then came back where he announced tearfully, but with a strange glimmering hope that he only had a few years–if that–to live.

Everyone was gathered, standing around him as he fought back tears. It was deadly quiet in the office as he stammered and gathered himself until one girl broke out into hysterics, and I found myself holding back a laugh—and make no mistake, not a nervous laugh, but laughter at the fact that she clearly didn’t care but this is supposedly what you are supposed to do at news like this even though it did not affect her in the slightest. I did not care, didn’t care about him, didn’t care about death. I really can’t imagine anyone truly cared. “But, I’m gonna fight this!” he said to applause as his voice quivered and he broke down in tears. It was some kind of neuron disease. Then his legs started to shake and he nearly collapsed. At this I had to leave, it was all too funny and I couldn’t take it anymore.

In fact, the thing cheered me up wonderfully. And it was just before lunch, so I used the opportunity to take an early lunch at a hole in the wall Italian Deli I never went to because of its seedy environment, unsanitary conditions, not a place a guy like me went to, not a place a mid-level manager at a financial firm went to, but here I was. What if someone saw me? Well, they had the best sandwiches in the city, but they also gave me heartburn. Well, what did I care? A guy was dying for christ’s sake! And this cheered me up in a way that nothing else had in a while. A man was dying and I was not dying, and I could do anything. A flight into the rarest daydreams in that uncomfortable booth, I swear I could hear some kind of music, a trombone, or a piano, or a violin. Beyond the window was a drifting silver cloud, and then a crash, a yell “get back here!” a man shouted as a group of teenaged boys ran out the front door with cash from the register and a woman’s purse. “Fuck you old man!” one kid yelled, the old man could not catch up, and whatever sound I was hearing rose, until closing my eyes some vision, of that eternal stream of color, animal life, life before life, light before light, time before time, this time beautiful salmon pink and emerald….well, what a gift to be alive and not dead

This is what I realize laying with my back on the grass during a perfect summer evening the day before I am to return home. It was perfect, all was perfect, all was beautiful. The ones you love are near, branches softly swaying in the gentle wind, leaves falling in the pool, large white rooms, luscious green plants. I am satisfied, I could stay here, but I am too satisfied—why is this? I could have stayed, I could have stayed another week, or, another month or forever in that vesperal blue and violet of an infinite suspension of life. But that thought came to me, that completely neutral, yet, beautiful thought of the sands of times hollowing everything out, until only a memory, an image, and even then this is erased until it is only sand.

I can bear no ill-will to what is neutral, what is necessary, inevitable. But it is strange, time is strange, existence is strange. Why? What is the point if it is all gone one day? Suddenly in light of this thought everything seems the quality of dew-drops, each quivering dew drop harboring a reflection of the entire world but evaporating in tinier droplets towards the sun. My life, a strange accident, all lives…everything, an accident, yet somehow it could not be imagined otherwise.

Driving back the next day I feel slightly ill. I always feel slightly ill when I travel, I hate traveling. I hate sitting in an air conditioned car, and I am left pondering this strange situation of life, a gas station somewhere off the road, I can barely feel my legs, colors and shelves, people, humans, a recently cleaned bathroom, bleach and lavender spray. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

—

South Louisiana is flatlands, marshes, sugar crops standing proudly together an uncountable masses. It is my home, it is where the light lays in wait along endless fields ready to burst through parting clouds, windows, through to my very soul revealing a fertile land of imagination’s plenty, and a wide, slow river snaking through time providing this land its minerals and nutrients. This river, whose glaciered source I can only imagine, and whose ocean ending I will never reach..I give my thanks to it whenever I can. I imagine those times when the sun has set on its slow movements, when the whole of everything has melted in a brilliant molten image on the river’s surface. All of this is myself and all of myself I am it.

I don’t want to be anywhere else than here. I can’t be anywhere else than here. It is a place of so many things unbearable, unbearable heat, poverty, storms, hurricanes, oil-refineries poisoning entire communities—so many things unbearable that in all this life’s essence is revealed, and life’s capacity to endure, continue, and most of all dance, sing, strive towards the greatest joys, drifting white clouds sun-lined golden in the evening—driving I see them, and realize on my back they are moving, but looking out of the car window they are motionless. Here it is possible for the whole world to be stilled and beautified in motion, action, violence.

Really, I don’t want to go anywhere else. I don’t want to go to Europe, or China, or Japan, or Argentina or Australia. The appeal of those places is the conflict-less images offered, and maintained, by tourists industries, locals trying to scam you and the all-mighty power of the USA should anything befall you. American is where things happen, the last thing to happen in Europe was the holocaust, and every European man since has been the ‘last’ man.

Just thinking about ‘Europe’ right now I feel a sharp pang of disgust. If I am being generous I can understand how most don’t truly have a ‘home’ like I do. My family has been in south Louisiana now for more than two centuries, it is in my blood. It is, in relation to the rest of America a foreign land though with every new Trader Joes the colonists further stake their claim. Then, these colonists speak of who owned this land before them and stop just short of the great abyss of history upon all land, otherwise they would appeal to a God, otherwise they would be zionists. That is what they are, truly, these northerners. Every appeal to the ‘natives’ is just an embarrassingly self-conscious, half-measured appeal to God. I suppose we took this land, I suppose we had slaves work it, I suppose we committed many countless crimes, and I suppose you, northerner, committed no crime because you have no home. You shrink from the sins of life, from the sins of history. We do not. Yet you make us shrink give us guilt while you feast upon our culture…I hate these fucking people.

This world is very strange.

—

But one day it will all end. Yet, life will continue. Maybe it will not continue forever, but it will continue for sometime after I am gone. I am regularly disgusted with others, always have been, ever since I heard my first grade crush make a fart joke. That is where it started. I’d love to live in a pristine, insular glass world with only me and the people I love. To hell with everyone else, everything else. Going in the city to look for apartments I saw my friend and bonked my horn at him until swerving out of traffic I pulled over on a side street. He didn’t know it was me until I yelled “Get in, faggot” and we drove around uptown blasting Kanye’s Graduation and terrorizing the northerner outposts of boutique grocery stores, ‘seed’ stores, god knows what else. It was a lot of fun. I told him I might be hungover cause I got drunk the previous night, and then I told him I get drunk almost every night, ‘alone?’ he asked me, yes, alone, every-night I get drunk and only now feel hungover. Then I told that I don’t believe most people are capable of love. They are capable of imitating love to various degrees but for most people love has a fundamentally negative quality—evinced by the very fact we have a word like ‘love’ to begin with.

He was shocked at this, and pushed back. Maybe I am wrong. I feel too much love, too much compassion that it makes me evil at times. There is an intoxicating irrationality in forgoing the equation of human life such that one person is not just worth one or two or a hundred people but the entirety of humanity and even the universe itself, even time and space itself. A moment in their arms is everything, a moment they are in your arms is everything. Fuck everything else, burn everything else, castles cities, fields, Kingdoms for love…I cannot think of anything more human, I cannot think of anything else. Maybe, love for me, means something such that when I think of it is being held by ‘others’; others not myself or not the ones I love, I am perplexed. Maybe I am even disturbed, maybe I love myself too much, love life, my life, my people, my city my world too much. Maybe this is a sin, maybe this is evil.

When I was up north I had this vision, this vision of a kind of soft explosion of hazy light, an explosion in which the air would consequently implode…I couldn’t quite explain it, only visualize it, through a cloud, a window or a tree the soft light would erupt and a space like vacuum would supersede air…closing my eyes this sense might appear like a blooming flower, or a lone blade of grass bending, an aesthetic elevation causing a light-headedness until on the verge of passing out everything is a blare of impossibly gentle white light and then coming to life re-emerging in the purity of divine revelation. This is what I imagined beauty was, but as soon as I crossed over into the south Louisiana flat lands that vision seems ridiculous. I like air that is heavy, thick, air like honey, fragrant and odorous, wet and damp a great manifold of competing microbiologies, violence, theft, sex, eros, death, destruction, birth, life! The dream of life, of criminality, strife, the foregoing of all questions of why or what or how, the singular and the universal at once contained in the ever presence of the now

Then, I get home. I realize I am tired. I take some drugs, too much by accident, I feel great. Feel like there is a thick sheet of glass between my perception and ‘me’ and while visually these perceptions are only slightly obscured they emit very little noise, have no resonance. Something comes and it goes, and I am left untouched, pristine. I try to conjure up the concerns from earlier in the day and can’t, and this is quite concerning, but even this drops out of my head. I take some more and go for a walk and can’t really feel anything, just tingly, numb, and very, very dumb. I try to toy with some philosophical concern and it is mush melting in my hands, who really cares.

I wonder at the homeless people on drugs, whether it is really that bad. To go to sleep at night I sometimes imagine I am homeless, I’ve never been homeless but it seems nice in my imagination. Where I am living right now is actually quite nice. A block away is the former house of a famous person that they are starting to tear down. I want to break into it. But I have a criminal record for trespassing and I think if I do it again it is a felony. Also, people are squares here they don’t get it. I wonder how bad it is to be homeless if you are always blitzed out of your mind. Like whether the equation of pleasure to pain is all that different than a suburbanite with a nice car and a nice house, perhaps the terms on each side are different, smaller, but maybe the fraction is the same.

Regardless, now I stand at a place in my life where I must decide what I am going to do. I could go back to my old life quite easily—this I realized last night, it would be very easy. My old job, and a one bedroom apartment. And it is a lot of fun, there is a lot of friction living on your own, working, making rent, it is exciting. And that friction generates something, an intensity, you realize all the things you can do and all the endless possibilities. But where exactly did that life get me?

And at the end, the contrast of working and whatever it is I do beyond work was too great. Whatever I do beyond work—call it freedom, thinking, writing, which must be kept a secret to whatever extent it can. I don’t need these freaks at work to know what I am doing. Really, it is strange, because I enjoy work. I come from a family of people who don’t really labour, land owners for many generations which I suppose grants a kind of freedom of perspective that allows me to see myself as someone else, at work I am someone else, something else, for a while at least. I cherished the toil, the sounds, the camaraderie, but to do that my entire life, or even any longer than I already have seems an injustice to something beyond myself. And, eventually, people ask questions, want to know who you are. I give people, I shit you not, a fake name whenever I can. Tell them straight up lies. My boss once told me I speak to him like a dog, and with a mix of embarrassment, pity, and overwhelming pride I knew I needed to move on, that was months ago. In the end, they cannot understand, or even begin to comprehend the extent of my arrogance, my indifference, my interior of life, seeing everything serene, necessary, beautiful. What is the point, I ask? Better yet, at one point did I need a point?

—

I used to never ask the question ‘why’ in regards to my life, why was meant for more expansive things, to shelter their meaning, but now I wake up and I think of my life and I ask ‘why’. I wonder what is the real difference from one path to the next if it all evens out in the end. Really the answer is simple—others, we live for others. Our life is not our own, and never really could be. I hate selfish people although in someways I am extremely selfish. I suppose selfish people I hate are not really truly selfish, they are so tied to others they cannot stand it. They need others in a way I don’t, need their acceptance, need their paltry comforts, their validation. This is, frankly, pathetic to me. These people could never be free, maybe they understand the word and maybe they toil over its philosophical meaning…lol, fuck them

Maybe, I think, I will one day get hungover from drinking too much. I didn’t get drunk last night and honestly feel pretty great this morning. Probably won’t drink for a while. I like being drunk, who doesn’t. I like being high, again, who doesn’t. I like getting drunk, and I like getting high, alone. But I like being sober alone the best. Really, that is what is shocking to me, that I like being sober most of all. That I am the most high when I sober, it is shocking. Listening to some old medieval music I can see trees in a far distance that is somehow also as near to me as anything else, in the music, changing from gold to green like changing costumes, and then blue between the leaves. A pure baby blue sky, innocence, pageantry, serenity. This is the whole issue, nothing really bothers me, it is all too beautiful. You people call yourselves an artist and yet, in a satire the likes of which only God could conjure up, you lament the conditions of your world instead of taking them up. The only thing offered to you, the whole manifold of life and existence, and you say it is too much, you cry. Let me tell you there was never anything else, but this moment, this existence, this life. Sorry that its light is too much for you lmao

The DNA helix is a symbolic representation of what is supposed to be the core form of biological ‘life’. Contained in its strands are the essential atoms of life; genes, self-replicating identities through which organic form endures. The Helix as a symbol presents a dual image, on the one hand it is a container, a kind of symbolic prison which we can never escape, yet is is not neatly geometric, it is playful, whimsical, as if through science there is the possibility of occasional escape; gene mutation, gene therapy, adaptions through which we might eschew fate and enter into the realm of the Gods. In mapping the entirety of the human genome we collectively indulged in the fantasy of a world without disease, of a life beyond life, yet such a fantasy could not persist forever, and the dogma of the DNA helix symbol has begun to collapse

Now, the supremacy of gene theory as the framework of biological life is at its end. Denis Noble, poetically a scientist of the heart (a cardiologist) discovered that the heart beats, on its own, as a response to its environment. A clump of cells in the womb that is larger than one-third of a centimeter in diameter must process oxygen and CO2 or else it is poisoned and dies. Thus, there is a pulse, primordial in its simplicity, a response to a vast miasma of nature; liquid and gases, air and light, all without a system of nerves to send proper electrical signals and all without a genetic program organizing it. A pulse, a beat, rhythm, fading in sound into many other pulses and rhythms and music—a pulse spanning the entirety of our species and beyond, to human and animal alike, to perhaps even beyond life, an original stimulus between both inside and outside ringing in a kind of harmony. One thinks of Schopenhauer, and his belief that the intellect’s only true contact with the Divine was through sound, music.

—

Precious few encounters one has with this thing we call the self. Mostly they are partial, if at all. Now, typing this, I can give particular visual indicators of my self; I am seated, for example on a futon with a mess of sheets and clothes on both sides of me. In front of me is some kind of large exercise equipment, lit at the tip of its metal end by a warm light from the crack of the room’s door. Otherwise a macbook is on my lap and I am typing away and imagining I am striking the image of a pianist rather than a writer. I could go on, explain up to infinity all the myriad things of my perception but they would never add up to one, nor would they ever add up to the ‘I’.

Schopenhauer wrote that the intellect begins with the eyes and this is why ‘eye’ is indistinguishable phonetically from the first person pronoun. The eye through its movement binds space and time in a perceptually coherent way, yet, in doing so straddles a periphery of the intellect itself at the very boundary of the finite and infinite. The eye traces along a perhaps infinite sequence of events in nature, and thus further bounds nature through conceptions of quantity, cause, substance, the impulse to package it all, designate it, name it, verbalize and conceptualize

This is at once a prison, and at once the condition for the purest flight life has to offer. One can be whisked away by the grandiosity of sight, perhaps, to madness, perhaps somewhere else. For me, I seek that secret place just at the boundary of sight, just at the boundary of the visible and the invisible, behind a leaf, a portal to a vast green terrain in which only imagination’s freedom reigns.

Schopenhauer stated in his writing that the universe is fundamentally dark, and that life is therefore blind. Light, accordingly, is an illusion of the intellect which is itself the manifestation of illusory processes. I do not believe he truly meant this. I believe Schopenhauer stumbled upon a light so rare that it historically it was reserved for holy men, Saints, Caesars and Napoleons, but Schopenhauer, not wishing to squander its brilliance on the misshapen masses, locked it away in an elaborate puzzle for Nietzsche, Gaugin, and his many adherents to discover a piece of it for themselves.

For as intelligent a man Schopenhauer was, it is difficult to imagine that he did not understand that there is no darkness without light, no shadow without the sun, no universe without stars. The other day, walking in circles beside a stream dazzling under the fractured tree light, I happened to stumble upon something. What, or where or how I cannot quite say. Perhaps it was this thing this no-thing, the ‘I’—it was my own silhouette, flattened before me, a pitch dark shadow.

I could see it as clearly as I could see anything. It was my height–-perhaps a little taller. I investigated it, it was still, silent, until from an exact yet indeterminable angle it was revealed to contain its own dimensions. It was a universe unto itself which I then, somehow, entered into—leapt into myself and across vast years and lightyears it was entirely dark, black, endless, but then there was a solitary star suspended in the endless abyss. The star was spinning, pulsing, and revealing what I had already known—revealing life, and light, and that I could see the darkness and therefore could already see the star which allowed the darkness. Before the invisible, there is a pure visibility. Life before death.

—

I think now more about the question of evil, of darkness. I don’t really know what to do about it. I don’t see much in the way of evil in my daily life, but I seem to see it clearly when I come across black and white photographed literary ‘parties’. Fat, cancerous old men of distinction (though neither I, nor anyone I know has heard of them) surrounded by demon eyed, evil mouthed dark haired lifeless skinned young women ready to feast on their corpses or else feast upon the corpse of a dying culture. Crows, worms, evil.

It is a kind of revelry brought on by the euphoria of impending death. Like the peasantry who could not stop dancing as the plague encroached. It is the perverse joy of the tension of life finally being relieved in totality, but first they must feast, fill their mouths with names and awards and journals, and every tendon and fiber and bone of the old regime. They are peasants, they only know how to eat and toil, how to spread the negative principle upon which their life hinges. They are mutated peasants, inflicted with the ‘existential’ regret of ‘modern’ ‘life. Or else like the mushrooms which have sprouted around Chernobyl adapted to the nuclear radiation of its melted cores. Only, our Chernobyl is New York City. And if you let me speak a bit freely I will say this—that I have never been to New York City, but have seen in my own city every year new New York City refugees here to find new bodies to feast on. In their Subarus in their Audis, they buy up every building which housed artists or studios and turn them into noxiously bright, white walled ‘galleries’ where on the wall hangs a massive gaudily colored acrylic painting of a fucking….street car…fucking streetcars and sometimes black people. Forgive me for this, these people need to go. Have your death revelry in your dying city, let my city be consumed by the waves. As it is meant to be

Illness spreads, from house to house, street to street, town to town. From person to person, tongue to tongue, skin-on-skin; the essence of life sifted of all its false gold and diamonds, from its excited luminous illusion, until all that is left is sand, and the ceaseless expanse, growth, multiplication of cells and life towards a nameless infinity. A body in bed, curled in white sheets. Sadie was afraid of the sun. A strand of light broke through the curtains to turn the peek of of her brown hair ancient mahogany. Nudging her gently, Sadie let out a soft cry and turned around to the other side of the bed. She didn’t want to do anything today.

–

Sadie had a problem with drinking. Also with pills and sometimes coke and sometimes men. Strange men if she had to and sometimes even if she didn’t have to. Once she went to the ER in the midst of a bender believing she was having a heart attack. Coming back mostly sober she told me the doctor could tell she was drinking because of the marks on her liver. Sadie was afraid, adamant that she’d never drink again, that she would stop that very day until after a bit of deliberation she decided they were just trying to scare her and kept on drinking and bought another eight ball.

It wasn’t a mystery how she got to be how she was, her parent’s appearance in her life was always spotty. During the weekends she was all but raised by her grandpa on crutches, and during the week even, she was left alone to walk from school, to fix her own dinner, make her own lunch. Mom and dad were addicts she told me once in confidence when we were fifteen, though I already knew, everyone already knew.

Now Sadie worked at a trashy diner across from a motel with all kinds of figures who would come in and out. As she told me some were bikers, others honest to god cowboys, but most were homeless druggies of some sort, prostitutes. She drank and smoked before all of that, but the pressure of the job she said made it all the more consuming. She said, how could she live like this without being high, how could she bear it all. Well, I didn’t quite know.

Now, she refused to get out of bed. She refused to get out of bed on one blisteringly sunny summer afternoon. She still lived with her mom and her younger brother, her father was dead, had been dead from an overdose. She didn’t like the light, it was too bright. She liked the stars and she liked electric nights. The sun, she said, was nauseating—or was it just the hangover, the regrets, the fear. I went to the kitchen where I poured whiskey in a plastic cup beside a sink filled with dishes. She drank it all in one big swig and unsteadily, her long white legs shaking, she lifted up from bed

–

Sadie had lived in the same home all her life. She wanted to leave at times—first at fourteen. Then, at eighteen, she made big plans to go away, to college maybe or somewhere. But instead she got a job, a boyfriend, and then another, and then another.

Her home’s neighborhood was, on all days of the week, lined with overfilled trash bins, rusted out cars, stray cats. The cats would look at you, stare at you, study you, before in stunning quickness disappear. They disappeared in something of an eternal cycle animating the never changing yet perpetually decaying fixtures of cars and homes and trees and trash bins. Sadie would feed the cats every evening before work and seven or nine of them would gather outside her back steps as she’d smoke a cigarette. Then, returning in the early morning hours she’d drink with which ones were left, her favorite a fat orange one named ‘Sammy’.

There was a night when we were thirteen and we were all beside a campfire. She was directly across from me in the circle, obscured by the glow emanating from the lick of orange flame. Like a mask of opaque desire hiding her until an expansive wind from somewhere unknown abated the flames and lifted the mask where her flesh was suddenly flushed with the rarest violet hue poured from the stars itself; her face in the night placed in a perfect vacuum of sense, there was no one else, only her, and everything was her, in her, in her eyes, her hair, in something unfathomable before me, a vast mysterious sea of nothingness below me, until one day it would annihilate me.

—

She was drunk again, high again, the houses and the cars and the flowers suspended in the slow infinity of a summer’s evening. She was happy, and that was sometimes all that mattered. Life, this strange thing, held entirely in a moment of bliss besides her, and otherwise unbounded, terribly, endlessly, blisteringly, perpetually searching for incomprehensible horizons.

Somewhere, on the far outskirts of her neighborhood was a slight grassy slope at a quiet intersection. We’d go there on summer evenings and sit, watch the cars in both directions and wonder where they were going. Wonder at the faces through the window, the contingency of worlds; a burst of headlights in the distance fading in the static night. Such big questions we pondered as everything large surrendered to the perfect quietude of that little place, like we were standing atop a mountain in the alps. Imagined that we were likewise at the bottom of a vast, dark ocean, or safe in a cloud, that between us was where the whole world lay in wait for one of us, or both of us, to leap into. We were still young, and nothing was yet quite real.

Yet, there was a time years ago when I imagined myself doing photo essays, perhaps traveling the world and collecting images of some generic landscape in my mind, maybe of an African desert, lions, generic poor people with strange out-grown stomachs to their slender frame. And then writing something, perhaps something… ontological. What could be more presumptive than this? Here is the text and here is the world, somehow they are related. Unrelated I was also at the time at my wits end with what was a master’s thesis from hell where I had been accused by my advisor of using ‘AI’ because it was, as he told me over zoom, ‘an impossible feat for a human being to write what you had written in a weeks time’. It was at first funny, at least I am good at writing I thought, but then it became one of the most stressful ordeals of my life and I just wanted to be done with it, but refused to write, and have my name on, the milquetoast thesis he wished me to write (cataloging, archival work, compare and contrast etc., etc.,) so I left.

At this time I was taking pictures with an old Pentax super film camera. It was very expensive, the film itself was expensive and getting it developed was expensive. Each roll ended up costing about 22 dollars from start to finish. I tried developing the film in my bathroom to no avail. Yet I tried, and hoped, one day, to become a photographer in major terms and a writer in minor terms. I’m not really sure what happened next besides my film camera broke and I started to write a novel.

So, here I am, with my little foreword and my little images. I am currently not living in New Orleans, instead somewhere else in Louisiana. It is very nice, very beautiful, although very very different. Almost like another state. I am excited about the prospect of traveling maybe 30 minutes in this or that direction and being somewhere i’ve never been before, somewhere perhaps with unused rusted railroads, strange plants, somewhere with maybe a large still lake like a mirror to the sky. Here there are many places with beauty so excessive it ceases to be pleasurable. Places, of course, which compels one to state its beauty but not to take this beauty as one’s own. It leaves me cold. I enjoy a tangible beauty, a finite beauty which allows my imagination to repeat it in variety of forms. New Orleans is in many ways remarkably ugly and that is what makes it beautiful. In fact, what is beautiful must be tangible, or else, it is not truly beautiful—it is a fact, the discomforting fact that existence on its own is extraordinary, to which one can only roll their eyes and say “Well, yes! Of course! Shut up about it!”

The subject object distinction comes about through the need of not being able to see things as they truly are. Presumably we have this ability to see things truly, and some may have had this ability in such an intense way that they were blinded by it—perhaps they had a tendency of looking father, higher than the rest and so it was disadvantageous. Thus, they invented mirrors, selfs, categories, cause and effect, the difference between subject and object. They invent art.

It is true what Lacan says that the artist understands the nature of reality some centuries before the thinkers do. By the time the thinkers have come around to it they have missed it, have stumbled upon the nearly dead body of the old regime of reality. Lacan uses Holbein as an example, Foucault uses Velasquez, I’ll use Vermeer, who, in his genre scenes, puts ‘stuff’ in the foreground blocking our visual access, in one painting there is even a stop sign in the form of a red door. ‘Stuff’ is the essential clumsiness of matter. That matter cannot be seen as it is ‘in itself’ but only as un-matter; appearance, image—

It reminds me of one of my characters who says something to the tune of…

I have no money and I have no food. But it does not matter to me. For life does not matter for me, not when I have dreams. I will not die, I will live forever, my death will be an illusion, an artist’s trick. I am so certain of this it disturbs me. That my life is both a trick and a pure image given by some dream.

Something appears in the glass, a reflection. Yet, what is beyond the glass also appears. Two thing appear through the glass, the within and the without, inside a plane and beyond a plane, and they intermingle in some secret space we cannot locate.

In my parent’s house there are a lot of windows. Through those windows there are a lot of….colors, forms, space, light…sometimes someone is talking to me and I notice what is going on and feel that boundary of window and reality, house and world, displaced momentarily. The boundary is somewhere else and I feel then on the brink of madness.

The Dutch, inventors of capitalism, and freed fully from the constraints of medieval theology, realized the beauty of a simple white wall and the fall of simple white light upon it.

I don’t believe Descartes, Spinoza or Leibniz truly believed in God. I believe empiricists believed in God in a stronger sense. Profession of a belief in God is the result of a loss of the original sense of God and the divine, a belief in all that is ‘out there’ is a re-affirmation and preservation of this sense. Schopenhauer believed in God the most and he all but solved Kant by surrendering to Hume and proclaiming causality the great infinity,

We used to understand the beauty of a white light on a white wall. This was the promise of capitalism. But no one knew the result coal would have, and the English would have so much of it. The English ruined everything, still to this day they ruin everything further. An historical accident and an abortion of beauty.

This is not quite a pristine white wall. Yet I see something totalizing in it. Space and messy twinkling stars and some divine blue oceanic shadow—well, its me. Considering myself a God for a time, isn’t that art? Or wait, are we supposed to be micro-animals, micro--humans? Micro-greens and fibers. All art seems to do now is make everything smaller, bring it back down to earth. Once I went to a farmer’s market and a couple was deliberating about micro-greens. That means the relationship is over. Wander how long it dragged on for

We think there is so much within us, that there is a great vast ocean of thoughts, perceptions, sufferings, whatnot. Really there is very little we have. We have likely less than a rock. All of that stuff, if we did have it in us, would turn us spiritually jaundiced. Or maybe you are filled with all kinds of stuff that you gotta get out, or maybe you are just confused. Whatever.

Final one. I edited this about ten different ways and decided on this image. It is a Rodin I found at an art collection. I didn’t like how it was originally lit, the lighting was the lighting of everything else, the form appeared like, gooey, too malleable, lacking in force. Like it had been subjugated to some art historical idea of an eternal undifferentiated substance in which all art is leveled to a common term. Genius washed out in the process. Here, the glittering of the marble (which was barely visible in the original) could be sweat, tears, stars, the premonition of bodily motion in stone, the premonition of the universe in the body which of course to a historian or collector is the tremors of a seizure or a stroke. The figure is lost in an eternal dream, his body is multiplied until at times it seems no longer even a body but a miasma of organic shapes. It departs from him, and his face is then lifted to the heights of the universal

Rodin was very sensitive to the light cast on his figures and from what angle and direction one saw them. I believe he preferred early morning light. The figure is never in the figure itself but someplace else. Not in perception either. A meeting place of light and shadow and bodies and hand and stone. It transitions like many great works from an ecstatic sensorium of bodies in motion to the sudden stillness of of beauty. It is like light through swaying trees, quivering, hiding, and then blinding. That is all I have to say.

–

Nothing is real. Never has there been the real. An entire history of western thought has not been able to form a conception of reality that is not simply a pure nothingness. The center of modern thought, the self, the ‘I’, taken as necessary, universal, yet it is ultimately an anonymous designation, empty of any sense. God, likewise, cannot be any one particular thing, yet he must be one, and he must be all. The reality of both—of God and the I is based on the difference exhibited between all that is not God and all that is not the I.. It is the difference between the moment and its passing, the there and the not-there, the thing and the no-thing, a number and the essentially uncountable manifold it divides. And just as God or the I or now is gestured at through its opposite, so too is reality predicated on the un-real; the delusion, the fantasy, the daydream. A boundary can never be placed from within the boundary, it must be from outside the boundary, from outside the moment itself. Only from dreams and illusion can we give form, only from beyond the form can anything be given at all.

Yet, we must then ask what is it that propels us beyond the moment, beyond the boundary. This can only be life itself and it can only be art itself. A peculiar fact to most people who praise ‘art’ is how much of it (at least what is remembered today) was formed through historical periods of strife. How, much of art is an expression of strife and deeply connected to power—such cases are conveniently forgotten by museums, exhibits, catalogues who fall back on an interpretation of art as a distinguished, untouchable activity, perhaps connected to life in a dim manner through its relation to historical ‘facts’ or social ‘conditions’, in which art appears as an emergent accident. Yet, these interpretations must consider art as consolation, as above or beyond the world itself.

Art may in fact exist for itself and only itself, but so may life, and so may power and so may war. In this they are all one. For everything else must exist for the sake of something else, is bounded by a logic of objectivity and utility and eventual erasure. We understand the renaissance as a great flourishing of arts and cultures and understand the extreme strife of that time as needing art to remedy its pains. Yet, this remedial view of art does not offer the completeness which such an explanation seeks. For art cannot be disconnected from strife, from war, from life, it is as much contained in the self-legitimization of power, of the self-justification of life, and the self-revelation of itself as it is a force from up on high treating with our world in pity.

We can imagine during the renaissance there were many artists like today—artists for whom art is done precisely because it lacks stakes, and because it busy’s the hands and the mind. We can imagine in the renaissance much art was produced which was of no different quality than the trinkets you pick up at an art fair or showing of student-art at a local gallery. Yet, none of this art is remembered. Much of the art today will not be remembered—in fact, nearly none of it will be. This is because art that is remembered has stakes, stakes that exceed a simple evaluation of whether it is good or not, but stakes which extend beyond the work of art itself. During the renaissance a painting of Venus was crafted not purely on the basis of aesthetic ideals, nor was a sculpture formed according to its representation of the human body—but they were crafted with an eye towards a greater sense, a revealing of a world. The flesh of a Venus subject to ever finer tints of lead white, crimson madder, yellow ochre to produce the appearance of surface and depth simultaneously, of immanence, Eros in the knowing glance of the Venus through a varnished canvas bringing to union the world, stirring a young prince to surrender to his fate and enacting the great play of history, of dynasty.

Likewise, in the sculpture the figure does not merely imitate life as it shown in the bare figure. It is not proportioned merely according to anatomy, but with an understanding of its placement in a ducal hall, and the effect of an emissaries perception for whom the sculpture is the vehicle for which a greater concentration of life and power, of gilded ornamentation and vaulted ceilings, of a power beyond quantity—beyond soldiers and silver, acres of farmland and stated boundaries, a power of a single sweeping movement spanning planets and moons and stars and reels in historical consciousness to return eternally to the hand of the artist who utters the word, glazes the canvas, chisels the marble in an act of infinite love lifting life to redemption.

One may then ask the question of why? One may step lightly in the waters of this movement extending across the universe, and, as with any stream, might travel down it seeking an origin. They will never find it. They might attribute it to mystery, to a fundamental un-explainability, yet what is un-explainable is only that it is infinitely explainable. That along the rushing waters is an explanation in every glittering of light, in every meeting of depth and surface, in every instance of time, in every work of art. As time creates itself to divide itself, and space extends itself to become fields and farms and hills and sky, so too does life, in its ecstatic movement form itself in each and every moment, in each body, eternally, infinitely. Its obscurity is the obscurity of light exhausting itself in its revelation.

—

The world is composed of rocks. Most of these rocks are not ever seen or remembered. The universe is composed of matter that would be, except for its detectable gravitational force, completely invisible. The cosmos contains rocks and matter that have never been seen and will likely never be seen. Life is in what is seen, sensed, felt. Yet, the visible is traced in memory; the memory of a star in a faint dot of crystal light communing with us in the sanctuary of a solitary night. Well, is it not all, perhaps a memory that is real? A dream seen in the painted flesh?

Nothing is real. Or yet, everything is real. Which would you prefer? I know what I would, in a world where things are increasingly put into place, designated in anxious delirium, this is that, here is there, whats and whys and whens, I know which one I would prefer—life, joy, immanent freedom which pushes me beyond life itself.

What is real is supposedly all the rocks and shit, dark matter, what cannot be seen, proteans and noumenons. What is real is supposedly what can never ever be explained, can never be held up to the light, that which is stored away for etenrity—substance and dirt and pain and suffering; the world bounded by subtractive principles of everything being calculated negative, pain, debt, lack, see the world in such a way if you will but keep you and your foul stagnant odor away from me for I believe in love and forgiveness, and I believe it is a great tragedy that much art made today, here, now, lapses into a hardening rather than a lightening of life. In our narratives of today things lack the capacity for elevation and instead fall back into the comforting world of primordial substance and goo and pain and filth. Anxiously people have realized that the technique of designation and putting places into things is not only not zero-sum but infinitely recursive and negative and so they have turned to the world of art to ease their anxieties. They appeal to a great, vast, unknowable suffering and aching and woo-woo bullshit. This is not art, it will never be art, it is shit. It will be forgotten, let it be forgotten.

–

That I still remember that minute interaction is proof I should have taken it as a premonition. Seventh grade is the first stage of life where girls and boys accord with one another just enough to begin talking as something other than simply circumstantial friends or classmates. Bounded nowe by some law of necessity together they dip their toes in a pure crystalline stream of love and forgiveness, yet a fear of something, perhaps where the stream begins or whether it ever ends prevents for most the full surrender to it. Perhaps I was afraid, or maybe women at every age are insane, perhaps being a 12 year old is insanity, perhaps life carries with it no rules intrinsic to it and we must through painstaking process carve our own rules into the infinite flesh of ecstatic existence. I don’t really know. All I know is my one true solace at that time was sports, and my one true home was the baseball diamond.

And it was, a diamond—60 feet from home to first base, first base to second, and then to third and back to home. From the pythagorean theorem you could measure out home to the pitcher’s mound although it didn’t really matter. 224 feet designated home from the center field wall. In that diamond, lit by lone lights extending into the vast mystery of clouded night skies, nothing else mattered but a column of numbers. And even the numbers added up to something so simple that it seemed all of life hinged on it, collapsed into it eventually—win or lose, safe or out, yes or no, did Kate like you or did she not like you, life or death, being and nothingness—all meeting at a single point at the totality of everything.

Pitching was the only thing I was good at. Pitching and running. I was otherwise last in the batting order and placed in right field always. I could have picked dandelions for all anyone cared when I was not pitching, which did not bother me one bit because the privilege of being a pitcher was the privilege of being placed center stage in this sacred diamond, the sovereignty in every movement of controlling the gates in which time flows in the space of this diamond world. He decides when the batter swings, when the runner leading off rushes back to base, he holds silence in the grip of his palm, in the pit of a leather mitt. Standing on that mound I made sure to let everyone know it was my game, and that peculiar sovereignty rebounds from movement to stillness to the crowd’s anticipation to a fast ball placed right at the bottom corner as the umpire yells ‘STRIKE!’ to end the inning.

But I wasn’t that good. I was not good enough to compensate for my astounding mediocrity in every other dimension of skill. In eighth grade I quit baseball and focused on basketball, then, in 9th grade, I realized I’d never be great at basketball either. With that, the book was closed on any serious athletic aspirations and I became greatly depressed amongst all the many confusing, stupid, hideous rules of regular life until finally finding little hideouts in the world of music, picture books, a poem here and there.

–

Motherly wisdom, or, in fact any wisdom transferred from parents to their adolescent children first experiencing the naked stirring of life hinges on the explanation of ‘hormones’. As it was explained to me hormones represent the many evils inherent in life, completely senseless, dizzying armies of cretins in your blood marching in files up to your brain and once having taken your brain begin a terrible process of legitimizing their rule across every other domain of your body.

Perhaps that crystalline stream one dips their toe into in the first prongs of youth is really the ceaseless infinity of life, of one after the other and succeeding generations with no end. Perhaps your parents or your teachers or any adult wishes secretly that it would all end because they have found themselves its prisoner. I quite liked middle school and being very young, I quite liked everything. Perhaps too much so; the exceeding joy of naked life finds itself naked, the intuition discovers it is blind. And, long story short I turned to drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, maybe to forget or maybe to remember ? Or perhaps one is truly the other.

There is no love quite like love on drugs. Love drunk and stupid and reckless. Madeline was a girl I knew when I was seventeen and our favorite thing to do was to get drunk on ghetto 40oz lagers with my dog Sally. We didn’t get Sally drunk but she was always around wagging her tail cause she knew we’d take her for walks at the odd night hours, at 4am, coming back when it was too late and also too early—memory is forgetting anyways, the end is the beginning, too late you are early and too early you are late. Non sense really, and how easily we dispense with any and all sense.

On Fridays we’d get drunk a little earlier—well, that’s not true, that’s when we’d take pills. Usually Xanax and Percocet if we could get it, Vicodin or Codeine worked well too—and we’d bring our 40z lagers in paper bags to a baseball field of eleven and twelves year olds, sit at the very top and drink until everyone had left and even the lights were off in the pure comfort of absolute darkness. Then I’d run out into the field, take up the scent of grass and red dirt and shake the chains to the dugout, and sometimes I’d pass out and waking up she’d be asleep next to me.

How many nights we spent over that brilliant diamond? Runners and batters and pitchers, and shouts and laughter—the whole world in a diamond, perhaps we struck an odd image and perhaps people convinced themselves we were older siblings—this was exciting. We’d choose a team to cheer for and then we’d yell and scream. These were some of the happiest, most liberating nights of my life. Happier than pitching a shutout or scoring a walk-off run, those moments of victory were always tainted by an unbearable anti-climax. I hit a home-run once, my dad wasn’t there. Nobody really cared. It was all just noise. It’s all just noise even as I am sitting here, writing this on a google doc on my phone in a place of miraculous beauty—of trees and streams and flowers, there is chirping, water rushing, leaves rustling, a veil ready to be lifted: two birds in a game of chase and one lifts into a soft golden haze and disappears in a mosaic of green and blue.

–

Many wild cats, skinny and striped, some fat, some pregnant, scurried around her street, taking residence in the row of burned houses. One day the houses would collapse, yet, they somehow still remained. With bits of woodboards and panelling dangling from its blackened facade. Cat eyes would peer from every gap and crevice, shining in the night, watching from a window.

I’d cross the avenue just before evening began its slow demise, at the same time as cats would pass in the opposite direction hoping to be fed by their rich patrons. Allison was always outside, on the first floor porch with one leg perched as she sat on the swing. She never wore pants, instead blue jeans cut to the edge of her ass. Pale, lily white legs on the cusp of a lilac or a violet on full display. She never seemed to notice me in my heroism as I crossed over to her street and walked down the sloping road to walk back up it, in what I remember felt like its own odyssey, and even when I was before her I had to do everything but bow at the feet of this princess of the wild.

When she’d finally look at you, you’d have to guess at her eye color, for whatever glow she held in her soul evaded categories; hazel, green, even blue, black. Her hair was wet, a raven tress, a figure perhaps Byron witnessed in his pilgrimage, standing before the sea, in the distance small and faint yet implanting something in the imagination which spanned incomprehensible horizons of dreams. Then, was her house, a second floor apartment where more cats were, hidden in heaps of laundry, there was her mother and her brother–-older than she was but what he was about no one seemed to know, where he worked, what he did. He was often not around, and when he was he was smoking in the back. They looked eerily similar, and one time using his bathroom there were countless orange prescription bottles littered around the sink and in the drawer, names with ominous X’s and Y’s and Z’s.

“What do you wanna do?” she asked me when we made it into her room. Her white sheeted mattress laying in the corner on the floor. There was never anything to do, the question itself was something of a Koan. So we laid in her bed as her small tv played, old re-runs of nickelodeon, MTV, a movie here and there. We’d smoke spliffs whose smoke would drift slow upwards and funnel out the ajared top of the window. Then, it would be night, where anything was possible. Long walks through drainage ditches, and the well spun myths of the older kids. Of a girl who lived somewhere down the path, in the woods, maybe she was a ghost, but they would leave food out for her–saltines and an open can of tuna fish, one boy even leaving a lone can opener in case someone had forgotten to open the can for her.

This is what we wanted to do, to wander, and then wonder. And Allison who at first would not say much would then tell me the truths of the trees and the houses and the night sky and even the stars. She believed in souls, she’d say, but they were mostly trapped, she told me she wished her soul could be free, and never get trapped.

–

Those nights bore the serene reign of the illusion of eternity, and still I imagined if I believed fully in the illusion it would last forever. Yet, each night when the static blue of the sky would turn soft violet we knew the illusion could not last. We’d return to our homes, I’d once more cross the avenue and walk down to my home two blocks away.

From a third floor window, through some trees and roofs I could make out their street and sometimes could see Allison or her brother. Sometimes they’d walk by my own house, one time with a cheap disposable camera where I noticed they were taking pictures. I could never guess her older brother’s age, he was older than her by at least eight years—his name was David, he was tall and skinny. Sometimes it would just be Allison walking past, and each time I’d want to let her in but didn’t.

I had not seen her for a week until driving down the avenue one evening where I noticed her figure from afar helping her mother carry groceries. That figure, with its lily legs, so intimately known, yet imbued in that moment with an anonymity making his wholly new, turned me wild with a fairy night’s mystery. Only, that night, approaching her house she was not on her porch and instead of going back I waited outside where she saw me from her window and let me in.

Her brother, I noticed, was there. Seated on a recliner in the living room, he gave me a discomforting look. We watched American beauty and smoked cigarettes and weed from an old bong. When it was near midnight we tried to leave, yet, her brother was still on the recliner and asked us where we were headed. “Somewhere” Allison said, un-convicingly. “Going over to his house?” David then asked. “No.” He was wriggling his toes, I remember, anxiously. His feet were bare and bony and stark white. In the dim lights of the living room I could see just how similar Allison and David were. They both seemed to be hiding some kind of secret, a secret Kingdom they both belonged to, with its own strange and harsh customs that perhaps I was in violation of. We left regardless, but that night was tainted and returning as the sun rose train horns in the distance paired with a succession of raven caws. The next day I returned to Allison’s home and David was throwing things off the balcony—shirts, shoes, hangers, whatever—with accompanying shouts. I noticed Allison carelessly swinging on the porch just as an Xbox landed and smashed on the pavement to an accompanying “Fuck!”

—

Allison once told me that she felt daydreams were more real than reality itself. I told her this was not possible, that of course it was not possible, to which she told me I was wrong. Sometime later, I realized she was right in a way I was unfortunate to never know—years later, after the burned houses had been torn down and the cats gathered and put down. I realized that was what drew me to her, to this odd street and this odd home, the sense of a moment’s pure annihilation, of a dream extending over everything. A timeless, unreal, world. I later learned her brother was in and out of psychiatric institutions for about five to seven different psychological disorders. He believed in some grave injustice he could never wholly articulate, instead articulating conspiracies until each thread of his reality unraveled.

Neither Allison nor I went to a proper university after high school. There was talk of her becoming a nurse and so going to nursing school while I went to community college. I could not imagine her as a nurse nor could I ever imagine her ever fitting to anything like a normal job, she was more in some mysterious way like the cats or the ravens or even the mysterious ghost girl in the drains. Directionless and alone for a time during that year at community college we began to spend more days together, and she’d come over to my home. She’d tell me the things she wanted to do, the places she wanted to go, all she wanted to see. We’d eat together at restaurants, get coffee in the mornings, she’d swim in my parent’s pool striking an image even today I can’t relieve of its strangeness—there she was, beside the pool, in a sky-blue bikini, her skin unearthly white, and then, arising from the aqua blue shimmer water like the rarest of nymphs yet with a wet face wholly human, vulnerable—her eyes were hazel, her mouth was wide and her teeth prominent. She was just a girl. A light breakig through the clouds only to get tangled in the trees.

After a vacation with my family we returned home to find someone had broken in and trashed it. Nothing was stolen, from what we could tell. I knew it was Allison’s brother David, although I never knew why. Thereafter I saw her less and less, until one day I saw her for the very last time. She had vanished, faded from life like an old weathered photograph into the secret kingdom of memory, of dreams, appearing faintly at times as something wholly different, a nurse, a waitress, a mother with children. I’d take walks along her street and although I knew someone still lived there, could see the warm glow of windows and maybe even her silhouette—that sense of an endless night, a moment’s complete dominion over life was gone. The burnt houses were rubble, the raven had left, countless dreams surrendered to some abyss of light—yet, life remained, continued, forever in a self annihilating moment

Yet, these spoken lies, amassing themselves in ever greater tangles form complexes which emit faint ray beams of truth. Lately I have started a new youtube channel for videos and have been blessed with a new algorithm, Mr. Beast, David Goggins telling me to ‘stay hard motherfucker!’, guy on a motorcycle who hates his wife, seen it all before. What interests me now is teenagers, usually, sometimes there is a pathetic twenty something year old in the mix, but teenagers in front of a iphone fascinate me. They mostly make facial expressions now, they don’t even fucking dance, just express something and move their lips to a voice over. The voice over says something incredibly simple and the teenager moves their lips and gestures. A simple act of mimesis which gains likes, followers, attention, praise. The voice over acts as a symbol in this economy of attention, it is the universal voice, you are rewarded for participation in it, for your part in making the ideal real. So prevalent that even when you find the original voice you cannot believe that the voice originated from a particular place, a particular person. Even as that particular person is speaking you will not be able to dislodge that perception of mimesis. The universal voice becomes the particular person, speaks through them, so univocal the origin must be God, and to find that it is in fact not god but just some person is so deeply traumatic we do not allow ourselves to register the fact before us.

This is, in a sense, the story of the ‘I’. First understood by Descartes’ as ontologically singular yet epistemologically universal, in Kant it is understood as a pure and empty reference by which the many can be gathered in a whole. The ‘I’ is universal in Kant, and therefore bounded inherently in a moral community, the ‘I’ is the ‘we’. In an almost poetic turn Kant raises morality from the illegibility of the truly singular, and thus, our modern world is born.

-
Speaking of autism, I have lately been in the throws of an intense fascination with Orcas. For one, their common name of Killer Whale being a misnomer seems almost a trick they have launched at us, hoping to breach the logic of our categories of nature, analogous, in many ways, to their complex hunting strategies akin to a special forces unit. Otherwise, they are a marvel of nature. An organism of such attainment and complexity that a lone orca, by itself, would be wholly unsustainable and would have been extinguished had it not been for some other force which allowed them to gather in complex communities able to develop and preserve techniques which make them able to meet the demands of their enormous caloric intake. Who knows which was greater: the timescale over which they developed into marvelous organism they are, or, the timescale over which they developed and honed their hunting strategies. Likely they contributed to one another at some point, becoming a vicious circle in which greater hunting capacities led to greater perfection and the need for greater resources. It is a testament to power’s self-preservation through expansion, nature’s chosen concentration of all her gifts. Horrific, perhaps even magnificent, perhaps even genius.

I wonder what what Schopenhauer would have thought of these exceptional beings. I learn about them at night, that is only time I watch things. Documentaries and then short clips during the day of them rising from the waters. They appear, emerging from icy water amidst broken sheets of ice like an advanced military weapon, perhaps a nuclear weapon—capsule white, elegant in its simplicity. Deception in its very design. It is difficult to imagine them not having an intellect. Sometimes when I am falling asleep to a documentary there is the sound of an Orca cry, and in that half dreaming state I imagine a brilliant splitting light breaking the deep, dark blue of the ocean, of my conscious, of life itself. Something eternal, just beyond, just above. There is a secret there, somewhere, a secret I believe to humanity.

-
This morning I woke up with a dim disgust regarding people in general. Other people, I don’t know if I understand them too completely or don’t understand them at all or maybe these are on in the same. They talk too much, speak too much, and because both of these are forms of lying, they lie to much, mess up, screw up, scramble the world for what I can only imagine are their own perhaps perverted or otherwise sexual and selfish aims.

I have realized, in recent weeks that I am a very caring and empathetic person. This is what people say to me, people in fact like me a whole lot in my real life. There was a period, I guess you could call it of intense mania, energy, where I thought I was more selfish than I was, but this period has gently landed into a nice state of calm, giving leisure. I honestly don’t have much to say besides my own interest. But I realized today, as I am writing this, that why I don’t believe in morality is that I have always though moralists were perverts, and not even the fun kind.Anytime someone has said something about morals or ethics I have judged them immediately to be a bad person, because otherwise, why would they talk about good things to do and not just do those things? Cause they don’t want to fucking do them, they want you to do it for them. Fuck you faggot.

What is true strength is love. Love, in its fullest sense is being willing to kill a bunch of others for one person. It is wholly irrational. We once thought that love was akin to taking a bunch of cocaine, this was rational—same pathways in the brain, chemicals, a whole topology of a specific, singular organ; the brain. We should have sounded the fucking alarms as soon as some virgin fag said that shit. To take a universal and timeless human experience and subordinate its meaning to the mechanism of a chemical, all for the sake of reason—i.e., pharmaceutical companies, insurance rackets, medical industrial complex etc etc etc., Listen, I don’t wish to posit boogey men or evil demons or whatnot, all I know is that people tend to want to be something they can hold, or that someone else can hold and love. They don’t want to love, they want to be loved, they want to be. Even if this means being muck or goo or a brain or a body or a self, or a penis, or a clitoris. Comfort themselves in the blanket of a tried and true interpretation of things. Fuck it let them, it will be a little less fun for me when I run up on yall niggass but not everything is about me.

—

—-

It is easy to forget about the possibility of death. Easy to forget that each moment comes to us with no guarantee. Easy to let the narcissism of momentary comfort etch itself over the horizons of past and future in a dim image of continuity. Somehow, although I don’t care to explain how as I have already done so, this forgetting of the possibility of death results in the subdividing of the world into countless many distinctions—cause and effect being the predominant operative in all this, that the billiard ball in fact strikes the billiard ball and the cue and the arm and tendons and billions of atoms and molecules all working in tandem are banished from the demands of the equation of causality so one’s attention can be fixed, placed on a simple happening, a 1+1 or perhaps even 2+2 and not the impossibility of infinity divided by infinity, which is not only not impossible but infinitely possible. The addition instead of simple terms, one plus one billard ball banishes not only the immense ocean of possibility but with it the possibility of death.

Thus, things are given a why, what, when, how. And we can pretend in our deluge of animal sedation that such questions of why are the stakes of life. In politics on the news, online conspiracy theories, dating shows, neighborhood gossip, so many whys whats and hows emerge that their expanse alone calls upon each of them the utmost significance.

When one’s life does not have the feeling of walking along the tenuous tightrope stretched above the abyss of non-existence, one finds ways to stimulate that original feeling. One finds many ways to simply engender that abyssal feeling in itself of oblivious non-existence. And in doing so, with the many questions of why and what and when the infinite divides itself against itself continually, the ocean swallows itself and yet remains. This, at least, is my own personal explanation for why so much talk and so much human activity almost doesnt even register to me. Why the many discourses echoing and abounding are meaningless chatter which might, like a billion monkeys at a billion typewriters, produce a pleasing sound here and there. A girl in her black work uniform with poorly dyed red hair rests her back against a white wall and furiously types away at her phone. What she is saying, or typing, or why or how does not matter to me, there is something in the mere appearance, how it stood out against everything else, a part in a play whose plot forever eludes me, which I can never discern fully.

—-

The only problem I really have with other people is that they exist. The miraculous fact of their existence and the angelic glow which accompanies even the most retched of them. They, by God’s grace, do not have to bear the burden of this fact, yet, somehow I do. I remember the moment, too, in a starbucks my sophmore year of college as a winter evening was falling, there was suddenly a person, and then another, and another, and then there was me, there was my father and his father, and many many others all having played their part in the lead up to a moment where I was waiting for my coffee to fuel my cram for finals. I supposed I realized I was, in some way, all these other people. Even the slightly overweight, depressed barista who yelled my name as she put the coffee on the table and furiously wiped her hands on her apron, she was part of me and I was part of her, and we were both part of something else. It was miraculous, like a living miracle hidden all this time only just now appearing from the shadows. Since, I have not been able to rid myself of this little secret despite my many attempts. Despite the anger it arouses in me when I hear others use such duct-tape terminology as the ‘oneness of everything’, ‘the beauty in the little things’, or many other sayings I have been fortunate enough to forget. These sayings themselves are paltry ‘whys’ for life, for moments of ‘happiness’ or ‘sadness’, bandaids…platitudes.. ;)…maybe others find some use in them,.

Part of why I do what I do, and much of the reason so many people find me ‘funny’ (in both ways) is because I bear the burden of this miracle’s continual withdrawal. Much of my life I am fortunate to hear and see it’s soft, spring petal glow, but when it escapes me and when everything is suddenly what it is with the veil lifted, I must call upon it, I must pray for it, dance and sing myself for it, and then, a miracle in itself, it re-appears.Yet, I must also protect it, though really what I am protecting is myself in all of this, and that truth is almost too much to bear on its own.

I don’t really know, I also don’t think there is much to truly know. Some people might call me evil. I’ve hurt many people in my life, I don’t understand others yet I understand them completely. I don’t believe in beginnings, I don’t believe in endings, maybe they are part of the same line bounding a figure but where it begins and where it ends we can never truly know. Each point must as well show what is beyond, show the infinity of empty space all around, the end of one boundary is yet another boundary with no ends. A line, drawn by some hand, containing everything, a tightrope where you can’t step too heavy, can’t step too light, but must find a rythym to your movements, an irregular rhyme in yourself to dance over that great oblivion. To just narrowly escape the self-division of infinity. Because there are a great many things to see—and fuck it I’m no angel, steeped in all this beauty yet I seek to make it mine to be beautiful myself against all else and against all others. Well, when did I say I was any different? Everything seeks to shine, catch the light if only for the briefest moment. Co-existence is muck mush bullshit, sink back into the sea, into the shadows if you will but leave me out of it. I’m trying to live. Fuck it im getting drunk

Anyways, shit, I’m just trying to share some beauty with the world and whatnot bla bla bla thank you

Under the cover of night was the destructive brilliant light of day cast away and all that was old and fixed washed asunder and returned by the waves of our spirit to the ocean of dreams. A crash, a roar, foam upon the shore as the deep violence and strife met its serene surface in moonlight melting skin, in starlight touching eyes, in our faint reflection through a window netting all that would be or ever been. Children, we were, God’s children, nature’s children, for whom life was such a small thing, entirely contained in the bathroom of a midnight diner, a buzzing fluorescent motel corridor, a street lamp a stray dog, and all the while something wholly not conforming to our life or life itself pressed against it ready to ecstatically, suddenly, annihilate it all.

Macy liked to bite, that was her thing. Ever since she was a kid. She was not one for tasting, supposedly due to buck teeth, she liked to bite, to take a bite out of us in excitement, our shirts, our hair, and take a bite out of the world when, at a gas station she’d slip a whole box of kit kats into her coat pockets and blow a kiss at the unassuming, flattered, clerk, then run, and we would run after her, get into the car and peel off—each of those little kit kats our stolen treasure. Macy, and then there was Anthony, who liked guns and liked to carry them, and we all three liked drugs of course, and we would drive on them, snort them, shoot them, smoke them, in the oddest places wondering whether this life has any one rule you could point to but beauty.

Did anything matter besides beauty? What else could matter besides the heat beneath the flesh and tangled hair and wet lips, thunder shocks and lightning, the shining stars above us—what was it said between us? What do we care! And what did we care when others could not comprehend, could not understand, such great misunderstandings did others have, and such great pleasure it brought us for every misunderstanding was an expression of this larger thing, this thing perhaps beyond life, every misunderstanding was the misunderstanding of the fact that there was nothing to be understood anyways. And there was nothing of us which could be understood, never, ever, for eternity.

—-

People drone on, talk a lot, think a lot, contemplate a lot about this or that or whatever the facts may be. I just don’t care, I don’t believe in facts either now or before or sometime far in the future. I don’t believe shit has a purpose, either, I can’t imagine it having any purpose and god I hope it doesn’t have a purpose because that means all these shit heads in the world are bound to me in some idiotic way towards some idiotic goal. Whatever my purpose is I don’t need really need to know. Whatever the facts might be let someone else carry the stone, cause I don’t care.

To take things so seriously and believe in a possible superimposition of order upon this thing we call life is to really not take things seriously at all. It is falseness at its core, a deep lack of true care for things of this world concealed by belief in an ultimate end. A belief in death. A wailing wish for anything disturbing the narcosis of the everyday to cease and be released from the noxious luminosity of life. ‘Heavy’ is the word sometimes used, i.e., not ‘light’ which is the essence of all things. Light, luminosity, light feet, delicate, dancing in shadows and play. But when one cannot dance, what are they supposed to do? Sit in a corner and watch from afar, and then talk, turn everything brilliant and surprising to slop and goo, continually strike themselves when the dance is over and the dancers have forgotten, bruise their cheeks and jaw and walk around with their purpled flesh as evidence of their participation as miserable spectators. Such are the ‘facts’ and the ‘higher principles’ and the ‘re-enchantment’ and ‘good’ and so on, self-inflicted bruises to feel real.

Memory is the only thing ever approaching evil, because it is the falsest fiction there is. True memory is forgetting, true memory is letting, through forgetting, what really matters to rise from the sea towards the sparkling sun shooting through the submerged blue of the ocean of consciousness. Memory is privileged when one is weak, of all the things that might be remembered it is often long dead claims, numbers, various precedents which are properly, actively remembered, and when told such numbers and cases and precedents preceded such other numbers and matters and precedents a clumsy appeal is made to the power of forgetting. Ever wondered why fiction is simply called fiction, yet what is ‘real’ is called ‘non’ fiction. Huh.

—

I think, sometimes, I might be by nature miserable. Here, in this proposition, is an easy comfort which allows me to take all the plurality of my life and subsume it into a warm blanketed fact of brute simplicity. I cannot partake in many of the common joys of others, I cannot enter into communion with people at large without a bout of nausea. When I was a kid I declared that I hated movies and all television because I had never saw a movie or a tv show that interested me. I liked music, I said, I like art, I liked skateboarding, not movies. That was, until one night when I was eleven we stayed in our new beach house just being finished and without proper cable we had to put on a DVD to watch at night. Well, I cannot remember much of the details, I know for a fact there must have been a roof on the third floor living room but my memory tells me otherwise, that we were completely exposed to the static blue of the cosmos as my mother put on Immortal Beloved and when young Beethoven ran away in the night to be subsumed by the stars as the chorus rose, I remember my own eleven year old self becoming one with the stars.

What of it? What is it all? What is this thing that is called life? Why, do we ask the question of ‘why’ in the first place? I do not much care for answers, I like the questions far too much, I like the horizon far too much, the faint dim distance far too much. I like hunting, chasing, running, cutting down wayward branches in violent delight. Feeling my boot stomp on the crunch of dry rush, and I like that occasional sight, of something cloaked in the silver moon glow. Far off it is, and as quickly as it seen it disappears. I will wait there for a time, a long time even, in stillness I will listen for its faint song, there it is—and then the flash, surmising the direction and speed I begin with silent, light steps. And when I know it enough I will follow it as its song rises, then begins the chase and it will run from me and I will run, together we run through the shadows of the forest until finally I will have caught up to it in such divine ecstasy I realize it is the moon itself, evening out the dark mess of life into one grand cosmic plane in which stars have been scattered in impossible, unreachable perfection surrounding the silver moon. Silver the refraction of gold, the moon the refraction of the stars, and everything that ever was or ever will be caught in the sacred wake of a secret alchemy. The debt is not due.