BLIND AND FINITE

BLIND AND FINITE

 A

[RE]

COLLECTION

BY  ALEX CRUSE

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S Y M M E TRY BREAKING Dear Sir: I have taken it upon myself to re-christen Sunday as: an inherited epiphany, a Pyrrhic victory, a recirculation back from a self-induced hell/inverted mirror where the black-blue psyche of my m y Animus is generated and steps forth. God exists only in man‟s discriminations discriminations of the finite. Your judgments cannot be written; I have all the alphabets locked in my m y teeth. Your eyes are like pools of o f hot wax collecting on the tops of 2 white candles, “like crawling out of a ditch into Jackie Onassis‟ iris.” Another shrine I can‟t  believe. My mind translates this into “21.52782 “21.52782 lux.” lux.” It‟s all pretty easy to understand. Until your autobiography screams, anthologize every cough.

(1a) “…the white culture is an „unnatural‟ culture.” -- Rastafari  Rastafari 10-point moral code

REQUIEM I: SPAHN RANCH JUNE 2011

We arrive before sunrise. After about twenty minutes the sun is teased up over a vista that‟s slanted like a wry mouth, an axis over which insomniac architecture —   burnt out and too crazed to settle into dusk   — seems seems to scream out of color and out o ut of time, hurtling the spectrum into charred  blackness and that is all; just a culmination of everything that we cannot see, all at once. Fires destroyed Manson‟s compound in 2005, but bu t elsewhere, dirty history adheres to stucco, operating as a mnemonic device of the built environment: from Western film sets to squats that housed lines of speed; misanthropic guitars; languid, unwashed bodies of the Family‟s Family‟s women,  women, contorted into sexual gymnastics, so their rent was free…

The sun‟s sun‟s rays bleed incandescent and desert clouds hold them inside. Emily‟s still asleep in the car and I‟m sitting on the h ood, fishing for a cigarette lighter. (I rustle some old receipts in my pocket and feel stupid: calculating leisure, they whisper back o ld vices and transactions; they‟re momentary suicides of the will— every every one, a memento from times when I could not provide for myself alone.) In a culture as perverse as this, society views them as them as the crazies, maniacs, sub-humans. Yet how Human is the one who constantly co nstantly feels the pressure of her institutionalized world, void of any connection to the natural one? The Tate-La Bianca murders were a depraved, near-cannibalistic expression of Marxism and I think: what good are ideologies if we are not willing to kill for them? Were the drugs and brainwashing joint-enablers, or retroactive scape goats? How close are our  passing homicidal urges —   before they are coaxed out of our respective systems by the homogenizing forces of marketing, peer reference gr oups, the belief in some social contract —   — to to transcending into action? action? I remember when I first heard Manson‟s records. His tongue in revolt, all cowboy anarchy, logic yawning, stalled in a year not no t governed by any an y precise diction or grammatical form (“old ego is a too much thing”)— and and his kids were grabbing verbal cues from anywhere, not caring if they were lies. I feel that inclination throughout m y body, too. I feel like I am broken enough to be sent absolutely over the edge by b y the decisive kick from my most primal brain, which tells me to act, not analyze, because analysis is useless and wrong. Maybe, most of us are no better. It‟s like this: maybe you‟ve been to school and you‟ve read books and maybe you think it‟s all  bullshit and maybe you don‟t. But, the truth is that, the demarcations of your mental topography

could be reduced to vapor if you were ever confronted by the singing charisma of a True Madman. All it might take in this unstable world is an introduction to someone who appears ap pears to know himself  better  better than you know yourself  know yourself   —who can convince you of something that you‟ve always suspected: there‟s a way out , out of being You.

REQUIEM II: TROY DAVIS SEPTEMBER 2011

"All the feelings of relief and peace I've been waiting for all these years, they will come later." --Anneliese MacPhail, mother of slain police officer Mark MacPhail

As of 11:08pm yesterday [September 21], Troy Davis is missing a world, one that he had already freed himself from. The Georgia Board of Pardons an d Paroles delivered on its promise, returning Davis to the State’s soil— the the very earth that, steeped with cash crops, gave rise to racist, imperialist economics; to Systemic Death: the American shadowy inevitability for most. The barons among us still live r eal eal Greek, while we’re chained to their mythological m ythological projects, designed to keep that insidious ratio of “one black man killed per every white police officer” intact, even if it takes 22 years for that institutionalized spite to manifest. This balance was restored last night. Such rabid, bureaucratic lynch mobs could have only spawned from the “majority mind,” that which defines morality and justice for the rest of us: those who suspend habeas corpus, who prevent against a gainst self-slaughter within Death Row, only to edify their own sterile instruments of destruction. And they hate you, and they hate me. They are indifferent towards their mistresses.

Troy Davis, perhaps, did not die an “innocent” man— too too much grit has coursed through our o ur collective blood to even feign an understanding of that word. (And, we indulge a state-sanctioned conception of morality by mere invocation of the concept.) But Davis died as something more  pure and, paradoxically, human than “an innocent man.” He died an av atar of an entrenched struggle, obviously —   but with his dying words he also communicated something that, by virtue of its perversity, was palpably real: “I am free!”

To couch the dynamics d ynamics of his trial, conviction, the subsequently rescinded testimony, his sentencing (Amy Goodman Goodman broadcasting “Strange Fruit” during her live coverage of the uneasy time between a potential verdict to stay sta y the execution, or to fire up the syringes…)—  syringes…)— to to speak of these events using the detached rhetoric of political philosophy is to give in to our ou r own psychic compulsion to make sense of the insane through context and codification.

Davis did not die a martyr, and he was not a willing sacrifice. Death penalt y repeal is perhaps one cause which needs n o more martyrs. If anything, Troy Davis was a p acifist whisper against the raging bloodlust of the State. His last statements were neither technical nor complex; they spoke of a simple peace that th at a hypocritical judicial system systematically inhibits, for its own devices: “The struggle for justice doesn't end end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me. I'm in good spirits and I'm  prayerful and at peace.” But, peace.” But, as they are perpetuators of this system, and were complicit to Davis’ murder   — the the MacPhail family cannot rightfully feel that peace.

REQUIESCAT IN PACE, DREAMS

Last dregs of the day. 9pm. Everything's swimming in red. Beach Boys chaser. okay. I only want to exist in that flattering light--we light--we were born into sterile fluorescence, skin against skin against plasma, and Fate owes us these nights under the red, a vaselinecoated glow that softens our ugliness... In these leather booths there exists a built-in reminder of mammalian death, of slaughter in the name of another's comfort: of institutional sadists who deal in headache and  palm sweat; this  is release from that,  the automatic monsters of bureaucracy. But, as they say, "Don't let the bastards grind you down… " “

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Forgive my low inertia, if nothing else. "Have you ever stared at a wall and grown conscious of your own immortality's slow disappearance?" disappearance?" It happens all the time. The planned obsolescence of humanity is unavoidable and,  perhaps, the final thread thread connecting connecting every last stalwart misanthrope to the social genome. Though we might think ourselves superior, there's a biological flaw engraved on the double helix: our own, inevitable wasting. Reflect on the apparatuses of death that we choose to hasten this process (pointed glance at the beer, the cigarette, the abundance of solitude encroaching upon your  psyche, the 12 layers of of irony we alternately alternately apply apply and deconstruct in an effort to cope with these more-or-less aesthetic choices--yet, choices--yet, we've chosen all of it.) We do not know what mutated Cognition can arise from these intellectually bankrupt activities--but still, unfailingly, it forms.

The waking brain produces phantasms that compete with our buried ghosts; the perverse dynamics that only sleep could engineer. The Unconscious dictates the fantastic, while an unhinged Consciousness Consciousness combines all the sickness of dreams with human logic. And it is the truly sick who stop having a preference, or even a choice, between the two.

REQUIEM FOR AN UNKNOWN PLAYWRIGHT …"So, like, there are these two dudes, and they're waiting for Godot..."  and so I put my headphones back on, listening to an album called "ART IS OVER," sunlight varnishing the ugliness of everything, and I invoke the shallow memory of the moment when my last vestige of interior normalcy died. All realities before this moment are recalled in grayscale Bas-relief; mere tableaux of ether... A camera turns on me as I walk through the university's courtyard, past a table over which someone has draped a banner "TEENS GOING GREEN" and a shrill woman is asking me about my thoughts on the environment environment (of which I have none, except that in the imminent cage match between Man and Planet, my money will  be on either warheads warheads or cannibals.) cannibals.) So I immediately and inexplicably adopt a pitch-perfect David Lynch intonation (the easiest way to find yourself behind a camera is to mimic one of the greatest directors of the past...whatever, "history.") "IN THE FUTURE WE WILL BE BORN WITH POLYVINYL CHLORIDE IN PLACE OF SKIN. PREVENT AGAINST SUBCUTANEOUS DAEMONS BY SEWING FENG SHUI INTO YOUR CLOTHES. 'MY COW IS NOT PRETTY, BUT IT IS PRETTY TO ME.'"

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Every new day is an excursion through hazes of interpersonal and systemic bullshit,  bad art, lame writing, writing, addictions, addictions, auxiliaries of of "the environment"... environment"... There's no respite. I scuttle my brain with beer on weeknights, cast a sepia shadow across nacre planes of cement, around a lake--I've walked around it 500 times at least--before I return to a classroom that sings with formalism, procedure, and silently envision one day completing the curve,  curve,  demounting from this inverted cube of glass and steel, that rotates synchronously with Ouroboros...until then I'm  just some dude, stalemating Godot. Godot.

(2) ɔoʌɐɥ ʇɔɐɹʇsqɐ “an atemporal score with a probable time-base in the region of 10^19 seconds. seconds.”

--is --is blood on the Earth (is the journey of chemistry heading toward…Our bios: acquainted with the same jokes[?] Have we shouted in large gasps of reasoning?) Some kind of satellite hive-mind, my life. Impoverished. Malnourished and proceeding to be "enough," to be a Sect of weight of obsessive monomania--executed unjustly--his scalp was the basis of the telecaster’s smile (upon telecasters.) Just one crying, about that: micro-cosmos. Was swimming some problems, but now that's finished. Sometimes people will get back into hitch-hiking, which may start with spiraling paths, in front of the future, of the fetish. Gold —DON’T BE FOOLED . Travel may be welcomed and will pass; and welcomed back… and their sorrows in the Raw Primordial give birth to the honeyed snare of amazing elastic skin all ripped up sexish and mostly of those things that were really important.

First: discerning, governable search engines: crack-cocaine gives birth to six-legged exhaustions. Sometimes they were secretly (1) you, (2) epigenetic warfare, and (3) my eyes. Franticly they search for their species . A LETHAL SITUATION : those devices, that have been able to ricochet off chaos? worse than obvious. A new place; my spit is crossing over the insane water, the sort that resonates a while. A sailor. Smart fucking joke... My love: the half-life of an idea of ______________ the sound of grave fiction; the most beautiful; although I know the eight arms of the poker face. YOU ARE FUCKED, a note is just one measure of the night. Background of the TV studio, 20, 0.0002, 0.0000000001...

FIVE EXAMPLES OF THE SECOND DIMENSION "Parabolic poem/ Morning, and subtly, alone"

i:

ii,

The inconceivability of a mysophobe’s happiness, so filthy is love.

the quiet degeneration of photographic hue, at war with sunlight, mutes the contrast of ruins unexplainable, deep spokes of shadow carved into the frame, a darkness incidental to mass; a photo, evidence of love empirical. Prove my sight. Validate.

iii,

Weaving of noise, together, together, assimilated yet oscillating, waxing the faux wooden veneers, the anachronisms and Scottish sentiment; streaking down the glass: profanity, epiphany, conjecture, laugh; the carbon exhaust, half-life of humor, the slow activation of internal acids, throats lacquered with microtonal organic procedures, dirgeful song of the arabesque inside you.

iv,

 All my masks, mannequin heads, fake hands, wigs: obsessed with plastics, a perverse refuge from my misanthropy: mimesis of the body itself.

v.

Ugly women married, ugly women with babies.

“ ONE ONE PRIMAL PROBLEM IS TO DEFINE TWO IDENTICAL SIDES OF SOMETHING.”  SOMETHING.”  silently lambasting the idiots always. Broadway becomes water. bones become a deaf reverie: the nomadic sleep of my nightmares, a psychic yurt whose structural integrity (that is, Horror) never loses gravity in the slightest dimension, which is to say: often awake: my Hydra intelligences, drunk and various, inhabiting different colors and mute gradients where CB radios collect negative air and pawn truckers’ molar dust off to history’s artificial night, dense with slang (all tongues ripped out) -Saturday. Sunlight enters eyes through gaps in fence-vinyl, fractionally, like Gysin's Dream Machine writ large. An ancient tangle of blank spaces, stressed and pulled into hieroglyphics of air. icons stamped briefly across a tongue, degrade into a gaze, into a spacious wound, into a place in my head as hollow as the carcass of dreams. Needing: 1) fewer enemies in my omnibus, 2) to fight the exploding hagiography of my bedroom mirror that spawns this crooked shrapnel, my teeth.

(3) SYMMETR Y B REA

KIN G,

ii.

IMMEDIATE AND MEANINGLESS AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, PT. II

 Lay on a campus lawn, a fringe fringe of arable land, land, with only death beyond it. A heliotropic affect, a physical disturbance. Confront academics in front of their monument, as you confront the sun--the two taxis which orient American cosmology.  It's a laconic building, building, the type that that elicits a faster faster response response than those with with more rigorous and complex vocabularies. Grid-work Grid-work of bricks continue on an axis, and  spills out into into public space like the colonnades colonnades of St. Peter's. Peter's. The thesis of that entrance: welcoming you, embracing you, more cosmic metaphor than architecture. We're so ethereal and binary that we forget how Space is a positive concept. We can use space as a form of poetic control. Think through the fourth dimension, past x, y, and z axes. Like the pyramids: "The art and architecture of the Egyptians reflected a confidence and security afforded by their geographic isolation." Millions of desert stones canting upward, splicing the sepia air, connecting earth and sky.  He then asked us, "How did this this architecture aid, aid, abet, and maintain maintain the status quo?" (pause)  My answer echoed echoed in a room of 200: "...they were were built by slaves?" slaves?"  Pyramids, Masonic Masonic images of longevity, longevity, permanence: permanence: appear on on the dollar bill bill as an anchor; they give our young nation faith in its currency, in its social surplus, in its monuments to decentralized suburban life. We can use money as a form of poetic control.

“144 x 144” Data matrix-representations matrix-representations of websites’ URLs, based upon the most popular phrase generated by Google’s “auto“auto -suggest” search feature, by each letter of the alphabet, on May 15, 2011.

 A Data Matrix Matrix Symbol can store up up to 2,335 2,335 alphanumeric alphanumeric characters. characters. Distinctive Distinctive Arabic Arabic lettering can now be transcribed as repetitiously-patterned, binary, non-linguistic information so that our ubiquitous computing devices can “read” text as we do. However, these code s are not intended to inform or enlighten, as “human” text arguably does— but to ease, organize, and expedite the consumption process. It is interesting to note that of the 26 most searched-for terms, only two (“quotes,” “Rebecca Black”) are not corporations, or sites in which  a monetary exchange is automatically implied. Also interesting is the fact that, while such generators are readily available online, no free document explaining the explaining  the QR (“quick response”) encoding process is available to the public. (But one, in PDF form, can be purchased from the International Organization for Standardization.)

NIMROD, PACING:

(“I UNDERSTAND AND I WISH TO CONTINUE”)

A MACHINERY MEANT FOR PRETTY CALM

 speaking of “new haircuts,” “diets,” “weather   ,”… --weather, held within a broadening sky, which encloses our every pattern, the myths hinged upon constellations. They infiltrate our fixed dialogic Systems, and we move with them. and yes, the Ancients are in dialogue with our understandings: of one another; our inadequacies; our weapons; our own bodies. We should never speak of the Gukurahundi, of politicide, of genocide/of Levittowns and commodity fetishism/of graffitti on mosques and broken Temple windows/of childrens' lost limbs/of Tantalum wars in the Congo — we we are manacled forever to the most mundane tragedies of our own psyches. Speak of fashion and I will kill you: we cannot unpack the artifice that originates inside ourselves. Speak only of science, and find sanctuary in law built biological —   — the the last  predictable pattern on an insane and senseless earth.

love is a minor calculus, shifting within the rubric of the seasons. We are dumb and childlike in our bankruptcy, our wilderness. Our axis has run out of stamina. This is where structure ends.

NOTES COVER:

"Theory of Garbage," Julio Teich Title is from The Right to be Lazy (1883) Lazy  (1883) by Paul Lafargue (K. Marx's son-in-law) 21.52782 lux= 2 foot-candles "Like crawling out of a ditch into Jackie Onassis‟ iris." --Lester Bangs, on Tangerine Dream (from Psychotic (from Psychotic  Reactions and Carburetor Dung ) images from deconcrete///////////////////////////////////////////////// PAGE 1:

PAGE 2:

"ANEMIC TONES VS. ANSEMIC CODES," 2011. Greek architecture in plan/excerpted crop circle

alphabet A line that appears in Rainer Werner Fassbiner's Lola Fassbiner's  Lola (by a thinly-veiled Hermann Goering avatar): "When I hear the word 'culture', that's when I reach for my revolver.” More precisely: " Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" ("Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!") This is actually a line said sai d by the character Thiemann in Act 1, Scene 1 of the play “Schlageter” (first performed in April of 1933, to honor Hitler's birthday), written by Nazi Poet Laureate Hanns Johst.* Of course, Mission of Burma found success with this line, as well —   — moreso moreso than did Goering, anyway. PAGE 7:

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images of the twin towers/Bas Jan Ader 

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"194X," 2010

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self-deteriorating/rotating self portrait, 2011

full quote: "The mysterious being known as God is an atemporal score with a probable time base in the region of 10 to the power of 19 seconds." From John Latham‟s piece, "God is Great." image: Milo Manara PAGE 15:

image: Time-Law symbol (determining sun/moon position) at Haugsbyn, from the Halstatt Period image: time variation of the smoothed pulse amplitude of a star, 1968.

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"B-0B9 vs. Mertz Glacier," 2010 (microphotography print under a cell of a drawing of Antartica's Mertz Glacier/B-0B9 iceberg collision)

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"A machinery meant for pretty calm" was taken from Russ Rymer's "BACK TO THE FUTURE: Disney reinvents the company town," a critique of Celebration, Florida.

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"Grid 5," some code iterations/imagery i made using Visual Basic

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