Expending fear by writing too much

(Again the lines are mine and my sweetheart colored them.)

Dear diary,

I’m in super-fear mode. This is some of the worst anxiety I’ve ever had. No single, specific reason; everything just feels terrifying, like there’s electric ice in the air. And chaos in my veins. We as individuals have a lot of unfinished business that keeps stress neck-high, there is no end in sight; plus the general state of employment in the U.S., and the hype surrounding health care, inequality, etc.—the country itself, the citizenry seems like it’s simmering, simmering, and will soon come to a boil.

*

I wrote that first paragraph and paused, then after a couple days I tried to pick up where I left off, and immediately I got called away by chores and problems; so now I’m returning again in a wholly different mindset: still nervous but no longer plagued with uber-terror; so I’ll just let the rest of this entry be tau. Or if not tau then upsilon.

I hate the suicide problem. I am not referring to an actual spike in rates of occurrence, tho maybe I should be; I mean that it is hard to philosophize about the subject: if you speak about it with anything but disapproval, some goodhearted person will panic and assume that you need help—that you yourself are suicidal. The idea is that simply talking about the act is an indication that you’re contemplating that act. And I would like to go beyond mere talk; I would like to wax lyrical, ascend into praise...

I love life so much, I love all its potentials.

Now, to force a derailment so as to avoid ending up in Hyperborea, I will copy some phrases from the bio section of people’s Blue Rose accounts:

• I’m an online influencer
• Digital Nomad
• Supplying hair professionals throughout the UK
• Art in your inbox!
• Mum to two. Huge fan of Disney. Twits are my own.
• Natural Skincare Remedy Maker and I Follow Jesus
• Feminist, NOT a multi-culturalist.
• Housewife, interests watching tv, books
• 20 years in business
• Liberals r destroying the world & have lost their minds
• bit of a geek
• love playing pool

It’s been rainy the last couple days. Low-hanging clouds form a grey ceiling over the land. The air is cool. No sun, thank god. Flocks of ducks and geese are floating on the thin green surface of a local pond, and my sweetheart and I are nearby on a wooden bench reading in a book of poetry. The mood of the outside matches the mood of the poem. For an instant, all is perfect.

But on Saturday morning, we had to rent another van. There was a one-day-only recycling jamboree in our county; they sent out a flyer listing household items such as hazardous waste and furniture that citizens could drop off at Gabella Street for a nominal fee. Now, since I published a book named after that locale, we felt that it was incumbent upon us to participate in the festivities; so we searched our apartment thoroughly for recyclables, and yet we could find no hazardous waste besides our food which is poison, but, since we still need to eat that, we therefore changed our focus to furniture and ultimately opted to discard our two sofas. These sofas are cream white with grey stripes; I inherited them from my roommate about twenty years ago; I hated them since the day that they were born—both the sofas and my roommate—they’re ugly and cumbersome, plus their stuffing is leaking.

So, in order to fit both items of furniture in the van, we had to stack one atop the other and pray that they don’t accidentally procreate. I am not joking about having to stack the sofas, for the van’s orifice truly was too narrow to allow the free passage of etc… But I AM joking about the potential for nonliving objects to engender progeny. Furniture manufactured by Lord Yahweh is guaranteed to remain inanimate. (That’s also a joke: see Genesis, ch. 3.)

So then we had to go to a giant palace and buy new furniture.

On the way to the palace, I looked out of my passenger-side window and saw that corporations have attached enormous hotels, made entirely of silver and glass, to the Mall of America. (I haven’t traveled out here in a really long time.) Gorgeously armored, vast, mechanical parasites.

So we arrived at the palace, which is located near the Great Mall, and the first thing my sweetheart did (she’s the driver, because I dislike driving our chariot) is try to park in a place that is not for parking. A parking spot is oblong, to accommodate the girth of your chariot’s horsepower; whereas this place was triangular: all it could billet is maybe one small snail. So we had to pull out and repark. And I teased my sweetheart for this. But then I felt bad for teasing her because she cried.

But what I’m trying to get at is this: We found a very cheap item to replace our old sofas, both of which passed away on Saturday; so we noted the product number and then navigated sixty thousand escalators to get to Floor One, where the goods are stored. And we found our package and hoisted it onto our carriage. (The store offers free use of metal carriages, for transporting goods.)

Now the reason that I refer to this new purchase as a “very cheap item” rather than a “sofa” or “love seat” is as follows. It is cheap, meaning both inexpensive and of poor quality. And I added the adverb very because it is, in truth, extremely cheap. (I use all words properly; I always find the best words for the job; that’s why I am a scribe rather than, say, a drywall repairperson.) And lastly, despite the fact that this item is technically labelled as furniture, I call the item simply item, for the same reason that the ancients referred to Yahweh Elohim as “the LORD God.”

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

That’s verse 7 from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Also note its motto, from Ferdinand Kürnberger:

. . . and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.

So, back at the palace, we hefted our very cheap item upon a metal carriage; then we shuffled over to our place in line. Despite being within a universe-sized purgatorio of furniture, when it comes to fulfilling the actual transaction, where cash changes hands, you still gotta wait in a stock-still queue with the luckless. That’s the Rulers’ decree. So we found the line, took our place, and slouched with the others. And we slouched there and slouched there. My point is that it took a long time to get checked out. And I am more than usually impatient and paranoid, especially around crowds of people who are all standing silently & staring straight ahead like extras in a sci-fi movie about the bliss of immortality. And then when we finally did get to the express-pay counter, the cashier simply beeped his laser gun at our big box and told us the price. Then we paid up and left. (Why did it take so long for all the other customers, yet, when our turn came, we were done in two seconds?)

But there’s a final detail of this story that you absolutely need to understand. We parked our chariot at sea level; and the checkout counters are a single flight of stairs above the earth. But none of this is labeled or apparent to the unsuspecting infidel. So after one leaves the checkout, one is confronted with the sight of an elevator. So we stepped inside with our metal carriage, and my sweetheart pressed the button labeled “1”; then the doors closed, and we waited. But I did not feel that familiar sensation of being hastened hellward by ambivalent forces. That’s a feeling that I normally dislike, but, now that it didn’t occur, I realize that it’s even worse to feel totally balanced inside of an elevator, which is to say, inert; for the seconds begin to tick by like hours, when you grasp that this stability means the compartment is not moving. So, trying not to panic, I said to my sweetheart: “Maybe we’re remaining frozen because you pressed ‘1’ and, since the level we’re on right now is perhaps the First Floor, the elevator thinks it’s already done its job. Try pressing the ‘G’ button; for it might consider the parking level as Ground.” And so she pressed “G,” and this worked, and we got home safely.

*

All these videos to watch online. Breaking-news videos, humorous videos, interviews, performances, historical speeches…

And what about cinema? An elegant theater with red curtains that are drawn to the side when the mystery is scheduled to appear; and the mystery is a filmstrip beamed from a projector upon a screen that appears sky-high, and the soundtrack booms…

I wonder how much all this streaming video of today will matter to futurity, if the black-and-white talkies and the cinemascope blah-blah-blah of yesteryear matter little today…

Remember silent film? Is it right to say that silent film is a specialty department nowadays, that it’s a section of art that is cared for by only a handful of specialists? Or am I wrong to suppose that? Are there masses of silent-film fanatics out there in the shadows—a silent majority?

Since nobody’s answering my questions, because I’m only talking to myself, because I’m the only one here, I’ll stick with my first presumption: that silent film is a sort of “dead language,” relatively speaking, among audiovisual formats. (I say this with teardrops brimming mine eyes, by the way, because I am one of the happy few silent-film lovers still in existence – tho far from an expert, I’m a genuine dumbshow idolator.) So if silent film is dead, what killed it? Wouldn’t we say that sound killed the silents? And if a technological innovation can eradicate an entire population of art, then what do we think will happen to all the talkies, the black-and-white classics, the cinemascope and technicolor blah-blah-blahs, the stuff of the recent past, and the stuff of today... even the online streaming videos... even the video games and virtual reality horseblinkers...?

My guess is that it’s all going down. In flames. Some newfangled contraption will emerge from the abyss, incorporating ALL of the innovations above: the motion pictures of the silent era, the sound of the talkie, the monochrome of the glorious, the color of the techni-, the interaction of arcade games, the touchscreen of the diner menu, the rapidly navigable research trove of the Internet (or whatever its strength is) plus super-deific not-virtual-but-ultra reality... etc.

And when this next technology arrives, all the old stuff, which means everything we know and love, will instantly be rendered obsolete. It’ll all be forgotten. Not even specialists will bother to archive this profusion of artwork that our generation labored to create. And the upstart technology will appear as if everything that the churches are always promising actually came true. And it’ll cost just a little more than anyone can afford, so you must bow under the yoke of debt to obtain your bliss. And it’ll be named some annoying, infantile nonsense word like Sping or PRORC.

*

On a joyful side-note, I just received a notification that my request is ready to be picked up at the library; so I went and retrieved it: The Odes of Horace – ah, this is a good omen: upon glancing just now at the translator James Michie’s preface, I alighted upon this sentence, which holds an arcane significance re the above:

It is better that Horace should be “done down” into English than that he should be undone by the gradual disappearance of Latin as part of our culture.

*

Also in between asterisks I read some books at the park with my sunny-side soul-mate, and this excerpt from André Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism stood out to me – it is a sign!

People pretend not to pay too much attention to the fact that the logical mechanism of the sentence alone reveals itself to be increasingly powerless to provoke the emotive shock in man which really makes his life meaningful. By comparison, the products of this spontaneous, or more spontaneous, direct or more direct, activity, such as those which Surrealism offers him in ever-increasing numbers in the form of books, paintings, and film, are products which he looked at dumbfounded at first, but which he now surrounds himself with, and begins, more or less timidly, to rely on to shake up his settled ways of thinking. I know: this man is not yet every man, and we have to allow him time to become so.

*

As I write this, I realize the U.S. has suffered another mega blood­bath. And another and another. And the future will look on our latest disaster, whatever it is, with the same blank wonder that we experience when we contemplate the tragedies of the past. The volcano that leveled a town in the blink of an eye. The flood that slew the globe’s whole population; except it buoyed up and saved the top tenth of one percent, in a makeshift ark.

Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?

—as Saint Luke has his Jesus ask his mob. (13:4)

I’m trying to say that the horrors of this age, the present, our “now,” are every jot as important as they feel to us; but I recognize that I myself am guilty of empathizing less with the suffering gods of the past than with the people of the present, so I deduce that the apes to come will, by the same token, lack the oomph to care for us infra-futurists.

So now we know that our art shall be ignored and forgotten, and no one will shed any tears for our age’s suffering. We live in a transitory epoch, another Medieval Period.

Or not? For what if the publicly funded research scientists fail to invent any sufficiently groundbreaking neo-technology, so the private corporations have nothing to steal and market; thereby leaving this present age’s books, paintings, movies, etc., intact, unvanquished; and our forms, genres, and traditions thus remain intelligible to futurity, which is to say, relative and attractive to the subsequent eras?

Yes, I believe that those artists who dare to invest their energies in timeworn forms during this Age of Electronic Everything, despite the thanklessness of the present climate, will hit fame’s jackpot. Because the harebrained ephemera-machine is running out of fuel: it’s slowing down, not speeding up. Remember when every breaking dawn would arrive bearing another fresh social network to fall into? And the youngest preteens would be using the zaniest new fad-site that not even the hippest tweenagers had heard of! Nobody could keep up with the changing of the fashions: it was like observing those subatomic particles that pop in and out of existence in mere fractions of nanoseconds, and they live near the rim of a black hole. You can’t even measure the unit of duration that constitutes their lifetime. They’re so small that they split thru quarks like the Red Sea. And they’re faster than the bolt of hope that invented the devil. But they’re the opposite of everlasting: because that’s better, although mortals can’t grasp why. They enter the world and exit in the same instant, almost. They leave us wanting more. They don’t stick around long enough to develop a cult following, or even to get un-named by a god-made mud-man. Never overstaying their welcome. They’re off, before you know it, into unknown realms where shy particles go, without the benefit of a Christian burial.

*

Anyway, movies were on my mind because I recently endured a great bout of sadness which I tried to lift by aiming my attention at a few of my favorite artists; so I watched a couple videos of interviews with…

I don’t want to state their names, because they already garner way too much attention. I just want to say that the idea worked, for it improved my mood; but it also backfired because it made me sad in totally different ways. I hate hearing tales about the success of risky artists, because I’m a risky artist who hasn’t succeeded. So there’s a modicum of jealousy at the core of my aggravation. Also the disclosure of what piece of the grand puzzle eventually “clicked” to send this rude boy onto the mainstream’s radar is, without fail, maddening, because the source of galvanization is always pure luck; the perfect-time-&-place combo is just a McGuffin: never talent, never genius, never “hard work” (whatever the fuck that means)—but always unicorns, always rainbows.

It’s like that scene in The Straight Story (1999) where the car hits a deer (I’m paraphrasing from memory); then the driver gets out and, after a litany of complaints, cries something like “Worst of all, I love deer!” — so:

Worst of all, I love unicorns and rainbows. (Why do you insist on making me curse your nonexistence!)

*

I realize this entry is not of a piece with itself: it should be broken into many little entries. But I would rather get rid of all this text at once; then twitch my mantle and proceed to darker woods.

Plus some of the themes and subjects of this too-big-to-fail blog post recur in ways that benefit from being part of such a comprehensive fill-in-the-blank. It’s like a symphony of multiple movements; a suite of many gorgeous compositions. In short, it’s a masterpiece.

*

Here’s one of the signs that your apostolate may have come down with a mild form of capitalism. If you notice this symptom:

Twelve out of every six disciples have anxiety and depression.

And I mean acute, debilitating. Why do doctors prescribe drugs to treat these things? The reason that people are out of their minds with fear and sadness is that today’s social system is a certified torture chamber.

Sorry, I didn’t intend to sink into truth-telling. It’s just that, after the story about buying the furniture, and then the free association about the fate of modern artists, which really chaps my hide... —It won’t happen again, I promise.

Now I look down and see the quote that the publisher put on the back of the softcover of Calvin Tomkins’ The Afternoon Interviews, which was sitting in front of me because I was reading it, because that’s what you do with books, you read them—is that so wrong?

“Fifty years ago we were pariahs. A young girl’s parents would never let her marry an artist.”
—Marcel Duchamp

This makes me think: Why did my helpmate’s parents let her soul marry mine? Yet now I recall that they withheld their permission: that’s why we eloped. And although we’re on cordial terms with them at present, and even though they live just blocks away, we never see my sweetheart’s parents – they’re living their church life, and we’re panting the art life. But in one of those aforesaid interviews (not Tomkins-Duchamp but the chat with the unnamed filmmaker that I screened via hi-def choppy video online), it was mentioned (I don’t know if this is true but I suspect it is) that Jacques Tati endured much misery from poverty before his death, and none of his friends or admirers came to his aid. And, of course, more examples abound of artists of all types enduring similar indignities. I think of Oscar Wilde; I think of X, Y, and Z... I think of Alpha-Omega.

My point is that it doesn’t matter if you make genius contributions to your country’s culture: your country WILL allow you to expire in misery; and, once you’re dead, your countrymen WILL turn a hefty profit from your creations. So if you’re smart, you’ll demand that ALL of your artworks be blotted upon your decease. For, who knows: At least one of your testament’s executors might obey.

Think of the impression that would be made upon you by the news that some one you know had committed the crime, say, of murder or theft, or been guilty of some act of cruelty or deception; and compare it with your feelings when you hear that he has met a voluntary death. While in the one case a lively sense of indignation and extreme resentment will be aroused, and you will call loudly for punishment or revenge, in the other you will be moved to grief and sympathy; and mingled with your thoughts will be admiration for his courage, rather than the moral disapproval which follows upon a wicked action.

Those are the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, from his prize-winning essay “On Suicide” (I don’t really know if it won any prizes, but that’s my impression of how the man tends to speak of his own work—and let me stress that I am charmed by this tendency), which, in the collection that I am holding now in my hand, is found in the section called “Essays on Pessimism.” And what follows are some words that Police Captain Andy improvises (because he misplaced his prepared speech) at the funeral of Officer Sunshine, in the film Wrong Cops (2013):

Simon William Shine, also known as Sunshine, took his own life into his hands. And as I speak to you now, his tormented soul is most certainly on its way to Hell, since, as we all know, anyone who goes against God’s will ends up in Hell.

Now, that notion from Schopenhauer: admiration for the courage of the suicide – does that ring true for you? It does for me: that’s how I’ve always felt. Someone tells me, “Did you hear? Monsieur So-So killed himself!” And my first thought is always, “Good for Monsieur So-So.” But it’s not because I dislike the fellow, or that I want as many lives as possible to draw to a close; no, it’s rather that I believe that life is unstoppable and limitless, and that to perform the act of self-slaughter only closes a chapter of mutation within the greater goings-on of transcendent otherness. And life should be bliss; and if it’s not, then the self should try to translate what is undesirable into a new tongue; but if this latter task proves too tedious, then bon voyage and au revoir: till we meet again, I wish thee many happy returns; goodbye—and hail! my Fancy.

And if you have a boring job, then quit it! It’s better to live a brief but happy life as a vagabond than to labor all the time and die in misery.

And if your folks are mean, then leave them! Wouldn’t you rather live as a freelance orphan than to slouch through yucky days with two bad parents?

And if life itself seems lousy, turn away! I myself would rather leave everything behind and become a creature in some fresh newfangled galaxy, far beyond the outermost reaches of thought, than to suffer a long and grumpy life on earth. Because, as they say: “When you’re dead, you turn into a book; and who will want to read your story?”

Those are the words of Sarah the sorceress, who is obviously an improved version of Jesus the khristos, from my own award-winning novel Rumors of Sarah, which I describe as a mistranslation of St. Mark’s gospel.

So the Nazarene died, and St. Mark turned him into a book, and I myself read his story. What comes after this afterlife? The story gets embellished during retelling. For evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of organization: from molecules to species and even as high as literary showboats. Look how the secular Iago became the sacred Satan, when John Milton reworked the villain from Shakespeare’s Othello. Or how Shakespeare himself progressed from sacred to sacreder, when he refashioned Lord Yahweh into King Lear. (I steal these last ideas from Harold Bloom; and the quote below is from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) For:

Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s; and from those of Dante or Shakespeare, an infinite number.

But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.

The reason this entry has gone quote-heavy is that I don’t know how to end it: I haven’t been satisfied with anything I’ve said along the way, and I keep thinking I’ll strike upon a…

Let me just tell about these damned fruit flies and then call it quits:

*

Yesterday and today we’ve noticed a few fruit flies in our apartment. It’s been months since we last had a sighting—I remember this, because I was worried that we’d develop an epidemic; thankfully that never happened. Yet now they’re back. Not many, but a few. So we researched how to get rid of them. We were told to fill a small dish with apple cider vinegar and then cover it with plastic wrap, and poke holes in the wrap: this will imprison the flies. So of course we didn’t have any apple cider vinegar in the house, but we did have red wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar; so I thought, it’s worth a shot; so I make a couple of traps: one with each of the two types of incorrect vinegar.

But we didn’t catch anything the whole first day. Plus my sweetheart came home from the store with some apple cider vinegar, just like the instructions said to use. So I poured out the old traps into the toilet, and set out two new traps with the right kind of bait. And right away, I noticed a fruit fly land on the rim of one of the glasses. But the thing just stayed there on the rim and didn’t go into the holes. So I assumed that the holes were too small. So I disposed of the plastic properly in the trash and tried something different—there was one alternative way to set the trap: the instructions explained that instead of using the plastic wrap, you could mix in a couple drops of liquid dish soap, so that the flies would not be able to stand on the surface of the vinegar but instead get sucked in and drown like the romantic poet Shelley.

So I set them up like so. Then after some minutes passed, I went to check the traps, to see if I’d caught anything. But they were empty. So I concluded that my whole earthly existence had been worthless and that I would never amount to anything. So I went into the bathroom to slit my wrists—yet, lo: down in the toilet bowl I espied a fruit fly floating dead upon the water. It was because I had poured out the other incorrect vinegars there earlier. So this fortunate vista literally saved my life.

Then I went back upstairs to celebrate by drinking a glass of water. On the way to the sink, I passed the garbage—and behold: down there among the refuse was a trio of fruit flies! climbing ecstatically over the discarded plastic wrap. So I quickly sealed up the bag and took out the trash. (NOTE: the “official” traps have yet to work.)

P.S.

I still haven’t found a reason to stop uploading my old rap demos – the uselessness of the act makes me want to keep committing it. But it’s been a while since I posted an entry here on this public-private diary-journal-shiplog, so this time I have not one but TWO tracks to share; the lesser one is called “Alien Lettuce People” – I just linked its title to the post that has the sound – and here’s the other one, called “Dead Angel”:

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/165913437356/dead-angel-is-an-uninspired-rap-demo-track-that