http://www.pleasureeditions.com PLEASURE EDITIONS Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:45:20 +0000 http://www.pleasureeditions.com en http://www.pleasureeditions.com/THE-WHITE-TOWER http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/THE-WHITE-TOWER Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:45:20 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 5450490 Available in print form as part of WEIRD MAGAZINE 3. <img src="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg1_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg1_o.jpg" data-mid="29348909" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg2_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg2_o.jpg" data-mid="29348916" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg3_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg3_o.jpg" data-mid="29348918" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg4_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload157.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5450490/weirdpg4_o.jpg" data-mid="29348922" border="0" align="left"/> Available in print form as part of WEIRD MAGAZINE 3. http://www.pleasureeditions.com/PERSONALITY-SURVEY-1 http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/PERSONALITY-SURVEY-1 Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:06:38 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 5262701 "STILL AVAILABLE! Originally offered as part of the January 2013 PORTRAITS FUNDRAISER. Click to download fillable PDF form. Send finished forms to pleasurezine@gmail.com and await further instructions." - CEO Jnco Balboa <img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_1_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_1_o.jpg" data-mid="28303150" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_2_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_2_o.jpg" data-mid="28303157" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_3_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_3_o.jpg" data-mid="28303162" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_4_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="969" height_o="1254" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_4_o.jpg" data-mid="28303168" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_5_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_5_o.jpg" data-mid="28303173" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_6_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_6_o.jpg" data-mid="28303178" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_7_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_7_o.jpg" data-mid="28303191" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_8_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5262701/winbogo survey FINAL_Page_8_o.jpg" data-mid="28303196" border="0" align="left"/> "STILL AVAILABLE! Originally offered as part of the January 2013 PORTRAITS FUNDRAISER. Click to download fillable PDF form. Send finished forms to... http://www.pleasureeditions.com/CRIMES-SANS-INITIALE http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/CRIMES-SANS-INITIALE Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:48:07 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 5261122 <img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/cover_905.jpg" width="905" height="1199" width_o="2048" height_o="2714" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/cover_o.jpg" data-mid="28293394" border="0" align="left"/> It is oddly fitting, if immensely awful, that at midnight on the 9th of February 1994, Ghérasim Luca, who had a predilection for occult numerology, took his life by the same means as had his friend Paul Celan in 1970 and his countryman Ilarie Voronca in 1946: all three men, expatriate Romanian poets long marooned in Paris, threw themselves into the Seine a perfect twenty-four years apart from one another. Luca, at 80, had just been evicted from his apartment; unlike Celan, he had long resisted attaining French citizenship and was living in the country without papers. In a note left to his wife Micheline Catti, Luca bemoaned ‘this world in which poets no longer have a place,' and if this wasn’t exactly an uncommon complaint from the étran-juif (a neologistic self-designation of Luca’s, foreigner-Jew), neither was it an unfounded one; for the perennial outsider, caught amidst the storm of nationalisms and totalitarian ideologies that characterized the European 20th century, had indeed lived a life of almost constant and relentless displacement. A Jew and socialist before the Second World War, Luca was denied freedom of expression in his homeland’s darkening cultural atmosphere--members of government were not amused, for example, by their reception of several erotic poems by Luca in 1933, an offense for which he received a relatively lax nine day jail sentence--and threatened more seriously by Romania’s increasingly anti-Semitic fascist rule. Having survived the Iron Guard, he had then to sustain his nation’s 1947 slide into the post-war ignominy of totalitarian Communism. Seeking an end to the militaristic nightmare--attempting and failing to escape his home country in 1949--he finally succeeded in emigrating to Israel three years later, but was hounded by the army there for fleeing his refuge nation’s mandatory conscription. In France, where he lived out the rest of his life, he was often destitute, furnishing his surrealist pieces with the relentlessly dour worldview afforded him by decades of a quasi-homelessness which then, in 1994, was finally made official. It is impossible to read, much less to translate Luca’s poetry without detecting the ever-present dimension of this persecution and alienation. His language, even if couched handily within the willfully shocking French surrealist tradition, is rife with gruesome imagery and scenes of violence. However the truest illustration of Luca’s singular poetic vision--and the one that’s earned him his reputation for being ‘untranslatable’--is the violence he does to language itself; Luca, writing in a French tongue which, despite its long-held status as lingua franca among European intellectuals, was fundamentally not his own, toyed with words in a deliberate and methodical, even clinical way. Puns are everywhere in his work; often they dictate a given poem’s entire construction. On an immediate symbolic level, this constant linguistic subversion was a conscious strategy designed to constitute a tacit assault on prevailing nationalist notions, as well as a means for prompting in the reader that dissociation of signification so crucial to the surrealist impulse. On a human level, it was the inherent language of the alien, the provincial Eastern European, the stateless drifter, the parler apatride of the étran-juif. Luca, whose early French phrasings have been faulted for their stiffness, wrote poetry from a place of eternal remoteness, outside the comfortable and insular realm of his Western European peers, and his words are thus divorced thoroughly from even the notion of exact meaning; his every turn of phrase eludes circumscription. This severing of definitions is, of course, a key component of the surrealist experiment, and it is not one at which Luca arrived lightly, nor, probably, by choice. For though the touchstones of his art were the same ones that informed European surrealism at large--Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, occult traditions, and the horror of 20th century militarism, to name but a few--Luca’s distinctive deconstructed language imbues them with a transcendent vitality, a stylistic perspective whose limitless possibilities are afforded only by its position at the farthest of cultural margins, where it resides in stammering outrage alongside its displaced author. Luca’s word-drunk poetry, grounded simultaneously in philosophy (as evidenced by his many theoretical treatises) and in simple happenstance of birth, constitutes an unprecedented consummation of what he characterizes in one such treatise, 1941’s “The Objectively Offered Object,” as the surrealist movement’s raison d’être: “a new objective possibility for resolving dialectically the conflict between interior and exterior worlds.” While Luca is here speaking of the sorts of ‘Symbolically Functioning Objects’ popularized by Dalí in the French Surrealist Group’s journal Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution--in which outwardly meaningless constructions of everyday objects were rigorously psychoanalyzed along fashionably Freudian lines-- he may as well be speaking about his wordplay. It was, in fact, through writing and constructing such ‘Objectively Offered Objects’ in his early surrealist texts that Luca began to explore the ego/id dialectic that he’d soon impose upon his own form, crafting poetic paradoxes (‘void voided of its void is full / void filled with its void is void’) whose external symbolic content was to be furnished only by the interior logic (more accurately desire, for the eroticism-preoccupied surrealist) of the reader and the physical sonority of the words themselves: “In visual language which serves to designate objects [to assign meaning], a word has but one sense, or two, and it holds its sonority prisoner... once this fixed form is broken, new relationships appear: sonority is exalted, secrets emerge from their slumber, the listener is introduced into a world of vibrations which demands physical participation along with mental adherence.” Here the unhappy circumstances of Luca’s life probably intervened in the theoretical framework: this hidden realm of meaningless sound, this gateway to the unconscious, was, after all, likely more easily accessible for the polyglot Luca, for whom languages--Romanian, Yiddish, German, French--were readily interchanged depending on what must have seemed to be rather arbitrary outside circumstances (such as the brutal Iron Guard’s effort to eradicate Yiddish from Bucharest). Senselessness, in the senseless Romanian 1930s and ‘40s, was easy to come by; the admitted ‘persecution mania’ from which Luca often claimed to suffer might be more aptly described as perfect honesty about the miserable state of his world. These nightmarish circumstances thus lend a certain extreme dimension to Luca’s poetic experiments; far from bawdy punning for its own sake, Luca’s distortions of language display what at times amounts to a genuine hatred of society--of the uniformity sought by idiotic nationalists, the mechanization and militarization of European politics, the complacency of societal authorities. Le Vampire Passif (The Passive Vampire), first published in 1941 Bucharest (Luca, living for a time in Paris, where he met and began moving in the same circles as André Breton and his French Surrealists, was forced back to Romania by the outbreak of war), is filled with heartbreaking invective: “Only in my moments of deepest depression do I realize that in that world of swine into which I was born,” Luca despairs, “I shall be forced to die, just as out in the street I’m obliged to rub shoulders with priests and cops.” Later, furnishing his refusal to serve society’s meaning-limiting uniformitarian impulse by invoking the reliably shocking trappings of the occult (‘poeticized Satanism’), he writes, “I sign a pact with Satan in my own blood... [that] will lend the century in which I have had the misfortune to be born something of the dazzling obscurity of past centuries, something of the pearlescent pallor of the centuries to come.” The present, meanwhile, is consigned irrevocably to the realm of misery--a misery whose single meaning is affixed and held firmly in place by a society of malevolent uniformity. But all was not hopelessness and extremism. Indeed, the politics of Luca and his short-lived postwar Romanian Surrealists Group, while certainly radical, nonetheless emphasized a confidently positive revolutionary impulse long after that same spark had left the movement’s French contingent (particularly its leader and sometime-sponsor of Luca’s, Breton, for whom, in the wake of the Second World War, revolutionary surrealism figured increasingly as a failed experiment). Again we can detect in the Romanian Surrealists’ call to ‘eroticize the proletariat’ a delicate interplay of more generalized surrealist themes (namely a blend of Marxist and psychoanalytic jargon) with the distinct character of the marginalized Eastern European--as if, in the brief interim between the end of the war and the 1947 Communist takeover (which would, it should be noted, crush both these idealisms and the spirit of their authors) it might still be possible to dialectically undermine the repressive European power structure by giving free symbolic rein to the desiring unconscious mind. It is no coincidence that this period saw a renewal of Luca’s creative impulse and a burst of manic prolificacy; many of his most revered poems were written from this hopeful vantage point, the eye of the totalitarian storm, in which he synthesized his vision of surrealism as the desire-invoking ‘exercice hallucinatoire au service de la révolution.' Until Luca’s last writings, in fact, he maintained this belief in the ferocity--and thus, revolutionary viability--of internal desire, consistently holding up the id, that zone of wild deviation from the mores of waking life, as the means by which the subjugated may free their oppressed symbolic conceptions. For all its ubiquity in Luca’s work, however, this is also a fittingly paradoxical conceit; after all, the single indispensable component to this liberty-proffering revolutionary unconscious is its quality of terror. An inversion of the institutional horror that had always afflicted the étran-juif, this inherent state (variously characterized throughout Luca’s oeuvre as ‘infernal’ and ‘Satanic’) was for Luca a cacophony of desires powerful enough that, if instrumentalized through art, it might not fail in undermining the entire oppressive symbolic order in art. Nor would this ferocious internal rewriting of symbols be confined to the realm of the page or gallery. Indeed, in his calls for unleashing the violent unconscious on the sociocultural realm Luca is advocating no less than a complete takeover of the system of imposed, commodified meaning--the very concrete stuff of culturally-dictated emotion: “The nature of the flowers one gives, which change in florists’ windows and lovers’ arms according to the seasons, offers us nothing... the artificial flowers carried artificially in a lover’s arms are laid at the feet of the beloved so that the artificial society in which we live might prolong its death throes.” The enemy, forever in Luca’s sights, is that hierarchical authority which seeks to delineate the meaning--and so delimit the revolutionary potential--of the population by fixing meanings to an unthreatening uniform constant. To ‘eroticize the proletariat,’ then, is to widen the conditional space of a symbol enough to let in a modicum of lurking, barbarous desire--even if this widening is afforded only by a choice pun. It is this effort, I believe, which best characterizes the whole of Luca’s writings--which justifies the messy ‘delirium of interpretation’ into which he forces the reader. And it is quite messy, quite often: in many of Luca’s works, particularly his earlier prose/philosophy/poetry hybrids such as The Passive Vampire and The Inventor of Love, the reader is bombarded with digressive forays into the author’s elaborate idiosyncratic belief system, somewhere between the fashions of the European avant garde and a broodingly personal outsider status. Broadly stated, there are Freudian considerations (the exploration of the Objectively Offered Object is, because non-heirarchical, also non-Oedipal, a definition that would inform to a great extent the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, who are probably the most vocal of the poet’s few cultural champions) and, while comprising largely the sort of idealization of the dream state that underpinned the work of Dalí and other early surrealists, these ideas frequently dip deeper into the occult--as well as a sort of cursory Kabbalism, Satanism, even alchemy--than did those of Luca’s Western European peers. Luca’s ideas were complex and multivalent as they get, and their divergent elements he synthesized into a distinct and ever-present brand of nature worship predicated, in reliably Lucan extremeness, on the eroticization of plants. If this would seem to fall outside of Luca’s Marxist purview--as how can meanings of natural objects really be heirarchically enforced? isn’t he the only one doing the symbol-imposing?--we would argue that it represents instead an extension of Luca’s assault on complacency, one for which he was willing to fudge a bit his diversity-touting ideals: a necessary lashing-out on the part of the étran-juif. If the oppressive power structure is to be undermined by the violence of the psyche, nature is best conceived of not as a collection of Objectively Offered Objects, but rather as the manifestation of that unconscious realm itself; the objective correlative of rabid desire. If this symmetry of meaning--this easy symbolism--is definitely a little un-Lucalike, it is a forgivable and perhaps necessary concession to the reader meant to be aroused by the notion of “a fantastic flora, virgin and demented, the faithful image of that terrible fauna from the heart of our being.” We see then that Luca aimed, from his distant mooring on the margins of enfranchisement, to guide the reader, to teach. Transmuting the unique complexities of his personality, his interests, and his statuses--national, political, temporal, cultural, religious--into a calculus by whose application one could unlock the possibilities of the unconscious mind, he asserted a manically zealous opposition to the senseless cruelties of 20th century life, sacrificing much--eventually, on the banks of the Seine, sacrificing all. However, for all the stringency of his elaborately-conceived artistic ideology, for all his vitriol, Luca was not above surrendering to the superiority of unchained human emotion--ineffable, and yes, untranslatable--over even the cruelest and most senseless of external circumstances, as when he describes in The Passive Vampire a brief window of internal happiness in militarized 1941 Romania, wherein one can almost imagine the Iron Guard marching the Bucharest streets to which he had been so unhappily consigned: “The nine days of love during which my freedom had exceeded even the hopes I placed in poetry and revolution, a limitless, total, infernal freedom, seem to me the mirror reverse of the nine days I had spent in prison nine years earlier because of love, because of my poems about love that my contemporaries had cited in their legal briefs as a case of the assault on common decency.” With an eye toward all of these considerations and thematic colorations in Luca’s oeuvre--his impulsive desirous push for semiotic disentanglement, relentless but for the times it is superseded by the notion of nature as the overpowering manifestation of that same desire; his politics’ delineation of all popularly-derived meanings as non-viably hierarchical except when they are superseded by love--we undertook the following translations without much concern for imposition, for any wrongheaded finality our work may appear to proffer. Immersing ourselves in Luca, it became clear that finality itself never figured in his efforts, that as ideology couldn’t wholly account for the mysteries of meaning that afflict the individual, neither could a rigorous and uniform poetic interpretation hope to explain or codify them. What’s more, it became clear that Luca did not and would not care a whit; that the stammering poetic language--belonging more to him than to France or any nation--effectively transcended the delineations of language. Our efforts were thus directed toward a translation rooted in the theoretical and historical bases of surrealism--and a feeling for when Luca would’ve eschewed them. The originals typify the Luca focus on raw desire in nature’s guise (“La proie s’ombre”), merciless mockery of official language and secret keeping (“Le nerf de boeuf”), and the process of codifying an objectively offered event or object (“Vers le non-mental,” “Madeleine”). They also typify the shagginess and apparent impenetrability of this phase of Luca’s work (it is to these sorts of pieces that the ‘untranslatable’ label tends to be affixed), but in the task of translating--that is, in our having no choice but to translate--a thoroughly different quality emerged, and did so across the source and target languages, effectively in between French and English. The small semiotic cells Luca uses--a glass of water, a nerve cell--find in their English versions not an exact equivalence but a means by which the negative semiotic space surrounding the pair can be brought into focus. This space, with the myriad potential meanings that live there, is the zone of semiotic unhinging where Luca’s poetry is meant to transport the reader--as in the oldest meaning-obviating trick in the book, wherein a word repeated over and over reliably loses its meaning and becomes pure sound (“Crimes sans initiale,” the last of the appended poems, is an exercise in just this practice which effectively needs no translation; indeed, we have left it mostly untouched). To translate the untranslatable, then, with all the sloppy inexactitude with which the meanings of the originals are brought into focus, is a continuation of the surrealist work in paradox, simultaneously pointing to its impossibility and continuing on, doing so without relent or logic but only that ravenous desire; it is an outgrowth of the insatiable quest to affect a verifiably equitable and just motherless tongue. <img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_03_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_03_o.png" data-mid="28348358" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_04_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_04_o.png" data-mid="28348363" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_05_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_05_o.png" data-mid="28348368" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_06_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_06_o.png" data-mid="28348369" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_07_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_07_o.png" data-mid="28348372" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_09_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_09_o.png" data-mid="28348373" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_11_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_11_o.png" data-mid="28348378" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_12_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_12_o.png" data-mid="28348380" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_14_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_14_o.png" data-mid="28348385" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_15_905.png" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload148.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/5261122/lucawhitedout_Page_15_o.png" data-mid="28348406" border="0" align="left"/> It is oddly fitting, if immensely awful, that at midnight on the 9th of February 1994, Ghérasim Luca, who had a predilection for occult numerology, took his life... http://www.pleasureeditions.com/PLEASURE http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/PLEASURE Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:25:28 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 2500091 Published July 26, 2012 Click for downloadable PDF <img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/PLEASURECOVER.jpg" width="670" height="860" width_o="1900" height_o="2440" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/PLEASURECOVER_o.jpg" data-mid="21111087" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_02_905.jpg" width="905" height="1170" width_o="1046" height_o="1353" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_02_o.jpg" data-mid="26800231" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_03_905.jpg" width="905" height="1150" width_o="2048" height_o="2602" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_03_o.jpg" data-mid="26800692" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_04_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_04_o.jpg" data-mid="26800696" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_05_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_05_o.jpg" data-mid="26800705" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_06_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_06_o.jpg" data-mid="26800717" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_07_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_07_o.jpg" data-mid="26800731" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_08_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_08_o.jpg" data-mid="26800739" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_09_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_09_o.jpg" data-mid="26800751" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_10_905.jpg" width="905" height="1168" width_o="2048" height_o="2643" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_10_o.jpg" data-mid="26800763" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_11_905.jpg" width="905" height="1178" width_o="1292" height_o="1683" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_11_o.jpg" data-mid="26800769" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_12_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_12_o.jpg" data-mid="26800776" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_13_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_13_o.jpg" data-mid="26800781" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_14_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_14_o.jpg" data-mid="26800791" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_15_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_15_o.jpg" data-mid="26800800" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_16_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_16_o.jpg" data-mid="26800807" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_17_905.jpg" width="905" height="1170" width_o="2048" height_o="2649" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_17_o.jpg" data-mid="26800819" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_18_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_18_o.jpg" data-mid="26800835" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_19_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_19_o.jpg" data-mid="26800841" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_20_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_20_o.jpg" data-mid="26800862" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_21_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_21_o.jpg" data-mid="26800875" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_22_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_22_o.jpg" data-mid="26800886" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_23_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1445" height_o="1870" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_23_o.jpg" data-mid="26800896" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_24_905.jpg" width="905" height="1169" width_o="987" height_o="1276" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_24_o.jpg" data-mid="26800908" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_25_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_25_o.jpg" data-mid="26800918" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_26_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_26_o.jpg" data-mid="26800927" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_27_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_27_o.jpg" data-mid="26800936" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_28_905.jpg" width="905" height="1170" width_o="2048" height_o="2649" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_28_o.jpg" data-mid="26800950" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_29_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_29_o.jpg" data-mid="26800972" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_30_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_30_o.jpg" data-mid="26800981" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_31_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_31_o.jpg" data-mid="26800997" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_32_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_32_o.jpg" data-mid="26801007" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_33_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_33_o.jpg" data-mid="26801008" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_34_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_34_o.jpg" data-mid="26801016" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_35_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_35_o.jpg" data-mid="26801022" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_36_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1020" height_o="1320" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_36_o.jpg" data-mid="26801025" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_37_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_37_o.jpg" data-mid="26801035" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_38_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_38_o.jpg" data-mid="26801042" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_39_905.jpg" width="905" height="1170" width_o="961" height_o="1243" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_39_o.jpg" data-mid="26801044" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_40_905.jpg" width="905" height="1170" width_o="2048" height_o="2649" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_40_o.jpg" data-mid="26801048" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_41_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_41_o.jpg" data-mid="26801054" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_42_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_42_o.jpg" data-mid="26801063" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_43_905.jpg" width="905" height="1170" width_o="1046" height_o="1353" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_43_o.jpg" data-mid="26801070" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_44_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_44_o.jpg" data-mid="26801076" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_45_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="1700" height_o="2200" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_45_o.jpg" data-mid="26801080" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_46_905.jpg" width="905" height="1171" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_46_o.jpg" data-mid="26801086" border="0" align="left"/><img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_47_905.jpg" width="905" height="1170" width_o="1930" height_o="2497" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500091/pleasuregutsFINAL_Page_47_o.jpg" data-mid="26801090" border="0" align="left"/> Published July 26, 2012 Click for downloadable PDF http://www.pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-3 http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-3 Sun, 17 Jun 2012 22:37:35 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 3606174 <img src="http://payload65.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/3606174/illtombera3cover.jpg" width="670" height="977" width_o="2048" height_o="2986" src_o="http://payload65.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/3606174/illtombera3cover_o.jpg" data-mid="18674024" border="0" align="left"/> PREVIOUSLY: The Transfiguration of Ritchie Ra, wherein he explores the eye, illness, and the last Transit of Venus likely to pass over a populated earth. We’re introduced to some of our heroes. Phenomena astronomical are discussed, accidents happen and thoughts return to Earth as Alfonso Heliotrope leaves his mark on Ritchie Ra’s body. Behind the mask is something even worse. Haze of sin settling over windshields and windowsills, leaving thin deposits, worming ways in toward bedrock. Topside graveyard nettles grasp and catch. Night falls over the city of the dead. Oh, but the lights come on, we can see it all. Let’s to the tall buildings, then, feeble axes mundi of glass and steel shearing delicate winds, diverting gentle current into scrappy threadbare components and refusing to budge while gray birds take lazy wing below, coasting on downward breezes, castoffs from considerable lateral wind loads. Skyscraper engineering a tricky goddamn business, account for wind pressure or load by engaging a rolodex of variables, velocity pressure times gust effect factor and external pressure coefficient minus likewise for the internal, providing the structure has no response characteristics that might make issues of, say, across-wind loading or vortex shedding or the like. So much work just so they can stand tall and resilient after fifty or a hundred years taking a beating. Still, without it we’d of course be nowhere, painting cave walls and fucking indiscriminately, or--hmm well let’s not get ahead of ourselves here--maybe just the latter, early sapiens leaving behind African origins at more or less the same time this whole place sat preserved under a thousand feet of ice, the era of our common Y-chromosomal ancestor, long before shamanic wall decoration entered the picture, that is, you know, long before the Word... and when cold retreated (not to return to the Northeast coast until Vinland turned icy under Viking incursion ten thousand years later), tentative bands took to hunting in Central Park and tossing scraped bones into the East River. What so defied nature in those days, when the only questionable ‘sustainability’ was that of our own race, never sure whether or not fickle deities might choose to plunge us back into frost? Adherence was the only option. Not that we ever thought about it, or needed to do, still no shaking the feeling that back then the equation was balanced, young human species wont to overstep and nature a vengeful demiurge repeatedly reminding us who was really in charge. Teleological theorizing is real easy to do, of course, with these bright city lights on. Where next? To the coast, through the Narrows, oceanside, Lenape having once referred to this whole area by an appellation meaning “place by the sea,” subsisting in summertime largely on the fluke, sturgeon, mackerel, eel won from local fishing sites and then moving on come autumn. At least that hasn’t changed, family boats heading out of port long as the weather’s good and coming back loaded with, well the once-superabundant oysters are gone but striped bass and sheepshead supplies can still be counted upon, no extant seals either but wouldn’t have wanted any in the first place, and anyways (here the city itself interrupts) doesn’t the fact of those Munsee fishermen sticking weirs in the water constitute as good an example of Fucking With Nature as does any sputtering motorboat or highrise condo? Well technically it’s not for us to say, but what the heck--these streetlights, glare streaming from some of those eight hundred thousand civic living and working spaces practically daring an answer--for a start, those weir-setters never made for an overshot carrying capacity, never took food out of the mouths of future generations and stuffed it in their own. If only we could, as in the world of real estate developers--which swarm has made such proud inroads on these islands--just crunch some numbers: let’s see, 15,000 Lenape New Yorkers have been estimated, split into some eighty kinship-structured groups rotating campsites, building longhouses, clearing trails, burning fields for planting, otherwise reshaping their roughly 320 square miles of land. Just stick some sort of natural resource metric in there and we might see whether K, akkursed karrying kapacity, had already been met, maybe even surpassed, by the time the canoe party sailed out in 1524 to greet Verrazzano and show him, without hesitation, the safest place to beach. Oh man, New York is steamed up over this--would that such a calculation could be done, one that spoke of a negative population growth, an exceeded upper limit, some clue that even their hunter-gatherer model was one which dealt in destructive consumption, that that calling isn’t exclusively ours... But in the absence of firm data, the proud metropolis will rely on its common sense, take care not to rationalize, just objectively assess, something bound to crop up--here’s one: the fact that those same romanticized human ancestors (got ‘em now) killed the mammoth, drove it, it just so happens, to extinction! But the derisive laugh catches, hollow, in the city’s throat, for yeah, that’s just it, fella. You’re a symptom. Alright, New York will concede that one (despite it being perhaps a little below the belt), but not ready to admit defeat, chooses to leave its lights on, just sort of inviting more speculation, here grasping at passing that buck, well what about that slash-and-burn agriculture you mentioned? Clearing fields, burning the woods, making room for those squash-maize-bean crops all pleasantly commingling undersoil--w-what do you call that? The growth of this city, the imposition of the grid, 1811 Commissioners’ Plan being the last straw (we graciously maintained the odd Lenape trail, the city reminds; you can still walk them today), can’t it all be seen as a natural outgrowth of any one of these techniques, no symptom but evolution, a defiance of nature, sure, but in its place a proud assertion of survival? A salmon fighting the current, a bird flying south, a diver depositing caissons at a bridge’s base, triumphantly drifting surfaceward and bravely fighting off the bends; what’s the difference? The strong survive, Might is Right, what happened to all that? Nature is but an element of a world built for manipulation, for exploitation, for-- --well, jeez, I mean have a little faith--(I can’t, the city answers. I am faith’s opposite number.) And the lights? I ain’t turning them off for nothing! Someone’s gonna have to (can’t help noticing its voice cracking here) d-do it for me! Yes, well, that might be just the thing... but no, no use being so cruel, reminding it. It’s living on borrowed time. It knows. Shall we just on with the tour? To the forests, then, manicured municipal parks, give the people a little green space, let them stretch their legs (See? New York by now pleading, Don’t you see we’re trying?). Round here at night all manner of life runs riot, fat subway rats crawling everywhere tipsy on pondwater, sneezing flecks of flu without discretion. Often these terminal cases are set upon by chickenhawks, who pretty much have their run of the place and so are often up past bedtime swooning dihedral unto any stragglers. Realistic-looking rock outcroppings encircle fake lakes, overlook bike paths and nocturnal rollerbladers. Kids drink pilfered beers and smash the bottles delightedly. Not too shabby, right? A little ecotope of our own, and you gotta admit, this dead city has a point. Every niche testifying to imminent collapse, to excessiveness and disintegration, and yet doing so in one voice, the lights blinking it out in code, manhole covers and grates steaming their missives, billboards in Times Square really magical sigils chanting the tenets of well-worn spells, the dead city, to be lost forever but content for having, in the face of inevitability, maintained a real fuck-you spirit, oh this place by the sea, such a shame, dressing itself up in funeral attire, lacing up boots for the march to the gallows. Well, then, join those proud ranks, O Doomed City, and be a sunken Ys, an invisible city of Kitezh. Be a swampy Saeftinghe, a dried-up Ur or Otrar. A razed Nineveh, an abandoned Petra, Ani, or Tikal, a ruined Babylon or Perperikon. Become Hajir, the city destroyed by a scream. A city of rumor, Z or de los Cesares, Paititi, Erum of the Pillars, defined by the tantalizing negative space you leave in the historical record. Become the Turquoise Mountain, the lost island kingdom of Salakanagara. Oh, become l’Anse aux Meadows and let the frost back in. Become Hattush and leave a curse for anyone who durst challenge. Stand proud and fight to the last; bring it all down with you if you can, O New York, dream city of lost light!; never buckle, don’t give an inch!; though the trapdoor may idle briefly before the drop, don’t turn away, don’t look back or down, hold fast to your rotten star but die, die, die, my darling. In her time, Georgia Klay has found occasion to set some likeminded observations down, the theme for her rather meaningful and the written word something for which she’s more or less always had a knack. Knack? No arrogance in the claim, see, she doesn’t quite know what to do with it herself, having more than once written a topic past the fullness of its meaning and, unable to stop, taken it into a realm of such devastating emotional consonance that she finds herself tearing up the pages and sobbing. So ‘knack’ will do for now. May be said, on that subject, that Georgia cries a little more than do most, but no blaming her when specifics are considered; just this morning, the long walk home and note on her door, straining through the already blurred vision of the morning-after at familiar handwriting joining up to signal that ghastly internal drop, a sinking not just of heartbeat or of stomach but of everything inside of her. Ritchie Ra is dead. AND WHERE WERE YOU??, means Arthur’d been there sometime during the night; she can see him knocking, knocking, giving up, scribbling this lame thesis and tacking it to her forbidding door. He always uses these histrionic notes, doubled-up bits of punctuation and overwrought phrasing, must think it’s be extra-affecting but man, she just doesn’t care. Where’d she been? She’d been elsewhere, stupid but it was too late, all too late anyway, and so she’d come home fucked, yeah, traitor, just the way she’d always been. So anger, denial, no way is she ready to accept. Never will. She’d walked, dazed and unclean, another couple of hours, gotten coffee and the fat proprietor had smiled at her, winked, chortled “Now why should someone as pretty as you be looking so sad?” and almost couldn’t say who it was actually doing it but someone, someone had thrown that same coffee right in his fucking face, and run out. That kind of talk she can’t handle. Is pretty, yeah, classical, always sort of thought of it as unexotic, bordering on plain. Resents it being used against her, she who’s done nothing to earn it, who’s in fact taken some pain to rewrite her appearance more appropriately, to err ever closer to ruin. To treat everyone, her own self included, in what she’s begun to think of as the only way could be called, amidst this Terror, ideologically defensible. But she hasn’t been able to blight her delicate red hair, pale skin and dark shadow, softness of feature that won’t, doesn’t ever seem to harden. Sullied, ravished, ravaged, Georgia still looks like a vestal young miss. Knackered, shattered, short, she still seems friendly. And wasn’t she, once, many years ago? When talent bespoke possibility, those optimistic days, when things were fun and despair cropped up but lo, she didn’t sweat it. Of course neither had she then experienced the thrill, the phenomenal satisfaction of something corresponding so genuinely, so perfectly, with her specific humanity, of vibrations ringing true, down cupola and campanile, to the foundation stone at her soul’s source. She had been friendly, okay, but hardly as thoroughly as she would become fouled. “Something about you,” she’s seen herself, a version of herself whisper. “You’ve diffracted.” “I have?” “Yeah. Just take a look.” But she couldn’t, never could. It wasn’t her, there in the mirror. “Now you’re all living ends...” She cried a lot, it was true. Changed her look, dyed her hair but boys and girls still played with it, what they thought of as some intimate gesture might make her propose marriage or something but inside she’d just be fighting back laughter at how cheap it all was beside that real intimacy, that brand on which she enjoyed a monopoly. She could maintain external ease, separate it from her true self--it was just something she could do, having never been prone to nerves or hesitation--but she could never bridge the gap, never really share with another. Just this explanatory Georgia, telling her what’s happened and what to expect--“some of you have a little longer; some are already dead...” And it is this Georgia whose measured words, in those infernal writing sessions, she is basically transcribing, a medium incapable, at any other time, of comprising such cogency, of such force. Certainly not with lovers, whose variance and patent nickel-and-dimeness really bespeaks the whole disconnect. Georgia, whose diffraction routine makes a diagnosis of solipsism sort of the elephant in the room, thinks of being an undependable, a deadbeat, not as a function of her personality but of the physical world itself, the field through which her various shards pass, alternating states, being and unbeing both. The lives she lives are discrete ones, proceeding serially and wholly outside of her control. She regards herself as someone perfectly honest about this. “Wow, because,” two nights ago with Mariève, pale Québécoise, dance student down from l’îsle on a tourist visa and a Bushwick sublet, “my mom spent some time up there in, uh, the sixties, I guess.” Mariève, beautiful and all but so tall her frame’s begun to encircle Georgia’s smaller one, in a polite French Canadian smother... She’s leaning away but the pursuit continues. “À Montréal? And what was she doing?” this poor thing already sodden with emotion, a languor Georgia’s learned to pinpoint, really a warning sign, slow breaths coming up intent behind her soft voice. “She, well,” Georgia looking out at their reflection as it murmurs back from a mirror in the darkened hall. “She was a student there.” Meaning a whole host of different things. “You should come up. Stay with me,” danseuse locked on and trying, trying hard, to hold Georgia’s body and attention close, sensing this implacable separation, gripping one to the other like Apollo did Daphne. “we’ll work on some new stuff together.” Georgia’d pretended to think about it. The next night, last night, the last night, as though untouched by events of the prior twenty-four hours, she’d reenacted the scene with high school kid Andreas, parents out, couldn’t believe his luck. “So maybe,” across the bed looking over at her looking up at his ceiling, the photos he’d pasted up there all friends smoking in the courtyard, and down at his desk to the bottle of india ink half used up on stick’n’pokes, a couple grody 40ozes they’d downed together, scenes from an all-too-familiar early upbringing to which she wasn’t wildly keen on returning, “you know, graduation’s like, it’s next week. Maybe we could stay at the same place, some house, you know, once I’m out of school.” “I don’t know.” Staying’s something Georgia doesn’t do, unless he means staying stuck in this timeless uncoupling scene. Perennially vowing not to stay. So that her life, night to night, is best remembered as a routine succession of these, days hollowed out but for the offer that ends one and the refusal that begins the next, that sees her step out into the blinding light of morning to head home with head hung. This proclivity for betrayal her life’s sole structuring principle, practically speaking. The other Georgia, the all-Georgia who can name things, speaks of this walk as the path that shapes the aggregate sum of her experience, the function that bounds her deviance like a definite integral. The street becomes a key through which she can decode all the correspondences between this rank town and herself. Why? Maybe because she’s known these passing junkies, because she’s turned into one. Because such intemperance, even the thought of it, fills her heart to bursting. Because the stoop and the gutter signify, for her, seats of prayer practically tabernacular in their sacredness, and entering one and performing a sacrificial rite an experience as incomparably mystical as it was for conquering Pompey to stand outside the Holy of Holies, rip the veil that guarded that secret place and step inside. That sort of pagan profanity in the face of transcendence the highest Georgia’s ever been, the benchmark of closeness against which every mortal partner makes his or her tepid claim. “Why not call it narcissism?” mother Frances, on the phone by the kitchen window, only half-joking in the days when Georgia might have spoken about this tendency, when it still eluded her ken. “Well it isn’t,” knows that much. “So what? Strip it of power. Put it down to vanity.” “But it isn’t,” something weary here. Frances just breathes on the line. “Why not, at the very least, stop writing so intensely about yourself?” mom’s desperate tone only making things worse, and she knows it too. Her opinion being Georgia realizes she’s special and that’s fine, but not this further recognition; this isn’t. Not this emerging facility with satanic paradox, this nurturing of darkest impulses. Frances shares enough of them with her daughter to see the danger ahead, and so tries, pathetically, her heart breaking in mid-sentence, to play the rube and dissuade her, call her names, hurt her feelings. Pretend not to understand. Anything to push her off the path of self-discovery that leads, in Klays, to serious trouble, and knowing all the while, the suggestion standing stock-still and unflinching in her nether perceptions, that the die has been cast, that her daughter is, in some measure, lost forever. That Georgia’d called down a family curse and was henceforth one of the damned, one who won’t even be able to count on wandering shiftless in some pleasant purgatory waiting to be named; nope, Georgia’d named herself... “What do you hope to get out of all this?” This all-Georgia could be an inquisitive sort, and impatient, once you got to know her. “Your rocks off?” She thinks for a moment, nods. That was more or less it. Could she tell her mom so? Put this down on paper, this further degree of realization? The way that it invigorated her dealings, how exciting everything became with such conversations echoing inward, the way its words pointed to a more terrible unspoken one that sat just out of reach--indeed, her charge is to ever search for that word, looking for it in overheard snatches of dialogue and invocation, in imagined secret histories and prophesied futures and scraps of torn-up pages, in powders insufflated and the mouths or movements of lovers, meanwhile the all-Georgia up ahead dangles it for her, can be seen holding this word out for the grabbing, and promises to join her in its vocalization if only she reaches a little further for it, in the grips of passion’s heat or of euphoric oblivion coming closest and pushing herself past humanity, past this company of souls to a place where she’s all oneness and hears, above the sudden thundering of tears, someone, some part of herself, say, “Death.” And she weeps and shivers and is home. * * This afternoon she’s dressed up penitent, as if that might make any difference, wearing the very same dress as yesterday, actually one she’s had for years, faded beige and grimy, and a leather jacket. Some sort of mark of shame, self-affixed and held firm, but of course nobody around here can see it for this and so no judgment’s to be expected. That she’s inured to this absence of punishment in no way diminishes her despair over it. J.R. Shrapnel, due any minute, has figured all day as a persistent, if nebulous, shape in her thoughts: a theoretical boy. The revelation of his name, which she hadn’t heard spoken in some time, on a voicemail left sometime during the night (“Hi Georgia? It’s Fiona, Fiona Snuzen, I don’t know if you remember met me at--” with vague merriment in the background, the clink of the drink, an insufferable drunkard’s soundscape that went on a ways until, “enways I was thinking if you wanted to collaborate on something in honor of J.R. Shrapnel’s father died or something? I heard?”) had led her to work backward through a sequence of equally revelatory realizations, that he’d been at Ritchie’s party, that he’s in town, that he’s alive, so on. And without much in the way of pretext, she’d asked her way over to where he’s staying, way uptown on Fort Washington, and is presently waiting, on his stoop, naturally, and in her dingy getup against the unseasonable cold, for this shade’s arrival. Georgia being the reigning ‘never-come-home’ champ, the thought does cross her mind that she might, as part of some ironic reversal, be forced to swig down a little of her own medicine and sit here all night, but the worry never really lands as soon enough she looks up to see him standing there, just ahead, struck dumb. A mutual hallucination, categorical proof of that external realm of fantasy, not some concocted zone of delusion but one shareable and thus impossible to write off. How else to explain this synchronicity of expression on their faces, the suggestion implicit, for Georgia, that he must be reeling same as she, taking measurements of physical change counterpart to her noting that he seems somehow taller, wizened, grown-up, sure, but a little peculiarly so. Not that she had prepared any elaborate tabulation of expectations for this meeting beyond the normative--or had she? Whatever, this is kind of unforeseen. Everything boyish about him has remained, just been consequently settled upon by a thin layer of decrepitude, where normal folks would’ve split the difference. Uncertainty has been hardened into permanence, tentativeness undermined by inveteracy, so that what emerges is the plain fact of contradiction. His short hair is somehow tangled and his clothes torn but his eyes belie youth, burn faint but detectable from within a yawning darkness, perhaps right around vision’s absolute threshold, a single candle’s flame at thirty miles distance. A trip from here to there, then to now, that to this, and is it really, empirically, him? “Did you know me?” a voice, apparently his, seems to ask her when she stands up and hugs him. And holds it, thinking. “Yeah, obviously.” Withdrawn, she looks away. “I, uh,” laughs and her eyes dance up to his, a brow cocked, “actually I’m not sure I did,” and she traces his gaze, what glister of it she can make out, as it settles on her hair. His Washington Heights upstairs is empty, as far as she can tell, a couple of library books on a coffee table, a mattress, a half a joint in an ashtray. “You hiding from somebody?” “No,” he nods. The trainride down to Georgia’s place (for once inside the apartment, he’d grabbed a small suitcase then ushered her promptly and unabashedly back out toward the door) is real weird, its conversations consisting of dangling allusions, fatal omissions, hints and implications gone unpursued. Their common experience has evaporated, so, each unknown to the other, they play at deke and circumlocution; with J.R.’s reveries hinging on but leaving out certain lingering reminiscences of last night’s party and Georgia’s doing the same dance around some roughly contemporaneous but unspoken actions of her own, an overlap presents itself in the empty space: “What happened to Ritchie Ra,” Georgia, wordsmith, so heedful of J.R.’s passive phrasing as he says this, “and on the same night as this trouble in Florida.” He looks at her. “You know more about it all, Ritchie and Thwock Morton and, and Heliotrope.” A small noise escapes from her throat at this, but it’s swallowed by subway rattle, and she shrugs and puts on a sad face. “Never been in on all that. I try to stay away.” Eyes starting to well up. J.R. staring lazy out the window, “Someone said you’ve got something new coming, some new project,” and he turns to see her halfway crying but smiling sloppy and sheepish through it. “Yeah, real new,” wiping her eyes, “least for me. Some music, performance, you know,” a self-conscious brag, “uncharted territory.” “And you’re working with them on it?” “What? Who?” J.R. gives a shrug that doubles as nothing. “Thwock Morton, O’Nubb, I don’t know.” Georgia falls into an uncharacteristic mumble. “Right, no, uhh you’re, right, I am, working, with,” and thankfully the doors open on her stop before this locked groove gets any worse, and she hops up like everything’s kosher, ushering J.R., whose sense of logical impropriety is kind of buzzing, up into Classon Ave debarkation. The space where Georgia’s been living, a big repurposed loft called Third Mind House, offers a similar respite from stultifying rationality, being, actually, very confusing. “This leads to the sort of common area, which is connected to every bedroom,” Georgia walking through her mental map in a musty stairwell that ends in a heap of doors extending some twenty-strong across the landing with nary an inch of jamb to separate one from the next. “We don’t have keys to the bedroom doors, which are all locked, so they’re pretty much ceremonial. That one’s me,” pointing to either the fifth or the sixth one, J.R. not bothering to falsify a nod of comprehension. “How many people do you live with?” “Right now?” She rolls her eyes up and bounces side to side, body language for ‘calculating,’ and at least ten seconds go by. “Too many. Or not enough. Don’t know.” They enter that common area, find a few big couches and lots of bodies. “Georgia!” It’s coming from Poppy, fourteen years old, a Mahwah, NJ runaway with bleached streaks in her black hair and braces. “A lot of messages, man, I mean a, two hundred or something, a guy called Adam from a label, Jeweled something--” but Georgia makes an ixnay face and hastily introduces her to J.R. And him around, “That’s Kava and Ket,” a blonde couple leaning each asleep on the other’s shoulder, “Herb the musclehead, hmm oh there’s Bob, with Blob,” pointing to a button-down Yagodaesque middle-aged man holding a corpulent white cat, “and here’s Bennie,” a thin, red-robed young man who bows deeply into a folded-hand namaste--so deeply, in fact, that a turquoise water pipe falls out of his billowy wizard sleeve in the act, spilling ash and weed into a great rising dust-and-cat-fur cloud on the square of flooring next to a splintry couch leg, though everyone’s too polite to notice. Heys all around. They try for casual chat, but some force, maybe gravity itself, drags all discourse toward a dark singularity, the center of this conversational black hole. Soon everyone’s sitting round speculating on the possible meanings of a novel and potently weird situation. “Getting really mixed up down Pensacola,” says Bennie, checking the news on his phone, “hostages, and gunplay.” “And NMF got ripped off!” Poppy stabbing vociferous underhand at the air just in front of her. “Yeah man, supposed to be playing a show down there today, got all their gear stolen during the night, guitars, amps, everything.” Georgia shakes her head blankly. Poppy has Bennie look up the distance between the woulda-been gig, in a backyard in Warrington, and the Little Institute, the unfinished development set snugly on forty acres in Beulah. “Twenty-five miles, man, but they never, you know--” “--And they’re sure this is a Seminole thing?” J.R., who’s been staring at the floor, still manages to eke this question out in the half-second it takes Poppy to swallow. Georgia jerks to attention, following the words up to the unlikely creature that’s done the issuing. “That’s just it,” Bennie standing up, keeps it going a bit louder over the shoulder as he heads to a raw-wood-paneled kitchen area in the corner of the living room, “it’s all so hush-hush. No Red Indian militia has claimed responsibility,” kind of shouting, actually. “There’ve been disputes over that spot forever,” J.R. obliging a history lesson but still holding out on that eye contact. “Protests. Cops, lots of cops and military. I don’t know. This kind of thing, it doesn’t really happen.” For some reason he looks at Georgia. “But I don’t--it’s not unheard of.” Georgia blinks back, looks away. Ritchie. Kava, who is woken but impossibly woozy (may have, in fact, been this way the entire time), begins to formulate a synthesized group hypothesis. “What’s taken place in Florida is an armed,” something here between a blink and a nap, “armed uprising, devised from the outside, numbered among whose principle architects was, in all likelihood...” “...one Ritchie Ra,” Ket takes over, his eyes still closed and employing the same groggy drawl, “who as we all know has played at this for like thirty years... and was, you can bet, simultaneously being targeted by forces disagreeable,” big yawn, “to his scheming.” “I don’t think that’s right.” Georgia has shut her eyes too, though for a different reason. “I don’t think Ritchie knew anything about it.” “Then why’d they cap him, man?” Poppy wants to know. “Yeah, why’s someone dead?” Bennie, who’s returned with a cup of tea and a fresh joint, wonders. “And who robbed No More Forever?” “Mis-di-rection,” pronounces halting Kava. “Perhaps just coincidence.” “Twenty-five miles man, that sound like a coincidence?” Poppy, tough. “Yeah, bullshit! Bullshit!” hothead Herb’s reaction is a little harsh, and he’s given a second to cool off, during which cooloff everyone tries to smile. “A diversion, then,” continues Ket after the beat, “meant to distract, redirect, or delay our investigative eff, ff, fforts,” and no help required on that last bit, Sherlock, since he’s now fast asleep. J.R. appears to be taking it all in, might be attentive but is really just inscrutable, Georgia sneaking a few more glances, none of which reward the effort. “You think they had it worked out back there?” a little later in her bedroom and either she hasn’t had a chance to turn the light on or it’s meant to stay off, something moving behind her question and her smile tending a little too close to simpering in the ask. “Maybe.” He fixes her with a stony stare, even but for maybe a couple degrees of chary narrowing. “I don’t know about Ritchie being involved in any of this. I was there, last night.” She bites her lip, kicks a speck of halflight on the floor. “Like, you know more than you’re letting on...?” J.R. cracks a smile. “No, come on, not exactly.” What then? “Not sure. It was night. I was upstairs. I didn’t see a body.” Well see this, smartass: Georgia taking off that jacket, letting it fall to the floor, follow it and savvy she’s standing there in just her dress. “Don’t you believe he’s dead?” “Sure.” He regards the discarded item. “I don’t really know how much it matters.” She looks down with her head level, just eyes doing the descent, there in the ghostly dark. “You don’t have to sleep here if you don’t want to.” How to quantify their relationship? They’re scattered as distant stars; the odd observer might make out, faintly, some sort of constellation but couldn’t ever imagine a single coalescent shape, could never go further than those fanciful lines hanging interdimensionally suspended, part space, part time, distances lengthening, separations growing more pronounced, look back now and again to note, man alive, but we’ve drifted... Other people just stayed put, feet on the ground and sick with stress, but J.R. and Georgia have, not to say transcended all that--their different bearings being the operative element--maybe ascended and descended, respectively. Each finding comfort and trust in what most’d style illusion, J.R. on the one hand looking to impossible cosmic measurements as proof that nothing bound by their majesty holds much import in comparison, Georgia on the other finding in begrimed urban detritus and buried debris affirmations of certain inescapable principles, secret internal laws which easily trump any imposed by another. Her magic more powerful, for being the more deadly, she can affect a change in his cognitive sphere as though it were her own. She can play with perceptions, sure, but so can any pretty girl; this is deeper stuff, this is too much. Ergo J.R. comes to know, caught jagged though he is on time’s gears, all mixed up and her dress falling, almost floating, to the floor, whither that errant satellite, disappeared from last night’s sky, has gone off. “The Moon...” as she crosses the room toward him unmistakable, purposed, approaching the assured calamity of meeting Above with Below and Christ, her beauty and her secret and it’s like he can’t keep it to himself saying without even meaning to, “She’s in you! She is you!” and at the point of contact she agrees, agrees, agrees. * * Georgia afterwards dispensing with her usual stratagem and actually not lying. Not looking up at the ceiling either, but straight, sitting, smoking, gazing straight at him, more curious than she can remember being, in forever. But there’s this shame. What is it about her own home, her own room, her tucked-away loft bed? Maybe she wants not to invite comparisons, it being the seat of her nightmares, her stupefactions, her lapses toward, well... The idea that, on those nights during which hope of survival is a lark, it’s these very sheets upon which her corpse lies sprawled, some nucleus thereof still alive somewhere inside awaiting the moment she’ll be able to ask whether morning will come and steeling herself for the inevitable, shattering No... sounds funny, as these things go, but she never intended to sully, to profane such a place, even to let another into it, scared it might communicate some classified fact, or worse, spread whatever ailment she might be said to suffer from, the walls of this place so caked with accumulant by now, testimony to her iniquity so thick in the air she can barely breathe. But she’d brought him over all the same, a gesture irrevocable, an effort at defining their heretofore clumsy connection, or maybe just a gambit meant to loosen his hold, get J.R., made of stone, to reciprocate, to simply register and share a single identifiable emotion. He’d asked whether she knew him, really underlining the whole issue: she didn’t, the right answer, for he wouldn’t allow her to. All the itchiness back at his place, her reluctant resolution to offer an invitation, that decision’s attendant result. All conducted outside of his purview, J.R. just going with it, his manner unquestioning, sure, but actually something closer to, say, Grand Indifference. Here’s his cold body now, next to hers, and she can’t seem to warm it. The type to normally take, in partners, a certain dumbness as read and untroubling, Georgia doesn’t, this time can’t let him off the hook, the idea holding firm that he’s hip to her ingenuousness, her desperate desire, and is yet so pitiless. That he’s aware, somehow, of what it’s taken her to be with him in this place, that he knows she’s sharing to counter the shame, and that he withholds still, will offer up none of himself to make her feel, Christ, not so alone in things. What’ll it take? What’s cutting, where this shell’s concerned? She can think of one thing. “I heard something about your dad.” And from next to her comes an indubitable bodily fluster, barely noticeable but then she’s got a feel for matters corporal. He’s jolted some. “Yeah?” “Is everything alright?” Considering it. “Not really sure.” Well now wait just one second. “‘Not really sure?’” “Standard operating procedure, the runaround, you know. It’s the military. They let you go weeks without an update. What have you heard?” “I’m sure you know more than I do--” “Don’t be.” “I mean, probably amounts to just idle speculation--” “He’s my father, Georgia, if you heard something...” Inhales here to bursting. “J.R., I heard, someone said, that he’d died.” So here’s her reciprocation, then, and isn’t she just thrilled for having catalyzed it, doesn’t, oh I don’t know, instantly regret the move. Shrapnel’s eyes broaden, slackjaw lets out a little air. He sits up slowly, dizzily, and turns a stricken gaze on Georgia, whose tear ducts, on permanent alert as we’ve already seen, spring into action--can’t believe she’s said it, hates that she said it, this stupid experiment gone awry--and in the moment before she makes the transition to a state of active crying, with tears massing at the brim like troops at the border, a little giggle escapes from the depths of his maw. J.R.’s expression resolves itself into classic goading posture. He, liar, has had a little fun. And is met with a slap. “Ow!” “What the fuck?” Georgia’s eyes are all shock of betrayal, but there’s a hint of a laugh somewhere. “Yeah, what the fuck, good question.” Rubs his cheek a second, then is calm. Takes a second to denote new seriousness. Lays a clumsy cold hand on her warm shoulder. “Won’t get me to come back, these questions. I’m not staying, Georgia.” She nods, thoughts in perfect concert, for what do you know?--she was right. He’s been onto her all along. “It’s fine. I get it.” “I don’t mean to make it so difficult. It’s not about you, not I won’t come back to you, to...” and gestures about her drug den, her shame, without speaking. Yeah he knows. “It’s okay. You can’t do anything but what you’re doing.” His eyes screwed up. “I don’t know. I guess. I should leave. I’m--” Is he trying to say he’s sorry? Instead he opens eyes, commences with the truth about commander Benjamin Shrapnel; in a minimally conscious state at the military hospital in Landstuhl by the German-French border, effectively comatose, effectively vegetative, there being some distinctions. “The usual thing, phone calls from blocked numbers, bits of information showing up in rumor or, or threat.” Threat? “I, uh...” he can’t talk about it. When did it happen? “Beginning of December. Seven months ago.” “And does this have anything to do with your return?” He takes a second. “I’m not returning. I wasn’t even here,” with a look that hammers home this need for secrecy. “Georgia.” Alarming, kinda, thinks Georgia, but then she’d known, vaguely, that Benjamin Shrapnel had been up to some strange and secret shit. So there he is, strung up to feeding tubes, cached behind corporate and military insigniae, on the other side of some unbridgeable apartness, alone with the void. She never met the man, only’d ever seen the missus, J.R.’s mom, Hertha Shrapnel or did she go, in those days, by some Mädchen appellation, perhaps one hyphenated? Oh, cruel refusal, this kin-group of withholders all adrift, with nothing to bind them, not even a designation of family in a shared surname. Georgia, naming proficient, sees this vacuum there. J.R.’s memories, as he begins to relate them, are defined by such nullities. The Happy Shrapnels with Uncle Ritchie Ra, the latter’s Sandwich MA home, the balmy cape summers of the grotesque Nineteen Ninetees. The first: kid J.R., perhaps seven years of age, with his host out walking the beach at night, scuttling crabs out of sungod Ra’s flashlight beam and finding, some light-lengths ahead, a nocturnal detachment of--what?--scavenging crows. Not at night, no way, and yet--there they are, thick on some immense kill, swarmed and chirruping, must be dozens, every angle of this shape beneath acrawl with tittering black hangers-on; at the swing of lantern’s arc a number take flight, revealing patches of mangled carcass, pecked at and torn up. J.R., guts and gore connoisseur like all kids his age, of course comes closer, examines sections, look look! might have been a head here, once; feet, maybe flippers down this way; there’re these cracked yellow vertebrae reaching up sharpcarved and fingerling, dead organs gurgling black somewhere beneath tattered muscle tissue. Just what manner of rough beast’s washed up, here defiling Cape Cod’s childhood shore? Ritchie Ra, no Cool Uncle by this measure, resolves to pull fascinated J.R. back, threatens, in fact, to tell the boy’s Father if he doesn’t get away from that skeletal heap. Yeah, good luck with that, Ritch; how to explain to him the fact, J.R. computing acute kid’s logic, that his beloved pop already knows all there is to know about this carcass? The boy’d been accused of overactive imagination but no disputing the memory, bobbed up surface-side and impossible to tip, that he now relates to an astonished Ritchie: that he and his father, days past in some lightfilled dream landscape, had met over this body, nodding like birds, and themselves crowed--that his father had told him a story, half-remembered, about Jan Sibelius and his resolute birds of youth, that Ben had said it was no secret to him that people could become birds as easily as breathe, if carefully hazarded, if undertaken with a little faith. This bird was here, J.R. preaches, to teach them about the transience of life. “For it is soon cut off,” he quotes, stunning Ritchie, who’d been an altar boy at his age, “and we fly away...” “That was a dream, J.R.!” Ritchie shouts, uncharacteristically harsh. “This is real!” When they head back to the beachhouse Ben’s on one or more hushed backroom telephone call (later, a teenaged J.R. would begin to correlate recalled periods of increased cellphone-chatter with their attendant foreign warfare operations) but upon tucking in for the drift into that surf-backed sleep soundtrack he ventures to ask about the dead creature, about this memory he can’t shake. His father’s face looking down at him is, at each stage of the story, reliably pokered, but the child can detect, certain as their shared sin, a twinge of recognition. Understands that Benjamin has to pretend not to know what his son is talking about, can’t be seen agreeing with any old outlandish claim, a simple matter of decorum and no offense taken. The rational role-playing dad assures feverish J.R. they’ll go check it out in the morning, now go to sleep, his expression’s underside as certain as J.R.’s that tomorrow there won’t be left for them a trace. All dreams evaporate. This connection, assured by paternal denial, meant just for tonight, and the souls of both Shrapnel men the more vigorously transported for it. One of the few trips they shared, really shared. Or memories of the days when J.R. began to see less of him, Long Twentieth Century having petered, or the new one kicked up vicious in its wake, at home alone with mom and the news on infinite loop, late nights finding her creeping zombily around, creaking open his bedroom door, leaning heavy shadow in the portal while he feigned unconsciousness. This sleepwalking, tailing him on city streets--familiar black car straggling behind and she’d be there in the crack of tinted window--listening in on calls, forbidding him travel or diversion or otherwise drowned in front of the TV set imagining what secret wars were being waged by her husband, by the father of her only son. Might’ve had some kinda effect on him, J.R. notes now, chuckling, eyes strained. This all checks out with Georgia, who after all had in those days known this cagey kid. Had tried to get close and found him slipped past time and again, had occasionally connected in ways which rose above their petty circumstances, their maladroit jumbling of identities, but which would sure enough be dashed by the end. Had they tried, really, to connect? She’d thought of him often, had worried for him, had wanted him to know so, soon enough satisfying herself that he did; still this missing piece, this hole in him tugging relentless anyway and telling her he’d never settle, if that was what she was after. She could relate to being trained, by parents, for betrayal, really she could--and he’d know it, too, if he’d ever thought to ask. But so could she be strong, and fight it. J.R. Shrapnel made no such effort; he just let himself get beaten. “Do they know what’s caused it?” she asks, meaning this coma business. He gives her a pained smile, shakes a fist skyward, knuckle sandwich for God’s own secrets, and says nothing. * * They part on iffy terms. No telling what might spur J.R. to further movement, a species of imminent evasion perfectly legible in his tone, he nonetheless will do his best to pay respects to dead Ritchie in whatever ceremony might, in these antsy times, be contrived for the purpose. Surely there are some worthy events coming up--the solstice approaches, after all, and with it the annual Third Mind Grind, a music-festival-cum-party-cum-house-trashing that has tended, in its prior iterations, to attract and bring together so many freaks from up and down the east coast in such woolly states of intemperance that brazen, fateful behavior is a given: any and all lingering business is usually dealt with, where their adhoc underground society is concerned. Unspoken issues are laid out, grudges and crushes are exorcised, pretty much everyone goes crazy. This year should constitute no exception. There is talk of an already-quite-lengthy RSVP list, probably on account of the promised entertainment: William Thwock Morton is scheduled to give the debut performance of the new pornosymphonic opus he’s been touting for months now, and Georgia has sort of half-promised to play, too, to give her new musical project a try, though she was careful to tell Bennie, who booked the show, that she wasn’t sure it’d be ready in time. Ritchie’s friends will all be there. Maybe that’s all the commemoration he needs. And maybe she and J.R.’ll just see each other then, Georgia mumbles, in an even undertone of surrender. No Say-hi-tos or Give-my-regardses, as for whom might such banalities be employed? They just separate, and J.R. heads into the common room, his error-fated trial of Georgia’s bedroom door having reminded him it’s locked, kid, and ain’t no key. In here all’s empty darkness, can’t see his hand and roommates gone to bed or, okay, snoring away somewhere in the room, a few distinct tones sounding and his steps quiet and careful, undetectable in the black, at length estimates he must be spitting distance to the exit now, letting down his guard a little and immediately--perfect hubris--clang, trips on something’s loud edge, snarls a curse, and falls onto the couch atop a supine body. “Gah!” the voice is a man’s, and as the light comes on J.R.’s thankful to see at least it wasn’t little Poppy, ninety pounds soaking wet, but musclebound Herb, who can more than handle such contact, now that you mention it, J.R.’s concerns suddenly tending in the other direction, like maybe he can’t say the same for himself, Herb here getting up and, jeez, standing he’s sure a huge one-- “Sorry, pal, didn’t mean it, honest.” “What is your problem?” in a snarled whisper that’s louder than a shout. Herb, small-headed, large-necked, sporting black biker shorts, makes to think what to do next, but is interrupted by “Nah, don’t worry about him, it’s no problem,” a hushed voice from across the room, the resident cat-carrier met earlier, name of Bob, was it? Points at whatever J.R.’s stepped on, a configuration of heavy salad bowl, pair of chopsticks, rubber bands, and a little square of cheddar cheese, “’Cept you’ve ruined Bob’s mousetrap.” “Oh man,” J.R. a little bemused at the choice of third person but just going with it, “sorry, Bob, you know, in the dark and everything.” “Oh no, common enough mistake but, as a matter of fact, I’m Blob. Bob’s the cat.” Who, as it turns out, has this fixation for catching mice, though not via any technique identifiably feline. “You saw him, he’s kinda, you know,” holds up an imaginary rotund belly, jiggles it around. “Thyroid. Poor guy, dealing with the little bastard day and night. Since we moved in, this asshole mouse taunting him every chance it got, parading around, once or twice even bringing some friends over to traipse by. He usually chases it once, twice, tires out, and just sulks. So sad to see, cocky goddamn mouse faking sleepiness or a leg injury just to linger nearby rubbing it in.” “At some point enough was enough,” Georgia, having heard the commotion, steps out of her bedroom to join the recounting, “and these little traps started popping up.” “A tunnel, made of a toilet paper roll, bit of cheddar on the end leaning out the window. You’d think it’d be a lock, right? Well the son of a bitch actually levered the tube to a vertical position till down dropped the cheese and he sat munching, on the windowsill, looking right at Bob.” “Or the peanut butter ball, a hollowed-out piece of bread which, when entered, would’ve tipped and rolled into the toilet. The mouse ate a chunk from the outside, and the no-longer-round, no-longer-rollable trap just sat there.” “Now this one, the latest prototype. Bob’s gotten real handy recently with the chopsticks, it’s pretty cool; looks like he stood them up in the floor, with those rubber bands at the base, holding up the bowl. Mouse trips the rubber bands getting at the cheese, and it all comes down on him, baby, he’s trapped.” “Or woulda been,” Georgia gesturing, maybe not entirely jestingly, at the circular ruins on the floor. J.R. feels just terrible, moreso for the fact that suddenly here’s Bob himself, emerging from under a bed somewhere to regard his handiwork all gone to pieces, sniffing inquisitive, impossible not to hear him asking Why. “Jesus, I’m, how should I make it up to him?” “Don’t bother,” says Blob. “Par for the course; he’ll just build something better next time.” J.R. supposes he’ll lean in for a word, extending a few envoy fingers. The cat’s manner’s all enigma, disregarding the ghost hand even as he brushes ass and nervous tail swept against the clothed legs of everyone else. Pleasantly white and, sure, rotund, Bob’s eyes are honed and set cold green from disappointment. He circles a few times, sits, but for all the world acts as though J.R. is not there. Well, may as well make with some message from this afterlife to which he’s been consigned, even if he’s not sure he believes his own advice: “Stay true, bud, and you’ll catch him,” to which words cat ears prick up and piercing eyes peer here and there, around the room, everywhere but at their invisible speaker. * * An acceptable span of time having elapsed since J.R.’s departure, Georgia soon heads for another bedroom, opens the door, knocking as she does on its interior face. Ket’s fetal atop the covers on one side of the bed, Kava tucked in on the other. Gentle though insistent rapping soon wakes Kava, who smiles sweetly. These sleeping beauties, who share everything with each other, have settled into lotophagous addiction, an apathetic peace habit manageable but for this constant somnolence. Not the sort, themselves, to doctor the opioid high with amphetamine or the like, they just sleep it off, sleep it on. Georgia, for her part not sure where she comes down on the question, knows nonetheless to tailor her request to their specialty. Kava makes with a red-stamped bag, product name ‘Friar’s Balsam’ logoed, “nothing special,” she notes, “clumpy, like, don’t get your, hopes,” but Georgia nods shakily, no big deal. “Just a little,” meek-toned, suddenly nothing more than a child. Kava shrugs, “Bring it back whenever,” throws up a lazy peace sign and hits the hay. Back in her room, Georgia gets to messing with the abbey gospel, mixing in the other stuff, working things as best she can into a decent powder. Eyesight unaffected by cries past and pending, she is here possessed, self- and otherwise, sure of deed, and careful. She will greet not a feeling more for the foreseeable, will drop entirely from that world, a chasm in time there to welcome her, its waters to lap gentle over her naked soul submerged. Is that cocaine she’s adding? Look, she does hate it, honest, preparatory school drug, college party drug, tacky and imaginationless, choice of rude apes, blustery chauvinists, rakish dolts, doltish rakes. So shot through with edge, with sophomore agitation, that it could only appeal to antagonists. So Georgia, hypocrite, sees its coupling here--rationalizes it--as a sort of check on its purpose, a strike against such clods, stealing the drug’s rush, as it were, and letting any harshness be met and felled by that other element, drowned in the Friar’s warm undulations. So she’s never some slimy model or sororitrix, never come down with rushed respiration and sweaty stares. Never using with another, above all, her ritual a private one. Afraid of needles, she at least has that, having more than once fended off accusations made by other deviants that any other administering mechanism is a gross waste of precious narcotica. As if that were one thing that Georgia, pale, frail, human, could manage for herself in the way of striking a blow against the beast, a bulwark of humanity so she for a moment remembers that this inner life, its world of worship and the dreadful and imminent danger it will always pose, is really just a quantum of earthly material, and that it can be defeated on that practical plane. A modicum of hope that someday she might be convinced the measly concoction needs never even approach the blood-brain Rubicon. But identifying excuses, she stops making them, and sniffs. Fa so la, do re mi, music spontaneously overtakes, singing out life and love in quietus valley. She falls back in bed, a transfiguring dance seizing her spirit, bodily transformations stirring, identities shed into wastrelsy till she feels, sudden and forever, this being come to her fore. A totem of transgression, manifestation of core sensibilities, the spirit of her betrayals, her perversions, her dependences. The succinct threat that lies simmering beneath her protracted snarls of unpardonable behavior and constant disloyalty. The destroyer, the devourer, the deflowerer. She’d goofed on a name for this identity, looking--like William Thwock Morton, to whom she’s become a kind of protegée, heh--to subvert the nonstarter end of culture, static art of this static age, free to be walked on, ignored, marketed and commodified. A name describing the shift in methods, the active sin no longer shyly lying in wait but corrupting, confronting. A name that’s a lie, that doesn’t pretend to truth or beauty, or decency. A name that’s short-hand for contempt, for contemptibility, that’s disgusting, that’s stupid and proud, that’s ready here in her to loose, to get hold of hearts and minds, to give and take it, to use and to be used. Georgia O’Queeffe, human animal, is almost too perfect. Soon into her journey she takes a turn, one phase worn to sweet frailty, her short rush up fallen into downward spilling promises, softest violet diacetylmorphine deliria. Not such a stretch towards fear here, a formidable one, just don’t count the breaths that seem to come few and far between, only trust in the warmth. Everything smooth, even the memory of pain hazy as a dream woken out of. Love molecules mingle in her bloodstream; film fogs over colors, an agreeable dullness stirring sensual atop her skin. She feels a hearth set in her hateful insides, now open and gently crackling ardorous energy out to mix in environs, coagulating and spreading universal a treacly and dirt-thick peace. Her heart swoons and she lets it, falling, falling, into holy rebirth. * * Alone in the night, a thousand years later, she finds herself in the secret city beneath the earth. Its mirror projections, inverted shapes, skyscrapers just funny now, just lame, fragments of glass and bent metal everywhere. Wanders around, approaching certain corners shot through with alarm at the certainty that around it she’ll find another of her selves, so turning and going the other way. Continues on for a while, dodging, dancing around shadows and iterations, this place so full of them, and finds a clearing and a platform. “Hold on!” shouts her mother Frances as she comes up behind, here Georgia’s age and indecently pretty--she was, too--and grabs her daughter’s hand. They run for the square, climb stairs and board a train, eking an entrance through its closing doors and stand proud, catching their breaths. In the first car, where they can peek out the front window, thrill to disappearing track signaling sudden drops up ahead, set themselves resolute against the toss of sharp turns. “Sure hope we made it in time,” Frances indicating it’s not over. Points in the meantime at the sights, smiling at city’s ruins, abandoned zones once thick with throngs and tourbuses. They hit all the NY highlights, downtown of revolutionary engagements and market bombs, shelled tower remains and cemeteries; midtown with vast junctions and blinking billboards, now bereft of souls, in the way so easily foreseen by anyone trapped in its bustle, the inescapable future wherein it’s abandoned, or relegated to the other, become a mass grave; apartment complexes and flashy restaurants, storefronts and loft spaces, open bar with death strewn casual, shrugged off lands hardened from warning, from cramping, from malevolent human intent. And Frances Klay herself a vision caught in time, young and yet reflected off surfaces shot forth in senescence, an older, parallel counterpart. Those wages of guilt cut in the urbanized earth are cut too in some layer of her, the whole deadened some by exposures and subjections and her face so busily layered by addenda and memory that to even make out an expression is inconceivable, though Georgia is hard-pressed to ignore this suggestion of ‘sly’ she feels close at hand. It doesn’t feel like her mother, just doesn’t. “Here we are,” and they step off onto a station so packed, so crowded with bodies that it’s immediately clear here’s where all the survivors went, safe haven with refugees gathered in retreat, the collapsing society outside assured of reaching soon enough but no matter to these herded citizens, who have given up, and are only here to mill around in tears, saying their goodbyes. Infant Georgia, by now regressed into early childhood, urges her mother on--can’t stay here, I mean, look around--but is met with unreadable silence and a look around, a nod, a thought that this might be just the place. Frances effortlessly lifts enervated, limp Georgia, and moves ahead where this delegation’s lined up to meet her. Venturing a glance, she can see these exiles are done-for, already dead and halfway putrescent, nothing left in them but brittley weighted matter. Terror swells, and looking up, seeking steely protective mothering in this discovery’s wake, she sees only Frances’ determination, and grasps the meaning of all this. She’s an offering. Their splintered hands out for the gift, Frances complies, hands baby Georgia over without the merest flinch of hesitancy, and turns away while her daughter, in the passing, attends. Immediately their fingers plunge through to bone and boiling, flesh vulnerable and unresistant to their unearthly advance. She, in the arms of the skeletons, becomes one, sees her mother leave her to it and escape while she hangs sacrificial, altar-borne in the fields of carnage, the torture garden, trapped there, unable to wake until an appreciable degree of illumination, many lifetimes’ worth of miraculous threads of delicatest daylight, are pieced together and dangled overhead by familiar all-Georgia, standing like Bernini’s piercing angel above the bed, a commendatory word on her lips on the occasion of her pale familiar’s most recent journey pitward. “Dig those living ends...” NEXT: Poppy charts the history of NYC runaways and Seminole punk; J.R. starts to get the feeling he’s been had; Atonwa, ragdoll, gets tossed around some more, and NMF attempt a daring rescue. PREVIOUSLY: The Transfiguration of Ritchie Ra, wherein he explores the eye, illness, and the last Transit of Venus likely to pass over a populated earth. We’re... http://www.pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-2 http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-2 Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:18:11 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 2500152 <img src="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500152/illtombera2white.jpg" width="670" height="867" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" src_o="http://payload10.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2500152/illtombera2white_o.jpg" data-mid="18675248" border="0" align="left"/> PREVIOUSLY: The siege of the Little Institute for Advanced Study and Noah’s Park Paviolion. Witchy subversion cuts through staid puritanism, rocketing via rail from the Old World to some hazily glimpsed New one, dangling just out of reach, just past the absolute threshold of our feeble vision. Atonwa, fresh out of a mysterious subterranean operating room, leaves the Institute employing a preternatural sense that says he’s at the center, or at least somewhere within the central iris, of a sinister frame-up. No onkwehonwe colonist distrust, Atonwa is clearly onto something or other—or are they just smelling his native cig butts as they litter the backroad? And anyways, didn’t he just do time in the most uncanny of holding cells? things starting to run together and congeal amnesi- and paranoiac as he drives north under assumed surveillance and is at length captured by ADAM, some acronymed tendril thereof, when he crosses state lines into Alabama. State apparati do what they will, and sometimes all you can do is laugh like a mental patient. Up in New York some hours prior, day’s golden end piercing a certain crystal glint that seems already to suggest some logical underside yet to announce itself, Arthur Yagoda gazes into reflective lobby glass and jerks gums this way and that, sucks his teeth, sends a finger in, hands smoothing the black necktie that’d hung dopily outside his buttoned dinner jacket the whole walk over, that’d knocked askew into once-sharp-now-dulled lapels and made, reflection seems to say, a mess of things. Wherefore, why a tie with a tuxedo, the real question he’d been mulling--by definition no tuxedo at all, no form of suit known to modern man, kind of closer, in point of fact, to the plain fact of disorder, to nothing. He thinks of the guests upstairs, pictures his entrance, can already feel polite glances masking less generous judgments. He’d been careful until now, pretty solidly attendant to the vagaries of get-together fashion, a dedicated follower thereof. And then this happens. Which means he’s staying down here till Georgia arrives, at the very least, late though he is, for Georgia’s late too, later; almost sunset, but he’ll wait and offset his own false steps by entering on her shoulder way he’d previously intended and we’ll see what the glances are saying then. Necktie, Christ, but just what’d come over him? This Arthur here being a guy who truly and quite openly thinks himself a pro, no sarcasm but actual, if boastful, sincerity when he speaks about parties, fancying around, looking like a million. Because he knows himself to be of the generation took ‘Unpleasantness’ as its cultural aspiration, he’s resolutely defined himself as Classically Cool, meaning here the light hi-hat taps and polished Oxfords, basically the hepcat rug-cutting sense. Accent on ‘Class,’ like. He’s tried to listen seriously to boring big band jazz. Actually flirted with British inflections, elements of style, the letter “u” and other orthographic cues. Eschewed excessive drink, casual fun, save when it’s allowed him to better cultivate this avatar, enrich its expansion, develop its idiosyncrasies. Make it real. Which meant ordering something harsh and straining to withhold the ensuing grimace. Or dillydallying at home before a party so that he could arrive hurriedly at the last second, apologizing but see, he’d had trouble extricating himself from this vague prior engagement. So that’s that, then, still eyeing his reflection. Not an error at all, this stupid tie, but an elegant idiosyncrasy: scoundrel Yagoda’s patent twist on the old favorite, his giving it a new shake. You know the guy, he can’t help but look cool. It’s the best he can do on short notice to rationalize what he hopes no one’ll realize is just your bog standard fuckup. The offending issue straightened out in both the figurative and literal senses, and a commensurate calm coming over his features, Arthur allows himself a moment of quiet composition, twinkles a little wink at his reflection, decides the hell with Georgia Klay and heads down the short hallway to the elevator, buoyed confident and ready. * * Upstairs, Ritchie Ra’s in his rooms, one story beneath the gathering, bolt upright on a shabby plastic mat, focus sort of coming and going. His small apartment, adjoint quarters to the workspace above--in all, the full top two floors of an eight story warehouse he’s been renting for twenty two years--and the atmosphere down here, down in this specific, tiny room spare by design, so that, with nothing much to focus on, a sort of defocalization--the necessary sort--comes settling over him natural as a nap. Loosening his gaze, the empty egg cartons pasted overhead to line the shared ceiling spool readily into infinite repetition, distant projections, blurring into space. Put there for soundproofing, tonight a little leaks in from upstairs anyways, noise pollution through the mosaicked cartons, unwelcome but ignored easily enough. Dirty cinderblocks, stained smoky red from the building’s formative industrial years, stack cleanly out, running the edge of the bare room, no art hanging. Spare by design. Ritchie’s hands lay themselves flat against the floor’s coldness, his brain noting this bit of disconnect, by which it means to say he can’t feel it. Knows it’s cold, but can’t feel a thing. Can’t even remember the sensation. More mineral than man, if a man’s got that somatosensory hookup, Ritchie’s been here for he doesn’t remember how long, straining through dissociation to stay 100% present, to let focus emanate but finding instead that it’s all caved inward, every level down to the minutest ending on top with these vaulted ceilings that, with no counterresistance, lower, terribly, each time he looks up at them. Messing with his private mental map. His home disappearing, this home he’s loved, in which he’s lived out so much, rooms wherein he once slept, worked, ate, loved but which now figure only as his summoning grounds, all memory, all life dropping out of view for long stretches, ugly and nightmarish when a glimpse is afforded, through his lens of truth out over the perverted mirror world, the Looking-glass House he used to think of as his own. It once necessitated a fatal break in concentration but now he’s learnt enough he can put a hand out to the glass all gone to gauze, smiling through, and note his faroff mirrorworld counterpart’s expression without losing control, without faltering. His Will holds fast. In fact, at this point he barely has to try. Already the air in front of his forehead begins to flutter, steam off a hot road in his steadfast attention’s headlights. Details begin to delineate themselves: teeth, nostrils, brittle links of hair. A hand, soon a body. Ritchie breathes deep, resolve locked on the shimmering figure before him. That thrillingest act, invocation. “O Shadow O Radiance usher command me signal ATAPAO ODIO O.” A voice he swears rings out verifiable. A prompt for direction, for command, voice prone in submission, cadence shaped by a tide Ritchie can’t quite see yet but which he detects in the recitative, low and slow as a creaking, tilting prow on very old waters. He’s had a hard time, these last few months, extricating himself from these exercises. A certain notion of imminent revelation hinting, baiting, bolting him in place, he’s got little patience for the outside world, safe in the assumption that to live publicly at a time like this, to engage in some crass pantomime of life as usual, would be plain wasteful. No, it’s this private realm and its exhilarating promise, this hint of mystical ascent that’s compelling, that demands further investigation. In becoming sick, in examining his sickness, he’s really started to work at this piety wholesale. Busy days, made to wallow in the quotidian, he dreams of the moment he’ll be able to return to this seat, surrender in worship, keel and list on the tide, usher up a guide with whom to confer, some entity from that realm of fullness, a being who’ll speak to his symptoms, who’ll illustrate what they hold, Ritchie’s real goal being--in a frail human way that, no matter his ever-strengthening will, he can’t shake--to prepare, to be ready for what’s next. Somehow, Venus and her orbit, ordained forever ago, have become swept up in all of it. The planet’s appearance, the deliberate passage across the face of the setting summer sun, mythical analog to the tumor spreading over his brain, will cement his newfound telic perspective, set the entirety of this feeling, its incidental moments and cosmic flashes, onto the short road to terminus. This day will be some kind of last one. But in a final concession to the Ritchie Ra the world once knew, he’s put together a party. Certain though he is that before the evening’s out he’ll return to this room and confer, he’ll just as surely do his social animal thing, run out the intervening hours in the company of those few whom he likes and those many whom he tolerates. Though the mirror, as we’ve seen, no longer projects for him any stale one-to-one expression, Ritchie’s roughly aware of how he looks to others. Handsome at the outset, hardly dead, not even within spitting distance. Fifty-nine, and mockingly vital. Closer inspection reveals those telltales; left pupil a little larger than his right, pronounced hood forming on the lid. A world of details conspiring to form subtler facial asymmetry, but the way he’s been wearing it, no one seems to’ve detected a thing. Indisputable, though, on his inside. Just a month ago--only a month, Christ--on another clement Cape morning indistinguishable at its start from all the others, thing’s’d woken up dizzy. Ritchie’d stood, confused (as all waking moments are shapeless, hazy and uncertain as their preceding sleep) rocked boatlike, tried walking across the room on marshmallow feet and actually fallen over. At that moment, he swears, his mind shot flashforward to that portentous diagnosis. Could his body have known, detected the encroachment? Which element had done the reporting—the invader itself? A spirit, invoked unknowingly? Had one already whispered a kernel of the truth to him, and so soon? No matter; doctors exist to shout down such whispers, and did, urged caution and lack of imagination and left him mumbling something about mild labyrinthitis, Dramamine to taste, nothing to worry about. Try and get some new work done, Ritchie, mean how long’s it been? But, without family or other easy distractions, he began to dream, began to dwell. Those nights he slept through, he’d awake to an awful mortal recall, having, during those few merciful hours, forgotten everything. Waking life now held all the familiar promise of nightmare--like he was living out some reverse childhood, a symmetric tapering off at life’s end--and made good on this hallucinatory potential. Visitations, wherein he’d walk into a seemingly empty room and without ever looking know, know utterly beyond doubt, that he wasn’t alone. Nights drifting, those immortal moments at the border of wakeful- and sleepfulness, when he’d be startled horribly at that sudden drop felt or scream heard, the moment every kid tries futilely to train him or herself to expect at bedtime. It was only natural, you’ll agree, to impute an ironclad connection between the thoughtforms he’d been learning to conjure--but couldn’t, not fully, not yet--and the growing cancerous mass behind his eyes. Surprise no longer entered into things, just this Uncanny, this expectation. He found himself reveling in it, hoping to get sicker and sicker, knowing he’d soon cross the threshold and receive a genuine magical communion. What thoughts, then, flashed in Ritchie’s head as the first seizure announced itself, and did so, as promised, right alongside that bonafide invocation, impossible simultaneity, the light there in the corner, shifting, turning, an experience he’s recalled ten thousand times since, an aura which propelled him upward into terror as the moment mounted, allowing himself to turn around, finally, to face this occupant, hazarding the long-avoided look behind and seeing, in a moment of searing culmination, its face, ancient and incalculable, staring him right back... then, as he buckled under confirmation, what question did he ask? Was it what this all was, or whether this, finally, was it? He can’t remember. He came back to himself, sprawled on the floor, tongue flopped in a puddle of vomit. In his account (which naturally he’s kept to himself) the seizure was a fulfillment. Likewise for the second such episode, the subsequent waiting room, and the neurologist carrying the MRI scans, shuffling slow down the hallway toward him and staring at the floor, steeling himself against eye contact. Little fulfillments, checkpoints headed up to the border, the big one. Which now lies just ahead, and who-knows-what there waiting on the other end. Okay, so, has Ritchie allowed himself to grieve, to be afraid, or just opted for this communion as substitute? A mirror world question, one with which he needn’t bother. Not so much plainly irrelevant as moot, too debatable to spill over into pertinence, and at any rate, it’s his private rejection of such banalities that constitutes this last half-proud rebellion and he’ll be damned if he’s to acquiesce now. Ritchie is either woefully stoic or just plain stoked. He honestly regards mortality as a goof. His aloofhood can, by now, hold the whole world in its sights with nary a blink, and beyond--so that if, say, the imminent transit of Venus is to be the last one anybody ever sees, it’s no skin off his elbow. No goofy kid’s nihilism, Ritchie’s outlook is hard-won and confirmed at great length. He’s found a kind of contentment, here living in the space between two apocalypses. Wish him well, though he doesn’t have long. We should all be so lucky. * * “Seen Georgia?” people want to know. “Uh, um,” or something, Arthur’ll stammer, and they’ll slide without much trouble into talking about what they’ve evidently wanted to all along, invariably some work of hers that they admire. Making things difficult for Arthur, eager to shift focus onto his own stuff. “Yeah, she and I’re actually thinking about collaborating on something, the two of us,” some patron saint of the segue smiling upon him, “see, I’ve got a new one I’m working on, some of the same characters from Intermission, but in a whole new context.” This girl, some artworld hanger-on, party type and as it just so happens an attractive young filly, may or may not know who Arthur is, what he’s talking about, any of it. Instead smiles pleasantly, says nothing, lets it fade slow while they just stand there. “You know,” Arthur with an eye toward keeping things in motion, “a little more minimalist, not so constrained by—” “No shit?” she says, interrupting, and loud. “Yeah, cause, Ritchie and Edgar, Edgar O’Nubb?,” referring here to the downtown instrumentalist, arranger, composer, producer whom Arthur’d met a handful of times but with whom, as she’d guessed, he couldn’t claim a first-name-based relationship, “couple parties ago they were talking about like new work she was gonna be doing, Georgia, something with that flower painter, like, it just I don’t know didn’t seem like something she was going to be like working with anybody else or, I don’t know it’s just that was my impression. Seemed kind of like, you know, something personal.” She mouths something, shyly but kinda emphatical. “Sorry?” In a barely audible whisper: “Something vaginal.” Arthur swallows. “You, uh, check out the bar yet?” * * The top floor of Ritchie’s South St. warehouse--built in 1830 to house hardware, machinery, dry goods, dry enough they provided ample fuel for the Lower Manhattan fire five years later that marred the redbrick facade, left it black and shabby ever since--retains that spartan downstairs layout, smaller rooms fringing the blueprint and this huge open central hall, dozens, maybe hundreds of sweaty folks here already attesting to the space’s haughty railway terminal grandeur. A welcome breeze snakes between the gaptoothed brick windowsills which arch high, stretching floor to ceiling with sooty stone gargoyles peering out from on top, and cools off the already stinky coteries. In between the windows are blotchy gray cement interstices, new wall put up as the building’s skeletal foundation got grimier and grimier. Ritchie, who moved in in 1980 and liked the place way it was, had had a mind to fight any and all ensuing renovations, but nothing, not even appeals to the Landmarks Conservancy, seemed to draw the slumlord owner’s eyes off the property prize, so he just gave up. Huge canvases, leftovers from the last opening, cover these walls so that folks are afforded a chance to see some paintings instead--though no one really spends much time looking, preferring to sit around, crashed out on these couches circling the ad hoc, cinderblock-built bar, and shoot the shit. Over at that bar, as a matter of fact, aforementioned Mr. O’Nubb and William Thwock Morton, virtuosic pianist, unrepentant hedonist, and incorrigible punnographer, have been drinking and discussing the latter’s latest project, a series of piano sonatas entitled Ticklin’ the Ovaries. “Eventually we go orchestral with it, recording on, you know, on a large scale,” the ‘it’ in that sentence referring to Thwock Morton’s nascent venture, the creation and dissemination of what he’s taken to calling Modern Erotic Composition, “and our interests converge.” O’Nubb, who’s always had unorthodox ideas of his own and is of late a professional studio engineer, is, it’s safe to say, on board. A permateenager, weird-tall and lanky in t-shirt, sneakers, unkempt dark hair worn shaggily though gone partway gray, his pretty much universally agreed-upon reputation is of a good guy who’s managed to stave off uncoolness well into middle age. Possesses enthusiasm, the brand borne of youthful positivity, not that phony stuff, and has been in the game long enough that it all seems rather miraculous at this point. Doesn’t coast on ‘Did seminal work in multiple musical outfits,’ ‘Has appeared to retain some degree of artistic credibility for some thirty-odd years,’ ‘Influenced all the non-notational music being produced today that’s worth listening to,’ anything else the gossipy types around him are right now whispering to those who confess embarrassedly not to be familiar with the man, because, oh yeah, he ain’t rich and famous neither. Sure, you do the research, read your liner notes, you’ll find his name’s relatively ubiquitous; meet the kids, maybe, who never heard a guitar the same way after the tenth or twelfth listen; if you’d like, track down a recording of one of those first New York shows and judge for yourself. O’Nubb’ll still be working for a living, careful not to price his services out of the realm of the interesting music, wherein the good musicians, the real freaks, can afford to enlist them. Which means none of this mansion stuff. But more than enough, anyway, to occupy his attention. O’Nubb runs a label/distribution firm, writes columns for friends’ magazines or introductions for friends’ books, plays in bands, tours, for Pete’s sake, in addition to the studio day job. And is fundamentally hard to angle, since by rights he ought to be bitter, angry at the musical mainstream, the record conglomerates, the plumb-stupid American consumer, but isn’t. He doesn’t partake of that kind of harshness. No political ire to raise, even. He’s peaceful, concerned with fun, and thus constitutes, for most, an unsolvable mystery. Thwock Morton, who’s fat and wears an obscene mustache, is the opposite. Warlike, bellicose, he philosophizes and labors over his musical output, is serious, in fact, as a heart attack on that score. A reflection of his notational upbringing, perhaps. Something of the rote in the way his art functions, those same dilettantes, heartless manipulators, flibbertigibbets’ll tell you. Unlike his compatriot, he harbors actual hate for them, for the terms based in fashion and fascism, all those ossified taxonomies. He, who won’t brook the hierarchical, confronts it. And so he creates this music that descends, pestilential and quite nastily, upon its mores. Now, make no mistake, he can play Liszt, grow his hair out, crack his knuckles, sit down to an étude would make your head spin. Has been known to. The establishment is not to be sloppily conflated with the enemy; leave that to the credibility-obsessed, the desperate-to-please, that younger, desperater generation. Thwock Morton laughed, for instance, when he heard Haydn’s little ‘Surprise Symphony,’ that kind of classical cuteness a prototypical iteration of the type of audities he’s sought to present in his own work (not to mention the wealth of jokes that sprang from the composer’s name—‘Why couldn’t Beethoven find his teacher?’ and the like). Clean fun has its place. And so for the other sort: he’d worshipped Otto Mühl and the Viennese Actionists (in honor of whom he submitted his first symphony under the pseudonym ‘I.P. Freely’), thumbed well that inimitably bawdy French literary tradition, spent his collegiate years developing and virulently defending theses on specific porno films, less-than-noteworthy ones whose admittedly straightforward efforts at titillation he was happy to resituate (“A Cross-Theoretical Analysis of Rhizomatic Tropes in Amazon Ass Splitters”, A-). Had it begun as a goof, the fulfillment of that universal prerequisite that says Throw It in Their Face If You’re Young? He’d parse the question some: it had begun as youth itself, which is unconcerned with Their Face save for when They interfere with the progress that youth strives to engender. Being young, eager, and talented, he’d been offered for perusal the breadth of artistic possibility; this portal slid open, he’d moved to prevent its narrowing. Genre, Vocation, these epithets, for him, had failed to fix, and even as he aged, intrinsicness and categorization meant nothing, a freshness of perspective that he shared with all good artists and all small children. Which has led to this commingling, one such new synthesis and the formal debut on the horizon for its typifying piece. The porno sonatas promise--or maybe it’s just their composer doing so on their behalf--to confuse, arouse, then maybe if they’re lucky outrage. Really anything but adoration, which would catalyze some serious reconsiderations; selbstlob stinkt, as the Germans say about praise. No, horror would be these works’ rightful reception. Same goes for their composer’s stand on parties, more than one of which has ended for him in a decided lack of clothing. But work before play, and see if it all doesn’t start to sort of run together anyways--“Your psychoacoustical expertise, Edgar,” Thwock Morton by now lubricated enough he’ll talk flip about art, “is what’ll really induce a physical reaction,” leaning in queerly close, “if you know. What. I mean.” * * Talk drifts, drinks drunk. Arthur Yagoda insinuates himself into what conversations he can but sits hesitant a few feet from O’Nubb’s turned back, glances over cautious now and again. A figure in a darkened corner holding a saxophone piques something in him, may as well call it interest. But where’s Georgia? His new gal here, who’d claimed personal friendships with every noteworthy guest, is similarly shifty, seems to be working on getting sufficiently blottoed so’s the laughs at Yagoda’s jokes come a little easier before she grabs the errant necktie and leans in close. Something gets whispered that, despite the distorting effect of her dusty cig-voice, makes drunken Arthur--who knew the tie’d be good for something--perk up, and they head, hand in hand, for one of the other rooms. The filly’s pulling him down a hallway, fingers slipping playful against his, leading, grasping the tip of just one or two, doing their dance: first brush, then joining, then the letting go. “Come on,” and he does, around a corner where she, ahead, almost topples over onto an oncoming figure, turns on him with indignation but opts just to chuckle slurry. “Hey, come on,” Arthur making the connection, “that’s J.R.” Yeah it is, he of the pallidness, the weak protein-thin hair dribbling and coming loose on top, J.R. Shrapnel, military heir. Boasted a, call it ‘tenuous’ familiarity with most of the other invitees, though Yagoda’s not really one to talk. “Hey bud,” Arthur feeling it out. “Been a while.” “Yeah,” J.R. forcing some species of smile but neglecting to cover up this sad strain around the eyes, “how--” “--Georgia,” They’d known each other. In high school they’d all known each other, two and one but hardly ever three. Yagoda the latecomer’d never achieved comparable closeness. “She’s not here? I’ve been looking--” J.R. is dressed far worse than he, thankfully, crappily patterned waistcoat and pocket square and nauseous pants that don’t fit. Some middle ground twixt ‘try’ and ‘give up,’ ‘don’t care,’ all that sloppy that Arthur abhors. A whole air of half-heartedness, in fact, is palpable in this figure’s presence. Though young, he’s sunken and beat. The name doesn’t ring a bell for the filly, who admits it openly and introduces herself to J.R. (and to Arthur, procuratically, for he hasn’t caught her name) as Fiona Snuzen, of the Upper West Side Snuzens, and making full use of that simultaneously loud-quiet cadence reserved only for the inebriate, wonders mightn’t their parents know one another? See, but it’s complicated. J.R.’s father is Benjamin Shrapnel, who, notably reclusive on account of the sensitive nature of his government work, still managed a decades-spanning friendship with Ritchie Ra, lasting until their respective recent tumbles into corporeal catastrophe. Between the two men had held the kind of true feeling which, artless and beneficent, confounded outside understanding, and so most of Ritchie’s friends spoke around it, while others, revealing in themselves the coarseness which grows, weedian, out of another’s success, indulged in furtive partygoer whispers. J.R., who’d known Ritchie his whole life, didn’t, not really, was locked out same as everyone else. Add this further wrinkle, awkwardness, perhaps resentment from the others on account of his father’s status, goes some way toward explaining the body language he’s displayed thus far tonight. “You might’ve known his Pop once, maybe, but not lately,” Arthur driving in some weird wedge. Their history a muddled one, seems he’s elected to assert himself nastily five years on, this girl a buoy at his side. “How is he, anyways?” J.R. means to just leave, but Fiona, for whom a switch has flipped, touches his arm, sighs, asks what happened. He looks up, eyes somehow narrowed on both of them simultaneously. “Excuse me,” and a move to creep away. “Well, I’m just,” the brazenness kind of throwing Arthur, “I was just asking, like, I mean no one’s seen you,” turning to Fiona in an effort to usher her toward him, “no one’s seen him in years.” She acquiesces, and he smiles at J.R., back in control, “There’ve been stories about you, like, that you’d get a kick out of.” No matter how long Arthur waits, J.R.’s gaze won’t meet his again. Is it possible that he actually doesn’t care about this stuff? “I mean did you get lost someplace?” J.R. starts in laughing at this, a nasty dry laugh, and spiteful. Arthur’s feelings harden instantly. Arm around Fiona, who doesn’t resist. “Well I guess I’ll just sort of see you, around, maybe,” trying to sound like he’s not even trying to hide the disdain as he sort of pushes her down the hallway, follows, marches. A second later he thinks to call out something else but upon turning back for the sidelong glance there’s no J.R. there to take it. Where’d he go? He’s actually just now sidling up to that aforementioned bar, where, though it’s easy to loose petty Arthur’s hold, he’s not quite as casual about tonight as he may’ve let on. He doesn’t sweat the guests, doesn’t care a whit for the digs of his peers, if Arthur even qualifies. But look, he can’t put too fine a point on this matter of Georgia Klay. He’s come today to see her, a goal borne not of hope or desire or anything like that; though he hadn’t much wanted to, he knew he couldn’t let himself flake, something like that. His will, this internal obstinacy. Even the worst thing that could happen here, tonight, well, it’s preferable to the brown study he might’ve lowered himself into had he not shown. Because he can sail past a lot of it (take Arthur Yagoda, see above), but the things that bother, do, and dreadfully; J.R. has presided, in his time, over some real festering of feeling, spells of dark in which all life is drained. He copes via low expectations--counting as a sure thing that he’ll be back there, in that heady zone, anyday soon--and in the meantime sees the beast crop up in this more manageable form as, say, anxiety over a girl whom he hasn’t seen in some years. Georgia. Now she’s abandoned him, as he abandoned her. This symmetry, see-saw link between them, tilting this way and that over the years, the connection unseverable but played out in feints or by proxy, defined by its own negative space. Which somehow suits J.R., cipher, just fine. * * Meantime Arthur’s in a half-darkened sideroom with Fiona, this early evening party kind of throwing off the tried-and-true go-in-a-room-turn-off-the-lights-let-it-happen thing on account it’s still bright enough, Manhattan turning under the sun, terminator line approaching, skewed off-axis this phase of the ecliptic, to see everything--see Fiona, her every expression, her energy somehow fucking with his hookup-equilibrium. Not supposed to go like this, force him to face a truth from which he’d rather look away. Should he feel weird about it? Is there something to it? This pesky light preventing him from banishing thoughts of J.R. back there, unimpressed, making him feel, oh, spooky doubt all of the sudden, an eldritch landscape mapping in his head, illuminating hidden thoughts wherein their possessor is, I don’t know, some kind of phony? Gah, get that shit out of here-- “I gotta,” separating from the girl, lifting her hands off and tossing them out of the way, making a move for the outside. “You’re joking,” Fiona having expected a certain professionalism, should’ve taken a hint from the sartorial goof. “No, because,” craven Yagoda pawning off everything, “they’re all going up to the roof, is, hear that?...” The sounds of footsteps are corroborating this, it isn’t pure nonsense. People are headed upstairs. The transit of Venus. “Who cares?” as she eyes him, upturned and keen. Christ, what does he do at a moment like this? The light’s still streaming in dusty through drawn blinds; there’ll be no avoiding it. A voice has hold of him, is yelling emphatic “No”s. And yet a promise, so simple, and Arthur a red-blooded American male who, thanks very much, never turns down a chance. Thinking it over for a second. Yeah. A wrinkle, though: Ritchie Ra, one story below, in private conference with one or more of those otherworldly representatives, has in fact been right beneath this very room, and had Arthur more of an eye toward the bigger picture he might have seen the actual cause for his sudden faltering, not any trick of the light but, in an unforeseen bit of collateral damage, a real-deal unholy miasma, a thought given form, a spirit, folks, conjured maybe a little laxly in the discipline department by the relative neophyte downstairs and now lo, reaching up for Arthur through the floor. Arthur, who’s read his Yeats but has no idea the man practiced Golden Dawn magick, Arthur who thinks of himself as learned enough he needn’t allow for the existence of such forces at all, is by going ahead with Fiona nonetheless entering into a tacit arrangement with them, a tenet of which says he’s going to have to make restitution for this offense. Proud youth who go against their instincts often run such a risk. But not J.R. Shrapnel. Standing there at the bar, outwardly alert but actually paying no attention at all, he drinks something and observes, altogether passive, interested--at least theoretically--in being drawn up in some sort of feeling but for the nonce just detached. Guests have begun to file upstairs for the astronomical portion of the evening, which frankly seems like it’ll be a world of trouble, poseurs having drunk to drunkenness, looking for those vague cosmic implications, coming up with some horseshit upon which to expostulate--the situation reels forward thusly in J.R.’s calculation, a safe one, he thinks, conservative. But surely it’s better than not trying at all? Well, yeah, he guesses, looking around, it’s a party’s got some actual thinking folks and maybe he should be a little kinder. But, cynics, check out this stratification: little gatherings cluster constellational around those guests of note, some hotshit actors, publishers and book agents, art critics, this guy in the corner miming along on a saxophone, a couple of, jeez, fashion models, each sporting their own eager-faced detachment. Mustn’t these celebrated personages know that the flunkies just want things from them? Mustn’t the flunkies know that they know? How long can the game go on? Exactly who’s the sucker in all of it? Ugh, zoom back camera! It’s too exhausting. “J.R....” He knows the voice, has known it since childhood, summers out on the Cape, that weighty thing, memory lurking under the thin topsoil of the present, its interactions, years welling up over dams and levees to crash through and swallow, see, for it’s Ritchie Ra himself, warm but looking maybe a little beat up. Just engaging this mutual moment, peaceful and boundless, nothing much to say. They look at one another for a few seconds before walking, side by side, to the stairs and onto the roof. Everyone up here’s walking that fine line J.R. prophesied, arranging themselves much the same as downstairs, this jazz guy over in the corner, this major record label A&R asshole, their respective corteges. The sun, beating thick across the river, tilting over New Jersey, engages the odd onlooker, puts a momentary damper on appearance-keeping-up; Venus’ tiny disk appears on its edge. “That’s it?” when someone points it out. “I can’t hardly see anything.” So, no orations, no jubilations? ‘That’s it?’ Just this unabashed voidfulness that leaves J.R. vindicated but bummed, being he doesn’t see it either. His mythological digression, in which he’s equipped to handle the mysteries of the universe better than any of these flim-flam artists, falls apart. Venus sits there mocking. Ritchie waves J.R. over to where he’s lounging on rusty deck chairs with O’Nubb, who’s migrated up here without Thwock Morton. Formal introductions are made, but J.R. doesn’t know music real well and so doesn’t start in swooning or anything like that. O’Nubb, who’s drinking a soda and grinning, is completely fine with this. “Nice to meet you, man,” and J.R., all of the sudden, is driven to an uncharacteristic openness. “...I’ve been trying to get it,” pointing over solar way. O’Nubb knows instantly what he’s talking about. “No real trick to speak of. Conversation, I once thought, but,” taking a sip, “when you get right down to it, there’s no way it’s going to appreciate what you have to say, is there?” “Sure there is,” Ritchie looking over. Past them--past the alarmingly asymmetric stare, the façade which, like that of his building, has got close to nothing left--expression says he’s been trying to get it, too. “I just mean that’s the least we can do, is praise it, Him.” O’Nubb laughs. “‘The Sun is God,’ something I heard somewhere.” “Yeah?” For J.R., all pretense melts. He wants to know something, he asks. “He’s being cute,” says Ritchie, “Turner, those were his last words, it’s said.” “Cute on account of ‘Ra,’” O’Nubb obliging some background. “Right, but it’s got to be true,” J.R. stumbling over sitting rapt and talking at the same time, “if it was ever worth worshipping... well, then now it must be all the more.” Some of that kid’s pantheism. He barely knows what he’s rattling about, but the words come quickly, feel natural in the saying. Ritchie nods, hazards another look. He wants to become available, put out feelers, open to it. “Pat and Billy,” here referring to the constituents of a seminal Seminole punk outfit called NMF in whose development and promotion Ritchie and Edgar’ve had a hand, “they’ve a song on their new record talks about it.” “In their charming roundabout way.” O’Nubb meaning sloppy, loud, drunken, honest. Earmarks of, you know, rock and roll. Ritchie Ra has spent his life ‘talking about it,’ too, in his wise. When he hit his stride, did his best work, he was creating out in repossessed territories, one of a handful of white men allowed on the land of Red Indian traditionals. “Instead of an abuse of nature,” they’d written in 1974, when Ritchie was twenty-one, Ganienkeh’s resettlers, the people of the Flint pitching tent for a return--centuries-old Haudenosaunee shade over the vast woods all the prefab shelter necessary--“let there be an appreciation of nature.” And some years later he’d come out and tried, shrugged off what he knew, what we all know, deep down, to be false and degenerate, set himself straight, sought sanctuary beneath the Tree. Painted, built, fought. Took shots at the passing helicopters night in, night out. Fell in love, lived loss. And what else: whiled away a universe in blissful submission, began to accept the bad for having spotted, though faint and far-flung, some of the good. Lived a life that seemed defensible, that seemed, in the face of what he’d left behind, survivable. But not exactly sustainable; idyll waning and well of goodwill dripping dry, he left. On his return to New York City the cynical and shitty art establishment opened its arms wide for its reformed rebel; representation, shows, a good amount of money followed. Ritchie, who at that time would draw as soon as breathe, tried to stay excited, keep an unerring eye on the movement of the spirit of survivance that he’d observed, that hint of the sublime that’d once invigorated his plans. Tried to stay enthused, to cast himself steady and unhesitating toward new ideas, above all else to keep on working. He’d returned, he thought, in order to curate exhibitions, to foster collaborative publishing plans, to sit back cozy in a well-defined collective of friends with few ulterior motives and even less politicking, to live out the spill into middle age with the surefooted aplomb garnered from eight years away from deadening urban life, eight years in the woods. Well, he’s managed to squeeze some of these projects out, find new ones, achieve a degree of notoriety whose emergence he’s treated with what grace has been manageable, he hopes. He’s traveled the world, spoken to vast audiences, talked on TV, once in French. Proud experiences on paper, but ones impossible to quantify genuinely--now he’s doing his final tally--save as “time wasted.” For it’s those years in Ganienkeh, naturally, which he pinpoints--or did, at least, until recent spiritual concerns superseded them--as his most thrilling, the time to which he’s since sought return. So that years’ worth of sharpened memories, dispatches from the past, are caught reflective when here, dying, Ritchie Ra looks at the fading face of the summer sun. Catching its light unawares, he might become paralyzed, but letting it in carefully, staying with it, he is filled up. Love, suspended miraculous in time’s invisible crosshairs--through to transfiguration, and glory. “I think,” voice unsteady, “think I’ll head downstairs.” “Really?” O’Nubb pointing. “It just started; mean, we got another half hour of viewing at least.” “I need a break.” Ritchie’s alight, vibrating, wants to be in his rooms alone. “J.R., have a good time. Edgar.” Edgar O’Nubb takes a look at his friend of two and a half decades. “Alright Ritch. See you.” * * So does O’Nubb know Ritchie’s sick, really? How about J.R. Shrapnel, who still figures in Ritchie’s conceptions as a clueless kid? This tendency to withhold, a quality Ritchie long ago consigned to ineradicability, has dictated his disclosure strategy to the last. People find things out their own way, like, if they’re meant to be made privy... but he’s human, after all, and mightn’t his last days be less lonely if only he’d share a little? Mightn’t he be underestimating his friends, their empathic capacities? He admits that he can’t say for sure--and anyway, when lucid, he can reflect on the way in which, having been human, he’s given up on some things. Heavenly minded, he’s no earthly good. No big deal when it’s all tabulated, but this decision, fatally followed through, does mean that personal fulfillment will not come for him in warm friendship’s guise; no lover’s comfort will usher him into the next world. He’s an artist and so he aims always to exalt in life’s transcendent mysteries, but his body is a man’s and it’ll die plain and unadorned. A note here on illness: his brain tumor is of the type designated glioblastoma multiforme, nothing with which to fuck, the proto-cancer, alpha and omega, impossible exponential cell growth, unfazeable. It’ll scrap, in fact, fight radiation and chemotherapy and render it all of it moot if you don’t care about the extra month or two. The best dent you can hope to make, if you want to call it one, is the knocking off of a hundredth or so in surgery and a subsequent regimen of radio- and chemotherapy to march through, salt the earth with innocent tissues chalked up as collateral damage and the whole affair meanwhile taking on absurd, comical shades of misery. Ritchie has undergone no medical treatment, cannot be said to be “battling” his illness, “a real fighter,” any of that. But he’s taken an interest, anyway. His second seizure--in which he felt himself, finally, begin to ascend, intuited a hint of the treasure behind the curtain--quite naturally raised the discourse to eschatological heights, ones cruelly defined by absences and almosts: would the next one take him all the way across, to a full and brutal perception of the glory of the Throne? Or--the splintering proposition he’d been forced, by his seizures, to consider--was he being tricked, descending into simple delusion, nonsense, hokey hippie horseshit? Too far gone, he couldn’t really engage, could only hope never to know for sure. Ritchie, considering these seizures, began to harbor a secret wish for another, a final transfiguring assault, one on whose wings he could lift off, survey his surroundings, gain dizzying altitude, give up the ghost. Some kind of absolving achievement, let him know he was right to play things the way he did--close, so goddamned close to the vest, wasn’t it? A personal transit of Venus, wherein the unknowable object might cross, purposeful and with grace, the cracked orb of his damaged left eye... * * The viewing party proceeding apace, those that’ve stuck around find themselves stumbling, literally in the case of the ever-more-deeply-intoxicated William Thwock Morton, onto ways of understanding, of not pretending. He’s dragged his sizable carriage upstairs in search of a figure spotted earlier out of the corner of a red-rimmed eye, is presently hectoring the other guests for confirmation--hadn’t they seen it too? His quarry’s identifying characteristics come out garbled, confused, results in no one quite knows who or what he’s talking about, despite the urgency indicated by his tone, most deciding instead to inch tentatively away, turn backs and drift outward to roof’s edge, hugging the peripheries of the peelt metal fire escapes. The hectoring rings out unabated, though, flirtations with belligerence giving way to a talking-to from O’Nubb and subsequent comedown, a gentle reframing of the narrative, so that Thwock Morton’s left here sitting ‘cool older dude’ style, leaning forward into a turned-round wooden school chair in the center of a group of lounging kids, expounding in storytelling mode, no longer haranguing, just a spot of warm relation, a fire-escape-side chat. Soon he’s surrounded by yet more acolytes alternately enthralled and bemused. On the subject of the transit, he adapts the countercultural creation myth, likely apocryphal, that’d been recounted often in the autumn of his years by the once-vicious dodecaphonic rebel Pierre Boulez. The story is of a conversation between Brahms and Mahler held along the Danube’s Vienna banks, wherein the former, decrying the state of contemporary composition, lamented for the lost spirits of Mozart and Beethoven and the long-gone golden age. In response to this, the story has der Mahler merely pointing to the river, noting it was impressive, sure, but that its flow ensured new waters for every consequent glance, so that one could never greet the same river twice. “The sun forges those new atoms faster than we can ever hope to get to know all the old ones, being, see, awful fucking big,” Thwock Morton well in the bag by now and fighting to stay on track, “but it changes, is the crux, renews itself. The sun that’ll see Venus off, won’t, will not, be the same sun who welcomed her, or, you know, as Heraclitus had it,” belching, “‘the river is never the same river, nor the man the same man.’” Freshly-hexed Arthur Yagoda, whose tryst’s concluded rather disappointingly, can be seen hiding on the outskirts of Thwock Morton’s detachment, listening intently. Times during the speech he laughs a little, at appropriate points. Nothing to do with his hands, he picks someone else’s drink up off the floor, holds it but doesn’t sip, eyes for detectable germs. Peers to and fro for Georgia, for Fiona Snuzen, for the nightmare vision of the two in conversation with one another. Off his game, ’s what he’d been, and really no one needs to know about it, least of all she. Handily distracting, Thwock Morton keeps on talking, equating the movement of the celestial spheres with the inexorable march of government totalitarianism, offering a jeremiad on the role of the artist in such hopeless times. Invokes the ghosts of Richard Strauss, poor comrade Shostakovich, Sibelius, mere men, mere Europeans, rendered anxious and assbackwards by manners and mores and idiotic pride, made pawns, collaborators, their gorgeous outputs sullied with all manner of political slime and their characters consequently consigned to that sorrowful realm. And comes to rest on this sellout trend’s latest contemptuous torch-carrier, the one whose mention hits home for those guests in the know as he entreats finally for the release of a concentrated solar flare “to strike fiercely, and mercilessly, and penetrate the black heart of Alfonso Heliotrope.” The very name, its saying, darkens the moment. A hush come over the rabble. “His representative is here. That beast of his, Renfro Vale. The monstrous pandrogyne. Here tonight, spying, and I’ve seen it.” This being the identity of the mysterious personage, spotted from afar, “And why shouldn’t he have sent someone? Why is any of you surprised to hear it?” Thwock Morton starts railing and Yagoda, confused, looks over at Edgar O’Nubb, who’s got this faint outcropping of concern, and at, ugh, of all the--of course it’s J.R. there alongside, whose very presence, very gaze, does Arthur offense. Can’t say whether eye contact was made, but resolving not to chance being seen a pussyfooter, Arthur Yagoda inhales sharply and walks over to Thwock Morton to introduce himself. “Hey man, just want to say it’s real special meeting you and—” “Yeah, special, sure,” Thwock Morton, unbeholden to those dumbshit niceties, can just let loose, “Special ed, special olympics...” actually turns away from Yagoda here, looking for something else, never bothers finishing the thought. Arthur for his part laughs, nods, calms his twitchy hands and wipes them on his jacket. Takes a second to steel himself and then goes for it: “You haven’t seen Georgia Klay around, have you?” And he looks up! Is J.R. still watching?--Arthur doesn’t dare check. “No Georgia, man, she never showed,” comes the response, still heavy on the insouciance. “Huh,” foot’s in the door just stay cool, “well, maybe she might’ve told you about me, she and I like, us having done some work together; Arthur Yagoda?” “As in the bathroom?” Thwock Morton, tall, wide, just sort of dimensional, really spreads out in this question’s asking. “I'm sorry?” “Where?” offered as naturally. “Where, what?,” Arthur’s drinksmanship not as advanced as this situation requires. “Where do you mean? Here?” “Where... where do we work together? Wait what,” doing his best under the circumstances, but sinking fast. Thwock Morton’s a different story, has in fact rarely been prouder, ergo straightens up to deliver the following: “Yagoda the bathroom here, here and now?” Okay, so the punnee detects it, but, bowled, he can only play it straight: “Uh. Yeah.” “Yagoda the bathroom,” giggling, mostly harmless. He really can’t help it; Thwock Morton, austere art hero, has this lamentable dick-around habit that he will not, cannot break. Let one of these pregnant vocables go in his presence, he’ll deliver it of all manner of gaiety. Sees playing with words as a bona fide component of his transgressive duty, one from which he won’t allow himself to shrink. Not that the other elements go neglected, though, don’t worry; he’s a workhorse and can juggle various brands of confrontation at once, a trait to which his present behavior attests: having tired of the Yagoda pun parade, Thwock Morton slowly, deliberately, methodically (if slovenlily), undoes his belt, reaches into his pants, actually pulls it out, and, looking square in the eyes a beneficiary chosen at random (a balding publicist with a cummerbund and a neck tat), commences pissing. “Yagoda the bathroom,” he slurps, “where and when you wanna.” But his target’s disappeared back into the crowd, and few are left lounging around to laugh. * * Jeez, but what must Arthur be thinking? Nothing, really; he’s wrecked. Wants little anymore and expects even less. This party, this encroaching nightfall, these wraiths tittering and him powerless, at their mercy, with no ferryman, no guide. Georgia. He considers the depth of his mercy toward her, the wanton fullness of that mercy’s betrayal. He’s often thought, in shaky efforts to assuage ill feeling, of how similar they are, how inarguable, underneath all the pretense, was their case for companionship. Somehow he still trusts in it, some far-flung future he’d be unsurprised to wake into wherein it’s all worked out exactly right. But then these moments, all of that feeling turned, spleen overpowering, venom discomfiting so that Arthur can only watch, from outside, as the night happens to him. All the transit talk’s just reinforced he revolves around her. His orbit steadfast, undecaying, would never enable him to just move on to something new. A sufficient catalyst would have to be something truly calamitous, truly revealing. Did Georgia feel as strongly? Could she ever do? Arthur can’t see a way out of the labyrinth, his every day beginning so heavy with expectation and ending heavier still, its burden left unclaimed. He has thousands of wishes, all variants on the one says they’re together and there’s nobody else with whom to bother. How did it get so serious? Arthur, prankster himself, wasn’t always like this. His private persona once synched neatly with the public; in school society he did pretty goddamn well thanks; sure, held some vague envy for those around Georgia, for her gifts, for J.R. Shrapnel and his stalwart elements of refusal, but yeah, suffered not from want or however that goes. He was the kind of kid, after all, for whom that life’s made: liked to have a good time, could impress easily enough, pull one over on anyone and everyone, teachers as easy marks as were girls. Wasn’t so polished, hadn’t perfected his game but still stood way out ahead of the pack, and knew so. Say what you want, Arthur’s awareness has always been sharp—he embraced the artifice early, had no qualms about fakery, networking, getting ahead. That this recognition informed his writing is indisputable. About that writing, then. Well, the less said about his earliest plays, names like La Danse macabre and Chiaroscuro, the better. An omnivorous reader, he grasped some, ripped off more. Young as he was, it could hardly be called an offense, and questions of integrity went out the window, anyway, in light of his philosophy that said it all justified itself if he could just do well. At some point or another it became his defining characteristic, the pursuit of this Arthurian legend--well, that and the Georgia Klay side of the equation. Her becoming a fixed point in his universe lined up nicely with the expansion of this playwriting thing, on account of the overlap, cause she could write, man, and effortlessly, not like Arthur who’d sit pulling teeth late nights pounding out shitty work he just hated, three bad pages for every good one, who’d dishearten, who’d feel more and more a victim of cosmic castigation, a fingerwag at his pride swooped from above. Not so with Georgia, a fact that just fascinated. Her situation was complicated, by the standard of those immature days. She’d struck Arthur as being somehow outside the desperate vying that so seizes young people, that so colors their relationships. She didn’t spurn it, as surly J.R. did, but seemed for her part to good-naturedly brush it aside, the implication being she’d lived and found fulfillment in the real world, outside of this circus, had never succumbed to it, and was thus impossibly adult. That she would never be his, not ever, but cared not for the inflated status that might otherwise attend such a haughty pose. Georgia intimidated other girls, it was said, though never on purpose, or for any reason besides she could talk to anyone with ease and never seemed to need, or to risk, anything. Arthur, who in those days was always risking, always needed, and couldn’t write for shit, had to fight to play it cool. He placed himself constantly in her proximity, tried to balance being genuine with that unflappability but something would always give the whole game away. Georgia, funnier, would let him know she knew it but put him at ease all the same, joking with him--they would often drink together--calling him names. He’d never felt ashamed to so brazenly bask in the attention. That it didn’t bother Arthur not to have progressed beyond this stage in their relationship spoke perhaps to the superficiality of the whole operation. It was enough, back then, to be attended on, to meet on the goof-around plane and never rise above. He could continue his empty pursuits of other girls, seek status, play the picaro, long as he was getting this on the side. It may even have had some depth to it, her ability to see through his bullshit somehow giving license by, say, cutting him down to periodic size. Indeed, he came to rely on this penance, his mockery at her hands, to get through those flirtations with soullessness that otherwise threatened to consume. Anchored, he stayed somehow decent. Until, separated by the cold northeast winter and the colder Ivy League--in four years she never came to visit him there--he saw the arrangement’s breakdown. To remember Georgia at that distance ceased to mean remembering times shared or conversations held, but meant rather to recall the sensation of being near to her; of holding on to her when, drunker, she’d stumbled; of how small she’d felt. Lush, oppressive corporeality usurped what had been platonic, secular, and in the same instant, what he sought overtook what he could reasonably expect to receive. He was, all of a sudden, the selfsame pathète against whose emergence he’d organized his whole life--what the fuck? He had been merciful, hadn’t he? in getting the callous treatment and not turning away, in doing his time, at her side, waiting, the better part of a decade. But he’s here anyway, floating through the throngs like a ghoul, alone, every detail of his environs testifying to that deep Colossal Bummer. The cruelty of the circumstances flabbergasts. He’d sought a temporary stopgap in the rendezvous with Fiona, whose gritty cigarette whisper had been reverberating hauntingly ever since. He’d fumbled the J.R. putdown. Gotten nothing from Thwock Morton, O’Nubb, Georgia’s peers. What next? Promise an increasingly rare thing up here, this dark-suited figure with the saxophone he’s been seeing all evening seizes attention and Arthur hazards an approach, following the instrument’s glint and wading into yet another retinue, where befalls a final ignominy: “Hey man--” these new friends give a start, look up spooked and droopy-eyed as Arthur sees it’s actually a bong, no reed just a mouthpiece and a bowl sitting inside its bell which, when lit, reflects and colors the shiny plastic beacon, this instrument he’s been following absentmindedly for hours, a smeared patina on the paraphernalium that, to his untrained eye, had made the dopesmoker appear a jazzmaster. “You wanna hit this?” A distant yell goes up in William Thwock Morton’s recognizable timbre somewhere behind, with what sounds like Fiona’s scratchy cackle sounding in response. Pulling at his tie, feeling like an idiot, Arthur accepts as, outstretched lazily, they offer him forgetfulness. * * The dark sees summer’s violence alight, raw on hot southerly winds, a change stretching the capacity for explication in those observers who, just outside of their sphere of comprehension, detect a little something missing. What’s been taken away, now that sun’s set and city lights once again smother and snuff those of the stars? What’s abandoned these souls? Certainty, pretty much--maybe faith, another name for the same thing. The comfort that informs any interaction between bodies human and astral, that says the very fact of the latter’s existence, its overpowering presence at any degree of remoteness, its utter exceptionality, means the former can safely surrender, knowing that nothing that can befall a life, neither death nor war nor the most grievous of lies, will ever constitute a real threat, not while living gods knock about the solar system, circling indefatigable, even servile moons and small bodies persisting beyond all comprehension. This, J.R. thinks, might be a sensible stand on things; that, in effect, earthly doubt’s of no consequence in the face of celestial riches simultaneously inconceivable in their scale and yet irrefutable in their verity. A truth that’s surely self-evident to any who’re made privy to a legitimate astronomical phenomenon, the jaded, the proud, the idiotic, whoever. And since the category’s such a resplendent one, near anything can qualify as an adequate reminder, a stand-in for more sumptuous metaphysical treasures and pleasures waiting for us, we hope, at the end of everything. Anything to keep us humble would do the trick, to just wink back at us in knowing solidarity--and yeah man, it hits J.R. of a sudden, that’s what it is, something is missing: ain’t no moon out. That’s what’s left them hanging, its vacuum filling up with uneasiness, dark emotions scooting down the pressure gradient with no nightlight to deny them, to embarrass. What’s worse, the absence of any hint of the cosmic order means that the night’s won for the ersatz, these mangy man-made trinkets, smog and tall buildings, civilizational junk blotting the rest out, proclaiming its note as if it were worthy of any, and getting away with it, too, on this night with no counterpole to hang there, solicitous and warm and vital. So where’d She go? Waning gibbous a mere two nights since full flower, there’s no excuse for this desertion. Further questions seize; is the polarization of emotion J.R.’s here identified among associates an effect of their being astrally jilted or some kind of cause of it? Which is the symptom, which the ill? By way of illustration: William Thwock Morton, seriously hammered, in and out of crowds of guests, just won’t calm down, and having now, sure enough, gone ahead and disrobed, commences blustering his way around, shouting for this spy in their midst to reveal his or herself, running up to people and trying for that bodily contact. Edgar O’Nubb keeps an eye on his progress, periodically runs interference on his increasingly combative nude friend so innocent souls have a chance to escape. Yeah, it’s mere containment that seems to be of paramount importance to O’Nubb, so it’s a bit of a surprise when he reappears at J.R.’s side wearing an expression that lends the boorishness some credence. “I believe him.” In response J.R. looks up, says something quiet that doesn’t catch, that neither hears, all attention now focused on the rooftop population, which, though thin and still thinning, constitutes all the same a faceless swirling mass on whose fringes Thwock Morton’s prey might be hiding. “Renfro Vale!” guests actually cringing to see things go this far, “Mark me! Take this to your master! Tell Heliotrope!” Thwock Morton summoning, demanding a trial be assembled even as guests begin to flee downstairs, “the coward!” the voice becoming lost in the increasingly panicked retreat’s general hubbub, even O’Nubb hesitantly packing it in as Thwock Morton launches into Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Siegfried stabbed by Hagen, “pointing to the ravens, right? ‘Errätst du auch dieser Raben Geraun?’” his voice being drowned out as he begins sputtering the names of sellouts, hypocrites and opportunists, traitors and informants, “your compatriots--Vidkun Quisling!--La Malinche!--” bodies pushing past--“Ronald Reagan!--Alcibiades!--Lord Haw-Haw!--” palpable anger above the din--“J. Edgar Hoover!--Jacques-Louis David!--Talleyrand, the preacher who didn’t believe in God!--Fouché!--Henry Kissinger!--” a space now cleared for the home stretch--“Elia Kazan!--Boris Yeltsin!--Delilah!--Rudolph Giuliani!--Bob Dylan!--” and in a moment designed just for straggler J.R., backed up as he is against the roof’s very edge, the quintessence of that reliably unreliable party timing when all extant sound drops out and the night condenses into singularity so that he can hear uttered, crystalline and unambiguous, the name of Benjamin Shrapnel. Whereupon his insides turn to steam. * * The fact was, it was all true. The pandrogyne henchperson of recording impresario Alfonso Heliotrope, one Renfro Vale, had been there, just moments ago, and though not too keen on being seen or joining in had nevertheless had some places to see, some people to go. Thwock Morton’s revery is right on the money, and it’s overwhelmed him. He’s haunted by Heliotrope, a mortal all at once in cahoots with the present’s hidden immortalities, a revealer of patterns and a participant in their perpetuation, a snake oil salesman and one all the more dangerous for knowing even a little of his larger role. Not for representing, he embodies; not for rationalizing, he acts. His present incarnation just a mask, understand, he’ll still saddle up for the triumphal procession, a small parade in the larger Roman pageant. “Remember that you too will die,” William Thwock Morton dreams, has long dreamt, of whispering into his ear as was done in those days, but that’s just it, it doesn’t matter. He’ll die, but not really, not in the way that death connotes consequence. Heliotrope’s but a stand-in for a much larger program. Take it off if you want, but behind the mask, see, there’s something even worse. Thwock Morton, prostrate on the roof in a puddle of this or that, looks over and sees at building’s edge, indeed cantilevered perilously out over the busy street below, someone that looks an awful lot like Ritchie Ra, some doppelgänger thereof, younger, less fierce but as angry. As sick, in the way that certain people are always sick, in exquisite private torment, a distended shadow draping over them from too far away for its source to be pinpointed, winds snapping cold breath at their backs, rattles of bone unavoidable as fate and non-transferable as nightmare, the storm of progress blowing down the angel of history. The figure looks over, locks attention, and Thwock Morton lifts a discombobulated forearm to reach out, somehow affect a rescue, but it won’t take, and anyways, he’s much too late; Renfro Vale has come and gone, and this is just J.R.; Ritchie Ra lies dead in his rooms two floors below. * * So. Things go muddley. The people seem content to characterize themselves, or be characterized by the night, as mere masses benignly opiated by their night of frivolity and so politely conceded to shifting and shunting and ending up nowhere at all, only really important for the jostle and confusion they wreak on those persons worth mentioning, in turn, by dint of their having been able to separate themselves in the first place. And jostle and confuse they do, and so make it impossible to establish any continuous account of the rest of the night’s events. Law enforcement arrived, stood around. At some point or another Edgar O’Nubb was back in the fray, wearing an expression said to be uncharacteristically severe. Arthur Yagoda might’ve floated around a while longer, stoned and on the lookout for either of two female companions, one of whom had of course never showed, the other having long melded into the rabble. And the standoff on the roof? Hard to say, really, whether or not it found resolution in dutiful J.R. Shrapnel’s acquisition of some greater knowledge of father Benjamin’s activities. How much he’d yet had, what’d been waiting there for augmentation. Whether familial fiat had plucked him for deposit into some frozen snapshot of an earlier age, doomed to await the long arm of the thaw reaching back, detritus from an explosion that hasn’t yet occurred. Whether his past staggered up into the night, steadied itself against the dogged wind, `nodded a flicker of hello at pale future. Whether the government operation that goes by the heiroglyphed name of ADAM came up at all. These being, after all, the sorts of singular insight that outside observation, however spirited, will never yield. NEXT: Georgia Klay. PREVIOUSLY: The siege of the Little Institute for Advanced Study and Noah’s Park Paviolion. Witchy subversion cuts through staid puritanism, rocketing via rail... http://www.pleasureeditions.com/THE-GORGON-no-5 http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/THE-GORGON-no-5 Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:55:45 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 2434443 DECEMBER 2011 click to enlarge <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p1.jpg" width="670" height="864" width_o="1700" height_o="2193" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p1_o.jpg" data-mid="12265305" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p2.jpg" width="670" height="848" width_o="1700" height_o="2154" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p2_o.jpg" data-mid="12265312" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p3.jpg" width="670" height="901" width_o="1700" height_o="2288" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p3_o.jpg" data-mid="12265323" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p4 1.jpg" width="670" height="873" width_o="1600" height_o="2087" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2434443/gorgon5p4 1_o.jpg" data-mid="12265333" border="0" align="left"/> DECEMBER 2011 click to enlarge http://www.pleasureeditions.com/THE-GORGON-no-4 http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/THE-GORGON-no-4 Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:45:30 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 2117119 OCTOBER 2011 click to enlarge <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117119/g4p1.jpg" width="670" height="845" width_o="846" height_o="1068" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117119/g4p1_o.jpg" data-mid="10551751" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117119/g4inside.jpg" width="670" height="427" width_o="2048" height_o="1307" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117119/g4inside_o.jpg" data-mid="10551758" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117119/g4p4.jpg" width="670" height="844" width_o="1586" height_o="2000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117119/g4p4_o.jpg" data-mid="10551761" border="0" align="left"/> OCTOBER 2011 click to enlarge http://www.pleasureeditions.com/THE-GORGON-no-3 http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/THE-GORGON-no-3 Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:28:12 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 2117074 AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2011 click to enlarge <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117074/g3p1.jpg" width="670" height="1059" width_o="1265" height_o="2000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117074/g3p1_o.jpg" data-mid="10551665" border="0" align="left"/> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117074/g3p2.jpg" width="670" height="1062" width_o="850" height_o="1348" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2117074/g3p2_o.jpg" data-mid="10551670" border="0" align="left"/> AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2011 click to enlarge http://www.pleasureeditions.com/CLASSICAL-HAIR http://www.pleasureeditions.com/following/pleasureeditions.com/CLASSICAL-HAIR Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:33:07 +0000 PLEASURE EDITIONS 2079077 <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2079077/cam.jpg" width="670" height="984" width_o="1275" height_o="1874" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2079077/cam_o.jpg" data-mid="10352853" border="0" align="left"/> If the painting on the wall is titled slightly to the left, it means turn around. If it is tilted slightly to the right, it means go around. A show of hands will go around of who wants which suggestion. If this ever happens, don't participate but leave to the bathroom. If you're not in there, you'll be on the podium with your skin transparent giving a lecture to people. Stare at the one person without glasses raising his hand in the corner of the room. Follow closely his under arm and see if you can spot a bipyramid. Within this part of arm something bad exists. I told the people back home I would never tell, it only should be a "village" secret. They think I am in my room building tools for the rest of the community. the violet ultra lingo bigger than a harp, my dad say sorted soft scream coming red home window i'm coming red home bowl i'm coming red boned bull i'm coming i'm coming i'm coming smell of bowling & hammer bread tiled with boiled ice cupboards full of shaky orange she nice my friend didn't tell me only if i lost track of time which is now slight movement a prince and his lover hand in hand with caps to boot a cloud in the sky look a nother Pastry Disc A mobile operating room is something I am addicted to it's sort of like vegetable trauma inside a karmic Italian deli Even if the color wheel was being projected out of the corner of my eye I would relocate for you unhinge my penis for Second Life with you and me our organs taken out My obsessive love for not walking human is here again A romantic plunge into the greenery will do me right a hot sip of stone that'll fall straight through our stomach will do me right onyx taint loorani i have my showtunes catalouge on hold we're sniffing tap water to see if the stolen light will ever return from the hill beside the cobbler's where we downsized a farm to pay for bedding the sheets are out to dry right now swaying over the chicken wire our little kooster is inside peeing trying to locate the booth in the kitchen don't you remember we built it for our friends from the commune don't you remember when we sat on their couch realizing we were not breathing and certainly floating bubble massage linkage of limp medicine Caesar hair polish & ankle fur shine chymical squash being lit tonight flowing golden hair with glassy fluid my little sister can't open my eyes deth is amazing says the native armenian indian take a bath in slow mica upon the spirits of salt the mercury splits star wall stair well is in a house its where you can't fuck I be in the good bag all i've ever wanted / 7 merchants hidden in your basement live like the long ago fish ten second portal to where spilt brown dust encrusted floating chair you got nothing show your skim your black rim behind the rotating wall I'll sleep 50 is safe but for 2 legs disconnecting their owner finding white powder on ceiling of sharon's office drowned in shelter serum flowing blue magazines algae mid quarter free shot its on every terrain don't sleep in sight you'll idealize time or when you flock to long pipe full o stupid bills can't leave the game says my friend who i found in my closet's half light if you try to extract electric wire from the edge of your sink you might realize it's either not actually there or your head is tilted only thing - chrome plated digital scrolling belt hanging in your little brother's play room blasted stars ashen breakfast ambrosial salts sinking upward in a positive memory go to dinner at the brand new kennel don't buy a dog but get something bigger if you can't email my babysitter tell her 'i can't leave the house strap me in' I can't explain it only show you the blaze the dark luster the golden hotel I am inside of the son he speaks to me thru taps on my door it is in every space that I draw fruit from the equinox bent collateral he tells me hush or the doctor gives me shot I say no it's unaware of my sentiment he says it's all beginning I say it's over & I'm living the bread basket fills up with mary water it sees through blossom your daughter never saw me hiding under the couch she just saw a vision from heaven where two gold men lay naked breathing on two mossy stones whispering dream to which I see myself underwater looking up at childhood where my boy body stood wondering how I'll be cute I was a box with fishing oil stuck inside it I was asking myself did I ever see Neptune? I could view myself three years prior I had a golden earring that was smelling quite odd it shone bright when my leg fell off they released the toxins from my flesh and this gem, O this golden gem came can we see inside your mouth? I need fluid, you and me if I separate Cardwell's toes we find bella gum the king from the bronze age says this stuff is laced with American ash don't let her burnt pigtails fool you after love she leaves a portrait under my pillow the sun leaves grandpa wondering where is the image? of her and I, after bed basically, the blue egg is equivalent to my granite neck brace I fashioned it after this girl I saw sinking from the street she said father has great news the slippery elm is in bloom time for the spiral staircase and the decrepit clock what I'm realizing is that my windows are the double time angled toward the moon when I sleep and when I wake the sun is in my face on the floor a serious fluid too light for eyes an aged stained glass window where I see myself and my blood parking to light two candles for the dreamy pope who lives in his cell a bee is seen smiling and spitting up Hallucinoid cock tail sips for the best boys who show skin for baby I need the beige rope to string along my cow farm when I did a yellow haze ran up the carpet emitting three squares whose surface was the table where I ate food when I got lost under my staircase spread the farm boys put down a white canvas and they wait for the carrots to open their cherry and they come spring time has been still the tobacco harvesters keep the 2 scythes for the evening time when they make love in bed for the kid's sake spring time is moving the gas attendant fills up his incense stock it is quite beautiful the black space dots which litter the psyche tiled granite & green wood it is raining on a door of seaweed where a small animal uses its paws but bug history recalls documents by lamp lighting the spoon which stirs the cauldron of my hair nails and eye why is it in a room that i feel the aura of people passing and coming or before bed see strands and lacy hands time became whorish short furs became linguini the tanned boy became water sage became a waiting room tablecloth become yantra sea became uncle the walnut became light sauce became warm tomatoes became boiled i don't have the wherewithal to see the man with rapper hands on the front of my bus i don't have the ingredients to play a pickup game of basketball in my basement, locked i don't have Lenten fabric to patch up the bottom of the old wedding cake i don't have areas of history uncharted for you, my dear i don't have a jungle co-op where humans play Mahjongg for alms i don't have pockets near my elbow for a communion of jug-wine i don't have silk for you to weave through and through i don't have an origin theory based off sexual coffee i don't have a shovel for you to remove my broken hair from the playpen lemon lavender let me tie-dye your doctor's left foot to look like the inverted monet postcard which you sold to the first turkish man you ever met let me rub vaporized silk on your temples to make you feel like a garage where two golden ducks sit waiting for aquatic smoke let me insert a text i wrote into your lower back to make you feel like a candle whose owner is a furnishing waiting for solid rest let me smoke your teeth to help you breathe me love i come to you at the most casual of hours when the steps that lead to your window are fake blue hair weaves Transferring Calls I'm in the company of men waging scraps of bread my cerebellum creamed with lead seventies' jocks shots such shopping must get done for no fun only in a few weeks can we go hiking around the filthily kennel and settle on the couch osmosis free sleeping with running nectar seeping down the stairs two cups of milk and Indian phlegm we'll have this picnic the one when Rick came haunting my day dream blending leaves & like burning free association pamphlets making small girl rub temples of every man I have druid hands less we forget me I'll be buried in land farther away from the sunglasses warehouse I'll be in a bathing suit my left arm severed holding on to tele wire connected to a glass staircase inside the local prince's house They'll be screening neurologist test previews of the applicants who exposed their brain for coin and life my bags are filled with soap I made by speaking Latin meet me meat for me and you we'll share the structure of things which must be lit by candle would we fall down, cloud by cloud? let us bake a mute pie and take one gelcap each on to the backyard we must first take measurements I am obsessed with this step it congeals our love and your sub rosa inside, now, the halos have been set in place the bathtub is floating beside the window and when we look out we see ourselves ten minutes ago digging for data invert my thighs to dream of pickled salad or have my hands find their way to your mouth where we're in not in time but on a balmy ranch overlooking rivers and lakes and streams all coming from you and me catcher I'm hovering in a steel staircase lined with money a silky baseball enters a priest's pigpen a fake leg begins to stalk my shadow saw it from the fisherman who sold me opium a big bronze cat starts appearing before my third ear she whispers a string of words made from tripoline which has been dipped in glycerol I don't like the taste I don't like the taste I only enjoy the smell it comes to me at midnight when I stuff myself inside my friend's homemade box it's underneath his gaelic shrine his fashion is impeccable his clothes are delightful nothing he wears except a skullcap it's spoiled and reeks of honey pour rose water on my silver spoon don't let the metal touch flesh distill the liquid from a limed sphere the runny lake must be milky I am ready for bodies in a space I am undoing what i look like I am figuring out how to rearrange my face for you my bramble to which I suck the sap and eat every coin that falls from strip floor malls opposite rain slanted coves of summer bush yellow light a further a dog follows to the end of a hall drawn white shades everyone's gone to bed is there grass fed to the bugs under the wood of my floor i am stop i am not here make my kooster boring up a cup of smoke and flowers from the bathroom on to the bedroom where my cat is eating cartoon my work is downstairs it's only me & "the Wood" old time E.R. chest respirators seventies time tabled electron bags black wires connecting to nature deranged cables stock of volts dusted heart pumpers & invite only spectrum goggles taking apart these things and reassembling old dreams for a ghetto son in Tennessee waiting for the "hick" speakers and serving the country with his digital head can I invite you down here? will you want to see the butterflies? they exist in my screensaver that I found in the old alley the same place I found myself and they found me I was crying above a rug handcrafted in a Mason's temple when they found me it was not because I wasn't alive it was only because my leg was open and they saw my inner friend who was peeking out scared & græy she is in me whispering to my nerves and speaking silently to my hamstring summer glock-9 I'll be free of rain flowers bring grids of V's if only you could unlock my neck enter and exit through the peephole shack up untie your eyes place them in both hands stick your arms out & watch me smile back at you i'm all fun and games you're a small human i'm a mossy sailor I introduce you to enlargement and germination telephone me inside my wrist I promise we'll conjure a light drizzle and devour this feast like cubs being rotated in a glass cubicle rot in the virgin sheet my graffiti sphinx has wetness the smudge is dry my chalky glass is SUMMONING the flies i de-spell and repent murky cherry water come to me in not reality sand board = place it check hers - impossible the dots connecting - possible theater stairs to V.I.P. room latex balls droober mask 60's hole / flat screen plasma go inside and view body yourself walking backwards down the stairs above the beach gazebo by rocks sun door open ancient mom yelling lighting diversity candles for all the ozone children who came good and touched the black altar Portugal pass on the golden curse navigate the erected find the spirit extract with the delicate touch of dew on black window mildew, spew all over the archway rose columns ascending the mountain blue glaciers spread wide dust seen growing near each cave berries in sacks stones soaked white pepper grass magi bones tied april 9, 2009 in building mind is moving there exists a diagram hidden under the carpet of a cat a flame a square a reflection of these upon grassy snow find it and two birds will greet you with most divine smiles I'm the feverus except I don't wear a nightgown when I wade in the river ammunition nitrates ribbed I commune with Jessica over the titrated pond my wet muzzle slips off She played softball in the Necroid River where I made my nestings me, -12, sitting on the bleachers slip into my New Jersey a part of her was once in me and got left there I've had surgery beyond what I know or like is she an eye for an eye? bill? yes yes and yes my weepery board, O my weeper board! what comes to me go fetch me my lump seed over there, roy our twelve clocks are broken i see a ladder with a wig at the top it's blonde we inhale Scents from Sea beside the melting backyard a duck planetarium, free don't drape the chainmail over my chest classical hair tie my eyes to your scalp let pink butterflies swim in the pot of melted sex while i run next door to fetch eggs Self cutting diabetic posters feed me a china set all of it teeming with flies And I see the sun it's being baked in a chrysanthemum pie for all the locals who can't hear if they could touch my skin they'd remember my cellar and the broken data discs I made them watch over and over scenes filled with lace fire and sugar don't you remember me I don't find my memories I place them inside a hashed egg on my headless hair when I'm sleeping standing up on my walls waiting for you my love costs a lot the air outside my window is liquid it is rising from the lake down the road in it is a secret i gave to you last christmas in the graveyard don't you remember when we kissed on All Soul's Night the secret priest I tightens his neck and she see me doing okay things a dull eye in the depths step by step go into my attic here's a hint it isn't "there" anymore <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2079077/camback.jpg" width="670" height="984" width_o="1275" height_o="1874" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/149795/2079077/camback_o.jpg" data-mid="10352882" border="0" align="left"/> If the painting on the wall is titled slightly to the left, it means turn around. If it is tilted slightly to the right, it means go around. A show of hands will...