The millennium comes from the sea. That much is true. A millennium gets cold by the end. Stays cold well after. Looks nice, initially. Even Antarctica can look appetizing. Initially. But icy scapes can develop mirages too. Mirages are always way too nice. November may yet be slaughtered by early cold, but who’s to say January will be any different? You’ve got to be able to tiptoe like Astaire over ragged seas.
But the fish since become angry.
“The fish are biting fishermen. End of story.”
That’s the Angel of Representation; lowly scoundrel and landlubber. Don’t listen to him. At university he made high grades in exhaustion, with all his unceasing homesickness for the obscure. Empirical Revelations ©. Oh well. It takes all types. Right now, he is into surveillance, so don’t listen to him or let him listen to you without him paying you the tax. It may be pure and good junk but … his soul is prey to nothingness. His skin replies to no poison. Get what you can soon as you can.
Given a respectable shock, terror is born you do not know where.
Terror is born large.
The larger it’s born … well, the larger a labyrinth needs to be to swallow it all up, down to its last abysses. Consumerism is a hunger too large to be swallowed by any other. It is our labyrinth. Our each and every one. A universe of mouths, munching on the rotted apple of the cosmos.
Our mouth is a labyrinth.
The Ouroboros is depicted as a snake eating its tail. Infinity and self-cancellation in one.
The first thing a snake is taught: How To Eat Something Larger Than Your Own Head.
*
Power of a thousand roses. A bestiary of sparks. No, not just a fireplace. Energy that can do everything for everyone. An energy that’s that good. Electricity that flows with a supercooled blue fire. Terror. Mystery. Mystery of unknown sex acts. Try and think about a procession of richly dressed virgins. Now try not to! Okay, so now you might understand this obscure yearning. Or you might not. But, if you’ve a mind to it, perhaps the sheer magnitude of the illogical can provide compass bearings for how far you need to go beyond all ordinates and abscissa. If you ask nicely. Start with schizoid thinking and go from there. That’s the ticket. Or filter your emotions only via deranged ecstasy. Don’t forget to inflect sex with the emotional insomnia of unsatisfied desire.
(Ironically, once you go schizoid you’ve gone public, you’ve outed yourself. Why care what anyone thinks? You’ll be dead one day too. Ignore onlookers. Even that pesky Angel of Representation who’s always hovering around, mediating every perception even as it’s beaten and forged into language. One of the worst things of all is to be self-conscious before language, or before any of its emissaries. I mean, look at him. The viewer making brush strokes has to study the effect. Empirical brushstrokes, sure, but they keep coming, so his image never has time to settle. Another ole time trick of Consumerism. The Angel of Representation is, frankly, just another Consumption Mongrel. And in this era dedicated to Pavlovian salivation over Celebrities, Representation may just well be the biggest mouth of all. The Labyrinth of Representation can never be stuffed full. Not while we can invent new ways of seeing. And what else is art for? Art is the handmaiden of Consumerism. But is it a symbiotic relationship of just parasitic? In any case, with the Angel of Representation there’s only one choice: Either sign him up quick or tell him to mind his own business and let you get on with your job.)
Two cascades of dream pearls fall. But you don’t want to let it all fall away, not really.
*
Why does anyone think language is the answer? People have too much faith in poets. And faith in the idea that “the world is will and representation”. It’s naïvely hopeful. Mind you, a lot of naïve hopes are actually rather beautiful. Either way, heads or tails, such big-arse hopes make the opposition look stoopid.
“The grammarian is the child who knows the language.” I heard one of them say that. The one Consumption Mongrel who is a scholar: The Reader of Labyrinths. The one who can trace your palm and read the Tree of Man writ within in ink of veins and haemoglobin. The ones whose eyes are barcode readers. The one whose fingertips can scan RFID tags. The one whose tongue can taste your pheromones on the air and catalogue them by percentage of fatigue toxins, and have a remedy air-expressed to your door by morning. This scholar is the voice of someone who experiences ambiguities wholeheartedly, fearlessly. Someone who promulgates the avant-garde of The Message, only too early for anyone’s health. Ideally, you should time your run. People resist ideas before their time, no matter their native genius.
This is the very thing the oh-so-dutiful Angel or Representation has yet to learn. But just try teach him that!
Well okay, I’ll try and take that on myself. Someone’s got to put him in his place, but he’s not the main opposition. The power behind the throne, so to speak, is that Grand Vizier figure, the Reader of Labyrinths. Steal the opposition’s ability to read the wind and you can cut them right off.
How to outflank the forces of Consumption? Flood world culture with art from the grass roots level, get people addicted to local crafts rather than homogenized mass exports? Or just flood every place with the notion of creative fertility, of self-production, self-reliance. Like that saying about teaching a man to fish for himself so he’ll never go hungry thereafter.
Yet, while I’m trying to get that all up and going, the Devil is able to steal an Entry, Stage Left of me. I have to stop work. Crowds rush up to us, faces expectant, shiny. Camera-phones snapfreeze the scene in overlapping novae of crystal memory exposures, pop-pop-pop. It’s as if the Heavens are detonating all at once.
Lucifer is such a bright character, his bodily outline is visible through stonework, his glorious molten liquid form turning stone transparent to his magisterial presence. Rock is thin as paper here. With his approach, insubstantial reality peels back, edges burnt to a crisp in fearful retreat from Him. There he stands, rusted with sulphur ecstasies, scales of incandescent brass and antinomy flaking off him in radioactive dandruff with a half-life decay of ten to the thirtieth resurrections.... Careless of Him, rather than mean-spirited.
Lucifer sledges, of course. And he does so addressing himself in the first person. He says, “Do you know why the Middle Ages was wise about the threat of comets? Comets are Satan’s ejaculate striving to impregnate the Earth with evil … ” He kindly demonstrates, but it doesn’t have the effect He anticipates. Crowds go wild about Ejaculating Comets, Raa Raa Raa. Understandable, really. The blinding sulphur arcs of The Devil’s ejaculate is kind of showy, rather like a showroom supercar, a Bugatti Veyron maybe. You let everyone see the trimmings. Especially the young girls. It’s a bit of misdirection, really. You’re not supposed to see The Devil become impregnated with blinding ecstasy, only once He’s already in it, face twisted around in terminal orgasm. Almost as if He has hold of a Gibson guitar during a heavy feedback solo, yeah. You feel intrusive, standing so close by, as if bumbling into someone’s invitation-only open-air orgy. You wait, vaguely embarrassed. The Devil’s cock makes John Holmes’s look like an albino pygmy’s arse-hair.
Outflanked, dumb to the moment, still fretting about grammatical niceties, and so careless about footing as he sidesteps Lucifer’s latest foursome, the Angel of Representation fumbles it, and gets cast into the sea of blood. Impotent against the Devil’s Guitar Solo, alas. Wings whose feathers form the quills for all humanity’s ink pens disappear in actinic pools of light, swallowed by scalding acid as the Angel goes under. Agitated, luminous tides of sulphur corrode the beach, discolour it to blinding point. That Nouveau Theoretician of Representation, the Reader of Labyrinths, is defenceless — and good riddance. I close in to make the kill. Talk about necessary and sufficient conditions: with no more Angel of Representation or Reader of Labyrinths, people at last may be free.
Flooding the world with creativity and self-determination was never going to work anyhow. People don’t want to lead themselves. Without following some kind of leader, what’s the point in being part of a pack?
Anyway, there should be a party.
So where are the circus tents?
People have no goddamn sense of occasion.
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1 comment:
Fucking Fabulist!
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