the systems of doctors tarr and professors fether

all the usual values – teamwork, stewardship, excellence, innovation, cooperation – imbecilic. excellence eg. anwar congo maintained it in killing through the mid-60s and – in the 2012 film the act of killing an odder excellence (for excellence in killing is as tediously common and desired as excellence in business, manipulation, and schadenfreude) in aesthetically simulating killing. christopher edward wollaston mackenzie geidt maintains excellence at establishment strategic defense and offence {{{{{{{{{{😀that game😀}}}}}}}}}}. elizabeth bishop at poetry. if i admire excellence – and how could i not? – i admire congo, geidt, bishop, and the million other dictators, murderers, general managers, and poets who have whatever combination of tenacity, volition, opportunity, and skill to do what can and probably should be called success in a specific segment of human endeavour

true, a formal value typically is placed in a smallish list – that which can often be found these valued days in institutions – the ostensible intent being that each metaphysical member counsels and balances the others. (sadoo diaper attempts, perversely, subterranely this very thing, this poly-appendaged teetertotter of energies, in its various writings on its council of i.) take a major global bank’s values: trust, teamwork, accountability. nowhere do we find competitiveness, cunning, avarice, mistrust, deception – these additional attributes required for successful management and perhaps for surviving life (the cooperative housing complex i live in is the least cooperative institution i’ve been involved with – exacerbated in part because of its relative impecuniousness and so proximity to the exigencies of the anthill. [but also its embodied and so impractical diversity, its ...])

a cinematic bookend is slowly arriving from the director
of one of the world’s premier debut features
(něco z alenkye 1988) – his last (hmyz 2018) –

humans are more like insects

this civilization more like an anthill

like his neighbor, be tar (who directed his stated last in 2011)
both having lived inescapably through the anthill
transforming it, using very different means in film
into dark comedies, obscure redemptions of the human

none of this is saying much beyond what’s nascent in heraclitus and developed with increasing complexity and parallel inefficacy across the aesthetic and philosophic subsidiaries of time. but value – which sadoo r die f rich reflung into vocabulary, now, like all glories, commercialized and stupiditized by fawning insects – this substantive, walks among the adjectives quite democratically (even willful!), dreaming of becoming verbs

ayahuasca and middleclass capitalism –

focusing one’s fragmented and inchoate desires on

growing the weed of the human?

fear after a time ... is narcotic

it can lull one by fatigue into sleep

but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably

apprehension, anxiety –

drugs of the age, manufactured by the

pfizer ink in our souls

snails and lasers for mpp or ph or cm

i choose to live alone because my imagination functions better when I don't have to speak with people,

gote noats

the proprietor of a guest house says he plays the tabla. i ask him if he plays out anywhere, in public. no, i only play for god. probably doesn’t tweet either.

the night lit loggias of bundi cornea of aravalli, sockets of worms, apertures onto the days when junglī suar wandered protected on a greener, less regulated, and three-dimensionally more vicious earth.

the 5-hour bus from jaipur to bundi in its 49 numbered seats holds 71 passengers, 8 on top, 9 goats, obese sacs of produce heaped mercilessly in the aisles, 3 employees (driver, bus manager, ticket operator), no washroom or a/c – it’s midday and 34°. deluxe, the agent had told me. my body doesn’t fit anywhere, only hindi’s spoken, no shocks on this bitch and the road’s all hole ... i’m a conscious turd flushed onto the laughing dirt when the receptacle of hadoti finally welcomes.

i had hardly believed him.

the celebrations, festivities, pan-coloured noise, parades occur multiple times daily. gods, death, marriage, birth (and what’s the bloody difference?). some ridiculous-looking male dressed in a silver suit and flowers is plunked on a horse that’s so weighted in decoration how can no one laugh or protest (where’s friedrich when you need him ... maybe b. tarr can direct the bundi horse)? a few dudes beat relentlessly on big drums for 30 minutes before the procession – which includes the requisite 20 following females and blaring tuktuk – begins to jolt and belch its way eastward. it’s all religion and it’s all the time.

a bordeaux man – almost comically friendly, pulls up a small stool to sit and chat to me, misses the stool falling on the floor (feel like i’m in a chaplin skit) – asks me how long the flight is home. about 15 hours i say. i thought it wouldn’t be much longer than paris he says – isn’t there a way you can just zip over the arctic?

in my homeland i never say i’m a writer. in that world of privilege as language and language as privilege such a designation is too pretentious, wearied, photocopied, easy, meaningless ... lumping me with gangling cheese strings of humans i have no affinity with, embarrassments to language, no-cost writing, bud lights of Word. but here i use it as an efficient conversation-ending explanation for why i don’t do tourist things but sit stupidly around staring into space like an incarnation of the god Vapid. everyone (europeans, indians) seems satisfied, asks no further questions.

 

the second night in rajasthan i ascend to the rooftop terrace of my guesthouse and a young french couple is dimly fucking on a chair. is clearing my throat sufficient international language? should i pull up a chair and watch, yank my dick out and cum on their faces? i go to a table, pull out my notebook and begin writing.