TUESDAYS

art ain’t what it used to be

Let us think now of creation.  Think of it rolling down itself like a snowball, rolling up like a sunset.  There we are.  Here.  In the lap of the machine, our mother.  Reading ones and zeros like a baby train.  The moment is now, you may have heard.  And i say the moment is now but i say the moment is then and a belch.  I say the moment is that stock broker cracked out on himself and the wall being broken and no one knowing the difference for that is the nature of the moment and who are you to say anything else.  The moment is the machine.  Let us pray and ask for grace to continue praying until we bleed flowers.  Who are you anyway to think of tomorrow.  That maestro of indifference.  Tomorrow is the absurdum ad reductio of absurdity, the dog of gods.  Where is spirit? where is potency? where is animation? where is virility? where is the transcendence of gender and war and despair and greed?  In strategic plans and retirement plans?  In pissy plans and coital plans?  In plans?  Yo Yo.  In the noon of now and the eye of cow and a trip of pigs and an I of you, woof woof.  Think now of creation.  Purple underbelly of sodomy on a Sunday afternoon.  Slinking down your panties like a song.  Oooooh.  Like a slug in your throat and a song in your ass.  You want peace?  You want love?  You want that desecration called money?  You want an automobile?  You want the apocalypse and you want it on this date and you want it in your bank account in neon?  Let me tell you, that weasly little imposter tolle and all his whoring siblings should have kept their mouths shut not because they were wrong but because they were wrong.  And if you don’t get that just go to jail and wait there with your cheap bourbon while everyone passes GO a thousand trillion times until even your boogies take on eternal significance and that is that, so there, buy Toyota, it’s American, and fuck your hamster until it bleeds.  Be nice.  Think now of creation.  That magenta haze of branded bliss.  That drunken taxi ride down Fifth when she was sprawled like a kangaroo and the clouds were raining testaments of truth, gutters sucking greedily, tongues like the Mariana Trench.   Who said Kathmandu didn’t have something to say after midnight?  Build a blossom to the sky.  Smother the Internet with tits.  You never were what you claimed to be.  As some evangelist spoke in the urban desert as the moon went black and limbs nailed themselves to the pretty windows of Costco.  Not much, she said, as she dropped her little black dress and poured another martini in the geraniums.  Not much for a Tuesday.  Let us think now of creation, which must have happened on a Tuesday if you think about it which i hardly recommend not simply because i hardly recommend anything but because Tuesdays are for drunks and pedophiles.  Where’s the light?  Where’s the light in the anus of rhyme?  Pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse.  So there’s this Tuesday, see ... this Tuesday walking down the street in his stockings with a little cash, this Tuesday on which nothing’s happening but TV, which isn’t much, and Greta Garbo’s strutting down a rainbow into Ireland and someone says, Hey Greta, what the fuck you two-faced fulda, and not much happens after that.  I saw the clouds on a Tuesday, quoting Donne or Sappho.  That turned me off Tuesdays.  Let us think now of ... dark pit of whatever, shark shit of Flight 447 ... here it comes ... that song you love, that law that protects you, that heat in your hardness, your murders in bed.  Let us think now of creation.  Creation, at 40,000 feet combusting.  In the drawers of your mother and the lap of incest.  In the god of mediocrity and the injustice of justice.  Let us think now.  Now.  Of creation.  It happened on Tuesday.

And if you doubt that, you’re a fink.

BLACKBIRDS

Time is blue like yogurt.  It doesn’t fall.  I saw it yesterday, hiking the adirondacks, slightly hungry.

Time, i thought, Not one for talking.  Yet i thought i heard it mumble as it almost fell (it almost falls but doesn’t) something about something left at the cleaners.  Must have been me, though, hearing time.

Time is blue like yogurt.  Like a sari wanting to be undone.  Really!  One would think its tastes would have evolved somewhat!  But that’s it, i guess.

I’ve always pictured it sort of like a foot-shaped solar-powered rubber calculator, with big keys, very pink, fun to press, always counting.  Time, unfortunately, has never quite returned the favor.

Time likes, i think, routinely to be stroked, like a cat quite acquainted with itself and having had a tabby as an uncle.

It likes to change in a closet, like a superhero.  It likes to brush with pepsodent.  Smokes like a chimney.  Doesn’t think twice, or even once.  Might make a good ceo if it weren’t for that annoying tic.

Whenever i’m in paris, which isn’t often these days, due to something some say is the same as time but really isn’t, never could be, but sort of is, i often see it sitting on one of those benches by the river, looking in (as in a mirror?), at the bodies that have been there.

Time, like the finest waterproof treatment (^hydrobloc) for the finest leather boots (zamberlans), isn’t cheap.  But, like lots of things, it is.

I fondled my yellow banana phone the other day, reminding me of time.  If it were green, i asked myself, Would it have done so?

Some say (some would say something else) time’s better in some things than its competitors.  But i don’t know.

You know what’s been said about time and blood and fear and more by that frenchman on a throne.  I’m inclined to believe in it with certain stools.

Time.  Bit of a pisser.  Like granny’s dingleberries when she’s dying.

A bit like yogurt?  Sure.  Green yogurt on the big keys in leather boots

Ogg Two

On the cosmic spiritual scale, cruelty and sentimentality compensate for each other.  As with all dualities, it is the responsibility of those who contain them and wish to evolve beyond the puerility of their opposition, of their typical unevolved opposition in society, to choreograph a perfect dance, an aesthetic dance, between them.  In other words, it is passionate knowledge we seek, that we must seek.  Four states:  passion with ignorance (the classic brute), knowledge without passion (the classic scholar), neither passion nor knowledge (the classic couch potato, the bourgeoisie, the mandarin), passion with knowledge (the classic poet).  But I taxonomize.

These recent days my weeks follow a path something like this:

·         - three schizoid days in the jungle

·         - a day of chaos

·         - a day of recovering from chaos

·         - a day of writing prep (aesthetic mining)

·         - a day of writing (aesthetic production)

Curious routine.  I’m reminded of Louis Aragon’s lines from his poem, Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux (There’s no happiness in love):

What it takes in regrets to repay one small thrill
What it takes in sorrow to pen the slightest song
What it takes in sad tears for one tune on a guitar

Risking when one’s older is far more interesting than risking when one’s young.  Yet the trajectory of most lives these days is oriented toward the minimization of risk as one ages (the rise of risk management as a discipline).  Increasing prosthetics and the securing of them (whether cottages, spouses, jobs and careers, friends, rrsps, social standing) are seen as signs of maturity, responsibility, adulthood.  This imbalance—this distribution of risk throughout time instead of throughout psyche or soul (which is collapsed time)—is embedded through our society and is a strategic social mistake.  Our definitions of maturity and sanity occur within a context of immaturity and imbecility.

Marijuana remains a Delphic oracle for me, pointing to murky inarticulate truths, which I must then mine myself, with tangential support and attempted sabotage from others.  Of course, weed is also a delightful accompaniment to sex and partying; but in those instances, while valuable, its function feels little different than the pleasant utilities of coffee or alcohol—a kind of boost to achieve a temporary social or physical transcendence.  When pot loses its resonance as a temporary transcendence or mining tool, it has nowhere to go, has no object to unite with but itself, and one becomes, in colloquial terms, a pothead, a stone.  The diminishment of pot as an entheogen, its rise as a lifestyle.

The cycle of productive pot mining during crises:  it first brings emotional warnings (I wander emotionally through potential problems, dangers), then brings clarity as the elements of the crisis are ready to coalesce.  I feel before I cognate.  Pot works its way from body through heart to mind to action, back to itself—at best, a guided tour of the present state of the soul.  One has to cocktail, of course:  to find a judicious mix of substances (preferably organic, non-toxic, non-addictive) over time, with the right mix of solitude/otherness, in the right moments and phases.  One has to learn to exploit the drug (not the drug exploit you):  but of course this is too techno-, too formulaic, too easy and unidirectional:  rather, one has to develop symbiosis with the drug (or substance, most unfortunate words, as both have been usurped by the desperate and fearful technocratic, legal, and political class), to find one’s place in it as it find its place in you.

Business strategy is just a specialty of philosophy … of conceptualizing world.  I experience little difference in the way I process a strategy problem in a business (pragmatic) setting and the way I process a problem of language, time, or nothingness.  Fortinbras meets Hamlet.

As a philosophical Taoist, my management style is aligned with the Tao Te Ching but my lifestyle is aligned with the Chuang Tzu.  I unite these two primary Taoist streams through the dualistic passion of Christianity.  Christ as welder.

One is frequently warned before going to India for the first time:  expect a nervous breakdown at least every two weeks.  Perhaps the same warning should be given about the Bain.

Even when I’m having a breakdown, I’m marvelous—the experience just the sector of marvelous called breakdown.  Breakdown is simply a desire, a reminder, of the necessity for adaptation, even as physical hunger is a desire for food, a reminder that we need to orient our present activities to the cupboard or fridge.  Breakdown is a hunger, reminding us we need to orient our present activities to soul.

To the West:

Your troubled mind emerges from your viewing the rational as rational.  The rational in itself is not rational, but the shadow of the irrational and so a subversion of itself.  Only in cooperation with the irrational does the rational effectively display itself and prove to be capable of any dignity, intelligence.

I must assert and defend the way I feel—the way I feel (not what I feel) is who I am.  People mistake what I think for what I am; they mistakenly identify the opinions I spout with identity.  But this is somewhat like mistaking a dandelion seed floating through the air with the dandelion in its entirety—its flower, leaves, roots.  Yet, even worse—it’s like identifying the seed with the DNA.  The way I feel—the way I process myself in relation to the world—is my spiritual DNA.  What might the discipline be called that maps the two?  It surely is not academic.  It surely doesn’t belong to psychology, philosophy, or genetics.  We might say it is the poetic discipline.  We might say it is the human one.  The difference between Taoism and Christianity:  the murky way as identity vs. the solid nails on a cross.

The curious thing about my present crisis is that it’s my first that feels as if it’s largely happening/existing outside me or a “relationship.”  Like how a fungus digests externally, I’m beginning to crisis externally.  Maybe I’m turning into a mushroom.

i will go to the end of time

and there find the source of the sun

i will destroy myself

to discover myself

i will question everything

to reveal nothing

i will deconstruct the city

to find the nature that’s hiding in me

i will resurrect god in a bathtub vigil

for no reason whatsoever

i will be celibate

because no one else is

i will confuse myself

to reveal myself

i will become bankrupt

to become rich

i will give myself over to the infinite paths of darkness

to live