News for a Pharaoh
Credo quia absurdus sum.
Exposition. The world is a confessional without a priest, a metaphor that feels out of place. If we trace our history through the moments when we had something to say, we would soon find ourselves at a loss for words—for words are encapsulated loss, an emulated motion that refuses to stick. What, then, of the world that began with a word?
Imagine this: You stand at the foot of Olympus Mons. You look up, the sky is stubbornly familiar: this is the edge of Western civilization. You are like a poet. Perhaps, like Rimbaud. Perhaps you’ve learned how to be a barbarian, a sexton tending to a dying compass. Your savage gods anoint you as Shelley’s rhapsodist—unencumbered by eternity.
Imagine you’ve exceeded your corpse.
Some thoughts on politics.
People still think Nietzsche was a Nazi. Which is, of course, absurd because he was the Unabomber if the Unabomber was a real poet who almost never wrote poems, like a monk taking alms while his last illumination rots at the bottom of a well while the cold and the snow turn the color of patriots blown to smithereens by the creeping irony they thought was dead. They thought, ‘irony's a concept & concepts are dead—like the night the American Revolution was canceled because the wind and the rain blew out the transformer.’ Time is another dead concept. It's why we’re alone, it's why headstones become just stones, it's why we burn books in piles reminiscent of Olympus or Sinai after the cleanup crew comes to take away our commandments & anachronisms & our obituaries bleeding ink like manifestos bleeding wine.
For naught but a moment.
§—
⌠ I suspect there's a
lie at the center
of every love affair—
⌡ if such a thing exists.
Can you imagine need without
desire?
Desire without conflagration?
Can you imagine a lifetime inside
a landmine?
§—
... —you understand (sic), the war’s simply
anguished indulgence,
a kinetic fetish; the
bombs and guns and broken bodies
—spasms of clinical significance.
(i.e. The transactional enumeration
of despair ad infinitum.)
§—
Tangentially related: To exist as engendered being is to exist beyond substance, to exist as an embodied metaphor—it is to have knowledge of the atom bomb:
sit(uation) rep(ort)s:
dry
dry
dry
like fiction,
mythology,
exculpatory contradiction (like
real time (captured
in transition)),
a temporal affliction,
neuropathy
like a firebird, like (ashes ashes)
we all
fell down.
Things we should have known. Poetry is an artform in perpetual regress. If it were ever secure in its meaning it would become undone along with the illusion of meaning itself. Does that make you sad? “Of course not,” I can hear you say, “the metaphor is too opaque, too cerebral, too much like a professor hopped up on coke and mescaline as if he’d stepped directly into his mid-twenties from the burnt pages of a burnt copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.” I might not ask you what you mean. Your face probably says everything. Still, I’m sorry about the book.
In any case, I know that to you I’m disembodied. I’m already an anachronism—already too much. So, let me try again: Should it make you sad? Consider the liquified caterpillar wrapped in her chrysalis. Consider her an allegory for the simile ‘like a dipole moment’. Her life as a caterpillar is over—pupa is her in between. But she only becomes what she was, she emerges from her own flesh. She becomes beautiful by an act of self-consumption. This is the force of nature. This is like the part of us that’s like dipole moments. This is why butterflies are pretty.
The World as Imposition
For what it's worth, chrysalis has always been inconsistently beautiful, a redundant becoming yielding to a universe of gesture and implication, an end to a means—pointless only to the point of inevitable; profound as a matter of imagery. In this spirit we consume our creators—those obstinate corpses bereft of their ancient finery, forgotten for what they once were or remembered for what they failed to be. It's a shame they had the faith to abandon unfortunate meaning so we could linger in their halls, wounded by the atrocity of being—the stop and start of a sensation that eludes us: Theseus and his ship were always doomed. Sisyphus, undone in his moment of imagination, finally offers up his liver to the crow. But, it’s still a dream, an incidental reality, a nothing-at-all content to exist as much as its passion allows—our history traced in circles from marrow to bone to flesh—our metamorphosis, the apostasy of birth.
Redactions. I learned to sleep when my emotional dipole collapsed. That’s how I learned how not to sleep. Now I can’t quite sleep enough. Do you remember when I said, “poetry is an artform in perpetual regress?” I really meant it. Just like I meant for you to picture yourself suffocating as Olympus Mons looms so tall you don’t notice it’s there. That’s like the death of Western Civilization.
But Shelley and Emerson, Plath and Ginsberg and even my own poems will continue to mean something because that’s the only thing they can do. The poet is a façade atop a tempest creating shadows of poems that can never be undone. This is the mirage created by a civilization’s anxiety. It’s the same reason the butterfly is pretty.
Perhaps we should have only our caricatures, the ones we had drawn at the end of a pier on a lake. Imagine there’s a paddle boat docked, and its steam is fake because it’s got an electric motor. For a moment everything’s quiet. Someone you love stands behind an artist who draws you exactly like you want. Then the moment is over. The paddle boat and its electric motor have gone, and you’re left holding an exaggerated picture of your exaggerated self. Imagine this lake and you and an artist you love at the foot of Olympus Mons and imagine the stubborn sky.
Imagine you’re sad, because sad feels good at ~0.38G.