Monday, August 25, 2008

The Kling lobby

If you can imagine a tone, vibrating at a particular rate. This tone spread from the lips of one boy, a solar systemic dust-bunny, settling into the air, freely absorbing every particle caught in the summer sunlight.

The city is vast, and threatens to overwhelm this tone, although it also vibrates in response to it. We won’t call these vibrations harmonies, for that would be too easy a description. No, we will call them sympathetic, although they are, by their nature, ambivalent. Being vibrations, they have, for the longest time, stood outside of the political process.

The city balanced on the edge of vast abyss that stretched over a black lake. So that the buildings of the city, many of which were cloud-shrouded, would not topple into the lake, every building was tethered to the ground with strong cables made of steel. We entered the Kling lobby as it was being destroyed by the tone. Having known of its onset for quite some time (years, in fact), we were surprised only by its forceful insistence. Frankly, we blew it off for a while. And then we were worried; could feel our cells shift, a micron, a pixel, an electron displacement.

The Kling lobby is a series of planes and fabrics. The fabrics include velvets, and others, more space-age and cleanly. The fabrics shuffle against our skin, sloughing off dead cells. The cells collect, shed moisture, consider, then reconsider themselves as mite-food, and squirm at the very thought of it. In short: utter consumption. Instantaneous.

The glass in the Kling lobby is vibrating so as to be invisible.
The structural supports crumbling.
Survival!
Limited from dust clouds.
Overheard against the open mouths: “Cover your eyes!”

Now here’s a funny story; you’ll laugh at this: The body swung itself over the stairwell, swollen to twice its original size. Fat cells reproduced until skin split. Arms growing out of the end places - punctuation. No preciousness here, just survival. The waxed floors shone, and our shoe leather couldn’t get a grip. Abrupt floor covered in something, and then, the usual: bright light, white-flash-what-have-you.

A cashless, armless people move through the streets. The snow falls, like always, on the armed and the armless. The people join in harmonies.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

"A fat photograph..." by John Wilkinson.

A fat photograph

about to be cropped


where what is incidental

bloats an incident


with light or dead space

The elements

will say Ah

drawn close


the moles & needles

drill unpractised flesh


She dies less

for points of their


invention, solid caps

over points of entry


than a quick–to–the–jaw

reasonableness


without waste or

overlapping


idly ripping

incidental blossom
off

-from Proud Flesh.

At a loss

Now,
if only he placed his thumb
salted or
part-knurled
on newsprint next to my ear
I could ink it.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Fight

MK Ultra and MK Olsen circle each other warily, sweat beading on the dry parts of their skin, but not on the elbows, which remain dry, and are not formerly dry.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Further excursions

My loves,

This excursion into what they are calling quiet space has been unlike others.  The air was duller, maybe the grafts have flattened, the mountains are no longer the kind of music I had grown used to hearing. There are too many folds, and some are blaming the hypoxia in the oceans on demons; I can't help but think of the stupidity of our own recent demonology. I suppose these sort of stratifications are inevitable. I am unable to write much more at this time; both of you should take care not to mention any of this to R_______.  He has his ears to the speaker, but is unable to graft from there to there.

Yours,

H.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Habilitation

My Dear Fortune,

I have thought of writing to you for some time now.  The evenings on the island have been humid and unpleasant; the curvature of the earth here is such that I have felt like nothing more than a tuning fork for suffering. The only news I have received from the mirrore realm was a very desperate letter from your dear father, and there were no details, only that you were up to your neck in politics, or at least its consequences.  

I hoped to avoid the conventional lines, but it seems that those suspect words are all that I have with which to write. Not to evince melodrama, in these crystalline times, but I am very upset by your, and Ljuba's, behavior, that you haven't found time to write a line since our meeting in Vienna. I know, my attitude towards life is increasingly petit-bourgeois, but with that dreadful scare still in my bones, I wonder if it wouldn't have happened had you written. I shall return to the sanatorium this eve, and am hoping against hope that you will be able to join me again. There is a village nearby where the fever has not yet touched; it is no floating-world, but will do for the moment.

Under some duress from the assembled martyrs, I have begun writing again, starting with a portrait of Max Weber (you know his achievements in some forms of quiet space travel). I think often of our past together, your image a song, the grain of your voice with me late in the night. My exile to these hotels and swamps has led me to further consider the difference between the concepts Gelten and Sollen (there may in fact be some useful gesture there). Although, as you know, perhaps better than I, we are each no Leo Naphta, caught deep inside magic mountain.

Although I don't wish to keep you from your studies, please let me know if you have thoughts on the colloquium. P____ has expressed his distaste for my politics, but then again, he was the first to decry quiet space, and that has gotten our cause nowhere. Don't forget about the machines, or the sites of prophecy! Without maintenance they, also, will be lost. Be secure in your feelings towards E_____. Her love affair with that musician is imminent. The three of us are living together, although with physical proximity comes inner separation; the only real solution seems to be a friendly parting after the war. I am suddenly aware of every fold in my skeleton; my own capacity for balance seems to be growing.

I affectionately embrace you.

Until then,

H.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Haiku 18






























- From 'Mostly Sitting Haiku," Allen Ginsberg.

Friday, August 1, 2008

0 to 9


-Sunrise, a song of two humans. F.W. Murnau. 1927.


Midsummer mix
here.

/moonpatrol/tetine/ellen allien/gui boratto/zoo brazil
/butch & amir/traffickers/rhythm & sound/the field
/djosos krost/the presets/m83/apparat