WE WRENCHED THE SHOW AWAY from Hemingway. Talked the reaction out of Parker’s handle. Were walking by when Arbus hurled herself from a nine-volt battery. She fell on us but lived to create a pièce de résistance.
Plath required a stone casket. We hired an army of contrarians and sealed every dormer in the vicinity of her enormity. All Joplin required was conveyancing. Look, we told her, we’ll make sure Everyman loves you; you can end your romance with pilots and borders.
Van Gogh needed perverting but in the end was grateful for our dialectic; he found it calming to know his vision was disturbed. When Poe barricaded himself inside his campaign, we slipped a pistol through his campaign door, begging him to give the worst another tsunami.
Soon afterward we filed a warrant and listed whitening, flight, hostesses, rosaries, and rules as the usual suspicions. We locked evolution away.
Woolf was the hardest. We waited at her sickness for years and when the time came, hauled her away from the cerebral. It’s because of her we eradicated all seams.
Seams are brave new desires now—horizons, separations, shape.
TEN POINT TOUR
1. Seduced by sang-froid we rode the city streets in busses made of bulletproof metaphysics. The busses had clear, indestructible platinoid instead of glass for the windows. Outside: car lights and casualties.
2. Many things have absorbed then dulled our interiors so that now it takes a violent swizzle to renew the deadly. Never mind, we say, trusting the next stereotype, the next expression of mind. Never mind.
3. We are damaged, but brilliantly. See how our scars weep music.
4. Riding the busses, we felt sad about our lives, that short stretch between black and black where we don the clothes of the world, disguising ourselves as wonders.
5. Riding the busses, we prowled our nihility like tourists.
6. Years ago nothing could touch us. We were safe from the mazurka of inner-city mayhem. Snapping our fingers we let our heavens collide, as in love! Years ago we were imparadised! Married to a tour bus of our own making.
7. Now, passing the pink and white bodies of newborn animals left for dead by the side of the road, you said, “This is what happens when a civilization turns off meat, when animal flesh is reviled,” and a man seated across from us nodded his head and said, “Ironic, isn’t it?”
8. As ever, there are many slides into sediment and we never know which moment will contain an earthquake. This is our song. We sing about our lucky escapes.
9. Still, I pointed out the window: “Look! A parade!” The bus slowed and the crowd on the sidewalk cheered. A wedding procession sped by.
10. We felt—metaphysically speaking—happy.
DARWIN ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE
THE FIRE AT THE DROP-IN-YOGA CENTRE was quickly brought under control. There were a few moments of fire-fighting heroics, then it was over. Then it was back to normal, back to the soup, back to the personal cop show. Your good guys, your bad guys. Your bang bang bang.
This is a picture of the smoke rising above the torched Centre. Afterwards, questions were raised; yoga instructors were filmed for the Late Breaking News. But the real value of the fire occurred during its burning. Because something specific had happened, a counterpoint, a clarifying bas-relief. Like what happens when a plane crashes or a murder is committed. The event jumps out specifically from the background chaos, the focus enlarges, and the wider world is seen. Illuminated.
My name is Darwin, like the man who invented the monkey. I hit the planet in ’59. I was named Darwin because 1959 was the centenary of the publication of The Origin Of Species. My father, now dead, was a postal clerk whose hobby was botany. He was also a vegetarian and an atheist, the only one in the neighborhood, or as I came to understand from the school taunting I received, the only one in the world. I spent my childhood being singled out for weirdness. Like my father I’m a loner. I regard this fact as an extreme form of random good luck.
My last trip to the hospital was in ’91. I thought something was controlling me. I was right. It was my own mind.
Being crazy is being the victim of mind-fuck situations all the time.
In the hospital I was pinned down and questioned by behaviourist nerds. I fought back. I told them I’d look after my own mental health. Then I discovered Freud and psychoanalyzed myself. This is what I learned: maintaining clarity in the waking state is the most difficult thing of all. Maintaining illumination, next to impossible. But I followed Freud’s example and, giving myself repeated raps to the mindset in much the same way a jackhammer pulverizes cement, I was able to successfully eliminate a large portion of my unconscious mind. Now I never dream. And my emotions have become mere passing phenomena.
These things I have done in order to avoid the pharmaceutical control of the mental health militia.
For some of us, these are the dark ages.
But I’m not dangerous.
Do you sense the agitation? It’s everywhere, but especially in the cities. The inhabitants there are restless, over-stimulated, desperate to maintain a transient vital energy. They shop, eat, drink, watch videos, ravenously. Everyone’s wild-eyed, nervous, cat-walking through crowds and traffic like haunted runway models. Pacing the streets, nerve endings vibrating. Money in their pockets, fulfillment eluding.
Everyone’s hungry. Most hungry are the images that hold us in thrall—the images that sell us things, that entertain us. Who would have guessed that this is what artificial intelligence has become: visual images with lives of their own feeding on our hunger?
The whole world has become a madness machine.
Your so-called “advanced civilization.”
I know. I’m just another angst-ridden Postmodern casualty.
Easily dismissed.
Bang. Bang.
This is a picture of me in my trench.
In my mother’s back yard in the city. When I built it she was happy. “It’s just like when you were a boy with your Erector set in the basement,” she said.
She was wrong. When I was a boy I was filled with a wild and ultimately stupid hope, creating the elaborate and beautiful metal forms of a skeleton city.
Now I dig holes.
When you abandon hope you also abandon hopelessness.
But I’ve discovered that an open trench provides poor protection. The slings and arrows of skyshine and gamma rays; the pounding music from the giant ad screens mounted on city buildings; the jarring wail of ambulance and police sirens sound like a city screaming in pain.
These things penetrate the fragile brain.
Speaking of brains, did you know that somehow the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness? But that scientists draw a blank on the nature of this conversion? The concept is simple. It’s like watching a white trail in the sky (brain) tracking the movement of a supersonic jet (consciousness).
Even with the penetrating rays and noises, I’m relaxed in my trench. Relief washing over me as I watch the white trail disappear.
Once I sat on the curbs of busy streets writing poems about anguish, love and terror. Some people still do that. Huddle inside their lives dragging pens across their pain.
The world is filled with inexplicable things. And love is in hiding. Perhaps this has always been so and it’s just that now we have too much black information, our perception has become damaged. Narrowed. Warped. Listen to the headlines; they say it all: There is a great panic amongst the people and they have spilled out into the streets .… Corpses are piled on verandas. Bruised and bleeding bodies are laid in rows along the streets …
The information is all like this.
But information is not understanding.
Darwin provided a glossary at the end of The Origin of Species. The word degradation is listed: the wearing down of land by the action of the sea or of meteoric agencies.
Change a couple of words and you’ve got Darwin Two’s definition of the times: Degradation: the wearing down of the human species by the
action of negative information. Or read the OED: Degradation: to become degenerate; a morbid change in structure.
Mother barricades herself inside her home. Most people do. Her trust in a beneficent world has become degraded. “You want my opinion?” Mother whispers through the bolted door. “Everything hurts! Inside. Outside. Everything is shattering like glass.”
Citizens tearing their hair, uncomprehending.
The cities are terrible places to live.
This is a sentence I like: There is newer and stronger evidence that the solitary individual who has disconnected himself from Postmodern life may actually represent the last vestige of independent, human thought.
A glimmer, a modus operandi, a casual illumination, perhaps.
Perhaps, even, the species value of Postmodern dislocation. A thing not easily dismissed.
Newer and stronger. Isn’t that what the original Darwin was all about?
Still, I vacillate. Who knows anything for sure? Who even understands?
This is a picture of my unconscious mind. It’s black, as in, empty. It’s like a night scene in a city without lights. Something is there but you can’t see it. It’s like willed, internal blindness. The interior barely existing. This is a view that spiritual people the world over aspire to. In the picture I’ve left three stars shining. These represent points of connection. They allow for the occasional moment of spontaneity. I had one of those a few years ago. I jumped off a cliff into the ocean. It was great.
Ha. Ha.
That was a joke.
Something I’m still capable of.
Here’s another joke.
During a lifetime, a couple of things might happen to make you laugh. But usually you’re stuck on your back at the bottom of some trench, the world sitting on your face like some obnoxious fat man using your head for a pillow.
Did I say, “joke”?
Jump shot to right about now. I thought I’d build a better shelter. I found an old book about nuclear war. Now there’s nostalgia. The comfort of a single external threat. None of this vague, confusing stuff. But a clear, constant menace, something you could get your teeth into.
So this book. From the survivalist movement of the early eighties. The cover: large black letters on a gun metal grey background. Inside: a revelation of practical instructions. How to ventilate and cool a below ground shelter. Emergency sanitation. Surviving without doctors. Improvised clothing. Air pumps. Water and Food: In the histories of great famines, some people do rob and kill for food, and a very few become cannibals. But the big majority continues to maintain civilized values while they starve. Self-Defense: There is no need to tell people that they will need their guns …
The book had everything, even personal stories. A family of six from Utah traveled 64 miles by car to a remote countryside location and built a door-covered trench shelter in only 34 hours. A pair of college girls made a hose ventilated toilet out of a 5-gallon paint can. Three rural families in Tennessee built an expedient blast shelter in 48 hours complete with bunks and bed sheet hammocks. A man traveled fifteen miles on foot carrying 80 pounds of water in two burlap bags, each lined with two plastic trash bags.
I decided on a Small-Pole Shelter.
Tools required to build a Small-Pole Shelter:
Ax, long handle.
Bow-saw, 28 in.
Pick
Shovel, long handle
Claw hammer
File, 10 in.
Steel tape, 10 ft.
The beauty of a plan: the particular in sharp focus. This may be the secret of a smooth existence, the pathway to a temporarily untroubled life.
A Small-Pole Shelter provides excellent protection against fallout radiation, blast, and fires. Twelve people can live in this shelter without serious hardship. For Darwin Two it’s a palace.
This is a picture of me building the Small-Pole Shelter.
A picture I’ve entitled, “A lonely, intelligent mutation scrambling with the brutes for existence.”
À la Darwin One. Who also worried about being seen as a monomaniac or a crank.
Darwin alone in the universe.
Here are some questions.
1. What if evolution has for some reason speeded up like a generalized cancer and that a rapid species change is occurring? That what once took millions of years to transmute and evolve is now taking one or two generations? That we are now fundamentally different animals from what our grandparents were?
2. What if all the lone, discontented, dismissed and hated voices living on the edge of our species existence are really an aberration, a mutation?
3. What if independent, objective thought is the cause of this mutation? Has, in fact, become the mutation?
4. What if the song we mutants should be singing starts like this: Hey Mama, I’m extinction bound …
Another picture, this one of me resting. The Small-Pole Shelter half complete.
Then came Dorothy like a random variation hauling her busted rainbow. Wandering the universe, homeless, deviating, stunned. Stopping by my half-built shelter. I told her to take off, get lost. But she was already lost. She stayed and after a few days made a nest for herself against my mother’s fence. A green plastic tarp crudely fashioned into a lean-to, a ratty sleeping bag.
Dorothy. Named for the 1939 film, carrying the burden of Oz: an alien world of delight and menace, magic and loyal friends.
Now that’s a definition of extinction.
Dorothy who seldom speaks.
A kid, in her early twenties. Spending her days clearing bits of wood from the shelter site, hauling dirt, tidying up. Seeping slowly into my life.
During this time I still slept and ate in my mother’s house. I started leaving her food like the stray animal she was.
Weeks went by. I became accustomed to her quiet presence. She’d watch me work on the shelter, helping when she saw the need. When the shelter was complete, I invited her inside. She moved her things to a far corner, away from my bunk. We are not lovers; we seldom speak, we never touch. But Dorothy has become my apprentice.
“Variation Under Domestication.” This is the title of Chapter 1 of the Origin.
Dorothy. An allied species.
This is a picture of Dorothy and Darwin Two—in disguise, of course—resting in the Small-Pole Shelter the morning after the Multiplex Cinema burned down. A spectacular fire lasting throughout the night and spreading to neighbouring buildings. Several of the mounted ad screens were also destroyed, a hugely fulfilling sight: blue and white electrical sparks exploding from the screens as they burned, the prancing images and the music suddenly eliminated, the blank screens crashing to the ground.
Did I say I wasn’t dangerous? I may have lied. Independent thought and action is always dangerous.
Illumination, of any sort, is dangerous.
And fire, in particular, can be cleansing.
A.
1. Trundolatry. The worship of change. Much easier to live with.
2. A new practice, yes. Relatively speaking. With a bunch of improvements you can’t see. Like the notion of time. You don’t get stuck in the long-term. Diversion remains intact.
3. Agreed. The word worship is a problem. More it’s the belief about what’s great. An exaltation of the short term.
4. Well, that’s difficult to say. But essentially it’s the rapid wearing out of interest. That’s the idea behind it. As the moment changes so does the interest.
5. True. But somehow the moment defines itself. You don’t have to think about it. Just ride the bus. Check out the view. There are lots of moments and lots of interests. Take your pick.
6. You could say that. But what’s the problem with surface? It’s a fast ride so you have to skim. Everything’s on the menu.
7. Whatever floats your boat.
8. The usual things. Any kind of star. Sometimes food, a colour, a country. Sometimes yourself. There’s no telling.
9. Well, we just stop paying attention. We move on. There’s nothing
mysterious …
10. True, again. But interest in this communication is fading. There’s something else …
THE NEW YEAR
IT WASN’T THE BIRTHDAY CAKE or even the city officials screaming at us to clear the building because of noxious fumes. It wasn’t the handing out of bulletproof vestments to the people or the way we carried the cake into the streets determined that the celebration should continue. It wasn’t even our knowledge that snipers perched like roosters on the rooftops, or that the millenarian’s bombast was timed to randomly explode. Doom was everywhere that year. Yet we remained undaunted. Soon enough the doorways flooded open like a burst of Sundays, and crowds gathered in the emptied streets. And though some of our faces were pale with dread, and some of us clutched our children and our old ones in fear, still we came. It was deflection that saved us. The way we would not be held by gloom. The way we blessed one another, tearing the blindfolds from each other’s eyes. The way our laughter sounded like peals of music in the open air. It was this toasting, finally, of our recovered, hopeless glee.
THE ADVICE GIVER
1. DEAR ADVICE GIVER,
Several years ago, for no reason, I suddenly became unimportant. It happened overnight, just like that. Brushing my teeth, I looked in the bathroom mirror and with a shock realized that I meant nothing; the sum total of who I am was completely without significance. The facts of my life—the job, the house—were mere props, a stage set and I was a stickman, a two dimensional, moving figure controlled by my brain, automatically, like an insect.
I was unable to regain the formerly glowing opinion of myself despite a round of physical exams and a prolonged session with a psychiatrist that was a total waste of time. Despite his excellent credentials, the psychiatrist was totally clueless—unable to help me or offer an explanation for my evaporated self-regard.
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