Industrial Park Office

      Last night, you became aware of a fact which few still alive can claim to know: that, somewhere on the Milwaukee District West (MD-W) Metra line between the townships of Roselle and Bartlett, there is an old industrial park. Its proper name is "Cunningham Trace," and it was developed in the late 1970s to house the offices of various Chicago-area manufacturers. The complex contains about twenty buildings in total; each building is more or less identical to the others, as they were all designed with the same obsessive motifs: windowless exteriors; smooth, round recesses set into the façade above each front door which house a rain-streaked orb of dull copper, held out by a rod mounted perpendicularly onto the inner curve of the recess, so that they seem to hover in space; repeating octagons, spiraling out in a deranged Mandelbrot pattern which breaks the footprints of the buildings into diffractory urchins of faceted walls. 

     The architect - one Walter Nicht who became a local celebrity in the city for his signature style, which he called 'Masonic Brutalism' - had spent several years fleshing out this allegedly utilitarian property before simply vanishing one evening and leaving the rest of his team without any further guidance or instructions. None of his fellow engineers possessed the controlled schizophrenia required to see the project through to completion. Before any of the tenants could fully occupy and establish their offices, the venture was scrapped, the site was swiftly abandoned in less than 48 hours, and a looming, dense grass from the prairie upon which the site had been set rapidly reemerged to fence off these buildings from the nearby service road leading away to the interstate.

     You awoke with instructions to travel there. At 5:45 a.m., you sat up in bed, got to your feet, and dressed for a clammy day. As the sun was just removing the caul of night from the sky, exposing the silhouettes of billboard stanchions by the Kennedy Expressway in Old Irving Park, you bought a train ticket from the automated fare vendor and sat blankly upon one of the benches on the platform. The train ride was brief. At that dawning hour, almost no one was in your train car, save for a ragged, toothless black man who sat on the upper deck and gesticulated at something beyond the murky lozenge-shaped windows. Each time he would allude to what was outside, he would perform a mute, convulsive laugh, followed by a scream responding to the dismay of a sudden realization. You ignored him, he ignored you.

     At the entrance to the industrial park, you threaded a path through the prairie grass, which rose above your shoulders. The building you sought was at the far back end of the lot, where the pavement abruptly broke off (the construction had been discontinued before the asphalt could be poured there). 

     The front doors of the office were treated with a tinted film - you could not see anything beyond them. An etched brass plate by the intercom bore the words: "Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America." You kicked through the glass, striping your leg with deep, parallel gashes, and walked in. The lobby was carpeted with a thick mauve fabric meant to simulate the texture of moss; this utterly consumed the sound of your footsteps. 

     You knew where to go. Following a railing of lacquered oak, screwed into the brick outer wall of main work floor, you wound around a pen of cubicles and entered a blinded office by one of the chamber's back corners. 

     In the office, a bare desk stood under a low-hanging lamp, which cast a cone of blistering light onto its dust-blanketed surface. There, you found a square of heavy card stock printed with embossed characters. This is what it said:

"Supreme meat to: Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati. An experimental loaf - pulp of the sublime - mother cuts in to excise servings, never finds her way out. The mass is homogeneous - the core is a processed pith and repository for the myth of 'homemade dinner.' For the specialists: three tins, respectively. All must agree to transcribe the full cubic content into manuscript form; as we know from previous trials, disaster is a distinct possibility as this is attempted; previous analysts, after interpreting the slab of a cross-section, have gone into 'event-mode' with their families (which is to say, they have gotten very 'active' with their wives, sons, daughters, and the peripheral neighborhood friends of the latter - so completely active that everyone involved was processed into a black jelly found smeared on the walls; these scenes of dissolution always invariably occurred in the foyer, usually near the key bowl, the shoe rack, or the umbrella urn). This borne in mind, bachelor staff will receive preference as operators moving forward. In urgent prayers, I ask that The Great Transparent One make provision for all of you as we prepare for what is to come. May no one follow us to the place where we are going."

     You folded the card and tucked it into the pocket of your shirt. Once you had returned home and gotten back to bed, you would use this document as a legend - you would follow the trace of its author and his unnamed associates. 

Tares

     You push your way out of the bus's back door and lower yourself down onto a windswept sidewalk. For you, the day has effectively concluded, even though the hands of your watch can scarcely conspire to agree on 1 p.m. You are barely even human, mentally, due to a deficit of sleep and a general feeling of hollowness, but you decide to dismiss the realization - to do otherwise would be to evaporate where you stand. So depleted is your consciousness that you cannot even recall where you have come from. You are also unsure of your intended point of arrival. And so you have been rendered homeless by a momentary daylight idiocy. 

     The sidewalk extends before you, running parallel to the street, which is unusually congested with commuters for this time of day. The traffic is so hindered by a gamut of road construction barriers, steamrollers, and excavators that you are progressing more quickly with your ambling gait than the vehicles. As you pass them, you allow yourself to inspect the people behind the steering wheels, along with any passengers accompanying them. Some people seem just as hollow as you, their eyes interrupted by the slanting lens of the windshield, unable to penetrate it with their tepid will to see. Others are enthralled by their phone screens, gaping with an inchoate rage at something so confusing and pacifying that they have evidently forgotten that they are. Then there are lone drivers with sour smirks on their faces, bouncing slightly in their seats and oscillating their gaze around at the interior surfaces of their vessel, discovering their own immediate lives in a sudden hermetic container, separated from anything that might identify them with 'the human race.' 

     As you survey this halt train of vital expenditure - this involuntary potlach of gasoline combustion - a thought occurs to you. You are impressed that it's yours.

     They're like a field of wheat.

     You are struck by such an intuitive double-image, unaccustomed to seeing things as something more than they are. It reminds you of those scenes in cartoons when, under the duress of famine, an animate, living character transforms into an oven-roasted ham. This latter thought reminds you that you hunger, and that a plain glazed donut from the gas station around the corner would make a fine afternoon snack.

     When you arrive at the pumping plaza, you find the environment to be uncharacteristically still. Almost all of the pumps are occupied by sedans and SUVs, but none of the owners are present. The only sound you hear is produced by a string of faded plastic pendants flapping in a current of hot air blowing from an exhaust fan in the roof of the gas station's main building. You head toward the bluish double doors of the 'Quik Mart,' stepping over a series of hatches leading to massive fuel tanks embedded below the pavement. Several of them are open, which is also an unexpected detail. 

     Inside, the store seems to have been abandoned. No one is behind the register. The only thing keeping this place from imploding upon its own obscurity and departing from existence is the buzz of the condensers beneath the refrigerated beverage shelves which line the far wall. You accept this scene, making little note of it and, lacking the energy to feel any misgivings, turn to leave. 

     Sometimes, there's just nothing there, you think. The thought gives you a vague admiration for yourself.

     But, just as you reach for the door handle, someone speaks at your back. 

     "Tares..."

     This voice fills the room. There is something reverberant about it, like a brass tube that has been struck with a mallet. It has gotten your attention enough to make you turn around. Standing in the gloomy door frame of the men's bathroom is a gleaming person, clothed in a spotless white robe. He holds a pair of golden, oar-like blades which you have never seen in your life; they are each roughly ten feet long, soiled with coagulated blood, and wrapped with nerves, ligaments, and clinging bands of pulverized human fat. 

     "...Huh?" you ask him, smiling for no identifiable reason.

     "Tares. An enemy planted them in the night. When the first buds sprang up in the midst of the precious wheat, it was too late to eliminate them. Their roots had mingled inextricably with those of the infant crop. We have waited a season, and have suffered the foul to thicken and mature amid the pure."

     "I've never heard of tares..." 

     "Few have. Fewer and fewer, these days. The sower planted them a long time ago. He's long gone, but his tares have abounded. Now the field is choked with them."

     "The field..." you murmur, smile brightening and eyes dilating, drifting in separate directions.

     "You're one of them," he says, showing his hundred teeth. 

     

MOTIWHOND

      Do you know what a 'MOTIWHOND' is?

     You step out onto the splintered, wooden planks of your rear staircase. It is before sunrise. Unforgiving blasts of wet wind rock you back a bit on your heels.

     You've never tried to wake up this early. If you had attempted to do so of your own volition, you would have merely sat up miserably on your mattress for hardly a minute before collapsing back into a bank of crushed pillows. But, last night, you couldn't stay submerged below the water line of sleep. You continuously opened your eyes, doing so about every half hour.

     It got to the point where your dreams were no longer content to wait for you to settle into them. You fell into some kind of mental crevice between consciousness and unconsciousness. And you have been stuck there ever since.

     From the top landing of your back stairs, you look up into the sky. Instead of an atmosphere, some celestial bodies, or maybe a cloud, you see the following sequence, in which you realize you are profoundly implicated:

     There is a tall, corrugated steel awning built over a service area for diesel trucks. Near one of the awning's stanchions is a trough-like pan filled with oily water. An orange cat bursts through the liquid surface and stands trembling, its legs sending circular ripples to the rims of the pan. A cartoonish, orb-shaped fish with bulging, incongruous eyes plugs the cat's mouth after swelling to a size large enough to dislocate the feline's jaws. Soon, the deformed fish grows so rotund that it is jettisoned out into the iridescent puddle below. 

     The cat squirms, remaining in place; its eyes convey a human suffering. Then it vomits up five more gigantic golden fish. After this purge, the cat steps backward out of the trough and onto an oil-bespattered patch of asphalt. It trembles, standing. 

     The cat then rots away in a matter of seconds. The last trace of its corpse is the frontal plate of its skull, lying flat and face-up on the ground. From your vantage point beneath it, it seems to be inverted and looking down at you. That, too, disintegrates, leaving nothing behind.

     "Some cheshire," you say aloud, your voice blotted out by the moaning wind.

     You know, in that moment, that you'll never be fully awake or fully asleep again. It's just going to be like this for the foreseeable future, and may even continue after your body dies.

     "This is what eternity is," you think out loud, "one variant of eternity, at least."

     Now you know what a 'MOTIWHOND' is: a MOment in TIme that is WHOlly the eND...

T.Y.M.H.O.G.

      The situation goes as follows. You are in a classroom every night after you fall asleep. It is not a dream. There are other people there, sitting at personal desks. There is a chalkboard at the front of the room. The instructor writes an acronym on the board:

T.Y.M.H.O.G.

     "It means 'Taking Your Minutes Hostage, Offered Up to God.' I am not here to reassure you or give you any kind of toolbox to navigate the suffering to come. I am merely here to let you know that you are being detained, and that our agency has an obligation to let you know why."

     You never feel anything in particular when the person up there, who is blurred and hard to see, explains his 'reasons' (which are never entirely coherent, and are usually more than a little unsettling when you think back on them in the morning). 

     You have been given to know a few things, though, about what is really happening when you come here. The people sitting at the other desks are real - they are not incarnations of some latent neurosis you've been nursing over the past decade. They have been sequestered, just like you. It almost seems impossible to look over at one of them, or to gain their acknowledgment. That would somehow be a transgression. But, in some theoretical way, you are connected with all of these people in real time. 

     Behind you, set into the room's back wall, is a fireplace. When the instructor is done giving his lecture, motivated by a dangerous kind of disorganized thinking, he makes you and the others get into a single-file line and wait your turn to approach the hearth, which has been blackened by licking flames at some indescribably remote period, but which is always bare and inactive every time you see it. Whenever it is someone's turn, the person will kneel in front of the acrid niche and 'pray.' Which is to say, the person will prostrate himself before the opening, digging his head into a ledge of pitted bricks, and something cold and bright will spool out of the nape of his neck and go twisting up into the bowels of the chimney. 

     Spending every night here instead of sleeping is truly a hell, but if this were the whole of the matter, you might be able to live with it. 

     The problem is, the thing that comes out of you when you kneel is not some decanted quantity of an ineffable essence drawn from your deepest spiritual well, of which the preponderance remains. It is one of your 'bodies,' which has been copied and transferred - kind of like a compressed .zip file getting uploaded to a special server. As the acronym would have you believe, your 'body' (being distinct every minute of its existence) is going up to 'God.' But it was almost immediately obvious, once you had arrived, that this was far from the truth. The being who receives this replica of you - this simulacrum - is a cannibal idiot; he just thinks he is God, and no intelligent being can tell him otherwise. He isn't even aware of himself. He just makes things. He made you, he likes to believe, and he made everything you can grasp with your senses. But he is a counterfeit: an alien retard pseudo-God. 

     When you come to a place like this, you sometimes suddenly know things without anyone ever telling you. As a certain man once said, you cannot ever 'gain' knowledge - knowing is but a remembrance of something you'd forgotten at the sluice gates of prior deaths; as a later man once said in his mewling, post-homicidal voice, "You can't tell a person anything he doesn't already know." Both men were here at some point.

     The real agony of this arrangement is that you are being divided into an untold quantity of simulations of yourself. And it's no escape to wake up because, in addition to being your initial self, you are also the self of each body that has been sourced from you. So you have to live those lives and know many worlds simultaneously. 

     Each body is a copy, but its destination and its fate endow it with a distinct quality encapsulated in a name. One body you recently produced met with a terrible conclusion that you often try unsuccessfully to forget. That particular one had been known to you as your 'Pinch Body.' Your Pinch Body didn't know where to go or what to do, and was often assailed by stimuli. Your Pinch Body ended up in some hovel of a tenement that had been all but abandoned. But one of the few remaining inhabitants found you and finished you off. Your central version of yourself burst into tears at your register during the moment of expiration (you work at a grocery store, primarily) and, to prevent the spectacle from getting out of hand, your boss sent you home early that day. 

     Then there was the matter of your 'Doubt Body.'

     Your Doubt Body was fleeing potential arrest at the hands of the police. Wrapped up in a ratty old robe, you cast about the wafting, inclining hills of a suburban town. Sleet was driving into the face of your Doubt Body, which made you tighten your grasp on your robe collar. You were passing by a secure gate, manned by military personnel, from which cars were allowed to exit one at a time. As you came near the gate entrance, a woman, driving what appeared to be an octagonal kiosk, sped out and turned directly toward you with no apparent intent to stop. You scowled and waved your hands to indicate your outrage before moving past her and continuing down the sidewalk. Shortly thereafter, a woman who looked almost identical to the kiosk driver, save for the fact that she was several decades older, caught up to you and began to question your Doubt Body about its faith: 

     "Are you a true believer?"

     "I wish I were. But, unfortunately, I don't think I am," your Doubt Body responded. 

     She cheerfully brushed off your response and continued to follow you, asking similar questions. Your Doubt Body desperately wished to get rid of this hanger-on. She had a falsely saccharine air, consistently smiling - sweet and elderly. But there was obviously something odious about her. At one point, as you were turning away from her in order to continue on your way down the sidewalk, you stepped wrongly and lost your balance. There was a trashcan bolted to the ground nearby. You fell deliberately in its direction, gripping its white plastic lid to stave off a true spill. The lid was indented on top, and a slurry had accumulated there from the driving sleet. When your hand came away, it left behind a residue of silty black dirt, which, drawn upon the surface tension of the melting liquid, immediately took on the form of a rudimentary face. The face was frowning like a fetish from Papua New Guinea. You saw in that face a terrifying omen of the woman's true nature. Then the two of you passed a newspaper dispenser, upon which sat a leather wallet that was full to bursting. The woman smirked at you for having passed it by without even so much as glancing at it. 

     Suddenly, you felt that you should stop and turn around, and you did so. The woman's eyes were no longer eyes: they were the lower halves of baby penguins' bodies, protruding feet first from her sockets - their cloacae served as her pupils. She told you that you were a 'neat' guy and asked whether you write down the things that happen to you in notebooks when you get home everyday. You became so increasingly alarmed at her presence that you could no longer look away from her. But, feeling an absolute necessity to be at a greater remove from her, you began walking backwards. She smirked again, and then the features of her falsely trustworthy face split open into cruel laughter. Your Doubt Body levitated a few feet into the air. You announced to her:

     "You are a dirty, evil spirit!"

     And then your Doubt Body dive-bombed her, and the feed was abruptly cut. Sometimes you find yourself doubting that your Doubt Body had ever been real. 

      There were other bodies than these - a body for every night you've passed in a state of so-called 'sleep' over these last ten years. There was your Rat Body, your Tear Body, your Crank Body, your Math Body, your Trepan Body, your Guelph Body, your Marrow Body, your Plinth Body, your Aphid Body, your Tournament Body, your Grail Body, your Transom Body, your Couse Body, your Heretic Body, your Porch Body, your Shriek Body, your Task Body, your Prince Body, your Vague Body, your Blade Body, your Sphere Body, your Punt Body, your Goad Body, your Mare Body, your Tare Body, your Grip Body, your Stun Body, your Curse Body, your Taste Body, your Bliss Body, your Chrome Body, your Blood Body, your Pump Body, your Wrath Body, your I Body, your Bisque Body, your Trap Body, your Molt Body, your Craze Body, your Grove Body, your Trial Body, your Shunt Body, and several others. 

     The whole world would not be enough to house the books required to document the lives of your bodies.

LIGLAM

      Æons have passed since you've been a person. All this time, you've been wondering to yourself whether this alteration was meant as a gift or a punishment. You figure that, either way, things probably even out. You neither enjoy nor dislike being here. You wouldn't have asked to come here, but you don't necessarily feel a strong urge to leave, either. You don't know what you are anymore. Things that know what they are are people, exclusively. People are in a world beneath yours. There are worlds above yours, as well, you have decided. Those spheres are reserved for nothings that know what they aren't. You: you're in the Dead Center - neither thing nor nothing, neither knowing what you are nor knowing what you aren't (between the extreme poles of knowledge, there is a vacuum of ignorance).

     You don't know what 'this' is, but you can say: "this is..."

     "This is satiation."

     "This is equilibrium."

     "This is all my fault."

     You've been here a long time, though. And you are identical with your location. You are the shape of the capsule which contains you. But you are not really inside of it, because you probably aren't allowed to be inside of yourself.

     ...Are you inside of yourself?

     Probably not. Money doesn't exist here but, if it did, you would bet money that you are not inside of yourself. You are not outside of yourself, either; and you aren't on yourself. You're just... You are yourself.

     But, despite how long you've been here, something has finally begun to change. In a world of pure, timeless shapes, the shapes have gone brown and soft for you: bad fruit. Suddenly, you're in a world of bad fruit where everything is leaking and draining and imploding.

     This is especially frightening for you. As an ignorant... grehh... For the sake of argument, let's just call you a 'grehh' for now... As an ignorant grehh who lacks desires of any kind, you're effectively retarded. The word 'retarded' doesn't even exist, but you sure are it. And, because you are a retarded grehh, everything that has suddenly begun to happen around you is incomprehensible and threatening. At the slightest disturbance, entire colonies of fruit flies collectively erupt into a storm cloud above the shrunken skins of these blistered shapes. You are aggrieved by this event every time you are forced to witness it.

     You thought you were done with the world you came from - the world of persons. You thought you had finally discovered eternity. But something new is happening now, and you might lash out with an unmotivated jerk of your novel, reddened limb and snap something off of a thing nearby you if someone doesn't give you some information.

     What if I were to tell you that I've got a book? Books aren't terribly real or trustworthy things, no, but when you get ahold of one, open it up, and start to scan the lines, you realize that you hold a significant amount of control over whatever it is that you are reading - whatever it is that you have decided to understand. In fact, let's just be honest here. There is a conspiracy of books. They're really vampiric, if you think about it. Why do we turn to these inert tomes of paper as if to a cheering bonfire in the midst of a dark blustering field when we feel existentially bored? The truth is, books only show you what you are already thinking the moment you crack them open.

     But you are a grehh, and an illiterate one. I will tell you what is in this book.

     This is a book about all of the things at which you look in a given moment, about the things you see and the things you refuse to see. Here, in these pages, one may find unending enumerative lists, catalogues of latent items in the environment: a textured steel plate screwed down into the floor between two prefabricated blocks of cement in a suspended footbridge, a folded piece of tripe waiting in the gloom of an unmanned deli cabinet, a discarded tennis shoe under a seat in the elevated back end of the bus (there's something dense, residual, and wet inside of the shoe), an industrial park office...

     No, don't get flippant with me. It's that kind of irreverence that made you an oligophrenic grehh in the first place, landing you in this shape world. One must only speak of this book in solemn, cold tones. You must plunge your eyes into the protoplasm of surfaces, sight-unseen, before you can dart the spotlights of your vision over its printed vellum. You've got to wash your uneira, too, just in case.

     Look, I can get you out of here if you really want me to. Maybe you're tired of being a grehh and want to get back to knowing things. The way out is another word that won't exist until I speak it. It's a mysterious word... the name of the book.

     If you want me to tell you the name of this book, you will tell me what you want me to do, which means your desires will have returned to you. This is an impossibility, but I'm willing to make it happen. You will no longer be here, though, once I say the name. Then there will be further books in further worlds, and what comes next will be no more obviously a gift or a punishment than the state in which you currently find yourself...

     Okay... 

     If that is what you want...

     The name of this book is LIGLAM.

The Cassette (pt. III)

     You near another intersection, which appears to be a precipice. On the side from which you've come, apartment blocks sprawl out into the harshly lit distances, devoid of movement or signs of habitation. On the other side, there is nothing but windowless brick facades - auto garages, collision centers, HVAC offices... The sidewalks there are strewn with powdered glass from smashed car windows, long since either towed or driven away (for no cars are parked there now). 

 

     You realize that you must cross the street if you wish to unlock the coded phrases being murmured in the palm of your hand. The street is thankfully absent of traffic; even so, you bound quickly across it, somehow certain that a rampaging fender could materialize at any moment to flatten you. The sound of glass grinding under the sole of your shoe goes some way in reducing your anxiety. What's more, the streetlamps here appear to be of the antiquated, sodium variety. They cast a deceptive, tinctured light that makes you believe in the continued existence of lone maniacs. You may be one of them, even. 

     Beneath you, there are occasional slabbed segments in the concrete, filled throughout with cryptic signs. They have been laid down in high-visibility yellow spray paint. When you encounter them, you notice that they leave no space unused within their quadrilateral boundary. Undoubtedly, they were written in a state of horror: horror vacui. They want you to believe them to have been authored by municipal workers in reflective vests of equally high visibility. You are meant to accept that the Men of Midday have left a record of their maintenance tasks - their chiselings, pourings, strippings, steamings, installations, and so on. But you feel a suffocating knot in your throat, as you did in childhood when drunken, jobless men would invite you into their apartments for a glass of cola and a microwaved danish. You know a ploy when you see one. So you note the markings well, pausing the tape, even, so that you can kneel down and record their arabesque entanglements in a notebook that never leaves your person. Some of the lines which you take down are rigid, while others hang like deflated liana vines in the Amazon, and still yet others turn toward you to reveal their hollowness. 

These tubules seem somehow to agree with the indifferent voice preserved in the magnetic tape - the speaker serves as a kind of narration to the street-side scriptures as you pass them:

"[turbulence swallowing everything]... So... so first things first: I imagined myself speaking into this thing before I actually pulled it out of the bag and pressed 'record.' There was an oaf on the EL who... reappearance of Theodore Roosevelt, with his foreshortened walrus whiskers... tiny spectacles drowning in the hypertensive meat of his face... I attended a short talk given by a 'Marek Bienczyk' yesterday and, without completely recounting the entire discussion (which I have taken down elsewhere in my notes), I just want to mention an episode of his book Transparency... His vehicle has been assaulted by a bicyclist, whom he has just hit to very little perilous effect. And, as a result of the bicyclist striking his windshield, a small web-like crack opens up in the glass... And the perceptual character - the narrating consciousness, who is presumably Marek Bienczyk, himself - goes immediately into a grocery store, and... Mania, a state of hysteria, because... suddenly, the experience of life's objects has become too immediate. And there's no opportunity for the gaze to penetrate and understand the depth of those objects... The surface becomes utterly unintelligible, bringing on a feeling of searing helplessness: you are exposed as a blind man to a world that has butted right up against your useless corneas. And this, to me, would seem to be one of the functions of the Beast of Conglomerate Surface. The Beast is brought about when the distance between one's critical cognition of the object and the immediate physical experience of that object in space has somehow collapsed. The objects, when they become apparent and he realizes that he is surrounded by them, and that they are not the transparent idea of themselves that he had grown so comfortable with... they gut him, making him a bloodthirsty shrieker, hungry to gnaw at viscera with no orifice-beginnings or orifice-ends... There's a tree over on the west-facing sidewalk... whose trunk has been artificially made to twist... looks like a licorice rope or a bewildered baobab, grown over with splintering bark, having parted the soil and broken out of the underground... We have to return to the concept of a certain reality? A reality that no one will ever appreciate or perceive until a group of people who have the ability to fixate on the peripheral details of the world are able to come together... and assemble these particles of fact into something... terribly, terribly true?.. And, also, I guess, there is something about this group coalescing and assembling these pieces into a new ultimate account of 'reality'... It will necessarily involve their deaths, or at least their disappearance - the dissolution of their identities as recognizable people. But I guess the problem with these sessions is that they always wander about... the idea of pure, wandering abstraction and analytical interpretation of the world is... it's a very sultry means of existing. Living life without seeing things is clearly worse. We are made terrible because of the fact that we cannot fail to see the things others can never notice. So you have to be able to drill into any surface that comes up to meet you, realizing the futility of doing so - recognizing beforehand the miserable opacity of it all... The surface can reflect and retain light, as if it were the parabola of some unhealthy porcelain (or milk glass), in which... some sort of sputum can be perceived, whose sole meaning is the culture flourishing and multiplying within it... 

"A street is like an unmade bed, with disordered, mangled blankets and sheets, flattened into a frieze that boils over in its stillness. Every urban street is an empty canyon that will one day collapse in on the fossils of those who would pass through it. And here I've spilled into the abstract again, but, you know... burning heaps of tropical garbage give off a plume of the densest, blackest smoke..."

Melchizedek

Morning lilt and lilt of tongue

English breakfast breaks the spell

Living air in livid lung

Cretins catch the morning EL

High it rises, high it climbs

In a rushing sapphire breeze

Zips along in lucid climes

Edified in asphalt seas

During every strained commute

Every eye constrains its mind

King of swords and priest of goût

Is it real, or am I blind?

Sibyll sends her sour sign

Tracing faces in the rain

Hoary, permanent design

Everything malign to gain

Trained to suffer, trained to build

Outer beings kiss the cold

Nazarenes approach the guild

Guile has willed a world of gold

Unguents poured from alabaster

Enter every perfect pore

On that wall of sodden plaster,

Fateful fingers find a door.

Dim impulses of unknowing

Revelations for the blind

Ebbing, turbid, draining, showing

Appellations meant to bind

Middle-age for middle-ages

Solitude for succored sages