Cells Amidst The Calm

My heart is draped with tousled hair, runny mascara, smeared lipstick, and arranged just so in the middle of a pentagram. I vomit surveillance cameras at the prismatic decomposition of inner space, which is a signal from beyond this realm to destroy exquisite works of art on sight. The air, whose legs are spread so widely it can wake up in the middle of a dream, is busy creating its own language on the calves of bald women, perhaps out of pity, or maybe even laziness?

A very particular odour--from the horrific cacophony of gasps, moans, the vibrations from the word "monster"--is always ready to crumble amidst the debris milling around listlessly, smoking cigarettes with style. When I returned, surrounded by FBI agents, it was wearing my lower abdomen, so I was forced to relive it all. I brushed up on the mythology, swelling and pressing cryptic, algebraic lips into the form most easily recorded by the surface of the ever-vigilant moon, fascination being the only branches remaining on a diamond-studded summer evening.

I'll never adhere to the strictures implicit in a beggar's quiet song. Secondary demons, trombone blasts squeezing into edible lingerie, have more drugs to whisper, an eclectic sample among gazes that cannot flee. To chase after the nerve cells in the attained calm is to stare into the pink and orange regalia of further prey, tassels chanting into the psychedelic smoke. Even before I knew anything of sodium cyanide gas, black curls that fill the various points where larvae fall into aristocracy, I had the sex edited out of my face, which, disguised as a cosmic meta-mind, will eventually be found plotting to steal the Adriatic Sea.

7:57 AM - 7 Comments - 9 Kudos - Add Comment

The Post-Borp Underground

The Post-Borp Underground
Hard to define aesthetically, and consisting of a disparate group of cantankerous individuals who would rather be condemned to an eternity sniffing Hulk Hogan's sweaty wrestling trunks than be thought of as being members of an artistic group or school, the post-borp underground has been called everything from 'the future of literature' to 'a complete hoax perpetrated by a bunch of mentally-retarded William S. Burroughs wannabes.'

The Players

Kane X. Faucher

The Skinny: A virtuoso who brings respectability and literary pedigree to the group. The author of several novels that people who don't sniff glue have actually read. Theoretcally sound, he is a subversive mole within the halls of academy, just so he can keep on indulging in wine, women and texting. He explains what Deleuze and Guattari are going on about to other members of the group.

Downside: Napoleonic on occasion, he devotes far too much time to lifting cars and plotting to overthrow Matina Stamatakis (see below) for leadership of the group.

Aaron Held

The Skinny: A prodigy renowned for his versatility in the visual and textual realms. Cute, shy, the teen heart-throb of the group who quietly, diligently churns out the borp with astounding regularity.

Downside: A crippling addiction to internet porn and death-metal.

Jaie Miller

The Skinny: The weird British guy. Profoundly influenced by surrealism and hip-hop culture, he produces reams of text at a pace that makes other members of the group suspect there are three of him. An anti-capitalist revolutionary who has devoted considerable energy to smashing the system, while also remaining really quite funky.

Downside: He's British, talks funny and has been arrested several times for stalking Lauryn Hill. He's also into jazz-funk.

Jaan Patterson

The Skinny: The blissed-out, mad prince of the group. Possesses a tremendous work-ethic, and is always ready to lend a helping hand to various projects, he is the glue that holds the group together. Very huggable and works the borp visually, textually and musically. Totally insane, druggy genius.

Downside: He often talks backwards. Other group members have come to see this as endearing, if not absolute proof of his connection to the borp.

Marcus Tang

The Skinny: Reclusive and mysterious. Works the borp from all angles, too. Rumoured to be the former lover of group leader Matina Stamatakis, as well as the father of her only child.

Downside: Very creepy. And angry. Very angry.

John Moore Williams

The Skinny: A textual virtuoso and rigorous literary theorist. If it can be written, he can write it. A red-head who probably worships Satan, he brings sexiness to the group and looks good with minimal amounts of clothing on. He is rumoured to be working on the first (though surely not the last) post-borp porno film.

Downside: None, really. And it's annoying, too!

Robert Chrysler

The Skinny: Barely-literate, drug and alcohol addled anarchist and surrealist. Obviously brain-damaged, disheveled and prone to mental instability, he nonetheless remains a prolific producer of text. Detractors of the group see him as epitomizing everything that is specious about it, supporters see him as being something of a 'spiritual leader.'

Downside: Cracked-out and obsessed with Theoni Tambaki (see below).

The Leaders

Lee Kwo

The Skinny: Textual and musical wizard of the borp. A veteran avant-gardist, who has seen it all, engaged with it very deeply and come away laughing maniacally. Proof that drugs can be a good thing, it is said Lee has already kicked several exotic concoctions not even known yet to the FDA.

Downside: Can't get over Stiv Bators and still wears his jeans way too tight.

Theoni Tambaki

The Skinny: Hash-crazed Greek anarchist, prone to knife-wielding thuggery and arson. She's been arrested several times for something to do with goats (the other members are sworn to secrecy). Fluent in every language known to man (and some unknown), she is both a poet and visual arts visionary. Lives and breathes the borp, and remains a staunch enemy of 'things as they are.'

Downside: Probably the goat thing.

Matina Stamatakis

The Skinny: The unquestionable leader of the group. A supremely talented beauty, who rules with a combination of charm and iron breasteses, despite being only three feet tall.

Downside: She likes Kajagoogoo.

*A special mention must be made of the man behind the scenes, John C. Goodman, for giving them a wall upon which to scrawl their weird thingies*

7:56 AM - 4 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

An X-Ray of Amen

:cerebral those days of infantile hedonism. fly over to a deep cleft in cartoon skulls, a multitude of red and silver flags through ion streets. liberation, bravura the number of legs to a cell. last weekend collecting dust on the stereo that dreams, my diffident ear multiplies like a flying saucer:

:it's hard to kill what you can't psalm first, small coins ruminating upon the dull, bearded face of the river. veins called a pleasure to corollary the random noun's paternity, I've smoked my last oceanic woman, alive in Mach 9 limbo. weightless dresses, mantras coughing white horses nailed to the cross. a green, heroic everything, media cigarettes recycled blood transforming itself into an image polished by my sexless throat:

  PeyoetryHut

11:50 AM - 7 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Four For Horus

1. I've finished weeping the sun and climbing the stairs to a finger immersed in the blue of the city. I can feel my skin stretching over yours again. Music, pure ambrosia to those currents of mine which knowingly, willingly, choose to smother what is golden in the distance between trees. I've a sudden need to flap my leather wings with all the clarity of war on meat-hooked lips, psychological, astrological. And very much a windmill. It begins in the mirror, in the molten wonder of hedonists refused entry to a timeless world.

Cherubim with red hands...

2. They drool a strange kind of thunder, hiss pharoahs in order to persist in their young, particularly fragrant, delirium. Bones of truth without being a single syllable at sunset, memories like purrung from someone's frantic antennae. 'Reality is invented by the incestuous,' (a favorite maxim of mine) scrawled on the foreheads of habit, riding the bus alongside the many corridors of summer, what survived to contemplate murmuring geometries, the sneer of jazz. I've tapped out thick, foolish beginnings to chaos for gasoline, sold the laughter depicted by thieves beneath angry bridges. But everybody still comes to me for their 3 o'clocks, what I'll do to leave traces of genitalia on pillows wet like trembling strangers I met in slow motion.

Everywhere is hanging in a cave.

3. You are very Christ-like when my veins are thin, quiet, a neutrality nobody cares to notice. Or it doesn't matter to them in the least when my shadow casts off its democratic veneer. I was structured as a series of prefaces to dusty, secret backrooms, waves of light drunk with the power of perfectly-tailored suits and oil-slick ennui. The sorcery, nervous, discordant, wants to analyze the way you slip in and out of my television, leaving me to stare at worn, decrepit pictures of Frida Kahlo and wish I wasn't such a radio for erasures on the cusp of turning into sandy, warm, thighs.

4. I'm determined to be a mysterious rhythm in curves of breath stuck to the cold, hard, facts, little daydreams glimpsed quickly through a freshly-polished bakery window, where the tables are deeply in lust with pools of spilt coffee that drip lasciviously over their edges. Saxophones could grow in that loneliness. It's almost impossible to drive through the screams that persist in my motionless, black hair, Tokyos of young women sent by a notion to paint my empty bottles of rum. They left their individual testimonials scattered on throats bleeding the sorrow of every minute detail, despite the eyelids of earth and air.

 PeyoetryHut

5:02 PM - 12 Comments - 24 Kudos - Add Comment

ChongDong Variations

ChongDong Variations
1.
It is a night of blood-flecked vomit, hot, churning disease. An engine of radiactive police surveillance, rusting crucifixes three clicks deliriant. Shadows graze the meat of her heart.

This city remains gashed open. Love has left for the space stations, frosted hegemony by noise to masturbate feral loins, orgasms laughing soft, disembodied limbs. She peels the evening away, a star loving beasts of diamonds. They shatter headless secretions of sun, an elixir's gone sky, arms in her stomach. The torque and rustle, time smudged jets of witchery beneath her breasts.

Only bacterial, sounds the virginal faces mirrored, wiggling tongues. The smile loves her machete, electric treatments worn as lunar possession. Circuits a single smear of burnt motion, broken necks floating metal erasure, sparkling earrings. Moonbeams dead where images are chemical serpents to quiver their war beneath her jaundiced muscles. Oblivion sighs the inside, droned pink's wonder, her attempt to think gasoline and her tragic bubble-gum nihilism.

2.
A world where sultry curls and ruthless hypodermics glare bought and sold beauty. Razors the sick stream, an alien ontology she pisses into America's bible of red meat, blood-soaked paper bills, torn fishnets the white mohawks away. Blind legions hiss, it's just the drugs, a kissed nuclear blue glimpsing what is viral about other technicolours. Phony ice-ages, the implants hereby code-named 'A Melting Cock.'

Silent, breathless quadrants of flame become pure rhythm without cubes of purple moan, or even telepathy howling outside the blur. Soft nodes goodnight the skyscraper's drip of teeth onto the same stupid mnemonics trying to look silver for zombie tourists. The tryptamine harem, once sexy, now globular husks fellating strange gods in the dark. Aquatic foreheads their desolation, seductions the circle of red arms. She's actually quite impossible, drooling five thousand cuts of meat, cathode rays slithering between shotgun blasts to the chest.

Hairy radioactives, her fingers stroke the strangeness, inexplicable coils far away. No sun communicating too heterosexual streets, hyperventilating number theory. Grins that pulsate, bounce off the cloudless, digital sky to impregnate a surplus age of sirens, her sentences form on torsos everywhere. Thin mist from engines that betray the dirt's voice of methane heat, all sigh and weak for cherubim wings exploding glass visions, two minutes of anything. Photographs of unmitigated hunger, hearts delivered to her ravenous lips via satellite...


http://peyoetryhut. blogspot. com

These variations (in progress) are a series of rhizomia based on Matina Stamatakis' and Carmen Racovitza's originals here:

http://www. grosssatire. blogspot. com/

4:23 PM - 8 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

Detritus by Crispin Sartwell

Detritus

By Crispin Sartwell

Hating inanimate objects seems entirely senseless. Mere things have no intentions, make no decisions, commit no crimes. They aren't guilty of anything. Why or how would you hate elements of the periodic table, clouds, liquids, rocks?

   Nevertheless, far more than I hate any person, I hate alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, methamphetamine, heroin. These stuffs or substances, these chemicals and vegetables and the fumes they emit when immolated, take away everything I have and everyone I love, every time. They are mindless, worthless, without value. They are empty. Meaningless. But they are the theme of my life. I came here to think, to study, to write. I came here to make love, to make babies, raise children, make a home, a garden, find some quiet joy. And my life has been dedicated to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and annihilation.

    Addiction, I tell you, isn't an epic tale of redemption, material for your amazing memoir and appearance on Oprah. It isn't a James Dean movie, a Hemingway story, or a Jimi Hendrix/Kurt Cobain song of suffering, hyper-intense genius. It's dying by choking on your own vomit. It's common as excrement and as profound: reeking, valueless, purposeless, pointless, meaningless.

    There's no little essence of wisdom suspended in the whiskey, no sparkling geode crystals inside the rock, no signal in the smoke. There just is nothing there.

    In brief: My father was an alcoholic, which broke our family when I was 10 or so. He died of his addictions at 52, which I believe is longer than his own father lasted. I lost a brother in 1983 to an incomprehensible murder fueled by PCP; I found him crumpled up by the side of a country road, his chest imploded by a .357 projectile. I lost a brother in 1991 to suicide by heroin overdose, after watching him turn from a hopeful little kid to an utterly despairing addict, a liar and a thief. My third and last brother spent five years in the state pen for armed robbery. He was a junkie, crackhead and so on, and then a recovering junkie, crackhead, and so on for many years. He expired two years ago in his sleep, his body ravaged by hepatitis, diabetes, and heart disease. In our family, that's success.

    I loved all these people, and at many times in their lives they were lovable: smart, funny, real people; loving people; creative, interesting people. They and I lost all that about themselves to piles of stones, lakes of polluted liquid, to chemical processes of purification and adulteration. They and I lost everything we had that we cared about, about ourselves and each other, to inanimate trash, detritus, an ugly little slag-heap of rubbish.

     I've just come through a marriage that, starting in ecstasy, descended into hell for the sake of drinking, hers and mine. I couldn't stop, and I couldn't make her stop, to hold our family together, to save our home or my sanity. In order to stay alive, I had to leave, full to the brim with love and with loathing. Now I live alone, sober for some six months, in the woods, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. The woods is the safest place for me. You wouldn't want me in your circle of friends.

    My every act of love, every home place, every hint of peace or happiness, is the premonition of another recapitulation of the endlessly-repeated loss that has no point or purpose, and has no end but in death.

    I've got four children and step-children in their teens and early twenties. Daily I expect to hear the worst: the car crash, the overdose, the end. I've already pre-mourned their substance-abuse-related deaths. I expect that my 8-year-old daughter, the most beautiful, joyous little sprite in the world, will grow up and marry an addict, or be an addict, or both.

     If I ever again find love, family, home, I will, of course, lose them all again to this incomprehensible slop.

    I've been involved in family interventions, begged people to stop, poured out my soul, shared my experience, driven people to meetings. Tried persuasion by love, or laying the smack down. I've seen people in and out of rehab. My brother Adam was in residential treatment when he overdosed; they'd let him out for a court date. He went down to 14th Street and scored, then died at my grandmother's apartment. She was in the hospital at the time. She herself died a week later, having lost a husband, a son, and a grandson to addiction.

   Everyone finds their own road, and their own abyss. Some survive and some don't, for no discernible reason, with no regard for what they deserve. There's nothing I can do.

    In my own case, once I start drinking, I don't know when or whether I'll stop. I've had periods from months to many years without alcohol, and I've found my way through various circuitous routes back to drinking. Then I become an evil idiot. I have no self-control or self-respect. I lie. I hide bottles around the house and drink the clock around. I puke my guts out. I'm alternately maudlin or consumed by rage. And I do all this in the service of nothing at all, of an illusion, of something that has never given me any enduring pleasure, only idiotic pain. I've devoted my life to it; it's my theme; my greatest love; my most intense relationship. And it's nothing.

    Putting it mildly, I'm not alone in these sorts of experiences, and a lot of people have been through even worse. What it's like being a meth addict or actually dying of alcohol poisoning, I don't literally know, yet. But if you think people are doing things like that in order to feel good, I say you're crazy.

    In my experience, in certain circumstances, booze makes you feel kind of giddy and loose for a little while. It makes you feel close to people. It makes you feel bold. That lasts about an hour, which is followed by years of just feeling physically sick, acting badly, feeling guilty, lying, pretending to be the person you used to be, breaking promises: in short, suffering, and making people suffer.

    Marijuana may be a youth cult, a medicine, a sacrament, a symbol. But really it just makes you feel kind of fuzzy and dazed; it amounts to a kind of apparently enthusiastic self-lobotomy. I've smoked every day all day for years at times in my life, and never gotten back anything worthwhile or even pleasurable.

    There are various ways to try to make addiction make sense, but I think that in the end it shows us nothing but the void, a kind of yawning maw of meaninglessness. Addicts often turn to God, and Lord knows our only hope may well be omnipotence. But addiction, in my view, stands as a refutation of the existence of a benevolent deity. Any God that created these materials, and who created addicts, and then placed us all in the same world is, at best, morally blank.

    For that matter, addiction refutes the theory of evolution, at least the version on which we're adapting ever-more successfully to our environment. Folks like me aren't adapting to our environment, we're using it to drive ourselves and everyone around us into despair, then using it to commit suicide. And generation after generation, we're passing forward our calamitous genes.

    The drugs, they tell us in the current neuro-biological metaphors, light up the pleasure centers of the brain. Then they dull these centers, leading to the need for ever-higher doses. But the pleasure, in my experience, is fleeting and valueless, the dullness interminable, eventuating in excruciating pain and unredeemed death.

   I've been in literally thousands of twelve-step meetings, and one thing you often hear is people affirming even their own addictions. There was something they needed to learn, and they came out better people. In the end, they found a kind of peace. This is sort of true in some cases and I have tried to think it through that way myself. But fundamentally, we wouldn't need this particular redemption if we hadn't subjected ourselves and everyone else to this particular degradation. And if addicts and addiction can be redeemed, we just as or more often simply descend by endless pain into meaningless annihilation.

   I'm familiar with the themes preached at the funerals of people like me. The idea that people die in order to teach other people lessons - don't drink or do drugs, maybe - would be ridiculous even if we were, in fact, capable of learning those lessons.

   If you think that addicts are hedonists, or that we suffer from lack of will-power, I tell you that you are wrong. Addiction is an incredible discipline of pain. It takes gigantic will to keep drinking in the face of a crumbling world and a crumbling personality, to keep giving yourself over to the nothingness when there are real people, things, and values all around you. It takes incredible dedication.

   During our marriage, my wife took heroic measures to keep drinking, every day. I was sober thirteen years when I married her. A daily heavy drinker for many years, she said the fact that I was a recovering alcoholic was one of the things that drew her to me. She declared herself to be an alcoholic (a declaration long since totally repudiated) and swore off. Once she started again, two years into our marriage, nothing I could do stopped her for a moment, could give her pause: no argument, no effusions or withdrawal of love. Not staying; not leaving. Not my binge-drinking, or attempts to recover. No suffering, endured or inflicted. No lies, heard or spoken. No betrayals, of her or by her.

   She had her reasons. There were drawbacks to my husbandry from the getgo. I have trouble trusting people; I have 'control issues,' perhaps familiar to people raised by or partnered to alcoholics. I also, I must say, gave a lot of love; I was a fiercely monogamous husband and devoted to our home and children. At any rate, drinking became a symbol, the symbol, of her autonomy, freedom, and integrity. That's a lot of weight to put on a glass, far more than it or I or our marriage could possibly sustain. Indeed, the image of substance abuse as freedom is, in my world, too fatal to be ironic. She loved me totally and forever, didn't want me to leave. And when I asked her to quit for a month, for what I conceived to be, for me, a matter of life and death, she simply refused. I don't have a problem, she said, over and over. It's your problem (well, no denying that). Then: I won't change my whole life. Can't you love me for who I am?

   The nadir in our relationship came last December 26th, when after yet another of my struggles toward sobriety, and after yet another week during which she was out drinking every day, I started swallowing the contents of and then smashed her bottle of pinot noir on a counter. Smashing that bottle was a threat, a cry of despair, an expression of desire and of hatred, an act and an end of communication. It exploded the brittle form of our marriage and splattered the black-red stuff of our very blood all over the kitchen. 

   Then I was driving randomly around Pennsylvania with a liter of vodka in my passenger seat, or passed out in $20 hotels, learning nothing. Trying not to think about who I was or what I'd done. I thought about driving north for a couple of days, becoming someone else. But I am a coward, and I came back to that same damn house. And after that? Into the woods, no longer living with my kids or my garden or my lover, gone from what had been my life for a decade. Among other things, doing to my children what my father did to me.

     She's the most generous, the most loving, the most loyal person I've ever known. And she has seen this reality as much and as clearly as anyone. Her first husband was, like my brothers, a spectacular addict, and he and her sister's husband both died of AIDS, from the intravenous drugs they all did together. While our marriage was in its final throes, her mother was dying of lung cancer: Nana kept smoking until she couldn't light a cigarette, all the while denying passionately that she was smoking at all, or had ever been addicted to tobacco. And she was, as they said over and over at her funeral - probably our last family function as a couple - a brutally honest and consistently forthright person.

    No matter that these things we drink or smoke or shoot up are small simple materials of limited usefulness; they always become an astounding symbol, until people are using the words synonymously with freedom, love, integrity, truth, art, self-esteem: synonymously with their own proper names. In their essential relation to us, they are lies; and the spawn and origin of lies, our selves as lies. In vino veritas, or maybe just fucking alcohol, a sign only of nihilism, of the journey we make - together, and each in our isolation - into oblivion.

   The stuff is the void not only around us but inside us. We swallow it, and it in turn swallows us. Finally, it's all that's left: 'who I am,' 'my whole life.' From a recreation, it becomes our origin and our destiny.

      I'm sorry to show you only the rage and emptiness. But the emptiness is my true home, the darkness where no one can hear me raging or sobbing; giggling maniacally at the fatal ironies; reciting the mindless, mechanical repetitions; telling over the losses; where no one can find me where I'm hidden. The loss is infinite, and infinitely repeated, and utterly unredeemed by time, God, or meaning.

    It may be that addiction is genetic, or that, as they like to put it, it has 'a genetic component.' My family seems to confirm that. Maybe it is a biochemical problem. Perhaps addicts have no control over our ingestion. One thing that believing this might do for me: relieve myself and people I love of some of the overwhelming, the unbearable responsibility for the terrible things we've done to ourselves and each other. It gives us the gift of fate. And though having a dark fate is depressing, it's also of course comforting in comparison with retrospectively examining the decision to shape the disastrous future we now inhabit.

    I find myself confused about this. Every time I have raised a bottle to my lips, I have felt free, and I have felt compelled. I made a decision, and the decision felt inevitable. I could have done otherwise, and I did what I had to do, what my identity and history demanded. Indeed, every time I raised a bottle to my lips, I kept faith with my father and brothers and my wife, my love; I shared their life and death. I kept faith with what we are, and I betrayed us.

   Finally, I don't forgive, and I don't want to forgive. I don't forgive my father, who left and never could be counted on to be where he'd said he'd be, or be what he said he was. I don't forgive my brothers, and my love for them is mixed with hatred and the most bitter disappointment. I don't forgive my wife, who, like all these other people, chose blank stuff instead of me, over love. And I don't forgive myself. I want responsibility for every act, and I can't bear it. I swing back and forth day by day, and on a bad day like today, minute by minute. Maybe it's our genes, our upbringing, our disease. But I don't forgive.

    If it comes to us as fate, addiction makes us into inanimate objects. We are the sheer substances we abuse. But I can't even stop blaming mere things: the crap we imbibe. That too, might offload some responsibility, might be a lie that gives comfort.

   On the other hand, maybe alcohol can't support hatred any more than it can love; perhaps it's no more an adequate symbol of stupidity and degradation and lies than it is an image of God and beauty and truth. But I can't achieve any real neutrality, and if it were up to me, I would simply erase abusable substances and substance abusers from the universe, and believe that the universe had become a better place.

      I'd like to leave you with a positive little moment, a warming hint of redemption. I have not entirely foresworn that possibility, even in a world of pointless self-inflicted suffering. Despite all the rock-solid evidence to the contrary, I still have hope for myself, and for any of us who have survived thus far. I'm still looking for a map of the void.

    If there is redemption for me in addiction, it is in being made to see, by force, the darkest of truths; being forced to see, through the destruction of illusion after illusion, the emptiness at the heart of everything. Finally, what I hate most about addiction is its lies, our lies, layer after layer of jive. In my darkest moments, I conclude from rich experience that there is always a lie even at the center of love. Truth sucks, but lies are murder.

   But though addiction makes us lie, feeds on lies, it also finally - or at least this is what I hope - makes the falsity of these lies undeniable. Peel back the lies and you find, at the heart, nothing. And arriving at nothing is finding the truth.

    I worry that in finding what we need to recover and to forgive, finding God or identifying our actions as a disease, we just find more illusions, that we're still, after all the awful confrontation with the truth, lying to ourselves. I want any illusion that will keep me alive. And I want out of all illusions, to see plainly the awful heart of reality.

    I turned fifty yesterday, itself something of an achievement in my world, and I keep wanting to be alive, to believe love can be real, to grow tomatoes, to take care of children. My little woods are beautiful and alive with birds, this time of year. There's something that so far keeps me quitting, which is why I've outlasted most of the people and things I've loved. I still want it all to make sense, and still suspect that every way of making it make sense is another layer of falsehood. But at this moment the only account that's true to my experience is one that keeps faith with the senselessness, the sheer loss, and leaves it at that.

10:59 AM - 4 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

Kek-W

Kek-W is amazing! Between all the writing, and the hallucinatory noise-making he does with the mighty IceBird Spiral.., I was quite shocked to discover that he's also a fine painter (look around here.. if you don't believe me).

On top of all that, he's now added DJing.. to his creative profile.

He assured me once that he does, indeed, sleep. But I think he's lying...

For those who don't already know:

 http://kidshirt.blogspot.com/

8:19 AM - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Sumerian Economics by Peter Lamborn Wilson

"money must be the sexuality of the dead"

Sumerian Economics
Peter Lamborn Wilson

Public secret: everyone knows but no one speaks. Another kind of public secret: the fact is published but no one pays attention.

A cuneiform tablet called The Sumerian King List states that "kingship first descended from heaven in the city of Eridu," in the south of Sumer. Mesopotamians believed Eridu the oldest city in the world, and modern archaeology confirms the myth. Eridu was founded about 5000 BC and disappeared under the sand around the time of Christ.

Eridu's god Ea or Enki (a kind of Neptune and Hermes combined) had a ziggurat where fish were sacrificed. He owned the ME, the fifty-one principles of Civilization. The first king, named "Staghorn," probably ruled as Enki's high priest. After some centuries came the Flood, and kingship had to descend from heaven again, this time in Uruk and Ur. Gilgamesh now appears on the list. The flood actually occurred; Sir Leonard Wooley saw the thick layer of silt at Ur between two inhabited strata.

Bishop Ushher once calculated according to the Bible that the world was created on October 19th 4004 BC at 9 o'clock in the morning. This makes no Darwinian sense, but provides a good date for the founding of the Sumerian state, which certainly created a new world. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees; Genesis owes much to the Enuma Elish (Mesopotamian Creation Myth). Our only text is late Babylonian but obviously based in a lost Sumerian original. Marduk the wargod of Babylon has apparently been pasted over a series of earlier figures beginning with Enki.

Before the creation of the world as we know it a family of deities held sway. Chief among them at the time, Tiamat (a typical avatar of the universal Neolithic earth goddess) described by the text as a dragon or serpent, rules a brood of monsters and dallies with her "Consort" (high priest) Kingu, an effeminate Tammuz/Adonis prototype. The youngest gods are dissatisfied with her reign; they are "noisy," and Tiamat (the text claims) wants to destroy them because their noise disturbs her slothful slumber. In truth the young gods are simply fed up with doing all the shitwork themselves because there are no "humans" yet. The gods want Progress. They elect Marduk their king and declare war on Tiamat.

A gruesome battle ensues. Marduk triumphs. He kills Tiamut and slices her body lengthwise in two. He separates the halves with a mighty ripping heave. One half becomes sky above, the other earth below.

Then he kills Kingu and chops his body up into gobs and gobbets. The gods mix the bloody mess with mud and mold little figurines. Thus humans are created as robots for the gods. The poem ends with a triumphalist paean to Marduk, the new king of heaven.

Clearly the Neolithic is over. City-god, war-god, metal-god, vs. country-goddess, lazy goddess, garden goddess. The creation of the world equals the creation of civilization, separation, hierarchy, masters and slaves, above and below. Ziggurat and pyramid symbolizes the new shape of life.

Combining Enuma elish and the King List we get an explosive secret document about the origin of civilization not as gradual evolution towards inevitable future, but as violent coup, conspiratorial overthrow of primordial rough-egalitarian Stone Age society by a crew of black magic cult cannibals. (Human sacrifice first appears in the archaeological record at Ur III. Similar grisly phenomena in the first few Egyptian dynasties.)

About 3100 writing was invented at Uruk. Apparently you can witness the moment in the strata: one layer no writing, next layer writing. Of course writing has a prehistory (like the State). From ancient times a system of accounting had grown up based on little clay counters in the shapes of commodities (hides, jars of oil, bars of metal, etc.) Also glyptic seals had been invented with images used heraldically to designate the seals' owners. Counters and seals were pressed into slabs of wet clay and the records were held in Temple archives-probably records of debts owed to the Temple. (In the Neolithic Age the temples no doubt served as redistribution centers. In the Bronze Age they began to function as banks.)

As I picture the invention of real writing took place within a singly brilliant family of temple archivists over three or four generations, say a century. The counters were discarded and a reed stylus was used to impress signs in clay, based on the shapes of the old counters, and with further pictograms imitated from the seals. Numbering was easily compacted from rows of counters to number-signs. The real break-through came with the flash that certain pictographs could be used for their sound divorced from their meaning and recombined to "spell" other words (especially abstractions). Integrating the two systems proved cumbersome, but maybe the sly scribes considered this an advantage. Writing needed to be difficult because it was a mystery revealed by gods and a monopoly of the New Class of scribes. Aristocrats rarely learned to read and write -- a matter for mere bureaucrats. But writing provided the key to state expansion by separating sound from meaning, speaker from hearer, and sight from other senses. Writing as separation both mirrors and reinforces separation as "written," as fate. Action-at-a-distance (including distance of time) constitutes the magic of the state, the nervous system of control. Writing both is and represents the new "Creation" ideology. It wipes out the oral tradition of the Stone Age and erases the collective memory of a time before hierarchy. In the text we have always been slaves.

By combining image and word in single memes or hieroglyphs the scribes of Uruk (and a few years later the pre-dynastic scribes of Egypt) created a magical system. According to a late syncretistic Greco-Egyptian myth, when Hermes-Toth invents writing he boasts to his father Zeus that humans never need forget anything ever again. Zeus replies, "On the contrary my son, now they'll forget everything." Zeus discerned the occult purpose of the text, the forgetfulness of the oral/aural, the false memory of the text, indeed the lost text. He sensed a void where others saw only a plenum of information. But this void is the telos of writing.

Writing begins as a method of controlling debt owed to the Temple, debt as yet another form of absence. When full-blown economic texts appear a few strata later we find ourselves already immersed in a complex economic world based on debt, interest, compound interest, debt peonage as well as outright slavery, rents, leases, private and public forms of property, long distance trade, craft monopolies, police, and even a "money-lenders bazaar." Not money as we understand it yet, but commodity currencies (usually barley and silver), often loaned for as much as 33 1/3rd % per year. The Jubilee or periodic forgiveness of debts (as known in the Bible) already existed in Sumer, which would have otherwise collapsed under the load of debt.

Sooner or later the bank (i.e. the temple) would solve this problem by obtaining the monopoly on money. By lending at interest ten or more times its actual assets, the modern bank simultaneously creates debt and the money to pay debt. Fiat, "let it be." But even in Sumer the indebtedness of the king (the state) to the temple (the bank) had already begun.

The problem with commodity currencies is that no one can have a monopoly on cows or wheat. Their materiality limits them. A cow might calve, and barley might grow, but not at rates demanded by usury. Silver doesn't grow at all.

So, the next brilliant move, by King Croesus of Lydia (Asia Minor, 7th century BC) was the invention of the coin, a refinement of money just as the Greek alphabet (also 7th cen.) was a refinement of writing. Originally a temple token or souvenir signifying one's "due portion" of the communal sacrifice, a lump of metal impressed with a royal or temple seal (often a sacrificial animal such as the bull), the coin begins its career with mana, something super-natural, something more (or less) than the weight of the metal. Stage two, coins showing two faces, one with image, the other with writing. You can never see both at once, suggesting the metaphysical slipperiness of the object, but together they constitute a hieroglyph, a word/image expressed in metal as a single meme of value.

Coins might "really" be worth only their weight in metal but the temple says they're worth more and the king is ready to enforce the decree. The object and its value are separated; the value floats free, the object circulates. Money works the way it works because of an absence not a presence. In fact money largely consists of absent wealth-debt -- your debt to king and temple. Moreover, free of its anchor in the messy materiality of commodity currencies, money can now compound unto eternity, far beyond mere cows and jars of beer, beyond all worldly things, even unto heaven. "Money begets money," Ben Franklin gloated. But money is dead. Coins are inanimate objects. Then money must be the sexuality of the dead.

The whole of Greco-Egypto-Sumerian economics compacts itself neatly into the hieroglyphic text of the Yankee dollar bill, the most popular publication in the history of History. The owl of Athena, one of the earliest coin images, perches microscopically on the face of the bill in the upper left corner of the upper right shield (you'll need a magnifying glass), and the Pyramid of Cheops is topped with the all-seeing eye of Horus or the panopticonical eye of ideology. The Washington family coat of arms (stars and stripes) combined with imperial eagle and fasces of arrows, etc.; a portrait of Washington as Masonic Grand Master; and even an admission that the bill is nothing but tender for debt, public or private. Since 1971 the bill is not even "backed" by gold, and thus has become pure textuality.

Hieroglyph as magic focus of desire deflects psyche from object to representation. It "enchains" imagination and defines consciousness. In this sense money constitutes the great triumph of writing, its proof of magic power. Image wields power over desire but no control. Control is added when the image is semanticized (or "alienated") by logos. The emblem (picture plus caption) gives desire or emotion an ideological frame and thus directs its force. Hieroglyph equals picture plus word, or picture as word ("rebus"), hence hieroglyph's power and control over both conscious and unconscious -- or in other words, its magic.

*for some reason, when i posted the url to the essay on Reality Sandwich, it would take you to the site, but not the essay itself...all it said was access to the essay was not authorized...so i will just post an url to Reality Sandwich and hope that is props enough*

 http://www.realitysandwich.com/

6:29 PM - 6 Comments - 7 Kudos - Add Comment

Some Crucial Reggae Podcasts

Revolutionary Dub Radio

 http://reggaerevolution.podomatic.com/

Sleeper's Record Shack

 http://sleeper.podomatic.com/

Dr. Tahl's Dub Shack

 http://www.doctortahlsdubshack.podomatic.com/

Ras Dragon

 http://www.doctortahlsdubshack.podomatic.com/

BMC's Reggae Mixes

 http://www.doctortahlsdubshack.podomatic.com/

Big Mikey Dread

 http://bigmikeydread.podomatic.com/

7:16 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Class War Karaoke

ClassWar Karaoke is based around a series of ongoing quarterly surveys.
each act contributes a piece of music, an image, and a piece of writing.

netlabels... classwar karaoke ... the idea is simple. it began from murmurists - murmurists as played-out in cyber. the idea began as art. the idea developed, though, into ideas about friendship, community, a kind of other economy - however modest, but grand in intent. such lovely souls out there, orbiting. the idea became about joining a little of this activity up. so those involved are friends. the art they make is wonderful to these ears. it's important to participate, to be active; and everyone needs a place. this netlabel is just one little place. best wishes, murmurists (march 2008)

the first of these surveys, 0001 survey,
was published 5th may 2008; included were:
an l after i an n before e, comfy rubbish, dr whom, ice bird spiral, igors roomy lab coat, murmurists, one minute wanda, prometheus, sifir, tracy lee summers, viscera(e), and zoologic.

all of the music and writing from this survey can be found in the blog section whilst the images can be found in the pics section.

a second survey, 0002 survey, includes Bryan Lewis Saunders, Comfy Rubbish, Fonik, Igor's Roomy Labcoat, Murmurists, One Minute Wanda, Sifir, Tracy Lee Summers, Undress Breton, and Zoologic

this will be published 1st august 2008. its theme, devised by sifir, is 'bodies the instruments', and arises from his somnambulist situations project.
read more about the theme and project here:

Somnambulist Situationists

Class War Karaoke

10:26 AM - 2 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment