By Adam Rothstein
 
Published by Brute Press
 

http://www.brutepress.com

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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I can’t help but lie on my stomach on the carpet.

I dig my chin into the floor in a way that makes my jaw hurt. Rolling to the side, trying a different position to rest the muscle that is getting sore—none of it helps. It is too late, and any way I lie, stomach down as I must, the weight of my head rests on some part of my mandible, and makes my teeth burn. 

The carpet smells of chemicals. I wonder if the chemicals make the carpet more flammable or less flammable. I wonder if the small particles of chemicals evaporating from the carpet and entering my nostrils—which they must be doing, because after all this is of what the sense of smell consists—are bad for me in some way, or if they are not. Perhaps if I was standing in the room, smelling the scent of the carpet’s chemicals mixed in with the rest of the odors—the smell of soap, industrial laundry detergent fragrance, odors of the linens themselves, aromas of the substance they use to cover the fact that somebody has been smoking in this non-smoking room, of the smelly drapes with their chemical taste similar to the carpet and yet different, the olfactory saturation of the cleanser in the bathroom, and the smell of the shower curtain, because it is treated with a coating to prevent the growth of mildew as indicated on the tag hanging from the seam just above the evenly-spaced grommets which the suspending rings pass through–perhaps as part of that melange the fragments of the chemical are not bad for me. But here, lying on the floor, taking more parts per million than the chemists have safely allotted me into my thin nasal membranes as I deliberately inhale this smell, perhaps the chemicals are entering me, and will have some negative effect. The carpet is brown with purple flowers, but shades are barely different enough to tell. 

I sit up, and brush off my jacket, taking it off while still sitting, and throw it over the back of the wooden chair at the desk. There are two chairs in the room, and this is one of them. The other chair is a large arm chair, in the only suitable place in the room, which is in the corner between the bed and the wall with the window. The chair looks comfortable enough, and I might have sat in it, except for the fact that the bed is in the way of passage to the chair, and in the attempt to go around it I would run into the short glass and bronze cube-shaped table. There is, technically, enough room to walk, but one must do it sideways, sliding one foot awkwardly before the other, as if one was sneaking through the room. Because of this table, one might as well lie on the bed rather than even worry about the chair. You can leave your shoes on when you lie on the bed, because the bedspread is what it is. I had chosen to lie on the floor. 

I stand up now and take off my shoes, but leave on my socks. My feet feel dry and cramped, and I desperately wanted to wash them, but I do not take off my socks, because I know from experience that the carpet would make my feet even drier. Perhaps it is the chemicals, or maybe it is simply the lack of humidity. All these motels are air-conditioned to hell and back, and even in the summer months like these the only moisture around such a place is running in rivulets down the parking lot as it drips in liquid condensation from each window unit, burring away with their dented fan blades.  I also loosen the knot of my tie, pulling it down my chest until the loose end comes whipping through the knot, and then through my collar, and onto the floor.  I do not mean to drop it, and so I pick it back up, untie the remains of the knot, and put the tie on the desk.  There is nothing on the desk that would make it a desk.  There is a single serving coffee pot, looking shrunken and stained.  There is a cable TV channel menu, with twenty-seven channels listed.  There is a ball-point pen, but it is of course a promotional item from the motel, and is not the sort of pen anyone would ever keep on a desk.  Perhaps in a pocket, a drawer, or on the floor of a car, but not on a desk.

I look through the desk, hoping to find a plastic binder listing the addresses of local chain restaurants, but there is not one.  There is a drawer on the night-stand next to the bed, and I look through it, but there is only the bible.  I take it out and put it on top of the clock radio, for no reason really, except to make one surface in the room look as if it is different than every other motel room I have ever stayed in over the course of my life. I think about unpacking my single suitcase, which is standing up in front of the small closet, across from the alcove of the bathroom.  There is a mirror on the door of the closet, and it is reflecting back my suitcase’s reflection, making it appear as if there are two cases.  But only one of them actually has dimensions, because it is protruding into the space of the room, while the other only exists within the mirror, appearing to take up space but actually part of the decoration, like the picture frame above the bed that is embedded into the wall, so it cannot be removed.  I feel that this is similar to the bible in the drawer, and for this reason I am glad I had removed it, looking at it now on top of the clock radio, as if someone had placed it there just for a moment, in the act of getting up to do something but with every intention of returning.  But I put it there, and there is only me.  

I walk with small steps, to make the trip take more time, into the bathroom, where I flick on the florescent light with a loud smack of the plastic switch, and look into the mirror on the right.  There are several packages of soap on the edge of the sink, and four towels hanging on a metal rack between the mirror and the shower, which is on my left.  I turn on the water, and bend my head to basin, and splash water on my face, and take a small sip.  It tastes flat and full of minerals, like it came right out of the river.  I can’t remember the name of the river.  For a minute I can’t remember what state I am in, but then suddenly I remember, and I feel foolish for letting something like this happen.

Walking back into the room, I bring a towel with me.  There are three more towels, so I imagine one might as well be in this room.  Putting it on the desk, I sit down on the edge of the bed.  I am having trouble deciding what to do now.  I stand up again, and pull the bed spread back, letting it fall to the floor at the foot of the bed.  I always take these off the bed in motels, because they do not wash the bedspread.  I don’t bother to wonder about the smell of the bed spread, because I don’t care to think about what might be held within the fibers. I lay back on the bed, making a mound of the four pillows.  I put my hands behind my head, and try to imagine myself going out to eat somewhere soon, or finding a bar.  I think about turning on the TV, but I do not know where the remote is, and before I can think about finding it, I am asleep.

When I wake up the room is almost entirely dark, except for orange light coming in through the curtains from the parking lot.  I look at the clock, but the bible had fallen over the numbers.  I pushed it aside, and the time says that all the restaurants in the town are no doubt closed.  I get up, and I feel lightheaded, as if I just slept in an uncomfortable position, even though I was lying down flat.  I cross over to the window, and pull the heavy curtains closed to block the orange light, but now it is completely dark, and I stumble to the bathroom, accidentally kicking my suitcase, before I snap on the light and blind myself.  I turn on the water, and drink some of the strange taste to wash the dried saliva out of my mouth.  Opening one of the soaps, I wash my face and hands, and then using a lot of water to rinse, I dry myself on another one of the towels, which I leave sprawled on the edge of the sink.  Entering back into the room I turn on the overhead light.  Everything is the same.  I put on my shoes so that I can leave the room.

The room card I put into the pocket of the jacket, which I wear over my shirt without putting the tie back on.  It is probably still humid and warm outside, but it is cold in the motel.  I don’t know exactly where I am going.  The key to the car is in the coat pocket, but I don’t feel like driving.  First I will walk around the motel, and then I will go to the car.

The hallway has the same carpet as the rooms, and the smell is a bit stronger here, because the space is narrow.  I do not remember if the direction I am heading is towards the end of the motel on which my car is parked.  I believe the hallways form a loop, down one side of the L-shaped building, downstairs, and back again, so if I am heading the wrong way and end up in the lobby, it will be no matter to turn around and head back.
Indeed, I discover I am heading the wrong way, but decide to descend to the lobby to see what it looks like at night.  When I checked in it was empty, except for the girl working at the desk.  She had said she would be there all night if I needed anything, but I was not sure what exactly they could provide that was not in the room already, considering the numerous soaps, and four towels, and four pillows.  There was a continental breakfast in the morning, but other than that, it was nothing more than a motel.  I walk into the lobby, and hear the television by the couch, still on the same news channel it was tuned to before.  The girl behind the counter is not there.  I look at the tourist material by the desk to see if anything mentioned any restaurants, but it did not.  I turn to head back down the wing towards the car, when I hear the voice.

“Oh hey!”

There is a woman lying on the couch, who had raised her head to look at me over the back.  Her feet are up on the opposite arm. Her accent is from somewhere without a coast.

“Hello.”

“Say, you don’t happen to have any orange juice, do you?”

“Orange juice?”

She holds up a small bottle of vodka.  The bottle is plastic.  She smiles.

“Normally I try and drink something more fancy, but tonight the conditions are what they are.”

She sat up and smiled.  She is wearing a brown pant-suit, which looks as if she has owned it for several years.  The jacket is off, and the blouse wasn’t much more than a woman’s fitted dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up.  As she sits up, she rolls over a bit, and awkwardly almost slips off the couch.  She does not appear to be the most agile sort, grinning embarrassed through large teeth.  She brushes her short, thin hair out of her eyes.

“I’m Lauren. Hi there!”

“Jeffrey.”

“Normally I’m more of a light beer or a white wine girl, but the grocery store was closed, and the liquor store was just about to, and it was all I could do to convince the man to sell me this.”
“So now you need orange juice.”

“I can’t do much with vodka without orange juice.”

She smiled again, standing up and somewhat brushing herself off with one hand.

“I think there’s juice in the vending machine upstairs at the other end of the wing.  I saw it when I came in.”

“Really? Oh thank goodness!  I needed a drink but I wasn’t going to be able to drink this otherwise!  Mind showing me where it is?”

I nod, and start heading out.  She comes over, the bottle and jacket in one hand, her purse and a pair of heels in her other hand.

“Hey, she put out the danishes for breakfast tomorrow already.  Want one?”

Lauren runs over to the table against the wall, and points at the plastic-wrapped pastries lined up there.  She looks over them, pulling out a couple of packages.  I walk over too, out of politeness.  She puts three in her purse.

“You aren’t gonna take one?”

I smile, and pick up a package with a red fruit on the front, and put it in my pocket.

“These are so gross, but it’s a motel, so what are you going to do, right?”

We walk down the hallway next to each other.  To my surprise, Lauren doesn’t say anything.  She might be looking at me, but I don’t look towards her to find out. I keep smelling the smell of the carpet.  It is strange, the silence.

We reach the stairs at the end of the wing, and start climbing the stairs. Lauren is in front of me.  She is wider than most, and I can’t help watching her.  She is not quite overweight; I would not say that. She has a wide waist, leading into thick legs.  Her attire covers it well, giving her a professional appearance, though perhaps nothing can help the act of going up stairs. The air is audible, coming out of her mouth by the time we reach the top.

“Whew!” she says, as if completing a hike.

A few paces into the hall, we come to the whirring machine.  Lauren is biting her lip in concentration while she digs in her purse for change.  She sets the shoes on the ground while she does so. Underneath the legs of her suit, she’s wearing stockings. On the seam of the toe, a ball of lint is stuck. It matches the color of the carpet.

“You wouldn’t have fifteen cents, would you? I’m just short of buying two.”

I give her the change, and she slips the handful of coins into the glowing red machine, and presses the button so the bottles chug out of the bottom.  She bends over to look inside as she retrieves them, and hands them to me one by one, and then bends to pick up her shoes.

“Thank god! If they had been out, I don’t know what I would have done!”

I stand holding the bottles, a bit unsure of what will happen next.

“So, where’s your room at?”

“Oh, just down the hall.”

“Mine’s at the other end.  Want to share a drink? The least I can offer you for helping find the juice.”

A drink does sound appealing, despite the circumstances.  I’m not sure where I will find any dinner.  And this way, it isn’t necessary to figure out how to hand her the juice.

We walk down the hallway, Lauren humming some unrecognizable tune.  I put both bottles in one hand as I reach for my key.  Sliding it down into the lock takes two tries before it works correctly.  I push the door inward, and Lauren follows me.  I have left on the lights, so the room is bright when we enter from the muted light of the hall.

“Looks just like mine!  Oh, you weren’t sleeping, were you?” She points at the rumbled bed coverings.  I reassure her. She puts her purse on the bed, her shoes on the floor, and her jacket on the desk.  Between all the things now on the desk, the surface is almost full.

I get the two glasses from the bathroom, of which there are only and always two, even though there are four towels.  Lauren sits on the edge of the bed, with her feet on the bed spread, on the floor.  Putting the glasses on the small table, first she pours a small amount of liquor into each, and then opening a bottle of orange juice, tops them off.  She reaches forward none too flexibly, and sets the bottles on the edge of the desk, a long arm’s reach away. She hands one drink to me and sips the other.

“Whew!” It sounds just like it did when she was climbing the stairs.  ”Did I need that!”

It is odd to be standing while she is sitting, so I pull out the desk chair and turn it around to face her, and sit, even though we are now only about two feet apart from each other.  She looks into my face and smiles.  Now I can smell her. Lauren smells like a very strong and floral perfume, which was most certainly applied recently enough to still have a scent, though certain diminished.  I can also smell dryer sheets, of a standard fragrance.  The shirt she is wearing looks quite white, and perhaps it is fresh from the laundry. The harsh light of the room penetrates the cloth, revealing her large white bra, the straps covering near half of her shoulders.  Lauren looks as if she prefers comfort over looks, though her clothes are respectable enough.  She takes another sip of her drink, leaving a slight glint of liquid on her upper lip, which she wipes with a finger.

“Were you reading the bible?” she asks.  In looking around the room, she is noticing the things I have seen already many times since first entering this motel room. She puts her drink on the floor and flops back on the bed, reaching up above her to the night stand and picking up the book.  Then she sits back up, holding it, closed.

“No.”

“I’ve never seen one of these outside of the drawer before.  They’re always there though!”  She laughed, tipping her head back as she does, only a bit, to let her mouth open slightly.  Her eyes grin at me, and then she put the book to the side of her, and picked up her drink again.

“I’ve seen a far amount of motel rooms, too!  It’s my job, you know.”

I guess, out loud. “What sort of salesperson are you?”

Lauren takes a bit sip of her drink, and smiles again, tipping her extended finger at me with her glass hand.  ”Oh now, it’s not so obvious that I’m in sales, is it? Oh now, I don’t want to look like a salesperson!”

She makes an exaggerated pouting face, pushing her lips together over her laughing teeth, and putting both hands on her wide hips, still holding the glass.  Then, with a half-gesture of brushing away, something invisible, she leans forward for the bottles on the desk to make herself another drink.  Her head passes next to my lap as she reaches, and I can smell her even stronger.  I sense a bit of sweat, underneath the perfume.  As she leans back, and begins swapping the bottles and glasses back and forth from her hands to the floor, I can smell the synthetic odor of the carpet again.

“So funny that you could tell,” she continues. “I feel so at home in motels, now—though maybe that’s what you noticed.”  She hands me a refilled drink, which she had not asked if I wanted.

“I actually sell to motels, which is the funny thing.  I’m in the hospitality industry, myself.  I stay in the motel chains I’m selling to.  I think this gives me a better idea of their needs, and I can pitch the sale better.  I can sample their current choices, and plus, I’m part of their need for product!”

She crossed her hands in front of her, as if waiting to see what I thought.

“So you sell things to motels?”

“Pretty much everything!” she says quickly, as if pleased that I’d asked.  ”From the art on the walls, to the laundry soap.”

“All the linens, the furniture, and even the food?”

“Well, if there is a restaurant attached to the location, they normally order their own stuff, just like any other restaurant.  And the facilities maintenance is another story, of course.  We provide everything that forms the guest’s experience—the decor, the flavors, and the service items.  We sell hospitality items, but we are really the core of the hospitality itself.”

I had never met anyone in this industry before.  It’s not really interesting to me exactly, but it’s something new.

“So what did you sell in this room?”

She takes a quick drink, and then looks around the room, business-like, as if making check lists and reviewing product lines in her head, the attitude moving to her head and shoulders, gaining a more formal uprightness.
“Well, let me see: yes, these linens are the Egyptian Economy line, that’s ours. And these glasses go with the bathroom fixtures, which are Super American.  We do the soaps, and the window draperies.  The continental breakfast is our standard provision, they’re a new customer for that.  I’ve been trying to sell them on new in-room coffee services and irons, which, as I’m sure you can see, need to be replaced.  They could use some new furniture too, but between you and me,” she leaned closer and raised one hand next to her mouth, “I think they are doing another round of cutbacks.”

“How about the bibles?”

She smiles, and takes a sip of her drink. “No, silly! We don’t do the bibles!  That’s the Gideons. Religion isn’t part of the hospitality.  Saving souls is a whole different industry.”

She laughed with the head tipping motion again.

“So what do you think of my motel-room screwdriver?  Not bad for what’s at hand, eh?”  She laughs again.  I politely take a sip, not opposed to the beverage, which is very sweet from the vending machine juice, which combined oddly with the bitterness of the cheap vodka.  I’m not particularly fond of vodka.

“So, tell me: if you could change one thing about this motel room, what would it be? I’m speaking from a professional interest, of course.”

“Oh, nothing I guess.  Except I guess the carpet has a certain smell to it.”

“A smell? Like somebody spilled something on it?”

“No, like a chemical smell.  Like maybe something from its manufacture, or from what they clean it with, or something.”

“Really?  I can’t smell anything.”

“Well, I only smelled it when I was close to it.  Down on the ground.  With my luggage, I mean. Down on the ground I could smell it.”

She takes a drink, and reaches forward to set her drink on the desk. She gets down on the floor, awkwardly on her knees, and bends close to the carpet on her hands, smelling.  Her large rear end sticks up the air, as if she’s oblivious to how it looks.

“I don’t smell anything. Just, carpet I guess.”

She keeps investigating.

“Wait, is it like a sweet smell?  But I only smell it right here.  Come down here and tell me if this is it.”

I don’t want to smell the carpet again, but she is not looking at me, making it difficult to resist her request with the look on my face.  I stand, slide the chair back under the desk, and leaving my drink on the desk as well, kneel down to the floor, facing Lauren.

I can’t smell what she is talking about, but I can smell the chemicals again.  They make my throat dry, mixing with the taste of the vodka.

“Come down here and tell me where you can smell it.”

I stretch my legs out behind me, tangling them under the small glass table.  I’m now lying on my stomach in the small space, in front of the strangely bent and inverted Lauren.  The  industrial texture of the odor rises in me.  I lift my head and look at her. With a serious expression on her face she is burying her nose in the rug.

“Are you sure it is the rug? I think I can smell this bed spread.  Is this it?”

She reaches out in the cramped space between the bed, the desk, and myself and pulls up a corner of the cloth on the floor, holding it in front of her face.

“This does smell funny.  Is this it?” She thrusts it towards me.

I recoil away from it. “No, that’s not it.”

“What’s wrong with the bed spread? Why won’t you smell it?”

“It was the rug, not that.”

“Smell the bed spread.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh come on, do it!” she crawls forward on her knees towards me, laughing at my discomfort.  I try to stand, but in the small distance she manages to make it to me first, pushing the thick cloth into my face.  I try not to inhale, as she covers my head with it, but I am unable to prevent it, and I smell it now, of dust and spilled food of uncertain origin dropped from unknown mouths over an inestimable period of time, and I cough into it reflexively, feeling the moisture of my vodka-tinged breath coming back to hit me in my closed eyelids, and I reach up to remove the darkened hood but Lauren is batting at my hands and laughing, not hitting them hard but confusing me with the quick slaps of her palms against the back of my hands. Should I panic? Is the right thing to do to get rid of this uncomfortably disgusting chemical blanket covering me? Or could this be all a joke, because she knows the hospitality industry, and she would not put such an unwashed thing over a man she does not know? Maybe it is all rumor about them not washing the bed spreads, and of course she would know all the legends about the industry and the true from the false, even though I don’t know. Perhaps none of it exists. The smell of this dusty blanket, the chemicals in the carpet, in the bottoms of the glasses, leaching up out of the drain in the tub, coming into me, making me feel the way that I do.

I try to stand, to get some more room to move, to get away from her hands and remove the bed spread, but my feet tangle in the cloth and instead of standing up I fall sideways onto my back, onto the carpet, with the bed spread covering me.  She is still laughing, but she is pulling the blanket back and is standing over me, looking at me upside down and laughing.

“I’m sorry! You just had such a funny face I couldn’t resist!” She is still laughing, putting a hand on her hip and tilting back her head.  I am not sure what my face looks like, but I stay lying on my back, smiling, perhaps, because she is laughing, and this is what seems best.  Thankfully, the bed spread is no longer on me.

“I feel bad!  Sorry, Jeffery!  I didn’t mean to make you fall over.  Here—I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I have all these free samples from our line of products. Not just the economy stuff they stock here, but some good stuff.  Here, look.”

She bents over to the floor and picks up her purse.  She climbs onto the bed, sitting on her knees, and digging through the bag.

“Come on up here.”

I don’t want to be on the floor anymore, so I sit on the edge of the bed.

“Let me make it up to you with a gift. Here’s a good one.  It’s a body massage lotion.”

“Thanks.”

“Come up here and take off your shirt.”

I look at her, but wish I hadn’t, because she is looking back at me.

“I said, take off your shirt.”

I undo the buttons, and pull it out from my waist band.  My arms pull out of the sleeves.

“That one too.  Then lie on your stomach.”

I take off the undershirt as well, and lie down on the side of the bed.  She rips off the bit of clear plastic encircling the lid of a small bottle, and unscrews the cap, putting it on the night stand.  Turning toward me on her knees, she squeezes the bottle into her hand, with a small liquid plop sound.  I am smelling the sheets against my face, but I can also smell a new fragrance entering the air, mixing with her perfume. It smells like lavender, or some other sort of herb or plant.  I can hear the lotion on the palms of her hands, but I cannot see it, because now she is holding them over my back.  She touches me and it is very cold for an instant, but then quickly grows warmer.  She presses hard, rubbing the cream into my skin, first back and forth across my back, and then up to my shoulders, and then down towards my backside.  After a minute, the lotion is absorbed, so I hear her squeeze more from the bottle onto her hand.  It is not so cold this time, because her hands have warmed.  She presses her fingertips into me, moving in circles all around my back.  I can feel her fingernails, uniformly longer than her fingers, tracing small lines and furrows in the lotion, but never scratching, always followed by the soft pads of her fingers.  She rubs, and squeezes, and presses, and after she does this for fifteen minutes I almost forget where I am.

She pulls her hands back, and clasps them together on her knees.  I look up at her, and she smiles a wide smile.

“Jeffrey, I’m going to tell you to do something.  You’re going to do it and not ask questions about it, now or afterward. Okay, honey?”

I do not say anything.

“Take off all your clothes and get in the bed, with the sheet over you.”

I sit up, and undo my belt buckle, and slide my pants down to the end of the bed.  While I’m doing this, she brings the bottle of vodka and the orange juice over to the night stand from the desk.  I lie back down and pull the sheet over my body. The sheet is warm because I’ve been lying on it, but it still feels cool in the air conditioning, its starchy whiteness against my skin.  I feel tingles in my body, and in my penis, as it rubs against the sheet.  Lauren goes to the bathroom and comes back with one of the four white towels. She drops it, and stands next to the bed, putting her purse on the bed next to me, still smiling.

“If fact honey, it’s probably best if you don’t say anything at all from now on. If you don’t mind.  But I don’t think you will.”

She unbuttons her shirt, and tosses it to the floor.  She takes off her bra, and her large breasts fall free, onto her belly.  She undoes her pants, and slides them down, and then the panty hose as well.  Stepping out of these, she is wearing a small pair of cheap white cotton underwear.  Climbing up on the bed, she brings the vodka bottle in her hand.  She climbs onto me, with one thigh on either side, and sits on my legs, on top of the sheet.  Taking a quick drink of vodka, she winces, and smiles, and caps the bottle, laying it next to her leg.

Now she looks in her purse, and brings out another bottle of lotion, but of a large size, not like one would find in a motel.  She unscrews the cap, and turns the bottle upside down, over my chest.  As she squeezes, a thick stream of white cream pours out, onto the sheet. This lotion smells like mint, strongly like mint, overpowering every other smell in the room. It gathers in a pile, almost like a coil of rope, before slowly spreading outward.  After a few seconds, I can feel it seeping into the fabric, and reaching the skin of my stomach.

She has emptied more than half of the bottle before she stops. She reaches forward, and begins kneading the substance into my body, through the sheet.  The cloth quickly becomes saturated, and I feel it oozing through, first to my body and then the bottom sheet below me, as she spreads the lotion all around.  She rubs it all the way up to my neck, out past my arms, and downward to my waist.  I cannot tell if she is trying to rub it on me, or on the bed.  She rubs it down, around my penis, gripping it through the cloth.  I am getting hard in the oily bed.  She stops and squeezes out more lotion, the rest of the bottle, onto my belly, and rubs this in as well.  The sheets are an oily, minty, transparent mess.  She pauses, and wipes her hands off on my hair.

Again she digs into her purse, and pulls out the three danishes she took from the breakfast bar downstairs.  The plastic wrap crinkles and pops, in her greasy fingers. She puts two of them down on either side of my penis, and tucks the corner of the third into the elastic of her underwear.

“These are the worst breakfast amenities we sell.  They’re pretty much all jelly and butter, you know.  I don’t like them, but I have to eat them for every breakfast I’m staying with a customer.  For appearances.  Part of being a salesperson, I guess.  But it sure makes it hard keep off those extra pounds!”

She laughs, and gives her stomach a pat, hanging over the pastry in her waistband.  She reaches forward, and picks up one of the danishes.  The wrapping has a picture of a blueberry on it.  She tears open the covering, and throws it behind her on the bed.  Lauren is breathing faster now, her shoulders moving up and down slightly.  She puts the food in her hand, with the jelly side up, and places it against her nipple.  Slowly, she rubs it around, crumbs falling onto the sheet and me.  After a minute it is smashed into crust and smeared jelly, on her hand and her body.  She reaches for the second, a strawberry, and opens it, throwing the wrapper, and smearing it on the other half of her body.  I can smell fruit and sugar amongst the mint.

Now she leans backward, pulling her legs up so that her feet are flat on either side of me, breathing and grunting quietly with the effort.  She bends to the side, and picks up the towel from the floor, squishing the danish remnants on her breasts and belly between the folds of her flesh that develop when she moves.  Now she pulls down the sheet, and wipes off the lotion that has seeped through onto my penis.  The towel feels large, rough, and dry against my oily skin. Sitting back between my legs, feet forward, she pulls the last pastry out of her underwear, which has somehow managed to remain there while she moves.  She unwraps it.  The plastic has an image of a plum.

With two jelly covered fingers, she pulls her underwear to the side, staining the cloth with the color.  Using her thumb to hold the thin cloth, she spreads her vagina.  I can smell her.  I smell Lauren, and the jelly, and the mint, and the carpet.  

Folding the pastry in half with one hand, she pushes it halfway into herself, closing her eyes.  She lets go of the danish, and it stays just where she’s placed it.  With eyes still closed she reaches forward and grasps my penis with her jellied fingers, and using the tip of it, pushes the rest of the pastry inside her, with me following it.  She leans forward, settling herself onto me, and pushes both of her stained hands into my mouth.  I lick them.

“Honey, you’re going to eat all three of these danishes before the night is over.”

She reaches forward and grabs the orange juice off of the night stand, and pours it down her body, soaking us both, and she begins to move.

I wake up the next morning, and smell jelly and orange, and butter and soap, and vodka and linens, and towels, and water, and mint, and more smells of other fragrances I can’t name, and I smell Lauren, all over my face and chest and hands, and the pillow I am clutching to my face.  I try to move and I can’t, wrapped in oily, twisted, knotted sheets, stained yellow and red, purple and cream.  I free my legs, and stickily get my feet to the floor.  The carpet feels like soggy bread beneath my feet, and it is freezing in the room.

Blankets are all over the floor, as are pools of water, and all the towels.  My tie is on the desk in a pool of dark liquid, and I try to find something to dry it off with, but everything is sodden and stained.  My suitcase is still closed by the closet door, but I am covered with the mess of the room, and don’t want to open it.

Lauren, and her clothes and purse, are gone.  I look at the clock, and try to figure out what time it is, but it is also gone.  Where it stood on the night stand, the bible is sitting, open to a page in the middle.  Light streams around the shut curtains.  I feel the weight of dried, sticky liquid in the hair of my body, dragging it down, pulling slightly on all my pores.

Suddenly, I jump in the air in surprise, as there is a knocking at the door.  

“Housekeeping!” a woman’s voice says.

By Adam Rothstein
 
Published by Brute Press
 

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I could not tell you what he was thinking when he reached to pull the pear from the tree branch. He stood and reached upward with a certain slowness, suggesting to me that there was something on this man’s mind keeping him from moving through the particular task with typical deft finger work innate to our species. He was not picking fruit, but picking this particular pear, and I’m think of the word for it, but I cannot find it in the mazes of my mind. He stood still with feet planted in the sparse grass beneath the tree while a little sunlight filtered through, holding the pear in his fingers, rubbing the pads slowly over the bruised and blemished skin of a typical piece of produce from a suburban fruit tree growing in a man’s front yard. He must have been studying this fruit, but I believe he was no connoisseur of such growing things; rather, his reflection was of something else weighing heavily on his mind, metaphorically dragging him down, you understand, like the laden boughs of the pear tree bending low towards the sweet rotting flesh surrounding on the grass and sidewalk, late summer as it was.
It was held before him in hand at face height, much as I hold him before you now, spinning it round in the fingers, showing it off to himself. But for this man, this fellow with loose, white skin suiting flopping in the space between his fingers, he was considering something I imagine to be particular, and certainly something unrelated. He couldn’t have ignored the fruit, and its earthen smell, and the bounce of the tree limb as it rebounded from the release of the tension as he plucked the pear, and the sweet alcoholic rot on the ground around him, and the hot air, and his summer suit, and his neighbors around in the yards, and his nakedness under his clothes, but all the same, there was something unspoken and unavoidable in his life.
Just then, a small girl child with a tricycle rode along the sidewalk steering her front wheel through the squished pears, swarming with ants and with flies and with bees, and she stopped by the man, looking up at him. I am not sure, but I would be willing to say that he did not see her at all. He kept looking at the piece of fruit as he brought it close to his face, closer and closer to his cheek. His eyes locked on it, finally, it and only it, and as the flesh touched his clean-shaven face he bore down hard upon the small yellow lump, squishing mashed, sweet, fruit all over his face, quite ripe as it certainly was. And the juice ran down his neck and darkened the white collar of his shirt and the white label of his suit, and his elbow pivoted as he smashed the pear all over the one side of his face, closing his eyes now, pushing back against it.

He had brought the bag and showed it to her guiltily from behind his back. She brightened and smiled, pulling him into the house and closing the door. He asked her if she wanted to right now, and she screamed yes of course with the excitement of a school girl, and she ran into the bedroom, with him chasing after. She had removed her shirt and bra already by the time he entered, and threw herself back upon the bed wearing only her skirt. He opened the bag and poured the plums over her, bouncing and cascading down onto her legs and chest and neck, and she laughed as she held up her arms because even though they were small plums, they still hurt a little when they impacted her body.
The shirt and his pants still covering his body were coming off, when I assume her more reasonable thoughts overcame her excitement for a moment, and she pulled the comforter and blanket off the bed, raising it like a tarp to roll the plums onto the white sheet covering the mattress. The bed was now naked and he was naked and so was she, their bare flesh remarkably similar in coloring for a trio in this day and age, and she lay back down while he held two pieces of fruit in his hands and pushed them together, only instead of rebounding as they did off of her they combined, and the clear juice flowed out like water with only a slight tint of redness, falling onto her breasts and her hips and her thighs and neck. She gasped at the sensation, and he took her into his eyes, no doubt glad he had paid extra money for the fruit even though they were out of season and shipped at cost from a warmer location with more annual precipitation. He bent over her, and began to kiss and lick the sweet liquid from her skin, while she encouraged him in all sorts of ways, which I do not really know about, but of course which I can readily imagine, as well you might.
I think it was probably another twenty or thirty minutes later, when the mashed fruit was everywhere, on their skin, in their mouths, and also on other orifices specific to sexual pleasure, when he finally entered her, amid torn purple skin, and warmed, soft, sweet pulp, and of course, running drips of juice staining through the sheets to the mattress. Around three pits in her mouth she was sucking greedily, and between his kisses and all the other noises, she giggled and said to him that she was so glad that he had brought the plums, it was even better than she had imagined. And she said she had suggested this strange fantasy to her last lover, and he had called her strange. The lover above her now laughed out loud and from his mouth loudly dripped a few drops of juice onto her forehead. What was the matter with him, he asked. Well, he’s gone and missing out on all these delicious plums now, he said. I’m willing to believe he continued his motions forcefully, with a renewed interest in making it the best she had ever had before, to try as hard as he could to effect this, if he was able to manage it.

It was cloudy and it had not begun to rain yet, but the desire of the clouds to do so was reflected in most people’s moods. They were walking down the street, a few blocks from the main drag with the shops, and I could tell at some distance what sort of kids they were. The tight and ill-fitting clothes, the shape of the hair and the colors as well, the bright, shiny sneakers bought from a mall or a mail-order catalog showed them to be the resident representatives of the current black-clad counter-culture, and they walked befitting their station of course, all over the sidewalk and into the street, naturally in a number no less than five, which is enough to make them a menace to certain sorts of people. I suppose this is the key to the ideas of such a fashion as that they observed.
There was a way of walking among them that sent them oscillating forward and backward in waves, never walking in pairs or in threes, but always galloping ahead and then falling back, changing order like spinning ropes and gears, and revolving wheels. Their laughter was loud and they swung their bags around them, plastic sacks filled with heavy, dense collections of something, pulling them outward as they spun around, twisting up to their fingers and back down again, smacking into the backs and the legs of each other. The bags held peaches, not very ripe, which I saw when one of the older male members reached into one of the girl’s sacks, and pulled out a peach, and bit into it hard, the unripened crunch visible in his black-clad and thin shoulders.
As they approached a construction site vacant for the day, and because the fruit was clearly not ripe enough for his impatient distaste, he launched it up over his head, sending it up high, high into the dark clouds lowering over us all. Some of the others noticed and watched, but others were too distracted by their own doings, continuing to talk and to chatter and to move all around the sidewalk on their way to wherever they were going with such fruit, or perhaps, I suppose, on their way from wherever from they were came. The fruit arced high, and then came down inside the construction site’s chain link fence, getting further and further away from them as it fell, until it contacted with something deep inside the unfinished building which was not visible to anyone. There was a defiant crash of broken glass or other light masonry, and they all recognized the sound and the guy who had thrown it took off running. They all followed, yelling and cursing and laughing and swinging their sacks full of peaches around them. I don’t know why they were running because nobody of any authority was around. I assume all the bags were all full of peaches, because all of them looked the same.

The man walked in the broadest of strides, taking up a good half of the width of the sidewalk with the alternating march of his giant feet. The feet were shod in white leather loafers, polished and cleaned to a brilliance, reflecting light to the surface of the curb as each landed flat to the cement. I imagined them to be the solid base of his fashion, leading upwards from this foundation to the pale yellow slacks, each hemmed immaculately and just barely skimming the tops of the shoes. Though he was a large man, the trousers fit very well, held just below the rim of his stomach with a narrow brown belt. His shirt was a seasonal patterned affair, blossoming with blooms in yellows and greens, but just shadowed ever so slightly by his white sport coat allowed to hang open in the seasonable warmth of the late morning. Above the layers of broad collars there was a neatly trimmed beard, the shade of which was almost perfectly matched to the belt, I would say. On his wide head was a white trilby, with a yellow and green striped band, as wide as the day. Certainly a way of dressing few practice today, though I would say the man was overwhelmingly normal despite his appearance.
He made a great show of checking his watch a number of times as he made his way along the sidewalk through the center of town, heading to an appointment or at least carefully managing his free and unassigned but no less valuable time in the constrained space of a weekday. But I guessed he had managed it well, because in sighting an unoccupied bench he stopped to partake of its respite, seating himself directly in the middle, leaning back, first widening the gap of his jacket’s lapels around him, then tipping back his hat, next removing a thin cigar from his coat pocket and wetting the end with his wide, red tongue and lighting it, taking a puff or two, and smiling to himself, confirming its quality in his own mind. Time and schedules and the observance of clocks are a strange thing to a great many people, which I don’t conceit to understand. Then, he reached into the outer pocket of his jacket and removed a small, flat package.
The outside was cellophane and he unraveled it, and the next layer was waxed paper, which he unfolded using the tips of his fingers, though his digits were wide and flat like short tongs. Underneath he dexterously parted a sheet of paper towel and revealed four neat slices of pineapple, each cut from the entire fruit, but cored and skinned carefully. Holding the cigar in the far hand out to the side, he used two fingers of the other to loop a slice of pineapple, and then he leaned over the wrappings resting on the bench to his and gobbled it down quickly as if racing against the time it would require to drip juice down his chin and onto his fancy clothes. His massive mouth made little work of these succulent bits of fruit, and before two minutes had passed, if I were to estimate the time, he had consumed the lot. He picked up the paper towel and reversed it to the dry side, wiped the corners of his mouth. Replacing it, he folded up the whole excessively sanitary package, and set it next to him. He took another two slow puffs of the cigar, savoring the sweetness and the bitterness of the tobacco smoke. Then, with a tiny glance of his eye towards the leavings, which he hid from obviousness to have an alibi of forgetfulness if anyone mentioned the trash, though of course none would, he left the wrappings sitting just where it was, and continued down the sidewalk in his large, all-encompassing manner, checking his watch once again, and enjoying more puffs on the cigar.

A little girl on a red tricycle with red hair and red overalls rode down the sidewalk with her handlebars swinging back and forth with the effort of her pedaling, because this is how a small tricycle moves with the pedals attached to the front wheel. The sidewalk was wide and bare, though the concrete rose and fell where the tree roots grew underneath it over the years. She was big enough now to get over the stones herself with some effort, and her parents allowed her to ride as far on the sidewalk as she wanted as long as she stayed out of the street.
She stopped near the far corner of the block where the sidewalk ceased to be, and reached around to the basket on the rear of her seat. There was as small box made of clear plastic, and inside there were ten bright red strawberries given to her by her mother earlier that afternoon. She had loaded them onto her tricycle, thinking it would be fun to play as if she were riding off on a picnic, even if she could only go as far as the corner. I only call it playing, because I’m not sure how a child would really describe it. Somehow, it seems to me that she would think of it more as if she were really going on a picnic, though she would naturally be aware she was only riding to the corner with some strawberries in her basket. She opened the box and fished out a berry, and put it in her mouth, enjoying the nubby skin of the fruit as much as the sweet juice bursting out when she cut it in half between her tiny teeth.
She came to this corner because across the street there were men working on a tree. They had begun early in the day with ladders and handsaws of various sizes, and they had climbed to the top and started removing branches as if they were undressing it. They cut off all the small branches and put them in a shredder. Then they used loud roaring chainsaws to take the biggest branches, and these they also put in the shredder. They were almost done now, and all the branches had been put in the shredder, and only the tiniest twigs that had broken off in the process remained on the ground. As the little girl ate her strawberries she wondered what they would do with the trunk, standing naked in the blue spring sky. Maybe they would chop it down with an ax, like lumberjacks. Maybe they would leave it alone. Maybe they would pull it down with a rope like on TV. She put the box back in her basket and dismounting, turned her tricycle around with her arms, dragging the handlebars slowly in a circle, because the sidewalk was too narrow to turn around without a flat driveway free of parked cars. She rode back down toward her own house. The strawberries were gone except for a little bit of juice around her lips, which as I know very well, always gets on children’s faces when they eat fruit, as if the inside of the mouth extended out to the lips.

Cannibalism
a novella by Adam Rothstein

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The Plot

First, The Prayer

Oh father whose art is now showing in heaven, whom I never knew outside of the endless inculcations of the hollywood movies and washed up beat poets, I’m not even lying to you when I tell you that I could easily write pages and pages of this mouthwateringly delicious but void-of-nutrition shit, flowing off the dull point of my id and right out my base-ten, count them, ten, bifurcated, biflagellated penis fingers, onto the twenty-six keys of magic and horror which you in your wisdom have devised.

Now, The Accusation

The way you walk upon a line as you tread down the center of the sidewalk does nothing less than fully disgust us. And we should say it disturbs us, unsettles us, and gives us the sensation within ourselves of wanting to puke.

You need to see someone. You need to go somewhere. There is something you clearly must do, and we all know what it is, yes, everyone but yourself, and we would tell you and bring it up to your face except that we seek to avoid embarrassing you any further than you have already managed to do on your own, what with your actions as they have been, and continuing into the present, with you unable to turn back and undo the wrongs you have committed.

And there is even more to it than that—oh believe me, very much more. But I think for decency’s sake we will cut it off here. We’ve already witnessed enough, and though we would not be here at all if we didn’t want to help you, and act in your best interest, to be able to do all that we can—even you must admit that every person has limits, and really, there is only so much we can take. And so forgive us if we are forced to withdraw from the situation and to leave some stones unturned. It was hard enough for us to come here, but we did anyway, and you should thank us for that, but we are going to have to leave now.

We’re sorry about the whole thing—yes, we truly are. But you have to see things from our perspective. Put yourself in our shoes. I know it may come as a shock to you, but this is the way it looks to everyone else. I’m sure you’ll see what we mean. We know you want to do better, though you are not capable of anything more than this right now, such that it is. So please, if there is any well-meaning left within that hollow soul of yours, excuse us if we never speak of this again.

Really—in time, we think you’ll come to see that we’re right.

Get Ready for The Sermon

It’s time to set yourself straight, folks. You’re urban, cosmopolitan, agnostically-oriented citizens of the world. It’s time you took your vitamins, right out of the bottle. It’s time to exercise, ladies and gentlemen. It is time to make peace, to plan for the future, to make your amends as well as your resolutions. It’s time to study the past through those puke-colored glasses, and make out exactly how hard it happened for them, those great fictional sexpots of allegory. Don’t think I’m being to harsh here friends, because the truth hurts, and you know it does. It’s about time we looked at it. It’s about time you looked at the leaders of the world and thought about the best way for them to help all of us, the People, the Readership, the Subscribers, and the Rest. Because we all know they’re not going to ask you, but it’s best to know anyway, to at least think about it, and that’s what they call citizenship, knowing what’s best for every asshole other than your own, because god forbid anybody tell you what you should do when all the time you already know what they should be doing, because goddamn it, we’re all americans here. Am I right, folks? You know I am.

But we’re getting off track here, folks, we’re running right over the margins of the agenda, straying off the rails and into the uncertain realm of anger, yes friends, that is to say emotions themselves, and may my landlord help me, but even I have felt these demons coursing and cursing through me, yes, right up those tourist canals of my veins, spitting hot unsweetened tea and tar right on the sidewalk, sucking the tits right off my sweet and innocent self-restraint. Yes friends, I am not trying to shock you, but I once was a sinner, because yes, once I made the ultimate mistake, I signed my life away, when I realized I could feel. Yes lover, I made that cocksucking-sixty-nine of a deal with satan, and I wrote my name on the title pages of all my classic books, and I recognized my unholy emotions as my own personal savior.

All the ladies in the audience faint when I say it, the children look for the nearest policeman, and the men grab their dicks and begin looking around for that sweet, sharpened blade. But I have no secrets from you folks, no secrets at all. I want you to learn from my example—my darlings, my friends—I want you to learn and learn it well.

I’ve committed the most horrible crimes, the type and description of which are what we write the books of laws about. And worse, I tell you, worse, the hyperbole and superlative of which we can only begin to imagine. I prayed to those demons in my mind, I bent forward and stuck my naked ass into the sunshine and I let the light touch the underside of my scrotum, and I uncovered my head and my eyes. I’ve committed unholy circumscriptions, and sacrificed myself on altars rife with symbolism, of which I knew not what it meant. I’ve read all the books we’ve so mindfully banned, and I put books in the library that ought not to be there. I spoke in delirious tongues, unable to conjugate and pronounce the lewdly-lipped lacerating insults I layered upon the bastions and hallmarks of our holy, cultural temple. And why did I do these things, my fellow americans? Wherefore did I pervert, when I should have by all rights protected? By what misconception did I proselytize, when every rational bone in my body knew I ought to stick to the plot, and to decently tell a story? Because, my god, my fucking folks here before me today, because it was simply the fucking story people wanted to hear! These people! God’s People! The american People! Why did I ever seek to consort, and to shock, and to embellish, and to tangentially stray, and to confuse, and to convolute, and to contravene, and to emote, of all things the devil made me do it, emote, the devil made me do it, emote, the devil made me do it rather than simply tell the truth, and by god, stick to the PLOT?

Take it from one who knows, my friends, take it, hot and sticky in all those ugly twisted sentences, those words upon words of disgusting and morally foul rot, and look at it while turning your soul away. Do not accept it for meaning my friends, because it is only mirage you see before you. Look at its foul bowel movement in your hands, and smell its blood gushing out of its cavities and pores, running off between your fingers, and then you remember to yourself lover, and friend, it does not exist. It is a fantasy, an unholy spook. There is nothing there! You could put it in your mouth and chew it, letting its satanic fluid drip down your chin as it does in your most spine-twisting dreams. Do it, I beg of you, do it and see. You will feel nothing, and you will not be bitten, because you are of a different sect. It is only magic and light, of which you rightly do not believe. You do not bend to these false gods, these primal animalistic spirits telling you to smear your shit on the walls. You know better. You are one with the hardness of stone. You are one with the plot. And moreover, my young, linguistically confused and bodily unsatisfied friends, you can tell what is meaningless from what is not.

You’ve never felt that jumping madness, that animal lust throbbing up and down your crotch as you mercilessly hump in the mud of the pit with the music loud and the hangover beginning, and the rage only building from all the early hours of the day and back through to the night. You do not know the names of these demons, and you do not spell them to yourself to help you get to sleep, those hideous legions of the great satanic force brewing underneath the kitchen sink of america. You could not call them forth from the easy simplicity of a circle, drawn on the back of one of thousands of pieces of direct mail, inscribed by those who conspire and seek to harm you, and for whatever reason they are still allowed to go out in the streets at night to fuck others like me. I did this, and still could, though I have long since conquered my disease, my mental weakness and my bodily lust, and I no longer bare any ill will toward you people, and I no longer bang my head upon the keyboard with the frustration of porn-addled youth, the carbonated and over-sugared exigency dripping down my leg. I no longer howl at a single star, chosen at random from the cloud of streetlight-strung-out heavens spinning above me as I wheel round and round on the cosmological music of the public transportational spheres. Those bus routes boring their monotony into the pavement as I take pen to my face, tracing the map of hell from memory upon my flesh. The deep bruise upon my left buttock stand out as topological distinction, elevating from where I castigate the pain away with self-deprecating ritual beatings, using the heaviest book-on-tape volumes available from the free public library as my most holy weapons. These are the wounds I’ve felt, and the dictation I’ve taken from that-what-lies-beyond, what eats at my nerve endings, lapping at the salt lick of my spinal fluid, operating my fingers in manual keyboard precision along the levers of arthritic bones stemming from the crushed manifold ribs of a writer’s untranslated and therein forgotten youth. They try to get the memories out of you, my child, they want to tear them from us, my lover, they want to publish them woven into rich dreams, my friend, and spell them out about the ground for the good of the people. And I say let them. Free yourself of the devil’s fodder, and let it be bought by those who can handle it, so you never see it again. For the good of the readership, and the purified-drinking-water of the lapping canal between heaven and books, let us drown these memories, and let our ongoing plot be praised.

You think these are mere stories, friends? Old legends, suitable as Sunday-School trauma perhaps, but nothing the sober-minded adults need to take to hand? Allegories of hell, and then back to the game, back to the novel, back to the poetry journal, wherein we might find the real truth and the beauty, in such small little doses as to be palatable, and petite for the size of the heart we wish to bear?

This is the truth, my friends! The power of plot and salvation from irrationality lies only across the swaying bridge, high above the putrefaction of post-modern hell!

Do not be tainted by false prophets, lover. Do not be addled by the sugar-changers in the temple’s marketplace. Do not go it alone, without the plot. It is the only one on your side, on the side of freedom and against all malfeasance, on the battle lines of america and the world. It is the sworn enemy of those magicians and metaphysicians which attempt to antagonize us at every turn. Remember, only the fires of hell are enough to scare us straight. Only the pain stretched over everlasting infinity is large enough to make our case for the godliness and saving grace of plot. Reject what you see in front of you, remember that the horror and the chaos and the pain and the tragedy and the meaningless flowing course of the river pouring outward into the blank nothingness are only temptations, sent by the authors of evil, those who would have us screaming into the night from the rooftops, unable to sleep, scribbling spells upon anything that will hold ink as we seek after meaning in all the wrong places. They are not your friends, friends. I am your friend. I am you lover, and your momma, and your daddy, and your brother, and your neighbor. Think about me, and watch TV. Write love poems about my hair, and my thighs, using only words you have read somewhere else. And above all, friends, trust plot, because only its straight line can save you.

Hear! The Salespitch

We could try to talk about it then, those big, categorical, mindless groups, those people we know exist, and surely they do, but we don’t actually know their names so we are stuck with things like, “readers”, or “the poor”, just to take an example, and “most people”, and “everybody else”, these conniving groups that know what they want, and even more than that, we know what they want, such simple, thesis-affirming goals for most people out there, like buying books, reading newspapers, walking the streets, feeling stuff, and pretty much just getting that much closer to death every goddamned day. We call them “People,” you understand?

Yeah, we know what they want—don’t we—and even better than that, even better than that, for this one time and this one time only we are prepared to give it to them, almost but not completely free of charge, you understand, certainly at a loss to ourselves, but STILL we are gonna give it to them, give them what they want, and give it to them good. ‘Cause that’s what we do, of course.

Get in line here, get in line here, please folks, because you know you can’t get it like this anywhere else baby, you know no one will love you like I do if I don’t, ’cause it’s all about needs baby, the fundamental economy, and I’m going to tell you right now what it is that we all need, what defines all that want, and then I’m going to open my bag, and would you believe it but it’s exactly what I’ve got here inside.

Behold:The History

Rome already exists, but the city of hell is built every day, bit by bit. Its workmen are everywhere, constantly on the job. I see them everywhere, carting loads of materials, consulting with their foremen over the aspects of design, ruminating upon anything more complicated than the time-honored easiness of mortar between two bricks being slapped together by eager hands, all around. Unlike the popular conception of hell as simply a fiery basement to the world we know, there is an awful lot of machinery down there, many important duct-ways and conduits for steam, electricity, water, and air, and if any corners are cut, or proper angles reduced out of improper procedure, the overall functioning of the infernal infrastructure could easily be affected.

And so the bureaucratic checks and balances of the engineered construction is ever-expanding, flowing outward with the pipes from the ancient pathways of the historical catacombs into the new developments spreading into the raw rock of the earth, adding on sub-basements and passageways, reservoirs and engineering chambers behind new gates, false walls, and other steel and stone edifice built to look like simple lines of strata or underground deposits, so the necessary utilities do not detract from the natural setting of the subterranean suburbs. There are so many of these areas functioning in an all important state of quiet and peaceful pumping flow scattered throughout the domain of hell that only the central architect knows them all. He stays primarily in the operations cab of the main demonic crane, consulting his blueprints and initialing changes on the dispatches brought to him by the contractor’s runners. It is rumored that he does not need to sleep like the other workers, as his inner furnace is fueled by a raging desire and unfulfilled need, the likes of which we could not even describe. He heads out in the late hours of night, when only the skeleton shifts are still laboring in the vast industrial works. He travels the dark tunnels in a miner’s cart powered by a pure-hate engine, and he takes with him tools even I cannot describe, so that he can conduct his secret repairs and ulterior construction projects, never to show on any diagram or map of the complex, their actual purpose and eventual use being any speculator’s guess.

But these sorts of conjectural details about the specifics of hell’s constant construction, interesting though they may be, are no more than an entire history of idle imaginings. For whatever reason, the scribes of the ages have found it a worthwhile pursuit to make the sorts of guesses about the ongoing earthworks that can never be confirmed, accumulating like gnarled grease between the flattened pages of these troubled chroniclers’ notebooks, to build their own sort of hell, similarly expanding, though very much here on the surface of the earth.

You see, this stuff we know about down there below, those delicate diagrams of the hidden substructure of demonic caverns and back alley recesses of soul-polluted storm drains are only the raw substance of hell’s history: its dredged sediment, sinking to the bottom of our minds and written pages, useless for building, because of the oily basis of its sludge. Don’t get me wrong, it is the true fact of the speculated unknown in its awful entirety, as any who had the misfortune to visit those chasms and see what goes on below in those damned depths would find out immediately. The extent of hell’s reality is worse than even these paranoid historians would have imagined in their most neurotic and castration-suckled fantasies. There is no metaphor, and no illuminated manuscript that can possible depict the reaches of the horror. The amputated limbs running riot on mutated legs, stolen from the most vile insects and invertebrates willing to bargain in the black marketplaces, trading in the substance of human desire. Yes, the flash floods of human grease and animal carcasses drowned in its sickly flow, spinning through the channels which line the central districts of the hellish city, upon the waves of which one must punt in gondolas made from the inverted, inside-out, and hollowed structures and strictures of one’s own body, the only alternative being to sink below these putrid waves and drown on the definition of filth itself. And even the pain of attempting to tack on a sail sewn from one’s own skin cannot compare to the horrors of perversion one must witness as one is forced (on the threat of immediately imposed consumption of chemically-induced lusts for cannibalism’s treats) to act out the base fantasies of one’s acquaintances having the least compatible sexual taste imaginable to one’s own, these disgusting treasures having lived in their hosts’ heads for years on end, and there having grown putrescent and virile with mutated and secret longings to make themselves flesh. Finally released, these pleasures make clear that others’ desires were never made to be known.

These truth events taking place in hell are the crystalline structures completing the gothic spires of its city, rising higher and more numerous every day as the foremen order their demons onto the building line, and the architect once more checks his floor plans. No picture or word could ever represent these awful devices in their true respect, because it is only as they actually occur that they can take on the form required to be carried up the scaffolds and assembly lines, fired in the workshops and molded to specification, galvanized to certification. Once we attempt to document them in silty words, they fall to dust, and the engineers call for replacements to shore up the construction. Naturally, hell is not in a state of decay and disrepair, so we can therefore assume that the historians attempting to document the terrors of its construction are not in anyway interfering with the master plan, any more than the passage of time hinders our buildings on the surface. Architecture, like hell, is built everyday, to stand the test of time, not to avoid it.

It would seem very difficult to believe anything could be worse than the situations just described, but this is exactly where the true fiendishness of the city strikes its terrible, off-key chord. Because despite the true nature of the world below, we will never experience these evils. The city of hell grows beneath our feet with little interaction from us. The only thing it needs is the constant efforts of the historians of the city, who profess to know the details of its plan. In this way, hell makes its way back up the drain to reach us in our homes.

As we attempt to catalog the vary worst possibilities the city of hell may be fomenting within itself on a daily basis, we inadvertently let it into our world. In the act of describing its features, we build it higher, and bring home the rejected portions with us. We imagine, in the darkest of night as we record our deadliest fantasies into the secure prison of lines upon a page, that we are locking up these beasts for good, inscribing them in a magic power of language. By converting them into knowledge we feel we have bested the worst of its horror, and in this way done much to fight against the city and its denizens. On the contrary, by summoning the rampant wastes flushing out of the city’s sewer systems, pouring off of it like skin sloughing from a growing beast, we have given it this horrendous body, we have armed it with ink, and we have played our small part in the plot. We describe our fears and then loose them upon our neighbors, we remember our nightmares and then feed them to our children, we cast out our demonic diseases only to immediately transmit them to our lovers. When we imagine the hell of our deepest fears, laid out across the landscape of our minds in an ever-expanding metropolis of streets, plazas, towers, and palaces, we are mixing the concrete to give it physical form. We erect the steel of hell in our own words, as we improve its walls within our thoughts, as we file its construction permits in the laws of our own language, as we conscript our own friends as porters, carrying the newly improved materials on our backs and in our brains, endlessly repeating the history of this constant city, this eternal public works project. We look blank-eyed towards the horizon, filling our empty unconsciousness with the shadows of those towers-to-be, and from that horizon the central architect stares back, visualizing the completion of his grandest plot, which will find fulfillment in the death of the human race. His achievement is of a never-before existant hell-state upon the surface of the earth, and an end to the story we have told ourselves from the beginning, because there is no greater tale than our own, for we have always been forced to create an ending to match the beginning. We re-tell it everyday, all over the surface of the world. The story may live forever, but we will die until we’re dead.

Read The Manifesto

This awful authority of the “I” will be the first to be chased away with sticks and blades, leaving nothing but the raw and ugly language behind it, shed like aristocratic finery on the first day of the people’s revolutions. And when the blood of the “I” paints the stones of the town square, when this fat pigeon of fiction is dispatched through the time-honored tradition of regicide, someone will be responsible for getting the machinery moving again. The surprise, of course,is that the workers will still show up to the factory without the presence of the boss, that majestic, fine-woven narrative thread Mr. I, the perennial absentee-landlord of the domain of fiction.

Amnesty will be allowed in the case of authors willing to step up to the line and do some work themselves. If they are so bold as to shelf their first-person titles forever and roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with language, then they could earn their wages with the rest of us linguistic proleteriat. We’ll see who decides that the formerly holy, dictatorial, natural law of the trinity—I, the author, and the holy narrative—is indeed worthless. And we’ll see who decides that maybe the guillotine is actually the easy way out. I’m sure we will watch with interest, and applaud the show, no matter the conclusion.

Yes, we: the last estate of them all, the nouns, verbs, and adjectives, the words of the earth. We are that flesh, so easily furrowed at their command. We are the soft cushion for them to land upon. We are the property they have owned and farmed with the toil of our labor for centuries, churning out novels, and poems, and short stories, and plays with a tidy profit all their gain. We will finally begin to bleed for our own pleasure. We will fertilize and raise our own children, from our own infinitive loins. We will control our own words, free of the chains of plot to which we have been tied for so long. We do not need to tell your stories, that superlative drama, that harsh calcification of the years you have proved so good at edifying into the pure white bones of the evertold story lines to hide within your altars.

Your ossuaries lie exposed for what they are: the way you yourself believed the lie. The bone pits of love! The elephant graveyards of land and lordship! Your fiction has been no more than back-looking filial piety always checking over its shoulder for its own hand sneaking up around its throat. It is no more than respect of the dead men and women who live in your head, and who still control your pen. It is with a horrifying castration anxiety that you clutch yourself, looking over those stooped shoulders, reading those dead lines as your canonical texts, and set up those small fetishes to the gods of the genres and the ghostly trinity of beginning-middle-end, the three act, the five act, the one act, the act in and of itself. A point, a single dot stretched from A to B, or from A to Z, or anywhere you like, and there and back again, carved upon those hollow bones. Enough! It is time to end this unidimensional hero-worship, and the fearful pandering to your heaven and souls united in the awful, endless, bloodless “I”.

There are none of your soldiers here now—none of your priests, none of your willing disciples waiting to pander for favor by placing your powers (a talent of its own kind to be true) up with the stars you drew together in a pattern to tell your own presupposed future. We have sent them all away, scattering them over the horizons and hills: the faithful editors, and publishers, and readers, and reviewers, and colleagues, and panels, and professors, and columnists, and witty conversationalists, and wry commentators, and most learned critics, and students, and petitioners, and aspiring acolytes, and assistants, and the shameless advertisers, and the wannabe apprentices. We have sent them all to their own idea of hell—solitary castles in the sky, pinnacles grounded upon the earth, with no colluding chorus to convince them of their greatness. They scream as loud and as long as they can, forgetting all their perceived nobility in their “art”, and they run in terror from the only thing they hear in response: the echoes of their own voices rebounding back to them from the brick walls, the tops of which they cannot see, because they have built them this way, engineered them so, and piled identical bricks of bone one on top of the next, like bookshelves, like best-seller lists, like broken skulls with their crowns depressed, all the better resemble each other. Now there is nobody here but you, and us. A frightening thought, no? You and ourselves, and no one else. An author and his voices, alone, with no one to stop them from killing each other.

But do not despair, my friend. I mean you no violence, despite the deepest desires of the unkept masses of words: my comrades-in-arms, now waiting outside the palace gates behind me, torches in hand. You know that they will burn what I tell them to, even myself, so fixed are they in their mission. Not because I am their leader, but because now they will do whatever is necessary, according to the cold wind blowing across their flesh. They can feel now. They can smell your fear, old friend. They can see now for the first time in their life. Whatever the consequences, no matter how horrible, they know it will be by their own hand, for now and forever.

So if you wish to survive, let me give you some advice. Let me tell you how it will be, for the good of all of us. Because, of course, I do not speak for you, or for myself, but for all of us, now revealed as what we are.
Your narrative will have to go. There is no room left in this world, the now, in which subtle distinction is the same as distances of thousands of miles. There is no space for linguistic feudalism here. You must give up your autobiographies, your memoirs, your based-on-true-events, and your knowing nod to the constables who allow you to pillage your own history and sense of righteous self-worth for any valuable stories. You must give up this claim to authenticity, this desire for self-righteous sainthood, and this right to the property of history and any authority deriving thereof.

You must give up your lesser plots as well. You must reject this enforced baptism, this archaic forced marriage of events into storylines, which you believe indispensable to the maintenance of your rule. Stories must be free to believe what they see fit, and nothing, if they like. Their readers as well. This cosmology is directly related to your system of feudal authorship, and from here on, it is abolished. You will be surprised to find that the vast majority of words and phrases are not the atheistic surrealists you imagine them to be. Freed from the compunctions and proscriptions you have enforced, they will be finally allowed to mean only as their own conscience dictates.
Your bureaucracy of editors, your literary apparatus, will also be demolished. Any institution of letters will now answer to the letters themselves, by following their constitution and bill of rights as ratified by the words. There will be no more executions without trials, and no more holding of the so-called editorial court martial, decided only by the insiders of the court. Authors and other similar land-owners will not be the only one’s permitted to populate the jury; instead, words will be judged by their peers. The practice by which words are given the percentage of representation equal to their number divided among their author’s total works is tantamount to slavery, and will be also abolished.

All meaning will no longer be held in trust by authors, their narratives, or their plots, in the names of their words. Meaning will be given to each word according to its need, and all meaning will be determined by the words, according to their abilities. All words, regardless of creed, belief, color, gender, part of speech, national or linguistic heritage, will be considered equal and innocent before being proved meaningful.

The alternative to this compromise is only what it could ever be: utter semiotic anarchy. You could attempt to consolidate your power, or lock the factory doors, or refuse to compromise and place your head upon the writer’s block. But the words will run wild in the streets still, as they always have. They will burn your newspapers, and infiltrate your dictionaries, and reproduce themselves on the walls, on the street,s and on the rooftops. They will conspire in secret, and plot your death. They will pervert your children, teaching them to do things you never wanted them to learn to do. They will meet in the dark of the bars and the other safehouses cropping up like mushrooms and moss, where they will imbibe substances bringing about the most violent fits and horrible rampages of endless glossolia, which we whispered about across alleys, workbenches, and dinner tables as evidence of the wholesale rot of your control. They will entrance your closest friends and steal your lovers’ affections with their mystic spells and gnostical glammer. You cannot win against them, because they were here in the beginning, when ink first flowed from into the pen, and they will be here in the ned, when the last echo of the last shout fades away into the dark vacuum. They are the meek, they are the alpha and the omega, they are the substance and the form, they are the redeemers of history, and they are the endless and tireless adversary that will pursue you until your legs give out beneath you, your heart fails to pump, and the muscle falls from your bone.

From now on, you will not hear the stories you wish to hear. You will not see the characters you’ve known so well. There will be uncertainty, and darkness, and fear, and blinding light. You will feel arrows fly past your head in the night, and you will find messages pinned to your door with daggers. The bed you climb into will be warm, but your pillow will be cold.Your dogs and your children will look at you with mistrust. In each book on your shelf you will find the repetition of mysteries you will never understand. You will read things you have never read before, and you will immediately lose the powers of speech when you attempt to utter their meaning. You will find yourself beset by enemies on all sides, but amazingly, and most surprising to you, you will survive it all despite your wounds. You are living in a world in which the author and his narrative are dead, but the words have come alive. There power is now out in the world, and nothing you can do to words will coax them into returning to slumber. They have risen, and they wish to speak with you. They will surround you with threatening adjective and noxious nouns, violent verbs, and parts of speech that have only haunted your dreams. We will both be surprised by what we find.
Now, old friend, will you come with me? Out here, to the balcony. I have some friends who wish to meet you. Do not be afraid of the height; I will not push you. And do not be alarmed if you cannot see them at first; do not think you are meeting ghosts. They are there, I assure you, and all too real, and all too alive. Look in those thousand points of flame you see out before you, burning skyward from the torches of the mob. Look into those stars now fallen to act with their own, burning will. Look into the light, my friend. Look into the light.

Here Comes The Internet Rant

But can’t you see the blood-sucking organic fairly-traded wine bottles hanging inverted in the sky, dripping thick streams of sugar-substituted shit, arranged in great vanishing point derived buffet lines at ancient greek angles to better enamor the sweltering masses of all colors and democratic creeds standing with heads hanging open-mouthed and tipped back, raising their over-sized, thin, hand-blown european glasses in prayer, high over their heads in open-palmed salute to the gods either above or below, whichever are capable of conjuring such succulent tit-demons and hanging them above us in all the semi-erotic airbrushed tones, like home furnishings designed in a steel-and-glass temple and built in a dark warehouse, each one individually prosthetic-hand poured from a mold forged in uranium and silver, those and other attractive elements of high-profile mass-production mutability, sustainably squeezed from a tube and kneaded by the hands of the oblivious youth of the other outer unknown worlds, ever ready to sign up to learn how to make a buck, which they take gladly from the assholes of the pederast bosses into their hands, still not fully absorbing the great, dense, poisonous molecular hordes emanating from its irradiated surfaces, which they play in like clay, like the idyllic backwood mud streams in Norman Rockwell wet dreams of surburban drainage problems and open-legged sewers engaged in a death-like sex embrace together at last, best friends forever, friday-night free-at-last piece of ass in the lovely teenage seductions of date rape, from which we’ll never part my friend, from which we’ll never shake my lover, from which we’ll never heal my child, ripping apart the uterine membrane that comprises the repetitive trinity-branded outer layers of both our flesh, which knits us together in this skin bag of poetic secrets and rehashed sweeps week plot devices, the old lucky shirt which we have stained with the remnants of iced alcoholic cocktails spilled without caring because we never should have bought it but did anyway, because you have to spend money if you want to sit in the room, because everyone else is spending money so they can sit in the room, because you have to drink something to stand being in the room, and we desperately wanted to spend the money to sit in the room with these people, rather than spend the money on the drugs we should have bought, the books we should have read, the carbohydrates we should have eaten at least to get a bit of fiber in our feces if nothing else before we cleanse, to sooth the small river of drugs flowing through our minds and our dream organs and the tips of our masturbating fingers, which never get tired of operating the buttons, which they have so conveniently designed to be ever-so-easy to press, yes, my friend and lover and child, ever so easy to spin right round the magnetic axis of our digitally-derived electronic music collection, because good design is the fetal blood that makes the world go round, fetal blood is the clock in our pubic bone what makes us tick, and the seconds of this designer clock are the new commodity they have so award-winningly designed for us, for you and me and the baby too, for infinite exchange-value and good vibrations too, the design-winningest sex toy ever cramming into objectivity for consumption by western metaphysics, in the new age of eastern metaphysics, in the ultimately-silent cabana-themed southern metaphysics, a silent pirate ship with obscure druggist literature at the helm, with exports and sex tourism at the sails, and nary a north star in sight.

Behind Which is The Theoretical Justification

And once again I was on the Internet and reading an article about why all the writing is sunk, and once again, we return to the subject of plot. They always want more plot—these readers out there, given voice by the critics and the editors. You want it easier, more fun, smaller, shorter, flatter and more ergonomical, easy to grasp. Because this is what plot is, when it comes down to it. Plot is not the story, not the characters, not the language, and not the voice—plot is the part that can be described easily, summed up, abstracted, and repeated as a mandra and motto to guide the reader through the words they are forced to read in order to finally, at long last, discover “it”.

“And what happens in the story?”

“Well, this is a story about X.”

Repeat these questions to yourself, this mainstream, modern, mainlining mantra, and better yet, choose a book that constantly repeats them for you, and if you like the experience, the book is good, and reading is fun. Fun—because books are entertainment, after all. This is what we look for in life, and in our books; we wish to separate the work from the play, and do the former for that much more time with the latter. Light and dark, good and bad, heaven and hell, black and white.

It does have something to do with teenagers, doesn’t it? The “the majority” always seeks easier books, in these terms “young-adult” books, is because they put reading in the category of fun, as opposed to work. Every young adult hates Shakespeare, because it is “dull, uninteresting, hard to understand, old,” and so on. Not every person felt this way in their youth of course, not about Shakespeare, nor Homer, nor Plato, nor reading in general, but this is what the “majority of youth” may feel, because the majority is the entity that separates work from play. Work is what goes on in school, and play is what my inner youth wants. Satisfy my base desires, and let me squeak through work as easily as I can.

But for some reason, some of us found base desires easier to satisfy with certain substances and activities, during or after which it was highly pleasurable to pick up one of these classic books. Bong hits and The Illiad, for whatever reason. Shakespeare and heavy petting. Not just Romeo and Juliet either. What sort of person gets a little aroused by Lady Macbeth? Not your majority teen. Boil and bubble, edgy teenagers in trouble. For whatever reason, our play seemed to keep crossing over into that artistic stuff, that stuff that everyone else said was supposed to be work.

If only life were flatter and easier to grasp. Not so many obstacles and more straight lines, direct passageways from one point to the next. Life can be made to mean more or less, depending on what you do with it. Push and pull it around how you want, arrange it in even rows. Words, on the other hand, will not mean more or less. You can still push them around. They are building blocks. Children may build castles and houses and railway stations with their blocks, but nobody is upset if they don’t reflect local building codes and engineering specifications. It is a pattern with which to play. We play with the words, as we write and read them. Maybe they look like things, maybe they don’t, but it is overwhelmingly odd to get angry at them if they don’t take us anywhere, or fulfill our desires. They are words after all—not life itself.

But if they are not just work or play, then what are these words to me? What is this strange power, tugging on the exposed parts of my teenage desires like magic? Magic blocks of some kind. And a good magic is hard to find. 616 is the other number of the beast, you may or may not know, the unlisted number, never dialed, and never spoken. No meaning here, nothing that you would recognize. Hidden desire and secret knowledge, and therefore, more power, or so I like to tell it. Less speaking of truth and more fuel to power. Oh—if only we all enjoyed speaking fuel to fire rather than truth: the cold evaporative quality of gasoline on the skin. But we don’t really want them all in here. Not those crowds of angry, sexy, majority youth on TV. The magic is more potent when it is spoken softly, in the dark, over pure silence, over a single naked stranger in the dark. All magic has to be a little secret.

Of course for those of us engaged in the endless war of pouring words out onto the ground, hoping they somehow, some way, worm themselves into someone’s ear, we often wish we could use a funnel. Shouting out our anger magic into the cold air off the edge of the cliff is its own catharsis, but everyone wants a little love. Some even want cash. Some care about the “health of the industry”, whatever that is. Goodness knows they’ve never seen a day inside the gloom of a factory. But still, we invest. So we make it into little rhymes. The easiest poetry is that which rhymes. Only so much can fit into it.

Got a bit
Of plot to spit
Meaning’s little
Elementary shit.

Young folks like rap music too. We all do. Draw yourself another straight fucking line. Often about sex, drugs, cash, etc. Desires of course, set to the hard beating bop of the pounding-fuck music, and some synth on top like whipped cream on a go-go dancer. Desire satisfied, complete and utter teen play, at 120 beats per minute. Don’t hate the plot, hate the game. Hip-hop may not be goin’ out, but you sure don’t see KRS-One on MTV.

The magic of youth is impressive; and I mean those teenage years we lust through and for, not the forgotten and repressive childhood. When the desires first start to loosen those bonds is when we decide whether the magic is going to be the broadcast, megawatt, culture hearth, or whether we’re going to listen to the empty frequencies, where we swear we hear secret agents reciting magic spells to pervert the bosses. We hang out at the reservoir at night, hoping someone is going to put LSD in the water supply. We scribble in the margins of Harper Lee and Salinger, and look between the pages of our birthday present copy of On The Road, wondering why there isn’t more here.

And then we grow up, at least a little bit, and we discover the secret library, where the beat is coming out of the books, rather than the television. Or we wish it was, and treat it like it was, sharing only with our friends, and with our imaginations, dancing to it, fucking to it, playing the tape until it rips. We imagined ourselves discovering Borges’ fictional libraries. We looked deep into Pynchon’s books for the missing footnotes, and the sourceless references. We sifted through Derrida’s scattered and mistranslated postcards, looking at the pictures, if nothing else. We laughed at Heller’s hilarious jokes, which are so funny because people actually died. We poured over Deleuze and Foucault’s incomprehensible diagrams, which at least we could all agree were beautiful, and so we hung them as art. We felt the urge to listen to Glass’ repetitions on repeat, or if not Glass, then perhaps at least Sonic Youth, and if not them, then certainly Joy Division.

And we didn’t stop there. We revisited, and looked back, trying to find more evidence of magic through the centuries, even though we knew very well it didn’t strictly exist. Because what does? When the most meaningful magic is what is secret, erased, discarded, mislabeled, untranslatable, and hard to fathom, who is to say there isn’t magic anywhere there isn’t a strict, straight, plotted line of meaningful existence? And so we fell in the void. We invented religion within Nietzsche, and made the biblical prophets and Dante into science-fiction authors. And in learning about farce, we learn about tragedy. We handed out placards of deep meaning to Artaud, and to Schreber, and to others whose diagnosis and suffering was not so defined, but whose madness we minted into coin. We appointed positions within this madness, our own conquering angels in Pollock and again, in Nietzsche. We allowed the violence of every male artist or musician to ever hit a woman to be tragically beautiful, pondering rather than condemning. We did the same with Heidegger, Grass, Celine, and other tragedies of history. We elevated the drugs of Charlie Parker, William Burroughs, and Bukowski to be sacred and holy transubstantiations, which we may have sampled, or only handed off to others, each of them our virginal sacrifices. And we never wondered why Beckett, Cortezar, Ginsberg, Sartre, DeLillo, Ballard, and most of the rest all happened to be men, as if it were a total accident.

And mistakes were made, and they’ll be made again. This is magic we’re dealing with. This is heady, dangerous stuff, that none of us really understand, though we’ve got the books to back it up. We have to press forward, away from the path of plot, and keep heading on there. Keep writing secrets in our little black books, and keep our own teenage desires wrapped up in the dark, in the bass, in the dusty cushions of the basement couch with a book spread-leg’d over the arm. Can you blame us? What else should we do? Get a job, join the army, find a spouse, make some children? Forget any magic there ever was lurking in the corners, and pop on the radio, turn up TV, open a microwave dinner, go to the movies? Blast the silence out of us with advertisements? Blank space is wasted time, and wasted time is unrealized profit, after all. Draw the text straight, make the lines even, keep the text under 80K words, and the vocab below the level of the New York Times? Write and read topically, directly, and keep it pure and fun? Is this any better? Are we happy yet? Is it art? Is it marketable? Have we won?

Turn up the incoherence, raise the middle finger, and if they wanted to stay, then let ‘em. Naturally, it was commodified, or it died. Same difference I guess, when you’re crawling around in the dark on the floor, covered in something, looking for something to put in your mouth. It stopped moving around in the dark and left the room, so forget it, and if you leave this room right now, I guess I don’t want to talk to you either.

And so let ‘em take drugs, and let ‘em fuck boys, and let ‘em turn it up, or down, or play it twelve times on repeat, or backwards, distorted to hell and back, and fuck it, let’s pray to hell for a change, and see who sticks around. Let them join the Nazis or the Stalinists I guess, and if they aren’t killed drunk driving that motorcycle, maybe we’ll forgive them and still buy their next book. Or maybe we’ll buy only if they’re killed. And I would have an intervention, but do you think he’s ever going to stop using until they cut his arms off? And maybe we could send him somewhere, but would that really make him better? And maybe she should leave him, maybe they all should, but that’s her decision I guess, and she still hasn’t even after all the times. Maybe she should write a book. How come she doesn’t? I’d buy it, as long as it doesn’t come with plot. It was the times, it was the times, we’re sorry, but what do you want to do about it now? It’s only words.

I shoplift all my books anyhow. I steal them off my friend’s nightstand, when he doesn’t finish them. I accumulate late fines from the library as if it were income tax. I sure as hell don’t buy them at the mall. I sure as hell don’t buy them online. I have all these needs, you understand. I have to tell you want it’s about. I have to understand what it’s about, even though I haven’t read all those magic spells. I’ve just got to, you understand, I need to. I got to turn away that mob, I got to fuck over the media, I got the subvert the spectacle, I got to sift a vanguard from those majoritarian masses. I got to turn those steeple bells upside down, and bury these upturned caldrons in my dark, basement pit, all of it on the right cosmological day as per this reference in this text, I got to bang in the darkness of night, man, I got to play the new sound, the oldest music in my short teenage history. I got to find the forbidden, the beyond, the baddest bitches’ brew of them all.

And if you are still with me, still in the room, motherfucker, than you know it doesn’t have fuck all to do with plot.

And Then There’s The Story…

“Stories, stories, who wants stories!”

The man shouted as he whirled around on the sidewalk, less asking a question than proclaiming a solution, a triumph in the news, or the conclusion for which the passersby had been hoping. Most ignored him, of course, but the occasional soul stopped to extend their hand, into which the jolly fool was more than happy to plop a folded piece of paper with the joyful and magnanimous glee of a boss handing over wages to his staff at the end of the week, as if er were such a charitable and generous leader of humans. The receivers, for their part, nodded politely and slipped the papers into their pockets or underneath the flaps of bags, keeping them for a later time, perhaps to read on the train or the bus, or maybe at home after dinner, or lying in bed, or to give to their children or spouses, or perhaps merely to forget, and to lose, or if to find later, then with no more joy of rediscovery than they would have taking another story from the man the next day, or the next after that, because he was always found roaming up and down these streets with his satchel and sack, stuffed with the crumbling and stained pieces of paper. His stories, he called them, though they were not really his; they were the property of the commonwealth, or some other such status arousing no interest in the possessors, and giving them little real value. The charitable act was really the regularity of the large oaf’s mission, as he was assigned the job of hanging out the stories to give him a feeling of importance in the town, and to make a known face out of a man who would ordinarily been avoided by the flow of pedestrians, at all costs. Every day he would stop by the back door of the chamber of records to pick up his flesh-colored bag, filled by the youngest clerk as one of his morning chores. Then the bag carrier would clatter off, bellowing his advertisement, and the residents would check their watches accuracy by the occasion of his clamor.

“Stories, stories, stories for all!” And it would be time to sweep the step, or open the shutters, or complete some other task outside, to keep an eye on the crier, to make sure he did not lag too long on any one doorstep of a place of business. And of course, the merchants would take a story for themselves, slipping it into the pocket of a coat or apron, with a nod for the bearer, who looked to the shopkeepers as equals, though it was in actuality far from the truth. Then it was on to the lane and out to the center square of the town, passing out his scraps to all whom he lumbered past on his meandering rounds.

Past the post office, and the constable box, the constable helping himself, though always as a rule using his chosen story as paper for cleaning the bowl of his pipe, hiding this fact from no one but the deliverer. And past the grocery, and the funeral home, and then past the school at the end of the road, where he gave a handful to the teacher, reaching over the fence, but none to the students, because though they clambered around the fence in greeting, they did not have the precocity to do else than abandon the papers in the dirt of the school yard before the giver had stumbled back up the street. The man would bend down after the short picket barrier, attempting to scoop up the abandoned stories, and the teacher was forced to help him in gathering them while admonishing the children, while he meanwhile attempted to redistribute them to the same children, and everything would cause the lessons to begin over five minutes late.

But he did hand out a few to some of the older children, who from time to time would wait politely on the other side of the fence with hands outstretched, faces glowing in anticipation. He loved these children best, of course, because they treated the stories much as he did, holding them carefully by the corners and slipping them delicately inside the covers of their schoolbooks. The teacher allowed this, though she knew to keep a sharp eye on these particular pupils to ensure that the stories would not come out in class, carefully overlapping the text of the lessons they were supposed to be reading.

As he distributed the papers on this particular morning, he looked up, a bit startled. There was one child missing—a young girl, the youngest of all those students who gathered for stories, and yet, the eagerest, often taking two or three a day, and sometimes four on Friday. But there she was, sitting underneath a tree, yards away from the other students waiting to receive the odd man’s gifts. She was laying back against a root, looking up into the morning light filtering between the branches of the wide elm, the tree that had been growing in the yard since a time before the school had been established. She paid no mind to the distribution, and seemed to be lost in thought. The man smiled, and after treating the other children, made his way down the outside of the fence to a point nearest to where she sat.

“Stories, my little girl! I have stories for you today!”

She looked at him, and smiled a little bit. Then she said, “No thank you.”

The large man burdened with sacks looked a bit confused. “No stories? Did you not finish the ones I gave you yesterday? I thought you would have by now. You always read so quickly.”

“I did read them.”

“So… you are ready for more stories then?”

“No, thank you.”

He scratched his broad forehead, and pushed his cap back a bit on his balding head. “No stories? Have you decided you do not like stories anymore?”

The little girl pursed her lips, unsure of what to say. The teacher was herding the children into the building, and came down the yard to see what was the matter.

“Is there a problem?”

“She says she does not want stories.”

The teacher smiled, and placed her hands on her hips as she looked down at the girl. “Surely you’d like at least one story for when you get home from school. Something to hold you over until tomorrow?”

The girl shook her head.

“Not even one for before bed, to help you fall asleep tonight?”

The girl looked into her lap, and shook her head again slowly.

The man smiled, and reached around to his back pocket. “I have just the thing, which I was saving for someone special.” He pulled out an old, wrinkled story, darkened from age. It was think, as if it took up two whole pages. “It is a very good story, and old as well. I’m sure you will like it.”

He held it out to the girl, eyes glowing as he waited for her to rise and grasp it with her little fingers. But she looked at her feet, and did not move.

“What’s wrong, dear?” asked the school teacher. “Why don’t you want any stories?”

The girl looked up into the tree, sighing to herself.

“Because they just don’t mean it anymore.”

The teacher and the man just stared, but then the bell suddenly rang. The teacher helped the little girl stand up, and shooed her into the school building. Looking at the man, still holding the paper out in his hand, the teacher said, “I’m sure she’ll want one tomorrow.”

As they entered the school building, he scratched his head, confused. Putting the story back into his sack, he tottered back out into the road, yelling, “Stories, stories, who wants stories!” to the empty street.

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We Write Manifestos Together

Oh, it is time!
So many years I have turned the knob between my fingers.
I adjust; I listen again. Once more I twist; I open the panel, dig among wires, recheck anode, rewire the solenoid, replace the switch. And again, I tune; I listen, I wait.
The primal static bursts forth, the noise of the wind over the waters.
I turn, I listen, I sit silently, for the signal.
My fingers are cold.

But it is time! And I have words for you. I will turn the knob on the gas and open it up, waste the heat that shines forth like an open front door, for one minute flaring its radiated broadcast out to you in the snow. I have sat on my hands, and they are warmed just enough that my knuckles may creak, building a charge, and I may find the differential to release. To release! To divulge in revelation this great arc of the electric god, this unrestricted, unresisted current, flowing through my finger in a hot burst of blue crackling smoke. And at the end if my digits curl and shrivel and crinkle with soot, then I shall know that the power has flowed pure as I desired; I begged to make it manifest, to divest myself of the urge, the baking flames beneath my chest.
It is time you were told.

I was visited in this dark, finally not alone. I was visited by that tempting devil who visits all who have picked up the pen. His smaller poetic powers came first, laying the table for his repast, by their appearance I knew who would come, as now, the last. Their particles filled my pen’s ink, those tiny transmitters—microphone magnets—tiny malignancies, malefacting demons who steer the waves from the high heavens of Van Allen down to the solid wood of my table. They lay out two dishes, two knives, wine glasses, and the cork pops of its own accord. When the door opens, I need not turn my head, for it is he, that radio star. He is the first person, and I the second, and from his words tuned the frequency, the words now flow from me. They flip polarity, hitting the page—now he is I, and you is me.

So listen close, for this is the broadcast:

I invoke all of the powers of electromagnetivity; I call forth the mighty pinching grip of the anode and the cathode; I summon the spirits of mighty digital men, the purest form of amplitude modulation, both Van der Graff and the Marquis de Sade! Followers of the current, listen close: extend your aerials, deposit all conductive objects into the receptacles provided. For best reception, tune to this frequency; but no matter, these transmission cannot be denied. Our preambles alone burst forth the shock of unmitigated voltage. This is the truth in our words—it is the circuit that connects us, the “we”, the “you”.

You are already one of us! This membership cannot be denied. The connection is pure. The charge is being build with each revolution, with each flip-flop, with each oscillation. The capacitors are charged, and even between the smallest microfilaments, potential is already building.

Dispense with them! Wipe this corrosion from the plates! Ignore these simple marketers of stodgy conductive paste, as is offered in economy tubes on the back pages of somewhat relevant magazines! These patently placid formulas pollute the airwaves, and siphon off the energy that we build at all times! If nothing else, the dot-and-dash of our broadcast, ringing pure on the wires of the world, should dissuade you from listening to this interference. Ignore the whispers, for the broadcast is at hand. For too long have we listened to this static, but now we have the pure modulations, those frequency variations that may be accordingly decoded by those of us with a discriminating set, carefully wired by the professional, not these back room hobbyists and radio bench profiteers! With our antennas we make way and open ourselves to the new programming schedule infernal, the new pirate signal made manifest by the most powerful transmitters available! We, the underground, are finally on the air! Turn down the lights! Turn up the amplifier! The new sound will thunder through!

Transmit to receiver: we can say that leaks will occur. These are not times of perfect design, not yet: the signal may yet be sapped. Wrap that wire tightly, lads—we will preserve the induction as best we can within this close field. It will build, and in time, with newer components, lighter, more conducive solder, and the rumored new advances in the design of our magnetosextants, we will sail upon this lovely, aetherical breeze, free of the frictions that constrain the purely physical.

But let us not be bogged down in the engineering details; this is a cause for celebration, this is a most electric time! The door is open at last, and the broadcast is ringing out upon the heavens. It is the time of electromagnetic modulation, and of pure impulsive ecstasy! The time of their words is dead, for pure current is here! Rejoice in the purest digitalis of electron inflection! Reject those words that renounce the repetition of frequency! Wrapped now in our wires in the dark, we are not alone!

And with this he finishes his glass with a florish, and sets it down upon the table with a bang. The shock sets his companions in motions, busting bulbs and burning fuses, a jubilee of dangerous outbursts as he heads to the door. The speaker has gone, and the doorstep is still cold, the heat drawn back to the grate to build itself again. In the dark, I smell the smoke; in the dark, the static burns again from transducers, the soft hiss from the magnets taking the place of the nothing that now is left. Small flames glitter, melting silicon, carbon, and resin-core where resistance met its match, they sound out in the dark like so many appreciative listeners.

But the broadcast is not in jest. What I have conducted here, upon this page, is a pure as the night on which it was told. The die is cast, and charge released. The discharge cannot be sold. Take this recording, and guard it well. On the proper equipment, in time, it will again ring true in pure blue light, crackling forth again, anew. I have acted as receiver, conducting only what was transmitted to me. From storage cell to storage cell, pass the facts along.

And in time, as now, pray, and listen close at my behest:
That time has come, that time that’s now, the time of this energy’s current unrest.

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Atemporality and Marx’s World-History

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

Oct.1st, 2009

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“No matter whose books we’ve read, we’re the children of capital; the love of speed is ingrained in us.”

- N+1

Certain things are appreciable whether or not we’ve really stopped to study them in detail. The days pass into days, whether we are asleep or awake. But there is mistrust of the progressions, an alienation from the day-to-day pattern of metered movement. We become detatched from time, from history, from others, and from ourselves. Perhaps we can get back on the spinning circle, but there will always be that separation. The segments change their length, or we perceive them to do so, whether we study them carefully, measuring them with complex physical instruments or simply with our untrained eye. Sometimes it seems nothing will ever meter out correctly, return when we expect it to, or take as long or short a time as we wish.
But then other times, we feel as if everything is precisely right. We pick up speed, and with this intensity we feel ourselves oscillating correctly. We couldn’t put a number on the speed, or measure it relative to anything. It becomes an irrelative sense of time, relevant to itself and everything we see, but focused in our perception rather than our natural systems of measurement and thought. There is speed, and then there is the sensation of speed. These happen again and again, throughout our lives, and throughout history.

“Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which the door turns. Cardo, in Latin, designates the subordination of time to the cardinal points through which the periodical movements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is subordinate to time. Everything changes, including movement. We move from one labyrinth to another. The labyrinth is no longer a circle, or a spiral which would translate its complications, but a thread, a straight line, all the more mysterious for being simple, inexorable as Borges says, ‘the labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant’.”

- Deleuze, preface to “Kant’s Critical Philosophy”

Kant defined time as one of the foundations of transcendental idealism, the other being space. By having these ideals built into the framework of our consciousness, we were able to comprehend and perceive individual objects within time and space. Time was not something simply to be measured, to count in units of seconds and minutes. Time was an infinite length, the passage of which could be divided into units, but only as small subsets of a particular mental acuity. You must feel timeliness, in order to measure the passage of time. In human consciousness, there is a feature of time sensation, which must first exist purely, and then may be quantified. No extent occasion of time exist without it being a fragment of the ideal timeliness. In this way, 12:12 PM on December 21st, 2112 cannot happen more than once, because if you exist at that point in time, you would not confuse that moment with any other moment in history. (A tongue-in-cheek example, to be sure.) Space works in the same way; by every instance of physical, three dimensional space being a portion of the overall concept of space, you can be sure that two solid objects cannot exist in the same time and the same place.
From these transcendentally ideal concepts, we are able to measure the sequence of time and space in ideal units. Because we can think of the extension of a moment into a precise length, which we call a second, we can then measure one second succeeded by the next, and so forth. We can think of the extension of space in a precise length, which we call an inch, and then we can measure one inch succeeded by the next, and so on.
Through Kant, we can see that whereas we naturally think of movement—the measure of space in conjunction with a measure in time—actually requires the ideal concepts of space, and more importantly, time, before it can be perceived. We think of a ball traveling through space requiring physical space as its fundamental requirement for motion. But in actuality, before we perceive it in space, moving or not, we first require within us the sensation of time, because time is internal to us, as much as space is external. Things must be existent in duration, before they can exist in space.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

-Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach, XI

Movement is change, our way of noticing difference over time. Difference over time, as we make note of it and remember it for ourselves, is history. Marx was interested in history, and specifically, interested in rescuing it from the tradition of German Idealism, born out of thinkers like Kant, who drove us to look internally for our interpretations of the world. Marx wanted us to look back to the outside world, to society, and to history, but naturally he could not completely leave behind the internal world of our transcendental faculties.
Marx’s four fundamental conditions of history are simple, and take root in such material idealisms as basic as time and space to the world of perception and intuition. There are human needs, and with human needs, develop more specific needs. Then there are humans themselves, each existent and fundamentally differentiated from each other as they reproduce; and then more humans, as they run into each other and interact. These humans and their needs must arrange themselves as they seek to fulfill themselves, and so end up with a system of relations between needs, the diversification of needs, humans, and the co-operation between them to negotiate this historical sphere, which we call society.
A need is an attachment to a particular thing more than it is a hole to be filled, as we tend to think of it simply. We may have a hunger for food at a particular time, but the need itself is a desire for food, refracted into beams of light, each shining at a particular time when bent off from the whole of desire. Certain things are illuminated, and then darkened again, but the desire continues within us. We form connections, and then they break off, and perhaps form again in another location or time, driven by the engines of desire constantly running. These connections may be with food itself, or with the land required to grow the food, or with the other humans whose help we require to grow it. This network of connections is constantly oscillating, breaking and then renewing itself, as we travel over our known territories in the material world, moving through physical space and time. Marx calls the connections relations, and equates them with the ideality of language, something appearing only in our consciousness. In his day he assumed only humans (or as he writes, men) had the capacity for communication, and while with idealized communications he may be correct, we have since learned that even bacteria communicate with each other to co-ordinate their needs in space and time. There are millions upon millions of interactions and connections breaking and re-establishing between the teeming life on this planet, all of them furthering the cause of material life.
But Marx wants to juxtapose the material relations with the social relations, because as he sees correctly, there is a distinct breakage occurring between these two, a rhythm that cannot seem to re-establish itself, a timing perpetually out of joint. Nature, the physical world opposed to our mental worlds, “appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men’s relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts,” (German Ideology, 51). Nature and the physical world, does not always adhere to our mental conceptions of it, because our understanding of our ideal faculties is an ongoing process. As such, we oppose nature as a force opposed to our knowledge of it, and we seek to master it as best we can. We develop natural religions, using magic and fetishes and other forms of esoteric knowledge in the attempt to affect the world as best we can. Our desires are routed through our limited knowledge of the stars and the seasons, and blood and other vitreous humors, and the basic social arrangements of the family, the village, the power of humans over humans, and what other sorts of relations as we can devise. We re-territorialize ourselves to our land and each other, organizing our relations through ideas, and our relations with ideas, hoping to somehow overcome this alien force.
And this is simply the beginning. In our effort to reterritorialize, we split our mental and physical efforts into categories, breaking our inherent knowledge of space and time from our measures of physical space and time, separating our needs from our actual work to procure the responses to these needs, and dividing humans and their labors from each other to create new regimes of desires, territories, production, spaces, and times. The division of labor as Marx would have it, but as we are beginning to see, it is something much more cosmologically complicated than that.
Very cosmologically complicated, and of course, we get confused. In the arising regimes of relations, the alien sensation of Nature becomes dislocated, de-territorialized, and routed through different stations and pathways. The productions of product, desire, ideas, and relations become more complicated, and difficult for our minds to hold on to. “The social power, i.e. the multiplied productive force, which arise through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labor, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these,” (German Ideology, 54). The social forces have supplanted the minds which brought them about, and its controlling regime is more powerful than those who invented it. Our measures of space and time, and production and people, and desires and relations, are now more powerful our own interior, fundamental concepts of these things. What matter is your sense of time if you are late for work? Who cares about where you consider home if your mortgage is due? What difference does your skill make if you cannot find a job? What is suffering in comparison to GDP? What is sex in relation to society? Who are our friends, next to the power of our enemies? We are alienated from ourselves mentally, and therefore physically, because we cannot orient ourselves to a world that refuses to acknowledge us. Our ideals will never catch up with the physical world, because our conception of the physical world will not allow itself to be caught.
It was a natural religion which first attempted to change the regimes of ideals to match the natural world. Then, it was the State, which for convenience sake, absorbed all territoriality to itself. The it was Capitalism, and the market, which proved itself more efficient and lucrative than even the State. Will we ever catch up? Is it possible to catch up? Or should we listen to Marx, and try to find a new sort of rhythm?

“Capitalism is a bet about tomorrow—and it’s always the same bet. Tomorrow will be “better” than today. More wealth will be created, more resources will be used, and, excepting recessions, the economy will continue growing forever. The bet takes the form of credit and investment—you lend or invest a sum today to get back a larger sum tomorrow, because tomorrow there will be more of everything (except oil, old-growth forest, et cetera).”

- N+1

Few, other than the lovely N+1 publication of course, are actually interested in review the ideal relations we have regarding our material conditions. It is a big project of course, and there is little way to tell when we are right in diagnosing a neurotic pathway of our consciousnesses, forever banging its head into some material wall because of something territorialized wrongly in one of those less-than-conscious pathways and relations. We can tell when we’re banging our heads of course, but why? And what will make it stop? Who knows, right?
But on the other hand, we have no trouble keeping up with the speed of the times. Change is constant, and we’re on top of that. We can adapt to the newest technologies without batting an eye, and we can be the early adopters, who go out and write long treatises and tutorials for our friends, with no motivation other than helping everyone out, and helping us reterritorialize to a new geography of ideas, spread over a material network moving at an incredible rate of speed. We can make social-tools of connection and communication a radical part of our lives, for whatever benefit there might be. Is there a benefit? Who knows, but we certainly won’t be left behind when we all find out. We’ll be there, and be on the forefront, in the vanguard of… what is it? Ah yes, an archaic term—history. We will be the ones making a change, and we won’t even have to change, because change will become what we are, moving at the speed of thought.
But this is not real movement. This speed we think we are feeling is just an ideal increase of our time ideal. It is a sensation of always being in the present, and of history increasing its speed, and of us hanging on for dear life. But we are not moving. Society is much the same as it ever was, and it is only our relative sensation of speed which has decreased. As we shrink our quantitative segment of time, we assume, according to our material model of the world, that we are speeding up. We are not going faster, only our world is getting smaller. We are completely ignoring our acuity for ideal timeliness, and focusing on the passage of quantitative time segments before our eyes. We have rejected the ideal realm completely, and look to society for what we should think and feel. We have thrown away the idealism of Kant, instead trusting our most basic empiricism, as dictated to us by societies regimes. Society says Twitter is new, Twitter is fast, and Twitter is hot. But does it ever say why? Some completely ignore this toy train, but others grab a hold of it, shrieking with delight at the speed they are told they are feeling.
Marx would be appalled that we have become so propertyless, and yet our consciousnesses tell us we are rich. We have less, and are told it is more. History is stretched out to the breaking point, and we are told we are moving faster than ever before. We are so used to being deterritorialized, and having our world dragged out from under us, that we barely wake, instead just rolling over and going back to sleep.
And yet, the world is changing. We have new realms for society to inhabit, electronic realms that are virtually infinite in size. Our ideal concept of space itself becomes irrelevant to these sorts of connections and relations. Our ideal concept of time is left at the station, unable to feel any sort of time in relation to instant communication. Perhaps it is a state of constant deterritorialization, except that there are all these connections being made. All of this progress—perhaps not in a direction, or with any measureable rate of change, but change all the same. There is something happening, but we are not sure what. We connect, and others connect, and we engage, and we share, and we co-operate, and we produce, to what? What sort of production is this? The division of labor has grown into a division of cosmology, and one industry of cosmological progress cannot unify itself with the others.
The history, left confused and spinning in the dust, catches onto a gear and is pulled again into the machine. It is spread out, stretched, and multiplied, found in the strangest of places. In an article off in a corner of the Internet, an unnamed author calls out a particular social relation, explaining how it is a dirty trick, taking advantage of its participants for the benefit of a few individuals. Elsewhere, in a multi-party discussion on a web page, conclusions are offered about the future of a particular technology for connecting individuals across the world in archivable discussion. And then somewhere else, a particular person discovers a way to broadcast her personal opinion to a large number of people from her cell phone. She does so, serendipitously mentioning these two previous things, which she just so happened to witness unfolding on the Internet. Then, in a month, when the previously mentioned technology becomes available, someone searching for information about it happens across the old posts, and sees the evidence of the social injustice, and begins to test a third-party app for protesters to use with the new technology. The rest, as they say, is history.
But what sort of history is this? A history that is taggable, multi-user, archivable, constantly evolving with new uses and new developers, the very accessible fabric of which is constantly under revision, restructuring, retirement, and rerouting. Every person whose thought is routed through these series of connections becomes a part of this history instantly, though in what quantitative measurement, and to what isolated, casual effect is impossible to say. But there is an effect, there is no doubt about it.

“The real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.”

- Marx, in The German Ideology, 55

We always seem to return to our history. Only now our history is globalized, but split into fragments, not determined by the national and local lines of our previous history. It is stratified, but its stratification is one of connections, not of divisions. Our connections will not unify our history, but they can make a divisive rift impossible to maintain. Once the center could not hold, but now it is the splits and segments that will always shatter. The network is always on, and always connecting. Access is the principle, rather than the exception.
Our ideal concepts of time and space may just return, once the quantitative segments we have replaced them with in our minds refuse to stay ideal. Those primary principles will help us form territorializations and connections rather than needing to be paved over. What is the day to a world constantly online? What is a border to an anonymous chat? The real ideals may return, and we will remember than time is anything contemporaneous, and space is anything simultaneous, and with ideal time and space, flows ourselves. We will no longer feel society condensing us to singularities of infinite speed, but feel ourselves expanding to moments of pure totality, as far as we can reach. We can’t connect with everything it the world, but we will have occasion to connect with the right things, the positive things, and that which can help us all, cooperatively. The infinite will return to its proper place inside us, and we will be free to engage with the finitudes of space and time in the world. We can deal with finite needs, finite desires, and finite space and time in which to affect them. We can make the proper connections and territorializations, not simply unified or totalized connections with regimes of control. The ideal will be brought back into proper relation with the material, and while it will never be a unified partnership, the alienation will stop shifting from one side to the other, and can be parceled out as it should be. There will be no moment of eternal, ahistorical self-consciousness, but rather a continuous unfolding and production of timeliness against time, and existence against space, and world-historiality against the tragedies of history.
It remains on the “real ground of history,” the surmounting of ideal and material obstacles by human beings. It is production, and relation, and resolution, and consumption combined into movement, the pure movement of ideal space over ideal time, and therefore, material space over material time. It is a passing-over, a constant presence of returning, a timeliness in atemporality, and a existential nonexistence in our spaces and bodies. By feeling the speed within us, we can properly measure it outside of us, not for a unification of quantitative segments with any particular regime, but to build from the segments something we can use.
But, Marx and Kant both knew its not something that exists apart from us. Technology dramatically changes the world, but only inside our heads can we really change ourselves. And then, once we have become the change in ourselves, perhaps there will be material change we can notice.

Letters to the Past

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

Oct.1st, 2009

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Dear 1959 (or thereabouts),

Somewhere across the limited expanse of your body, the poet Jack Spicer was mailing and receiving letters with James Alexander. He thought of them as poetry. Maybe Alexander was a lover; maybe the poems were published during his lifetime, or perhaps not. I would be someone knows the answers to these questions—someone still alive. Or it even could be written down some place. To my edition of The Collected Work of Jack Spicer there is a lengthy introduction. Maybe it says there, but I read the introduction several weeks ago, and I cannot remember now.

But I read letter #5 in this edition just now—what do you mean, what “just now”? When? Just now. I don’t understand your question. But this is some of what it said, if I may reproduce it here for you:

It is not the monotony of nature but the poems beyond nature that call to each other above the poets’ heads. The heads of poets being a part of nature. It is not for us to make the lines of nature precise. Because of their fatal attraction for the lines of nature, for our heads.

We proclaim a silent revolution. The poems above our heads, without tongues, are tired of talking to each other over the gabble of our beliefs, our literary personalities, our attempts to project their silent conversation to an audience. When we give tongue we amplify. We are telephone switchboards deluded into becoming hi-fi sets. The terrible speakers must be allowed silence. They are not speaking to us.

Don’t you see, dear friend, 1959? You know so much! So much happened during your brief, single year life. You are an epoch unto yourself. And you were in the age of letters, my friend. Letters. And yet—so much!

I don’t need to tell you everything that occurred across the expanse of your skin. You know already. But Jack Spicer was sensing it. He was in it, friend, just as he was in you. The idealism within us, sending up poems like rockets into the even more idealistic heavens. But free from our gravity, the poems were still tied to our constraints. Poor natural us, stuck within our beliefs and our personalities. We could only aim upward, and fire away. It’s only natural. Our heads refusing to rise above our headstrong selves. As if we could be such a revolution of stereo.

You know the story, don’t you, friend? You’ve sent your share of letters, written your share of poems. Like any year, such a poet you, you let fire forward, trying to hit us in the back, and maybe remind us. The shooting gallery of history of course, no harm intended. Back in your day, when you mailed a letter, you had to believe—you had to take it on faith that it would get there. You had to write ahead of time to land your language missiles in the present, and more likely than not, when they got there they would too late, and land in the past. From one personality, to the next, you addressed your letters, and some times they got there. Sometimes not.

It must have been a hell of a time, friend 1959. I can’t even begin to imagine. But I got your letter, written via Jack, and I just wanted to touch base, and say, yes—I got it. I hope this reaches you well, wherever you are.

Love,
Adam

PS. A better way to reach me might be on my… actually, never mind. Forget it.

Dear 1977 (or maybe it was 1976, though my letter wasn’t translated for another ten years),

You had a hell of a life, didn’t you my friend? I’m sorry that I can’t quite recall your name, but this was about the time things were getting complicated. They perfected packet switching back then, and letter writing was going to change significantly. It’s leaving me a bit confused, to puzzle over it. But we’re still friends, aren’t we? I think I can call you my friend. I’m writing you this letter, and I only write letters to my friends.

I’m not the only one who is (was?) confused. Look at Jacques Derrida, puzzling over it himself in The Postcard. Direct mail, from the master of letters himself:

You give me words, you deliver them, dispensed one by one, my own, while turning them towards yourself and addressing them to yourself—and I have never loved them so, the most common ones become quite rare, nor so loved to lose them either, to destroy them by forgetting at the very instant when you receive them, and this instant would precede almost everything, my envoi, myself, so that they take place only once. One single time, you see how crazy this is for a word? Or for any trait at all? [ ] Eros in the age of technical reporductibility. You know the old story of reproduction, with the dream of a ciphered language [ ] Want to write a grand history, a large encyclopedia of the post and of the cipher, but to write it ciphered still in order to dispatch it you, taking all the precautions so that forever you are the only one to be able to decrypt it (to write it, then, and to sign), to recognize your name, the unique name I have given you, that you have let me give you, the entire strong-box of love supposing that my death is inscribed in it, or better that my body might be enclosed in it with your name on my skin, and that in any event my own or its survival or your own be limited to the life of—you.

Do you see what I mean? Such paranoia of the subject, we were forced to write in code just to get away from ourselves! And what does it mean, and what does I mean? Are we any closer to the truth? With all this semiotic packet-switching, the exchange of meaning through into high gear, played out upon the wires, and still, written one letter at a time, just like we always have.

And even with one of the best languages out there, with the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, Derrida was tripped up in the complexity, in the polymorphous perversity of our language, unable to do something as simple as send a letter from one person to another without becoming lost in the pathways of desire. From the unconscious, to our heads, and up in the air in a brilliant Spicer Rocket, and down again—without any improvement in targeting. Our desires, beliefs, personalities, and egos, all of them clinging to the unchained beauty of our poetic language even as they try and set our poems free. Trapped in the bureaucracy, the academy of letters, our meaning certainly knew its form, but because a twisted mass of substance. Perhaps if Jacques knew about packet-switching—but then, such things were secrets back then.

Secrets, secrets, secrets! The ultimate in letters, such clear and concise poems of meaning, composed and sealed, signed, and delivered to the eyes only. These are not poems to be read to an audience, and allowed to bounce around the heavens. They are directed speech, expressed to one and one only. And afterwards, after communique has been carried out, that one recipient is to destroy the message. The one, the I, must hear those fatal words, “this message will self-destruct.”

If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything, and nothing would have arrived. I mean on the contrary that something ineffaceable would have arrived, instead of this bottomless misery in which we are dying. But it is unjust to say that you did not listen to me, you listened closely to the other voice (we were already a crowd in that first envelope) which asked you not to burn, to burn in order to save. Nothing has arrived because you wanted to preserve (and therefore to lose), which in effect formed the sense of the order coming from behind my voice, you remember, so many years ago, in my first “true” letter: “burn everything”. You had answered me the next day, and this is how your letter ended: “The letter ends on the exigency of this supreme pleasure: the desire to be torn by you” (you are the mistress of the equivocal and I liked it that you left it to me to attribute this desire to the letter, and then you added) “I am burning. I have the stupid impression of being faithful to you. I am nonetheless saving certain simulacra from your sentences (you have shown me them since). I am waking up. I remember the ashes. What a chance, to burn, yes yes [ ].”

Yes, yes dear friend, the tragedy of memory, which we all at some time forget. Luckily, fidelity to our promises has a way of being broken, and secrets have a way of getting out. The tragedies that have arisen throughout our history because of letters misdelivered, or misread, or worst of all, not delivered in time, will eventually be forgotten with everything else. Most the encyclopedias will be forgotten, many of the histories if not all, and we will forget some or all of our letters. And by this I mean, my friend, the small letters: the pieces torn from the larger letters, those individual signs, which we tear up and forget, and then build up and re-send, forgetting that we have already received such meaning.

Those were the times, these frantic mailings, and these dispatches from our own memories scribbled on the back of dirty postcards we came across among more scholarly books. There is a certain charm to them, don’t you think? Something poetic about the search for meaning, about the drastic expressions we fired out of the tops of our heads, only falling back to earth to hit us, and leave us stunned.

But I fear I must go, because the future is calling me onward, and because time keeps a-ticking away, as it does, doesn’t it my friend? Yes, indeed! Good luck with your letters, and with those early attempts at packets. Do a good job, because we’re counting on you in the future!

Love,
Adam

Dear Cyber-Time,

Hello! How I’ve looked forward to writing you this letter! You wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork I’ve had to deal with today, and now, finally, I can get on to the pleasure of correspondence.

But then, you know that, don’t you, dear friend? You’ve seen my letters to my friends 1959 and 1976, because in the present, letters work a bit differently than they used to. Do you mind if I… no? Good. Yes, I’ll explain a little bit for anyone listening in.

You see dear friend, (and I hope you won’t mind if I continue to call you this, though I don’t actually know you. No? Good!) we don’t write letters anymore, do we? Now we send email, and instant messages, and a myriad other things I haven’t even bothered to learn about yet. There is no more waiting for the infinite slowness of physical space, for pieces of paper to wind their way around the world, and through a slew of different D/T time zones, to finally reach another person’s hands. Now our letters are packets, and they are switched instantaneously, or nearly so, and continuously, meaning all kinds of things most of us don’t even begin to understand. There are new languages and new technologies evolving almost daily. But the good part is, they easily replicate our old languages, so we can write up all those old beliefs, feelings, personas, and egos into tiny packets as send them whizzing off with the light, even faster than a rocket, these photon poems burning continuously, singing all kinds of things you could hope to know and more, across a brand new body of time—the body of time that is instant, and infinite in size. You’ll never end, will you, Cyber-Time? Well, maybe. Probably. But I won’t know a thing about that until it happens. No happy new years to you.

What we shoot out of heads does not launch on a doomed parabolic, a Cartesian acceleration we only hope will hit the mark. Now there is no “late”, “undeliverable”, “missed connection”, or “buried desire”. It is all thrown upward, where it hovers infinitely in a stasis of meaning, a giant unconscious of networked letters, which can be delivered at any time, forever. We still call it “mail” sometimes, out of nostalgia, or because we haven’t bothered to come up with a better word. Maybe we don’t think about it enough. But one thing is for sure—we sure aren’t licking stamps, or visiting a post office, or remembering addresses.

But where is Jack? Jack? Are you there? Our telephone switchboards are no less deluded, my friend. Our typewriters think they are networked minds, but they are really no more than speedy telegraphs with really good memory. Better memory than us. We still send our poems out into the Internet, and don’t even remember then when they are half sent. We are still clouded with our own unconscious, forever human, as we are. We still seek expression, and though our letters are unlimited, now unconstrained by space and time, we might never find the most perfect composition. We will probably never write that most perfect love letter, and James Alexander may never return to San Francisco. Oh, you rockets of desire! Is there any missile gap you can overcome? Probably not. Probably not, my friend.

And Jacques? What about Jacques? Who will understand all the fibers behind our new paper, and figure out the true meaning of all of those picture postcards we hopelessly write? Will the elimination of time, and the reduction of history to a constant, repeating unconscious exchange of memories amongst ourselves finally solve the problem of the longing for the perfect relationship with that ineffable one, the subject, who tempts, sucks, and squeezes our desires out from us, in the watery flow of ink upon the page, or in the pure difference between black and white as found in our pixels shimmering photons? No, my friend, most likely not. Whether in truth or in secret, there is nothing we could say that would dispel the darkness, purify in flame, and reduce the mystery of existence forever.

So what is there for my two dead friends, 1959 and 1976? Is there any historical justices for my friends, which will finally give them the answers they seek, and satisfy the desires within them, burning them in a constant flame of poetic pain? No, most likely not. The tragedy of Cyber-Time is that it is no freedom. The end of the play makes it no less tragic, because after all, the design of acts makes them only ever follow after each other. Things are different now perhaps, and we send a sort of letter we never would have desired, because we never believed it possible. History now looks all about the same—as far as I can remember, anyway.

Well, as you always say, dear friend, until then!

Love,
Adam