Night Walks

The night-time shade is thick and concealing like ink. It is penetrated in front of his widened eyes by a long, angular face, corpse-white, with sparkling blue eyes and a smile. The face passes by, other faces can be seen, cracking through the dimness, their all-too-familiar pallor. he sits and he walks, he avoids the formal prescriptions of social interaction, he is comming from a party; he would like to be walking now arm in arm with a friend whom he could lean in close to and whisper something, whose eyes would be vacant, big-yellow like lemons, and watching the passers-by. Recently he held a dog brain, smaller than one might think, in his cupped hands and smelled the blood. If he could smell his own brain it would smell the same.

It is summer time, but the night is so black and the street lights so orange that he can almost see the fat, white snowflakes falling beneath them, reflecting their light all the more powerfully for the wind which blows them quickly slantwise. Thousands of golden shooting-stars comming on like a train, falling a thousand miles per hour, knocking him down with their wanton, dizzying, unrestrained momentum. He shivers. He thinks. His thoughts turn to dust. France is a really strange place, what sort of party was that anyway? I should have never gone, that is true, but why did I leave so early? Pink and white tulips as big as buffaloes with marbled streaks of white swallow up store-fronts whole. Why all the goddamn flowers? So bright one can hardly sleep.

Post #11

I think the purpse of mankind is to create a game so perfect that it presents the expirence of being a human exactly.

Post #10

What would it mean anyway to try and speak about ourselves and the world we live in? There are plenty of words that we could use, but has anything really been said? We talk about our seperation from things, and when we hand something to somebody we do so graciously. We are nevertheless forced to speak of relationship, to analyze the pressing against of our extentions on the floor, the space we take up, and the influences of the seductions of Thing on our sped-up world view. The sickness we never feel, our desire for unreality. The swollen, felty feelers of our lying language contaminating everything they feel so delightedly and with such rapid abandon. We still speak and, more importantly, criticize. And there is much to criticize. But is relationship still one such possibility? Are we not rather something more superficial; animals perhaps all along? Our bodies press against the floor and it is nothing special, we take up space, we forget always what we look like, the thing, invested with all its corporate intentionality, remains boring. (Warhol elevated his soup can to art, and we all clapped our hands, "good job".) Our language points us towards changing horizions, we step and we end up at the border of nothingness. Argument fails because we aim to convince each other of a feeling we all feel, but cannot analyze or repair.

I think the only thing left to write is cultural catch phrases.

Is this not correct? Is it too pessimistic? Have we left something out? What the hell are we talking about anyway? Is equivocation a stylistic device? Can we continue in this vein with justification? I imagine we wrote the above note while zipping around like a heavy light-beam in a walnut shell. Are we finally just dicks if we call it a light-beam of language?

Addendum

Upon reflection, what I've said about mankind is not true, or it is, but only one side of the coin: death, afterall precedes birth, and forgetting paves the way for new remembrances. The philosopher must truly remain silent, but the artist might still have a chance! That new culture appears first to be merely banal might simply be its nature. Praised in its lifetime by pedants, and awed later by forlorn poets. Progress is still to much to hope for, but the end, I think, is not yet in sight; the brave may therefore still embrace action!

Post #9

Video games are perhaps a real means of cracking through reality which I like to think of as resembling an eggshell, only finely painted. That reality is really that fragile really ought not to be doubted: death gives us ample evidence to believe so. Either we become nothing, or our soul carries us somewhere else, yes? That's what Plato thought anyway, but in either case reality is shattered. Reflections of this sort lead me to hope that my present form of existence is actually a game also. That perhaps I am actually a famous historical figure of the past whose expirences I am now living, as though they were mine and with no knowledge of any disparity, with the aid of some super advanced mind-and-body-overwhelming game system.

But such is mere fantasy and really doesn't help anyway. For I must still die, no matter how many times I play the game; that is, how many different lives I am programmed to live. We could talk about the philosophical implications of such a possiblity, but in fact there are none. True philosophy, that which occurs under staircases and in broom closets, where angels live as dust and balls of twine, has already taught itself to be silent. Sadly mind you--the lesson was full of anger historically, and you would yell too if, after so many years, you discovered you were mute--but now only sadly. And the excited still do philosophy in the light, but they seem only to be adults who have decided to be children because it is easier.

The artist is the real grown-up. For the first time maybe has he the true raw power of the philosopher; he may be naked and still evil, hold out his fist with fire reflected in his eye and actually mean it in some important way. But this power is reversed, or negative: it comes not from above or behind things, but rather it belongs to the bones of the philosopher: to his words that he has sworn no longer to speak, that is, to his unspoken words. The artists' power then is no longer the power to redeem, but indeed the last vomit-green rays of human truth. A scourge demanding that mankind yield!

On the bright side, there is no mankind, and therefore no artist with the will to this power. What remains seems to be the slow forgetting: the soup of culture has run dry and we're not hungry anymore, it did taste good at the time, but with full bellies that delight is forgotten. Like the squirrel who ate bubble-gum, we'll starve to death fully satiated. And it will take so long that on our deathbed we will have forgotten that we ate anything at all.

The analogies are all breaking down now: the squirrel might now explore his world, no longer consumed with hunger. But our soup was our exploration, and yet in reality we would still explore if we could; we are therefore satiated only because we must be and we forget only because we die.

Post #8

Seven was a good number to stop at, but I changed my mind, which I'm allowed to do. Changing one's mind is the bedfellow of lying through one's teeth, therefore, if Bush changed his mind everybody wouldn't care. Anyway, I'll probably stop at 9 because that's a good number too.

So I've discovered a word that justifies anything, and that word is: literally. I'm not joking, it literally justifies everything.

I intend to eventually post and attempt to analyze a poem by Gottfried Benn that I think you all should read. I'm writing this now to remind myself to post it.

That's it. Mazur, I dedicate this post to you for convincing me to change my mind.

Three Notes about God

It is about time somebody says what everybody has been thinking for awhile, namely that the Greek and Roman gods do, in fact, exist. By inference to the best explanation I tell you: they exist. Of course, it is not really correct to call them the Greek and Roman gods, they only resemble these gods. And we can't afterall know anything about them anyway, so it is pointless inventing silly cosmologies. Xenophanes told us that if horses had gods they would resemble horses. But he was wrong: horses do have gods, and they do resemble horses, which means that they mostly like to fuck and eat hay. Likewise do our gods resemble us. Also, they like to watch the Olympics and get high and shit.

One plain and not unusual day, although it was to become strange and unusual because of what happened, God's voice boomed over the sky in every spoken language and informed poor mankind thus: "My dear children, during my long sabbatical you have truly astonished my expectations; I am pleased and very displeased, and in my infinite wisdom I have decided to reward you with the curse of an elevation in status. Henceforth, you shall all be immortal. None of you shall age or bear children--those now pregnant will carry their little thinking burdens forever, and though the bodies of all children will not develope, their minds will. I grant to you, my children, an infinite depth of mind and memory, so that you will never exhaust your capacity. And I will protect each one of you from the gun and the guillotine; you shall never die. But I will not protect you from the sins of the flesh. In this way only will you not be my angels. Until the end of time you will be, and yet remain otherwise free. Praise my name."
At first nobody believed it, except the literally hundreds of thousands of people who emerged unharmed from the thousands upon thousands of car accidents all over the globe caused by God's unexpected voice.

Would the world be harder or easier to understand if it were not uncommon for children born out of wedlock to have the features of animals, or if say paintings would occasionally be animate and walk around horrified? Or if in war the dead were known to rise and slay the living? Or buildings turn and warp on their foundations, change colors violently, and then come to rest more or less normal and with a few casualties? And if solid ground would suddenly digest a pedestrian and excrete the stinking remains smelling of wet earth? We could imagine any number of things like this. But would individual man be then more easily satisfied? It is not altogether illogical to suppose so. Eating the dried cake of hope and query in vain cannot really be less satisfying than a nonsense world. The existential nightmare, pardon the cliché, is afterall the regularity and banality of existence. Rather should existence be really terrifying. War is important to mention here, because in war are things as unpredictable as described above possible. War would make more sense then, if the world itself conformed, and really, we'd all be a lot happier I think.

My Copper Elephant

A child who grew up all alone had for company only a miniature copper elephant. Supposedly his parents had left it for him, before they disappeared. The child lived in a pleasant, if boring, place and had all the nourishment that he could desire. While most children were eating oatmeal and grits, this child feasted on sushi, barbecue, and all sorts of exoctic vegtables. He learned to read and think in many languages, and had access to a vast variety of thought provoking books. He was, however, without mother and father, and he missed them dearly like other children about whom he had read, even though he did not understand very much.

The castle he lived in had many rooms, and one had to be crafty to see them all. The child had counted: twenty, everyday, each one with something new in it. He lived in a magic castle, of this he was certain. Soft white light poured always from the hollow, reverberating walls. One had to get on one's hands and knees and crawl through small tunnels to get to the other rooms. Everyday he wanted to see the new things. Sometimes there were trap doors and they were hidden, one had to solve a riddle or puzzle before they would open. At night he feared that he had missed one; in all the days he must have missed one; what could he have missed? An object priceless without a doubt. Some news about the war? Or something French? The French soul. He loved to think about the feeling of the book in his hand when he read Sartre, he would pretend to be sick all over the little black words.

Only the copper elephant remained the same. Everday something new, and one thing the same. He always left the little thing in the main room, although he dearly wished to put it in his pocket. But he was naked, he had figured that out, naked since the day he was born, so he had no pockets, no pants either. Maybe pants will be a new thing someday. Maybe they have already, and you just didn't know how to use them. This was another of his fears; there had been many times when something simply did not make sense, and try as he might he could not fix it. None of them were pants, I would recogize pants, but one of them might lead to pants.

When he was angry or bored he would toss the little elephant hard against the noisy walls. He imagined that was what thunder sounded like. The hard elephant would scratch the tender walls. The scratches never stayed, he had heard about scratch remover, so it probably happened when you were asleep. Lots seemed to happen when you were asleep; the whole world sometimes changed.... Even the walls change, new walls. Lots of new things everyday too. I've kept books overnight before. Sometimes they come back. It all always changes. New things. Walls. But I don't know why, I ask, and I really don't know.

When I'm dead the copper elephant will still be here, it is because I am organic and therefore decay quicker. I wonder if the walls will change for him?

Post #7

I'm thinking I'll only from now on write prose. It is aferall the style I wish to practice. Yes, prose in general, a specific style maybe; insomuch as any style is particular to its auther. To practice a distinctive style, one with known rules, not yet, even if I make them up myself. Only a general outline at best, but something still to strive for. I'll title them also.

I'm kinda drunk, so the fist one (see above) might not be so great.