Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Collage




“I won’t hurt you,” said the man. “But Trump’s North Korea strategy could cause a famine,” said the woman. The two of them continued drinking wine and eating cheese in the deserted park.

“Where are we?” asked the woman. “Neither here nor there,” answered the man. The woman looked at the sky, noted the fluffy white clouds and the bright blue sky. “There’s no air pollution here. I must be far from home.” The man let the words sit still in the air. He spread brie on a cracker and took a bite.

“Did you know that twenty-two percent of North Korea is agricultural land?” The man swallowed his cracker and sipped his wine, a Chardonnay from Sonoma. “No, I didn’t know that. However, I know that forty-four percent of U.S. land is agricultural.” The woman nodded her head. “We see eye to eye then, don’t we?”

The man threw his empty wine glass into a stand of bushes. “Don’t rush to judgment. We may live in the blank margins of printed pages, but we’re only the same in the sense that we don’t exist.” The woman ran her hand through the trimmed green grass at the edge of the blanket where they were sitting. “Perhaps, but I have no memory of not existing.” The man responded, “Precisely. If you had then you would exist.”

The woman considered this as she scanned the park, seeing the trees, the empty walking paths, the slight slope of the hill where they sat. “This is a pleasant place. Peaceful, too. I have memories of existing, though.” The man sighed. “How do you prove a memory?” The woman could not answer. Instead, she looked down at the flowered dress covering her legs. Her knees were resting together, and her feet were folded up to the side of her thighs. She had to twist her torso whenever she looked at the man. 

She felt ashamed as she didn’t know any answers to this question. She was thin in body and, she thought to herself, frail of mind. “Is it important to prove such a thing?” The man shook his head as he spread brie on another cracker. “No, not as far I can tell.” A thought occurred to her. “But I’m thinking and remembering, this much I know. I must exist.” The man crushed the cracker in his hand, leaned forward from his keeling position, his face inches from hers, and said, “That’s not existence.” He sat back on his knees, picked up a white cloth napkin, a fine linen, and wiped his hands clean.

The woman pondered aloud, “Am I asking the wrong questions?” The man shook his head again, but this time calmly. With disdain in his voice he said, “You’re asking too many questions.” The woman felt hurt and tears ran down her cheeks. “Why are you so mean?” The man sighed. “Another question.” 


On ESPN there was an attractive woman, a former high school football cheerleader, who had become a real journalist. After watching an old man falling and breaking his hip while trying to dance, she found her inner Robert Altman, and became a homely but wise Radio Shack salesperson. She found a second job delivering pizza on the weekends and then a third on Monday nights as a jazz music DJ at a local radio station. Wilson Wise Wilson, upon hearing her voice on the radio, fell in love with her, but he was never able to muster the courage to tell her because he had been worn down by an anonymous black comic who had followed him in public for years belittling his fuddy-duddyness. 

The woman interviewed a jazz musician on her radio show. His most memorable statement was that, “Jazz is about chill, cool, not the loud sarcastic arguments on Reddit.” She sprayed him with a squirt gun and he became melted cheese. She then told a story to her listeners about how her dad used to take her for rides on his moped up and down a desert road in central Nevada. He called her, “My beautiful girl,” but one day he left her in the middle of the desert as he rode away on his moped. She got a ride from a tall man in a pickup truck. He stopped a mile outside of Carson City and told her she needed to get out. She pleaded for him to continue driving her into town. He shook his head, reached acrossed her, and opened the door. As she got out of the vehicle, he handed her a squirt gun and said, “This is magic. It will do what it wants when you squirt it. I have no more need for it.” She held the gun in her hand as she watched him roar down the road, weave into oncoming traffic, and smash head-on into a beer truck. 

She delivered a pepperoni pizza to an old man who tried to pay her with a jar of pennies. She used her squirt gun again, but the old man simply got wet. Frustrated, she threw the gun on the ground and stomped on it, cracking the plastic gun and obliterating its magic. The old man scolded her, “That was a stupid thing to do. I will not pay you now.” Relieved, the woman gave him the pizza and returned to her vehicle. She drove recklessly through town, ran a stop sign, and shattered a porcelain woman who had been stranded in a crosswalk.

The woman stopped at the Radio Shack where she worked. The store was part of a strip mall on the main drag of the town where she lived. She unlocked the front door, turned to lock it again, and then walked to the manager’s office in the back. Her plan was to sleep just long enough to shake off the heebie jeebies. She was nearly asleep when the Ghost of Spock appeared to her. “Little one,” he said, “only smoke cigars with the windows open.” He vanished a moment later and she fell asleep.


Living in a car. “My aunt was a racist.” During the Vagina Monologues, Bill realized he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Still living in a car, but I wandered about the library grounds near the river. Jenny is one of the locals. She doesn’t think of herself as homeless. I’m disgusted by her; she feels threatened by me. A thuggish 20-something boy-man masturbated next to a dumpster. White boy tweekers with Southern accents have been riding the rails. Now they’re fucking with my car. I’m pissed off. I calculate numbers in my head; not as strategy, but as a means to calm the rage. 

Extrication, conversion, distraction. I drove the three of them to a showing of Clockwork Orange downtown. We didn’t have money so we just sat outside smoking butts we found on the sidewalk. These guys had a happy cruelty vibe, a sense of hurting a helpless thing with glee. I dropped a dirty handkerchief to the ground and walked back to my car. I needed to go before a meter maid threw a boot on my tire. The guys? They’d lost interest. I heard one of them laugh about rectum prolapse. None of them used those words, though. The phrasing was “shit your asshole out your asshole.”


To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that as something of a miracle.


As far as history is concerned, I’m already dead. If there is something independent of history I might be able to bounce back. I found God, but God was woefully insufficient. The world from which I departed was a menagerie. I am spiritually withered, physically alive, and internally free of morality. Dawn is breaking on a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. I could be a hyena, a lean and hungry one. If so, I could go forth to fatten myself.

I’m out of printer cartridges. I can’t afford new ones. The agencies want me to mail copies of my current income, but I can’t print out the documents I scanned or the bank statements I downloaded. I could make things work in this world if I had a video game console for life. 


Foucault identified the problematization of idleness as a means to manufacture a necessity of work for those who could not live without it—the poor—and to justify confinement for those who did not work, whether by choice, lack of opportunity, inability, or any other reason. 


“How many times have I told you?”

“Six.”


Will please stop turning the—


Condemned by law, disturbed by the peace, squandered of goods, throttled by oppression, scared without profession, and labeled “insane.” The truth of this person was answered by confinement, according to law and its practice. 


He fiddles with a guitar
And sings with a twang
He thinks this makes him country smart
But there ain’t much rhymes with “twang”
I swear he don’t know that
And never will I tell
Except I just did right there
So what the fucking hell


Being in the world is grounded on the land. God gave His only Son. A dream on anger masked was a way of clearing a sense of loneliness. The expression of this went unnoticed. A fundamental part of our constitution is connection to specific others so to experience separation is anguish. Love is welcoming otherness or else it’s devoid of existence. An emphasis on vocabulary is framework material. Intention external to oneself is an attempt at escape. The observer is participant and denial of this results in diachronic disjunction.

I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. I hear not a word spoken because she is beautiful. Bigfoot visits Santa Claus. My heart is Athena, Apothecary, Elderberry. One always has thoughts. The ontology establishing the subject “I” is based on the dialectic notion that certainty rests with the subject and uncertainty rests in objects. On the surface, language bears this out, but in the depths we find only that language is coercive in establishing a subject/object dialectic. The separation between subjects and objects occurs through perceptive schisms encouraged by language. 

These Cartesian linguistic intuitions provide a subject-oriented ontology that allows objects to come into existence as affirmations of subject/object distinctions. The relationship exists from subject to object, from source to result, and this demands a linear order of causality. Timelines are causal projections through which history is perceived. 


He was only partially affected by the year in solitary confinement. Henry, the man's name, didn't know whether he was in an American prison or if he was in a foreign land. He also didn't know who put him there or why they did. 

Henry was a banker. An investment banker. A damn good one, cutthroat, sharp, and intuitive with a massive well of knowledge combined with a relational understanding of the links between systems. He used algorithms and codes, but not by using a computer. His mind was unique and he could apply complex mathematical calculations faster than the most robust computers. 

The pity was that he went after a fund that served as a laundromat for unknown organizations. Were they criminal in nature? Drug lords or mafias? Shady Russian billionaires or even Russian government operatives (same thing, right?)? Maybe they were terrorist organizations or the Saudi government. These things he wasn't able to figure out. But he wanted to take over that fund and he nearly succeeded. 

Before he was taken, he had been in London. That was where he worked for an international finance conglomerate. He was drugged and whisked away in a van as he became unconscious. He woke in what seemed to be a basement, but more like a dungeon. He walked down hallways, turning corner after corner, passing doors that appeared to be cells. He heard nothing, though, and he was still in a dream-like stupor which made him think he was losing his mind, that he might be in an insane asylum, but not one listed on any registry anywhere. A CIA insane asylum or prison? A Russian intelligence experimental medical facility? 

He was finally thrown into a room and the door locked. It was similar to a prison cell: a tiny bed with stained mattress, a stainless steel sink and toilet, but no windows to the outside world or even on the door. He fell on the bed and passed out.

When he awoke he discovered that he was lying on a couch. A very expensive couch it seemed. As he looked around the room he noticed high ceilings, maybe 12-feet, and a grand piano in a corner not far from a bay window awash in morning sunlight. He looked to his left and saw a foyer with a chandelier dangling and an elegant staircase leading up to another floor. 


Collage is a perceptual tool of seeming randomness that obliterates the linear order of causality. Chaos theory and the “butterfly effect” are accidental reactions attempting to escape duality, but they fail to detach from linear causality. Instead, they reaffirm linearity more insidiously by covering the order of causality with a cloud of complexity. Rather than an escape, chaos theory creates only a more complicated trap. 


Jenny told her daughter, Sally, that she had “sinned before God.” Sally, just six years old and inexperienced enough with language to not make such egregious mistakes, interpreted her mother’s statement as, “I sinned before God sinned.” Sally was very impressed by this and thought her mother must be pretty amazing to have accomplished anything before God was able to accomplish it. She bragged about it to her friends, but they all thought Sally’s mom must be wrong. “God is first in all things,” said Betty. “Yeah, that’s what it says in the Bible,” said Maria. Sally thought about this. “Do you think my mom was lying?” Greta said she must have been. Sally walked home after school, slightly dejected by the idea that God had sinned before her mother had. But then she saw a butterfly and chased after it giggling as she did so. She forgot all about winning at sinning and lived happily ever after.