THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT by alex alex cruse
This is a fragmented account of a drive across the United States, ripped from a journal. Slept in a car/motels/deserts/on a Brooklyn roof, and bathed in lakes/gas stations/not at all. Philosophy is what remains only after survivalism is removed. removed. Covered 14 states in about six days total, before bumming around New York for another three.
DAY ONE
Currently heading to San Diego from Oakland; am currently somewhere on Amtrak’s route between the Central Coast and Los Angeles. Angeles. Wheels Wheels slap endless endlessly ly against the tracks, like like an addict’s fingers rhythmically prepare skin. I’ve been on trains for hours; through blurred and slatted vision, the dunes appear italic. .
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I amble through Union Station’s art deco ducts, ugly and sick with exhaustion, exhaustion, and get asked for change three times within five minutes. ...The recessed ceiling of the station’s fantastic semi-rotunda—its blue coffers arranged in a brutal pattern of emptiness, emptiness, like like a thousand sunken, Aryan Aryan eyes—serves eyes—serves as backdrop to a woman who simulates tears by wetting her face with water from the restroom sink next to mine, as she chokes out a request for a dollar. As all poetry is a lie, I found it oddly poetic—but, similar to my reaction to most poetry, I denied her .
Ran into G., whom I hadn’t seen in years, as he was walking along the sidewalk outside the station. I was chewing on a cigarette/feeling bad/sublimating it all by way of Olvera Street’s subterranean bass blasts when I spotted him: “HEY!” “Cruse! What the fuck? What are you doing here?” “Just…y’know, ‘raging against the cataract of time.’ Picking up a friend’s car in San Diego, driving driving it to New York starting tomorrow.” “Whoa. By yourself?” “Yeah…” Grin. “You don’t change.” “...Unfortunately.”
…and we don’t change—none don’t change—none of us, not really. Psyches are static: circumstance, dynamic. Yet most of us “normalize” as we age, because the industrialized life is denied occasions for adventure and variability. My hatred of that notion is, I guess, why I’m here now, stupidly spontaneous.
DAY TWO
Biplane engines overhead shudder through collective associations with aerial warfare, and drag vinyl apocrypha across the sky…advertising colonizes even this, the last pure domain. Current scene: implied implied recrudescence of consumption, after the pockets have grown cold c old from prolonged inactivity inactivity;; after so many many hues of of Neutral have stitched stitched into one another--into the even, planar Zen of the road…This landscape landscape is a filmst filmstrip rip of the unreal. unreal. And, as it is is unbuilt, unbuilt, it could never house or sustain you; it can only hold your dumb, inert gaze for a transitory moment, before ejecting you back into an existence both paper-thin and performative. The desert’s only kin in ambivalence is the manufactured metal box that you now inhabit—which has always separated you, from everything (can’t we say that the mass production of automobiles was entirely historically-contingent upon American isolationism…?) --and through its glass, heat lacquers your face to the sheen of a pewter St. Christopher medallion, and it glows, all neon and heresy. The blood is merely acting out its script…in such barren realms, realms, ideas ideas of god or fate are cremated under an atheist sun. All this weather and machine legacy, foreign and domestic, is legible punctuation on your genetic paragraph.
DAY THREE
Driving Driving (somewhere outside De Smet, South Dakota) under naked trees of lightning lightning that snake out from violent clouds, their mass a tessellation of anger and electricity…can’t quite believe I’m not dead. Sought refuge from the storm in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s former home…yeah. Now I’m in a wood-paneled diner, surrounded by hateful stares and collapsed mouths, and sucking down coffee that tastes like a nursing home. (...today’s surrealism does not beg for metaphoric accuracy.) Haven’t slept slept for about 36 hours. The road invites hallucinations, and Earth delivers: jagged, pale Mesozoic colossi of the Badlands stretch for miles, all enrobed in bands of rouge sediment…and yet, like an old IBM punch card, their code’s randomness is illusory—an encrypted, alien, sempiternal intelligence breathes inside. The rocks’ arbitrary appearance confronts the park’s urban precision, making the site seem even more bizarre.
DAY FOUR
Across state and county lines, air pulses isotropic with the radio’s energy. Infinite planes of asymmetry produce a weird plaid of theologian frequencies…male and female voices alternating in a miasma of psalms, before they lose traction in the air and slip away… comically replaced by a Black Sabbath song, or with a detached, British description of Syrian deaths.. . . . .The military cemetery at the base of the Black Hills forms an acrostic of Name and Rank, all meaningless now; it spells out Death’s matrix, the cause and its effect…one small family of graves, its significance obscure, contains gaps: broken axes await more soldiers’ obedient skin to be subsumed into—and reinforce—their logic of destruction…“What destruction…“What is it they know that the powerless powerless do not? What terrible structure structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise?...”
DAY EIGHT
Have seen many Western European tourists, encased in cheap designer imitations and huddled around the United States’ most glorified hole in the ground, eyes fixed on their cameras’ pixelated stares. Spent today walking down the Coney Island pier. Heard a faraway woman’s rendition of the National Anthem, her voice scraping earnestly at an octave too high, like a besotted dog against a wooden door, and a dislocated form of nostalgia nostalgia began to creep in. Huizinga’s “THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT” ebbed around the outer membrane of my…consciousness(?) (who knows), nagging imperceptibly as paranoia or a half-remembered nightmare. I stamped each syllable of the phrase onto the pier’s shit-shellacked wooden planks as I walked.
You can grow so silent and interior that you hear all your body’s minute processes before they even occur…a prickling schizophrenia, like Fourier’s undiscovered fifth wave, not detectable by even the most sophisticated instrument. Sole human interaction occurred today in Brooklyn, when a man slowed in the street, leaned out of his vehicle, and wordlessly flashed a grip of 20-dollar bills at me. He was driving a van emblazoned emblazoned with LAB CORP. DNA TESTING SOLUTIONS. “HEY MAN, YOU WANT MY PLASMA??” I screamed.
