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,

nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio

i’m here to apply for the position of dog-walker

oh great. a few questions then

sure

tell me about your history with dogs, your love for them, …

i don’t like dogs, they seem too much like humans

i’m not sure how comfortable i am having someone walk fifi who doesn’t like dogs

i like plants

bujja needs her plants walked!

i’ve liked a few dogs in my life who seem like plants  – why don’t you put fifi on the windowsill and i’ll tell you if i like it

she’s a she … fifi … fifi ... fifi ... oh fifi my little ball of fluff, my darling, oh sweetsipie, oh my chubbawoofpoo, my …

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

oh no i don’t like it. in fact i wholly detest it

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

it’s out of the question then. you can’t walk fifi

i’d like to walk it

look – i must have someone who minimally tolerates dogs, who at least can pretend to like fifi. i know she can be annoying but all of us can be, and she had a difficult puppyhood and we’ve grown up together really and now – it sounds a bit silly i know – but she’s my closest friend, i shouldn't admit this but we cuddle at nights, sometimes quite intimately …

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

i must walk it, give it to me now

i’m sorry, i’ll have to ask you to leave or i’m going to call the police

i will leave, but only with fifi

i’m calling the police

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

fifi bites the owner and runs out the open door

with the dog-walker, who

– along with fifi – is never seen again

m.d.

the feeling that comes with aging … feels like nostalgia but isn’t, lacking its reduced colour, its need to experience certain configurations of time and identity as superior (or inferior – as regret, bitterness).

nevertheless, with accumulation of losses, a feeling visits in relation to these accumulations, these assets, that feels as if it has something to do with time. but, when explored, has more to do with the nature of dream.

my experience of dreaming has increased and it is this – oneirocompetence – that i would name this feeling, and nothing sentimental ... experience that skirts deftly around the scrimmage of opinions, the tedium of politics, the oppositions of feeling, and a false pretense of language toward knowing.

sauerkraut in india

fukky risotto and a sadoo are riding the marudhar express when a tourist across the way says – look, there’s the taj mahal. the sadoo says no that’s the mona lisa. the tourist looks confused and annoyed, says it’s obviously the taj mahal. the sadoo says you obviously know nothing about signs.

the air india attendant at narita asks to weigh my carry-on – limit 7kg. i know it’s over because of the food. so i take out the food, put it on the floor and weigh my bag without it: 6.5kg. take the bag off the scale, return my food, leave.

a german, a swede, and a canadian

are sitting on the rooftop of a guest house ...

why travel? –

• to record humanity in its dusty dusk
• to re-savour the wilderness
• to hear the silent song of the plant
• to keep the bow taut (for contrast, for the sameness of things)
• to see the moon and sun
• to trip over time’s mirrors
• to reanimate death
• to ask this question
• to have the eyes scrubbed and the body bodied
• to virtualize nature and skin the internet
• to re-eroticize absence and presence
• to participate, however tentatively and disdainfully, in my fellow species’ orthodoxy – money
• to immerse myself in that film about flesh, the common human plot – and there plot that plot in words
• to put poetry in its place and replace place
• to glorify unpasteurized organic sauerkraut

 

varanasi and jerusalem – coital spirit partners in the production of religious babies (with astounding longevity)

you see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons

if you don't know the rules, you are crushed; but if you do know the rules you are cut off from your own nature

so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and so angry, so innocent and so dangerous ...

depicting the failure of love, the failure of society, and the failure of humans to rise above the ridiculous

do indians get sick when they visit the west because it's too hygienic?

everyone on these long-haul international flights just sleeps or watches movies – don’t they have minds to use during their brief transit through life?

whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate

                but we have a drug for this!

i see the world is mad

if i tell the truth they rush to beat me

if i lie they trust me

  keep the slanderer near you, build it a hut in your courtyard –

  for, without soap or water, it will scrub your character clean

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.

taragarh fort

the taragarh fort is the only place i can go here where people are thoroughly absent, where i’m actually alone. no eyes. 700 years old and unmaintained, a glory pervades the place, which was made – like most of civilization’s structures – for killing. crumbling staircases and paintings (a place made by goblins kipling commented), weedy courtyards, algae and guano stepwells, room and turret enfolding in nested surprise (this place could never be public in the west – it's too full of litigation potential!), i meet no one in my 4 hours wandering this monstrous beauty. it was made for this – failure, dilapidation, emptiness. monkeys and me are the only sign of mammalian life. the honks and bands of bundi are silent, the sleepy omnipresent activity which hangs from every aperture like laundry tucked away, endless religion shuts up, the dead mughals are almost likeable in their deadness.

structures are not built for their stated purposes but for what they become after their purposes have left. in the first silence i’ve had since the brief interludes i had in hawai’i i understand why things are built, this human rabidity – for the invested humans to die, their memory to be lost, their visions forgotten, their sufferings and killings made irrelevant, and something to emerge from the uninhabited spaces that speaks of a vigorous purity, a meditative integration directly unachievable by a species so committed to compartmentalization, mono-narrative, destruction.

a ruinous fort teaches me this, and why human society has become for me the noise of a broken muffler collapsing down a mountainside.

in losing purpose, purpose is found.

propreantepenultimate

the dogs wake me every morning between 0300 and 0400 for their scheduled street fight – their sorting the day’s hierarchy? a requisite sacrifice, maiming, exile? as if hundreds of canine demons are auctioning their souls on the block of eternal hunger, an experimental band barely clinging to the cliffs of sound jamming on that nearby abandoned rooftop. institutional and community life without their euphemisms, a polycacophonous rooster birthing the corruption of the day. i sit on my bed of camels for the hour’s free concert – war eventually exhausting itself (jabes writes within the human moral realm even evil must sleep) – this audio textbook of history, resting afterwards on the grass of dreams.

while this town is softer, gentler than many in northern india, it inevitably has its aggressions. only here have motorcycles and tuktuks aimed for and hit me – though lightly, as they stopped – always young men thinking it a joke. others – of the same tribe – sneer as they pass, spitting at my feet. less subtle than the routine aggressions of my home culture. pros and cons.

though tourists are here, they’re relatively few and disappear once out of town on the rural roads. there i’m a sufficient novelty that the contents of every fifth motorcycle are compelled to say hello, a decent percentage of these pulling alongside, i guess to fully manifest the exchange, ensure the white man knows the indian exists.

one gaggle of 3 boys (they all look 12 but the driver says he’s 18), initially amusing, circle back to me so many times, take uncountable selfies with me, ask me to record phrases in their phone then laugh outrageously, that i finally get annoyed and tell them to go home and watch porn.

this is a town of bands. bandi. i’ve lost track of the number that have passed below – led by 6 or 7 male uniformed brass- and drum-players, followed by colourful females carrying jars. looks like pt barnum should emerge, with a topper and dancing elephants. (as music, i prefer the dogs fighting.) the animals as usual are insouciant, though the monkeys and humans watch, bound in camaraderie by their eyes.

cows, despite being holy here, survive on plastic bag scraps and wire. their indifference to all manner of proximate abuse, noise, traffic is almost admirable. the dogs and wild boars too – the former often curled sleeping on the road during the day while vehicles go racing by honking loudly centimetres from their dreams. what trust! or, rather, what enculturation.

the guest house i’m staying at is run by a family whose living area is the lobby. sometimes i enter and 9 adult humans and 5 children are congregated, tv on, the tumbled troupe all gossip and screaming. i keep probiotics in their freezer and as i obtain a pill one morning an adult asks me what is your disease?

the proprietor’s son who does the cooking says you write too much. (that’s a new one.) reminds me of a recent paternalistic email from a bureaucrat in the housing co-op i live in – all power to the imagination! he hypocritically closes. these inane expressions of conformists, who are given residence in the house of language, born into the temple of imagination, growing to use their habitats, their birthrights, as walls and missiles. endearing in a sense i suppose. but the zoo after a few visits loses its appeal and one seeks possibility outside the societal cages of virtuous enforcement and obeisant commonplaces.

 

for some reason i’m reminded – consciousness even yet sprouts through the hard soil of ubiquitous establishment and cliché – of bruno schultz, who knew his uselessness, and used it, despite the variegations of human force and treachery, to colour life’s long night.