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“CAN I NOT GET OUT OF HERE?”

Sharon;s carefullyy calibrated mental adustments for the karmaic force cease to b life necassary


I wrote thus whilst asleep.
Who is Sharon?

Can I not get out of here?

I cannot get out out of her the necessary adjustments.

The force of a calibrated life.

To not get out of here.

Whilst asleep a growing sense of familiarity grows around the day to come and the day just gone.

Waking and the sleeping submerge one another and neither can quite remember the other.

It is home. It may not be your home. Here is an alluring body, here are a known set of pleasures.

The connection is already set, introductions are hardly necessary.

Beneath the surface there is everything, yet we slide one over the other, always on the surface.

Familiar old patterns.
The limits are also the comforts.
Sharon;s carefullyy calibrated mental adustments for the karmaic force cease to b life necassary

“CAN I NOT GET OUT OF HERE?”
I wrote thus whilst asleep.

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I gather
around me, a veritable wall
a grand array
of cheese variations. 


The feast is atomised but available; stacked high, and yet hand sized, mouth sized, fist to bite size; this rotovation is the mighty mastication of plenty. 

Cream cone crenellations are erected and all too soon digested. This immaculate defence is thus internalised. 

Although some have asked if I am pregnant, in fact it is that I, by steady accretion of adipose tissue, become impregnable. 

To carry this much weight is to be the greatness of a visible and confident storehouse. My barns are the brag. My feasting is bravado. Surely one must be royalty in order to drag along the street so vast a weight; I do not need to run away. I cannot run. My societal wealth is immersed in this fatty connective tissue, my vast round is on show and certain.


Tradition demands that such bounty be returned. 

My uncanny stature must, in due course, be returned to the ground. 

Instead of my wobbly royalty it is suggested that we gladly sacrifice obese children; other children. The future is only ever a threat, after all. So to sustain my stature hereby welcome the suggestion of how the cheapened excess of neglect can be squashed under a shopping stampede. 

In the central person, properly defended, this great breadth of person, who is after all an entire system, the sovereignty of fat is a candle. This corpulent burning cannot today be extinguished. Too big to fail; such is my belly. In this long night one must not snuff out the individual largess, which we have now agreed to call light, for otherwise it will prove difficult to raise the bowl to one’s mouth.


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Home becomes not home.

It is never to be recalled.
It is never safe.
Our home is the impossible, it is never the destination.

That great love, that want to act, that which once stood here in equanimity, this place where humbly all was possible.

The wall equally positioned, all around.

Home becomes memory.

Before our nakedness and this insufferable need
there is a desolation wherein no clothing and no satisfaction will ever be possible.

Memory becomes not memory.

Memory becomes refuge.

The world ending is ever capable of generating approximate desolations.

Refuge becomes not refuge.

Refuge becomes path.

The world ending ever generates new worlds, ever ending. The incomplete completion, the succour of devastation.

Path never ceases.

Path becomes home.


That wall equally around all.

Path becomes memory.

Path becomes refuge

Refuge dissolves into the possible.

The abysmal bleeds its own abyss. Between walls of nothing and nothingness of wall, the equal touch, an energetic vastness.

This is possibly our home. Ever ever does that great love need to act.

Our home is the impossible, a trembling memory, a tumbling path, an open refuge;
it is never safe,
it is never the destination,
it is never here to be recalled.


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To give back

rending consciousness.
To give back
consciousness to consciousness
rendering life unto life

and really no one likes to do this. 

Really, we are very uncomfortable with most expressions of life. Experiences which call life; life must be ushered into another category. Even disguising life as consciousness is on occasion preferable to simply listening to breath, following the pulse, processing spit, excreta, and other such extremes of attention. 

The improbable liveliness of living, this is an extreme activity. It can be disguised behind perilous sports or transformed into a fitness regime. It can be sunk into jigsaw and card games, made monomania or hobby; even so, it remains difficult to like. We tend not to befriend living, and this not because of morbidity but precisely because death is an intimate and necessary aspect of life. Consciousness is easier. Consciousness can be risen, trained, focussed, farmed, warped or expanded and, as such, it is subject to treatment. Consciousness becomes a thing.

Become conscious of consciousness and it begins to belong in that separate slot, this other groove, the thing that runs along-side and helps to frame your identity. Indeed, identity without the sidekick consciousness might be deemed frivolous or fly-by.

Awareness partakes of all these games, and many others. If there is no awareness then there are barely any games.

Also there is a must. There is life, there must be. Life must be, despite our flight from it.

Our shapely and eloquent perceptual apparatus partakes of life-must-be and life in game and life in its ending. 

Life in its ending is beginning, elsewhere, of loquacious sensing and lush inward rushing patterns of being.

Cohabiting and collaborating with these spacious patterns, awareness in its “must” partakes of the giving away; it continually gives itself away. It is rendered unto fear. 

Fear is rendered unto life in the moment. 

The moment is a rent in the perceptual field. 

Rendering covers, flows over, and adorns the perceptual field. 

Consciousness is ornamentation. 

The ornamental can be found as irruptions of deathly life and as rosy living, these symbol lives forced into the not yet lived life. The ornamental simultaneously soothes a consciousness into mediated unawareness and renders it naked before its own symbolic fecundity.

We give back the ornament to the symbol. We give back the symbol to the awareness. We give back the awareness to its living root. We give back the root of our being to the greater self. We disappear. This disappeared appearance is given back. No loss of freedom there, but perhaps a decimation of identity; the fat of ego is ten times reduced, and should the entire process be repeated then the fat of ego may fully depart from fleshy participation.

Consciousness consciously rendering consciousness is as if a melody drawn from out its own song, the unease of living easily alive.

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Confessed library dreamer

the earth is struck from above and below simultaneously. The shelves bulge as if a rubber mask suddenly and grossly inflated. Manuscripts and sheaves of paper and reports cascade upon us. As we burrow through this academic rubble we exchange further reports of our language clogged reverie, explaining in detail how, when dreaming of books, those books are always wanted. Books violently desired. Books hoarded and piled high and of impossible reach.

 A fearful droom. The human resource department have a token system by which to reward good uniform, although no one outside of the department is aware of this. 


An anxious dream. The head of department is collecting brightly coloured tokens in a very large bowl.

An overwrought fantasia. Students remove an entire bay of shelving, taking even the brackets off the wall, and begin to fill this disrupted space with their own artistic creations. The bowl of tokens is tipped over but the rebellious learners are brazen and casual about the anarchy thus far inspired.

An instructive musing on a series of concentric constrictions.

We dig a labyrinthine set of tunnels and pits and then watch it fill up with our own projections.

In this mesh of hallucination the first person is also the observer and the observer is also the observed. Those who disrupt are also I. Those who need space for great creations and all the contents of all the books, also I. Those determined to control and hoard, these also must be I.

Bureau is from burra, a shaggy cloth used for covering desks and tables. Bureau is the covered writing place; bureaucracy is to set in order by a covered form of writing. If a root is not rested upon then it will not be squashed, it will not become scratched nor in any manner disfigured.

The written surface is always disfigured.

Veils are pulled over an essentially uncontrollable situation. Once a fine collation of layers settle, then the layers may be controlled.

Language is immaterial and material simultaneously. Language is in the same moment layered and controlled, revealed and uncontrollable. Emptying and approaching; the gift I have hidden is the gift I also wish to reveal.

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From its inner glow 

come 

the pleasure and euphoria of chocolate.

The gods on high had a monopoly on the thick elixir, and we humans were condemned to live in ignorance. Ignorance of euphoria is an equivalence of reality without fire. The fire inward and the fire of cooking and light. The fire needed to cook chocolate; the pragmatics of releasing an inner glow.

Quetzalcoatl stole chocolate’s secrets for the Toltecs. Is this an equivalence to the story of Prometheus? While the rest of the gods slept, Q. took a few seeds and hid them in his beard, skiddering to earth on the long thread of a spider’s web in order to present these to the city of Tula.

Q’s offering was usurped by the princes, the priests, and the warrior chiefs.

Their palates alone were deemed worthy of glowing inner euphoria.

As the owners of heaven forbade chocolate to mortals, so the owners of the earth forbade it to commoners. 


The mythology of gift plays in the presence of possibility. One such possibility is that of extinction. 

The gift’s tendency to abundance is in swift politic turned to the rule of scarcity (the rule through scarcity). Thereafter it appears that the given (and the desire to give) is steadily warped toward Scrooge-like tendencies. Presence (prior to the pedagogy of a haunting) will be transmuted into absence.

Extinction is an anxious term. There is an ache of a presence not properly attended to (and therefore the learning must be discovered in ghosts).

A great culture consisting of art and astronomy, of mathematics and alphabet, of architecture and politic; imagine power and prowess corralled around in confidence. All of this ceased.

Historic pollen counts trace rainfall; drought is implicated, disease is pondered; what was the catastrophe?

Gift not given.

These wonder-full evocative images of sudden absence and of dramatic exit are motifs, evocations and laments. 

Gift not given.

It is in this context that mass events are depicted as if a form of charm which one weaves around our hope of survival. Tropes of city and state evacuation become popular with large budget cinema because they are apotropaic. 

We depict global disaster near superstitiously, for reasons of fear we try to out-fear our fear. There may be little which is overtly conscious about this; the terrible lure of the spectacular hides itself from self in its splutter and glitter. The stirrings of freedom become caught in the ungifted trap of our entertaining unawareness.

Awareness was a warm euphoria awakening to the gift of consciousness. Abundance is still hidden within awareness, the “in plain sight” haunting of chocolate and fire. 

That a civil order changed does not indicate that the people of that order ceased. The gift will continue to be smuggled out.

The gift is not yet given.

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Narcissism 
Vanity is a blindness pushed against desperation to become a trap baited with pride and walled around by fear. Vanity is a built folly that the narcissistic would choose to live in.

It was written in black using a medium thick felt marker pen on the wood of the picnic site: Have sex with my wife or watch us have sex – 100% genuine.
I cautiously scanned the area while opening my sandwich box. I did not want my lunch to be spoilt.
I lift my head above the parapet: a crown appears upon my head; at least I think it is a crown; soon it turns out to be  fortified wall: I lift my head above the parapet: I am crowned; but the crown turns into a wall which make me safe although my kingdom is small: I lift my head above the parapet; the sight is astonishing, as if all the world were mine: from out my brow there grows a crown; it turns into a fortress: I lift my head above the parapet…
Utopian and liminal, these temporary places partially resolved. There is possible the possible of an entirely transient freedom. Inattention or absence or inability to genuinely pervade the entirety of any one domain that is at least nominally a domain; thus a moment become free, marked by a vacating or vacation of power. Liberty and play presume along a threshold of parting and returning.

The blissful romanticism of ruination is as a child’s first step. In such a step the tyranny of automatism need not persist. The craven call of a system’s need to domineer and function without exception need not be habitual.
To loop that thread was to create a foothold by which to swing up into the lower branches of the tree of knowledge. It was simultaneously denied and willed for us in the garden. We, new to liminality, had to take the first bite, by needs we were exiled; it was necessary that, unbidden, we came upon the sacredness of the lost. Losing to which finding is intimately linked.
The key, the concierge repeats, is fine. Perhaps it’s the door which ails one?


In the murder of unicorns we see sexual jealousy while the extermination of dragons is an almost entirely political and material endeavour. That is to say, to remove dragons is sublimation. You now sell snake oil and sell it well because it works for you.
No great thoughts just the endless dirty ones are the thoughts which keep me awake – unless this insomniac’s orgy of ghosts covers, like a thin smearing of cream, something else. Lick me.
It was our first material, the first thing beyond flesh: Night harboured the day itself, an impenetrable anxiety. But if night became our vision then these visions could become malleable, useful, small – if we wished. Now we dared hold it, make a shape of it, and even dredge it for an untainted sun. The key works fine, now turn the lock. Do you have the right door?

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Eroded 

a frozen lake skated upon. Around its edge, the mind has a regular pattern of grooves. 
In the middle it is empty. 
Empty apart from a gradually freezing over hole. The crack opened briefly for an adventurous child, and then shut.

Waiting on the stupid inside of you like a classroom caught agog at the sight of books, piled precariously and held aloft by an ajar door; Go conk me pan.
As if the foot were not already an embarrassed aching of the floor.

And as driving is an ability to miss things so is the daily lyrical, a spray of glitter, pillow stuffing for a prison existence (made a prison because one repeatedly misses the walls).
Terrorists are failed artists who are failed terrorists while musicians are only confused djs and djs are writers while writers are kitchen porters and the waiters are always actors who are waiting to be politicians and they handle larger budgets than terrorists.
When digging a hole keep digging but ensure that one changes direction. Now one is tunnelling.

Twins parted at birth, lost to each other and yet sensing a residual shrapnel from the broken heart which is buried deep in the body; so does the expanding post-inflationary universe suffer from separation anxiety. Stars and void suffer from a sense of loss. This additional dimension of emotion cannot be explained, nor admitted to, unless stars and void move into a lived dimension that our un-living observation will find difficult to pursue. Beyond its stretch marks, this universe is satiated with the love of its own conception.

In separation anxiety there is a deep seated desire for connection linked to an oft destructive wariness of intimacy. We understand this because to some extent we are all twins of the broken bond, our better sibling abandoned in the womb. We are both jealous of and saddened by this absence. Such intimacy re-attained – the unattainable – implies a connectedness that rapidly reaches a state of unconditional telepathy. The universe is pulling back from speeds greater than the speed of light, just as we are frightened of how questions posed in one nebula may be immediately answered in another; if this is allowed, so will hurt felt in one place be immediately experienced by the entire body. 

How is this space, both around and intimately within us, to pass through its own sense of elasticity? To turn a hysterical stopping from ravaged apathy to heavenly stillness. To move from tripping over a complex of blockages to building blocks raised in contemplation. 

Of mountains and people, in condos and complexes, of insects and water, of blue sky; clear blue vast azure; mountains. Of ankles and photography; prayer, wind, and heat haze; of a cloud coming, of a tree pointing, a lake batting against a damn. Of walkers and hikers and elevation and rattlers imagined and birds blown by in bad poetry, barely an attempt at note taking. The air is thin this high, although that does not do as an excuse. The air is brilliant, snow draped extravagance. The pen must, by its very nature, fail to stand up against this landscape. Yet also fools must scribble thus in order to say: Look, small furry things bouncing up scree. And what are they one must wonder, while the rodents blithely chink chink chink. The lake beats out its own time and we, at last, are quiet for a while.
How is this space, both around and intimately within us, to pass through its own sense of elasticity? It is impossible to ever possess this land, such is the conclusion from the high place. Even if it were offered, it would be impossible to possess this land. At most one may be able to put a mark upon it. And for a time, perhaps, one could put a claim to that mark, but nothing more. More is miserable fantasy and even mark-making can become something of an embarrassment. What poor temptation is this idea of possession!
The true morality tale or the truth of a moral tale does not lie in its closure. Messy, because it is messed in with our lives, and yet we are able to make stories. So there is no closure although we can draw to a close, which would be to pull up a moral without necessarily having directly heard it in the story. Nothing here may be true and yet we can still see that the truth will seek us out. And there was Dr Ruth dancing on the wing of a downed Stealth Fighter in a field in the Balkans in a war at the end of a century, laughing and jumping on four hundred and thirty million. She was saying; “One should really not have any hang ups anymore.”



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Technique
“We are talking about ‘technique’, a word that in itself suggests a way of ‘cutting’ a Gordian Knot, because technique, conscious thought, and unconscious thought are all ways of thinking that are mistaken for thought itself.” [Rene Magritte.]
Homage
No – it is more like frottage.
Squeamishness
To live fast, die young, and (imagine one will) leave a beautiful corpse.
Double entendre
It is a blunt instrument.
Purpose
Purpose spoils peace whereas peace serves no purpose, that is to say, peace does not serve.
Peace
Doves sound like toys when they fly; queak-queak-queak. Is this why they have been taken to symbolize peace? No one can quite believe that they are real.

Fear
Fear is layered in the body so that each strata resonates with a specific realm.
At the head and twitching shoulders one will discover the cerebral convolutions of paranoia, a form of fearing whose source of anxiety may be loosely termed Authority. This is the threat from on high which might put the head in a noose or place the neck on a guillotine. The head, your head, is presumptuously mimicking the structure ‘hierarchy’ and therefore it has to be crushed. Courts and cops, CCTV mounted on the mast…
Lower down, fear in the heaving stomach and the suddenly hollow legs may be sourced to an anxiety that has stalked one along the gutter all the way from out ‘the jungle’. Here is the predator upon whose horns your entrails may be hung, the shadows from out off which the pack will pounce.
Secrets
What are secrets used for? If kept with the strictest adherence to secrecy then they are useless. A secret only works if it is shared. Of course, such sharing should be curtailed, held within certain demarcated realms for a certain period of time, or at least it should be pretended that this is so.
Hidden knowledge is more often than not simply banal, as is open knowledge (again, the question is to what use such material can be put). The efficiency of secrecy operates not in content per se but rather in the manner it simultaneously excludes and includes. It inspires a few to a jealous eye upon their own privilege – or sense of privilege – while the remainder are then inspired to see to it that they are included (in the secret) and that they will soon have the same sense of privilege.
Secrets are used to bring people closer together.

Original first published in Inventory: losing, finding, collecting. Vol.2 No.1 1997