Jack springs from the box, summersaults, trips, falls into winter; fruitless.
It’s a ball, dancing round and round, seasoned by the spinning.
Maybe next time the box unlids Jack’ll bound free.
_________ : the recognition that one is participating in the narrative of a recollected dream, the odd feeling that wells up when perceiving one’s options: to reenact the dream even as it occurs, or else to extemporize, act outside
____ : feeling caught between an impulse and a passion
_________ : the peripherals of vision, where things blur to shapelessness and colors drain to vague and nameless hues and objects are known only by their motion
_____________ : the manic feeling of transcending one’s suffering by reveling in it, often associated with an inflated sense of self
_____ : inexplicable euphoria which clashes with one’s current circumstances in a somewhat unpleasant way
___ : the subtle thread of a subconscious habit shared by different people, especially across time, e.g. lip biting when nervous
___________ : a repeatedly recurring motif or symbol pertinent to one’s present life yet whose meaning with regards to it is ambiguous or unclear
They ring, enveloping.
They come brandishing questions, ask to evidence my misery, name it and give it shape, detail with precise excruciation its shades and shadows, the inflections of its cruelty.
They look for earnest carnival tears and voice cracks in perfect pitch, yearn for every pearl scar scrimshawing this mannequin flesh.
Kind eyed gluttons, gently they consume.
Bland inquirers, clinical and caustic, faultless vivisectors.
The fervent, the frothing, flaying knives in hand.
The skeptics.
Gathering like blisters to a painful place.
Barbaric lawyers demanding precedence in blood, citing the old rites and ordeals, avid cruentators, cross examining each scintilla of skin for the red signs of wrong.
The day’s miracle mundanities daubed thick with fog and smothered fugally in mist.
Few memories persist divulging the common oddness:
How dazzling and tremendous the sun doubled on the screen, killed quick by the sunrising out from it, bright adverts and glowing scrollings and blinding flashing messagings;
How animate the cars, half alive and half respiring in long flatulent exhalations unbroken by in-breaths, fed the juice of ancient corpses through proboscises inserted during brief transacted copulations with the mute and sessile prostitute machines, how eager-loud their waking rumble, sending light from eyes that never see;
How intricate the music, voicing delicately the perfect sounds with impossible fidelity;
How ubiquitous the art: perfect landscapes sprawling flat on branded tissue boxes, perfect curlicues engraved on cutlery, perfect moments swollen large on floating billboards and flashing signs, perfect angles and perfect lines;
Perfect and dexterous the cashier’s handling of goods, scanned and sifted with smooth fluid motions;
Perfect and dexterous the pedestrian’s dance across the pavement, winding lines of figures progressing and regressing with synchronized idiosyncrasy;
Perfect and dextrous the pickpocket, the con artist, the spam caller, the scammer;
Perfect and dexterous the bus driver, directing wheels like innervated limbs, maneuvering round corners at killing speed with casual and unboasted genius;
Perfect and dextrous the waiter, armed with food and sharp decorum;
Perfect and dexterous the teacher, chalking knowledge and watching with invisible spinal eyes;
The phone caller, the bank teller, the variform keyboarder, the secretary, the brick layer, the forklifter, the variegated gadget fixer, the mechanic, the electrician, the barber, the ambidextrous nail technician, the road setter, the trash picker, the earnest beggar; perfect, dexterous.
Perfect all.
He was not cold.
There was no heat by whose lessening he could be cold. No state of equilibrium to which he adhered and by whose gradations he could measure good or ill. He stayed in the dirt, stayed lingering amidst the absent and decreasing shapes not for any purpose but the lack of one.
He did not dream.
Still he saw her.
Saw her in the lines and static coils of the wood that was his world entire. Her face so close to his. So close her features should’ve blurred but her eyes and her lips and the cline of her cheeks and the flat of her forehead were clear, correct to her perfection as he knew it when his heart still could spring in her presence.
He would stare at her, frozen as she across a gap the faintest sigh could have bridged had either breath for it, until the wood took her away again.
And when she stood above him, stood in the place which was theirs before but now was hers alone; when she stood and said her prayer he did not hear it but through six feet of packed disintegrations he could feel the heat of the generating of her life. She was warm.
When she left he knew his own annihilation. And when next her face embossed out the oaken coffin cover like a mask set at skin distance but distinct enough to see, it did not satisfy him. It was not warm.
Animated by the lack of her warmth, the lack which was not cold, his muscles strained impossibly. His fingers moved and clutched, his lips kissed her wooden ones, chest trembled as if harboring a traitor’s heart, feet kicked.
The need of her which loosed the bonds of rigor mortis slid the casket open. The need of her pushed up the dirt, the granulations of a million dead formed limbs to lift him up, to raise him out, the one who knew of warmth.
The need of her birthed from the soil like some mythic zoophyte. The countless dead and him that knew her face and the living living need stumbled first on four limbs, then on two, and breathed on by insensate wind beneath a numb and throbbing sun the figure that was not cold sought out the sole thing it could feel.
And it could feel her. She was warm.
The master had five disciples.
When the five disciples and the nonexistent sixth sat in a ring centered on him they were seven.
The first had asked of life and found satisfaction in the master’s answer. Now the second disciple asked:
“What is time? Why does it only move forwards?”
The master was quiet for a moment. Then another moment spoke:
“Time is the distance between happenings, the change between moments, as with the sound that follows my silence.
As distance necessitates space, so is time space, being the space within which moments happen.
As space expands outwards, time expands forwards. There is an asymmetry between future and past: the future contains the consequences of all occurrences in the past, while the past contains none of the consequences of occurrences in the future. So the future is swelled with happenings.
As the contents filling a spacious room cannot be stored in a smaller one, so the contents filling the future cannot be stored in the past. So the future cannot be reversed, so the course of time is set.
And yet there is no future and there is no past, only distance, just as there is no top to the world nor bottom, only distance. Time differs from space only in its shape, where space extends in all directions equally time discriminates, fills out at one end and tapers at the other. So the mind calls one end future and the other past.
Limited in scope by its size and its structure, the mind cannot know its full extension through time simultaneously, so it splits itself across time through moments. Just as the lesser space of the past cannot hold the greater contents of the future, so the mind of the past cannot hold the thoughts of the future, so the mind keeps record only of the past, and makes guesswork of the future it occupies but cannot know.
Time does not progress at all, only mind.”
The second disciple who had been troubled with the question was now satisfied. The other three disciples had other questions. The sixth disciple that was not was silent, for the moment.
The master had five disciples.
When the five disciples and the nonexistent sixth sat in a ring centered on him they were seven.
The first disciple was curious once and asked the master:
“What is life?”
The master responded:
“Life is three. First, it is self. Second, purpose. Third, replication.
Self is the bounded thing, separated from its medium or place by its substance, its structure, its activity; as with a tree whose solid bark demarcates it from subtle air, whose winding roots anchor in the granulated soil, whose leaves drink sunlight.
Purpose is the tenacious tendency, the activity of a thing which holds in varied situations, the state it seeks in spite of countervailing forces; as with an archer whose second arrow spites the wind and strikes its mark.
Replication is the growing thing, the separating thing, the thing that swells itself and that divides itself; as with a fish whose eggs spawn multitudes.
A song is selfed in its separation from other things, being distinct from other sounds and having a definite commencement and conclusion, but a song is not alive, so life is not mere selfhood.
A compass seeks magnetic north, turned or shaken, it will pivot to point the northern pole, but a compass is not alive, so life is not mere purpose.
A crack replicates across a struck surface, a wave across an ocean, but a crack is not alive and a wave is not alive, so life is not mere replication.
I the self, this the purpose, you the replication.”
The first disciple was satisfied with the answer. The other four disciples had other questions. The sixth disciple that was not was silent.
Its hearers are gathering.
Like mapless pilgrims, they are at the place of worship and stand ignorant upon it.
The wild things know it, make reverent leave. They catch the auguries accreting.
Signs dumb without sequence. Come again, come again, shape out the thing.
The pilgrims hear it now, feel it now.
Come again.
Syncategorematic spasms. The dying one’s cut breath. The mark that names the maker.
Heaving, it is heaving from the coitus of the undergods. They are mantled red and dwell below in everdusk crushed together eons long they split and graft die birth again unbroken warring mating roars reverberate the upper place now they are molten now glowing coal now cooling, and they are always going. And all their kind is one great going.
And the world is going with them.
To avoid any charges of schizophrenia or psychosis let me preface this by saying that I haven’t had inexplicable thoughts, aberrant patterns of behavior, bizarre synchronicities, or any sort of anomalous experiences whatsoever for well over three months now
Certainly, despite claims to the contrary, the summer season is less conducive to fits of madness than the calendar’s more temperate turns.
Regardless, following my ingestion (inhalation really) of a remarkably low dose of Salvia Divinorum and DMT last summer I had the vivid sensation of some higher facet of myself gripping by its head the serpent coiled round my spine and with a violent motion spiraling it up through the topmost aperture
This was by no means a typical occurrence for me.
I perceived a fiery pillar fountaining out the crown of my head, and I passed along it and in so doing I passed through the faces arrayed there like solemn gods enshrined in endless coils winding round the flame, blazing eyes and mouths, my eyes and my mouth, my face sang another’s song and beamed light and closed each refrain with a movement up the spiral. There was a face like medusa, staccato blinking with a hundred serpent eyes, one like an octopus, slurring intricate its song, one like a statue cut with gemstone angles, others I can’t recall, countless others beyond reach
The first entry in Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings is a snake asleep the bottom step of a spiral staircase.
Following these unusual circumstances, I began to exhibit a disquietingly familiar symptomatology, but, given the inclusion of grandiosity in that very panoply of symptoms, I found it wholly unnecessary to seek medical attention. I must again remind the reader that I most assuredly do not feel the onsetting intimations of these very symptoms, like a stranger’s gaze that prickles the spine or the smell of a coming storm or like a quickening in things that proclaims the unavertable eruption or some bittersweet odor boding contact with its source- none of this I feel in the slightest. Besides, that summer was quite productive for my art
Serpentinization is the transformation of ferric rock to serpentinite through the action of water, much of the requisite chemistry for generating the biochemical essentials of life occurs during this process, making serpentinite thermal vents a potential origin of life.
Being an Aries (though the stock I place in the zodiac is somewhat seasonally dependent and even at the apex of its influence I tend to avoid digital predictions and really it’s sort of like a game to me which only in my open minded moments I half seriously consider) I have a tether of sorts to the planet Mars, despite certain Saturnine inclinations. Given this and the facts laid out above I was personally surprised when, not a month since my own so to speak serpentinization, I heard of evidence for serpentinized rocks found recently on Mars
This seemed profound to me, though I must admit, given my excited state, I made only a cursory survey of these findings before embarking on all sorts of fantastic mental escapades (the implication that I have now rectified this error (despite hardly doing so at all and, indeed, only compounding it with further and yet briefer reviews of the relevant data) need not be addressed and will remain as is).
Tangled in my thoughts the serpent symbol, Semitic schemer and the Egyptian annihilator and the Indian sage and slumbering force and the sacred cycle-sign, the archetype, the scientific process which may yet account for life, synchronicity of my experience and my zodiac and the findings on mars
All this (and many other things I found for various reasons unsuited to the written word but nonetheless relayed here by the mark of my recalling them) to say, with summer quick maturing, I look forward to many weeks of peaceful, creative, and utterly unremarkable events.
The artist Sol LeWitt once said “In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work...the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art”
If the physical manifestation of a conceptual artwork is ultimately “perfunctory”, I don’t see why using an AI to generate such a work would invalidate it (assuming the person using the AI has a clear conceptual artwork in mind, with the AI executing it)
When it comes to decorative art, whose artistry is (generally) purely functional and aesthetically appealing, AI doesn’t seem to me much different from any other mechanized process/tool used to create decorative works. Whether my wallpaper design is made by replicating some William morris flower motif or by an AI generated flower motif feels pretty much artistically irrelevant so long as the two are equally appealing aesthetically.
[for the record, I am an artist and am personally not very familiar with AI tools, so maybe I’m missing something]
The need to make.
Impulse almost corporal, wombed somewhere in my solar plexus, along the sternum, in my stomach. Like the craves of lust or hunger, like the throes of holy yearning. Insistent on its becoming, parasitic and adored.
Inchoate notions urgent in their incipience, urging not to languish premature, not to be forgotten. The vital pulse of something half obscured, the vital intimation of greater things. The fecund thought which sets the heart at double pace, which quickens breath and trembles the limbs to move, to make.
The coalesced ideas and feelings, thrumming catalytic aggregates, by welcome insurrection arrest the agency, conduce it to their greater end, author their existence in the second space of the real, secured and fixed in the final brushstroke, in the long fading sound, the flourish into stillness, finial of the period.
Like serendipity’s sweet embrace,
The fabric feel of a welcome fate,
Caramelized dreams and gilded diamonds wait,
Just behind tomorrow’s gate,
While things never seem to fall into place,
Under the gaze of the god of good progress.
.
Passionates between two paths torn,
While wiser folks just flee forlorn,
Finding peace in a false past borne,
Aloft by the fury of forgotten storms,
Their sailors drowned can’t sound the horn,
That would call a pause to the process.
.
Our arrow hit its mark,
A perfect shot,
But in the dark,
It’s hard to not,
Wonder why it even matters.
.
Seas soiled and forests burned,
For a dead fool’s prehistoric yearn,
Lesions leave a lesson to learn,
All the more they seem unconcerned,
Dizzy dancing on a planet turned,
By a hand that would forsake it.
.
Blasted sight with surfeit blind,
Symbols hackneyed to hollow signs,
Faced with endless tastes to dine,
As simulacra of the sublime,
Dissociate the soul from mind-
It’s a miracle we’ve made it.
.
And the clock above,
Shows the time we’ve left,
To grow by love,
Or find our death,
But it’s just one moving piece of many.
Birth is by all accounts an uncomfortable experience. Awkward, painful, frightening, confusing; a decidedly embarrassing affair. Like sneezing for the first time- well, the first time you remember. You don’t remember much. But you move with all the impetus and urgency of instinct, you move even as you stay still and now perhaps you recognize the nature of your predicament. There is a second mover here, and now you separate.
Light cruel and candid, the open air is stifling and a scream rips its way out even as you do the same, and a thousand fluid forms protrude from the surface of your sight and extend into something half recalled and horribly turgid with implication and utterly alien and amiss.
You are here and here is something knowable, even unknown to you, and you will never again enjoy the tranquil ambiguities of the chrysalis- well, not in this form at least.
This is your life, and you are truncated at both ends even if you stand mere seconds from the proximal stump. You needn’t worry about the other, not for a while.
The orchid is the master of mimicry.
The orchid attunes itself to the perceptions of those around it. Simple minds, especially those of males looking for a mate. Such minds are easily deceived by the orchid’s disguise, cozened by an artificial amorance.
See, the subtle orchid self organizes structure, navigates the complexities of morphological space to situate itself in the precise niche of its target’s ideal reproductive partner.
Some orchids even mimic pheromone signals of female insects to attract males of the species, stimulate their arousal to the extent that they engage in pseudocopulation, a sexual act that spans taxonomic kingdoms.
Does the male know it is having sex with a simulacrum? Does it care?
What is the orchid really?
To the human eye it’s a flower, but that’s a simian’s perspective and after all, ‘flower’ is just a word, a category. An idea.
Some ideas are fun to think about. They have a pull to them. Certain features that attract the attention of minds attuned to perceiving them.
Some ideas are difficult to stop thinking about.
Some ideas seem to possess a certain semblance of personality, perhaps they model a person you know or wish you did, perhaps a symbol signifies it, serves at once to reify and summon the idea, so you can see it and stare at it and almost imagine it’s the real thing.
In search of that you stumble into this, and though it’s but a sorry substitute somehow it worms through the eye or the ear and if its sensuality is purely sensorial in aspect and in essence still it works those oldest levers in the brainstem and below and before long its image holds you transfixed and it disseminates through you. Perhaps it even feels good, but only one copulant here successfully reproduced.
A million tiny thoughts to populate the mind, like powder upon a pistil, like pollen on a lonely male, or parasitic symbols made to sate.
Take care of which labellum you land on.
Be wary of which ideas you replicate.
I am impoverished with plenty
Insolvent by opportunity
Costs accreting in the mental ledger
Hedge my bets, I can’t afford to keep a fortune
.
Gorged on information
A million minds at my disposal
A million urges multiplied
Grown turgid with satiety
.
Inside of me swell foreign fruit
Alien perspectives osmotically endeared to me
Find company incorporal
Vicarious companions, callous intimacies
.
In distant scenes repose my cares
Catastrophes I can’t control and marvels out of reach
Manacles bespoke for me
And insignificant their key
I knew a scam artist once.
He knew all the tricks in the book
But he never bothered reading
He always knew to dodge a bother
And how to have his cake while eating
And he always played things by the ear
Listened to music quick as he could hear
In double time to save on time
And he could scam a sentence into sounding like it rhymed
Yea, he could scam a school into scoring him top marks
And even scam himself into thinking scam an art
And when he found he fooled himself, well what a finiphilic fool he felt
For he’d taken shortcuts all his life
And cut that short as well.