December 2008 Archives

Quiet. Desolation of the plains.

A faint wind, whispering more than rolling; I am privy to its ministrations if I don"t move a muscle.

My appendages are carefully removed, piled in a neat heap on the floor alongside the cot - well, as neat as a heap of appendages resulting from dismemberment can be.

The excessive occupation of my mind seems to have abated. Or should I say, the visitations have ceased. As silence builds through me, the last of the visitors seem to ooze away, as if they were jelly dripping from a sloppy jar. And sloppy jar I have been - but no more. The stakes are too high: my existence depends upon it.

Not that I am one to place value upon my existence, per se, or an existence in the abstract, one as microcosm for the all... No , this is far simpler. Custodian of my fate, whether errand-boy or master, it is unseemly to say the least to abandon one's charge, however compromised, however pain-saturated.  Gosh, unseemly is a ridiculous descriptor - it is downright wrong to do so.

Dear Reader, you have suffered along with me to some extent - perhaps cursory, perhaps deeply - so I owe the debt of honesty to you in the sweet recompense that is voluntary commerce, Simply: I no longer had the option to, so to speak, dick around with my existence; when the fates brought their ticket in, it was time to put up or shut up. And, I am sure it will not come as a surprise to you - I was a few quarts shy of a full tank. Insufficient fuel for the trip. Dead in the water, if one took the even-slightly-more-long-than-the-short view. And embarrassed, forgetful, ashamed, unrepentant, and disoriented all at the one.

And so across the Great Water we go. Into the voidal quietude. A silence as vast as - well, as vast as is. A flicker: presence. The mind, astonished: not numbed, but - not inverted, but freed. No objects. No size. Time is a vacuum, into which abhorrence disappears. Incapacity. Subluxation. Ready the cartoon music, which plays silently.

It's not the easiest thing in the world to write when you have no body.

No, I'm not asking for sympathy. No offense, but what would your sympathy do for me? Staunch the flood of thick serum from the razor-licked lines running down my arms, my trunk, my face, my legs?  Stabilize the spasmodic response of my corporeal envelope to this patently fatal disruption of its homeostasis? Notify my next of kin, especially the dead ones? (Why would the living ones care? As Tricky Dick said, you won't have me to kick around anymore.)

No, I am simply observing the quandary i which I find myself. I do take it on as a personal mission, a personal challenge, to record the war raging in our souls. My little battle is but a grain of sand on the beach of the Great Struggle, but as a microcosm it holds the war entire within its angsty boundaries. So: care to give me a break? Get this body over to the desk, or else get me the fuck out of here! If I can't write, I can't live - I just can't stand it, and neither should you.

That being the case, pass the scalpel, please? Yes, I know I cannot take it from you, given the immobility of my arms; I'd like you to pass the scalpel across my windpipe, or other ready access to the carotid artery. You're my ticket out, pal! God, can't you see it: you are the freedom rider! the giver of the gift of life - or, perhaps, from life, but whatever - you get the drift. Cut me loose, goose, I gotta talk to an angel about a leviathan...

OK, OK, I will stop complaining. But please, please turn off that wretched music! It torments me more than the sick ache in my extremities as my blood seeps away from its original mission, and, looking as awkward as any out-of-place performer, flows to no place in particular - as long as it is away - in a deliberate if motive-free Dance of Death. Bring it on! You think I can't stand this? You think I am unwilling, or unready, or unsuited to die? Fuck You, Mr. Rosewater! This is what I was born to do - get it? This is my hour, my task, my elevation, my release, my exhausted mistake in the wake of cascading misapprehensions and wrong turns which dot my recent past like pox run wild on the face of a child. I'm ruinning wild. I'm running out. I'm out.

Two strikes, and I'm already out. Where's Rockefeller when you need him? Now let's not have any jejune jokes about lightning my load, or striking when the iron is hot - I am the iron, goo-goo-g'joob  - the irony of which is too much, really, really too much. Shut up! Don't you hate this? I do.

But do help me out, OK?

Just one thing:

Who was that man with the mask? Did the lightning come from inside? Are you listening to my thoughts? Can't you please send my friend? I really need her, really really .... it would be more than an act of mercy: it would be a boon. No, not a boom - a boon! No, I wasn't threatening to blow you up! Why would I do that? Are you mad? Wait - that's crazy! No. For God's sake!

zap!

Strike Three.

Hmmm.

Dark in here...

Nelson?
  

 

 

I would like to start this entry on an upbeat note, but I am incapable of that right now.  As if coming to grips with my recent ordeal was not enough, what should re-emerge into my realm of quandary but the legal attack of my corporeal entity. It's not that I am unhappy, or angry - both of which are in fact true. It is that I am weighed down to the point of incapacity, so overwhelmed do I feel. I must warn you, reader, that this entry is plagued by distress, irresolution, and even some plain-old pretty gross reportage. So, if you are looking for amusement or edification, you may well wish to consider skipping this one; I feel badly enough without having to think about its negative impact on you. But now I continue - as I must.

No sooner had I taken a brief respite from my relentless inquiry, returning to my above-ground pad in search of nutrition and protection, when I noticed the paper tacked to the outside of my front door. Was it precognition that froze my heart with apprehension? Or am I just becoming a trained animal, ready to halt, tremble and slather at the slightest sign of unfamiliar approach? I thought I was at least somewhat resilient; if you have, in following my story, deemed me worthy of any appreciation in terms of strength of will, mind or character, I regret that I must disabuse you of such a notion. Apparently I more closely resemble a slug , or perhaps a slime mold - which, ironically, lined the walls of my cell in the oh so recent past.

"Suffer and Die!" read the bold print across the top of the legal-sized paper. Well, actually it simply addressed me by name, and continued to  inform me that I was no longer required to appear in court to defend myself against my corporeal entity's charges. To the contrary, I was to be invited to a holiday party on its behalf! "Let bygones be bygones!", exclaimed the note, as it subtly emitted odorless viral material into my respiratory system, carried by the heavy breathing which my confusion and fear had induced. Clever, no? Soon I was dead.


Is this why the floor of my room is covered in blood? I was not aware blood was so sticky - I find it difficult to walk, to lift my feet. Long strands of maroon viscosity festoon the gap between my foot and the floor - and the sound: not a screech, but a far-off awful moan of some kind. Oh wait - that is me. I am afraid. As I might be. I cannot control my locomotion, feeling as if I was drunk from some illegally stimulant-saturated beverage, and my gyroscope teeters alarmingly off to the side, as if I were perambulating gravity-free on the outside of a space station. I tumble to the ground, as if in slow motion. The sticky blood is apparently quite deep, because I feel it course down my throat, choking me in an orgy of plenitude, as if a giant wave, virile with moon gravitation, had sucked me under and stolen my footing. I am gone, again.

Rainbows scrape my face. I hear a clatter of birds' wings, and my ears hurt from the percussion. An invisible doctor and his elongated associates tower above me, tools gleaming cold silver in their hands, I sense blades everywhere. My arms are sliced along the vertical meridians, deep red emerging like a generous tide, rising from the open flesh, then running in swift and sickening rivulets down, down... Unconsciousness, greeting me, would be welcome; but it is the doctor I must face. God spare me! Oh, that's right, I offended the Supreme One last time by talking  cheek. Oh well, too bad for me. The doctor has white teeth - impossibly bright. What is that, glinting light into my eyes from behind his head? Sleep? Fainting? No such luck. You shall be awake.

The Passion of the Fish is a lost film by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Set in a small medieval village on the coast of Italy, it documents the steady and relentless erosion of the narrator's faith as he attempts to endure virtual imprisonment and social isolation. Unusual for its use of documentary footage in the service of fiction, it hadn't previously come to life, as shooting just completed yesterday. When I left the hole. Because that's what Pasolini was shooting. Even though he's dead, at the hands of a roadside pickup. Or the mafia. Or political enemies. Or in an enactment of his own script. When his body was discovered in the trunk of the car, the cans of undeveloped film were found with him. Even though that was 33 years ago. The film couldn't be developed, since it had been exposed to three decades of changing climatic conditions in the car's trunk. Even though shooting was just wrapped. He wasn't entirely happy with it, as I understand. But then again, my perceptual faculties were severely compromised at the time, and he had been dead for quite a while. You can see the difficulty in all this.

But it pales next to the difficulty of the poison, which followed the fish; even though the word "passion" is in the title (translated from the original "la passione dei pesci") when distributed in the States through Godard's  association with Janus Films (and released straight to DVD as "la passion des poissons" - although both Godard and Janus deny any participation in, or knowledge of, this release), the real passion came later. But we will get to that, because, although the fish was present from the start, the transitional point - the so-called "plot pivot" - came via the poison.

Have you ever found yourself lost in a forest, with no hope of finding your way out, and no food supplies remaining? I'm sure you have. Like me, you probably looked for something - anything - to eat: roots, berries, small animals, insects, tasty leaves, and so on. And, like me, you probably didn't find anything. And, like me, you probably sought a soft bit of earth on which to lie, on which to wait patiently for sleep, and then, for death - inevitable, the only question is how long - either by starvation, exposure, or, best of all, at the hands - or teeth - of a predator.

I am so sorry - I did not mean to awaken unpleasant memories! I know you did not travel all this way - across the many, seductive and varied Internets - to be accosted by such memories - even though they are yours, and you cannot escape them - you know you should stop trying to escape them - look, even here, where you expected to find nothing, or less than nothing, they have found you! Don't you understand? Really, it is completely futile to even imagine escaping them - not to mention actually doing so. I'm sure you see that now.

I'm glad that we have that settled. Does your neck hurt? I think I must still have some poison in my system, but no worries - it's not contagious. I, on the other hand, don't know what you might be carrying, but I put my trust in you, and I hope and pray that you will not violate it by exposing me to some deadly virus or impulsive murderous impulse. OK? I mean, give me a break! We haven't even met! Let's, uh, just slow things down a bit, OK? I don't feel so well, you know.

In fact, it evokes feelings of great sadness in me to let the sick sensations bubble up from my veins, forever compromised by the extremities to which I have been subjected. You may feel sympathetic; you may be indifferent; you may think I am a fool. And you would be right. But it is not my fault. Sucking the bones seemed such a simple pleasure; who would have known what it would lead to? God! I'm not religious, but, please, God: save me! It's your fault: you put those bones there, and made them what they were. Oh, they just got that way by themselves? A likely story. You can't expect me to believe that. I know you wouldn't. Uh, I guess I am not supposed to speak that way. Apologies - or something.

I need to lie down for a bit.

I have been underground for some months. Trolls - or perhaps Dwarves, or Republicans - tricked me into their darkened, sun-deprived lair with the promise of release from pain. It was, of course, a shameless lie, but I was desperate, and gullible enough to pursue it. As a reward, I drowned five months of my life in some sticky fluid - lost forever, or so it seems.

Actually, not "lost": I gained much knowledge, almost all of it unwelcome. However, a beam of light penetrated the density of my increasingly sluggish perceptual apparatus, and, as a result, I crawled out of my self-inflicted hole. Of course, I prefer to call it "their" hole, and to blame "them" for my being in it, but that would not only be disingenuous - it would also put the lie to whatever insight I have gleaned by virtue of said bolt of lightning which snapped my fog. So: my hole, my fault. Mea culpa and all that.

So here's the story, faithful reader. Or unfaithful - or faithless - what do I know? What do you know? What do any of us know? Which, in fact, is the point I was trying to get to...

Whilst (homage to the long history of the language which I so freely mangle) deep in the lair of darkness, the following chain of events transpired:

• I accepted the "obvious truth" than my pain was unnecessary, useless, and preventable (must I cut to the chase and presage the plot pivot? the necessary, the needed, the irrevocable?)...
• Shortly thereafter, I noticed that my perceptual apparatus had spawned a comforting, distancing cushioning layer... a feeling as if I had descended into a sensual bliss characterized by some randy flavor of attractive unconsciousness... 
  
• Which cushioning and opacity continued to deepen until I no longer had my bearings...
• And I found myself enthusiastic about truly horrible and reprehensible behaviors and perspectives...
• But as I noticed the extreme growth of my fingernails and toenails, and watched with fascination and a covert horror as they, graying and striated, curled back upon themselves...
• and then: zap!

OK, I know what you are thinking (actually, I have no idea! presumptuous, deluded, myopic, self-referential...)  - that I squirreled myself into a cocoon of protective ignorance and decay, fueled by fear, vanity and delusion - only to be awakened by a luminous random or willful intercession - and you only need read further to be privy, to identify what brought this gift of release, of awakening... but you would be wrong.

No, dear reader (don't you hate that?) - I was not released, awakened, by a gifted intercession. To the contrary, I was poisoned. Self-poisoned, if you must know. And this I will further describe, haï lecteur - as soon as I can rub the sensation back into my wrists, scarred, chaffed and bruise-pocked as they are...