Introducing "Aphorrhœa"

Your humble Abjectus has begun a new weblog, Aphorrhœa, which, as the title suggests, is devoted to reviving the art of aphoristic thought and writing. I hope it brings you joy.

Disclaimer: all aphorisms found on Aphorrhœa are the creations of Abjectus or his partner; any aphorisms therein bearing any similarity to any extant aphorisms (or maxims, epigrams, morals, old saws, bromides or other sorts of pithy observations) is unintentional and therefore coincidental.

Fall into the Gap

(This review also appears on amazon.com.)

The Parallax View, which the ever-prolific Slavoj Zizek has declared the "magnum opus" of his substantial oeuvre, is a generally rewarding if uneven work.

I took from it this: every posited antinomy, opposition or other binarism conceals in itself a more pluriform nature, the terms themselves irreducible to themselves (a challenge to Western thoughts principle of identity: an entity is identical to itself[?]), leaving an irreducible bare difference(the old Derridean stand-by) that remains largely unaccountable but ontologically substantial nonetheless -- a locus of "the Real." Ultimately uncognizable, this difference, which for Zizek is the Lacanian "objet petit a," opens a parallax gap wherein this difference, though uncognizable, nevertheless serves as a common referent among the actors of any ideological disagreement.

I found this a compelling thesis, and Zizek, though often given to an over-reliance on rhetorical questions, ellipses, and anacoluthon (this latter tendency perhaps inspired by St. Paul, himself an inveterate employer of anacoluthon, whom Z. frequently discusses in the early portions of TPV), is in the main persuasive. (I have to balk, however, at Z.'s frequent recourse to pop-cultural examples. Are overwrought, pandering summer blockbusters like The Matrix and The Revenge of the Sith really so fraught with important theoretical implications?) The real shortcoming of TPV, as I see it, comes in the final pages, wherein Z., having explicated his theory, waxes prescriptive, encouraging his readers to embody the "Bartleby-parallax" in order to avoid being caught up in the Hegelian pseudo-negations of counterhegemonic practices. We must be as resistant to the latter in our "preferring-not-to's" as to the hegemonic ills the latter are intended to redress -- I prefer not to eat factory-farmed, adulterated, GM food; I prefer not to purchase food from an organic farming co-op. Because not to do so and to remain, rather, in the old dialectic of resorting to alternatives to dismaying hegemony, is to remain ensnared in the Foucauldian circuits of power that result in the eternal recursion and reinscription of extant relations. The parallactic Bartleby disrupts the workings of ideological apparatuses by cultivating an inner disposition of refusal until, according to Z., there opens up possibilities that are not determined by the dialectic.

This is precisely where Z. lost me. I recall Bartleby's fate: blind, starving, homeless, jailed ... eventually dead. And, for all of Z.'s hostility to what he calls "postmodern techno-gnosticism," Bartleby seem an odd exemplar, given the fact that Herman Melville, Bartleby's creator, often mused upon the tenets of Gnosticism (He composed a poem on gnosticism, and The Confidence Man, his last published novel, arguably lends itself to a gnostic reading). Z.'s recommendation here seems too close to Baudrillard's injunction to "be silent" in the face of popular media -- essentially to choose a mode of resistance likely futile, all while consoling oneself that futility is inevitable, until from the inchoate parallax gap of the Real messianically springs, like Athena from the head of Zeus, the possibility of truly efficacious revolution.

C. at Sea

Swim.
And she will swim
Far past the dolphins who sport, spout to fluke,
Far past wave-slapped hulks,
Their sound the sound of a thousand mouths
Puckered 'round a thousand stones.

Stones.
And stones
Black with wet,
Black as sharks' eyes,
Barnacled Arguslike,
Bear her down.

Down.
Down past wrecks whose flecks of rust she will inspect,
The dream of which
No longer a wish
But an act.

Ache.
And she will ache
As we all ache;
God's tears, we,
A diluvian rain, we

Drown.

Shit Floats

Three thousand miles from here, in that human Porto-Pottie, Tucson, many thousand fledging fleshpots and thugs will begin classes at The University of Arizona. For the first time in nearly seven years, I will not be there, though I have not escaped entirely; I begin teaching at The University of Rhode Island on 6 September.

Nevertheless, my distance from the former institution (you may take my use of this word in more than one way) grants me a certain freedom of reflection no longer stifled by outlandish professional pieties, imposed from above in the UA Writing Program, which, in their simpering delusiveness, often clash with perception. We graduate students in the program's employ were, for example, encouraged to regard all of our charges as incipient geniuses who brought "different skill sets" (read: "ADHD and near-illiteracy") to the classroom, presenting us with "unique pedagogical challenges" (read: "discourtesy and fecklessness verging on sociopathy"), and that any one of these bright young things would flourish, given the proper instruction (I. e., reinforcing in their minds that critical writing is tantamount to assembling a bookcase from IKEA; in other words, that it is not an exercise in intellection, and certainly not an art; and that the university composition classroom is a place, or "space," to use the Writing Program's milksop nomenclature, in which all opinions, or "feelings," about a text are equally valid and meaningful, the instructor's being just one more opinion. The larger implication here is that the letters after the instructor's name are irrelevant. Who can grade another's feelings, after all?). These "unique pedagogical challenges" one invariably attempted to overcome by instituting embarrassing disclipinary measures in order to prevent his class from falling into utter disorder.

The upshot? I am sorry to impart this to you, mon cher lecteur, but the overwhelming majority of undergraduates at The University of Arizona are animals. Their "unique skill sets," stemming from a lifelong immersion in popular media, the repository of all things brutish and vulgar, and exacerbated by the total collapse of American public education, renders them impervious to instruction. The males are slovenly. (UA recently filmed in-house a video, shown to all incoming students, which illustrates for them "inappropriate behavior"; one such behavior is students who allow their personal hygiene to fall in arrears to a significant degree [no pun intended].) They are impassive and disaffected, and write like they speak -- typically, the textual equivalent of simian grunts and hoots. The females are whorish and as stupid in their way as the males. And, as a body, they are an impossible, treacherous, often mutinous bunch. I liken the first day of the semester to being locked in a room with twenty-five angry badgers.

The ivory tower is being deluged ... and shit floats.

!!!!

Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. Schopenhauer

My neighborhood: Sometimes there is silence, sometimes there is noise. Noise predominates. The most prevalent noise is the constant chatter, usually of voices heavily accented, which sometimes flares into yells and imprecations, fusillades attending some who-knows-the-reason histrionics. (Strangely, my street, Ives, experiences quite it share of lovers' spats; Rhodies seem to know little about restraint and even less about decorum.)

There is also a presence most terrible, most brutish, and, unfortunately, most loud -- a fat, stunted, sloping-browed miscarriage of humanity who rides endless circuits around the neighborhood on chopper reminiscent of the one belonging to the anthropomorphized cheetah who sells ersatz-cheese snacks (Here he is now! Speak of the devil and he is bound to show up.) -- a chopper so constructed as to maximize the combustive noise of the engine. The noise it produces is window-rattling, nerve-fraying and can only be described as farts of the gods. What this mongoloid's object is one can only speculate. I am of the opinion that it involves mating, and this noise-making is part of some ritual, remarkable in both its crude ostentation and apparent inefficacy and perhaps peculiar to northeastern pipe-welding illiterates, devoted to that end. I imagine he believes this infernal bike of his so compellingly announces both his potency and availability that the females of the neighborhood cannot but swoon at his approach and fling themselves into recumbency on the street to receive his seed. C. is of the opinion that, being so apparently stupid and unlettered, he can only get his own back this way, with his noisy bike, against the society which has so thoroughly thwarted his jouissance and neutered his will with its oppressive expectations of civility and the productive disposal of one's time.

In addition to this motorcycle idiot are those whom I call "the people of the stoop": squatters upon entryway steps for hours on end, carrying on with the sort of pointless, high-decibel blather only indolent welfare cheats can ken. They appear in the process of being squeezed from the neighborhood by the property-value-minded Portuguese, and are under constant surveillance by the Providence police. Truly, then, one can say that these stoopsquatters' bark is worse than their bite.

Despite these clamorous elements, however, Providence -- at least the east side, where I live -- seems an orderly city. I have found it even more retiring than Tucson; many more businesses here keep bankers' hours. Not to be outdone, my bank does not even keep bankers' hours, closing its door to commerce at 4 PM daily (noon on Saturday).

Alum & D

I would have deserted you years before
if I knew what you would do
and what our life would come to;

no one pays a premium
for what he can get discounted.
Your man now should have taught you that.

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Rage, like rust, never sleeps. What is rage but love pilloried and mocked? And who are this love's accusers but those for whom love merely bites its own coin, whose luster is its very falseness?

My rage places me beyond all hope -- but also beyond all fear. There is something quite soothing about not being able to feel as one used to. It will serve me when I stand before the grainy tide of mindless time and, unlike my recreant oppressors, who will quiver before the inevitability of their own annihilation, which could never have come too soon, will nod my assent: truly fitting, this moment where rage and rust converge in the eager maw of oblivion. Nothing to record the anguish, the constant bleed of sorrow. No traces, no stains. Just mist in summer's morning light.

Rust is the sleep that isn't; death is the sleep that is.

Geworfen

She said her fondest dream of me is of me by the pool reading Heidegger.

Me at twenty-four, rail-thin and poor, a slight pungency about me from the slop encountered at my job as a hospital janitor, squinting at the German verbiage as tight and springy as racquet strings, mouthing it soundlessly in the vain hope of finding its meaning; me in the springtime of my intellect; me before the days in which names found bodies, names joyful to speak, bodies delightful to embrace -- pregnant, however, with misery to come.

And come it did. Though not that day, that day of mind-spraining discourse, of wrathful sunshine which made the pool's water seem oily and slack, not at all inviting. No, then it was only me and my ambition, my frustration, my loneliness. . .

This is also one of my fondest dreams of me -- as much a dream to me now as it is to her.

Nihil U.

Many practitioners of prevailing critical theory -- I have in mind specifically Michel Foucault and his disciples -- have, for several decades now, besieged the sovereignty of the individual to the point of its nearly disappearing altogether. Central to their contentions is the preeminence of discourse, the fiber and sinews of the episteme, over the agentive subject. The subject believes herself to be a nodal point of ingenuity, creativity, artfulness; but really she is animated both from within and without by the power discourse is. Here, however, it becomes a bit murky; Foucault never develops a physics per se of the power discourse exerts on the subject. Rather, Foucault leaves one with the blanket assertion that power is dynamic, never originating in the subject, nor entirely outside of her, and instead suffusing the entire milieu in which the subject moves and with which she is co-extensive.

I, for instance, believe as I write this that I am cleverly crafting this recondite weblog entry, when in fact I am nothing short of some automaton, my mind and fingers quickened by the discursive episteme (or should it read, "epistemic discourses?" I am never quite sure.) of which these words and phrases -- these syntagmata -- are but rearranged and reconfigured fragments. Nothing I write here, as any graduate student in humanities will tell you, is new. If, moreover, you were to parse my words with the aid of other texts bound up in the same episteme, as disciples of Foucault do, you would quickly see that any inventiveness you might find here would quickly disappear, taking with it any notions of me as an "author" as traditionally understood. To write this entry is to write my epitaph as some force above, beyond or behind these words. There is only lifeless text.

Essentially, the thought of Foucault and others derives from Nietzsche, who has enjoyed the posthumous glory he predicted for himself. And I should add that this mode of theoretical inquiry can be quite convincing, quite seductive -- even gripping -- as far as it goes. But who can live with this knowledge of himself? Can I? Can you? If we are all essentially ciphers, and what is worse, ciphers of ourselves, then have we not reached the end of history, the Hegelian World Spirit having sublated itself into itself in some strange convergence resulting in a singularity of always already elsewhere eidetic qualities? If Foucault and his ilk are correct, then all of human art and speculative thought has been nothing more than the futility of one attempting to see the back of his head.

I write all of this because I do not see anything supplanting postmodern theory, whose greatest single accomplishment may be that it has proven, perhaps unwittingly, its virtue as a bedfellow to the corporatization of the university, which to all outward appearances has consolidated it domain over institutions across the nation. To the victors go the spoils and devil take the hindmost, the devil in this instance being humanity itself.

Hot in the Colonies

And how! Sweatstains mark my shirt and pantlegs -- moaning mouths of ghosts. It is too hot to move, to think, to write. Yet one writes. The heat of the laptop, and already-hot palms recoil.

Torrid. I told C. that I was going to fly to Arizona to cool off; at least one can find air-conditioning there. Here, in the apartment, inside is as outside, and one feels himself a character from a Conrad novel, one fanned by a coolie as he watches the water lap the shore and knows that in its bloodwarm flow, no relief.

In this swelter one feels as if he is being tried, his blubber rendered into lamp oil too adulterated by water to ignite.

Come, Autumn. Come quickly.

A sidenote: Your Abjectus has found work at The University of Rhode Island. He will be teaching literature.

Minutiae

Somehow the beach finds its way
into every fold and recess of the head of lettuce,
bugchewed, limp with weather,
which you bought for dinner
from the farmers market.

This sand in my mouth
takes me to our old hot home;
I see the imps cavorting there
and wonder how their forks can
from time to time still reach me.

Bureaucracitus and Other Afflictions

As shaken as C. and I have been during our first few weeks of residing in Providence, we can certainly say this: it is no Tucson. Admittedly, we remain somewhat nonplussed and beleaguered, our latest misadventure being my presently unsuccessful mission to render my car legal for the streets of Rhode Island. A daunting prospect it has proven; Rhode Island has not only one of the most gratuitously byzantine motor vehicle registries ^1, but also some of the most stringent and exacting vehicle safety standards in the nation. Submitted to inspection were my windshield wiper blades, wheel alignment (more on these two in a moment), brake master cylinder, engine light, and many more items that could conceivably endanger both other motorists and me. My car, mind you, while indeed somewhat long in the grille, has only 79,000 miles on it and has been regularly maintained -- and I failed the inspection! The nature and extent of my car's perilous disrepair? A breached CV boot, worn wiper blades, and window tinting (my car spent its early years in Arizona).

This news, coming some five hours after having brought the car to the state-certified repair shop, was quite a shock, because I had just come from a state where a safety inspection consists of a DMV functionary looking to see if one's headlamps, directional, parking and reverse lights work. I authorized a the CV boot repair, which added $250.00 to the $37.00 inspection tally and another two hours of loitering in a tire showroom watching what seemed like eighty turns of the CNN news carousel on a 70s-vintage faux-credenza widescreen TV that had serious tint problems in the form of a dramatic shift to the red which made the talking heads of CNN look like burn victims.

Later I came home and began, in a thunderstorm that came suddenly, the exasperating task of peeling tinted laminate from all four windows and the rear windshield of my car.

This experience, one in a litany of other patience-trying experiences here in P-town has somehow managed to radicalize C. into some sort of Republican with a Libertarian bent, because she believes that such hassles result from the putatively progressive policies of blue-state mandarins, which result only in bloated bureaucracy, graft, till-skimming, and cronyism. I suggested to her various points west, namely, Rapid City, South Dakota or Northern Idaho, as places she should look to eventually settling.

More follies and pitfalls await, I'm sure.




1. If you think my words here an exaggeration, know that I at one point actually had to scribble down on the back of a photocopied form an impromptu sworn statement averring that my stepmother and father were indeed my stepmother and father, my stepmother and father's signing the title over to me and "selling" the car to me for one dollar being deemed insufficient evidence of both my parentage and my rightful possession of the auto in question, as was the fact that I bear my father's name -- first, middle and last.

Providence Harbor

Ah love,
If we could just fit our mouths
Around the winking loaves of tide
We would know ourselves to be giants
And, mindful of this,
Save the world from its smallness.

A Ghost's Ghost

What is in the end to be despoiled,
Begins by being first richly endowed.

Lao Tzu

Here in Providence I confront my utter insignificance. Here I am a stranger to brush past, to shoulder aside, to step around. I see myself skim frictionlessly over the curve of the cosmos like a drop of oil over a lettuce leaf.

In Tucson, the same things go on, only now without me -- as if I ever truly were crucial to their functioning. The same people drive, shop, eat, fight and fuck. And she and he are still there, the latter doubtless counting his money, the former biding her time. I hope she strikes, and soon. Pitilessly, completely lacking gratitude or a sense of reciprocity -- as she did me.

But this sequel will go unviewed, unsavored. It will tumble dumbly down steep slopes to silence and I will always be as I am: far, far away.

I wish I could have been to her for one day -- one hour -- too beautiful to forsake.

Overheard: An Intersection Somewhere in Elmwood, R. I.

Goddamnit, Andre!
Always actin' the muthafuckin' fool.
I'm sick of it!
Fuh real.
And I haven't even been outta jail twenty-four hours

To think, the best and worst of us dream...

Darkness Visible

A week expires here in Rhode Island, our inaugural week, and I feel as if I am a splinter lodged under prickly New-English skin. I am wracked with doubt, with fear. I despair of making a life here, quaint though it may be, because I find my temperament dissonant with what appears to be the prevailing spirit of Providence -- impatience and haste. The Portuguese inhabitants of Fox Point have been warm and engaging; Arizonans to them are exotic. The roadways are, however, not nearly so. They are sphincter-tightening, hair-whitening. And it seems that my car has become a bone of contention among the other residents of our apartment building. Though I was assured a parking spot -- Providence has this senseless statute, apparently intended to reduce crime, prohibiting motor vehicles from parking on the street overnight -- I have been given a pseudo-spot against a fence separating the alley behind the wine shop I live above and the residence behind, creating a situation where the other residents, believing my car to be blocking the only convenient egress from their parking spaces, come knocking on my front door or ringing my doorbell from the street below at strange hours with the request (more like a demand) that I move my car to the street. I have become, it seems, the de facto valet of the building, a predicament I find ennervating in the extreme.

Also ennervating has been the weather, which can only be described as "soupy": fifty-plus percent relative humidity and lowering skies. Our apartment, not equipped with air-conditioning, which is obviously some decadent luxury on the east coast, becomes stifling when one wanders away from either of the two fans we have. The net effect of my presence in Providence heretofore has thrown me into a black despair, and I sleep many more hours than I should -- often until three or four in the afternoon. Then I give C. an earful of bitter reflections born of the horrible anomie I feel. I have had several times to resist the urge to jump in my Honda and drive as far as my credit cards will allow -- far from here ... oh so far from there in Tucson which, while dirty and hateful and maddening, was at least familiar. There at least my fear and loathing was specific and itemized.

Saturday night and the natives are restless. Rap music churning from open car windows mixes with the shouts of rowdies into the streets below. Never did a place so singularly threaten to thwart contemplation. Dumb beer-fueled mayhem floods like a tide, and I am as if lashed to a pylon, forced to gulp and hold my breath.

Rhode Island ... Providence -- R.I.P., E.

Eo Ipso

in a corner,
the husk of a gnat
an eyelash
some cigarette ash
and a tiny iris of dust
made by a tear.

Providential Deliverance

I re-emerge, the interstates of this nation having spat me out in New England, after many hours behind the wheel of a graceless truck whose cab housed bugbit travelers, courtesy of that raunchy Clovis motel, drugged, maudlin cats, and surprisingly gamesome rats.

I managed to avoid the sort of nutritionless roadside fare that atrophies truckers, turning them into chainsmoking effigies fashioned, as it seems, from a potato and toothpicks. There were fireworks (Viva la revolucion!), days of constipation, nerves frazzled and pinched, near-misses and hard-brakes, and, finally, the gray-brown shores of Rhode Island, where I, pilgrim from the shiny post-industrial West to the post-agrarian East, will soon settle into a new routine, a new groove -- a happier life (God willing) than I knew in that festering vale of dust and tears.

Dateline: Clovis

So, reader, your E. is now at large -- in Clovis, New Mexico to be exact. I write this from the Motel 7 on Highway 70, just a stone's throw from Texas, which was formerly a Motel 6 of fond remembrance. Interesting that under its new ownership its guiding powers should increase it one integer to the number of God. I should add that the sign beckoning to weary travelers is now a shamrock, instead of the rather nondescript red, white and blue that the nabobs of the central Motel 6 office selected for this motel in its original inception. The shamrock, which, as every Catholic child knows, St. Patrick used to instruct the Irish on the finer points of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The the shamrocked inn on the way to Providence. Are we guided by some unseen hand? Best not to inquire into it too closely.

I must retire now, suffering as I am from "white line fever," in order to "put the hammer down" in a push for the gateway city.

It looks like we've got ourselves a convoy. . .

Rhode Island Read

Reader, your E. will, in very few days, depart for Providence, RI in the hope that the city will, at least for him, be true to its name.

What fortune awaits him? This weblog will chronicle his comings, goings and doings. E. will have opportunity to rub elbows with the Ivy League set, but this for him will prove daunting, because he cannot help but feel that, after so many year in Tucson, he has become some wild and hairy savage from the hinterlands.

Whatever befalls him, he will hope that the great sorrow which visited him in Tucson will not chase him across the plains.

Stay tuned; the next chapter of the history of E-tiolation will soon have its first words written.

Melotonin Nights

We had our dreams once, cosy and promising.

Now these dreams are as blood in my eyes -- blood in the eyes as certain reptiles sometimes get. Or one who has been choked too long sometimes gets.

They come back and I ask them to leave, but this is oh so obviously only an invitation to stay. . .

Everything that Rises Must Converge

And so, Goodbye.

Goodbye to febrile frustration. I will soak in saline different from that which has washed my cheeks for many months.

Goodbye to dreams of ease in the timeless heat. I will blaze my way through bracing winds and wet woollen skies.

Goodbye to dank shame and the rot it breeds. I will seek my cure by the sea where dreams draw new life in leisure, in the drowsy succor of mulled wine and delicate fish flesh, in waves that beat stones into sand into stones again. . .

. . .And we, my love, will be just as enduring.

For Lack of Genuine Feeling . . .

. . . I run and all those things -- you know those things which have been dogging my heels -- now get their due and I think, something is beginning to dissolve, to separate, the base have reached unprecedented depths of baseness while the virtuous are even more firm, perhaps desperate, in their determination.

How much longer can absurdity reign? We will mark our time, my dear, by the tight white skin drawn 'cross our fists; in furrowed brows the chancre will plant its corruption.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

Ends have no ends: the end of the tether simply marks the beginning of your drowning.

Vase

The shattered vase has been glued back together, the flowers replaced, filled again with water. The water, however, enjoys a greater puissance: it pushes against the seams and threatens to return the vase to the shards it now discernibly consists of. . .

Do you know the moral of this tale?

I am, Reader, a superfluous man, a criminal, scourged by Experience, bearing the stripes of Memory, pilloried and scorned.

(Incidentally, the vase, once shattered, though it may have dated to dynasties long since lost to the dust, loses its value.)

Sadly

you will remain for me
an effigy
some old god of the sea
bringing weather
bringing storms
and stillborn
infants killed by never being
never seeing
the light from your thighs
no "he has your eyes"
not you
not me

not ever

Every "I Love You" (A Fragment)

For some time every "I love you" she uttered was like turning her ass toward an angry dog, offering it that fleshy but, in terms of potential trauma, inconsequential portion of her anatomy. Offering it, that is, while rolling up the magazine with which she planned shortly to wear the animal out. A feint, in other words. . .

For some time every "I love you" he uttered was accompanied by kisses, which he placed on the nape of her neck with all the delicacy of a pointillist. Placed, that is, much like his hand upon her hip every night as he listened to her breath fall softly into the cadence of sleep, and he lay there as if in a mist of her exhalations, grateful -- grateful to God (whom he had only just begun to believe in again) -- to have her by his side when the bad dreams came. And they always came. . .

My Neighbor

of wretchedness there are many sorts;
most of which, however,
are a-semous as static,
unheeded, snored-over --

the wretchedness of her oxford
from the discount shop, sweated from shop to shop
and dried of labor's lost labor
in her child's screech, in its needy upturned mouth.

i will, on leaving, kiss this apparition
whom seeing compels me to roads
eastward from the maddened dust. i run:
my contraception.

Perhaps Now I'll Write . . .

Perhaps now I’ll write . . . I’ll pass on this batch of
doggerel
oh well washed up
perhaps a job in a factory better suits me

beats me how to write poets, esp. contemp. poets,
too precious by half
if you have to ask sure, but watch yourself;

all egos though they try to downplay it
are lurking snakes in the grass their venom is
not quite as sweet as mothers milk—

so I’ll forgo the preliminaries
proceedings proceeding acc. to plan man
I could—you’se a biscuit! now why did I think that now?
not now I have a headache which reminds me:

if your cock should get lopped off
by a piece of eqpmt.
then you will know just how far her patience extends and then
misery will attend you just as it does me
it never ends a curse from a curse and I disburse it forward, postage due,

do you comprehend the scope of his despair
when hes aware hes already lived his best life?

Overheard

"Huh? I won’t shut up.
Living is, you know, really falling down a well, --
No, there’s no one there to feed you with a fork on a rake --
because such abrasions would occasion consideration of your condition.
You don’t know you know you’re falling, is my point.

"Anyway, that’s my position.
So continue dreaming of lies
like permanence and stasis.
But I’ll let you in on this:
what we know as bodies we feel
no philosophy can encompass."

Doctors, Variously

Johnson's Metaphysickals:
“heterogeneous ideas [their's]
yoked together
by great violence.”

But what would the doctor,
inclined gustatorially rabbitward (vide MacCaulay),
say of he whose repast
is the very yoke of violence?

Send downstream, would he, no sin
molesting midnight with its blaze
for to ash the river’s scum to raze,
that he should dip his toes in?

(I doubt it.)

A metaphysician
once met a physician;
contrary chirurgeons
they found each other,

But this was no bother

Because Scalpel -- the very Form of "scalpel" --
cuts minds
and fatted rinds alike
to fright them into bleeding.

From Russia with Love

Your E. has a bogus profile with the handle "kelly_christie" on the nerve.com personals site. KC is apparently quite popular with the Hyperborean set. This correspondence was sent him recently:

I want that you have paid the attention to my structure. If you really search serious relations, and your heart is occupied with nobody, write to me.
Write and give to me the email. And it is even better if you will write to me on my address:

[name deleted]@yahoo.com writes only here!!!

I wait your letter, do not hesitate, and write to me. Your structure has really liked me and I am interested in acquaintance to you.
In the first letter I shall try to tell more about myself and I shall necessarily send you the photo

Anastasia

And this, too, recently (I should say that kelly_christie goes both ways.):

Hello. My name is Igor. I looked yours profile and you have interested me. I would like to learn about you more. If I have interested you write on mine email [name deleted]@mail.ru. I wait for your letter and a photo with impatience. I hope for pleasant dating.
Igor

I sometimes feel ambivalent about my prank profile, as if I am toying with lonely peoples' feelings. One thing I have discovered, however, is that very few people pay attention to anything but the photograph. Some remark on kelly_christie's shall I say, curious, statements and musings -- but even these don't deter the lovelorn. Only one's "structure" (to quote dear Anastasia) matters, ultimately.

What can I say? KC is the very picture of glasnost.

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. . .

You've heard my complaints, read them again and again. And yet, and yet, certain things I must unburden my mind of: the new knowledge that the most conclusive results come from the smallest tests, and, totally unrelated, the double invagination of the chiasmus. Brought to you by Derrida, this -- a kiss on a dear red lip of rhetoric.

Poked, I get up again, to persevere purposelessly, to snatch days from the calendar, though truly only robbing myself in doing so, until one day when my thumbs are tied upon my chest and I rest,

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. . .

but it will be a quiet realization and one that will occur too late.

Right now, goddamn-you's still seem too gentle.

Bad French

If, as I write this entry on a laptop actually on my lap, zapping a future generation from my gonads, I were to tell you that people are utterly predictable, what would you say? You disagree? Let me assure you, then, that your disagreement is informed strictly by certain inherited, and perhaps cherished, biases of yours. You are not being completely honest with yourself. You're instantiating what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed meconaissance -- strategic misrecognition or avoidance of truths undeniably before us, a conspiracy of the intentionally, wilfully purblind in the interest of keeping greased the wheels of social intercourse. A thousand little lies shape your day, which would be quite different were those lies to become truths.

I, for instance, know precisely why my ex-wife left me -- though I will not disclose the reason why to you, cher lecteur (Extend to me a little meconaissance, won't you?). I thought about it at length today, as I have thousands of times before, and with each time the reasons grow increasingly undeniable. Now, the funny thing is, knowledge of the truth rarely comes with the sparing of your feelings. Hence the need for meconnaisance in the first place: feelings are of paramount importance, especially now. You draw more flies with honey than vinegar, after all.

You will, however, enjoy a certain flinty grace if you are able to be honest with yourself and are unwilling to settle for explanations -- typically rationalizations -- born of meconaissance. This grace comes in the form of a certain obduracy which allows you for a moment to regard the universe not as the medium of beneficent Providence, but rather as the indifferent void it truly is. This grace allows you to say with bitterness, but without self-pity, "I will be alive for a time and I will not be alive for a far greater time; my complaints, therefore, truly are just the 'sound and fury' of which Shakespeare's Macbeth speaks."

Certain Things

There are certain things, I think, one will never throw out. Not mementos. These are too ostentatious, meant more for others than oneself -- Here's the the train we took to Budapest! -- too pregnant with their place of origin or of purchase. No, the things I have in mind are far most humble, far more unassuming than mementos. Aides de memoire would perhaps would be a better term. Though even that does not quite signify, because unlike aides de memoire these things are accidentally talismanic, lacking the intentional investment enjoyed by things one keeps to remember.

The things I am speaking of are things most frequently found in the bottom of drawers, at the back of file cabinets, inside books or jacket pockets. Unlike a deliberately regarded aides de memoire, these things are more surprising. They strike one, not unpleasantly, but always with some poignancy, prompting him to remember events he had forgotten. One picks up this thing, usually in the course of tidying up, regards it, loses himself in the associations it evokes, and return it to its hiding place, forgetting, unless of course he stop to record this experience -- in a blog for instance -- moments later that he had even encountered the item.

Returned to its obscurity, it waits. Until some time later, perhaps years later, one find it again, and this time remembers not only the forgotten memory with which it is associated, but also the memory of having remembered this memory before.

These things, then, are the parts of one that recede from the light of active memory. They remind one that he is aging and that he is reaching a point in his existence where he will have more memories than he will make. They are signposts on the road to his long home, and, though he neglects these humble things most of the time, he know dimly that he needs to discover them again and again. For they offer to conjure the ghosts of pleasures and sorrows which become his only consolation.

Fear

I fear people who smile with their mouths open; they always look as if they're about to bite you and seem pained at having to do so.

I fear people who measure one's humanity by focusing exclusively on externalities. The fat, mutilated, maimed and crippled are to them strangely somehow beyond suffering in their suffering. Only the beautiful can know heartache, can know pain -- the pain of an esophagus burned by acid vomit, the pain of breast-implant surgery recovery, the pain of taxed but chiseled muscles marshaled against gravity in some mindless fuck of physics to engender more beef, more shapes unnatural in their shapeliness.

I fear people who see others as nothing more than animate beige stains against the snow globe of their awareness, whose puling is maddening in its pointlessness, whose complaints cannot be real complaints because they're not his complaints.

I fear people.

An Afternoon Spent with the In-laws

Oh, how they come at you with smiles hard as drill bits,
to look you over, the soft white curiosity you are --
all cotton, khaki and slender fingers that they when greeting you
clasp with blunt rough hands, making you feel
as if your hand is caught in coral.

They ask with small interest what you do, but you are speechless,
transfixed by the reflection of yourself in the dirty paneled mirror
that shows you to yourself in this very moment,
and you hear more the thoughts of you you imagine they’re thinking
than the words they’re speaking.

Thus you leave them with the impression that you,
already rather faggotty, do nothing but compose poetry indolently
while their poor daughtergranddaughter buries her promise behind a time-clock
in order to keep hearth and home together; though the fireplace, you remind them,
is strictly ornamental and you do teach to earn a wage most of the year.

You do go two months without a paycheck in the summer unless you can hustle,
scrape some work together that will allow you to escape
the reproachful glare she greets you with each day at the end of her shift
until you wish you could just live in a sewer and drink monsoon humidity

but you must have that new couch,
new media cabinet —
must in short live
as a tenured professor
though you’re still just a grad student.

Prolegomena to a Valediction

It will be good to leave this place where summer, overstaying his welcome, squats to pick his ass on mountain peaks; where every dumpster diver is a veritable sage of Köenigsburg in his untidy regularity -- a device to synchronize watches by.

It will be good to leave this place, without sadness, but with a measure of bitterness. May scandal and humiliation crawl about this town all they want, and wriggle their maggoty being upon it until it sags back into the cooked gray crust it was before the red man, before the white man -- long before the degenerate, run off from towns which wrested order and civility from cold mud and deep forests, turned his eye to it with designs for a blasted paradise, an oasis of low life, loose change and looser morals.

This town seethes with criminality; it ripples with shoulders slumping in defeat.

Another Whore in the Brothel of the Cash Nexus

Embarrassing.

I posted a resumé on monster.com last night. What insipid, and, what's worse, dishonest writing it requires of one. One must trumpet every trivial procedure in language that makes it seem such expert, recondite stuff. Wretched.

Here is an example, culled from my resumé:

I wish to secure part-time employment as a copy or content editor. I have six years of relevant experience, and my command of written English is regarded highly by professionals in my field. I believe that my skill and experience would prove useful to any private or public interest for whom written communication is essential.

So self-important, yet so supplicatory. Yes, reader, your humble E. is sinking quickly in to that modern Slough of Despond: the job market.

When Raw Emotion Ashamedly Hides Itself behind a Sort of Light Verse, This Is What One Gets

What lyric would be fair enough? --
Fair enough.
I won’t write it.

What object would be dare enough?;
Dared enough,
I might try it.

What defect would be care enough?
Don’t you care enough
to hide it?

Or perhaps, knowing
how you, in your going,
struck me as with a length of cyclone fence,
and I fell to pieces regular, quadrangular
for you to murder further
at your leisure, though
you’d rather not stir from present pleasure,
to deal with that bloody mess.

On a Certain Customary Exchange

Till death do us part -- perhaps the most viciously delusive phrase in our language.

Look at it. Move your mouth around it -- silently, if you wish, though to speak it aloud is to hear yourself spit and lisp and hiss like a cobra. Till death do us part. Imagine saying it to someone and having her say it you. You will, I assure you, never say anything less flippantly, less facetiously, than this phrase, though your postmodern sensibility enforces in you irony.

Till death do us part -- words of proleptic finality, of the expectation of consummation. Akin to another phrase: And they lived happily ever after. . . Words that are a sort of death, really, bringing death before Death. Words that try to cheat Death of its droit du seigneur, the ellipsis in tow simply a set of pegs for the figures in the story to hang upon, silent and still like marionettes in this nebulous, static ever-after. They depart to become our dearly departed, their reward in truth a sort of exhaustion, a moribundity.

Unlike your friends in the tale, however, your life does not brook such envelopment. Your fate is always to step out of this finality, the ellipsis not a set of pegs, but of stepping stones to a darkly aneschatonic after-the-ever-after into which you are forced by accident or perfidy and where you wait for the messianic dispensation of the wholly drawn arc, made cruelly to hang fire well after hair grays and cuticles bleed from gnawing.

This is the sort of "character" you are. Why, then, do you constantly try to yoke a narrative -- revised how many thousand times now? -- to this billiards game of existence? Why do you insist on being both author and hero, when you can be precisely neither?

These are questions I leave with you tonight.

Listen

Listen.
The crickets churn their drone in the night, this hot night;
hot ourselves, we lie together.

We snuck here because this night, no special night,
one of small significance, indifferent news,
was the only one we’d have.

So, as mosquitoes dip their meals from us,
as grass, coarse and searching, bedevil us,
we grow restless with itching, with sweat and noisy damp,

yet strain to hear the neutral liveliness of life,
and force ourselves to stay,
because we know someday we will beg time --

if only to itch, to sweat,
to lie together another moment more --
to likewise linger.

I Begrudge You Your New Life

I begrudge you your new life.
It tumbles the remains of mine
into a corner to slump bonily,
disarticulate on absent sinews;

or, better: a whispered-to nut skin,
trembling, to blow to flakes any second --
any second of these slow seconds
swollen to moments, grown to months --

thus the life arrhythmic
of a dying star dipping
to smear itself against the night --
a final dive of insouciance.

An Eschaton

He dreamt:

This hulk, this monstrous bygone them, which drags its listing ass, adrift, alone with loneliness.

But down to every thread of gristle, he wished to gather in his fist the miles and miles of arteries and veins in him and fling this missile into stains bloodily tentacular, believing then, and only then, in conning such spaghetti, would she have a picture, verisimilar, of his extremity.

He:

“Here, before I cross the bar, I swear I’ll topple every jar
of beshitted dreamers’ beshitted dreams.

Those turds hotly rotting, stillborn of feverish ambits; it will as I say! So be it.”

So was it?

"Infelicity Dogs His Heels"

". . .But perhaps I will find occasion to dust off dreams, mothballed, creaky from disuse, some future day when Misery no longer has me in her thrall. . ."

This is something I cannot allow myself to think, I'm afraid; postmodern weltschmerz lays too great a claim on me, clouding the vision of my mind's eye to such an extent that it cannot distinguish hope from hazard. Such myopia makes me timid, tremulous.

My hope and joy, nearly seven years in duration, have long since been eaten and digested, and I have been shat -- I AM shit -- into the dunghill that is the resting place of all of Fortune's nearsighted fools.

A Note on "Romance"

She languishes. Though she is reluctant to admit it, her hesitation speaks volumes, her eventual response, cryptic and evasive, speaks volumes more:

"What is romance anyway?"

"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" is my reply, hollowly jocund. In sad eyes that meet tired ones, there is a mutual recognition: I languish because you languish. And languishing is the sine qua non of romance. Which thus shows itself the devil's most subtly cursed gift.

A Drive-By Fable

The wounded animal left out in the rain drew himself around his soaked body, baring its teeth at those who extended to it a consoling hand, until eventually it died, a victim of both its injury and its own vicious ignorance. . .

Auto-Da-Fe, of a Sort

This blog, this aching nothing, black and sad -- dandruff on velvet. It is pathetic, really, sending one cri du coeur after another into this void where only the mortally wounded circle in the small hours, looking for a place to die.

Will she ever say she's sorry -- she who invited the worm into the fruit, the canker to the bloom?

I think soon I will erase this blog. It's too hysterical by half, and equally as maudlin. I'd profit more by writing chirpy ad copy for some sticky cellophaned sweets.

We hear only the words we say, we read only the words we write. This agony that summons forth these words? -- an apoplectic in dumbshow.

My teeth can always fit around the barrel, D---. A fitter kiss now than those I had from your lips. . .

Beati Immaculati

A fool and his money, the saying goes, are easily parted. As are a fool and his virginity, those responsible for this wretched offering entitled The 40-Year-Old Virgin would have us believe.

Do not, however, simply take me on my word that this film is wretched. Rather, examine, as I have, the film's leitmotif: a modern version of the "problem play" so very popular in Elizabethan/Jacobean England (The Bard even wrote one and called it Measure for Measure), The 40-Year-Old Virgin invites us to consider Andy Stitzer's--the titular virgin's--condition as aberrant, strange. Having sex early in life, and having it often, then, is apparently as normative an experience for the typical American as his first NASCAR race or clean twelve-point-buck kill.

Andy Stitzer, on the other hand, has somehow managed to skip this quintessentially American initiatory rite -- a rite that inevitably brings one to the inestimable and inexhaustible pleasures of highly mediated consumerist hedonism -- opting instead for the hyperfetishism typical of those in a state of arrested development peculiar to pimply pre-adolescence and involving TV-show action figures left in their packaging. One, in other words, that centers on junk-culture collectibles, those relics of a more idyllic age when one's existence remained unimpinged upon by biological imperatives.

Andy Stitzer, with the aid of several friends and co-workers,is nevertheless lifted from the sociological bywater he has found himself in and brought to the golden shores of coitus.

As you can see, the above synopsis fairly captures the dramatic arc of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Thus, seemingly aware of this paucity (I couldn't help but think while watching the film that it could have been dispensed with much more deftly in a five-minute Saturday Night Live skit) the filmmakers liberally lard their product with gratuitous vulgarity and digressive, sophomoric badinage.

If you want to see palpable evidence of The Culture Industry's creative bankruptcy, then by all means watch this film. If, however, you realize that you will die one day, and that the two-plus hours which The 40-Year-Old Virgin will claim from you are too precious, too irreplaceable to be wasted, then find some other way to beguile your Friday or Saturday evening. Because, ultimately, the only thing The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends up screwing is the audience.

Aqua vita

(Words I hope will console pyreflie)

Sometimes the heavens show mercy and let a brief rain fall on the man perishing in the desert...

For the past few weeks I have been mired in despair, falling into black moods that only become blacker, and I have been trying desperately to remain cheerful as I push another fistful of pills down my throat, as I attempt to ramrod into my heart enthusiasm for things I tell myself I want -- to teach English abroad, to learn Vietnamese, to become a published poet. But to no avail. That old hobgoblin Nihilism stalks me once more, making me believe that any project I undertake would prove empty, futile -- ashes and rust.

In a conversation I had yesterday, I maintained that, because we conduct our lives with a constant awareness of death -- and an often crippling one at that -- death seems to have more force, more influence, than life; that life is so thoroughly permeated by death that one may question, as I do, if we humans are ever in fact alive at all, or, better stated, if Life indeed stands as some definite dialectical antithesis to Death, and not simply the latter's more attractive profile, as it were.

Such a morose line of thought (this turn of mind, if you have not discovered for yourself, dear Reader, is quite characteristic of old E.) led me to make this assertion: That any nihilist who prides himself on uncompromising intellectual honesty could only write one work: a single page with a period in the middle of it. And that's all. Otherwise, he betrays himself as an imposter, a metaphysician in pilfered garb.

This asseveration seemed so apt, so pithy, that I laughed in spite of my stifling sadness.

I set my mind, then, to live my new-found creed: to live life awaiting death. Life for me would be simply a purple plastic chair in Death's lobby.

But, as is so often the case, I cannot make that move which is the dark inverse of Kierkegaard's one of "infinite resignation" -- a sort of infinite resignation in it own right, though lacking the intuitive assurance of an eventual boon in the hereafter -- because always some tiny fissure in the melancholic mass of my mind parts to admit some small drop of a promise of the hint of an intimation. And I, the parched crawler upon the sand, slaver drily after it.

So, forgive my lack of resolve, dear reader. It is not the result of an absence of faith, but of faith despite absence. After all, whenever we find ourselves in a darkened room, we instinctively grope the wall for a light switch.

"Hostel" Words

Below is a review of Hostel, some lurid bloodbath produced by Quentin Tarantino and directed by a yo-yo named Eli Roth. I wrote the review as a goof. For I have not even seen the film; though I have researched it a bit on the internet, it having entered my ken as I was looking into what I consider to be quite an uptick in graphic violence in film, a trend that troubles me greatly.

My review is certainly peremptory; some may even say it is downright arrogant. I will concede this point. But please know that I wrote it to be deliberately so.

Now, mine was one of the first reviews posted on amazon.com, and of the six subsequent reviewers to date, only one reviewer responded directly to me. I reproduced his review below mine.

First, my review:

Sadism, as the release of Hostel suggests, is the order of the day.

We need not, however, even examine, really, how or to what extent this film will offend middle-class sensibility; the individual as moral agent is a subject that had some time ago receded from serious consideration, dispatched thither by that many-tentacled monster our culture has become, in which, astonishingly, torture receives sententious treatment in popular media as a viable means of interrogation. In this era of absent absolutes, all human activity becomes equally meritorious because precisely none is--at least, that is, from the point of view of any reliable moral calculus. To judge one (negatively) is to oppress him usurpatiously, without license, because no one enjoys that God's-eye view where all contigent situational skirmishes resolve into a more comprehensively scrutable context.

No, I will not natter on about bourgeois morality and the assault from all quarters that it constantly suffers; to point this out is to say nothing new.

The arrival of Hostel, which I'm sure will, like the blood-laced pabulum it is, be lapped up with glee by the same Adderall-addled first-person-shooter-shooters whom it has been my tremendous misfortune to (attempt to) teach, is infelicitous for another reason: it contributes, at a time in which it has never been more dangerous to do so, to the inevitable desensitizing to sadistic brutality which occurs with every film and video game of this genre, where violence, if not represented in a humorous vein (See: just about every Quentin Tarantino film. Incidentally, Tarantino, like some infernal latter-day P. T. Barnum, grants his imprimatur to Hostel), is represented simply for its own sake--some clinical curiosity, epiphenomenal with drawing air in a human form, and nothing more.

Indeed, I have seen an earlier version of this film. It then bore the title, The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal.

The parallels of the story of Hostel, in which some American dunderheads embark on an ill-fated tour of hedonism in a former Soviet satellite state, to contemporary events are uncanny enough to make one wax conspiratorial. I need only cite "extraordinary rendition": diffuse weaselese for the surreptitous flouting of the protections of the Geneva Convention. To be extraordinarily rendered is, as I understand it, to be whisked away to some former Soviet satellite state in order to be interrogated clandestinely in a place where the Geneva Convention has about as much real moral traction as Poor Richard's Almanac has for the typical American today.

Makes you think, don't it?

While I am certainly open to arguments to the contrary, it is my conviction that, in foisting this squalid little piece of snuff on a (let's admit it) rather ignorant, impressionable, sycophantic mass audience, Quentin Tarantino and Hostel writer-director Eli Roth stand guilty of acting with a degree of social and political irresponsibility that, given the current climate of dirty war for dubious aims, can only be considered destructively un-American. They have cynically cashed in on what I do not doubt will be perceived in the future as a sad epoch of American cultural history in order be the on the vanguard of a sordid recrudescence of grand-guignol. They have seen to it that, when torture becomes art, art becomes torture.

...And decadent art, which Hostel, Artaudian in its pretensions but lacking the requisite intelligence, most certainly is, has historically been a sure symptom of an empire in collapse.

So enjoy your blood and circuses, unlettered plebes. Ignore the heat, and ignore that sound in the distance; it's only Nero tuning his violin.

Now, the reviewer who responds to my review. Pay special attention to his ad hominem attack, keeping in mind my remarks about Hostel's intended audience:

GREAT FUN HORROR MOVIE!, January 6, 2006
Reviewer: Doug Birtell; "doug e fresh" (pa) - See all my reviews

just like to start off by saying mr jack squint down there from nowhere usa needs to get his head out his @ss and back to reality. un-american? lol anything but. this is what america has become and if you don't like it then you should invest in a time machine to haul your lame @ss back to a decade where your not so offended and also stop trying to impress people with your language skills not to mention take up room for reviews on this site. that being said hostel is a horror fanatics wildest fantasy, a ton better then wolf creek. jay hernandez holds it down! there are plenty of great gruesome scenes in this flick. eli roth developed alot since cabin fever. don't want to spoil anything but i'll just say most of the great stuff happens while out of the torture chamber not in it and when hernandez frees himself from it he gets the much deserved pay back hes seeking. recommended.

Now perhaps you understand why I believe I am living in hell.