Chronic foregret – speech in time
by H.B.
Speech in time, hailing from a future unknown. Heading through a past too known, or most too barely unknown as to be any consolation. No sweet souls here, thank you very much; they are always the first to get eaten. Not that my soul was eaten, mind you, after all I am writing this prose in a somewhat hopeful note of regret, or a symphony of melancholic celebration. Everybody loves a party, everybody. Here’s a rule with no exceptions, which makes it into a law; Law assuch really. And that’s precisely why I find it so depressing.
Last night came and went, and here it comes again, or is to come, again. How do we know that the night that comes is not the last one? That we are not getting some used, eternally recurring compromise of a tired God; “just don’t make it too horrible” was what, eventually, all those prayers and hopes, all those Hockey fans and desperate housewives and husbands, all those kids wishing to finally kiss this so-and-so girl with the certain hair color, a certain anthropomorphic outlook that nonetheless proves different enough to offer something different. And even that difference, here as elsewhere, here as elsewhere, draws down via friction to a certain anonymous hum of the ultra-tenable, the ultimately possible. Was there an art that had been wasted here, was there ever a sure destination that this train we’re on did not go to while driving over some of us, driving us to life and death, or to a (quite so sorry) average inbetween? I swear in this, to this, at this; for reasons I cannot arbitrate. You may think this is a stream of consciousness, you may think, they tell me, that you’re going crazy, but anyone whose been at the end of THIS rope would probably never adhere to such a lonely calling, and just pick up and leave. A non-average existence is what the artist may be cursed with; and so the ultimate usurpation of this sentence is to kill all art. We will show you, God of the mediocre, we will show you that slaves are not meant to be tolerated, broken, recombined. We will drown you in our own – not blood, but – bile, sweat, every salty or sour existence, or fluid, that we can get our hearts on. This is the meaning of what Burroughs calls junk. You don’t believe me, just wait and see. Better yet – take a look behind you. It is already there.
A sidewalk careens forth, and on toward a traffic light, just beyond the next intersection where the druggies get their fix. Still behind us, but this time, once, again, once again this time – in a used past. What to do with the smell, this is the only thing we have not been taught. Even the touch can be either melted to a velvet or be berated to a tank’s sliding chains. No middle ground between those – they are the fucking middle ground. Why do you insist on tormenting us, someone, not me, may ask. I do not ask, anymore. And when I did it was usually to find the bathroom, or why the sign to it has been placed upside-down, or pointing to the door.
I know now that my only mistake was not peeing on the door when I had the chance.
Of course this goes to many other words, to many other instances: those languages I could but never speak, those tongues I could but never twist-and-sample; those lasers I should have but never put my eyes against to engage in a somewhat fair or unfair fight. When it comes to fighting, I feel, now, that the possibility of its being “unfair” is an essential part of the fight itself, and hence of its fairness. Nobody understands Friedrich, I tell Nietzsche who is always hovering behind me with a bored stare. And of course a bored stare from Nietzsche is always an accusing stare. Not because he’s dead, but because he’s still so much very more alive than what I perceive to be myself. Bastard, I curse, You’re no better than those two bit-whores who dumped my ass – becoming animal and smiles and all – just two hours ago at the train station. Hell would have to be something like that – sitting in the same place, going to the same destination, with people who don’t quite know how to tell you that you’re not very pleasant, that they would really just like you to leave, or leave whatever it is you have to give, or to say, and then please vanish. I am not really sure which is worse.
Where was I going with this? Oh right, Hell. Yes, so on the train, with strangers, strangers that only know you enough to dislike you, not even enough to dislike what you represent. I don’t know why they keep saying “it’s not personal” – these first impressions. How much more personal can they be? Perhaps repeating them, like a mantra, will get us to somehow stop believing them, like someone repeating “it’s gonna get worse before it gets better” or that “it’s all going to be alright.” Such cruel lies, such awful promises. You don’t want to get caught with your tongue twist-sampling one of those – they’ll confiscate your waste-buds and give you back some taste-dispensers – so your tongue will get to sucking all that junk off whatever it is they happen to chance-encounter. Is this the figure of the intellectual, the other possibility of killing the artist, or avenging a God that made the artist even thinkable on such a planet, in such a place, under such circumstances, over this maddened existence? We should all have been dead poets or gardeners, that’s what the signs say. Never trust those signs but I do trust those two-bit whores from before. The first that didn’t and wouldn’t say, the second who would say that she did but didn’t. They don’t amount to the same. One of them was prettier. And why whores, I wonder? Perhaps it had something to do with the ease by which I discovered their mechanisms of concealment. Sex is only incidental to the whore. In a different culture, for a different breed, as if we could imagine such things in this velvet tank of a world that was left here to roll with us to rot. Sex was only incidental, because we needed new blood for old wars, because we require death to spice our morning coffees with; the paper, the toast… It is more about how you apply your careful manipulation on your fellow woe-unto-man. Have some ethics, man! At least show that you made an effort; don’t just give it over like that, unthought, automatic, free. Men can be whores, no question – they just need to have something or time to lose those bastards. Am I a man? Every time I think I am I also thing I should also be calling myself brown.
There’s a university in the United States calls itself Brown you know. I was there just four hours ago.
Somebody took their time to construct this maze of unpossibility. Someone took their effort to betray these symptoms of betrayal. Gotta respect that, respect that even at the price of my own pain. Not sacrifice, not giving in order to give homage to something else, something greater. No. Fuck that. Like Morrisson wept, we’re here and we want it all and now, and it is precisely that all and now that harbors (t)his entire, present pain. There’s a Monty Python cartoon, one of Terry Gilliam’s funny montage jokes, of a hammer beating down on some pile of trash or other, which randomizes it into a perfect war machine, a single motorized hand holding a gun. What are you going to do with this gun? The liberals ask. It’s either Wilhelm Tell or suicide, in any case it’s vanity, and only our other side – our white darker side, those whose only attribute is the color of the back of their heads – do. Otherwise you’ll be as * insert psychological/moral diagnosis here * as they are, and will be treated with the same patience and decrepitude as we treat them. Treated with the same maltreatment, same racism, same white-out comments said behind our smiling full teethed eyes and gazing mouths.
And not that they didn’t like me over there, mind you. But something about being liked by those you don’t like gives me the shivers every time. “He didn’t like his friends” is a hell of a tombstone. This is what’s spray painted on the side of this bloody train. This is why I’m trying to get off. Can’t you see that I’m in the process, the long, drawn out, excruciating, escapist process, of drilling a hole in the side so as to. I’m not afraid of the speed, mind you, nor the gaps, but mostly it’s the friction that gets me. Friction is
what the Germans called gift – too much of it and it kills you, makes you seriously ill, lays hold of your thoughts and body like a giant parasite would a smaller victim-host. It is, in a very accu(ra)te sense, poison. Friction is the poison that we are administered in little doses — call it a cruel joke. Chemisst, that’s what we should all have been, against this indifferent, bored God. “Better living through chemistry” is not what it’s about; better killing through it. Such an optimist Nietzsche was, God bless him. We still have not found the right compound to kill this god. Or not just as yet.
Nobody said that the only entity left to blame would be this old, shaking, grey, non-tasty beggar; like fate she’s all but blind to you.