A HOUSE BIG ENOUGH FOR ALL OF YOU
For every piece of shit at the center of the universe.
This work is for Clarice Lispector and Fernando Pessoa. Dedicated to the story of Michael Stipe and Kim Gordon visiting William Burroughs at his home with her infant daughter. Devoted to an essay by Mike Kelley where he talks about bringing the paper mache likeness of a witch to an effigy burning contest at a Michigan State football rally, where the jocks stood back and let him burn his creation, speechless surrounded by sports mascots and dudes with letterman jackets. To the ghosts of Ana Mendietta and Lee Lozano. This is a journal of illness. The transcription of a diseased mind body conflict. A hopeful attempt to resolve an ancient experience of placelessness and of creating little homes. A declaration of acceptance and generosity, basic goodness and loving kindness, for all the children and for all the pet snakes.
Now, consider the three dimensional presence of the left thumb. Now imagine the volume of the index finger. Imagine that the thumb and index finger are porous. On a molecular level, space flows through and around the finger and thumb. Consider the distance btwn the tip of the thumb and the tip of the finger. The space btwn the eyes. The space btwn the eye and the eye lid. Btwn the eye and the page, btwn the page and the eyes. The distance btwn Dubai + Jakarta btwn Beijing + Kabul, btwn the tip of the World Trade Center + the center of the Earth
PART ONE
The bed collapsed. Fell apart completely, bits of particle board and obscure Swedish hardware scattered across the floor. The mattress lumped over winter clothes and extra blankets. Laughing together, the bed reminds them of an installation; trompe-loeil Ikea furniture in careful piles of cast plaster, milled wood and painted metal, arranged to appear broken. Artwork like this was important once, sometime ago in a past life he remembers with vague sadness. They came together on the broken bed and again once more, before picking up the wreckage. A new-old life of sleeping on a mattress on the floor; insect bites, spider welts and respiratory problems eventually forced the purchase of a new bed frame, frustrating to Abdel1, the same model as the one that had been destroyed. Of course, the relationship ended. There was an accidental bloody nose, maybe caused by dry heat and dehydration, cocaine and compulsive use of the netti pot, no one can be certain, but the sight of blood during a heated argument affected a kind of implied brutality, even if no such thing had actually occurred, the record, transcribed in a merciless, trembling hand now contains a reference to domestic violence.
A packs for an overnight train to Denver, using an oversized Army surplus duffle bag, the kind that opens from the top like a big canvas tube, anything at the bottom is trapped there until the whole thing gets unpacked. A pair of thick rubber snow boots takes this place, he will never use them and eventually they get traded for a Patagonia windbreaker and a hit of LSD. The bag is too big and too heavy, impractical for this trip. As a bike messenger in Chicago, loaded it with corporate payroll envelopes, little plastic windows, thick paper printed on one side with elaborate patterns in blue or black, securing the contents against identity theft. The design of the patterns are complex and beautiful, like islamic decoration, architectural brise-soleil or Memphis Milano style hashmarks and carefully organized squiggles. Intersecting, fractalic, spiral-graphic geometry, an aesthetic corollary to psychedelic hallucination, interwoven matrices of computer generated lines.
Alan Watts describes the universe as an infinite multidimensional spider web stretching in all directions at once, covered in dew droplets, each reflecting one another infinitely, threads of cosmic notation- at once random and consistent, like the numbers on the paychecks inside. The envelopes are armor protecting virtual currency as it transfers from one account to another, back and forth forever, flowing and undulating in a boundless trough of debt and labor. Real and hyper-real, the virtualization of financial structures as they inter-sect with all aspects of daily life spreads virulently and eternally, exponents on exponents, the power of profane symmetry, the realm of advanced mathematics, poetics and matters of a spiritual nature.
Dues ex Machina /Caveat Emptor /Memento Mori
Abdel closes his eyes, the patterns pulse and wobble in synch with the rhythms of the ocean and the earth and the music in his ear buds, something about Biggie really lends itself to this type of experience.
‘...Fuck ‘em, I didn’t wanna go to heaven anyway...’
The observation car of a long distance Amtrak train has curved windows that reach almost to the ceiling, a moving screen. A perfect view of the backend of an American landscape. Graffiti for days, all the way from New York through Philadelphia and then things slow down as empty spaces are punctuated by industrial buildings, warehouses, brick yards, neat piles of sand and gravel and mulch, stacks of wooden pallets.
Approaching Chicago, the graffiti picks back up. Spray paint is Illegal in Cook County. So are automatic weapons, yet somehow both proliferate via outlying counties, or neighboring states with relaxed gun control, Indiana is stocked with Krylon, Rust-o-leum and discount ammunition. Abdel had a friend on the Southside, who worked for Pepsi painting murals on billboards, at night he went back and bombed over them. Victor had two huge Kane Corsos in his tiny apartment, the dogs’ crates and a flat screen took up most of the space, which had no windows. Victor drove an $80k Audi S8 paid for in cash and had a sailboat on the lake. He was 26 when he died, fell off an old train trellis while running from Police in the middle of the night, there were a few good articles about it, a huge mural in Pilsen, his cousin took the dogs.
The windows of the train fogged up in thick weather, for the first few hours the observation car bustled with passengers moving around, getting settled, buying snacks and beer and little bottles of liquor. By 9pm or so most people started nestling into their laptops, streaming whatever or reading; crooked sleeping bodies on the brightly patterned Amtrak seat cushions. Ugg boots, collegiate sweatpants, the familiar nasty smells of snack bar hot dogs and nacho cheese. By ten or so, the crowd in the observation car had solidified into a specific cast of characters who would remain more or less in the same place for the duration. Skinny old Bluesman: tattered South pole bubble jacket, brown leather fedora, missing tooth, guitar, fifth of Dewars White Label. Skinny younger guy from Harlem: Triple Five Soul hoodie, sagging jeans wild hair like the kid form Boondocks. Shwag weed, but no papers.
Depaul University Baseball Bros: Matching sweatpants, long sleeve Underarmor, massive biceps, tight fades, positive mental attitudes. Shady looking white dude: metal tattoos on his arms and hands; wispy satanic designs that may have once depicted figures or text but now had faded into a blurry, grey-green network of veiny, subcutaneous smudges, bottle of off brand Kentucky Bourbon, all kinds of pills. Fearful eyes and a kind of stutter, he stayed close by for the next nineteen hours.
Big Dude with a Denver Broncos jersey: bandana covering his forehead so that his bleach-frosted, gel-spiked hair poked out the top. Cooler of Bud-Ice, two bags of Lays potato chips. His Girlfriend: XL Fox Racing zip front hoodie, stretch-pants, Adidas sandals with Victoria’s Secret, PINK socks pulled up high. She had the flu and was coughing and moaning, drifting in and out of consciousness the whole way. Abdel: canvas bank bag with 25 hand stapled poetry chapbooks, one pound of dry sausage from the Ukrainian pork store, baguette, hard Parmesan, almonds, $900 in cash, tin of Drum tobacco and 200 papers. By midnight the baseball twins were long gone, metal guy and Abdel had been working hard on the bottle of bourbon, and had started breaking up some of the pills and taking quarters of this and halves of that.
The guy turned out to be into books and art so Abdel traded a chapbook and $20 for four Clonzapam and a green triangular Xanax 3, a good deal for sure. The guy had ziplock bags full of prescription bottles and didn’t seem too worried about diminishing his supply, besides, they were stuck on a train in the middle of the night with no one else to talk to. Metal guy was super suspicious of everyone else, which made Abdel nervous, he was cool though and eventually started to tell his story. Growing up in Michigan he got into the music scene in Detroit and eventually wound up on the road touring with bands, he spent a few years traveling internationally- Australia, Japan, Germany, Norway, Sweden Nordic countries are big into metal. They talked about Burzum and the the mythology of Varg Vikernes who was imprisoned for the murder of fellow black metal musician Euronymous of the band Mayhem, Vikernes was also charged with arson in connection with the burning of several Norwiegan Stave churches.
The Bluesman had started playing guitar and he and the kid from Harlem were making up songs, sitting on the dining table, which was secured to the wall and bolted to the floor of the train. There were several of these tables in the observation car which would eventually become sleeping platforms for anyone who had a cushion or a blanket, anyone else who wanted to to sleep horizontally as opposed to twisted up in the seats would have to settle for the floor. Abdel didn’t really sleep, neither did the Boondocks guy or the couple with the cooler. The girlfriend seemed to be getting sicker and sicker as the night went on and her dude started asking around for medicine, Abdel had a few NyQuil gel-caps which he traded for three beers.
The train stopped for an hour in Omaha, there was a serious snowstorm going on outside and at some point in the last hundred miles or so, they were forced to reverse direction and switch to a different track, at 3 in the morning, all fucked up on pills and drinking. Abdel didn’t care, besides, he still had the Xanax and knew he could flip that switch and any point and fade into oblivion for at least as long as it would take to get to Colorado, after which it would be morning and the bar would reopen, people would start to wake up and the sad, fluorescent carnival of the observation car at night would subside, returning these few souls to the daylight, rolling west toward the mountains.
Abdel regains consciousness on the floor of the observation car, Bluesman and a new stranger are curled up nearby, still asleep. He rolls over and out the huge curved windows, all he can see is landscape. A vast stretch of flatlands, blurry hills in the distance and several young brown cows grazing on the frosty grass. No more snow, clear blue skies, cattle everywhere, dotting the grey-green expanse of earth, two hundred head or more. The windows become intricate dioramas like the life size installations in the Museum of Natural History in New York. In the future, he’ll watch The Squid and the Whale on a laptop in someone’s bed in Maine, which indeed, ends up badly for everyone involved.
Arriving in Boulder at lunch time, Abdel found the air so thin that he became almost instantly disoriented, food helped, then two strong beers and a joint in the park returned him to hyperventilating delirium. Lying in a bed listening to the voices in the next room he began to count his breaths, filling the lungs with thin mountain air and releasing it slowly as his heart began to slow to a manageable pace, Abdel drifts off to a dreamless sleep and when he wakes, the sun had set behind eighty million year old formations at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Abdel’s friend Tadziu, born and raised in Detroit, worked as a mechanic for years and then discovered a freegan dumpster diving scene that carried him to Chicago and then west to Colorado to wait tables, build bicycles, traffic homegrown weed and learn to knit, crochet and sew patches on everything. Tadziu landed in Boulder after a hard winter in the midwest, wanting access to dispensaries and festival culture, the apartment had a view of the Flatiron and his roommates were cool enough.
Waking from his weird little nap, Abdel is greeted with a cup of tea and another joint, which this time does the trick. Abdel is sitting crosslegged on the floor holding a ball python named Lee Jackson. His arms and the snake begin to merge, seamlessly and elegantly the cold body blending perfectly with the warmth of Abdel’s blood flow. The presence of a snake, from here on out would become crucial to his spirituality. Snake god takes its place now, a new energy; ancient and powerful. Changing the game forever.
he mystery of bodies
is abundance and
every opinion a Lurking Place.
Lacking the desire to follow
a symmetrical path,
the individual is not an arrow,
but a loop.
A truly humanoid machine
is attached to failure, and the fear
of death
Narcissus in a bent reflection
suffers a crises of recognition.
Desire here is triangulated
and prismatic,
the narrative is broken
and we must learn
to read the short form.
Mechanisms of desire do not
walk on four legs in the morning
two in the afternoon
and three at night
they are an evening triangle.
the swollen footed symbol,
folds under scrutiny.
remember the forest
just breathing, at dusk
where the new stories are
illuminated droplets
they evaporate
and reappear in between.
Food. Body. Money. Sex. Talking: garbage in garbage out. The opposite of whatever doesn’t factor in here. A specter haunts the world, a specter is haunting the world, the world is a specter, words are a specter. Welcome to Specter world.
Any action can be looked at as performance, even action words like buy or sell or fuck.
What does money feel like? A theory is maybe loaded with hypothetical schisms, points of reference all collapse in on each other so that things add up like in the movies. Exchange takes time as we say passes, there is no evidence.
Smoke from people burning grass and branches catches in the back of the throat, kind of sweet, tropical and unfamiliar. The trip to Puerto Rico for the New Year with a group of friends, all artists from Baltimore and Philadelphia. Part of a scene that was getting some attention from the broader critical community, champions of politically conscious, textual performance work, publications and installation focused on contemporary cultural critique. Janine and Abdel were engaged to be married for several years before the dark reality of his addictions and mental health problems became unavoidable. This holiday time was a respite from the chaos that had started to descend on their life together, an opportunity to reset the timer and enjoy some peace and quiet with friends and family near the beach. The house was on the ocean, in fact waves crashed against the walls during high tide, the view out of the kitchen window was pure horizon. Epic sunrise, a small pool above the sea wall to cool off in, hammocks, a deck specifically for yoga and meditation. The sound of coqui frogs and massive dark green leaves everywhere separated the grounds from the road, up a steep hill and at the top of a curved, shaded driveway that seemed to disappear at night and made everyone feel truly insulated from the outside world.
At the bottom of the driveway a small stone pedestal with a smooth stone sphere balanced on top of it, a tsunami alarm. If there were an earthquake, the sphere would fall off, put it back on and if it falls again, its time to run uphill as fast as possible. The local advice is to head to higher ground on foot. At around 2 am on the first night, Abdel and Jana awoke to what felt like the subway rumbling beneath them, but they weren’t in New York. By the time they were standing in the courtyard with everyone else, the foundation of the small guest house was twisting and buckling, dark crevices appeared in the grey cement as the Coqui frogs stopped their chirping and the stone sphere rolled off of its pedestal and down the slope of the property toward the ocean.
Jana is from the Southwest, a child of the desert with a vacant air of detachment that Abdel is drawn to. Empty space inside, she is a fierce intellectual, a powerful writer and has lived a life that he envies, she is the type of person who he wants just as much to emulate as to be with. He gives his love as if by opening every faucet he has access too, every interaction is a flood of analysis and criticism and incomprehensible struggle; tethered by effortless, generous sex, substance abuse and creativity.
Always there was a meltdown, this is the pattern. Jana has been through some shit in her life as well, she gives herself over entirely to this process, the second guessing only comes later once actual harm has been done, damage to the trust and tenderness that is irreversible. Trauma is the thread that unites them and of course, the one that inevitably begins to unravel.
Rincon is known for its surfing, the biggest waves in the Caribbean are at Playa Domes, named for a decommissioned nuclear reactor that protrudes form the underbrush, a pale green metal hemisphere nestled in the dark jungle plants. The waves at Domes are perfect for surfing, world renowned pipelines, often massive, unridable monster waves that roll in one after another, sometimes thirty or forty feet tall. At this time of year, the waves are small, but the undercurrent at Domes is always strong,
Abdel notices from a hundred yards away, someone being sucked out past the breakers and people gathered near the coral rock cliffs by the entrance, shouting and waving their arms. Running on the sand he could see that the people yelling were his people and that it was Jana who had been swept out by the current. In a full on panic Abdel ran past the group and dove into the water, swimming out toward the jagged cliffs, powerful ocean water pushing against him as he scrambles up and over the rocks scanning the surface for her. Bleeding from the coral rocks as they slice his bare feet he keeps climbing, now around a small bend in the cliff he can see her, battered and also bleeding, pulling herself up out of the churning ocean water, gasping for breath. Abdel the hero. The lone rescue party. Only, by the time he arrived she’d already saved herself.
Safety in believing
in the order of Things
broken cipher
cracks in the walls
of Borges’ Labyrinth
through which one may sneak a peak.
or creep
get creepy.
comfort in the hastened construction
of some much needed new mythology
that which conceals a philosophy
where every opinion is a lurking place.
And how satisfying it can be to slide
around in the shadows, taking no action.
the energy of a coiled spring, dangerous.
Imminent
violent, perhaps. Or worse.
so basic, remember
genius of feeling, maybe
genius of hurting.
Fourteen thousand foot white capped mountains. Shear altitude in every direction. Tadziu and Abdel are driving through the Rockies, smoking joints and listening to JDilla in an rusty old, baby blue Mercedes Benz. Leaving Boulder early in the morning they wound their way along route 70, passing through Utah, waking up one morning in Moab surrounded by red rock cliffs and scrubby desert. Spent the next night in a Walmart parking lot in Burley Idaho, watching Coming to America on a two hundred dollar laptop Tadziu got from his mom. At three in the morning, the parking lot in Idaho was deserted. Quiet, except for the Benz’s diesel engine and the sound of styrofoam cups and leaves and sticks and plastic trash blowing around in the brutal wind. Coming to America is set in Long Island City, near the Queensbridge Projects. 41st Side of Vernon. Home of Nasir bin Olu Dara, Braveheart.
Abdel worked for a time at an Art Storage warehouse in Queens named after the spaceship in the Disney sci-fi comedy Flight of The Navigator. Trimaxion Fine Art Storage was situated in the basement of a parking garage, next to the former site of the notorious club, Metropolis. On weekends in the early nineties, there was a traveling rodeo that would pack the lot with hundreds of people and cars, hiding the bull riders from street view. One hot summer afternoon, a bull escaped. Charging through the neighborhood, smashing into street signs and garbage cans, terrified residents watching from the upper floors of the project houses. The NYPD eventually cornered the traumatized animal in Ravenswood and killed him with their guns.
Hypnotized by the darkness, Tadziu and Abdel would spend the next two nights by the side of the road in eastern Oregon, a blanket of stars above them so bright that they appeared to cast a white glow across the frost coated grass, as far away from other people as Abdel had ever been. Only stars and sky and earth and cold and the heart of a lion. Driving west through Oregon the landscape is flat and dusty, low scrub pine and everything is the same brown color. A dark stripe on the horizon becomes thicker and thicker, greener and approaching fast. Then, a line of pine trees tears through the sky and scrub brush, a gateway to the Northwest. The Columbia River gorge is middle earth, the resources here have supported human life for thousands of years, remains of peoples who migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia have been found among the waterfalls. The most verdant, abundant place that Abdel had ever seen. Moss covered rock walls and sea hawks floating high above a giant artery carrying melted ice water from the Cascades to the Pacific.
The house in Portland belongs to friends of Tadziu’s, twin sisters, folk musicians who tour all year and support themselves by trimming weed. The basement is rows of bunkbeds and a stage, set up for touring bands the twins have been hosting travelers here for years and welcome Tadziu and Abdel casually, with big spliffs and cold beer. Home cooking. Three other women live in the house, all musicians, craftspeople- wool blankets everywhere, dim light, people playing music packing bowls and eating dense organic bread with the cheese of a sheep who lives nearby. After days and nights on the road in the cold, this place is a dream inside a dream, but they’re running out of money fast.
Abdel gets sick, food poisoning from a carrot cake he found in the back of the fridge. Three or four days in bed in the basement puking in the slop sink and masturbating to take his mind off of the gnawing pains in his gut he discovered chatroulette, a phantasmagorical carousel of virtual sex partners, mostly close ups of dicks.
CR is a footnote in the prophecy of Nicola Tesla, who for told electrified tablets of infinite wisdom connected by invisible threads. The libraries of the world condensed in the palm of your hand. And dicks, of course. and tits. and buttholes. and people wearing horror masks on camera at four in the morning everywhere in the whole entire world. Running out of money things between Tadziu and Abdel get tense quickly, T is used to living on very little, Abdel’s anxiety is directly linked to the balance of his checking account. Tadziu is not afraid of being broke although their hosts start to notice that they are running out of food and that the tone of their interactions has become strained. Whispered arguments about how to budget meals and how frequently the vaporizer needs to be replenished are reverberating against the walls, delicate fabrics draped over table lamps cast their rose colored glow on the plaster. Beginning to feel like intruders, the hushed voices of the women in the next room suggest that it may be time to move on.
Abdel needs to go and visit some old friends before leaving. Artists and musicians and west coast activist kids who went to undergrad with his brother in Baltimore. They live in a house together somewhere near the place where Elliot Smith wrote From Basement On a Hill, the place is called The Ranch, they host parties and performances and have bonfires in the backyard. One of the ranch dudes used to work at a wildlife refuge in Peru, nursing injured sloth, delivering baby llamas and trapping rats and mice for the snakes.
Crouched behind a parked car, tracing the shadow of a street lamp in white chalk, he explains that in order to avoid being mauled, it is important never to let the rope around your waist go taught. You must run as fast as the puma, or else you’ll tug her neck and she will turn around, intent on releasing the tension; then you’re fucked. Behind him on the sidewalk, the shadow of a fire hydrant is outlined in blue. He traces shadows in chalk, most of the time there is no sun in Oregon, when there is, he goes around and marks the shadows, days and nights go by and the sun comes back out, the shadows line up exactly where the chalk lines are. At night, street lights create shadows of the same objects.
The Dudes from the ranch bring Abdel to a bath house on the outskirts. Built into a hillside, the place is an indoor/outdoor labyrinth of saunas and pools, hot springs regulated by pumps and filters harness heat that is as old as the earth itself. Cold rain on the warm cedar roofs and billows of steam that float through the old growth branches form a canopy over walkways that curve around the hillside for perfect looking naked people with glowing skin.
An older woman walks in front of Abdel shifting her weight from side to side, gently loping like a cat, her heals make contact with the slippery wooden planks. She places each step deliberately, almost dancing, rolling on the balls of her feet, moving forward slowly, her long wet silver hair reaches nearly to the top of her butt, in a single braid. She turns her head to meet his gaze and disappears through a narrow doorway leaving a cloud of mist that takes the shape of her body and hangs in the wet air before swirling in every direction at once. Blinded by the steam for a moment he leans against the railing of the walkway breathing in the smell of damp wood and smoke.
Inside the largest sauna, twenty bodies tuck their legs underneath themselves and a man pours water over the hot stones, sending a scalding burst of air into Abdel’s throat and nostrils.
He follows this one man with his eyes as he sits across from him on the benches, his face and neck completely covered in tattoos, massive plugs in his earlobes, an expression of profound kindness on his face is obscured by the blueish markings. Abdel is at home in the sauna, even in this earthy western scene the steam bath brings out the New Yorker in him, chambers of collective solitude. Abdel remembers the locker room of an exclusive Manhattan health club where he once worked as a desk clerk, making his rounds at closing time. Prominent physicians, financiers, powerful capitalists, politicians and lawyers, literally rubbing elbows in the steam room, a cloistered realm of secret handjobs and insider trading.
Having parted warmly with Tadziu, Abdel is on a bus in the morning with a Jazz quintet headed to LA, past Mt. Shasta, lunch at a taco truck somewhere and a series of unremarkable naps in the back of a van on the way to San Francisco, where things start to get dark for a while. He has a feeling of imminent loss, which cannot be explained except to say that one exists in a state of being filled with emptiness. The onset of this darkness comes at the crest of a wave of euphoria, which sustains for several months although flecked with depression and panic, as if two great masses of liquid surging together churn and swirl until one is dissolved into the other.
Back in Baltimore, in a short term rental with no real furniture, Jana realizes that she shouldn’t have left Chicago and wants to go back. So she does, leaving Abdel to drink alone in an empty space in a strange little city. Things begin to unravel quickly for him there. The streets are dark and hazardous. Booze and drugs are cheap and available, sleeping for a time on a pile of clothes and waking up shattered every morning to teach undergraduate writing classes he knows that things are heading steadily toward a major upheaval, or even a minor upheaval, but something is coming. The universe is pulling and pushing at the same time and that churning war of spectral bodies, the volatile liquid mixing inside of him is growing louder.
Out one night walking Abdel turns a corner to find a group of teenage boys standing on the corner, he should have pivoted and started moving quickly in the opposite direction but some shitty energy inside of him pushes forward, through a crowd of high school freshman, maybe eighth graders, who predictably fall upon him with choking arms as he curls into a ball to protect his face and drops to the ground while twenty fists and feet deliver a rapid sequence of sharp blows to the head and the neck, back and ribs. The churning liquids still for a moment and everything in the whole entire world goes dark. Floating in a state of shock, strangely excited. He emerges bruised and with a pounding heart rate, no cell phone, no wallet, but also no stab wounds or gashes from the box cutters. lucky kid.
Fresh from a weekend in New York visiting a friend whose paintings are being shown by a gallery in San Juan, living in a cavernous borrowed studio space in Tribeca with glass tiled floors that look down into some abyss, the unknowable darkness of the actual underground, the soil comprised of crushed oyster shells and the bones of dead criminals and furious indigenous ghosts. They spent three days drinking cheap red wine and smoking weed, running into people at gallery openings who gather to warm their hands on the miserable glow emanating from such wretched performers.
Years later Abdel is reminded of a story of a guy being arrested on the LES on September 9th, 2001. Spending three nights in The Tombs, he is released on the morning of September 12th, lower Manhattan is covered in dust, everything is trashed. None of the cops told him or any of the other inmates anything about what was going on aboveground, left to draw his own conclusions as he walked across the island toward the bridge.
Just getting home, Abdel recognizes Jana’s silhouette from a distance, walking up the hill toward his place in Baltimore, she has nowhere to stay and needs to spend a few nights, which turn into a few weeks and all of a sudden they are looking for group sex partners on the internet. Of course, this goes badly, for everyone involved, but the memories will last a lifetime. This adventure is the end game for Abdel and Jana, who are not strong enough to survive sequence after sequence of emotional upheaval, sexual jealousy, skull splitting hangovers, air travel, bus travel, train travel, fucking Philadelphia.
Abdel writes a letter to Jana loaded with regretful finality. He goes to rehab in an old house on the Chesapeake Bay where JFK and Marilyn Monore used to meet in secret, Jana gets a position at NYU and publishes a novel. A year later, they spend a month and a half together trying to work things out and Jana looses several thousand dollars of her parent’s money on a security deposit for an apartment in Ditmas Park that they never move into.
PART TWO
The parts do not make a whole, less than a thing. It is not apparent how
all of the elements come together. Yet they nevertheless do, through com-
position, sometimes by chance so that it appears as if it is a thing, but we
know better since it never feels solid or purposeful enough.
Paul Chan
PROFOUND DECLINE
MANIFEST
IN A CONDITION OF TRUTH
NO THEOLOGY AT THE MOMENT
AND
NO JUDICIAL PROCESS
ALL THE WORDS ON PAPER
WONT AMOUNT TO NETHING
NOT JUST A THEORIST OF THE FLAME
BUT ON FIRE
A KNIFE MADE OF SALT
OF WHICH THERE IS NO BLADE
AND THE HANDLE IS MISSING
SPACE OF PLACES / SPACE OF FLOWS
I DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT ANYTHING
AND I LIKE IT HERE ALTHOUGH I HAVE
NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE AND KNOW
NOTHING ABOUT THIS PLACE
OCEAN / DESERT / MONEY / METAL
LANGUAGE / DISTANCE / DENSITY
EMPTY ZONES OF EXCHANGE
& TRANSGRESSION
NO MORE THAN A STRANGE LUMINESCENCE GROWING MORE INTENSE BY THE HOUR, OF WHICH NO ONE CAN TELL FOR CERTAIN WHEN IT WILL BEGIN TO WANE OR WHEN IT WILL FADE AWAY
Utilizing the indentations and accidents of the rock, transpiring
mountains instead of scaling them. Boring into the landscape as op-
posed to traversing it. The harbingers of ambulant fire in an age of
global capitalism continue to experience the mystical agency of their
ancient counterparts.
In this way, also engendered by the illusion of sovereignty, the light at
the end of the tunnel. Activated not by fire in the case of the ancient,
but by satellites and liquid crystal. A massive ship appears on the horizon,
a likeness of whoever is carved into its bow. Rare birds. CMYK sunset
AT THE TIME OF WRITING,
TRY NOT TO.
NO PLACE, NO TIME AT ALL
NO MONEY AND NO EXTACY
GENIUS OF FEELING
GENIUS OF REMEMBERING
PART THREE
Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy, one must
not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new
conception of life that is born within us. In burning a corpse we
obtain one gram of powder: accordingly, thousands of graveyards
could be accommodated on a single chemist’s shelf. We can burn all
past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy.
Mythical violence, is the violence of change—it is the violence that
destroys one social order only to substitute a new and different social
order. Divine violence, by contrast, only destroys, undermines, tears
down any order -beyond any possibility of a subsequent return to order.
This divine violence is a materialist violence.
Walter Benjamin
If there is nothing but myself then of what am I affraid?
-Joseph Campell
THE END OF TIME WILL NEVER COME
HISTORY / ANIMALS / HOUSES / HOMES / HIDING LIES
PERFORMANCE / CULTURE // SUB CULTURE / / FILM
MAGIC / MYTH / MYSTICISM / AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR / STYLE
NOTES / FOLK LEGENDS // MAP LEGENDS / GEOGRAPHIC DISTANCE
DISTANCES in TIME / DRAWINGS // COLLAGE / MISSING PIECES
EMPTY SPACES
LIKE OUT OF A MOVIE
David Lynch often deals with layers of consciousness in his films and is known for
drawing influence from his dreams. The typical Lynchian zone is a dark, codified
dream scape, mysterious and terrifying. In Twin Peaks the natural world serves as a
transgressive medium that allows people to move between corporeal, terrestrial reality
and a subconscious layer. These spaces are distinct and separate, but elements of one
exist in the other. Lynch has created barriers and gateways, psychic portals, often in
the form of tangible things in the ‘real’ world–circle of ash, ring of trees, framed
photograph.
These objects are activated by human characters and animals. Agent Cooper’s dreams,
the premonitions of the Log Lady, the owls are not what they seem. The forest, of
course. While there are clear distinctions between the real and the surreal, events in
the mystical realm can, and do affect characters in the waking world. Often through
dreams or through daylight visitations by mystical agents who bring mysterious,
foreboding correspondence from the other side. In the film, Fire Walk With Me,
which Lynch intended as a prequel to Twin Peaks, many of the unanswered
questions of the original, two season drama are revealed. Both deal with the
mysterious, although, the film begins with answers to questions that are raised at the
beginning of Twin Peaks. Both are essentially mysteries, although the gravity of the
mystery, depends on which story is received first. The basic format of a mystery is
present in the film and the series, Lynch adheres to the structure of a mystery story. In
this way, the trancendental, magical, dream logic is contained by a familiar structure.
Like a circle of ashes in the forest, the format begins to function as the bounding
fibers of a portal to another world. The function of interior space in terms of film
theory, is significant here. The director’s ability to control an environment is literally
fundamental to film making as an art form.
The set serves as a structure within which transgressive and
transformative rituals can be performed. The function of interior / exterior here,
brings up a set of dichotomies: inside / outside, on / off, houseless / sheltered,
intoxicated / sober. These dichotomies provide containers for transgressive logic, and
transgressive performance. Like the structure of a mystery story or a horror story,
these dichotomies provide containers for transgressive logic, and transgressive
performance. Fire Walk with Me, deals with two coded movements, one in the
beginning and one toward the end; although we don’t get direct access to the code, it
is obscured, hidden from sight, but I feel assured that Lynch is giving us more
information than we have the bandwidth for.
Everybody’s looking for themselves. I am a person in search of themself, how
archetypical can you get? We’re all trying to fulfill ourselves, understand
ourselves, get in touch with ourselves, face the reality of ourselves explore
ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever since we’ve dispensed with God, we’ve got noth-
ing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life. I think that the true
self, the first self, that original self is a real quantifiable thing, tangible
and incarnate and I am going to find the fucker.
Altered States. 19—
In J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World, the protagonist, Dr. Kerans, explores a black
lagoon, in a dystopian future jungle it conceals a flooded London street
corner. The exposure of the submerged city inspires rounds of nostalgic, fearful
conversation among the other characters. Kerans, in a diving suit, submerges. Ballard
describes this descent as an amniotic bath, warmer than expected and quiet.
Suspended in the thick, muddy lagoon water, Kerans experiences euphoric sensations
of comfort and silence.
In the film Altered States, William Hurt plays Eddie Jessup, a Harvard physiologist
who is researching the elemental human ‘self’. Early in his career, Dr. Jessup’s
experiments with sensory deprivation had resulted in strange side effects, sickness
and mental difficulties in several of the test subjects. Jessup repeatedly engages with
dangerous submersion experiments, which ultimately put his own life at risk.
Like Kerans, Jessup embodies a Science Fiction trope: the curious scientist, pushing
boundaries. Like Fire Walk with Me, Altered States transgresses the structure of its
genre, and deals with the literal transgression of physical and imagined space. Altered
States is about investigations into the human mind via psychedelic drugs. Jessup
travels to Mexico and experiments with magic mushrooms. A psychological process
which ultimately materializes as actual physical affect-the blood of a goat. In the tank,
Jessup transforms into a neanderthal man and escapes the laboratory.
He becomes obsessed with going further back through genetic history. In search of
the true self. What he finds is a kind of cosmic womb, an embryonic laser light show.
He ultimately realizes that God is nothing, and fights his way back into the
world of the waking. The film ends with Hurt in the fetal position, sweaty and naked
in the arms of the woman he loves. Altered States is a classic Hollywood science
fiction thriller, the scientists’ research with consciousness expanding substances
eventually yields terrifying results. People get hurt, a goat is killed, Jessup is affected
with grotesque mutations, huge bulbous masses moving under his skin. Kerans’ fate
in Ballard’s book is also essentially horrific. Someone on the surface of the lagoon cuts
of Keran’s air supply and he is forced to struggle through the swampy water to save
his own life, the story ends with Kerans stopping to rest as he wanders the jungle
alone, waiting to die. Like Dr. Jessup, Kerans is in pursuit of dangerous knowledge
and becomes a victim of his own curiosity.
There are often elements of horror in Science Fiction, the future is a scary place.
The function of interior space in Hollywood horror films, especially people’s
houses, illicit feelings of ‘home’, they really drip with it. In many films, the home is a
symbol of safety and domesticity. A clean, ordered zone, which is
transgressed upon by an intruder, usually a male, who intends to disrupt the clean
ordered domestic sphere by smashing windows, destroying furniture, and murdering
the people and animals living inside. The threat of violence ultimately gives way to a
climactic realization of that threat, usually repeated over and over again. Periods of
intense violence give way to moments of calm, restorative sequences, only to be
transgressed upon once again by increasingly disturbing depictions of violence.
Sometimes, ordered zones are displayed as memories of domestic spaces, representing
nostalgic feelings of comfort or safety. animals, children, soft lighting. Hanging a coat
and tossing the keys in a dish on a table by the door. The horror structure plays on
notions of familiarity, family. Notions of ‘home’, identifiable signs, relatable
affect. Houses here are containers for characters, containers for situations, prisms
refracting highly concentrated beams of human experience. Automobiles also
function in this mode, inside and outside and moving and still. Everywhere, and
nowhere all at once.
PART 4
The Russian theorist Boris Groys writes of art and politics. He says that a pattern of
repetition is underlying all the proceses of historical change. Groys speaks of a
process for the creation of images that can transcend time borders. Time border of
past and time border of future. Every photograph, every film. Like Altered States,
Groys experiments with the past and conjures Kasmir Malevich, whose Black Square
paintings can be seen as a transcendental image. The more we construct this analogy
of the black square as repetitive symbol, we cannot look at anything without seeing
the black square at the same time. We are floating in a deprivation chamber,
repetition here is the material of our collective willful ignorance of what may in fact
be true and real. By Groys’ analysis, we live in a world where everyone is an artist,
aspects of Joseph Beuys vision of the 1970s is fully realized in the here and now, only
it is not quite as he imagined. Bueys spoke of a collective ‘right’ for any person to call
themselves an artist, for Groys, that right has become an obligation.
EXTERIOR NIGHT
A house is illuminated by lights from the swimming pool. Heated water steams up the
plate glass windows. Each pane of glass is black, reflective, monolithic. Shot from
ground level the walls of the house are larger than life, the windows are Malevich’s
black square, transcendent and repetitive. From inside the house looking out, we can
see lush foliage. Landscape architecture, minimalist garden decor. All bathed in
creepy, sexual, flickering light from the pool. Lawn chair shatters plate glass window,
chase ensues, bloody violence.
A FORCE IS SHOWN AT WORK MAKING OBJECTS WHICH ALONE
COMPLETE SCIENCE AND ALLOW INTELLIGENCE TO SURVIVE
- Willam Carlos Williams, Spring and All
NO COINCIDENCE, EVERYTHING AS PROSCRIBED
NOTHING 2B AFRAID OF >< NOTHING 2B AFRAID 4?
This was an excerpt from a much longer text, if you are interested to read more, please comment or contact me on Instagram @Knamen_lites
MXBW 2024
The name Abdel is derived from the Arabic word ʿabd al, which is a combination of the word abd (عبد) meaning "servant" and the definite prefix al or el (ال) meaning "the". In Arabic personal names, ʿAbd al is often part of a compound name that refers to an attribute of Allah. The name came to me in a dream.