Unrelated photo of some notes on the inside cover of a paperback:
Dear diary,
In accordance with the common, local observance, today I set all our wristwatches and fobs back one hour; so, instead of writing these words at 7:00 a.m. I am writing them at 6:27 no just joking 6 even. Why do sentences acquire a certain glow when you cut them away from the encyclopedia? Daylight saving time (DST), known as summer time in some countries, is the practice of periodically advancing clocks so that evening daylight lasts longer, while sacrificing normal sunrise times.
I say let’s simply sacrifice the sun. Let our eyes adjust to the dark. No stars; pitch blackness forever...
This reminds me of something funny: Back in the days when I worked as an astrophysicist, I was haunted by the inescapability of the Universal Stasis — for I assumed that Entropy would oblige everything in the World to decelerate to an eventual stop, like when a racecar runs out of fuel; or when the horse that is pulling your buggy leaves off trotting, so that not even a prominent Wall Street lawyer can persuade the beast to take one step, for it answers the most forceful legal arguments to “Giddy-up!” by echoing Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.” So anyway, all the Energy in the World will have become as motionless as a Frozen Flame: and the Entirety, now chilled to stagnation, will be like one Vast Dead Thing; and we’ll have to wait for another Big Bang to come and re-rouse us: Finnegans Wake! …But you see that, back in those days, I was focused on the macro scale. That’s what happens when you work too long in the field of Science: you become blind to anything other than The Truth. And so I quit my job and became a regular mortal again, just another earthling; and I began to consider this planet where I’m now stranded and which is turning into Hell. And since it’s scorching-broiling-sweltering here, I switched my political party from Anti-Entropy to Anti-…
What should I call the new party that I joined? I want it to convey the meaning “Pro-Cold” but I need to use the “Anti” prefix (yet without resorting to the too-simple antonym “Heat”), because two fortnights ago, when I was brainstorming about abortion, I noted how everyone wants to call themselves PRO-something (as in “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice”), and I made a vow right then and there: If I ever get to name a political faction, I will fix upon a negative-sounding title, just to prove how punk I am. …Ergo, I’m faced with the task of branding an attitude that recognizes the planetary threat of too much loving warmth, and thus stands in solidarity with all the mammals hereabouts. Not to say that we are against reptiles and birds and other creatures like worms flies and roaches, but I assume that THEY will have an easier time adapting to living under lava than We the People; therefore I declare unto all non-mammalians what the sniper whose name is Screw, from the movie Wrong Cops (2013), says while returning the rifle to his associate, Officer Simon William Shine: “Don’t ask me again, Sunshine; you’re on your own with your shit.” …I guess I’ll settle for Anti-Energy. Because Anti-Solar sounds too cosmically suave, and although Anti-Sunshine conveys the kind of meanness that I’m looking for, I fear that people will incorrectly assume my stance is thus against the above film’s character; and that’s the last thing I’d ever want to imply. I side with Officer Duke, who says, when delivering Sunshine the contraband that he requested: “I gave you an extra half, because I like you.”
So I switched my allegiance from Anti-Entropy to Anti-Energy. (As I think about it, I like this name more and more: The Anti-Energy Party – it’s nice because nobody wants to join it; I loathe group-think, so it’s fine with me if I have zero teammates; at the same time, I am able to represent my opinions as official, and I get to vote for them without having my vote count. Only moneyed interests should have their votes count.) Thus, nowadays I’m as opposed to the explosive dynamism of the stars, as in my youth I was for it.
But here’s what’s funny: I live in Minnesota – why should anyone who experiences a Freeze Death of Everlasting Blankness for three quarters of every year (this place has harsh winters) wish to sacrifice the sun? Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, since you asked: It’s not worth making this tundra a jungle, if it means that the rest of the world must suffer in the process – I can’t be happy with riches while others are poor. That’s why I still repeat what I said on the campaign trail, back near the beginning of Book IV of Paradise Lost, when I was John Milton’s Satan:
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look’st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide their diminisht heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams…
Now this almost makes me want to change my party’s name to Anti-Ray. Because my name is Bryan Ray, so although the reference is to our shared satanic aversion to the beams of the sun, it would imply that I am against myself, which I am; because I know that in some sense I AM the sun in heaven, being fire of its fire, thus I am at enmity with my own origin, since my sky-self and earth-self never leave off trying to force each other into a state of abasement, and each is incessantly revising its mirror-image into the only begotten offspring of itself as prime ancestor. So this is how I became my own archenemy. I am gnosis forged with ignorance as oversoul, and all id is ego. In other words, I am the most unknowable of everything unique, for I’ve achieved the impossible act of convincing everyone else that they are truly NOT ME. I even convinced myself of this.
NO: delete that whole last paragraph. I’ve done enough of that kind of writing. This public-private ship-log that I’m keeping will only end up repeating vainly the splendors of that Evil Scripture I authored if I don’t make a U-turn and empty my old self out. Repent of my ways. Like when Marcel Duchamp explained, regarding his swerve from The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even to his other work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas (I copy out these titles because I like them), that he actively controverted his artistic stance so as to avoid becoming a slave to his own ideas (yet since the latter work was unveiled only posthumously, how did he comment on this?—maybe I should stop paraphrasing from “memory”)… Therefore, hello to Hope, Fear, and Remorse: all Bad to me is lost; Good be thou my Bad. (By thee at least United Empire with Spacetime’s King I hold.) I’ll go through now and reverse the foregoing text properly:
My name is So-and-so That’s OK, I don’t need to reverse that – the name can stay the same, lest the reversal appear as merely a change of garment, rather than a change of essence; and my whole point in turning myself inside-out is to… no, it’s pointless. I am against myself. That’s false: I’m truly FOR myself, now that I’m negating everything I have said. I know that in some sense I AM the sun in heaven… I am certainly not the sun in heaven, I am a body on earth, physical, mortal, typing on this keyboard. (Back in 2017, people typed keys with their fingers to create words, recklessly; there was no thought-recognition software or auto-translators of corporate-approved imaginations to pacify Mammon.) I am at enmity with my own origin. Wrong: I like where I came from, which is NOT the sky-self and the earth-self but my biological parents: two wretches hailing from the state of Wisconsin. Or Duluth, MN; or wherever it was they got cast. My spirit is incessantly revising its image of flesh into the only begotten etc. That’s not right either: my spirit and my body are friends now; and God is in Heaven...
But this exercise is getting tedious, so I’ll quit. Having tried it both ways, I prefer the first paragraph. Now I’ll end this entry where it began, on the notion of time, with another plagiarized excerpt, to let in more daylight:
A grandfather clock is a gigantic, freestanding time-keeper with a pendulum held inside the waist of its case. Clocks of this type are roughly equal in height to the English inventor who is credited with developing their form. From this we may conclude that, prior to 1670, male grandparents were either nonexistent, or they possessed only the vaguest notion of time: the system that they utilized, of inferring the day’s hour by noting the position of the sun, guaranteed them to be late for all events, including their final appointment with the Angel of Death: for, as has been noted, the stars have burnt out; it is on account of all the above that our elders lived such long lives on this planet, and I do not say they enjoyed it.
[—from The Odes of Horace (Book 3, Ode 6); J. Michie translation]
P.S.
Whether confronted with a sitcom or a rap track, people generally do not listen very closely, but I think that the happy few who pay attention appreciate it when a joker (read: fine artist) offers up something that’s obviously half-assed, because our current culture does not deserve any better.
Below is the first of ten tracks from yet another demo rap tape that I found in the dustbin where I tossed them. I’ll upload the album online, one track at a time. The next ones will be less abortive, I assure ye. Ye’ll note that this song sounds unfinished – that’s on purpose. It’s intentionally floundering. I started out trying to write some typical “gangsta rap” lyrics, thinking it’d be amusing to say them without conviction, because a guy with my demeanor shouldn’t be attempting that genre; but it didn’t work well. That’s why the lyrics are basically just two couplets.
When I get to the rest of them, you will notice that each of the album’s songs end with a guitar performance by my brother Paul – I didn’t let him rehearse or do more than one take, I just forced him to play cold during his first time hearing each beat, because I wanted to get done fast. I will name the album very plainly, with a question mark at the end: Slow Raps with Guitar Solos?
P.P.S.
Also I finally did get my last finished rap demo uploaded to YouTube, as individual tracks as well as the full album in a single file. It’s called Rapping in My Room. And there are other goofs I did at demo rap headquarters.
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