THE BOOK

GREEN CANDLE will be published by Snail Press in December of this year. The volume includes most of the writing you can see here as well as a handful of other experimental writing, a full playscript, drawings, and an introduction by Matthew Goulish. It is a very beautifully designed book (designer: Nicholas Monsour) and is constructed of high quality materials, including a protective/decorative slipcover featuring artwork by Jill Adamson. Snail Press is a relatively new endeavor specializing in high-end archival quality art books and poetry. They take pride in an artist/author-focused approach to the business. I could not be happier to be working with this incredible press.

The book is available for pre-order now:

http://snailpress.com/publications/

http://snailpress.com/

THE MOUTH

This place is a mouth. This is all a mouth. Into the mouth all things are gathered, and chewed, and pushed further still into darkness.

There are spots in my lungs now, or have always been, nothing is shrinking, and no longer dying, just me as usual unbalanced on throbbing-numb feet. A mouth I dreamed I didn’t have became instead the world. I gush into the throat to mark my passage from my room to teeth (tongue) to throat to (lung) gut, a mimicry or less of my pathetic insides.

News washes over me as a crashing wave: thunderous but calming, and it happens again and again and soon it is a steady drone and I am vibrating a little.

Pain.

I wish you were here all of my friends, all made of wood. You are solid and grainy and you can be there forever, a tree at the foot of a hospital bed, or simply amble through with positive urgency like the tumbleweed, enough wind to cut your path and levitate my body for a couple days and moments. It will rain sawdust or ashes in the dream which follows because I picture you to be the clouds and the oceans and that’s all there is, and fire. Ease me to sleep; smooth the edges of the jagged ether.

STEADY/DULL

I don’t know anything. A top of a thing set face down on a sink hole, a road, a major vein through a gigantic city falls into the earth, a drop of 40 or 50 feet or 60 feet an abyss. It is a slim vein stretched between a heart and a lung, a liver and a lung, the lung the fleshy balloon of the gut. The gut a chamber or a war room possessed by pulsation, thick immaculate blood trembling through an abstract atlas, a nebulous network of stench and living rot.

I’ve been having these nightmares for the past few weeks. A ****** approaches me at the ****** and ****** me before I can say anything. I think that and then I realize that I cannot speak anyway, and I don’t have a mouth and I look into the mirror and notice that my eyes are disappearing, and then I can’t see. I am a train, I have become a high-speed train and I am crossing a tundra. I freeze up and then I wake up.

There is a hidden tunnel in the woods. But it is not safe or useful, it is just for hiding predators to wait for you.

MISDIRECTION

A field of dirt becomes a grassy field. The field of grass becomes a forest of trees. The plot of earth, at first only rocks beneath an ocean, has worked actively to become itself, to adapt to an always slowly changing context. It defines itself as much as its surroundings, its era, and its context work to define it. The work of delineation. 

In spite of congruity, some of the trees do not live well alongside some of the plants below. An insect appears and destroys an element of the ecosystem. The context is not only at the mercy of nature. There is also chance, and uncertainty, and malice, and magic, and skill, and lack, and fright, and impression, and quickness, and cruelty, and hunger.

Looking in the other direction, looking away from the principal object, is sometimes bread and butter. Cruelty is bread and butter. If you worry too much about your posture in another man’s tableau, it is cruel to misdirect the intention of the tableau.

TREES

Trees grow down into the earth as they grow up out of it - progress in development, bulging and pulsating organic matter, also thinking and the mind, creativity and invention, is occult. Organic matter decomposes when it stops growing, a corpse deteriorates into the earth, the body’s first attempt at that subterranean progress. Death, by decomposition, becomes an extension of your growth process.

Eventually, that which was the body and that which is the earth become indistinguishable, and in fact the soil becomes rich and lively. There is a message here, but I am really not interested in articulating it. I want to say that it has nothing to do with unity.

MONSTERS

A monster is not a human. Monsters have been articulated throughout human history in order to lend a sense of tangibility to encountered evils. Is there evil? Are there monsters?

People have imagined monsters tearing their prey apart from without, creating graphic scenes of gore, pain and screaming. Monster work takes time; they chisel away at the organs bit by bit until the wound produces reactive effects in the prey’s body. Then pain occurs and the prey visits the doctor.

Over time the monsters establish themselves within the prey and they found a network of settlements throughout the gory landscape of guts. They multiply and proliferate, extending their kingdom to other regions – the bones, the nodes, the spine and the brain.

When the body has been ravaged beyond repair, when the horde has remained triumphant in the war with the chemicals and poisons the prey’s doctors have introduced into the body, everybody dies together. The prey and the horde agree in death.

RENDERED

It is easy to add grandiosity. Like buying a magazine at the airport, every person closes his eyes and hums quietly – just enough to facilitate a slight vibration in the skull. Like wearing gloves in the pool, every person behaves confidently, having pocketed his painted ignorance from birth to the void. Every thing that exists careens indifferently about the great vacuum.

In The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck two children, Mytyl and Tyltyl, are given a hat with a magical jewel on it – when the jewel is inverted, the children see the souls of things. The children embark on an epic visionquest in search of the blue bird of happiness. They travel with Light, Bread, Milk, Fire, Sugar, Water, the dog and cat – all now with human faces and the ability to talk – and the good fairy Berylune.  First, they visit the underworld where they make the acquaintance of the queen of the realm – Night – and her children, Sleep and Death.

The most pleasurable activity is articulation, particularly when you do not understand your subject. The manufacture of comprehension is the apotheotic substantiation of the creative urge.  

We render our knowledge.

THE SQUIRREL

Almost half a year of it and I still don’t trust my pain. I am dully unsure of it, though it defines my daily meter. I am commonly debilitated – in the morning, when standing or walking for any amount of time, after meals – but sometimes I am aware of a thin yet established skepticism within myself. Now, as I think about it directly, I can know without question that I am wracked by incessant discomfort. But when I find myself dwelling on it below the surface of my conscious thoughts, indirectly, there is the squirrel. Is it fake, has all of this been staged? 

On the first floor of our house in Chicago there was a small windowless room that shared no walls with the outdoors; it was an entirely interior room. One day I opened the door to that room and there was a squirrel.

INTERVAL

The interval between sleeping and thinking is a monument and it cannot be articulated by words. The interval, silence, is articulated by a watering of the eyes, the eye lids which do not open, the clear eye, the glossy eye, the muddled eye. The interval, silence, precludes the feeling; the feeling precludes the articulation. The articulation is the final moment of the interval’s existence, in that the interval, silence, exists as a memory (monument) for some time following its chronological manifestation. The eye waters, or is stuck or glossed, and the initial feeling of the day is presented, the chronological life of the interval coming to an end. Sleep, silence, articulation.

Is it important that sleep defies articulation? The psychoanalysts, the theorists, the Surrealists sought to articulate the abstracted monuments of sleep. To articulate is to define, which is too violent for sleep - vast and rich as a solar storm.

Evolution will lead us away from the vulgar urge to transform everything into language. Language is like the interval, silence, and is tempered if not betrayed by the watering, stuck-shut, glossy or muddled eye.

ON GRASPING

Is death painful? When someone dies a calm and quiet death, is there a moment of inexpressible anguish? Is it that prospect of a final and ultimate human pain my biggest fear? Is it a primal fear? If there is such a moment of pain, is it the fundamental human pain? Is it the predicate of all suffering? If so, is it an illusion? 

Emotions might be complex constructs of the brain, symbolic manifestations of our abstract yearning.

The sensation of being looked at is the hallucination of the social. It is the fundamental hallucination of self-perception. Maybe the definition of hallucination positions such visions within a plane of abstraction that resides one step beyond the relative articulation of perception we equate to reality, in the way that metaphysics resides one step beyond physics. This reductive form of visualization allows people to experience the sensation of grasping.

The climber grasps a jutted branch as she loses her balance; the explorer grasps the patriotic meaning of his discovery; the infant gasps for air.

PAIN

In the morning, nebulous. Later, nebulous. The air is a fruit jelly and there are seeds in it punctuating my eyes. Feedback travels across the monitors at invisible speeds. This instance is a manifestation of pain.

Sometimes pain is manifested by its own recession. The drug is the referent of the sensation it tends to obliterate. The jam is a tightrope between the pain and the treatment. It spreads like everything, all through me and how it pleases, into my liver and it consummates, it complicates its new residence, blindly and how it pleases. My organs do not resist the visitor, the tenant, and from without the thick syrupy jelly is gummed across everything, and it punctuates the weakness of a failed resistance. That is the pain protagonist, bleeding and purging and demanding whatever there is, but the pain remains mandatory, and it is also deaf.

Pain is an apricot: having fallen from the tree it rots a few steps down the hill from where it dropped, toward a river, and when the sun finds its way through the branches, it rots more.

ATLANTIS

Disappointment. The inside of your body is a mess, organized and chaotic, a wet and pulsating mass of dark material, guts. We behave as in the wild, the logic of expectations is lost on ourselves, in a labyrinth of caves beneath an island too small to properly name. It is known as a myth-place because the Mapquest directions are super abstract. There is not a way to measure the distance of a day. Time travel has something to do with distance as well as duration, and it is excessive like the weight of the water at the bottom of the ocean. The most remarkable thing about Atlantis is that it isn’t smashed by what it contains.

FATIGUE

Fatigue, like matted fur, leaves an impression – or it leaves a stain on the skin – but it doesn’t matter. Fatigue is meaningless, limiting, upsetting (capsized, thrown into mental discomposure). There are cyclical predicates to our relentless exhaustion, and so they are abided, but it is upsetting like being capsized, upsetting as in thrown into mental discomposure because it is meaningless.  Physical pain contributes, and emotional strain and fear and reading and talking on the telephone, and traveling. 

I find myself beneath the surface of my fatigue and since it is meaningless I cast it out of my visualization and I'm no longer beneath anything. Instead, I am amidst a comprehensive archetype of relentlessness, one without an object, without exhaustion or fear or reading.

The onset of total dissipation into a lack so epically refracted is the principal mise en abîme of my glassy mortality.

WIND WAKE

Cold air enters these rooms in increments – when it is very windy outside, during storms. The windows are new, and they are nice, but they do not shut completely. There is something happening at the top of the window, between the frame and the pane. Also, there is friction in the middle.

Your words are becoming like air. My body is fragile and aches, even when I spring up out of a chair and slip across the wood. If I injure myself my body will not heal. I am prone to “wound healing impediment”. My body’s ability to fix an injury is impeded. I cannot have surgery. There is friction in the middle.

I am uncertain about the function of levity.

The breathing that leads to the words is silent, and I do not think of it until I think about rogue air. Rogue air succeeds in remaining itself because it’s not impeded from embodying its true nature – air travels where it pleases. The earth and the sun and the moon carve great paths in the sky, through the trees, into cities and homes; air is globally unimpeded, like the internet or cancer.

When I am being talked to, I utilize the energy my body manufactures in order to process the meaning of the words, and I'm often unable to contextualize them as readily as I once was. This is how the words disappear. When my house is destroyed, the wind will not destroy it. When my body dies, your words will not have precipitated the malfunction.

Air is invisible. We can only see the wind by its wake.

What do people mean when they say that someone has been “battling cancer” or has “lost his fight with cancer”? I do not feel like I am fighting in a battle. I do not feel like I am fighting. I do not feel aggressive, and I do not feel like I have a way of defending myself from an internal aggressor.

I do not want to die, but I am going to die.

STIG SÆTERBAKKEN

"I believe disharmony and asymmetry correspond to a disharmony and an asymmetry within us, because we ourselves are not whole, or complete. Because we are never fully and completely ourselves. Because our lacks, our weaknesses, and our fears make up an essential dimension within us. Because our wounds are meant not only for healing, but also the opposite, to be kept open, as part of our receptivity to that which is around us and within us. And because there is also relief in this, not to be healed, not to be cured, melancholia satisfies us by preventing us from reaching satisfaction, it clams us by keeping our anxiety alive, it gives us peace by prolonging the state of emergency, the state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind."

IT'S NOT WORKING

It’s not working the way it should be working.

The path between a failure of the treatment and its simple consequence becomes delineated in the inarticulate light of dawn. Delineation is afforded an abstract elucidation even if shrouded by physical inarticulation. I am talking about the physical space embodied by an illustration.

The logic of the illustrative place is the logic of murk; delineation isn’t a metaphor, nor is it performed literally.

Delineation is the mise-en-scène of failure.

But that is not the point. A point is not linear.

SCAPE

Henri Bergson: “A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable.” A landscape is contained – the nature of a ‘scape is defined by its frame, and frames are laughable. Another meaning for the word scape: a shaft or stemlike object.  Picture in your mind a landscape. You see a painting or a photograph, a limited vista lacking perspective focus. A frame is the stem of the growth it contains, bearing a life (comedy) that pulses within. Our obsession with the frame is validated by the pulse. Everything we love has a pulse, and it had a pulse before we loved it. Love, like comedy, is a frame – “beautiful, charming and sublime, or significant and ugly” and also mostly just a simple shaft, a thing supporting another more spectacular thing, a stem. Bergson said that humans are animals that laugh and are laughed at, but also that laughter is couched by indifference. Bergson is wrong. Indifference is a main trait of animals. Laughter, like love, is a stutter in the pulse-scape. Remarkably “human”, everything is always being laughed at, expectations and reason always malfunctioning, and stems are voided of their leaves and flowers by the wind and animals. This is a main trait of landscapes.

BEWILDERMENT

A labyrinth, definitively, is a bewildering argument. In mythology, we know that Daedelus built the original labyrinth as a prison for the Minotaur, but historically the labyrinth was the royal Minoan palace at Knossos on Crete, a sprawling complex of passages and halls built into the island.

If you stare at a waterfall and then look at the wallpaper, you will see its pattern crawling up to the ceiling. The “waterfall effect” is your brain forcing your eyes to perceive of continued motion. It is a bewildering.

If you explore the labyrinth for too long, your reemergence into the common grid will be characterized by monuments and turns you do not remember. A sprawling complex becomes a wilderness of illogical topography. If you explore the labyrinth for two weeks, your neighborhood will lack cartographic certainty for a month. Your prior experience of the city was mediated by the trail of memories you left behind you as you went along, but as breadcrumbs in the forest they will be eaten, bewildered. 

It is reductive to conflate your various perceptions. Although they are physically interrelated, they do not conform to the same laws. Laws are arbitrarily determined, and perception is quantifiable. Each awareness – how to make macaroons, your memory of the lake house, your conception of the planet from Solaris, symbology – is a material island; there are more than seven continents in your mind.

In death, the ocean is not squandered. It remains, dotted by the many-natured islands you (discerned/enabled/constructed/watched grow) in life. However, it is said that the islands become wilder.