Nine Dark Sides of Neptune

(aka Poseidon’s nocturnal nonagon)

the ghosts of reincarnation

We never hit bottom (death, annihilation, call it what you want) after we’ve been dropped from the clouds by bonobos or gremlins or angels or planes or laboratories into life’s well but rather our names gradually (though at different pacings) lose themselves in the increasing distance and darkness.  Our names are scraped by the well’s debris, by the bumping against the eternal walls, the other octillion things falling, until they cannot be read, except perhaps by those few who, by training or inclination, read obscure and ancient scripts.  At most, they may be sensed, as a mutant draft temporarily flings us, unnamed and acquainted only with falling, upward into the named; then we briefly become what are called ghosts or ancestral spirits or that uncanny mood that inexplicably possessed me as i passed that alley that spring evening, with mulch and blossoms still clinging to the dusk.

inheriting

William Golding, in The Inheritors, captures the melancholic exuberant inevitable takeover of Neanderthals by Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  Are we not now writing—collectively, melancholically, exuberantly, during the phenomenon itself—of the inevitable takeover of ourselves by the next order, already emerging and visible in the urban hordes ... what shall we call it?  If part of the Homo line ... Homo Webus? Homo Technus? Homo Nihilus?  If not part of the Homo line ... Weberthals? Technothals? Nihilathals?  They will not replace us primarily by violence and deceit, the techniques we used to overcome the Neanderthals, but with virtuality and pharmaceuticals and a dark patience not dissimilar to the dark patience of god.

the project of the projection of why

We don’t ultimately criticize anyone else or thing, although it frequently feels like this; all we do is receive signs that we’re to walk a particular path, which most are unable to help us with, an inability deriving from the characteristics of the particular or general path they are walking and must walk.  Our criticisms are emotional responses to our objections to our solitudes and fates.  We are inclined to blame others for these circumscriptions of nature, we attempt to drag facticity into our subjectivities, but in so doing refuse to grow into the circumscriptions of ourselves.

spiritual blood-letting

Even as there is a blood type that can donate to all others but only receive from its own, so there are spiritual types.  In one or two thousand years, if we progress spiritually at the same rate we’ve progressed technologically over the past two thousand years, we may understand these as well as we presently understand the ABO blood system.  But now, spiritually, we perform the practice of blood-letting and call it psychotherapy.  Our tamperings with psyches, minds, souls are primitive and barbaric; distant generations will look aghast on them, as we do now on the medical practices of the 17^th century.  But in the meantime we diminish spirits everywhere by having professionals draw vitality into their curious bowls, so that they can turn it into specimens and lay claims over it by virtue of having mapped it on their brains ... for, surely, in the logic of premodern medicine, doing something is better than doing nothing.

monsters of maturity

Once one has acclimatized oneself to human rejection, betrayal, anger, hate, abuse, incompetence, corruption, stupidity, greed, vanity, arrogance, projection (ideological and emotional), lust, delusion, hypocrisy, schadenfreude, injustice, possessiveness, smarminess, sentimentality, smallness, jealousy, envy and resentment; once one has accepted them as aspects of existence, as presently palpable (and so, in a sense, necessary, legitimate) as play, reflection, stillness, and smoking ... and experiences them in the way one experiences the Canadian winter (one may not always like it, one is at times compelled to mention it, even discuss it, but one becomes fairly indifferent to its harshness and vicissitudes); once one has traversed these common, bulky expressions of the human soul—and seen that routine society, its members and institutions, is primarily devoted to nurturing and renaming these expressions, in a kind of spiritual laundering process, to make them socially acceptable—one then can enter a space which facilitates appreciating the rare instances of nobility, dignity, grace, and intelligence as they do appear, randomly, irrespective of ideology, class, education, gender, almost as mutations, fleeting and beautiful, in the occasional individual—whether in a novel, poem or dream ... or in what we call reality ... who can say?

pupils of truth

I look into my pupils in the mirror and see rabbit holes:  deep shafts carved in vision to mine the madness of night.  I fall into them.  I count the false lights, falling, like fountains in a desert, windows on the energy of ossified illusion.  My words are tears, electric tears on the infinite electric page.  Only tears are real.  They carve the shafts that yield the words in falling.  Tears carve and in carving yield the tears of words.  Everything is a circle.

the insects will see god!

... : —  everything with twenty tentacles, grasping, asserting, leeching, sucking:  society a galaxy of tentacles, a fashion house of mawing hunger, a vast pile of insects crawling over each other, with the dead, the poor, the dispossessed, the exponentially growing artifacts of history and mind and art forming an increasingly huge and reeking pile on which the rest of us—randomly born into relative privilege, now for a moment able to breathe and move and see—crawl in hopes we can better see the stars.  And inch by inch, century by century, light year by light year, blood by blood, we get a little closer ...

inquisition redux

Modern psychotherapy as a vital resurgence of the Inquisition, in new, modern and exciting forms.  Immanence may have replaced transcendence, the psyche may have replaced god and psychology religion, but humans remain much the same, as a reading of Euripides, Chaucer, Omar Khayyám or Chuang Tzu quickly reveals.  Unfortunately, our First World social apparatuses lack the power to physically maul and decapitate those who deviate from the emotional orthodoxy ... but the means must align themselves with the environment, so the presently approved techniques of emotional mauling and decapitating are studied, developed, applied, published, enforced and analyzed by the industry’s professionals, with their canon and vocabularies, and accepted as commonplaces and promulgated by the masses and penitents, who receive their treatments with a dignity as wholesome and admirable as those 200 – 800 years ago.  These structures and processes include, but are not limited to, rigid unimaginative socially enforceable definitions (theoretical, behavioral) of emotional and spiritual maturity (no less narrow, dogmatic and serious than the official belief structures of the Middle Ages), orthodox emotional configurations devoted to tyrannizing—but nicely, politely, professionally, legally—their heterodox alternatives and calling their devotion not righteousness—for that is passé—but health.

the feather and the rock

Happiness is a feather on the edge of a shoulder while running an obstacle course through air conditioners, pain is a rock.

Happiness is not a feather, happiness is water.

But pain is a rock.

Flesh is a rock.

Flesh is a rock, movement is water.

Flesh is a rock, love is water.

Flesh is a rock, flesh is water.

Dictionary of Modern Times viii

With a mild preponderance and possibly overpreponderance of this is its and animals and genetics and night and screams and muches, very muches, born of a February in Canada and dedicated to the particular convergences of this time and this place, and in sweet memory of Excess’ child, Silence.

Melencolia I 

(7.2973525698 ×10−3 = 1/137.035999074 wasn’t, surely, just a coincidence,

when Albrecht writ god’s soul on 24x18.8 centimeters)

that old master, that old bastard, albrecht dee, calmly fit the whirring world onto a page

angels and artists, like cows and justice, aren’t that impressed

with whirrs and whirls and worlds

but go about their predetermined business anyway

of sitting or sleeping or looking

while others gasp or spit or drive quickly by when shown, calmly, cows and artists

just sitting there

appearing to do nothing

sssssso^domy,sssssso^dome

Manūščihr, High Persian Priest, who wrote Dādestān ī Dēnīg or Pursišn-Nāmag (but truly it seems more Dēnīg than Nāmag), devotes an unusually inordinate bulk of his little treatise to rectums, what not to do about them, what to do about them if you’ve done something about them, the impact of any such actions on archangels and whether the angels raise those who do something about rectums from the dead, whether killing those who have done something to them is meritorious or deleterious, a discussion of the height of the stenches arising from those who have done something about rectums, ... almost 10% of his ninth century work—written to highlight the most important religious, social, ethical, legal, philosophical, and cosmological knowledge of the age—devoted to rectums!

The pious may be pious but they ain’t porous, said Boris.

the propositions of freedom

1.      so one day you know or sense or it’s sensed for you

2.      or maybe not one day but in the crack of a mood or some hideous lunch or a forgettable decade or genital

3.      that this is it

4.      and you decide or more likely it’s somehow decided for you

5.      by your genes or a stray banana or your parents (whatever they have to do with anything) or some misplaced underwear

6.      whether you buckle down and do the that this is it:  kids and cars and pufnstuf

7.      or you go nuts and the that this is it does and buckles you

8.      or you try to detour around the buckling and the doing and the nutting and the #3 follows along (or maybe leads or plays hide-and-seek, it’s hard to tell), which seems like a kind of buckling and doing and nutting (and/or being buckled&done&nutted) and the seeming, as mister frost in his hiemal soul foretold, might have made all the difference, which doesn’t, frankly, (as he also sang, but more surreptitiously) seem very much

it’s raining cash&jism, the sun is slippery in the sky!

And I saw ducks, like greasy monsters,

hirsute and horrible, on the teetertotters of their quacks,

mourning for their churchy mamas yet,

spinoza’s ethics tucked inside their pretty breasts.

And I saw crocodiles, in sartorial suspenders,

quoting ducks but mainly snoring,

seated on their leather ancestry not meaning very much.

And there were tortoises too, almost cute and cuddly

if it weren’t for their memory of now till 1889.

And not just these!:  neurotic OCD flamingos chomping on themselves,

rolypunting wombats and crafty sewer faggy rats,

birds in bunnies! phoenixes in tabloids! fish in fishnets! giraffes as maître d's!

     !             !!!                    !!                  !              !!!                           !       !!

So it is in the age of meteorology,

with cash and giraffes and mamas.  (And a slippery sun.)

dna murmurs

Pling goes the pling of the pling on the plingpling

Plong goes the pling of the pling on the plong

Schasht goes the Unterwoof of your sweet pedigrees

And pling goes the plong of the pling on the pling

the fair

I like the weird ones.

Who have fallen off the carousel’s piggies and horses

and wander among the music, the rising falling rising falling rising falling

and watch, halfheartedly, the changing riders, the lineup’s scramble, the crying laughing faces

and wait, though not necessarily with anticipation, for those called to fall to fall:

and some sit there, appearing dumb, close to the hooves

others babble below the noise, the happy hum

still others walk with or against the revolution, conversing with the riders

for their own peculiar purposes or just because they must converse

and a few are given over to feeling the falling rising the revolutions the music

and saying, or not, this is it this is it …

Meanwhile, the lineup waits excitedly, replenishing itself like weather

and the piggies know exactly what to do to give that special feeling of what it’s like to be alive

and the weird ones, who have fallen off (or maybe climbed down because of godknowswhat)

still join in the ride and are not apart

All’s Well That Ends Well

The experiment fails if the word is uttered,

it’s all signs and pigeons and the impossible calm of your gaze:

time must do its thing without help from us

(who’ve never really known what to do with time other than fill it with our sighs and screams

[which may be, for us, all time ever is:

our problem play of noise]).

So utter the word anyway—

the word’s but a yellow scream or sigh,

a streak on god’s expanding canvas

which does—(admit it!)—nothing to failure or experiments

(they’re quite capable of doing fine on their own, thanks).

Words are just pigeons and time is just your gaze.

weather report

The sky’s today the underbelly of a dove

Vast and sleepy in the heavens,

Resting on the bloated arrogance of earth

It looks, too, somewhat like a marshmallow

A little charred, as if it fell into the fire,

Enough food for all Somalia, if we could drag it down

All this—though it isn’t much—might portend some days to come

Without doves or marshmallows or the relief of famine.

Just the overturned blue bowl, the empty ancient shape,

Holding the avocado of the world.

in a february, random snapshots taken with my iEYE, whilst touring on a dubious lectica, inappropriately portered by doré and hopkins

the sky is green,

my heart is green like the sky

i drive the tram between the Cocytus and Lethe:

there’s always room, never any fare … entrer!

When I was six, bound in the trunk of a Bourbon taxi,

the Delta wailing like a herd of marauding banshees,

Krishna, gloved, in the back seat, tickled my toes.

the world, as light as bubbles,

is always chained to Wonderland with songs

See the paintings, suspended in the air!—

twisted landscapes with the brains of emergent DNA

sipping lattes in postbiopunk cafés.

Fluffy vivisected faces crossing suns of perfect beauty

whilst the Flintstones play stone banjos on a duck float.

There—the city rising to receding lights, coke and gin and futures in the faucets,

numbers cracking through the concrete, maudlin peace and tofu,

hearts for sale like sausagedogs, pronouns rotting in the dumpsters,

you like Shirley Mosque and me like Thelonius Poopoo

playing cards on the distended belly of the headless duchess.

It’s all here, in the funfair, in the city, on the greens,

the world is light as bubbles and the sky as free as banshees

we’re playing golf on bloodcarts, singing—Hey nonny ninny

it’s all here in the window, in a scream

Pflug & Pfuff

visited the Room of the Eleven Heads on the last day of the first month in the year after The Apocalypse, and counted the heads and looked into the eyes even when there seemed to be none and necked a little in the washroom and returned to the Eleven Heads, which all seemed to be quite aware that something had been going on.

They’re peeking out from everywhere, said Pflug.

Like gophers on Groundhog Day, said Pfuff.

They know what we did, said Pflug.

In the washroom, said Pfuff.

That we maybe shouldn’t, said Pflug.

Just recently, said Pfuff.

In the washroom, said Pflug.

But the 11 heads, despite their seeming awareness, remained mute, and if they knew anything, retained it in their stony hearts and showed it only with their eyes.

poverty

                … say it … say it over and over … say it fiscally, emotionally, intellectually, imaginatively, spiritually, ontologically, socially, romantically, sexually, psychically, erotically, culturally, familially, politically, aesthetically, oneirically, temporally, integratively, physically, eternally … an artist is never poor … her endless effusions of wealth erupt from vast deserts of emptiness … but none of this is poverty, for poverty is lack, indicating concrete objects outside one’s grasp that one must have to be fulfilled; the artist, wanting all and being intimate with the gap between desire and fulfillment, works with what is given—and what is given is most frequently the gap—to destroy and create.

dinnertime

(aka stretched unsonnet, having just been run over by a GO train, on a simulated death march to bataan)

Brussels sprouts like baby heads

In the laptop’s womby glow

Thyme like beatcops stuck in Gorgonzola’s teeth

The city stretched like bubbling pancakes

John Cage caged like hamsters

The dance like Karen Cane on stilts

Rice and lentils happy in their reputations

And the carrot—noble carrot!—laughing like an orange.

Ah!, it’s dinner, it’s dinnertime,

King Crimson’s playing bible tunes

And the city’s sparkling like a rhinestone demiurge

The city’s sparkling like a Brussels sprout

Baudelaire’s skeletons hiphopping on the twinkling apathetic clouds

Death winking like a greedy god

And metaphor on crack, you on jungle daylight savings time

The night climbing Leah’s Ladder,

You in Hades munching vultures

I in heaven being munched by cokey Munsch

It’s Toronto at three a.m. in February

It’s like a raisin tko’d in some detergent factory

It’s dinnertime and the oven’s counting roman numerals,

It’s dinnertime, we’re riding chaise longues to hell.

Dictionary of Modern Times vii

to pray

God, the unspeakable, who rarely uses words and has now almost forgotten how, who is white like an infinite desert of arctic snow but hides in the palettes of painters and fashion designers, who comes and goes like steam on a window, about whom it might be said that little can be said and in this saying is our speaking, whom I think I saw once at the bottom of a tube of toothpaste, who may resemble numbers in their purity, who may resemble filthy rectums and schizophrenia and maggots in a putrid kitten, who does not exist, who played a tune once in a bar in the twelfth century in Perm, who had grown weary of love by the time of the dinosaurs, who prefers backgammon to bridge and Pauline Phillips to Martha Stewart, who owns a schnauzer and calls it Misfortune, who presently drives a ’72 Honda Civic hatchback but complains about it bitterly, whose LSAT scores are average, except in 1949 when a 179 was obtained, who’s sort of like you on one of those days, be near us we pray and be with Aunt Jennie and her dementia and watch over the situation in Belarus and take care of the distressed and starving everywhere and help me live forever without any problems and can we colonize another planet soon cause that would be really cool and I’m sorry for what happened in Auschwitz and please especially give me an iPad4 for my birthday and get rid of Mark who’s really annoying amen.

eat your greens, mister murray

Mister Murray was a carnivore from 1964—

cow and pig and fowl and horse and whale and wild boar.

No matter how much Spousey tried to get him to eat greens,

the most he’d have (perhaps once a week) would be a lima bean.

She tried the oldest time-aged tricks that Gramma had once used:

she lined her thighs with chard and kale, put lettuce in the booze;

but all that Mister Murray’d do was flick those greens away,

get some beer from the corner store then say, Ok, now let’s play.

Until finally one day she chained him to the rad,

took off her clothes and yelled—you won’t get had

until you eat four pounds of spinach, borage, collards and garden cress,

till then I’m just gonna sit here and taunt you with my breasts.

It was, you must admit, a fairly classic scene

of dueling wife and husband, of sizzling flesh and greens.

Who won, you ask?  Did Mister Murray get his meat?

Or was Spousey there till doomsday, throwing fennel on her teats?

We’ll never know, because it just so happened then

that Franky Rank, a drunk, was driving his volkswagen,

crashed into the living room where that war was going on

and killed all three, the dachshund too, and the teacup persian.

All the leafy things that Mister Murray’s wife had so carefully prepared,

laid on her lovely body, so eager to be shared,

slowly were forgotten, dried, and quietly withered to dust ...

and all that remains is this memory of human lust.

  

jabès, even, wipes his ass, too, like god

... it’s not a stretch to think of the two of them

squatting on eternity’s jakes

sharing a joke about scatology and suffering

pulling on the heavenly toilet paper roll they share

helping each other out a bit, the way friends do,

then jabès wandering off to write the book of rolls, or something,

and god, doing what he’s made to do—

silently watching the dumpings of humanity,

listening to jabès yab until he can yab no more

and becomes, like god, silent and watching,

dumping, pulling, sharing, wiping,

squatting at the right hand of ...

and the word redeemed, once, the silence,

or seemed to, in its empty suffering,

now so full of itself, it’s not a stretch to think ...

You know how it is, in the south of france, with all those grapes.

Petite Pierre preferred to spend his dimanches

not under Bishop Balustrade’s barbed brimstone

but under Boucher Borduas’ bobonne, Bernadette,

in the vineyards, with all those grapes,

until the bishop and the boucher

found and chopped Petite Pierre and Bernadette into itty bitty bits

and buried them near Bresse,

where they flowered into fabulous vintages

which you drank while touring

and said, How lovely, how marvelous, the wine, in the south of France,

with all those grapes,

you know how it is.

ode to coconut oil

- as if the great iam-iam had coconuts for balls

- as if he spread the earth with it then bowled down the alley of the coco-milky way
- this, not amniotic fluid, our squishy birthright

- probe & astroglide & k-y & even butter (& always vaseline) be damned:  cocoil!—the healthier alternative (got coc & nut & o! in it ... it’s meant to be!)
-  oh oil of the coconut, be praised!

lover in bombay, margarita in oaxaca

recently the Council of Doves in Bad Worms confirmed the vatic cries of the heresiarchs in their distress and declared that god is cheese and his angels worms, that god was formed of the milky way and his angels of him when he was sour.  Consequently, through the declaration, the heresiarchs were put to death, their distress silenced, but the truth of cheese remains.

i have a lover in Bombay, a margarita in Oaxaca, and this is the truth i see in the cold and the soil and the cries of loneliness as they swoop on the vivid wings of night.

flinging w/o flinging

the jade of middle age

jaded, middle aged

the age of mutton fat jade

do you hear the war cry that men hurl

into the face of the future,

challenging it to strife?

not wishing to be one among many like jade

nor to be aloof like stone

faith 0 doubt 0

After 6,000 overtime periods, the score remains ...

... if you must shake your fist at something, do not shake your fist at fate, shake it at freedom ...

unit of pain:  microouch

¹ base unit of felt pain

² Microsoft’s underground subsidiary and parent

i see myself through the rearview mirror of a passing motorcycle seen on the bumper of a vintage car reflected on the concave chrome of some trinket on the dash

Yet, even so, there i am.  Solid, in a sense, like industrial smoke at night when it’s -25°.  Indisputable, really.  Something that surely wouldn’t be there, that appearing, in a world just of machines and mirrors.  Distorted, perhaps, but what isn’t, considering the nature of reflection and the reflection of technology and the technology of nature?  It’s the case, i suppose, if i hadn’t got the trinket that i wouldn’t have been seen and so, presumably, would be nothing, unless you’re one of those who believe there’s always a surface somewhere that’s reflecting the immanent image, if one knows where to look, under the views, in the closets of mirrors, in the blood of machines, the hidden alphabets, if one needs to see that much, if it’s a quest instead of simply just an accident.

i sensed myself passing in a mirror, and i was not undone

this is it, the self as an intuition of a simulacrum of a self.  This isn’t only time, its elusiveness, its impossibility, its eternal game, that peepshow on the bottomless lake of the heart.  It’s what we are, in our ... what shall we call it? ... our ... our ... our humanity ... but can we say it(, how can we say it)?  ([Humanity is so inhuman.])  It’s the inability to grasp that’s at the center of the mirror, our recoiling, our glimpse of that glimpse of the glimpse.  I walked on, though, as if i had seen nothing, and the mirror, too, did little other than what it does.

we travel to the moon but, still, our brains are underwater, our hearts are in the womb (_{and this is to say nothing of our gonads, which seem to be, most of the time, just in themselves})

and what connects these odd devices—brains and hearts and moons?  Something in the drugstore or the eucharist?  The black and white prints of dyer or wilbur or osho or katie or ouspensky or jesus (who didn’t do prints [unless you count the shroud]) or dürer or you?  A tweak to the brain or the heart or the moon? You? The plague or the crash of the web or a plane, the planes or plains of non-euclidean geometry, sweet flowers of absurdity, elliptical love?  An exclusion of thoughts (new thought, higher thought, severed thought, california thought), ^the work, the negation of suffering ... or their inclusion—mind’s niagara falls:  seduction, death, and power, the high-wire over the lyric eddies of the masses?  Perhaps god has a giant elastic, a collection of twine and ribbon, which he wraps around the stuff when he’s in the mood or it’s about to snap.  Or maybe it all just somehow hangs together on its own, despite our plagues and drugs and books and amulets and work, and nobody really knows why or how.

... and, for our excited readership, lounging at home in their petunias, sipping chai and turnip juice, we hint at definitions to come—

1. Melencolia I 
2. sssssssssso^domy,sssssssssso^dome
3. hitting the jillpot
4. ... and ^flesh fulfilled its destiny as _flesh ...
5. a sociology of use
6. bach:  so insufficient now, so sufficient
7. death roe

Prayers & Reveries: god the everywhere, the egg

A number of entries from the ponderous Reveries & Prayers were released by The Sadoo in January 2012.  Readers may recall that this ponderosity was written by Xavier Xavier von Xavier, a Vergobret crucified in Belgica Prima by his Council for taking certain Druidic practices beyond what was deemed acceptable by the tribe.  While he was dying—and the Guinness World Tortures lists his CDT (crucifixion death time) as the longest in civilization, clocking in at a whopping 12 years, 7 months, 12 days, 3 hours, 17 minutes, and 53 seconds—he dictated Reveries and Prayers to his milkmaid.  While only fragments remain, it seems certain that Xavier’s work consists of 81 pieces, radically different in form and orientation, direct utterances of the mystic's spirit, suspended, ecstatic and dolorous, over the chasm between life and death.  The Secular Sadoo is pleased to bring, once again and under impulse, a moderately comprehensible fragment to its readership and likewise thanks Sissy Spacek for translating from Gaulish to English.

god the everywhere, the egg

The question of whether god was hatched and, if so, how, is considered moot by many, the issues being more substantially of the egg’s diameter and incubation.

Heresiarch Hillela upholds the majority opinion that the egg was 300 cubits long, 50 wide, and 30 high, with a roof finished to a cubit upward and an entrance on the side, made of gopher wood, smeared inside and out with pitch, with three decks and internal compartments, being incubated in the forehead of Richard El Mundo Wolff Mallorca Te Quiero III of Porto Alegre when he was on his way to Novo Nordisk, thinking it was Novosibirsk, and got stuck on the obscure island of Tago Maaago for seven years because of marital troubles.

Others, notably Heresiarchs Gamelana and Shringa, maintain the earth was once an egg and this egg an eye, the eye and only eye of Isis, before she was named and bodied.  After an eternity less an hour, the earth cracked and Isis became blind and from the power of the pain usurped a body from the stars and stole the eyes of god so that he could not see humanity’s suffering, and moved to Egypt, where she lived for many years.

There are still others—the Mouflon sect of the Ruminant Quadrupedalists particularly—who defend the view put forward in The Ovine Egg of God, that sheep lay eggs and in each egg is god and in each god a sheep and in each sheep an egg, a nested birth and herd and divinity without end.

Heresiarch Ensi is inclined as the moon is waxing to purport that all is egg, and everything; there is naught that is not egg.  So god is continually in embryo, hatching, being conceived—inescapably one and many, the ubiquitous yolk and white and shell of all, forever egging itself into eggsistence, ache and ach, our shellves, yellow laughs of purity, we eggy gods.  When the moon is waning, however, she is less so inclined, and when the moon is absent, she is silent, and if asked about the subject shakes her somewhat oval head and only moans.

The Role of the Prophet in the Cinematic Age

The prophet, by nature, stands outside.  But where does he stand in the cinematic age, when all the world’s a film and the prophet but another strutter stuttering his lines?

He once stood outside of society; he had nature to stand in.  Nature, hardly hospitable, but still a home to those who lived without extensions, offered pyretic inspiration to the vatic class.  But in this age of moving pictures, shadows collaboratively scripting, where even nature has become another movie, the prophet has nowhere to stand but within the script.

Never one to toe the party line or even to attend to parties, he tended to appeal to one of two trajectories:  law or perfection.  While both his appeals were impossible to fully follow, at least the gap between behavior and ideal in the former was measurable; but in the latter it was infinite ... and infinity, despite the modern mathematical set, is troublesome to measure.

Yet prophets still are born.  The human soul has not kept pace with its technological extensions and continues to blindly cast anachronisms into the urban ball.  Not just prophets, but an entire assortment of leftovers and hangovers from the age of nature and religion swirl democratically with the adaptable, awaiting death or genetic modification to make them palatable or sterile or both.

Prophets still are born and have no choice, as with the rest of us, but to be who they are.  Where do they stand?  What do they say?  Can and should they do anything to perpetuate their kind?

I have answered the first question:  they stand inside and must find the outside from within.  If the path to prophecy is less direct than it used to be, this simply reflects the growth of the mirror-lined labyrinth in which we all find ourselves; the path to all vocations is less direct; there is more life--and death--to negotiate to travel anywhere.  Time and space have not shrunk, as false prophets glibly claim in DOA bestsellers, but expanded; they both reach for infinity with their greedy hands and we, peculiar configurations of time and space, are compelled to follow.

I have inferred the answer to the second question.  They say what they have been given.  They search in the labyrinth for the prophetic script, find their lines, and read them.  Law or perfection, it doesn’t matter:  they both are now immeasurable.  Law has become a discipline of cinematography, as all disciplines have, without depth or limit, a surface of screens and regulations stretched across the feral earth; and perfection is the only thing outside the law.  Does this seem futile?  Does it seem vain?  Does it seem as if one speaks to noise-plugged ears and beam-scaled eyes?  Well, this is in the job description.

As to the third question, I am no prophet.  I peer into the eye of the past, but the future’s blind, its eyeballs gouged.  Can and should are modals and modals are politicians’ province.  I am no politician.  I simply say:  let soul and technology battle it out on eros’ primrose fields.  Can technology modify soul?  Can soul’s extensions modify their source?  This is the human experiment, and prophets are simply little litmus tests to tell which way the battle’s going.  In short, prophets can perpetuate their kind as long as soul retains sectors free from technology’s reach; once soul and technology are synonymous, however, perpetuation will not only not be achievable, it will not be attempted, for it will not be thought.

If I am no prophet or politician, what am I?  I am what so many are:  a journalist.  I simply describe what I have seen and see.  Prophets, though, are prophets, and are compelled to babble their outside from within until the outside is no more.  Their role is as it always has been:  impossible, necessary, repetitive, unheard.   Cinema itself, this flatland we have constructed for ourselves and moved within, modifies perhaps the challenges, but only at a technical level, not a spiritual one.  This would in fact modify the role for many others, but not for the prophet; for he, as we know, lives spiritually not technically, and technical vicissitudes, their domain and power, are outside his comprehension.

The cinema not only lives, but we live within it.  The prophet too cannot escape this newfound air, the ventilated air of the theater, but breathes it along with everyone else.  He peers not from darkness directly--this capacity is lost to the species--but through a front or backlit screen and says what he must say in such a manner.  Nevertheless, he will be ignored.

Those whose home is the theater, who find the within from within, are often called prophets, but they are not; they are managers and moneychangers and scribes of all assortments and, yes, even journalists; their words are gold, though even in this age as they must be--orbiting flecks of gold.  The prophet, though, bumbles forth, in certainty lost, and now, in the cinematic age, lost even to his lostness.