The day before Thanksgiving, and I am like someone having a one-way argument in a soundproof room. But I like the way that such rooms foreground the flow of bodily fluids amplified inside the curving tubes of the ear, and how they tend to focus one on the exigencies of personal thougts without the disruptions often imposed by linear narrative. Still, everyone who writes has some audience in mind, even if that audience is an imaginary one. My imaginary audience would be fairly diverse and yet serious enough about what they read to want to take something of importance with them after they were through--does that sound platitudinous? Perhaps, someone answers, but that someone is me, and I am still alone in this white-blog screen, which reminds me of the backdrop for most of the scenes in that old George Lucas film, THX 1138. Of course, it might be better if I had Donald Pleasance and Robert Duval to talk to. Then again, there is some benefit to being alone and not having to contend with the interruptions of others. Today, I would welcome such interruptions, on my blog, that is--in other areas I am a private person who is content to be alone most of the time, and is lucky enough to live in an area where contact with other people is infrequent; and not for any other reason than the fact, that I find solitary activities--like writing--so refreshing...
It snowed yesterday, and through the night, and I am not sure that I am too happy about that. Then gain, snow is always preferable to the cold weather that often follows in its wake...lets hope that this winter will be a mild one in Ohio.
The steward of the PhlegmTurtlePalace

                                                            Banana Learns A Craft

                                                             “…for something

                                              like history is trying to take place in secret meetings and bombs,

                                              something that does not include us, though we are there in force,

                                                            counting the dead”—Rodney Jones, Grand Projection

Banana grimaces and awakens from a slumber dominated by images of an immensely proportioned alien structure. His mouth opens into an elongated ‘O’ that soon begins to distort into the shape of a wobbling Hula-Hoop in decaying orbit around the waist of a child. Banana still bears the fading red stains from Tomato’s epic leak, and he doesn’t have much to say to his plump rubicund neighbor as a result. Moreover, he feels less and less inclined to join with the other fruits and vegetables in their daily rounds of gregarious gossiping and grimacing. He can grimace quite effectively all by himself, thank you; and he spends much of his time balanced against the rims of the Fruit Bowl, secretly hoping to fall out onto the hard floor below. Of course, for Banana, whose hide is thick and tough, this would barely cause any significant bruising, but might draw the attention of Hand.

Hand, of course, occupies that special place in the Fruit and Vegetable narrative, usually reserved for demons, monsters and ghouls. He—or she, as no one can really distinguish gender in Claymation—has five articulable digits, each capable of putting the squeeze on any produce item that is desired at any given moment. Worse, for the occupants of the Fruit-And-Vegetable-Bowl, is the fact that Hand has mercurial tastes, probably influenced by an unseen partner, and can be relied upon to do the unexpected. If Hand desires a Pepper, he might just grab Habanero, of whom the other Fruits and Vegetables have grown so fond; but, if Hand, wants an Apple, Red Delicious might get the grab, and will be remembered as he looked when ascending in the organism’s tight and strangling grip, as he rises into the depths of Kitchen never to be seen again. Hand, of course, makes no apologies; he is as Kitchen made him.

Banana slowly begins to sense that none of the Fruits and Vegetables is really that important in the grand scheme of things happening in Kitchen. This is disquieting in itself, but even more disturbing is the realization that Hand is the central player in the Claymation drama, and only appears to be a monstrous anomaly because the Fruits and Vegetables have been cast as edible bit-players. Banana is shocked and emasculated by this realization, and knows that he could never tell the others, as they will most likely get angry—thinking that this repugnant, but quite possibly accurate, insight is a reflection of his opinion—and end up tossing him out of the Bowl as a result. But it is not for Banana to decipher the complex tangle of creeper-vines undergirding his mysterious motivations. It is enough that Banana knows that he must leave the Fruit Bowl and find the truth.

Hopping out is easy enough. Some momentum and a push from the upended top of his black anvil crest—the umbilicus that once connected him to the collective banana consciousness that still seeks communion through symbolic reunification with the ‘Bunch’—is enough to pole-vault Banana over the rim and down onto the flat table surface below. Banana knows that he must descend to the lowest level of Kitchen in order to make it to the large and alien device that he has seen in his dream, which he is certain is just on the other side of a far plateau. Banana twists his elongated yellow body, goes into an unintentional small-‘o’ mouth-grimace and turns end-over-end like a Starfish until he builds up enough speed to glide down to floor level.

Star-fishing across floor level, Banana confronts his first obstacle in the form of a tremendous monolith whose sheer walls rise at too straight an angle for normal scaling to be effective. He realizes that this is the close-up view of the plateau on which the alien device resides. Getting to the counter-top will be tricky, but Banana is an inventive fruit of unfathomed intuitive capabilities. A single strand of fiber from his own hide will make the perfect tow-line that he can use to shimmy right up the sheer cliff face of this gargantuan butte; Banana, however, doesn’t want to compromise his body just for the sake of convenience, so he devises another arrangement. Using his own increased momentum, and an innate knowledge of a strange occult science called “Newtonian Physics”—which, Banana believes to be the ‘physics’ of Newts—he upends himself again and begins Star-fishing rapidly in a series of ever diminishing concentric circles. Once the circle begins turning in on itself, Banana uses the explosive thrust in momentum to corkscrew into a spiraling mass of centrifugally propulsive Caribbean fruit. He ascends off of the bottom level and into the rarified air of Kitchen, glimpsing the Claymation Fruit and Vegetable world in its totality for the first time.

The ‘Device’ is just as Banana has imagined it. It sits on a small platform, and has a large screen that is framed by a thin cladding of the same unknown material as the platform. When Banana looks at the screen, he sees an exact duplicate of the world he is part of—the Kitchen—but from an unusual angle. Banana adjusts his angle and is shocked by what appears. It is another Banana, who is staring back at Banana just across the narrow divide between his world and the world of the ‘Device.’ Banana tries to cross over, between the barrier, but the duplicate Banana steps in to prevent him from entering. Each time that he attempts to wedge himself against the screen so as to force his way into the ‘Device’ World, his opposite, immediately—as if through some form of telepathy—puts the identical part of his Banana physique against the screen to prevent Fruit-and-Vegetable-World, Banana from gaining access.

It is deeply frustrating, and Banana grimaces unwittingly, only to notice that his doppelganger has grimaced as well. Banana then turns his Claymation mouth into a wide ‘O’ grimace, denoting disgust. Device World Banana does the same, and at the exact same moment. Banana is horrified but secretly thrilled. His mouth opens and he intones, “What an amazing creature—it can read the intentions of other fruits!” Of course, no sounds actually come out of Banana’s open O-Claymation mouth, although he does sense a string of symbols denoting an identical meaning running across an unseen subliminal barrier. As expected the Device World Banana utters the exact same string of symbols. Fruit and vegetable World Banana is fascinated and perplexed. In rapid succession he displays an entire portfolio of grimaces, tweaks, undulations, gesticulating frowns, discombobulated sqwonks, and assorted clown-faces and fish-lips, all to his opposite counterpart, who does the exact same thing in the exact same order. There isn’t even a change in nuance. Both Bananas look across the barrier at their opposite, with a forlorn expression of resignation, tempered by the slightest hint of burning curiosity.

Suddenly, Fruit and Vegetable World Banana, has an epiphany. “It’s a duplicate, because it’s another me; if I can reproduce it on this side of the barrier, I can populate the entire Fruit Bowl with a never-ending supply of Bananas, with which ‘We’ can combat Hand. He can’t grab us all at once!” Banana is delighted with himself for having this insight and his Claymation mouth immediately converts into a half-circle grin. The question now is exactly how to go about reproducing Device World Banana, as another Fruit and Vegetable World Banana without upsetting the balance between the two realms. ‘But why should there be any balance between the two realms?’ wonders Banana. ‘Perhaps, the problem is in how I look at Device World Banana,’ he elaborates. ‘Maybe there is no Device World, only an apparatus which manipulates light, the way that Hand manipulates its five articulable digits.’

It is only a short Starfish-leap from this intuition to the realization that Banana can best reproduce a doppelganger by manipulating the Claymation realm itself. But doing this will not be easy, since Claymation is the bones and body of the Fruit and Vegetable World; and, getting outside of it is as impossible a task as standing at a distance from oneself to gauge the precise dimensions of one’s boundaries. Banana can sense however, that the Claymation World is not one continuous moment of uninterrupted movement, but a series of frames, each with a distinct beginning and end. Of course, if he shared this bizarre idea with the other Fruits and Vegetables they would think him mad, or worse, some form of charlatan. But banana knows that no matter how strange it sounds, his idea is true. However, if Banana’s very identity is construed as part of the Claymation World how can he retain the former while standing adjacent to, but not within, the latter? This is a question that Banana feels is unanswerable. Yet, he must try to do exactly this, if he is to be successful in his wild endeavor.

Banana stands rigidly, as if encased in petrified cantaloupe skin, and begins to visualize an invocation with which to summon Device World Banana over onto his side of the barrier. Banana now realizes that there is, in fact, no barrier, only a refracted world of light; and, that by extension, Device World Banana is also an illusion comprised of tiny seeds of light. Names have a tendency towards semi-permanence however, no matter what world one is residing in—and Banana still finds it irresistible to think of this apparition of luminescence as another version of himself. He slowly begins visualizing the spaces between the Claymation Fruit and Vegetable World and the unknown void from which it is generated; which he pictures as a series of tiny mandarin oranges dropping from a small chute onto a continuously moving conveyor belt. The oranges are as the frames in the Claymation world, and the conveyor belt is the passage of time, which makes it all appear continuous and uninterrupted. At the end of the Conveyor belt is a Hand. If there are too many oranges, the Hand cannot grab them all at once, so it picks a few and lets the others go. Banana sees this as a symbol of Hand’s limitations, as well as a something that diagrams the possibilities for fruit proliferation in the dangerous world of Claymation.

While lost in this stream of Claymation images, Banana begins reproducing his proxies on his side of the barrier. When he realizes that his plan is working, he becomes puzzled for a moment, as he doesn’t know exactly how he has managed to do this; but, it is enough, perhaps, that Claymation World has stepped in to actualize his fantasy and bring it within range of completion. The more Banana thinks about the process of making proxies, the more easily he is able to conjure them, until he finds himself in the company of over two dozen ripe and grimacing Bananas who are identical to him in every way.

Getting this group of gregarious fruits to listen to him however, is another matter entirely. They are all quite frisky, and, of course, resplendent in their thick yellow-hide jackets. Not one of them is interested in hearing what any of their counterparts has to say however, and they all seem to talk at once, sounding like a gaggle of cranberries in a swampy bog at harvest time. This is no way for mature Bananas to comport themselves, thinks Banana, before realizing that the circumstances here are actually quite exceptional. To speak with his proxies he must appeal to their sense of self-preservation; to their desire to save their smooth and lightly speckled yellow skins.

“Fellow Bananas, proxies, replicas,” he intones as a scrawl of obscure symbols passes underneath on a subliminal screen, “If you want to live, to ripen into the black splotchy sweetness of old age, we must all band together as a single bunch, and do our best to confuse Hand with our natural talents as imitation Claymation fruits.”  While the results are not as dramatic as Banana hopes, he notices that he has caught the attention of the proxies, who soon stop chattering, and indicate that they are prepared to make the journey back to the Fruit Bowl.

Banana can remember nothing of the journey back to the Bowl, he simply makes a seamless transition from imagining being back in the relative safety of the familiar redoubt, with his proxies, to actually finding himself in the same perch where he had been before his journey to the light-refracting ‘Device.’  ‘The Claymation World certainly acts mysteriously,’ he thinks. Now, however, he is surrounded by two dozen fellow Bananas, who are exact duplicates, and they are crowding out the other Fruits and Vegetables, who are grumbling at low frequency and grimacing large Claymation mouth-lip O’s. Hopefully, this will all be resolved soon, as Banana anticipates an oncoming Hand-grab, in the midst of the restive complaining and arguing that hovers about the Fruit Bowl like the sweet smell of oxygenating perishables.

Such whimsy is quickly put to the test when Hand emerges, mysteriously, from the outer reaches of Kitchen. It quickly grabs at Banana, but the proxies are waiting, and begin vibrating and moving about, trying their best to confuse Hand, who recoils in surprise. Banana’s anvil is shimmying like a crow caught on the roof of a barn during a thunderstorm, as he adds his intonations to the clamoring rustle amongst the proxies and the other fruits. Hand is at a loss for words, in a manner of speaking, as hand always does its hunting silently, and rears back as if in prelude to a charge. But Hand doesn’t charge, instead it seems to draw further into the recesses of Kitchen, and then goes down, like an apple knocked off a tree.

At first the Fruits and Vegetables cannot see where Hand has actually gone; but then Habanero Pepper, whose vision is first rate, indicates that Hand is lying motionless on the bottom level of Kitchen, the floor. Suddenly all of the Fruits and Vegetables are peering in the same direction, across the rim of the Fruit Bowl and down into the depths of Kitchen, to get a look at the now dormant apparatus. It is Tomato who calls it however, intoning that, indeed, ‘Hand is dead.’ For a second everything freezes, and Banana, momentarily believes that the Claymation World is playing its now familiar time-lapse games—that only he seems to notice—again. However, within seconds, the silence is broken with the loud vibrations of a Fruit and Vegetable cheer that causes a rapid transit of numerous arcane symbols across the subliminal screen below.

It is then that Habanero Pepper and Banana notice something odd. Hand is not alone, but appears to be attached to a larger apparatus, that consists of snaking limbs, a bulbous middle area, a large head-like protrusion, and—much to the chagrin of the Fruits and Vegetables who are gathered at the Bowl rim staring out at the monstrous manifestation in growing discomfort—another Hand. Banana points out, however, that neither hand, is moving, so he concludes, happily, that hand and its previously unknown brother, are both dormant, perhaps permanently consigned to the oblivion of non being. This promps the Fruits and vegetables to sing in unison: “Hallelujah, Hallelujah; Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelu-u-u-ja…Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hall-a-a-lu-u-u-jah… Hallelujah, Hallelujah; Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelu-u-u-ja.”

At that moment, as if inspired by the angelic singing of Claymation          Fruits and Vegetables, the head-protrusion begins to turn slowly. Suddenly, the eyes open, and they start looking around Kitchen, at first uncomprehendingly, and then with greater and greater awareness of what has just transpired. Banana looks at his fellow Claymation Fruits and Vegetables and thinks that he might have been premature in his assertion regarding the death of Hand. Now, there is a new and unfamiliar monster, and the denizens of the Fruit Bowl are all silent in nervous anticipation.

JZRothstein  11/25/2013

11/23/2013

Hello to whomever probably isn't there anyway,
I'm archiving some stuff--its a long process and it will take some time. If anyone is eavesdropping, I welcome any advice regarding the uploading of images, particularly when the images are attached to texts, like the text that I published today on the blog, "Explaining The Unexplainable."

Anyhow--I'm groggy from too much Valerian root last night, taken to counteract a strangely disembodied free-floating anxiety, that sometimes chooses to settle in my stomach like plutonium 'taking up residence' in a reactor core. My core is heating up, but far from anything close to meltdown...Which reminds me, if anyone has images of Shoreham nuclear reactor, please post them on my blog; and if you find it difficult to post images (and I am open to any hyper-modern, industrial, or unusual imagery that is out there), please tell me how I can make the blog available for inclusion of such images...Any questions?
No?
Well, I'm signing out for now,
phlegmturtlepalace  steward

                                (Dreaming Omaha pt1.)                   

                                                   Explaining The Unexplainable

 

“It seems very pretty,” she said

when she had finished it,

“but it’s rather hard to understand!”

(You see she didn’t like to confess,

even to herself, that she couldn’t

make it out at all.) “Somehow it

seems to fill my head with ideas—

only I don’t know what they are!”

 

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

The concept of trying to explain the unexplainable appears self-contradictory because western languages are logocentric. Thus, there is a tendency to assume that the concept of making visible, what is obscure, or invisible, must cancel itself out. This is because the words we ordinarily use in the service of describing an, arguably, shared reality do not, in fact, possess those very containers, or conceptual apparatus, necessary to clarify esoteric experiences and “constructs;” which, by definition—lacking context in the ordinary sense of the word—are suppressed, and regarded as inherently irrational, or simply unimportant.  Hence, the question around which such an argument can be framed is: ‘what does one do when the available forms of expression—the Tupperware through which ordinary words, sentences, paragraphs, (or figurative tropes such as hyperbole, metaphor and synecdoche), etc—are deemed inadequate or irrelevant to explain the integrity of the content of these self-contained forms’?

If one regards the idea that the interrogation of accumulated meaning, in language, or poetry, is (or can be) primarily concerned with the relationships between words—rather than necessarily being measured in accordance with the assumption that some form of globalized meaning be used as a central criterion—then, it follows logically that, it need not be essential for it to be “rooted” in the commonly understood world of tangible phenomenon. Instead, a poem can exist as a self-contained map of something experienced outside of the parameters commonly used to frame such experiences (I.E., constructs), since context, or a usable frame of reference, is not necessary to heighten that aforementioned connection—as it need only exist between the elements of the poem themselves, without having to refer to any recognizable theme outside of those relations. In this sense, a poem can be a closed system without being understandable in the Cartesian sense of cause-and-effect relationships between objects that refer to a closely-mapped reality outside of the aforementioned concerns of the poem itself.

The ways in which such ‘heuristic’ hypotheses  are used in areas extrinsic to aesthetics can help explain some of the dynamics that animate the everyday categories into which the stuff of  ordinary experiences are frequently catalogued for the sake of convenience. Hence, a culturally contingent picture of the world being described is itself a product of the mediated history of the language used to magically invoke it as a ‘reality.’ As a result, the potential to interpret all manner of impressions within these sometimes misleading methods of recording and analyzing experience hints at the underlying complexity of what often appears deceptively simple or obvious.

There is also the question of how in our everyday interactions with other people and environments we employ these heuristic framing devices as ingenious ways of compartmentalizing complex experiences, thus rendering them portable and easier to evaluate. The inverse of this process however is that one’s world can only expand to the proportions allowed by the interconnected system of names and categories that are employed for this purpose. This is commonly understood to reflect the specialized system of nomenclature and classifications, or taxa, into which aspects of one’s existence and experiences are catalogued and categorized, hence standardized, for more efficient evaluation and reference. The difficulty, of course, arises from the tendency to take these artifacts of the attempt to group various experiences—using a method similar to how animals and plants are often classified—into usable and practical containers, and then elevate them to a level of equality on par with the often subjective and quirky processes of continuing, interconnected, perception that reflect the raw stuff of unmediated existence. Whereas the former is a kind of map key, coded in the language of discrete, and well defined—therefore self-contained—experiences, organized into an hierarchy of tropes that does not reflect the more chaotic maelstrom of nature’s actual workings; the latter, is the untamed thing to which that map key refers. And, it is only through the special code offered by a conventionalized and rational system of naming that this chaos of life can be corralled and civilized, so that it can be made available for reflection. One might think of the way that a library organizes ideas into easily located books and other media, as an example of this process.

This very device however, so clever and portable, creates the environment upon which later map-makers, freely and without pause for reflection, reconstitute the entire process as a single entity. In this way, we have all become reliant upon the code itself to explain the landscape to which it refers, and only dimly resembles, as if they were indistinguishable. Such confusing of abstract ‘idea’ with the ‘world-in-itself’ creates a gap in the way in which that ‘life-in-the-world’ can be described. This gap is narrowed by the passage of time until it is no longer visible, except to the most determined observer, and creates a consciousness that loses sight of the true richness of this no longer recoverable awareness of itself as an ongoing spontaneous entity. It is here, at the junction of the standardized, usable past, and it’s almost forgotten origins, via a foot-path leading to an overgrown weed-rich garden of unexplored complexity, where it becomes necessary to speak the world subjectively and on its own terms, without compass or clear frame-of-reference, as those very things have distorted and cut it off from our sanitized simplification of its primal, unmediated, experience.

In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave this tragic loss of the richness offered by a transcendentally experienced ‘reality’ is presented as a form of deprivation. The individual is portrayed as a passive consumer of debased representations of reality, now reduced to shadows of objects cast on the walls of a cave and distorted further by the uneven light of a fire that is also a symbolic caricature of its own inferiority compared to a more potent form of illumination. When this denizen of the cavern is suddenly released from his sensory bondage into the penetrating sunlight of Plato’s metaphorical world that exists beyond ordinary perceptions, he is overwhelmed by three dimensional objects which can now be experienced in their true depth through all five of the senses. Unfortunately, however, nothing in his limited experience has prepared him for this encounter with a world of such unfamiliar vigor and resonance, and this precipitates an existential crises: how does one describe the truth of this viscerally experienced, transcendental reality, when there exists no known language or system of concepts with which to convey its intensity and complexity? The reason for this, as it is implied in Plato’s narrative, is that the very language, ideas and concepts which might be used to express the essence of this epiphany about the nature of the world, has been impoverished by its continued application to the limited palette of events which occur in the environment of the cave. Hence, all of the familiar methods of communicating the nature and depth of one’s experiences, have become so thoroughly associated with a specific and very mundane order of sensory impressions that they could never adequately convey the heightened complexity and richness of the new environment into which Plato’s cave dweller now finds himself. Thus, he is limited by the inadequacy of a language adapted over time for an entirely different order of experience. To use such a specialized set of cliché-worn containers to capture an essentially foreign index of place, would be to invite misunderstanding, apprehension and perhaps even ostracism; since, as Plato also makes clear, nothing is more disturbing to the uninitiated than exposure to the blue-prints of an alien world for which no corresponding maps exist. One must either endeavor to reinvent language so that it fits the shape of one’s experience, no matter how strange and unfamiliar, or one must retreat into incommunicative silence.

Through this process, and inversely, via its absence, we may now see how the symbolic meanings associated with certain idioms and the worn-carpet of associations which gradually erode words, like moss-covered stones in a jetty rubbed smooth by the cumulative effects of water, create a need for new modes of expression. This is, of course, on one level, exactly what art is for. And, the metaphors—and other forms of symbolic illustration—inherent in the structure of its articulation of existence, function as touchstone’s for translating the arcane into an overdetermined but  conceptually comprehensible  map of experience. However, as language and culture unfold into elaborately branching tangles of associations—perhaps similar to the way in which an origami bird or elephant begins to reveal manifold angles and shapes as it ages and frays like an hallucinogenic floral display blossoming in time-lapse—the dense array of meanings which make it coherent also begin to stretch and mutate. And, while such mutation is also part of the expression of art, it frequently evolves into a complex bramble-knot of self-referential, and inter-textual, meanings that balance a growing reflexivity with the tendency for such cultural forms to take on unusual shapes. The latter often react to the gravitational pull of shifting cultural gestalt’s by suddenly steering into unexpected directions like elaborate parade floats that loosen from their moorings and then go sailing across those parts of the city rarely visited by festivals or airborne balloons. All of this, of course, adds new layers of import to expressions already overloaded with significance.

Perhaps, at this point in my analysis it would be more accurate to compare the meanings embedded in the sounds used to convey the intangible aspects of language to the symbolic integers in algebraic equations, such as x or y. Mind you, this is intended as an heuristic metaphor, not as a literal analogy. Nonetheless, these coded digits put in the form of letters convey the same mysterious unavailability of meaning as their linguistic counterparts, provided that one does not take the analogy to the literal extreme of assuming that idiomatic import can be quantified as if it were a mathematical calculation. One might visualize this process by imagining that each word is a separate container made of colored glass, and that their respective contents are concealed by these translucent hues, with the aforementioned algebraic symbols used to denote the mystery residing within each flask. In this way, the full significance of their meaning always remains partially obscured, denoting the extent to which each can be emptied and refilled with revised or even completely novel signifiers.  

If part of the connotation of even the most familiar expressions, are already hidden from view in this way, what does that suggest about the combined whole, when expressions are strung together like beads of oddly textured glass into sentences and paragraphs? If meaning is cumulative, with residues gradually adhering until they form calcite deposits which grow into separate tree-ring like narratives of etymological usage, then it may also be true that such discrepancies may provide a code for recuperating some aspects of lost context. This does not mean that the hidden vocabularies within each word, curled up like semantic alligators emerging into the multidimensional negative space of an MC Escher lithograph, can really be made available in any modern framework; rather, they can be only partially reconstituted, and primarily for the purpose of mapping out the process of how meanings are lost and discarded in the temporal flux that occurs imperceptibly over many years. Ultimately, what is gone cannot simply be returned, and those stories buried deeply inside the DNA helixes of every nuanced dialect, are more like intimations of a fossil record denoting the existence of an ancient ox bow lake in a Mesozoic river-bed than they are like simple equations whose meanings can be extrapolated from missing integers. All of this, of course, is rendered more difficult by the fact that contingency, itself alters the tropes inherent in signs, often beyond recognition, and in complete disregard for a word’s former history. This is because language is open ended, given to an impressionistic gloss of metaphor; and thus subject to complex distortions, over time, which transfigure it in the same way that the aforementioned geological processes would alter a prehistoric river bottom.

Of course, even this comparison is flawed, as there are accurate methods available to reimagine the environment of the latter, but no way, save for another glossing of metaphor to attempt to re-invoke the essence of the former. This, of course, is what allows languages of all sorts to bend and flex into the odd combinations and contortions of art and poetry: namely, that elusive quality of elasticity. This is also why the ostensibly inexpressible always needs to be reimagined, as such excavations reinvigorate the language as a whole, even if their quarried relics must be extrapolated in the speculative manner of divining pig-entrails, rather than in the reifying context of geometric inference.

The differences in the methods used to recuperate meaning—between say the avant-garde’s of the last century and their more accessible counterparts—might be summed up using the allegorical example of taking two different hypothetical approaches to persuading an alien-visitor, who has never seen or even imagined an ocean of liquid water, that certain biological forms exist and thrive even in its deepest regions. For example, one might explain the existence of a particular bioluminescent fish species, living far beneath the deceptively static looking surface of the ocean, to our metonymic alien—who has no frame of reference for any marine environment—by inviting this alien into the ocean. This could be achieved by utilizing a small deep-sea submersible object. Within the protective hull of this high-tech submarine, our hypothetical visitor, and human host, could travel to the very depths of the ocean; both, to point out how this particular fish interacts on its own terms within the framework of its own environment, and to give our curious, but skeptical, alien guest a glimpse of just how different this part of the world looks when one is sitting near the bottom of several miles of water, in a dense hydrosphere into which no sunlight can reach. In such an environment, one would point out to one’s visitor the oddness of other formations, such as the cracks in the ocean floor from which black-smokers emerge—large vents exuding dark clouds of sulfur and other chemicals—and the various flora and fauna ( odd undersea plant forms comprised of separate individuals forming entire colonies of sulfur drinking tubed-shaped flowers, and the numerous species of albino crabs and shrimp, that exist at their rims). This would reinforce how a  bioluminescent fish, for example, could exist at such depths; and would be, in fact, a natural consequence of the vicissitudes of such an environment; a fact less easily understood, if the fish were merely caught on a deep-sea line and pulled back up to the surface; hence; removing it, even if only temporarily, from the unique setting that justifies its singular adaptation. In much the same way, the process of explaining the obscure on its own terms, while sacrificing a certain amount of concision and clarity, comes much closer to recuperating the esoteric shades of meaning once embedded so firmly within the fabric of language.

All of this speaks of a ghostly residue, adhering to the surface of words and phrases, like an almost transparent sausage-casing or gelatin sheen; one hinting at the existence of a lost code now folded into the compactness of the words that were formerly employed as catalysts for its explosive emergence into a world of shared perceptions. The subsequent fragmentation and consolidation of memes of communication into discrete envelopes of carefully parsed out meanings has both insured the specificity and clarity necessary for communicating the stylized abstractions of a technologically sophisticated world; and, simultaneously, reduced many complex and difficult ideas into tiny compartments sufficient only for sound-bites and mass-produced clichés. The tragedy in this is that what has been pruned away into effective displays of linguistic topiary has also transformed a previously interconnected, forested, architecture of foliage into a contested memory of superfluous shrubbery. Thus, even as art forms continually adapt their recuperative properties, the newly aestheticized connection to a wider framework of meaning that they reveal will be compromised by the very artificiality of the process of elucidation, hence reducing it to a rather elaborate form of highbrow nostalgia. Ultimately, we cannot revisit the past through language, only insert it within the frame of the present, and ineluctably change it into a reflection of our own desires and sentiments. In this sense the past has indeed passed into the past.

 

JZRothstein (final edit) 8/20/2013

                                           Intention in Art and Poetry

In art of any kind, intension is not only opaque but, in terms of audience reception to a given work, largely irrelevant, as one’s audience will invariably reconstitute the supposed objectives behind that work in accordance with their own sensibilities. The latter are, of course, far from transparent or autonomous—in the Cartesian sense—as they are the result of the interface between western concepts of agency and their intersection with the circulation of myriad cultural and political discourses. The resulting development of reception oriented notions of meaning in art is determined, then, by a tableau of mediated, yet still vital, audience expectations. This is true for poetry as well since the import of an agglomeration of connected words can only signify within a framework that is mediated by audience expectations; thus, the signification of a work—the interpretational field in which it is situated as a sign—must organize itself, in art, within, or at least in reference to, a particular set of assumptions that together constitute the epistemological ether in which the orbits of various works are embedded; and which, as a result, largely determine the direction of their respective gravitational forces, although not their intensity. What this means is that art and literature—of all types—are constituted in relation to a set of conventions that exist in proximity to the work in question the way that gravity exerts its coercive pull on the mass of a given object, even as that object also coerces the other objects which act upon it, thus creating a labyrinthine gravitational matrix whose direction is in fact a product of modifying pulls from all directions simultaneously. In such a byzantine arena of interpenetrating and forceful motion, the mass of a body does not exist autonomously—as there would be no perfect vacuum against which its mass could be measured—but always within a gravitational field. My point here, of course, is in reference to an hypothetical audience, reception, and is not intended to reflect on the autonomy of an artist’s intentions—the latter being incidental to the former; and, their integrity not at issue.

Likewise, the meaning of the aesthetic sign—the way it signifies—can never be determined, even within the relatively hermetic sanctuary of pure artistic intentions; since, once the product of the artist’s desire, the work itself, is exposed to the scrutiny of others, its meaning is immediately distorted, amplified, overdetermined and re-cooked, in a sense, as a necessary function of the interaction between work and audience. This does not take away from whatever autonomy as an object the work may                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           possess, in the same sense that differing gravitational masses, in reference to the placement of heavenly objects, do not affect their volume, only the way in which that volume is mediated by the larger environment. In an analogous fashion all works of art, are contingent in reference to both import and intentionality. Thus, a work can have the most pointed intentions but still be creatively misconstrued by its audience. In fact, such misinterpretation is to some degree both foreseen and intended by the artist, since he/she knows that the lasting value of a work is an outgrowth of the complexity of the various interpretations it is availed of.  By extension, the overdetermined nature of the richest interpretive schemata are a product of translucence, even opacity, rather than purity of vision, since the latter can be obscured by the radio static that tends to overwhelm the narrowest of tonal signals, no matter how clear at the outset. Conversely, it is the broad band signal, transmitted in all directions by the large, expansive, sloppy, even vague, work—out of whose layered miasma emerges the mythical phantasms of self-recognition in an audience, often subsequently attributed to “genius”—which provides the most fertile ground for investing the feelings and emotions needed to create what one art critic has termed “the erotics of engagement.”

These aforementioned “erotics” are the basis for perceiving both meaning and complexity within a work. They are, in every sense, the outgrowth of the tension between the desire to attribute specific import to the work of art, and the ineffability produced by the invariably un-sayable essence that grows from the metaphorical field within which any specific work is conceived. Hence, the desire to place the work in context and to speak its significance is offset by—although rarely in harmonious balance with—the deep uncanny feelings that are the unique outgrowths of autonomous aesthetic productions. And here is where the autonomous work of art is at its most paradoxical, being both an intangible vapor and a palpable expression interwoven with the materiality of its container: that container being the language of the work, however singular, and however untranslatable into the argot of the Cartesian paradigm that informs the critical frame of reference into which it is often mistakenly placed. I say “mistakenly” because, however temporary the insertion into a particular discursive context, such contextualization marks the autonomous work with the grammar—ergo, the ideology—and the assumptions buried in any given mode of transcription. Thus, the procedure itself modifies the syntax, feel and balance of the work, making of it a transducer that processes its singular waveform into that of whatever energy is used in its alteration.

This “innocent” attempt to translate an aesthetic idiom—being mindful of the fact that aesthetic idioms are by nature untranslatable, a condition that underlies the subsequent paradox inherent in endeavoring to make them understood (since to be understood is to be controlled, to be known, to be caricatured and smoothed out, rendered comprehensible, and therefore sanitized)—strikes at the very core of the profound nature of positivistic criticism’s misunderstanding of art. This “mis-comprehension” is closer in nature to a willful attempt to squeeze all examples of autonomous aesthetic expression into the standardized napkin-holder compartments of the Cartesian ideological gestalt that undergirds much of the content of this theme-and-symbol based form of critique. This fact is often concealed beneath the misleadingly extensive pedigree of the aforementioned style of criticism and its many related forms. Consequently, adherents as disparate as Philip Rahv, Clement Greenburg and Lucy Lippard could be said to all share a certain basic constellation of assumptions regarding the comprehensibility of all art, despite the fact none of the diverse critics mentioned above, and few of their myriad bedfellows, would ever dare paint themselves into the same positivistic canvas with such a broad brush. And, it would be unfair to make of this category-of-convenience anything more binding than a heuristic device intended to underscore the way in which their distinct methods play into the myth of accessibility that has reduced the over-determined, allegorical, quality of much western aesthetic expression over the course of the last several centuries into a misleading and falsely reductionist gestalt.

The latter has subsumed the entropic beauty of the most difficult and thought provoking works within a series of discrete containers whose programmatic simplification of their byzantine metonymic, and metaphorically over-determined, range of motifs has partially imprisoned their full dioramic scope the way that the luckier of Soviet political exiles were once carted off to the frozen half-way houses of the ‘New Socialist’ industrial showcase cities. And, much like the Sovietized advance-guard, pioneers sent to domesticate newly urbanized Siberian spaces—coercively entrusted with tidying up the various cultural and technical infrastructures of these jerry-built cultural redoubts of the post-Stalinist era—the coterie of post-Cartesian critics who make diverse aesthetic visions palatable to specialized market-sensibilities, have at least created a space into which such works can be insulated from the isolating cold that characterizes the unfortunate lot of those artists and works that find themselves outside-of-history. Thus, the former are luckier than their Gulag-inserted predecessors since the ‘post-modern,’ critical gestalts, practiced by many self-proclaimed arbiters of artistic value, during the past half-century, have provided more hotel-like gilded rooms, and more freedom of movement, conceptually speaking, for the various films, paintings, poems, etc., whose value they have consistently mediated within a soft-pedaled positivistic framework, even when they have remonstrated to the contrary.

This partial imprisonment of artistic desire within the half-way house heuristic stop-overs of both the modern museum-instillation summary and its natural correlative in the gallery-show pamphlet has helped standardize the very language of artistic criticism in a manner consistent with a greater attention given to the marketing of art as an aesthetic lifestyle-accouterment. The promotional schemes used for various forms of literature have also followed in the footsteps of this slight paradigm shift towards a greater appreciation of the positivistic aspects of all of the arts both as marketable commodities and as “decorative appliances” or “aesthetic wallpaper.”  And, while this approach appears superficially at least, to embrace an exploration of nuance and complexity, it subtly re-shifts the focus of the entire discourse towards a newly re-christened nomenclature of the niche and its associated atmospheric sub-categories.

The full outcome of this permutation will, of course, remain stubbornly elusive, at least until the entire ramifications of the long-term marriage of art and commerce, potentiated by the broad dissemination of a marketing oriented “Wall Street” ideology—one, that has been around for quite some time but never in such a concentrated form or with such an obviously negative effect on aesthetics, as already seen in other aspects of the same “Total-Marketing”-Culture, approach—are fully felt in the realm of aesthetic production. This is just an extension of Capitalism’s ingenious built in, dynamic, mechanism for incorporating even those discourses that seem to have inoculated themselves against its much touted excesses of co-opted inclusion, concealing the Rice-Krispy’s-trajectory of their modus operandi in order to resist annexation into that very territory. (Marcuse, p57-61) Yet, it is capital’s complete disregard of ideology, position, or aesthetic placement that allows it to so successfully gentrify even the most artistically obscure neighborhoods, provided, of course, that some form of even the most minute sub-market already exists to justify the initial incursion into such ordinarily neglected communities. When the latter is not present, the invasion does not usually materialize in any but the most disconnected and marginal form—the obtaining of certain subsidiaries for example, or some other indirect means of benefiting from an already existing market which is otherwise thankfully ignored. However, even the appearance of the mass-merchandising paradigm in contiguous areas can effect a substantial change in niche markets that have always served distinct and non-mass-market oriented, bohemian communities. And while the world of mass-produced objects—however essential to, or even intertwined with, various intellectual and aesthetic disciplines and practices, such as experimental music CD’s or philosophical tomes published by university presses—is often seen as distinct from the more rarified forms of fine arts production, in many cases they are marketed in precisely the same way; both, presented as specialized works for unusual (meaning, educated, intellectual fringe, or elite, etc.,) audiences; all representing small sub-markets whose distinct demographics are rapidly being anatomized, or subdivided, if you prefer a metaphor culled from the competitive world of real-estate, into small discrete plots, each with their own unique, but ultimately reproducible (read: manufactured) aesthetic flavor.

In other words, the world of capital is just now, when it is beginning to teeter from greed and overly-aggressive market-saturation practices, becoming adept at the art of micro-marketing to specialized, minority (meaning, in this case, the extremely well educated, or the super-well alienated; and, yes, there is definitely a connection between the two) audiences—those whose aesthetics run towards the unique, avant-garde, or that which was formerly held to be completely un-marketable. This small category, then, intersects the fine arts, since appealing to consumers—if that word can actually be used to describe the not-quite literal consumption of ideas, say, transpiring between artist and audience at a Joseph Beuys instillation—of Anselm Keifer, for example,  is both in principle and in practice, much like attempting to sell pre-commoditized identity-constructs to the equally self-conscious (read: aware of the underlying processes involving, and therefore more cynical about, the machinations of marketing intangibles like cultural sensibility) audiences of avant-garde electronic rock bands like Nurse With Wound. Nonetheless, the trend is moving ineluctably in that direction.

The relationship between this new culture of stylized, marginal-niche reception, and the commoditized, self-reflexive, identity constructs, into which it is absorbed, forms a closed circuit. This circuit can be conceptualized as somewhat similar to the mythical uroboris; the worm who consumes its own tail continuously, until, presumably, it disappears entirely. This paradox is the consequence of the diminishing returns that often result when self-referential identities begin to consume their own past through the texts of contemporary aesthetic narratives. This feeding, on the cicada-corpse of one’s own history, tends to create a culturally incestuous sensibility, even as irony sets in to cleanse out the husk of what was once a more variegated and complete circuit of inter-communicative texts The subsequent gestalt, marginalizes its own production of discourse, by fetishizing it as the romantic consequence of the rapid evolution of an sentimentalized otherness that hectors its audience with the myth of its own un-corruptible purity—its staunch refusal to be absorbed into the play of commodities—even as it is being reproduced as a template to be further digested later into the bodies of other secondary cultural texts. (Debord, p 136, paragraph, 190) This gradual coopting is not simply hypocrisy, but rather the result of a process that emerges from the contradictions inherent in the niche-audience’s self-reflexively complex identification with the performance of marginality inherent in the aforementioned cultural texts.

Of course, there are certain analytical, pop-cultural, paradigms which would assert that such coopting encodes related forms of cultural production with a certain amount of resistance. (Kellner and Best, p273)  This is true, insofar as such ideas are still resonant in their newly encoded subtexts. More frequently, the alteration of context has a distorting effect on whatever subversive material remains intact, through whatever system of memes into which it has been re-inscribed, thus allowing for the absorption of traditional cultural codes into its now altered structure. (Marcuse, p64) This subtle transformation in coding makes the text’s subsequent diffusion into the larger play of commoditized signs more reflective of the latter’s dynamic elasticity, than of any kind of true resistance to the hegemony of the basic underlying assumptions that survive such cosmetic transfigurations, on an almost daily basis, in a culture dominated by new technologies and the ever more eclectic mingling of various aesthetic and discursive forms. (Foster, p 167)  In this context, the encoding of subversive material functions as a vaccination against the larger paradigm’s becoming infected by the otherness of this sub-textual, underground, remnant. Thus, the latter survives on a molecular level, so to speak, while being altered, in a cellular fashion, as if colonized by a virus. Hence, it is in this way, one might say, re-engineered, so that it can accommodate a new system of master meanings, or codes. One need only watch the subtle way in which the comedies of Judd Apatow use humor to re-codify the ever-changing boundaries between novel and more marginally subversive outsider discourses, to see how such dynamics work.

It is possible then to conceive of the dynamics of postmodern reception as a strategy for recuperating and balancing a discourse that seeks to re-establish a master-narrative based on the primacy of commodity-oriented cultural production, while at the same time functioning to confirm a homeostasis amongst competing social possibilities opened up through the use of novel technologies. This, of course, transcends the arena of the arts; and, it will be left to other critics and historians to continue the work of attempting to contextualize the confusing array of contradictory cultural codes and assertions now circulating through this economy of intertwined production. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that even in the presentation of avant-gardes—as semi-autonomous realms, not responsive to the ethos of the larger circulation of consumerist tropes—there is hidden in plain sight the same tendency to organize competing cultural claims into an equivalent hierarchy of values, and to observe, through an appropriately foggy matrix of aestheticized nomenclature, many of the same assumptions and principles. This is, of course, an old critique, in the sense that it re-affirms the process of gentrification and absorption in the arts; but it is one which attempts to assess the rapidly transformed appearance of these processes as a response to new technologies, and shifting codes of audience reaction. If the tendency is to comprehend these dynamics in terms of an unchanging process of Marcusian assimilation, it must be said that the rapid shifts in other areas of the culture are transforming the very nature of how such a process function, and in doing so, distorting it, perhaps, beyond recognition. This essay then, is intended only as a marker, a buoy of sorts, to map out the direction and dispersal of the tidal flow of such cultural transmogrifications, while asserting its ties to the already existing dynamics of what Marcuse referred to, perhaps clumsily, as Repressive Desublimation. (p56) Such theoretical constructs are, however, stretched to a point of distortion by the pressure placed on them by historical and technological change; and in this, lies the hope that such change will alter those very relationships and place aesthetics in a new position relative to the organizing hierarchies of twentieth-century capitalism—one which might be inspired by something other than the rigid unifying principles of other familiar ideological constructs, and instead create something entirely new. And, while the transitional ethos of the present time (the so-called postmodern period) suggests the possibility of such transformation, it also seems to reaffirm an older order that still undergirds and motivates the seismic shifts that bring about such change. Only time will tell if this kind of transition is a gestural illusion or a harbinger of a deeper new reality.

 

                                        

                                                                 Works Cited

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1991) Postmodern theory: Critical interrogations, New York: The Guilford Press.

Debord, Guy (1994, orig. pub. Date, 1967) The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books.

Foster, Hal (1985) Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Seattle: Bay press.

Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon Press.

                                                The Human Lip Room

Me and Double-Rice are gliding through the center of the city, down automated sidewalks surrounded by the eardrum ringing machinery that pairs everything around us to its lowest common denominator: movement. We’re high on Scopolamine-Toast, and the edges have a fuzzy dried egg-yolk feeling like finding oneself in a dream based on a Chemical Brothers song after too many donuts. ‘Dig Your Own Hole and keep the spade’ say the wise one’s; that way nobody can ever find out where you went, cause you’ve hidden the only real clue. The moles might know, but they never talk, and they’re mouths are always filled with dirt anyway, so it’s impossible to translate it back into a known tongue, especially when the fee is a mud-spit in the eye. Some knowledge is just not worth having; and fuzzy sight, even temporarily, is too great a risk for the lone, unaccompanied, Swat, down here in the Chip.

Double-Rice is flying on Toast-induced inspiration today, and says that he can find the Human Lip Room, and steal the only evidence of our official existence from the Master-Cylinder—his pet name for the place otherwise known as “P-P;” ‘Paranoid Palace, in the colloquial, where information is sifted like sand from molecular scraps of diamond, down to the fine-point of a single strand, as distinctive as a benzene ring or a fingerprint. The ‘Room,’ is in one apartment, on one gigantic floor of one high-rise tower in a single, tremendous, housing project—each building an exact duplicate of the one adjacent to it— in a city where such structures are million-fold and growing. We check out Clinton-Projects, Cheney-Houses, and the Bush Bastion and myriad other redoubts—even the Obama-Sphere, the luxury towers that stretch out over the river like an arcing prism seen through tinted-glass. Dead presidents all of them, whose names are as meaningless to us, as the history books from which they sprang disfigured, by our complete indifference.

The world is as opaque as we are, and nobody bothers to give their name anymore—just a few letters, a moniker, a fragment of a self, like crumbs from a much larger but indistinct bread-loaf, tossed under a moving lectric-monkey-bus for already distracted arthritic pigeons;  and, our very instincts could get us ground-round, underneath like unsuspecting birds. In fact, I dream-worlded that very same scenario, several nights past, when I drove on a coastal road, unchanged since Five-Boroughs-Days, covered with dirty white Seagulls, some still sleepy from long flight across the garbage-lands, and soon began hearing the crunching of bones under tires, and blood squirts, minced bodies and feathers flying in frenzied disorientation. I woke up swearing off chicken and anything else wish-boned, or beaked. Such promises last only as long as stingy dream-memory stays awake however, and I am soon grinding down winglets with the rhythmic pulsations of Solar-automated teeth in time for the Toast and its power to revive dulled appetites, as we make fruitless inquiries into rumors about the Room.

But this is exactly where Double Rice shines, because he is a master at extracting information from even the most media-closed, White-housing, sidewalk-minder, and can see inside the superficial indifference of virtually all  Mr-Limped-lipped, fish-mouths, in his quest for the HLR—our Grail, our Jack Kennedy Head-Shot, our hidden Osama. Still, bad shrimp-info-tune-masters White-House us down dead end corridors and Nixon-Says, Cul-De-Sacs that hold little interest and divert us from the Arabian-Oil-scent of our fabled Room. Double Rice is feeling the effects of the Toast, and he’s going into that mythic 1967-trance that brings visions, sweet fables and, pre-insight blow-back into the thought-chamber, like unwanted flies accompanying a Blue-Morphis larvae into the silkworm shed—in plain-headline, the destructive and the dazzling, which are both equally useless here.

“Listen Keds—he always calls me that because of my sneaker-tread-pattern arm-tattoo—these motherfuckers are trying to White-House us onto the Bylines; I can sense the Lip Room man, the Toast is laying it all out in front of me like Japanese-seaweed-trail. It’s definitely a-or b block, Lyndon-Johnson-Houses.”

“Wait a minute, D-Rice, the last time, you were Toasted and we went there we got our fucking chins greased, compliments Fiora-Guint’s, Kelly boys. Those guys are mean, Like Asian Hornet nasty—let’s vet this info first before we go down like Yellow-Cake theory.”

“I aint trying to Yellow-Cake you man—“

“Not you, them, the guys you just spoke to—“

“Well I didn’t listen to what they said, Keds, I fucking Seymour Hersh’d it man, like between the lines. See those guys are doing Lip Service for the HLR man, they turd for the cylinder.”

“I’m not following you, here, they lay trail for these guys?”

“No, they run messages, like e-com buffers—back and forth in circular ‘lectro-monkey bus routes through the Chip. They’re krill man, small fish, so the Cylinder uses them to lay temp-trail. That way, there’s no chip-scan, no follow-up, no infra-red.”

“Are you sure that they aren’t just Yellow-Caking you, like Nixoning their real Bylines so that you can’t get a scan on them?”

“They might be, but those fish gave away the stink man, they said, “no, there ain’t nothing infra-red scannable here, man, like not even night vision—I mean, if they didn’t know anything, how could they be so fucking sure?”

“Maybe they’re just covering for the Jackson Five or the Vanilla Fudge; the gangs out here are thicker than ad-pop-drones over a co-opt zone. I mean, we don’t know who they’re laying trail for—they might just be turding for some castle-throne oz-wiz, behind a red curtain. I don’t want my chin greased over some skittles-shit.”

“This isn’t skittles man, this is Big-Mac, protein, like Basra-oil-field—we just hooked into the cy-line man, the cylinder is in my drone-scan. All I need is the go-ahead.”

I wasn’t entirely convinced, as I was still filmy with Toast and strutting the pudding just like Big Rice; but he was on his Haight-Ashbury, and you couldn’t talk him out of it—so why try? He had always had a gift for smelling seaweed trail if it started getting rot-fish, and nobody was better at Shockanawe; and, of course, he could stealth-fuck anybody in a fight, so it was at least worth a run down the trail, scannable or not.

But luck isn’t drone-scanning us too well so far, and I tell Double Rice that his Haight-Ashbury Owsley might be more like desert toad-lick. Well D-Rice doesn’t like that analogy much, and he asks me when I last had a hunch that lead anywhere other than turd trail. Hurtful words, but largely true; and, as we cut infra-red towards Lyndon-Johnson, and the Kelly-Boys, we know that we have to scan-right or lose the trail and get chinned bad. We take auto-walks, and monkey-busses, down night-lit drone-ways amidst silver and sparkle-clad chip-grazers and squeegee-lopers. There are Swats and other walk-minders and intervention-scabs nightsticking the margins, but we stay on the trail and scan straight, insuring that we won’t stick out like disaster-headlines.

The Lyndon Johnson Houses, a-block, rise up like Swats chasing Osama, from the blue-dust haze of night-lit, and we make towards the larger stack high-rises, by the lectric-plant that stands guard over the multi-stacks. The  high-rises are rowed out like wind-turbines in a power-net zone, and so close together that one can scan one’s neighbor in the next building simply by wagging tongue through an open window. In double a, one-McNamara, we traverse steps and clear-tube, lifts across an arrangement of floors and levels that remind me of a dream-worlded tower, with floor-layers as thin as poker-deck cards and intersecting stairways made from recycled food-can metal. This isn’t so far from the headline truth as the levels in the high rise, are too complex for any simple scanning, and require night-vision concentration to infra-red the right doorways.

After a turd-trail of missteps and White-Housed leads, we end up on roof of high-rise D-a-1, Mcnamara, scanning the whole of the a and b sections of the Lyndon Johnson houses and the shadowy recesses of the lectric-plant, which casts its dark silhouette over every rooftop within short-drone distance from our perch. There is a sound from below the roof, on the old-school-style stairwell, and it starts to click more insistently. “Definitely some stink-fish trotting in to Osama-grab us,” says Double Rice, as the syncopated sneaker dance gets within scan-range of the doorway, and then seems to stop for a second. “Why’s he hesitating?” I whisper to Double Rice. “I don’t know, but we better shokinawe this stink-fish before he stealth scans us out of hide-n-dark.” “I’m too Haight-Ashbury’d from the Toast to be Chasing Osama in this haze man, I’m strutting the pudding big time,” I reply. But D-Rice is concentrating on that door, waiting for the fish to trail-scan us into night-vis, so that he can make first stealth run at us.

“Watch out for this Kelly-Boy fish-stink motherfucker, Double-Rice yells, as the door flies open and two fish-turds, wearing white-man pants and loafers, come running at us, old-school, like they just knew already that they weren’t going to waste time stealth-droning us. “We’re Osmond Brothers,” they scream, like official ID papers flickering through Magneto-scan filters at a Swat-stop, as they raise arms in Shockinawe style old-school fist-punch. Double Rice is on trail and scans first with a direct hit onto the larger Osmond, while I just see an elongated arm, reaching out for me across a dark scar of moon-cover-cloud, like intervening therapy hands, trying to Haldol my screen into dream-world stasis. I am shockinawed instead, to the same general effect, and leave my scan-screen entirely undefended and useless, as I recoil from the blow, only half-hallucinated across helmet-bow of my head.

At first, I seem to awaken into a discrete blackness, where shrimp-shaped enema bags, hang from free-floating tree-limbs, touting the benefits of tower-collapse-darkness clouds. I try to interpret the banging and scraping sounds filtering through the miasma into Morse code, but without any measurable success; and, I am soon plummeted into Claymation dream world. Here, is an entirely different screen-scan, and I don’t have a GPS-chip on how to read it, but something steps in to translate across the ontological barrier.

The fruits are gathered into a pile with some of their vegetable friends. There is Banana, and Apple, Orange, Pear and Grapefruit—the latter, is the largest in the bunch. Then there is Tomato and Zucchini, who is quite green I might add; and finally, a small but boisterous Habanero Pepper. They are all quite handsome, and color coordinated. Each has a pair of Claymation lips, and when they are surprised or upset, the lips make an O, and then fold back into a grimace before retracting to their original unscannable state. Almost immediately, Tomato springs a leak, and starts juicing-out with red-fountain of seed-water. Most of it gets on Banana, whose yellow lips, make the anticipated O and then grimace deeply. He is not happy. If Tomato juices out completely, Banana will be left carrying the corpse like an Osama-skin trophy, and none of the other fruits will offer to help. This is unacceptable. But Habanero-Pepper has an idea. He communicates it in a special way that doesn’t translate from Claymation into my scan-app, so even in dreamthink I can’t convey; but it doesn’t matter, as a sunstream of orange light begins suturing up Tomato’s leak-hole, with its capsicum lectric’ bandage. Everyone is happy for the moment, except Banana, whose thick yellow hide is covered in red juice, and he keeps going into an O grimace before finally settling back into unscannable default position. There seems to be a message here, but I don’t quite understand what it is, as I am simultaneously being regaled with a story about a five-headed creature with articulable digits who comes around periodically to ruthlessly snatch a piece of fruit, before replacing it with another. They call it Hand, and I am told that his Osama-Grabs are sudden and without mercy. Only Tomato has avoided the wrath of Hand, up to this point; perhaps, as Banana, who is a third round replacement fruit, speculates, because Hand doesn’t like Tomato’s. The whole pile of fruit and vegetable friends begin laughing, as if this is the funniest thing that they have ever heard, and their mouths make O shapes and grimaces that pirouette in ways that seem to run up against the very boundaries of what is physically conceivable for a Claymation mouth-lip. I am entranced by these gymnastics, the way they break new ground and change my previous ideas regarding what fruit and vegetable movements are possible. And then, the entire cycle begins again, with leaks and juices and sunrays of suturing capsicum before the inevitable parade of grimace-acrobatics; because there is no past and no future, as everything in the world of fruit-and-vegetable friends is a rerun, a circle of alternating O’s and grimaces that chases, and then eats its own tail through eternity like an oroboris. Soon, my own mouth becomes an unscannable O, as I feel myself being rapidly pulled towards the surface of the more comprehensible world I had left minutes before in the wake of the Osmond Blow, also delivered by a hand.

“Keds, Keds, wake your Shockinawed ass up” yells Double Rice, in a way that barely hides his fear that I might be out for a longer dream-ride than anticipated. “C’mon Man, snap back into infra-red scan, we gotta get out of here—wake up!” he tells me, as I come out of my blank-scan haze. “I had the weirdest fucking dream-vis,” “We don’t have time right now—the rest of those Turd-punking Osmond Brothers are going to swarm in here, any minute, like a bunch of pissed-off South-American Giant hornets, and we gotta stealth-scan off this rooftop, before we get Osama-grabbed.

I can still feel the pull of the Toast, as I Pudding-Strut down the stairwell, with Double Rice, grateful to have friends who can shockinawe gang-turders before they can do it to us first. Once outside, after the interminable drop through the tube-lift, we head towards the corner of McNamara section, in the direction of Rusk, where the Kelly Boys have been known to keep their main scan-station. “Slow down D-Rice, I’m getting winded.” I say, in a gasp. “You are seriously Toasted,” says double Rice, with just a hint of envy, over the fact that I might be Strutting the Pudding a little more heavily than he is We find a spot to rest, in an alleyway, between a delivery door, and an unused lectric’ monkey-bus stand. “Where are we?” I ask. “In the alley between McNamara section and Rusk section.” “What are we doing in Rusk?” “Nothing, but we have to scan through Rusk in order to get to Bundy.” “What’s in Bundy?” “What do you think?” Oh, let me guess,” I say sarcastically, but Double Rice is already there, and he’s throwing out the punch-line like a Swat net over a suspect. “The HLR is in Bundy section man—that’s where the master cylinder is; the machinery and we can get there and erase ourselves from every screen and drone scan on the green-map, if we can Yellow-Cake the security apps.” This news perks me up, quite a bit, as Double Rice sounds very sure of his infoscans; and when Double Rice is this confident, he’s usually right on the trail.

“Where did you get that sneaker-tread tattoo anyway?” asks Double Rice.

“I got it after the Swat-drafts, when they were White-Housing all of those kids from the gridline and the Chip into the Swats, so that they could use them to NSA each other into the scan-maps.”

“What does that have to do with the sneaker tread pattern, I don’t get it?”

“The sneaker tread is just a kind of barcode, identifying me with the Big-Shoe apps, so that if I got drafted I could get scanned back out of the system, and find my way back home to the Chip.”

“Do those Swats even care if you’re marked like that?”

“Not really, but that mark means you’ve already been scanned as part of the Big-Shoe app, and that any attempt to override it is copyright infringement. See, they might fuck with the rest of us and try to Yellowcake their way into master-scanning every Chip Grazer they can find into their app; but they can’t fuck with each other like that.”

“You mean, the cylinder heads, right?” asked Double Rice.

“Exactly,” I said, and then added, “The lot of us might just be a bunch of chip-grazing squeegee-lopers, but even the master scans at the Cylinder heads, have to follow their own guidelines; otherwise, they can’t control the rest of the system.”

“Well, in a couple of hours, once we get to the Human Lip Room, we won’t have to worry about getting scanned, trail-sacked, or stealth-droned again, because we won’t even exist, on that fucking screen-map,” said Double Rice, with an inspiring confidence.

“I hope your right, because those mother-fuckers are always trying to White House us into a corner. It’s getting too Nixonian for me, man. I just want to get off the gridline entirely, and find a place where the screen map doesn’t even exist, and where nobody turds surreptitiously for anybody else’s benefit.”

“Good luck with that,” said Double Rice, in a way that suggested that I should just be happy in achieving even one of those outcomes.

Bundy Section was much different than the other areas that we had passed through. It was darker, and surrounded by two levels of fencing and a large retaining wall that barely concealed a gigantic concrete structure. The surface of this cylinder-like building was festooned with cables, metal-grids and antennae like projections that stuck out from every part of its surface like ornaments from the branches of a tremendous Christmas tree, or quills on a porcupine. This was no ordinary security structure however; it was as massive as an entire a-block of high-rises, had few if any visible windows, and was obviously designed to be unscannable. This Leviathan was its own master- map, and connected to everything else in only one direction: Receiving. If we could get in, we could NSA them, before they did it to us. Double Rice’s information was great as usual, and we hatched a plan for hacking the beast, that finally tapped my one and only stealth-talent—an innate gift for re-orienting cell-phone scans so that they reflected whatever app or pattern was necessary to fool the lab-hacks and ‘dummy-trail’ the mole-netters into map-scan oblivion. If we were caught, the Swats and Intervention-therapists, would lectric’ Haldol us into permanent incubator-status, or worse. And, I certainly didn’t want to get anywhere near that particular possibility.

Double Rice slid between the fence grates first, using his thermal-scan-proof hazmat suit that he had bought off one of the Jackson Five during a long since forgotten gang-war peace-negotiation. The jacket kept our presence from being noticed, and provided cover from the nettle like lectric’ fence barbs, as well as the robo-parasites, that waited in tiny embedded cylinder-heads to be injected directly into the flesh of anyone unlucky enough to graze the spiky surfaces that ran the entire length of the outer security barrier.

The second layer of fencing was much the same, but included an almost primitive exoskeleton of carefully arranged Punji-spikes, that threatened to Osama-grab you as irrevocably as any lectric’ nightstick swinging Swat on a Shockinawe rampage. You could tell that Double Rice was really excited, he kept making references to Basra Oilfields, and became quite obsessive about our infra-red scans. We were definitely applying ourselves to our work now, HoChiMinhing it a little bit, to turd-trail the lab hacks just in case we were unwittingly scanned.

But it was the retaining wall, which surrounded the Leviathan that posed the greatest challenge. It was covered with small nodes that resembled close up image-scans of the sweat pores on a grown man’s hand. Setting off any one of these ‘black-hole’ alarms could activate the master scanner, and result in a guaranteed stealth-grab, the outcome of which would lead to an unthinkable end, and one that we were not anxious to ponder. I put my cell-hacking capability to the test, and began dialing in the codes that would confuse the hacks, and put the rest of the system onto a turd-trail leading away from our intended itinerary. The remaining nodes could be fooled by old-schooling the still used insect-code, which alluded to frequent Cicada-swarm events that were known to disable the most complex anti-hack systems from time to time. It was this weakness in the system for electronic sensory overload that would allow us to NSA the cyphers from the trunk and roots of the master cylinder, thus enabling our stealth-shockinawe to effectively erase all records, bar codes and scans alluding to our existence. We would, in plain-headlines, be unpersoned from the system, and immune to hypothetical future stealth Osamagrabs. Or, at least we hoped.

Our traversing of the black-holes in the retaining wall went smoothly, as we HoChiMinhtrailed our way right into a small electronics-scan-chip insertion-door nestled at the base of the Leviathan. Double Rice assured me that, even if hidden cameras were infra-red scanning us, the Insect-Codes had most probably deactivated them, and there would likely be a gaggle of lab-hacks racing around like lectric’ monkey busses trying to find the root of the problem. By that time, however, we would surely have penetrated to the very heart of the beast: the Human Lip Room itself.

The only thing that confused me about all of this was Double Rice’s insistence that the HLR would be located on a non-descript floor of a non-descript high rise. When I asked him about that discrepancy however, he just laughed and said, “that must be the motherfucking bad-shrimp-info-master, Yellow-Caking, from those Kelly-Boy turding punks, that you were so concerned about.” “Yeh, but, if they could turd-trail you about that, what else did they Yellowcake us on?” I asked. “Don’t worry man, they didn’t turd-trail me, we’ve still got good infra-red scan on the HLR, right in the heart of the Paranoid Palace. This is the real hidden Osama, the description of the actual building is just a detail; it’s the location that matters,” said Double Rice—emphasizing the word location. But my doubts had already ceased to be anything more than obligatory caution markers, for at that point, we were HoChiMinhing through the air-purification ducts that lead to the Stealth-GPS’d location that Double Rice had known about all along.

It was a simple white door, with a rather tarnished silver knob. There were no titles or markings on it except for a small schematic drawing of two lines pressed against each other in a uniting kiss; these were the lips.

For a second we both looked at each other cautiously, and with certain trepidation.

“So this is where we ‘dig our own hole, I guess?” I asked, pointedly, and then added: “We just have to make sure the mole-scanners don’t find our spade.”

“You don’t sound so confident man, relax, replied Double Rice. “I got this Jack Kennedy Head Shot already aimed, and we’ll be Oswalding out of the damn book depository in less than two motherfucking minutes; and unlike that guy, our ‘spade’ is never going to get found, because we’re erasing the whole thing from the system, so we can’t get JackRuby’d or Osama-grabbed. It’s like Oswalding without any identifiable Oswald!”

“So we’re really de-Oswalding then right?” I asked, secretly impressed with Double Rice’s knack for uploading old-school 20-C headline-vis, and knowing exactly where to place emphasis for inspiration.

“Call it whatever the fuck you want, Keds, we’re gonna stealth the bar codes with our names on them right out of the cylinder—I call it freedom.”

“Okay, that sounds good, can we just open this fucking door then?”

“Relax,” said Double Rice, and we both laughed nervously, as his hand gracefully turned the knob and the door opened silently like the prelude to a stealth shockinawe.

The room was enormous, and brightly night-lit, although I could not see the source of the illumination. There were rows and rows of shelves spreading out in what appeared to be an infinite array that had no central emanation point, but instead ramified outwardly like an infinitely unfolding antherless flower petal, in CG, with Double Rice and I playing the role of the first  virtual honey bees to actually get inside of it. “I had no idea this was so beautiful,” I remarked, and then fell silent, embarrassed to have expressed such effusive longing for a place which was believed to embody an unnatural, synthetically manipulated evil. Yet, the absence of any nearby walls—the sheer size of it—and its cathedral like presence, seemed to empty me of all emotions except for a strange feeling for which I had no name. Double Rice, quickly supplied one, however: “Communion, man, this is communion.”

A small woman, wearing a rather busy lab-coat covered with tiny diapered teddy-bear motifs, and matching white-boy pants, walked over to us. She was all smiles, and obviously unsuspecting of our subterfuge. My apprehension melted away.

“You must be one of the aphids tending to this flower”, I said, and then noticed that Double Rice was glaring at me.

“Well, that sounds really pretty, but I don’t know what that means”, she said with disarming and unexpected warmth.

“Just an inside joke,” I muttered.

Well, you guys probably want to get acclimated first, we have a lounge and kitchen enclosure off to the right, and you can find some lab-coats in the rack in the closet. And, you can do whatever you want to them, you can affix old-school iron-ons, or download whatever pictures you like. Dr. Patel is the supervisor, but you can call him Andy, we’re very informal here. Oh, I almost forgot, I’m Jesse, Jesse Bear.”

“Bear as in Bear, like the furry animal with sharp claws and big teeth?”

“Yes, spelled exactly like that, but I have no claws and I’m not known to bite.”

Double Rice and I both smiled and laughed. We hadn’t expected to meet anyone in the Room except some lectric’ nightstick swinging Swats, and here we were talking to the friendliest Chip Grazer that either of us had met in weeks. I had to wonder, just to satisfy my own paranoia, if for no other reason, whether this was just a NSA stealth prelude to an Osama grab; but, there was nothing about the mood or the layout of the place to support such speculation.

“She thinks we work here man, we’re in.” whispered Double Rice, interrupting my stream of speculation.

“Are you sure that she’s not stealthing us, with a two-face, or NSAing our asses from that alcove over there.?”

“I couldn’t tell you man, but my scan-intuition isn’t registering; and this doesn’t feel like old school network, vis-theater to me. They really don’t know why we’re here. We should be able to sever our ties with the master Cylinder and HoChiMinh out of this motherfucker before anyone even begins to ask questions.”

But I was hardly listening, at that point. I was too awed by the completeness of it; a completeness that spoke of something infinite, something that had no beginning, no origin, and no conceivable end. It was an ecstatic space for the continuing variations embedded in personal histories, as preserved in one tiny slide of lip-tissue. In real-headlines, there was a stain-glass slide, just like in the old-school science books, for everybody, one for each person who had ever lived. This didn’t square at all with the image of Lab-hacks NSAing the unsuspecting and micro-managing the daily rhythms and minutia of moment to moment existence, that I had expected to infra-red scan the moment we walked in. But then, why the ugly security apparatus, and the antennas and electronic-info grates? Why the fences?

None of it could be reconciled, but this place, whatever its purpose, had morphed into something far more interesting than a central hive for insectoid surveillance devices. It was bigger than that; it was a temple—a religious zone; and evidence, that both Double Rice and myself were being colonized by the very apparatus that we had hoped to escape from. Could we now undermine a structure that had taken off its mask, revealing itself, like the embers of a burning bush, to be the Master Cylinder metaphorically connecting with eternity through the prism of the Chip-world? I was speechless, and Double Rice looked uncharacteristically preoccupied. The place spoke of pure heavenly symmetry; and I knew that we had to find the master-scan screen, stealth our names out of it, and HoChiMinh our Squeegee-Loping asses out of there, forthwith, even if it meant being cast out of paradise forever.

JZRothstein 11/111/2013