jedicist.org Blog

In looking for my keys (aargh, where are my keys?) I pulled out my small pile of scraps and fragments that my typewriter has generated over the last few weeks.  This blog was originally conceived as a public notebook, and this post is in line with that: these fragments are totally raw, unedited, personal; they are a blend of fiction and reality; sometimes I was writing the emotional state of a fictional character in my mind, and yet I cannot hide the truth that I have been focused on vocational anxiety, and what little writing I’ve managed to eeke out of that unproductive emotion can only wallow in it pitifully.

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THE PLATFORM OF THE SATISFACTIONIST PARTY INTERNATIONAL (DRAFT)

What is is all that is, and so it must satiate.

Since what is is all that is, any economy predicated on growth and dependent upon expansion for its health is inherently a lie.

We have been lied to by expansionist policy: humans are enveloped in finity.  We cannot escape our own skin.  And yet, we must eat.

The past has put too much energy and investment into expansion: we will turn the movement inwards, to provide sustenance for our own bellies first.

Therefore, all capital relegated into abstraction by history must be liquefied into usable material.  What is, must be made available to consumption; what was always only hypothetical must be rendered as a lie.

i e, all capital must be liquedated.

Capital that exists as human potential must be either liberated or more fully utilized.  Labor is not the only human potential.

All assets owend by previously incorporated national entities must be liquefied and fed back to the bodies politic, including all back stores of grain, inks, papers, oils, and other commodities.

In the case that assets owned by a particular national entity are human in nature, i e of an emotional or creative value, or expressed in terms of potential instilled by a process of over- and elite- education, these assets must be brought under liquified scientific scruitiny and re-administered to the intellecutal elite who will re-create value to be fed back to the Taxpayer in aspirational morale.

And so on, ad nauseum.

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The mind has become obscured.  It can no longer differentiate passion from desire, dharma from vocation.  I am controlled, manhandled by the anxieties of desire.  I am not my situation: my days run through me as a river in the desert; I waste myself unwisely, expend myself in diversions, offer myself to those who are unworthy.  I spend energy trying to ignore myself.  I cannot sustain creation and balance.  I ebb and flow rapidly, I find myself unpredictable and unreliable; I surrender myself to myself; I bow before the ferment; I am too ready to accept faliure as fate.

Again I will try; today again I will remake myself.  I will become…

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What truths can economies manufacture?

What productivity does anxiety wreck?

Why am I so determined to obey?  Why do I so virulently seek my own powerlessness?  What am I doing to my lungs, my body, my voice?  Oh, great risi,  advise me, I know not my dharma.  AM I to function, to languish, or to revolt?  I am comfortable with any of these, my path is not yet formed.  I get no directions from community or environs.  Individualism has taken me too far off any recognizable road.  I have something to offer any who is not myself, but I do not know who or what.  Like a child lost in a forest, I watch capitalism but cannot participate; like a child in a forest, I can walk through streets lined with mighty buildings and cannot enter any; what I call my home is a temporary shelter, a camp.  Will I reach home in this life?  Is this my desire?  Is desire what ought to guide me?  I am mighty.  This, I have never doubted.  But the nature of my expression, the manifestation of inner power in the form of a life’s work, I do not know.  I have long believed that when I am old, it will become clear what my life’s work has been.  I have never thought that I would know beforehand. I thought perhaps that it would only be a soft touch that was required from myself to enter the chute of karmic works, to begin to truly create, to feel desiring products to spin daily out from my fingertips.  Effort is worthwhile, and yet I am lazy: I have been lazy; I must soon reposition myself, delve into some rich atmosphere of intention, intention that most valuable of treasures, which brings significance to every action.

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drive, drive that beast along.  That unyielding desire, drive it to wealth justified by art that does not lie; the forum that is a lie.  White space is expensive in this land, white walls do not come easy.  Through riches and on to death.  Through fame and on to failure.  Through love and on to war, we drive, holding drinks and passing out printed cards, we try to thrive through mimosas and martinis, barely balancing on the edge of sobriety, we drive, through convention centers of hungry eyes, through failure we drive.

Jai Jai Navia

Zed

First of all, I want to open this blog to comments and participation in a non-spamming kind of way. For that to happen, though, I need to control who has an account on this blog, so send me an email. Details are Here.

So, I’ve joined this lovely writing workshop here in Brooklyn. Besides meeting and doing writing prompts every week, the group is also doing a long-term collaboration with an equivalent group in Dublin, Ireland, that works like a long exqusite skeleton: one person will send a kernel, the next person on the other side of the pond will rewrite it and add one element, and so on. I just began a new thread of this project with a fragment about Solemna Navia, a character of mine who remains stubbornly fragmented and storyless; I thought this would be a perfect venue for her to grow into more minds than my own:

Solemna Navia was a plant. She had installed herself within warriors and made them farmers; she sought to use their Power to make a place for herself, at least a body for herself, beginning with food. The Toxic Event had taken the place of food, of plants; they all had trampled over their dinner on the way out the door. Her stomach felt the absence almost immediately, and now, years later, she wondered if the void would ever be filled. Perhaps once she had been a dedicated and careful anorexic, but now she began to mourn food, to miss it as the lover she had lived to hate. So she decided to begin to produce, to grow. She wanted to become life, and life is food, and love of food could teach love of the earth. Land in the city was disorganized, cut into unstable chunks of ex-lawn. So she hatched a plan to go south, find some land. She had found the Banks, an old tobacco farm, the soil depleted by decades of monoculture in service to addiction. Her warriors held her in their mind, planted her dream into the earth.

This is for the soil that once was never unclean.
Roots grow into leaves
May you be clean again.

Solemna Navia knew that the life of plants is in the dirt, that their intelligence comes from their roots. Though her field was irradiated and toxic, she coaxed from it lives purer than the food that had been eaten before the Event. Her crops were fertilized with the oils and plastics of decaying gadgets, once coveted motherboards whose silicon strove to kill the lives she strove for. A rebirth is a slow thing. Irrigation is a small canal. Clouds of ash are unforgivingly dark. Jai: jai Navia!

No, I did not put in the work necessary to make this good.  Yes, I want to share it with you.  Yes, it’s worth reading if you’re reading.

The prompt: to evoke economic anxiety

The animals still needed to be fed, and she had barely finished feeding herself. Not that she was hungry much anymore; her stint in the hospital had taken care of all that. But she dreamed about eating, still, imagined the metal curvature of the spoon against her tongue, the metallic clink of handwashed plates knocking together in the cabinet, a sound like one of the notes the bear hits as he gnaws against the lock on his enclosure, or maybe even coins hitting an empty register.

When the animals get too hungry, they can’t be so sociable as they need to be. Visitors get turned off by sulking chimps and vicious hissing marmots. Children go home in tears. And that was never the intention, that wasn’t why she had started the menagerie. It had been for the children. For Victor, really, though he hadn’t lived to see it. When the cages were new, before the animals had come, she had imagined his presence filling them—his spirit not little boy sized as most conventional ghosts are the size of people left behind, but expansive, like a gas, filling the empty but environmentally-appropriate habitats, filtering between the chickenwire and the locks. The locks, now rusted, almost rusted shut. She hadn’t opened most of them in years, didn’t think she ever would, now. They would die in there, she would finally give up on this place and flee across the border, try to get out of reach of her creditors. It would happen soon, at this rate, sooner than she had hoped.

Some of the animals were still in that fierce stage of hunger. The jackal cackled and flung his body against his walls. The sloths just sighed. Last week, the chimps had fought, fought so hard she thought they were resorting to cannibalism. Now they lay in a stupor, apparently passing in and out of consciousness, swallowing air to fill their bellies and then pungently deflating from both ends.

She sat in a faded upholstered chair in front of their enclosure and considered hunger, from a theoretical point of view. Considered the utensils and other infrastructure of culinary activity.

She would feed them if she could, she would, she would. She was not cruel. But she could not; the whole country was deflated, starving; the government had willed the economy out of existence, apparently—according to the bill collectors—with loans like the one she had gotten to build this place.

She thought about murdering them. What is it they say about misery in lesser beings? She thought of the long sound of a knife being released, wielded. She thought of Victor. He had wanted the monkeys so badly. It had all been his idea, the idea of a child turned into a business plan, a loan application, defaults and down payments. Now, his memorial.

She thought of the government doctors, still probably eating in cafeterias, despite it all. When they had released her, they had told her to start a business. Do something for the national economy, they had said. Part of her rehabilitation. Or reeducation. Both words were thrown around a lot. But now that their great experiment had failed, now that Victor was gone, now that her animals were hungery and her programming unraveling, they were unresponsive. She wondered if they still wore suits under their white coats.

Her own clothes were stained with feces that the chimps had thrown when there were still feces to be thrown. They hung off her narrowing arms. She could fit into some of Victor’s old clothes, now. She wouldn’t be able to make her next payment. If she missed one more, she would lose herself; even herself, only herself; they didn’t want the monkeys.

She didn’t eat much these days, and even if she could, she probably wouldn’t. It tasted like sawdust. The hospital had seen to that.

She still kept the menagerie open, and, once and a while, some tourist family would come by, glad to stretch their legs after being in the station wagon too long. She told them the animals were just sleeping, if they weren’t in a rage. If the kids were too young to understand suffering, she’d get away with it. The parents were sympathetic, it was the same everywhere in the country. They were escaping themselves, telling the kids they were just going on a little trip, then hiding their last valuables under the boot and leaving their house to the dogs.

She still had her plates and spoons, at least, her lumpy chair, worthless to her creditors, worthless to her starving animals. She had her cages that kept the animals away from her flesh. She still had her memorial. And, soon, she would flee.

If you’re checking out this blog for the first time, I’d appricate it if you scrolled down and checked out the first couple posts before this one.  Thanks!

Well, if you’re going to be reading this blog, you’re gonna have to get used to reading fragments and scraps out of context, posted at inappropriate times, things sometimes too writerly to be read. Here’s an overview of what’s been in my notebook recently, with this trip hanging somewhere in the unimaginable future. And, inevitably, I’ve posted some of it scattered around Pinko’s Copies. This is how I work, and I don’t have a problem with making it public, I think, especially once I get a sense of who reads this blog. Here and everywhere, please comment, start dialogues, tell me that you exist.

1.

It was no mistake that Bey was there on the dusty streets, paranoid of feral dogs. He was sent there to be American. To be the American. He was there through the whole thing. Well, he came after the factory had been shut down by the farmers. But still through all the awkward tension that surrounds revolution. Had been witness to a representative portion of all the little skirmishes entirely too personal to be News, that add up one day at one pre-determined place and time. He was there because America could never be there—to inward looking. And so was Bey, who one day looked too deep inward and popped out the other side. Fetus omphaloskepsis. He hadn’t necessarily found anything in there, just looked deeper through nothingness until he found himself outward. Deep outward. 36 hour flight Outward.

Incessantly, events happen. Things far outside Bey’s peripheral vision, behind that house over there, or in the city that he just left two weeks ago, things he’ll never know about, but that were earth-shattering for the folks directly involved in them. Not News, never News, News he knew about. The News never surprised him. But the lives did.

2.
Do we share a world? The immensity of our failure shakes every life. Schizophrenia is when the world pays farmers to not produce food (actually, to produce Not Food). Schizophrenia is when surplus turns so quickly into starvation.

Will Obama recover from The Narrative? Will he lead us, his people? will he actually speak to and for me?

But I will be Absent. Absolutely Absent, engaging with the Starvation side of things.
I will be Unimagination. In the immensity of the Global System, enmired in Reality. In Love.

3.

hilarious and incessant paranoia of not being there, of being unplugged, not on the scene, unobservable, missing out, unlaid, not realizing the big push, the long haul, the inevitablility of tomorrow. The absolute necessity of Taking Time. Of being unobservable. Walking alone on top of a mountain and through airports.

4.

He imagined his soul like a bulbous growth hanging off the side of his astral self like a tumor or some sort of hemorrhoid. He imagined himself stroking it, watering it, feeding it with special hi-nutrient water, maturing it until it could be harvested and sold.

5.

The streets lie horizontally, the buildings vertically. Only the outsides of things can narrate, just as all the senses are placed on the human skin, all meaning is placed on the skin of the city. The interiors justify and align the facades. Cement depends on molds and rebar for structure. Rebar predetermines the structures. Cement overdetermines the city. Each building is hollow inside, making the city a shell, indifferent to habitation. And through the streets, all manner of man and metal roam.