The Shirt That Smells

Buy the shirt

the shirt that smells

the monastic self-contained

germ-saturated suppurated drip

Shirt of self-flagellating stink goo

gaminess of original shirt the shirt

that smells the pressurized coprolite

coal-to-diamonds carboniferous ooze

the curse never directly uttered the milk

 sprout-discharge that sent skunks running

  through stadium floorboards under the

   awnings of rain-soaked street-corner

    cafes beneath wooden-slat bar-board

     shellac-stained by years of soaked in

      beer n’ scotch-whiskey polluted milk

       festered fly-eggs n’ discharge wept

        through enzymatic micrometers

         thick bug tweedle waddle in

          self-indulgences of mud,

           and hair-shirt hunger

            crying out “forgive

              me for I have

               sinned and

                wish only

                 to return

                  to the di-

                   amond

                    corner

                     edge

                        of

                      God’s

                     tornadic

                   kingdom”…

                 Of relics and

               flagellents and the fam-

             iliar twitch of desire to mock

          all gratuitous forms of self-aggrand-

       izement as we revisit the serrated knife

    edge upon which the diamond of compression

forms itself from lithic mats of Pennsylvanian carbon

gradually sunk into its own permafrost  afro-moss thick-

ness of stretched and pressurized heat-driven condensate

soaked finally into the shadows of its own outline lived and

 bound within a circumscribed field of tertiary palimpsest

  the blue-print for the hard-stone jagged crystalline edged

    atom-squeezing hot crowded Coney-Island of hard

     stone molecular aggregate-pressure over a local

       filamentary fragment of torrid density like the

        tiny embryonic locus of concrete convection

         which animates the active cynosure of

          incubatory graphite as it shrinks to                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

            its own tumescence the meme stink

             olfactory bulbs with shirt fragment

              tatters soft like a gel after crying

                a long suppuration of memory

                 into its irreversible mutation

                 from a shirt—a human thing—

                  now down to a diamond an

                  industrialized institution

                    of pre-planned multi-

                     tudes without the

                     obscure off-center

                      interwoven kudzu

                      of memory; its stink

                      a chaos of mildewed

                        wind-blown laundry

                         that stagnates even

                           the ghastly pressure

                           of ugly industrial

                            fields of stagnant

                             diamonds only

                              to exhale again

                            in all of its malodorous

                        macro-passionate expansive

                     chaos of sometimes disenfranchised

            glory…The Stink Shirt the emblem

the flag the smell, the drip-drip-dropped sweat swollen suture

of mushroom cloud inversions—a sign, a tweed, a gabardine

diversion of a flattening of all affectations into the roiling liquid

mackerel shit bloated oil-stained oyster smell convective diamond stink reef

where we have come up against tidal boundaries splashed over without use of

grammar save waves of turgid earthy sweat machismo into unshaven cotton-shards

of granular poppy-headed epistolary opium-horned conversions into graphite stained

underpants of a preferable softness to diamond needle hemorrhoidal hardness

as it washes over beachiness in fine grained corn-powder now  wetted over into mats of seaweed foam

future across contested ocean-shore palimpsest wave-waving wagging back over the tail shards of sand-

smoothed history, a natural history woven once on an industrial sewing machine, the history of a shirt a shirt

stinks to combine industrial effluent with pre-hominid arm-pit, shit, groin-stink.

The shirt as history, as an emblem of shit, as a flag waving emblem

Of shurt waving flag-like across a beach a desert twilight eclipsing into history as

An idea one hatched up half-albatross amphibian, an idea

Of history—a shirt waves across an empty sandstrewn coast-

Line. Beach sand, clothing and the stink of

sterile silence,  a static of sterile,

sand-strewn silence…

 

JZ Rothstein/ final edit—early am 6/28/2012

paleolithic dirt
reveals smudged brown ink print
dancing through wet veil

Toad chest imbibed
deeply androgynous images of
carapace tiled silk

Horsey Heads

                                                           Horsey Heads

Jan and Yolinda have Horsey Heads, Beetle and Frugg do too. They are all living in the various rooms of the Cavalcade House waiting for Early Departure. Early Departure is when you leave early—when you can retire from the Cavalcade House, and leave the Spectacle behind. Early Departure is what everyone is waiting for, and for some it never actually seems to arrive quickly enough. But for the denizens of the house, it is finally only a few days away, and they are all high on anticipation, and whispering each other into states of near ecstasy. “What is it like”? They ask. “What is it really like?” Will there be an indoor swimming pool of infinite length and depth?” Will there be a room with a beach motif and a tree house where we can put our hammocks?”  “Will there be any new people?” “Do we need to take any extra money, or is everything provided?” Beetle even asks if they have machines that one can crawl into, like a sleeping bag, so that you can dream about anything you want and they will record it—they, being the ‘machines.’ But mostly, everyone just wants to be able to confirm that they won’t be disconnected entirely from the Spectacle—it has, after all, given them the only home that most of them can remember, and the only version of the world that any of them can conjure at this point; so, it is only natural that they imagine this new place, in terms borrowed, smuggled and stolen, from the one that they are leaving. And, the leaving will be permanent, but nobody seems to mind. Nobody, that is, except Frugg, he won’t allow himself the oblique luxury of being thrown into a mysterious circumstantial miasma, at least not until he’s figured out all the angles.

Beetle is dreaming, and it’s a good dream—he’s a whale; but not just any whale, he’s a Flying Blue, floating invisibly above cities made entirely of jellied fish-innards encased in giant transparent plastic tubes. He winds through the foliage of this enormous assemblage of delicious smells and sometimes gnaws on the cylinders, only to realize that he has baleens instead of teeth, and must wait for the pipes to decompose naturally. But, the only thing that decomposes here, are the fish innards, turning first to jelly, then to a yellow liquid, which is siphoned off to who knows where, while Beetle Blue-Whale waits for a chink in the plastic plumbing that never seems to appear. Nevertheless, he’s a happy whale, who can swim wherever he likes while doing backflips and somersaults without losing his buoyancy. Then, while meditating over the question of how a whale could live to adulthood, without any food, there is an explosion. Beetle is shaken awake and realizes that he isn’t dreaming any longer; that, in fact, someone has blown up an adjoining room in Cavalcade House.

 Nobody else seems to waken, however, and Beetle is already having thoughts of Blue Whaleness again, when he forces himself out of his sleeping hammock and goes to find his pen-light. The pen-light is small—about the same dimensions as the hypodermic syringes that he uses to pump himself full of Levo-Dromorphan on Saturday nights—but it will do for this purpose. He checks the adjacent rooms, The Green room, The Mauve Room, and The Jungle Book Room—which is festooned with wallpaper showing exotic tropical animals and plants. None of the rooms have been touched, and their respective sleepers are snug in their hammocks and completely oblivious to what has just happened.

Beetle is confused; even more so, when he finds himself awakening in his hammock, as the dream within a dream dissolves leaving him wondering if this sequence of events is also imagined. He can’t remember now, whether, as a whale, he had a Horsey-Head, or a Fishy-Whale-Head; and, it probably shouldn’t matter, but he can’t get the question out of his mind, so he asks Frugg: “How the fuck should I know?” croaks Frugg, who occasionally, looks more like a jowly toad than he does a Horsey, with green eyes and vibrating rolls of flesh hanging down from his prognathous chin, like stalactites in a cave. Beetle wonders if Frugg might actually be an hallucinogenic, Horse-Headed Toad (‘could such a creature actually exist?’); if so, he could lick the sebaceous cysts that have crystallized on Frugg’s jowls and get a visionary feeling, like he did that time when he swallowed Jan’s prosthetic left eyeball. The eyeball had been soaking in a Paregoric solution, which Jan used for cleaning, his ‘glazzy,’ as he liked to call it, when Beetle got the urge and swallowed the contents of the cup. Jan didn’t speak to him after that for many months. And, it was only after Beetle found him a new ‘glazzy’ in an attic trinket-box that Jan would even accept his apology.

Yolinda has finished her morning ablutions and is now entering the kitchen. She is still full of questions about Early Departure. “Can we take our hammocks to Early Departure?” she asks no one in particular. “Ask Beetle,” says Frugg, “he can make new questions out of your old questions, until you actually inquire about something interesting.” “That’s a not-nice thing to say,” says Yolinda. “Perhaps,” counters Frugg, “but I haven’t even worked out the complete details of Early Departure yet; and before we can talk about doing stuff, and taking stuff, we need to know where we are actually going!” This makes everybody assembled in the small kitchen area think for a long moment, until a large bubble of yellow cogitation fills the room like an exhaust gas pumped from the intestines of a giant machine, whose sole purpose is to manufacture abstruse questions about meaningless hypotheticals.

Yolinda hates this yellow machine gas and begins climbing the wall, until she is no more than a small dot adjacent to the ceiling, her Horsey Head shaking up and down like that talking equine that Frugg remembers from television. “Come down,” orders Jan. “If you stay up there too long you will turn back into empty space, and then we’ll all have to mix our differing memories of you with water to reconstitute them—and if we do that you’ll be different than before, and you will ask all of the same questions again, because you won’t remember the original answers.” “I would rather shrink into nothing and be reconstituted!” says Yolinda impetuously. “Then, I can be reborn, and I’ll be as fresh as a Pike hatchling, or a newborn baby Lizard on an equatorial beach in Early Departure.” “But there aren’t any beaches in Early Departure,” says Jan, “the place isn’t a destination, it’s a deadline!” “Deadlines have beaches too!” insists Yolinda, but she begins the slow climb back down the wall, as if she knows better than to take her own assertions on the subject seriously. “Now your showing sense.” Says Jan. When she gets back to floor level, and reassumes her full size, she rubs her neck across Jan’s neck, and their two interlocked Horsey-Heads inadvertently take on the shape of a large X.

Beetle is confused, and asks Frugg—who is very smart but looking more and more Toad-like every minute—why Horsey-Heads shrink when they climb short distances up walls. “Well,” says Frugg—who really has no idea—“Horsey Heads get smaller in direct inverse proportion to their tendency to become larger when they loom close.” “Well, isn’t that true of everything, isn’t it just a matter of degree?” asks Beetle; who continues, asking, “Why do they shrink so much more than other objects, when they are only a short distance away?” Frugg is irritated now, and his Horsey-Head nostrils begin to flare and blow out green tufts of mossy-smoke. “If you don’t like it, blame it on Physics, because only Physics knows why things are the way they are!”

“Where do I find Physics?”

“In a book, stupid!”

“How can he fit in a book—is it a large book with a high ceiling?”

“Books don’t have ceilings, you read them.”

“So Physics is covered with words to read, like tattoos?”

“Physics is not a person, it’s a set of ideas, a structure, a scientific framework—you don’t talk to it directly, you do it, or you read about it in a book!” says Frugg, his Horsey-Head shaking up and down sarcastically.

“I don’t understand,” says Beetle, “I thought Physics was a person, because you are always saying, ‘Physics tells us,’ like ‘Plato asserts’, or ‘Fishies feel such-and-such;’ remember when you started a sentence saying, ‘Fishies feel such and such?’

“I never started a sentence saying, ‘Fishies feel such and such,’ I started a sentence saying ‘Fishies feel pain, so if you hook them while Fishy Trolling, you will be causing them to suffer.’ That is what I said.”

“Then why don’t the Fishes complain?” asks Beetle, who is genuinely confused, and starting to foam at the Horsey-mouth. He also knows, simultaneously, that his incessant queries are getting Frugg more and more angry.

“Beetle, why don’t you just direct all future questions to Yolinda, she seems to be on the same wavelength as you, and I only respond to questions that can actually be answered,” retorts Frugg, who then punctuates his response, by walking briskly out of the kitchen.

Beetle is silent, he really wants answers to his questions, especially now that Early Departure is looming so closely, but he doesn’t know if there is enough time left to learn the intricacies of life in Cavalcade House; or even, for that matter, what Cavalcade House actually is. Does it have an outside? Is it stationary, or does it move, but just too slowly for anyone to actually feel it? Is it the whole world? Or, does the world get bigger suddenly with the advent of Early Departure? There were no easy answers to these questions; in fact, there were no answers at all, and Beetle contemplated the silence, as he peered out the kitchen window, and noticed that the light coming through was diffuse and without a center. “I wonder where that light comes from?” he asks himself, “And why does it disappear at night?”

Frugg sits in the Pink Room deftly applying pressure to two tiny metal pins, as he affixes them to the top of an odd structure comprised of thousands of similar little connecting rods. When viewed as a whole, the apparatus is shaped like an intricate machine, but one of unknown purpose and function. Frugg delicately moves the structure until it sits adjacent to one of the room’s four pink walls. The walls are not actually pure pink—not as far as Frugg can tell—but are instead suffused with a pink aura, which gives the room a depth, that makes one feel almost as if one could venture right out into this diffuse pinkness and enter an entirely different spatial dimension. Of course, Frugg knows that this is merely an illusion, created by the way in which the wallpaper is designed—he is, after all, a real Cartesian. His housemates, however, are not always quite so sharp in their perceptions; and, on many occasions, he has watched, bemusedly, as Yolinda and Beetle have periodically, and at different times—walked right into a solid bulkhead, like confused birds who can’t fathom how a clear surface of glass could impede their aerial itineraries.

Jan, however, is more intelligent, and tends to move slowly and with caution. When he enters the room and sees Frugg’s strange invention, he wants to know if its purpose is aesthetic or practical. “Both,” answers Frugg, who is proud of his inventiveness, and knows that the others will not understand exactly how the device is supposed to work, but will appreciate it, all the more, because it will work so efficiently.

“Well, what does it do?” asks Jan.

“It’s an Early Departure Machine,” answers Frugg, with unconcealed pride.

This pride is infectious, and Jan is soon huddling with Frugg in the corner of the room, and listening to all of the complex details regarding the workings of the strange little object. Frugg, then turns a small switch on a converted TV-remote, and the machine begins emanating a warm energy that Jan envisions as choral-reef blue—a light color suffused with an enveloping momentum that Jan can actually feel as if it is making its way down his throat and into his digestive apparatus, like a well cooked egg that he has just swallowed whole. Strangely, however, the machine, itself, appears inert—like it is little more than a series of arbitrarily connected pins in no particular order and of no consequence in any functional way. Jan inquires about this apparent paradox; but Frugg insists that there is no paradox at all—that this is merely the earliest part of the machine’s transformative process, and that within a short time, Jan and the others will both feel and see the effects of the device.

The machine begins emitting sound, which resolves into an uncanny children’s rhyme:

Horsey heads, horsey heads

sleep in little hayloft beds.

Horsey heads, horsey heads

their riders gone, and now he’s dead.

Horsey heads, horsey heads

dissolve when they don’t take their meds.

Frugg snorts facetiously. “The machine really works!”

“But don’t we have to wait for the tickets?” asks Jan.

“This little modular gizmo takes care of everything—processing, boarding and arrival.”

“Where does all of this take place?”

“Right here; the departure area is right here in the Pink Room.”

“I think I’m missing something in your explanation,” interjects Jan. “How can we leave for Early Departure if we don’t even leave Cavalcade House?”

“The Spectacle doesn’t require that you actually move in the physical sense in order to go from one place to another.” says Frugg with an air of mystery, his Horsey Head nodding in annoyance.

“I thought you were the Cartesian, the Rationalist, does this sound rational to you?”

“You have to think of it in terms of modern physics, the machine plays with space-time, and, through quantum fluctuation, it allows us to navigate efficiently through various portals.”

“If I was prone to believe that sort of explanation, I would go ask Beetle or Yolinda—this is the kind of nonsense that they like to espouse!” asserts Jan.

“The difference is that they don’t know what they’re talking about, whereas I do—this machine is science not magic,” replies Frugg, his nostrils flaring and exuding green smoke.

“If that’s true, I’m not sure that I really know the difference between the two,” answers Jan, a bit sullenly.

“You’ll see,” responds Frugg with confidence.

Jan sits in the kitchen thinking. His glazzy hurts, and he can’t get the strange radio noises out of his mind. “’Sleep in hayloft beds?’ what does that mean?” Beetle walks in suddenly, interrupting Jan’s thought stream, murmuring excitedly about Frugg’s Early Departure Machine. “My dreams are going to be made into movies,” he whinnies. “I think you’ve got its actual function confused with your current fantasy,” snorts Jan, his Horsey Head releasing tiny puffs of spinach colored steam. “How do you know?” asks Beetle. “I don’t think any machine exists that can record and then playback one’s dreams,” answers Jan, with a superior smirk. “If there’s a machine that can create Early Departure from the Pink Room, why can’t there be one that records dreams so that you can watch them later?” counters Beetle. “Because this isn’t a ‘Dream Recording Machine, bellows Jan, it’s an Early Departure Machine—different machines perform different functions.” “And how do you know this?” queries Beetle. “You know what? I really don’t know for sure,” answers Jan, who realizes that Beetle may actually have a point.

Meanwhile, Frugg is up in the Pink Room twiddling the remote and pressing various combinations of buttons to see what each sequence actually does. One particular progression projects images of famous movie actors on the wall, while another makes Frugg feel drunk; still another creates a strange music that sounds like honeybees scraping pollen from their hind legs. There is even a series that makes Frugg ravenous for a delicious piece of fruit—in this instance, however, the fruit he desires is formed from small bits of clay, rather than something growing from a tree. “This is a strange device,” he thinks, automatically attributing all of the parts he has trouble understanding to ‘quantum physics.’ His difficulties in understanding the strange effects of the device are compounded when he inadvertently presses the channel-changer three times in succession and suddenly finds himself, encased in a neoprene and fiberglass space-suit, in orbit several hundred miles above the surface of the earth, and trailing a tuna-sandwich wrapped in heavy-duty plastic. “Where am I now?” he asks of no one in particular, before pushing the buttons again in reverse order and finding himself back in the Pink Room.

Frugg is now quite sure that he cannot really explain exactly what it is that is allowing the machine to induce such effects, but he knows it must be some sort of ‘science,’ as he refuses to believe in a concept as mystifying as ‘magic.’ Calling it ‘magic’ would be like attributing anything unusual happening in Cavalcade House, to something as abstract as ‘God.’  In fact, to many people, magic is inextricably linked to God, whose name is mistakenly invoked as shorthand for any labyrinthine causality. Frugg believes that people do this when they are pressed for an explanation, rather than out of any sincere conviction. Strangely, however, given his professed Cartesian Rationalism, Frugg believes strongly in God, only in his belief God is a distant figure, largely content to let natural processes take an unfettered course. This is because God is not a control freak, as many religions have often portrayed him. Frugg is not even sure that God has a specific gender, since God would precede such definitions, in the same way that God precedes other human categories and judgments. One of these being the tendency for people to invent inescapably convoluted labyrinths of their own.

As the appointed hour creeps slowly into range, the others make their way back to the Pink Room. Jan is first, and he is travelling light, having packed only a small suitcase full of toiletries and several books. Jan’s glass eye is protruding more than usual, a sign that he is slightly worried about the outcome of the upcoming journey. Frugg, reading Jan’s expression accurately, tells him not to worry, as “quantum physics will set everything right.” “That’s what worries me most,” says Jan, “quantum physics is your new way of making it sound like you’re saying more than we need to know, when in fact you’re not saying anything at all. What exactly is this ‘quantum physics’ anyway?” Frugg ignores the question, and instead asks Beetle, who is just now walking in—and sauntering the way he does after a nice infusion of Levo-Dromorphan—if he has seen Yolinda about the house. “No,” answers Beetle, who doesn’t offer any elaboration on his answer. “Well, we need Yolinda in order to facilitate Early Departure, otherwise we will be stuck here indefinitely. “Here as opposed to where?” inquires Jan, whose Horsey Head is now rising along with his nose hackles. “Our destination,” answers Frugg, without offering any more details. “It sounds like your saying nothing again,” comments Jan.

The growing tension is temporarily dispelled by Yolinda, who steps into the room the way a jockey opens a stable-gate—treading softly so as not to draw any attention to herself. “All here—good, we can get started, says Frugg. “Started on what exactly?” questions Jan, this time doing it in such a way as to caution Frugg against merely repeating the day’s well-worn tautology.

“The machine is going to induce a space-time shift that will propel us forward into the next level.”

“Level of what—do you actually have any idea what you’re talking about?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”

“That doesn’t tell the rest of us anything, except that you are brazenly over-confidant.”

“I’ve done this before.”

“When?”

“When we took our last Early Departure.”

“There was no last Early Departure.”

“Of course there was, don’t you remember?”

“No, I don’t remember anything of the kind—and how the fuck do you remember?”

“Now, now, be a good Horsey—

“Don’t fucking patronize me,” snorts Jan, “just tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Okay—I’ll tell all of you,” answers Frugg, in a revelatory tone. “Before we came to be in Cavalcade House, we were in another place on the Spectacle continuum—I know it’s complicated, so just bear with me. We were in Luxor-Towers, and we were a little different…” Frugg pauses. Everyone is staring silently, in a mixture of disbelief and almost palpable curiosity. “We didn’t have Horsey Heads then. “What did we have?” interjects Jan. “Man-Heads,” answers Frugg. “What is a Man-Head”, queries Beetle nervously. “The head of a man,” answers Frugg, whose own head is starting to become unmistakably toad-like, without its equine dimensions being affected in the least.

Nobody says a word—everyone just looks at the machine, which is now bleeping, and steaming like an abstract sculptural rendering of a toy-locomotive engine. “Well, does that mean that we can get Fishy-Whale Heads, the next time around?” asks Beetle excitedly. “I don’t know”, responds Frugg quite seriously. “The Spectacle Continuum is a strange process, and one can’t predict its workings with any precise amount of accuracy.” “Does that mean that we’re all going to end up in stasis? asks, Yolinda, who has been silently taking it all in up until now. “I don’t think so, but I can’t be completely sure,” responds Frugg. “That doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence,” replies Jan.

“Look,” argues Frugg, “we’ve made it before, and we’ll make it this time—I’m completely positive of that. I just don’t know if we will retain our Horsey Heads or if we’ll end up partially altered as some other form of…” “Of what?” asks Jan. “Of something” retorts Frugg. I can’t even try to predict it—just as I couldn’t have predicted this. That’s what that song was about—once we go into the continuum induced by the device, our ‘rider’ is gone, and we ‘disappear,’ in a sense, before appearing somewhere else—as something different, with different qualities.”

“You make it sound like a type of reincarnation,” says Jan.

“Well, maybe it is, in a way,” answers Frugg.

The group sits motionless, listening to the crackling static and sporadic beeping of the machine, as it warms up. It begins to emit a translucent green mist. This soon, becomes a heavy fog and quickly envelops the room. Jan feels funny. He is the first and last to speak, from within this miasma. “I don’t know, but I feel like my body is moving without actually going anywhere—does anyone else—“

 

JZRothstein 12/19/2013

Hello silent onlookers
It has occured to me the this 'silence' may be an artifact of the the way in which my blog is structured; meaning, that some people may actually intend to make comments, but cannot; or, maybe nobody really has any desire to...Or, maybe, well, it doesn't matter, as I use this space for archives and, apparently, monologues--soliloquies perhaps.

In that spirit, I should mention that perusing the New York Times this morning at the public library, I found several articles referring to both the CIA's longstanding and notorious torture program (you remember, 'harsh interrogation;' and a gas chamber is a 'fumigation lounge,' I suppose), which was discontinued--although there is probably more to that story as well, since the military ran a similar program that was never actually abolished by the Obama adminsitration--but whose effects still reverberate; and, to the ongoing saga of the NSA information fisheries. It seems as if the 'Agency' regards its right to keep information regarding their own critical in-house study of the now-defunct program, just as secret as the program itself was intended to be. On that basis, they insist that a congressional intelligence committee--headed by Diane Feinstein, who often puts the KB in Kafkaesque Bureaucrat--should make do with an apparently limited palette of information. After all, national security is at stake!

Really? I suppose that there are numerous terrorist cells waiting with baited breath to find out the exact details of just how many times, various 'detainees' were subjected to invasive "tube-feedings" after 'concerned' Guantanamo doctors--who might want to check their Hippocratic oaths for comprehension--decided that 'life-saving measures' were necessary to revive their helpless charges. And I am sure that those same 'cells' will be dying to parlay the CIA's famous legal-justifications--which their primary spokesperson, has also claimed have classified status (by what logic I do not quite understand)--for their application of their other famous "persuasion" tactics. It boggles the mind, that anyone could argue, that--in addition to the actual details of torture and other activities--the justification itself, could somehow be kept secret. I suppose that this is the "trust-us-we-have-ourt-reasons-which-we-cant-reveal-either-so-trust-us-more" argument. Sounds like that same guy who once tried to argue that the government is like the 'father,' and the population (or the 'Volk' if that is a suficient hint) are the 'children,' and children don't require reasons just commands and assertions.

Just as disturbing however, is the cruelty disguiswed as the legitimate application of medicine. It just breaks me aup, and brings tears of gratitude to my eyes to hear about how our dedicated medical staff at 'GITMO' intervene to save the lives of the inmates. Am I being sarcastic, you bet your NSA-recorded-and-stored e-mails I am. Have any of these assholes ver heard of Aushwitz--perhaps not the way that I spell it, but no matter)? How about Bergen-Belson? Chelmos maybe? If it sounds like I am exaggerating, think of Guantanamo Bay, not as equivalent to the aforementioend concentration camps, but as a member of the same category, on a slightly lesser point on that continuum. In such a historical context, one should pay close attention to the way in which medical language was/is used to justify torture, by trying to give it the imprint of legitimacy by lacquering such distasteful acts with the varnish of "necessity;" the latter, being the most popular word in the lexicon of tyrants world-wide.
There was some other stuff, which I will post about later, which could mean tomorrow, or the next day--as my alloted time on this public library computer is running out (talk about information control, well in a sort of convoluted, unintended, sense anyway)...But the NSA program is starting to come under the sort of criticism that should have been prevalant from the moment that Edward Snowdens revelations became public...Snowden for President, or at least the medal of Patriotism; and fuch the NSA and Dianne Feinstein for her coindescending response to the Snowden amnesty request.
PTP steward out

Some pictures...

Conventions

When you no longer is

you lose your isness but only

for a second since after that

mathematical point

of overlap—and transition from

are- is in a world of “thingness”

to aintness—the acetate runs_

 Then…you can speak only

“in” the shrinking down to

a miniscule point of theoretical

dot of wasness of between

are and Isn’t comes

“nolonger” which

is really just a mystification

of “thevoid” (which itself doesn’t

separate from its qualifying article

as there is no “the” in thevoid

just_ ) as you isn’t and therefore

need not speak in terms of was’s or

hasn’t since you aint is or are anyway;

so, now nothing “isn’t”a word

or a place,

just a step

off the precipice

of_is,

not “into”

any”thing”

but off of_ …

which like space itself

is the medium which makes is

tangible as isness and the youness which emerges

from its belly—like a flower that begins to wilt from

the very moment of its conception until it hangs lifeless

at the point at which the transition to isn’t occurs at some

abstract future date—ride the eternal­_, which is neither_ or_, but only_,

the way a continent rides along the subduction zone of a geological plate,

until their invariable slide-under into notness…

12/13/2013
I notice that some more people have viewed my posts, since my last entry. I suppose, that if there are people out there who listen to Jandek, and Nurse With Wound, that there might also be a few who might like my DIY Turtle-Screed. Then again, the only similarity between the aforementioned and myself, is that they aren't necessarily that easy to pigeon-hole; although, people often try by using buzzwords and sound-bite phrases--as well as other facile labels that say more about the tendency to caricature than about the focus of the nomenclature in question.

This week I have had several recurrences of gout--which has, as the NRC once said of Plutonium, taken up residence--apparently in my heel. This isn't a problem until I start walking, when the intense pain caused by the weight being put on my ankle and heel, forces me to shift my bulk to my other foot, which soon begins to ache as well. It is a Promethean form of suffering; for, like that famous personage--who once gave humanity fire, and was forced to suffer for it eternally by having to endure the horrors of birds forever pecking out his liver (which always regenerated, so that it could be pecked out again)--my feet heal within a few days, only to be subject to the same blinding pain the following week, when the Uric Acid crystals again congeal within the sensitive flesh of that and other areas of my body. It looks as if I will be taking Folate and Vitamin C, and eating more spinach and lentils, as these are beneficial.

And, as Gout tends to focus the mind--mainly on the discernible nuances that animate one's pain--it tends to de-emphasize everything else. As I am sure that nobody who reads this is looking for, or interested in, advice on Gout, this doesn't bode well for readability. Of course, I should be back to my old self in a day or two, and revert to a more eclectic style of metaphysical analysis.

I will leave some pictures for those who require a daily Phlegm-nodule just in case.
Until my next communication,
The steward of the PhlegmTurtlePalace--home of the Mock-Turtle-Soup for the soiled, and the Neolithic Tortoise carapace.

Daily Phlegm Regurgitation
(or Turtle Soup for the emotionally soiled)
Some more pictures for whomever is actually looking and reading...By the way, I am in a public library, where all of the computers are arranged inconveniently close to one another; and, this woman next to me--who clearly has no sense of the concept of 'personal space'--is apparently micro-managing a term paper which her overtaxed daughter is trying to complete. I am, of course, annoyed by this, but I am not sure how to inform the woman of this admittedly minor problem, without appearing like an asshole. Of course, I have at times been an asshole, in situations very similar to this one, and that is precisely why I want to avoid any misunderstanding in this instance. My guilty conscience shadows my every whim, and constrains me by limiting my choices to only those that seem socially acceptable. Am I really such a repressed creature? Is the social crab-net, in which we are all entangled an unnecessary encumbrance? Only time will tell--but Freud did say so explicitly, for whatever that's worth--and I have to say that this woman's whisper could be used by the CIA for a Psy-ops mission--it's that irritating.

Well, I am getting off very soon anyway--And, what do you know, someone signed off a computer, and she moved to the other side. Thank you.
Goodbye  for now, all.

PhlegmTurtlePalace steward out.  

                                              Tomato and the Tiny World

It was all kitsch.  Tomato didn’t know what that word meant, but he felt that the sound of it—more precisely, the way it made him vibrate, as sound in itself was foreign to Claymation Fruits and Vegetables—captured something very particular about life in and around the Fruit Bowl. What this particularity was could only be expressed through a type of vibration, and that vibration would then be translated into an image. This image, which tomato saw in the depths of his gelatinous seed membranes, was that of a completely rounded reflecting eye. The eye was deeply set into a larger sphere that protruded several cherry stems from the base of its body, which was made of the same smooth and dark chitin-like material, except that the apparatus was not reflective.

Tomato did not know where he had seen such an image before, but he imagined it as something that could take one’s vegetableness and transform it into something easily identified. Once identified, it could be given a name, and then it would be unchangeable forever; and this, somehow, disturbed Tomato, who knew after all, that a Tomato was always in a state of flux. If he was called by, or resonated to, the vibration of Tomato it was merely a device of convenience, like a way of marking a place or a thing, or a quality, inside one’s consciousness so as to be better able to find it later on—not to confuse it with the ribbon of Carrot skin-fiber that you had initially tied around it as a simple matter of expediency.

Of course, this is often precisely what happened, and it appeared to Tomato that such a misidentification was like confusing the specific hardness of Carrot, with some universal quality called “Carrotness.” This would be a great way of describing Carrot-like things in the world, until some other reddish hardness emerged that was not Carrotness. How then, in such a case, could Carrotness be distinguished from this almost identical to Carrotness, Not-Carrotness?  And, even if a compromise was eventually made to include Not-Carrotness next to, but separate from, Carrotness what would happen when another quality emerged—one that may always have existed but that would likely have been misidentified—that was not, Not-Carrotness, but also different from Carrotness? Tomato could see where such infinite regressions were leading and she could understand how absurd they were, like ascribing gender to a piece of fruit—once it started, there was no way of ever stopping the back and forth, and beyond to the next successive level, that the process led to. Eventually, there would be infinite categories for various gradations of Carrotness, Not-Carrotness, Not-Not-Carrotness, and ad-infinitum.

This was the basic problem in trying to describe the world; namely that once it went from a state of isness to a state of Itness, and then ThisisItness, something, delicate but very much present in that world would thenceforth be required to wear a misleading sign. And, such a sign would never be the truth, as the ‘Truth’ had always been in the thing itself, not outside of it in a sublime cuneiform screen-crawl. It was enough to make one want to spew their seeds. There was another term for this of course, and like every other phrase translated from Tomato’s essentially FVW idiom, it could never really be uttered by a tomato—or a banana, or habanero pepper, etc.,—but was certainly known to Tomato; in fact, it was known to all who inhabited the Claymation FVW Fruit Bowl, and that expression was, ‘Chinese Box.’ Tomato saw himself as a tiny fruit, forever moving from one version of this box to another, without ever escaping his own reflection, which loomed like an afterimage in the shiny hulls of each successive manifestation of The Box. And, with each step in this endless process, Tomato felt herself to be less and less real.

But that was the very conundrum, for as Tomato had surely envisioned, the Claymation Fruits and Vegetables were not ‘real’ food-items at all, but mere resemblances, carved from the stuff of an unknown medium and posed by unseen and incomprehensible digits. How then, could a subject, that willfully misunderstood its own form and origins, as deeply as a Claymation Fruit, accurately appraise the distorted relationship between a thing and that simulacrum composed of its hypostatized ‘Thingness?’ And, could such a Fruit, or Vegetable (and, it must be added that Tomato, was himself a Fruit, or a Simulacrum of a Fruit, although the argument over which category properly defines the food-item on which she was based, is just another form of ‘The Box’) be capable in whatever form, or level of resemblance to that form, of actually reflecting on its own existence in the rarified language of contemporary Culture Theorists? Perhaps it would be better to ask Tomato to explain himself, in his own words; and alas, the fact that he has no actual ‘words’—as he has no vocal chords in which to shape them, and no ears to hear them—should not be an impediment, since denizens of the Claymation FVW, are highly inventive in finding alternate modes of expression. And, tomato, like most of her fellows in the Fruit Bowl, feels vibrations and inhabits meanings, often without the benefit of intervening symbols. Yet, it is precisely those symbols that Tomato has recognized as being central to the problem. Perhaps, he experiences them as well, but on some sublime level that those who merely observe the goings on in the Claymation world can only guess at.

Tomato, of course, doesn’t care—she knows not whether there are any cosmic witnesses to her drama, and has little patience for speculation beyond the level of the most sublime vibrations. Hence, he sets out to find a connection, or yardstick, through which to explain the Chinese box; one that, hopefully, will not also become another larger and more inclusive Chinese Box. This, of course, may prove to be difficult. Nonetheless, Tomato is determined, in a way that only a Tomato can be, and sets out to seek a mystical connection that might help explain the infinitely regressing puzzle of ‘The Box.’ To do that Tomato would have to find the ‘reflecting eye,’ from his gelatinous-seed vision, and to find it, she would need to seek out Banana, who was the only Fruit she knew to have successfully made the journey to the edge of Kitchen.

Banana was propped on the counter next to the Fruit Bowl. He was grimacing, and forming strange shapes with his lips that the proxies found humorous. They would giggle in unison, while their Claymation mouths contorted into tiny vibrating o’s, which would then begin expanding and contracting, causing them to giggle even harder. The giggle vibration went, ‘Tee-hee-hee-hee,’ and then repeated several times. It was like an impassioned prayer, and Tomato could feel the juices bubbling inside his seed-filled belly, as he became entranced by this strange new music. But, in this instance, Tomato’s purpose had to precede all other considerations; so he made his presence known to Banana, who indicated by fluttering his lips that they should find a more suitable place to communicate.

Banana pays careful attention as Tomato contorts his Claymation lips into various shapes and vibrates his gelatinous bodice for emphasis. Banana responds, sharing with Tomato his insight into the nature of Kitchen. A subliminal, cuneiform screen crawl undergirds the entire exchange, and features an impressive assortment of symbols that neither Banana nor Tomato fully comprehends, although the meaning is clear enough—they can feel it. Banana informs Tomato that if they want to understand the conundrum of “The Box,” that they need to investigate the tiniest parts of ‘The Tiny World.’ This advice seems paradoxical to Tomato, since the Box infuses everything, and the tiniest things can only be absorbed into its larger structure. Banana, however, is adamant on this point; because, as he goes on to explain (in the inimitable way that FVW denizens explain things to one another) only by observing the tiniest of the tiny,  which, after all, are part of everything, can they understand the biggest of the big—and nothing is bigger than the concept of The Box.

Banana opens his Claymation mouth into a perfect ‘o’ and blows out a small sphere that looks like a smoke ring. It shimmers brightly as it spins, turning orange and falling onto Table-Top with a soft flutter, like a citrus fruit landing in a pillow-lined basket. Tomato can feel the warmth emanating from this diminutive sphere. It has very tiny Claymation mouth lips, and Tomato has to peer very closely to see them contort into a half-circle grin. This is a sign of friendliness—and the little sphere vibrates happily like an unripened cranberry rotating in a wind-vortex. There was a sublime cuneiform screen crawl, and Tomato began resonating to a specific word—the word was Pixel.  It was only natural that Tomato should attach this free-floating idiomatic vibration to Sphere, who was still untethered and nameless. Once the two began to merge, Tomato could envision Sphere more clearly; but as Pixel, the tiny ball of orange energy, took on weight and mass, and lost his friendly grinning countenance. Pixel had now become a fact in the Claymation world.  

The diminutive ball of weighted mass had many surprises within, however. To prove the point, he suddenly grimaced in a tiny parody of Banana’s inimitable large mouth-‘O,’ and served up a much smaller sphere, which wiggled in a gelatinous dance of transformation, becoming in turn, a multi-pronged form, a sphere of rapidly changing shapes—whose motions reminded Tomato of a balloon full of wind-rustling strawberries—and, finally, millions of tiny flickering lights. The flickering lights would give way to other flickering lights, in an intimate ritual of energy transference. When Tomato tried to focus on the illuminated orb in front of him, all she could see was a single strand of wriggling fiber, and then nothing at all. This was obviously some sort of trick—why else would the sphere reduce itself to an absence, a void? Or, was this transformation into nothingness, sort of like a mouth-grimace, ‘O,’ a way of communicating something, perhaps something with meaning?  

Banana indicated that this was, in fact, Pixel’s intention. Tomato was shocked—he had never actually realized that an object so small could have intentions; then again, who would have ever accused a Claymation fruit of possessing thought vibrations and ideas? The world of Kitchen was simply suffused with odd surprises. And here was the oddest: Pixel was opening his energy-mouth so wide that it became clear that he wanted Tomato to jump inside. Tomato understood immediately, that if he did, he would be temporarily absorbed into the world of Pixel; that is, the world of the ever-shrinking sphere, and by extension the universe of the very small, and the tiniest of the tiny. If Tomato were to go into this minute dimension, he wanted to be confident that he would return from its unknown depths as the same Tomato that he was before he made the decision. Banana vibrated reassuringly that, the quavering shimmy of time would stop until that moment when he returned.

Pixel’s mouth-lips were opened so wide, that Tomato thought she could see an entire universe inside of them. As he readied himself to take the plunge, he tried to envision his malleable rubicund bodice contorting into the shape of a carrot. Tomato wasn’t entirely sure if this was working, but she suddenly felt herself being pulled towards the open mouth grimace, which now loomed as large as the terrifying event-horizon of Blender. No Fruit or Vegetable had ever returned from that horrible creature’s open-caw to tell the tale, but Tomato resonated with the fear it produced, and sensed the word, ‘Soupification.’ That fear resonance was soon dispelled, however, as a bubbly-band of ecstatic energy went through Tomato and settled in his seed membranes.  She could feel her Fruit-body being stretched like Pickled Okra, and getting all gooey and elastic, as she entered into the barrier separating the Claymation world of Kitchen from the Pixel-World of the very tiny.

When Tomato was fully absorbed, he felt for his seed membranes, and was reassured that they were there, and that he was fully intact. She could sense that she was now in a space without boundaries or points of clear reference, where light and dark pin-dots of energy exchanged characteristics in untraceable sequences. Pixel soon appeared, but as a holographic projection, who paradoxically took a form, which had no discernible mass, amidst a landscape devoid entirely of actual space. Tomato was confused by this strange state of being, as it wasn’t ‘being’ in any sense that might trigger a familiar vibration, but ‘being’ as a timeless jelly through which the smallest forms were amplified.

What Tomato saw next was a confirmation of his Kitsch vision from earlier that day—it was a large rendering of the chitin armature which held that same rounded-reflecting eye; seen in holographic relief; however, it revealed itself instead to be a lens through which images were imbibed and retained. This eye vibrated into a screen crawl that Tomato could discern as ‘Camera.’ More surprising was the realization that Camera was not an outgrowth of Pixel, but that pixel was an intangible quality retained by the Eye: a small point that articulated a miniscule part of a larger field, now transformed into something familiar to Tomato but beyond his conceptual reach. This ‘thing,’ or quality, made up every discernible moment in the pixelated frames of the FVW narrative of which Tomato was but a tiny part. Yet, the entire apparitional world to which this seemed to refer, had no center, no mass, and could be manipulated from any point on the very scale which Tomato now conceived as a measuring rod for these qualities.

Still, this particular unit of measurement would only retain its meaning for as long as Tomato remained in the world of the very small. Once Tomato reemerged back into Kitchen World, he would lose the uncooked-vegetable-strand of comprehension that was allowing him to at least partially grasp the strange universe that he had willingly fallen into. As he vibrated uneasily to the resonating meanings that seemed to collide with one another, like badly juggled fruits, inside his seed membranes, Tomato sensed the existence of a single point, or building block. This point took up no space, but paradoxically pulsated from every part of the pixel-field at once. Tomato could not understand how something could be nothing, and yet quiver from every conceivable direction, and do this without a central locus of emanation. Moreover, there could be no point of expansion to the vibration, as the field itself was already an expansion of the void—which meant pure nothingness. Yet, the point retained its quality of pointiness while shimmying everywhere at once, like a ripple in dishwater caused by the impact of a stray blueberry, that remained long after the blueberry sank beneath the suds, or floated off. One could extrapolate the center of the wave, its origin point, but could not conjure it visually. All of this led to an epiphany, a rare burst of insight for any creature from the Claymation world, although one familiar to the likes of Banana, who tended in his cogitative-vibrations towards the metaphysical.

Suddenly Tomato comprehended an expanded and more nuanced universe than he had previously imagined possible. He could now see clearly now, that Pixel was just one unit, repeated into near abstraction, representing things-of-the-world. Some of these things, in fact, were so strange and complex—being covered with soft outer-membranes, puffed up by strange nodules and hard lattice-like scaffoldings—that Tomato simply couldn’t understand exactly what he was now seeing. Many of the creatures of this world, in their full flowering, were filled with the same soft oozes as Tomato, and when you squeezed them tightly, magical goos would emerge that appeared to be the stuff from which everything else might be formed. But this impression didn’t resonate correctly, for the laws of this world reflected more than the sum of their parts, and Tomato could sense an element of consciousness that was clearly missing from Kitchen and the Claymation FVW. What this quality actually was, seemed too abstract to fit into any pixelated thought-idiom that he could conjure; but, it was a world of all inclusive size, in which being ran together in a confused jumble of intermingled sensations and ideas, like the watery ectoplasm which emanated from overcooked Okra.

Camera existed as one discrete element in this world of cross-pollinating bundled entities, and its existence was specialized, as it functioned as a kind of measuring device—a conveyer of symbolic meaning. Into this digitized frame of meaning were thrust Tomato and all of the other denizens of the Fruit and Vegetable World, who grimaced, gesticulated and vibrated indifferently, not knowing or caring about such larger concepts; which, after all seemed distant and abstract when compared with the specter of Hand swooping down for a Fruit-grab. But Tomato also felt that he could never be the same after such a realization—after all, what self-respecting Claymation Fruit could tolerate the notion that he/she was merely a symbol rendered concretely by an artificial process conceived in the imagination of a creature too complex to be named or even vaguely characterized. There was, he knew, another word for this, but he couldn’t discern its vibrations well enough to feel it clearly.

As he was pulled back out of Pixel’s mouth, reactivating the innumerably insurmountable gears of time, he knew that he would never get closer to that realization than he had been only seconds before. Soon, it would all be a half-recalled jumble of inexplicable images—lost to memory and requiring a conceptual apparatus that did not exist within the boundaries of Kitchen. Banana was unusually sympathetic to Tomato’s sense of having lost something that was never entirely understood in the first place. This was an anomalous state—after all, how could one recuperate a world that one had never actually experienced in the first place; yet, this was the source of the paradox. Other than Tomato, only Banana seemed capable of fully comprehending it.

As they climbed back into the Fruit Bowl exhausted and well exercised by the day’s adventure’s they could not help but view their surroundings in an entirely new way. Tomato knew that he had to communicate this new reality to the seemingly indifferent perishables assembled in the Bowl, but how he would go about this was anybody’s guess. What if they misconstrued his intent, and began to worship him as if he were the source of the information, instead of merely being an instrument through which it could be disseminated. Nothing could remain abstract for long in the Fruit and Vegetable World—everything had to be given a form, even if it resonated falsely. He knew that he would need Banana’s help, and that in the end it was just as likely that he would be ostracized for his generosity. He brought up the possibility of remaining silent about the whole episode instead, but quickly rejected it. He had a mission now, and he was going to fulfill it as his true purpose, even if he had to invent it first.

 

JZRothstein Final-Edit 12/10/2013