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.
