On glue and tapes

Dear diary,

Do you ever get in the mood where you wanna glue everything together? That’s what mood I’m in right now: I just wanna glue everything.

Yesterday I found a cardboard box that was taped shut — it was among some things that I had put in storage — so I cut the tape and opened the box: inside were some felt-tip pens, a block eraser, and a bottle of glue. Here is a quote from the package of the latter, which, by the way, was Elmer’s brand:

For Household Repairs, Craft Projects & More!
New Stronger Formula Dries Fast, Safe & Non-Toxic!

So this put me in a mood to glue whatever I can get my hands on.

I should probably mention how the glue bottle works. You twist its orange conical top, which causes a hole to open at its tip; then you squeeze its sides, and white multi-purpose glue comes gushing out.

The first objects I espied were books, so I glued some books together. I glued Edward Lear to Tolstoy. Then I glued Finnegans Wake to the dictionary that was on my coffee table. Also I saw some suitcases in the corner of the room, so I glued them to the television.

Lastly I took down one of the paintings from the wall, and I poured glue all over its face (which happened to be literally a human face, because it was a portrait of God); then I turned it around and held it against the place where it had been hanging: so now it’s glued to the wall.

The reason I was rifling thru my storage is that I was trying to find my old VCR, which stands for “videocassette recorder”. Cuz during this pandemic lock-down that we’re experiencing, our local library is closed; and that’s where normally I’d borrow any movies that I want to watch — so, with that option gone, I must fall back on my own supply of motion pictures; and most of the films that I have copies of are on analog videocassette. (I own some DVDs as well—DVD stands for “digital versatile disc”; it’s just another way to store high-resolution audiovisual material—but I’ve currently exhausted them.)

When I was in high school, I purchased a good quality VCR made by Hitachi; and now, twenty-five years later, the thing still works — this I know because I found the unit and hooked it up to my widescreen TV using “RCA connectors”, also known as “phono plugs”. (RCA is an acronym for Radio Corporation of America, which introduced the design by the early 1940s for internal connection of the pickup to the chassis in home radio-phonograph consoles.) It amazed me that I was able to get such a newfangled device, like the television that we inherited when we moved into this new shack, to communicate with such an ancient form of machinery as a VHS player (that’s another name for the aforesaid tape recorder — VHS is short for Video Home System), which is nearly obsolete, as we live in the Eon of Instant Disposables.

By the way, those suitcases that I affixed to the TV did not interfere with our movie-watching experience, since I only glued them to either side of its casing: one on the left and one on the right, like the cherubs that guard the fruit of immortality in paradise.

The LORD God banned humankind from his Garden of Bliss; and he placed at the east of Eden a team of cherubs, to block the way of the Tree of Life, and a flaming sword which turned every which way. (Genesis 3:24)

The first film that we watched on tape, incidentally, was Alphaville (1965), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

I just love the viscosity of glue. I love the way it looks when it oozes, and the speed at which it wells and blobs and seeps. It travels at a slow pace: glue is not hasty; it knows it has all the time in the world. And then when it dries, it hardens so strong. Nobody can pull apart what Elmer has fused together.

So I had the empty case for the Alphaville cassette in my hand, and I decided to glue it to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). (In addition to that so-called prequel, I own the first two seasons of the TV series on both VHS and DVD: I bought duplicate copies when it came out in the updated format, because I’m a fanatic; but, if you want my opinion, I now think it’s most worth watching only the aforesaid feature film, after the pilot episode with the “European ending”.) Then I glued Taxi Driver (1976) to Dr. Strangelove (1964).

So I’m glad that I didn’t discard, dispose of, or destroy my collection of old cassettes tapes and video disks, back when I toyed with the idea of annihilating them. I photographed the spines of the entire trove during August of 2017, and shared the pictures in a blog post; however, out of contempt for my readership, I refuse to provide a hyperlink to that entry.

I also glued some socks together. And I glued a woofer speaker to the frame of a tray-table. I glued our coat rack to the front door (so that’s convenient); then I glued our entertainment system’s remote control to the arm of our sofa, so that when you sit down & look to your left, you see all these buttons that you can press, & you feel like you’re inside the fuselage of an airplane. Also I glued a light bulb to one of the fins of our ceiling fan.

I like the way that glue looks when you smear it over a drawing — I’m not talking about its hardness now, or the way that it unifies materials: I’m praising the muted sheen of its glossy translucence. I think that all artists should put glue on their finished drawings, as a way to seal the deal and declare their work finalized.

Anyone who draws, say, a dog, or a plumber at work, or a golfer in mid-swing, and then brushes glue all over the surface and lets it harden into a thick coat like a veneer, I’ll buy your work for $500 dollars. That’s a promise. I wish I could offer more, because [insert reason here], but I only have a certain amount of money in my bank account, and $500 is a good, round number — it’s enough to declare, “Your work really matters”, while at the same time it won’t send me, your benefactor, into the poor house with all you artists yourselves. For we wouldn’t want that.

*

Hmm… I wonder if there’s anything else I’d like to claim that I glued together before ending this…

No, I don’t think so. I feel pretty satisfied with what I’ve done. Text is different than an ink line drawing, or a graphite sketch: An author never needs to daub her script with glaze after writing “THE END”; for words are non-physical (can I call them spiritual, or will that offend you?): there’s no real way to lock language down; a textual composition can always be tampered with. An arrangement of words depends upon readers in futurity cooperating with their author’s intended arrangement, which never does happen. Look at the most famous works of literature: First of all, they’ve all been translated into alien tongues. Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey. Dante’s Divine Comedy. Also the Bible: even if you could read its Hebrew Scriptures in the “original” (say you got your hands on the Masoretic Text in scroll-form on lambskin), you’d already be attending to the result of ages of redactors wrestling editors who in turn were wrestling scribes and priests and prophets who were wrestling aural poets or seers. (I’m using wrestling as a trope for revising.) It’s a wonderful hodgepodge. And you can either allow yourself to be frustrated with the lack of control in this endeavor, or you can join in the fun.

That’s precisely why I love glue so much: it’s unnatural. (I’m against nature.) The normal state of existence is to change continuously, and thots flow and morph from mind to mind, like the game called “Telephone” here in the U.S. and “Chinese Whispers” elsewhere.

What if we discovered a substance that one could drape over speech to make it stand still for all of time, like a verbal statue? (I’m not talking about videorecording, because that doesn’t cast a wide enough net: that’s only a small sliver of reality.) Like the beautiful insect who was encased in amber during the prehistoric eon, and its body is preserved today, so we can look at it and give judgments like “Ooh!” and “Ah!” — similarly, there should be a way to encase the human voice in chrysolite: to contain an entire reading of a poem simultaneously, in the selfsame sphere; thus you could behold the sum of its marvels all at once, instead of having to start perusing it at the beginning & then proceed temporally, at a rate of one second per second, until you reach the finale.

Or, better yet, take that voice that you hear in your head while you read a poem silently to yourself — encase THAT in fire. This would be a genuine accomplishment, and we’d all react to our progress by feeling acute anxiety and gasping: “Where is our genius luring us?”

But dinosaurs are incredibly dull-witted. They sit around arguing about what ultimately led to humankind’s demise. Some say it was the plague that knocked them out. Some say it was their various systems of government, which couldn’t figure out how to cooperate when they needed it most. Some say it was the pollution that they brought forth; some blame overpopulation...

I could go on listing all the hypotheses that the thunder-lizards have posited regarding the question “What killed off humans,” but I’m getting kinda bored now and I wanna go drink rum; so I’ll just unveil the true reason: It was all the above. (That’s why I called them stupid for thinking it was only one thing.) In other words, we died a totally natural death.

Yet, as luck would have it, we humans all, each & every one of us (and by “us” I do not mean our mortal souls but our true selves) got preserved in a fleshy flux, beyond comprehension, for all of eternity.