The Whale Grandissimus

Dear Reader,

Pusillanimous man that he is, your Abjectus, having succumbed to personal vanity, has begun a new 'blog on livejournal.com, entitled The Whale Grandissimus:

http://grandissimus.livejournal.com/

Weltverbesserungswahn I intend to remain as it is, but I will only post to it infrequently. If you find yourself simply starving for my scribblings and ravings, please feel free to visit the new 'blog.

For the time being, then —

Auf Wiedersehen,

A.

Empirics of the Half-Forgotten

Just so much manflesh
Riding the "T" in the five-o'clock crush:
an item on a bill of lading,
a fact for the statistician,
the bulk necessitating the measures taken.

Never had I less a sense
of this integument of fiction, this "me" of me,
than while on the train to Braintree.
Perhaps what I experienced was ego-death,
but it seemed at the time like just plain death.

I imagined a subway mis-en-scene:
a passenger, most prosaically fell,
slips a blade in me, then withdraws expertly,
as I sag wordlessly;

Or: sweaty in the chilly car,
a passenger jerks his breast and
I see myself flying to bits.
In these situations,
no tragedy,

no soil soaked in startled gore,
only me, mute meat merely;
the confusion, police, stampede, relief
simply elements of an event, no more —
pure sequence, empirics of the half-forgotten.

Grim Decay of Nows into Tomorrows

"Paralysis of will: Where does one not find this cripple today!"

Beyond Good and Evil

How much easier when the cold east winds could be warmed to tolerable by bong smoke...

When the frisson of neurasthenia, proof of a finely-tuned humanity, was ample solace...

When the whore, the hustler and the catchpenny were always others...

When the brave cavalry of sublime thoughts promised ventures to brighter lands...

When faith shone in a beloved's face, not a sheep's eye...

How much easier, those how-much-easier days no longer.

Cold Missiles the Wind Sends

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief.

"Dejection: An Ode"

A life like manga: read backwards. Like an ice cream cone in the hand of a careless child: running, dribbling, gathering fuzz and trash commonly called "experience." And always so tired, and so tiresome. To whom are we most overfamiliar? Ourselves, of course. I doubt I'd ever speak to that person in the mirror if I'd never seen him. (Narcissus never did anyone any favors.)

Thus and so the prattling transcript of a mind. If only I could speak at the speed of thought, what universes would swallow C.!

Something is strangled in the relay, though; my mouth gets stifled around clots of notions until the cuticle of frustration around every bone and vein contracts, pressing best-forgotten memories into an effigy of me—the me that stands for me.

Let me let you in on a secret: I seek blessedness, though blessedness of a certain sort. I seek one with the integrity to know when she has ceased to be human, and has instead, less than an animal—dumb to itself, yet wiser for it—been fetched from abstractions and become mere orgone and organs, a wet vessel of pulsions, like some snapdragon sagging, heavy with will. Then I will know the pure gospel of bones: they're always ready after one's demise to serve as handles for pairing knives.

Prodigious relief, then sleep.

Finally: finality.

That Stuff which Falls Between Mother and Matter

"I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe."

Heart of Darkness

Favors fall liberally or not at all, and so it goes. . .

I ask C., "So have you given up completely?"

She asks me to clarify.

"Have you given up, y'know, on any possibility of hope or of beauty entering your life?"

It's late. I'm waiting for the naturopathic sleep aid to take effect. C. can fall asleep almost instantly; I with my pillow-talk must seem to her a gnat in her ear.

She offers me a muzzy, "No." (A tired C. is a terse C.)

"Well I have. What do you look forward to? Sure, I have some notion of improving my creaturely comfort, to have more than I have now. But is this a worthy ambition?" This question is of course rhetorical.

"Is it even an adequate ambition?" I know I've lost her to sleep by now. "I used to have dreams—visions of the future that in their depth and clarity resembled those old stereoscopic photographs—but that was before. . ." More silence from her here, but not the silence of sleep, I think.

What was jeopardized by the explosion of my former life is inestimable, the ripples carry ever forward. Dreams or no dreams, which to have? In dreams I implore D., weep before her as if in a glass cube, suffocated more by my frustration at her inability or unwillingness to hear me, than by my inability to breathe; and I scream louder and louder until my muffled sounds push damply back against my face. This is the typical dream of REM sleep.

The no-dream dream, on the other hand, is not the flakes of life awake dropping through the slumbering mind, but the projection of my imagination into the future . The bulb is burned out in the projector, however. So instead I throw blackness into black and stumble through days become grindingly the same.

How much longer can I persecute C. with my lack of a being, properly speaking? It is a sin to worry bones of wretchedness, dog in the manger I perhaps am. I almost beg to be cast off. But that C. can sleep and wake and sleep knowing that she has not yet outlived her life perhaps disposes her charitably toward me.

Meanwhile I am buoyed by the cavity anti-depressants have left in me.