writing viii

writing is a translation from one necessity to another. initially this translation feels like a freedom, but time translates the feeling of freedom to another necessity. so … from necessity through necessity to necessity. let no one then speak of writing as a pleasure, unless it is a dark one. yet writing laughs in darkness, in the way that death laughs. writing is the deepest of comedies. melville suitably placed these comedies in the ocean’s depths.

writing makes manifest the dna of the city and sets this against the cosmology of the observable universe, not in opposition but in radical and unspeakable union.

writing, in taking issue with time, is equally a covert energy at odds with money. not because time is money, as the commonplace goes, but because writing subverts everything … time and money simply being two of the dominant present commonplaces and so so easily subverted. (to say that time is money is only to reveal a wholesale incomprehension of time, money, and the copulative. time is as equally a cabbage or a totem.)

i would like to see rainbows not of colour, of spectra of light, but of text, of multihued words, appearing not in the sky as an arc but in the canopy of mind as supernumerary hyperspheres of dream.

writing stains white light with sins of blackness.

the towers of the city are trees. i cut them down with the axe of my mind and thinly slice them into blank surfaces for words that use my body for their transit.

i do not say these are my words, this is my work. at most i say these words may have, like dragonflies, settled once on my flesh. we are not each other’s. i have briefly been fascinated by their light and indifferent touch. they have briefly used me for purposes i hardly understand.

the seeming infinity of language is to action as the seeming infinity of the universe is to the earth.

oh words. what should i do with you in the dump of my soul? you do not belong there. it should be silence and flies.

when i write, it is not as if something draws me toward it. rather, nothing draws me. and in this empty picture or unused well i write and the words that form are water on water, some elemental union of void and deworded word.

i look at the city’s cells stacked like tarantula containers. words, fed weekly, taking years to grow, then crawling mature and fragile into a world of long and innumerable blades.

writing avoids the world’s causticities and hard illusions by ingesting them and shitting them out on soiled pages which humans sniff and, smelling themselves, celebrate. any true writer drily laughs behind its salaciously ascetic face.

i write the way i walk. aimlessly. with my eyes as legs. the city as the page and my flesh a pen. non-linearly. distracted. whole. diffused. holographic. hopeless but not despairing. open. omnipotent. free. deneeded. one.