Smoking long drags below the overpass, ashes grey like TV static in the same shade of fuzzing emptiness as the snow flurrying in all directions. Cars pass overhead in a long droning hum that sounds like the blizzard if it had a voice, A bitch cries in the cold backseat as Texas to North Dakota’s second Mississippi, the continent unfolding around the car in endless plains to horizons stacking upon horizons of the frigid steppe. After a stretch it comes to the desert, where it draws down to the sunrise.
We Appreciate Power
Friday, February 5, 2021
A Colorlessness Creeping In Empty Places to Remind Us of the Winters We Thought We Left Behind
Smoking long drags below the overpass, ashes grey like TV static in the same shade of fuzzing emptiness as the snow flurrying in all directions. Cars pass overhead in a long droning hum that sounds like the blizzard if it had a voice, A bitch cries in the cold backseat as Texas to North Dakota’s second Mississippi, the continent unfolding around the car in endless plains to horizons stacking upon horizons of the frigid steppe. After a stretch it comes to the desert, where it draws down to the sunrise.
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Peak Oil
“Evil - I want to taste raw evil. I want to see pure evil. I want you to bleed as I cry. I want to see evil. I want to see raw evil. I want to see flowing black ink-like raw evil from a pure spring. I want to see the skin pricked and raw evil bubble to the surface. I told you, I want evil. Pure evil. Raw evil from the pure source of a spring. I want to see a needle prick his skin. I want to see that hide severed. I want holes. I want oil. I told you - I want evil. Raw evil. Pure evil.”
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Danse Macabre
In Lu Tong’s Seven Bowls of Tea, each successive bowl is a higher level of ascension into the clouds, until retirement bringing one gently back to Earth. In the same narrative, alcohol accumulates. The teetotal narrative is that of an arc of pleasure and an ascent of quantity. One begins innocent before they enter into the wide trajectory of the bottle, to the heights of the lifestyle afforded to one by partying, then down from the tipping point at the peak, until rock bottom or death - either way, stylized as a desert awakening, before a tundra or upon a mesa, looking out in brutal sobriety upon the unforgiving beauty of the sun, realizing, like a teenager on their first LSD trip, the beauty and horror of the world. “I’m high on life” isn’t an exaggeration, as every former alkie and addict says it, but is a life only afforded to by ascending and descending a lethally perilous arc of addiction. The living addictions, pornography or gambling, can never compare to this, as they do not have the key factor here of the arc, where one kisses Heaven, falls into Hell, awakens back into the Earth and sees the sun like the day they were born, but now with clarity - they appreciate life truly, after devoting decades to a slow dying, coming back to the world after the “rock bottom” encountered them with true darkness.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Quarantine Dreams
I sit in my fourth floor apartment and watch the street below. A schoolbus goes past, a rigid ruler-distance from when I saw it pass this morning. I sip another cup of coffee, my heart already racing (self-inflicted). I’m trying to drink less, maybe after a few more hours at my computer, I’ll feel the sun’s low enough to earn another sip into the dissolving agent. It’s hard to tell which way this is to the wedding, the low and slow or the high and fierce. Either way, it’s leading to something abnormal, a journey I hate more and more but a destination I feel distantly as someplace grand.
Friday, January 8, 2021
An Exercise in Empathy
It goes without saying that we met under the spell of innocence. Walking along the road that seemed to stretch in all directions as an asphalt steppe, hand in hand, the sun setting from the brilliant white of childhood summer to a dying afternoon. The whole world wreathed in grandfatherly gold, gilt flake from an earlier century coating ornately carved pillars of each villa and castle of our memories and ancestries, the simple music enjoyed only in earliest youth and oldest wisdom of chirping birds through opened windows. We had separated somewhere down the street, into our own alleys. From my window, I watched a wedding, grandfather beside me in that chair he rotted in. Two held hands and joined beneath a gazebo. I saw love and adulthood and heard the vulgar-sounding instrumentations of Vivaldi down flower lined paths. Feet trampled into stone and made an ugly discordant sound. The old man looked at me knowingly. I looked back down onto the garden and saw in horror, the future.
Monday, January 4, 2021
How to Read an Environment
An audio log in The Witness - found inside the Mountain, underneath a series of wall panels with sketches of concept art hung up - is a short lecture from Paul Cézanne on the nature of painting. In it, he relays his concept of the Motif in painting. Beginning by putting his hands together, he then remarks on two facts of his posture. The wholeness made by the clasp, and the coming-together of the different strands. Each finger, a unique piece, that must lock in perfect context with the rest. Like a bell, the entire object requires a total unity in order for a proper ring to sound when struck.
Saturday, December 26, 2020
The Capital of Words
The refrain against so-called “rent seeking” always goes the same - I’m sure in the early years, when the development of written language took place there was the cry - but is this really necessary? After all, we can speak perfectly well to each other, why introduce an intermediary? And further before, writers of the pure and original will often state a case to the dawn of language itself, as some obscuring illusion that separates one from the real. A famous anecdote, Jean-Paul Sartre seething at the foot of a tree-stump - but how do I really know who you are?
The real is a concept emerging itself from alienation. The concept of there being some interior missed is one only constructed by a remove from that interior, and to be more radical, is a concept constructed by the very interior. The interior, the “real” is not the thing lost in the move to language, but the thing created for language. By constructing the notion of the real, one withdraws into the private, secondary space of language, by that very distance, speech is born. Hence the purpose of “Truth”, the ever important concept, emerges only as something that one is distanced from. The removal, the separation of oneself from the real is the act of language, to forever dance around, separate, and build second-order systems of reference-to, something that is instantly perceived at the moment of experience.
Language is always superstructural by this, secondary and above. It then mutates, develops orders of itself that then refer to the underlying previous. Written language first emerges as a set of pictograms, numerical dashes, evolving in complexity, as a tool of the leisured and ruling class, calculating economic, military, or mythic matters. It then fell, from its initial minority adoption, its infrastructure descended upon the below until the situation today where literacy is the norm in almost all of the world.
Information networks grow by this mechanism. Speech is interesting, far moreso than the “real”, as it has the potential for unlimited growth. While experience is monodirectional and single-moment, speech is infinite. One human can transmit to another, who can then uptake, reinterpret, pass on or change the message, across each node - each individual. This is the human capacity - to combine, interpret, morph - to create. That the power of “good and evil” was what got Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of the Real is no coincidence. The divide, to appraise, is to invent language, to steal the power that was solely the province of God, as the originator of the “real”.
And so - civilization - brought about by this process of accumulating greater and greater levels of abstractions. Abstractions are fascinating in their ability to talk beyond their supposed direct reference, to talk to each other without any “truthful” reference to the “real”. An abstraction is capable of dealing with itself, as language will always refer to other language, which in turn, will only construct further and further accumulations of language as the ever-growing garden continues to be watered and fertilized by every speaker and writer.
And so too, was capitalism born, as early as civilization was itself. In one of the early issues of American Affairs, an article was published on so-called “grey money”, referring to these anonymous entities, private equity firms, hedge funds, investment groups, that controlled such an outsize portion of the world’s ownership. This is not an accident. Not out of any nefarious accumulation, from an earlier era when economics was more “real”, but out of how capitalism has functioned, always. Capitalism too, didn’t originate alien from some evil wizard or out of any exceptional new era when the steam engine was invented, as many of our contemporary thinkers will say on the question of theodicy, but out of this same process. Abstractions, formulated atop material things. In language, the narrative is more direct, with that of a sole individual first philosopher who decided to abstract the real from the experienced, but identical in economics. Material manipulation, the things of the world processed, harvested, yoked, sculpted, emerged via the same social-linguistic abstraction - now via the abstraction of money or trade, which we foolishly single out as separate from other identical forms of the process of abstraction via social-communicative relations between people. The grey-money often spoken of in anger is nothing new in this regard. Economics in itself, is nothing more than another emergent system, a fruiting body from the mycelium of language, identical to the internet, art, or etiquette.