Logic is a very good invention; muddled
although Spencer struggles against it,
uncertain about the duration. He's afraid
there are no logical news today. "Why
don't we use the following: It is not a
superficial foolishness, but the deepest of
which we are capable." It
is familiar,
frightening, slowed withdrawal of fear,
faint, foreign, suddenness-tortured. Crawls
to head, crawls into head, crawls in head,
crawls from head, is without, ungestured,
without even the throb of a voice to throb
back to. He doesn't know how can he what is love. He enters
by staring by stretching with his hands
stepping through and creating what's on the
other side. Though no more dreaming threatens
him, stares him down::::he is not
real. He awakens
from ten hours of sleep, washes his hair,
face, genitals, thighs, feet, feels his
week-old beard, cuts a rhombular hole in the
fog with his palm sees his
face::::"tomorrow;" brushes
teeth::::sits, urinates; finds his black
shorts in the pile on the bathroom scale, a
good tee-shirt in the pile on the couch. He writes. He gets up and goes into the
bathroom and splashes his face and puts in
eye-drops, cleans his glasses with toilet
paper. He changes the record, turns the
volume up a little, sits back down, rereads
what he'd just written. He devotes what
remains of the afternoon to writing letters.
The gray opacity evening weaves into the dull
white fabric of his curtains causes him to
look up, turn and see the time.
Spencer dives for the
gold fillings of sunken men. "The truth is the truth is
language, omnipotent carnivorous, plagues us
the red scars burning as if branding cattle
endlessly, radiation our soul's forced new
electricity::::we can only dream with man's words." Science is decorative; nature
is functional. He
learns courage is overwhelming a numbing
fear::::he'd always thought it simply an
extension of stupidity.
He mistakes a stain on his sheet for a potato
chip. Breathing is happiness. Thinking comes
from imagining. Happiness, goodness and
truthfulness governed by love is the meaning of human existence.
Tonight the crickets push themselves. Being
sweat and being sweat. Trying to sleep is to
sleeping what thinking is to life. "How
is it we've come to value the production of
goods for profit above the production of
goods for use? Is greed inexplicable?::::is
greed an imperceivable power greater than all
of us combined?::::is universal guilt
embroidered with this divine greed the
space-time fabric of what we call our 'Human
Spirit' with which we are intricately weaving
Earth's and humankind's death shroud?
Embarrassment tugs at the frayed edges of
what we're creating."
Spencer burns a
stick over this fire
then with the charcoal writes these words
across the pure white space of his memory. He
doesn't know how to think::::he's no process
through which out comes thought. He's used
processes described by others, but they've
all failed to astonish::::he gets bored quick and takes a
break or goes about learning someone else's
mind attempting to think it his. He's used
chance without having gone through the
processes to create chance and discovered the
aesthetitization of Language. The
geek who gnaws his
head believes his intelligence a poetic
device. Coaxes schizophrenia in splinters
from his body. And
this is one of the minor things::::like a
bottle of wine brought on a visit to be
consumed. He picks lice
from your hair and eats them. So he projects his flesh onto your
flesh to show you what you feel that he
cannot. If despair overwhelms what is inside
points to him unfunny and garage. Each letter arrives through a
process his patience imagines
then abandons.
Tasting like beef broth from a tin cup. Clouds fly birds evaporate into
sliding glass doors. "The recesses of
the Universe white-out all sound or we echo
there we echo echo echo."
Does Spencer eat eggs for
breakfast or do eggs eat him? Drowning and thristy. The raw white cheese of
his face. Broken dishes in Betty Davis. Find lost.
Fish abuse sex. The bald lump of lips. Have floated to shore upon their
sea shell. In nothingness All is
recognizable::::each speck of dust a
monument::::isn't that the way he believed he
used his sight before arriving here? Abstraction
has not as of yet been invented. Body 90% + water; genetic
materials, instincts, molecules, organisms,
organs; hosts wide variety foreign organic
and inorganic substances. Primary function: breathing. His only consistency so far is in
crawling inside you, curling up in faetal
position and nestling with you
inside you. A
single path carving spray dance the
ghosts::::the yet unborn.