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.