PERSON OR ANIMAL

Several people have the same conversation with their sisters. She has been subject to some great injustice, and as a result she will have to leave the country. These people have never met, but two of them are linked by a mutual friend, who upon hearing the similar stories related in separate contexts decides to make an introduction. When they meet, they share their mutual, casual surprise. “Where is your sister moving?” “Guatemala. Where is your sister moving?” “England.”

If my dog and your dog are the same sort of dog, it is possible that people will not be able to tell them apart.

Disconnection has a deep-seated affect as its predicate. Although disparity does not implicitly contain despair it is built by lack, and lack always resembles loss and loss is associated with despair. In that way, despair is nothing more than the cornerstone of the disparate. Despair in itself precludes the affect it produces – its trappings are performed.

When your favorite person or animal dies, they will grind up the bones and mix them into the mortar that will be used to build an unassuming apartment house downtown. 

When things are the same, they cannot be any more different.

TANIZAKI/DARKNESS

Italics by Junichiro Tanizaki, from In Praise of Shadows

Darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.

In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines. These machines are the inventions of Westerners, and are, as we might expect, well suited to the Western arts. But precisely on this account they put our own arts at a great disadvantage.

Perhaps this missed connection is related to the one we find blockading the passageways between the mind and the body, those abstract highways upon which death sits waiting. The body is the phonograph, failing in its so purposeful attempts to manufacture survival, so we distort the message itself to “curry favor” for it with the mind. The mind demands to be let alone, and peace is its only true goal. Lurking death is transformed and disseminated into myriad expressions of tension, distaste, discomfort, yearning – we believe it to be cathartic, this release of expression. But the translation leaves remnants behind, and death continues to troll the highways.

The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.

As long as we shower blinding white light onto everything we can at all times and in every circumstance, we will be blind. It is a terrible blindness, to believe in a truth derived only as it is found – bathed in light and stark comprehension. The darkness of a shadow reveals more about the dynamic and character of a place than washed out electrical lighting can. The relationship between darkness and light is the relationship between all things.

A fool investigates every corner of his room with a flashlight and believes he knows it perfectly.

SADNESS

Sadness is imperturbable: it doesn’t change, it makes itself visible in a number of ways. There is a fern growing near the top of a prominent hill by the city. You are familiar with the fern and you believe that there probably aren’t many other people who have ever considered the fern, though many people come from the city and climb to the top of the hill. When you stand above the fern and face west against the skyline, you begin to feel empowered. You have imbued upon the fern your sadness. You imagine the people from the city brushing past the fern and taking on bits of that sadness until the fern is no longer sad. You climb again to the top of the hill and stand, facing west, above the fern.

To embody your sadness is to dramatize it – the fern is ridiculous because it always appears sad.

BLOOD

Blood has nothing to do with life. Blood is ephemera, kept fresh by the living. People are cavalier with their blood. Blood is a clothing. There are indefinable shapes and perfect shapes – they languish in the blood as loose dirt in the sky. But they are only vessels, transporting overvalued elements throughout the body, like oxygen.

It can be said that life is an æther, that it is the act of the unseen. We problematize the unseen because its lineaments are indescribable. We fetishize the describable because we’re simple. Someone says, “if a thing is indescribable, then how can it be a thing?” Using a word such as æther is like drawing a pattern in the sand to delineate a map. That is, it’s practical.

SOME OTHER PLANETS

There are planets - in our solar system - we cannot see. If they are hiding behind other planets, the sun, or in some dark recess, I think we could find them. But they aren’t hiding. If someone mentions another earth or speaks of alternate dimensions, we are still not talking about the same thing. My planets are invisible, constructed beyond perception, but constructed. If there is life in any of these places, it is not far from us.

When we mow the lawn, is there pain?

To disappear into the blades.

Split into air.

UNDERWORLD

PANTHER: Good day, Mrs. Night.

NIGHT: Good day? I’ve never heard that one. You might say “Good evening” at least.

PANTHER: I beg your pardon… Are those your children?

NIGHT: This is Sleep.

PANTHER: He is very fat.

NIGHT: That is because he sleeps so well.

PANTHER: And the other? Why does she hide her face?

NIGHT: That is Sleep’s sister. It is better not to mention her name… So you have come for the blue bird? 

PANTHER: Yes, if you’ll allow me. Will you tell me where it is?

NIGHT: The bird of happiness resides behind one of those three doors. You may take only one thing with you when you leave this palace.

PANTHER: I understand.

He goes to the first door and opens it. The deafening sound of thunder suddenly fills the space. Three GHOSTS, in various forms, rush the door and try to get through. The PANTHER holds them off, and is able to shut the door.

The PANTHER collects himself and goes to the next door. He cautiously opens it. There is no noise or violence.

As the door is opened wide, a beautiful and calm vista is unveiled: a large fountain lit by the moon, backdropped by snow-capped mountains. 

The PANTHER steps inside. Still nothing, but the sound of water from the ornate fountain becomes audible.

The SICKNESSES begin to crawl and stumble into view. They make a dismal approach, yearning for treatment and cures.

The PANTHER backs out of the room. One little SICKNESS, in slippers and a nightcap, frisks out of the room and into the chamber. The SICKNESS sneezes, coughs and wheezes.

PANTHER: Who is that?

NIGHT: That is Cold-in-the-Head, one of the smallest of the sicknesses. It’s nothing.

NIGHT gestures and the SICKNESS scurries back into the vista. The PANTHER closes the door.

The PANTHER approaches the final door and opens it wide. It is a sky full of blue birds. The sound of their wings fills the hall.

PANTHER: There are so many, an infinite number!

He reaches out and grabs armfuls of birds.

PANTHER: I’ve already caught seven of them! Here they are, so many of them!

He steps out of the room and looks into his arms. They’re all dead. 

PANTHER: What have you done? They’re all dead.

NIGHT: There is only one that can live outside of this place.

THREE MOUNTAINS

There are three tall mountains in a row. Or like a child we believe them to be in a row because they look as such from a distance. A child stands in the village looking out into the mountains and he sees these three mountains as if in a row. The three mountains actually form a perfect triangle – the base of each mountain is equidistant to the bases of the others. The peaks of the three mountains are of equal height, and since they are the tallest peaks in the mountain range, there seems to be a man-made quality to them. Equivalence is a man-made concept, and we take pride in it. We are surprised to find equivalence in nature, and when we do we often start thinking about god or aliens.

A person is never so happy as when he discerns some equivalent property between seemingly disparate things. Thus, it is strange when somebody dies. How does a person die? I am not dead. When I lose a glove, I know that it has not died and disappeared into the æther. It is somewhere. There is a lack of equivalence in death because it is not man-made. Unlike the three mountains, whose parts will infinitely remain, a person evaporates.

THE BODY

Do our bodies speak to us? The answer is “probably”, but the definition of “speak” lacks certainty.  If a leaf is blown against your cheek as you cross through the grass, is it a challenge? When the light bulb in the hallway burns out, it has said nothing. A body is like a bulb: the heat within it is blind. It is the same with thinking, the hallucination of language, itself a more reflexive hallucination. Language is the hallucination of energy, like when you understand the meaning of a poem, like when a kind man becomes murderous, like the flight pattern of a comet. In this way, it is possible that the body is the hallucination of the mind, itself buried beneath these layers of sediment – the rocks, the dirt, the earth of “knowing”. In time, our bodies revolt. Wholly, we are creatures of revolution, no different from the hawk circling the sky, awaiting the emergence of the mouse.

DEATH

Of all the ways death could be, it might be constructed. An obelisk is built by the living in respect to death, but there is another obelisk beneath it – an inverted black obelisk that is death itself. The memory is the spectacle of the actual. The spectacle is designed to placate and satisfy the needs of the mourning, as the actual trembles beneath, a living death not made of stone. This obelisk is a shadow not created by light, a visible darkness. It is covered in eyes; it is an eye.

Beneath a lighthouse there is a similar growth, a negative replica of the lighthouse that does not shine out any warning. The subterranean house is a specter. The specter haunts the island earth. The lighthouse can see far out to sea, and its specter is blind.

Death isn’t an animal, and it’s not a ghost, and it’s not a mirror. It is more like ice fishing than goose hunting, more like water than sky. When we die, we stiffen.

CONUNDRUM

"The most important things" is a conundrum. A squirrel values the nut so much so that he’ll chew into your walls and live there. He’ll wake you up, thrashing about in the maze of wires and rotting wood. The most important thing becomes directions. A squirrel cannot comprehend directions so he is led out of the house by knocks and dodges.  The most important thing is to rid the walls of the squirrel.

Leave a moat of walnuts around the home and when it’s collected build another, wider circle. Continue this practice until the squirrel is living on the next block, then form a final trail toward the factories or someplace. The final trail can be comprised of finer nuts. It is important to gain the full attention of the squirrel. 

If the most valuable item we know is human life, what is it that we do to substantiate our survivals? Envision survival as a tower. It is very far away, but terminally visible on the horizon. The sky is hazy, and the architectural details are conjecture. We imagine them. Envision survival as a cave – miles and miles of terminal darkness. A cave does not have a narrative.

THE HAND GRAVE

A grassy field. MASON & DIXON enter, hunched over, searching through the grasses. MASON comes to something.

MASON: Dixon, get over here.

DIXON: What is it?

MASON: It’s a human hand.

DIXON: Oh...

MASON: Do you want to pick it up?

DIXON: No.

MASON: It’s decomposing into the earth. Do you see that?

DIXON: No.

MASON: If you look closely you can see it decomposing.

DIXON: That hand is going to become one with this field.

MASON: That hand is merging with the dirt.

DIXON: It’s almost earth.

MASON: It’s gone.

DIXON: My watch fell out of my pocket!

MASON: Where?

DIXON: It fell into that hand grave.

MASON: Well...

DIXON: The watch is sinking into the dirt.

MASON: The watch is merging with the earth.

DIXON: That’s strange.

MASON: Are you going to grab it?

DIXON: I’m not.

MASON: That is fair.

The sun sets.

WHEN THEY SAY THINGS

When they say things to you, “this is a normal response,“ “there’s a path through the forest, “ “it’s all part of the plan,” “you’ll get through this,” strike people across the neck, take away their breath, or cause them to bleed. It is true that there is a path through the forest, but there are many paths there, and some of them are only used by animals.

One way of envisioning this problem is to consider the city – over thousands of years the conception of the city has changed so much so that we can think of the ship of Theseus. Then we think of the labyrinth and we’re already off track. The idea has been betrayed when we think of the labyrinth. Too many people are thinking of the labyrinth.

The city may have once been a circle of one hundred stone houses. 

TAOSIAN MISSIVE

You pan across the deserted desert house from a distance, then approach on foot from the side. There are many ways in and you can see that no person waits indoors. You stay outside. Your eyes avert to the sky at the sound of a rumble, like a bird falling into the rocks, and the coarse bluff resects the clear blue as in a painting of stripes. There is no other sound in this paragraph, unless there is the sound of the heater bristling into the underside of a wicker chair. There is a wool blanket folded and laid across the backrest, a dull pattern in the southwestern style.  

A Taos of the mind.