Other Other Stuff

Friends and Neighbors: To "Be With" is Sometimes to "Move Against."

Stephen Ellis, save it. We live in unsafe image and function, whether “zone” or “organ” doesn't matter: They've come to be separated. One without the other is unsound, and human life's too quiet. Save it. We suffer the delusion that text is written (save it) or “produced” in a way similar to the way emotions and intellectual spiriting moves us through perceived “meanings” in a time that is running parallel with our reading. But it isn't a parallel situation. The speed of our perception is the reading itself, there are no parallels. Save it. It isn't about the quality in the play because it can never be a game. Descending to earth was nice. I came to play. We could talk about instrumentality. That would make sense. To make sense is the “behind” that aesthetics never wants to get itself around or to the representational “front” of. Source is left shivering on the front stair before a door on whose other side, the coal fire of its analogical “blessing” warms the house. I grew up from the ground, in an actual country. That was in another place and time. Nations are necessary proponents of The Argument, that is, one always must be crossing borders, not to “make things new” but for the simple fact of commerce. Congress. (Fuck me, please. Is that potato yours? Can I use it after you're done with it? Etc.) Save it.

Life's not affordable or sustainable. Claw your way to the bottom, the top, or somewhere toward the middle of the pile, hopefully near the edge. I've had a lot of things in my hands over the years: A wounded sparrow, a rattle, a Chesterfield King, a salami, a hammer, a bottle neck, three salamanders, a wheat stalk, oats, dog turds, fragrant spruce dimension lumber, a thigh, pond water, bread, my shirt, a breast, a mountain top (I was crawling), semen, celery, a poem by Steve (other), Frederique's waist, a birch sapling, welding rod, dirt, a pork chop, some rice, ice, my driver's license and the brim of my cousin's hat. I never knew what to do about any of it, but since they're all either permanently or temporarily gone, I presume to think that I help dispose them to their present condition. Save it.

To gather all this up into a resume or a curriculum vitae, is a horse shit joke. I remember the long gravel pit, just to the left of Route 9, fading into the Parkway and the marshlands beyond, that drained into the bay, and finally the ocean. Things disperse without us using our will to do anything more than follow their natural sequence. Water evaporates and comes back down on all our inland heads. Twenty-five years later, someone told me my childhood love of the gravel pit meant I was in love with Death. I left the country. I was away. I came back with an attitude.

Do I wear underwear? I don't think I'm ready to talk about that yet. Consider the dashed foundations of youth's bright and burgeoning desires that see themselves destroyed in style-less ineptitude. Grace is everything. Only a servant would say that. It's a good thing to remember. Remember the servant. Never forget grace, and make it never-ending. Mature nature is hideous as it emerges on our becoming close to Death. To not exist, but not to never have existed, is beautiful. We just keep melting into one another. The novel thing to do is get up off your ass and go there. To wherever it's happening. Decline is what we're raised to accept. Fully developed culture goes back as far as human time. The first man and woman were a garden that lived inside a diamond cut perfectly from the inside out.

That's the story of Biography. Save it.