A View from the tramp

The last notion ever to effervesce

From the non-knowledge of the globe

Consisted of the fact that

I...
Would manage to share your misery.

Wherever I went you were there,

Existing [that is all]...

Through all the small out-of-place things;

An obscenity, an Über-voyeur of anxiety,

Wrapping a world into an innocuous lump,

Waiting to be consumed by that scaly void.

But you don’t laugh or cry,

You just say:

“This is it – reality”, blink... blink.

To me that's just a chug chug of bass,

A dreary half-life dirge:

The soul stultifying fug of a non-

Composition; a No, a NO.

And when I think of you...

It makes me sad...not in a good way.

It must be that simple.

The raw-ness of raw evenings,

And all the things you can’t say,

The utter pointless, swerve of

A future that is as stupid and undecided as you,

And the bombs will come and the children will die

And the images and films will be the same;

But there is never a reason.

It must be that simple.

It must be that simple

The greater good.

I always wonder what would happen if

The people who crowd the streets with

Such moral indignation,

And the obvious lick of the good and the true,

Were given their way,

Would utopia dawn, would a world of

Complete peace be the answer,

The completion of the dialectic?

No, but the point is the action

The pointless, heroic failure

Getting to the truth is not the goal

Knowing it won’t happen, that is the function.

The real reason for the horror is never

Defined and is probably dull and banal.

The conspiracy:

we live for the mystery

And the things they don’t say

Are the things in ourselves we don’t want to know.

So march March on, but know

You are walking away from the Real.

My Life Right Now (things I shouldn’t be saying).

This is the stuff that happens when you’re not looking.

Alone on a limb of the idiot tree trying to keep all the leaves facing the sunlight, while it’s blazing rays do nothing but antagonise my eyes, producing a tension headache and a will to drop off the tree into the ambiguity of the dark void below. 

I appear to have woken up into somebody else’s life, this is what happens: I leave the house, go to some predetermined destination, stand around a bit and on occasion take part in a trivial conversation, where I, rather than pierce it with a pointy finger popping it into a splay of exploding latex, stand there and nod and add a few uttered clichés to the ever flowing stream of hackneyed diatribe.   

I’m a bottle twisting and turning in the tumult of tepid waves of ego. I’ve somehow been given/given myself the task of keeping all those fragile plates of ‘self’ spinning, while I dash between them, sweating and drowning in disgust, becoming a seasoned entertainer, but an increasingly infuriated one.

Cumbersome and unwieldy metaphors aside, basically and clearly put this is what I’m trying to say: I’ve become innocuous, dull and dreary merely to maintain and reinforce those egos placed in my general vicinity; I find myself agreeing with all kinds of passionless mediocre collections of words dribbling out of lazy lips. Not because I actually agree, but just to keep everything in place and their dewy eyes from falling. I’ve become trapped between these words, censoring myself ‘just in case’ it upsets someone’s cart and their oranges spill out and roll around and about the place.

How did this happen?

Jeeeez I don’t know, but once you’re sat on your weeping stool and that little realisation comes down your face like the water from a burst pipe and you suddenly become aware of the rug you’re wrapped in, it’s hard not to look back on the last 6 months like the constant digging of the hole in which you’re about to be dumped.  Every spade-load of memories becomes evidence for how you became so splattered with mental lethargy and the heavy eye lids of a hooked-postured myrmidon.  

It’s like I’ve been slowly deafened by an ad nauseum hum, the sound of the machine drilling further inside – there is no will, no stepping into the unknown, I just feel the cold boot of the apathy pushing against my cheek. Melancholy is my master signifier, my ore to forge that ridiculous and wonderful creativity that spews from me; I was the weirdo, that person in between who could be simultaneously offensive and hilarious, but where is it now? Hidden, secreted out of sight with embarrassment, a cudgel to beat myself with rather than a sword sent from the gods with magical truth-telling powers.

Am I finally ‘normal’, suckered into that cul de sac of inspiration? Am I a participant in a slave morality, do I exist in bad conscience, and have I always?

I’m trying to upkeep this image of myself that has come to the fore in the last year of being someone ‘everyone likes and gets along with’. This is one of the downfalls of a sensitive person going out into the world and dealing with all the small others unaware of their fragile teetering and their participation in the game of egos, we empathise with them all, see value in them all; I’ve become so immersed in keeping up this transcendental image of me, the saviour, that I’ve become part of the game myself – locked-in syndrome. 

I’m looking in on myself as if on the cover of a gaudy magazine, looking so perfect. I’ trying to maintain this image, live up to the thing I think is me, misrecognising myself in this shiny paper mirror. I am a role, a facet of ‘The spectacle’ the Situationists talked about; it suddenly all makes sense again as it always did. I’m trying to construct myself into this prefect image at every second of the day, lying in bed my head whirrs with the way I should be lying, why I should be inspired and creative but I’m not, how I am a wily discerning sophisticated person as if trying to prove it to someone – that thing, the big Other, I’m at its feet whimpering with all the rest.

Caught in the clamour of egos, soothing their illusions, I have lost my own and flounder confused looking for one ill fated fantasy after another, not joyfully but apathetically, but none of them are mine, they are the detritus from all the personalities I have placated haunting me as I try to latch on to something, anything in the hullaballoo.

Now I sit abruptly aware of the rubble of my-self in my hands and I can immediately see the line, that slight border to be crossed; there are things you shouldn’t say and all that is wonderful and unknown is over that line, unpredictability is over that line, but I hold back, I can feel it even now; those thoughts of others that remain in flux, frowning and belittling, my imagination has been tainted by their imagination, a monstrous hybrid that leaves a weak inoffensive sallow face unmarked by tears. For now I am stuck in this lull waiting for the things I shouldn’t say to bubble to the surface.

'Emotional Rollercoaster'

Dear self

‘It was an emotional rollercoaster’

A man splattered with an ugly face and eyes whiter than the sun mouthing these words on the screen, summing up his team’s victory in the penalty shoot-out.

A girl, descending the steps of the court, describing her tumultuous legal battle, happy like a dozy canine.

A man surrounded by eyes so pure and adoring, casting these words as profound knowledge into dribbling mouths; his long and eventful travels through the world.

A robot, metal and empty, looking into the coming night, programmed with binary code, the 1 and 0 of mediocrity – a slow dull whirr and the words construct themselves. 

Rectal or loser

There is not a humanoid on any plane of existence that can convince me, with their useless words, that this fairground phrase, a worn out piece of carpet at the entrance to reality, sums up the complexity, uniqueness and multiplicity of any person or situation – indeed I’m also not entirely sure an interpretive dance would do the job, but no one has ever tried and this is the point.

The overuse of this expression, in all the blinding corners of my consciousness, is a fetid stain and sadness on my countenance. It makes me want to put my head in a blender then use the pulp to write an elegy to my soul on the kitchen floor. I realise this may seem like an overreaction, but with all the stringy sinews of my being (that vibrate with lucidity, played by the evil harp player in my head), the one thing I know is that it is not, because of what is at stake: the meaning of your existence.

Collate Errors

It’s like giving a loved one flowers or some such heart related product on Valentine’s Day – How romantic?  No No No! It’s not romantic if you have a gun held to your head being ordered to do it; of course the gun in this context would be a metaphor for expectation or, if you like, the superegoic pressures of society. The only way it would be romantic would be if you kicked the assailant in the nads or indeed grabbed the gun from them and shot yourself. Romance is chaotic, scary and a spontaneous act, not an obsequious and vapid gesture; if you choose to represent your ‘powerful and transcendental love’ with a husk empty of any unique meaning, I wonder what that says about you and your relationship.

Just as on TV or radio news when a tragic and unexpected death has occurred – you can almost sing along to the trite sound of the words uttered by the family member of the deceased – s/he was such a special/wonderful/talented son/daughter/husband/wife. I don’t doubt that they were, but the fact that you have chosen to represent them to the public and therefore the (big) Other (that judging unknown place where all utterances are addressed to and which holds the silence that begets the structure of your thoughts) with a laboriously repeated platitude makes me think the complete opposite; if they were that special render them in a way that shows their beauty, it doesn’t have to be words or interpretive dance, or dramatic in any way, just make an attempt at meaningful.

Oracle Err Slot

 ‘An emotional rollercoaster’ What does this phrase actually mean [holding it between quivering fingers and examining it before wrenching away in disgust]? A rollercoaster – Roller – Coaster – 2 innocuous and ‘pleasant’ words denoting ease and lack of resistance, but placed together and put in a context they denote that physical construction that weaves shadows around the participants of the fairground and can suddenly be used to suggest the trials and ructions, ‘the ups and downs’, of any situation that ever happened that was a bit hard to comprehend within a linear progression of emotion.

Nonetheless, its overuse renders it empty – an empty pot (dug up and reconstituted by archaeologists, seemingly filled with layers of subtle and profound meanings and a valuable insights, but basically just an empty pot, the same as all the millions of other pots brought from the ground, that maybe used to have stuff in them, but now they don’t and are destined to be looked at it through the glass of the museum). It is not insightful or interesting surrounded by so many multiples of the same.  It is perfect for those empty Valentine’s Day flowers though.

A Rollercoaster – a piece of mechanical engineering; a track designed to give the participant the feeling of danger and excitement without the risk – an entertainment. It is a manmade simulation. There is never really any danger it is all a construct with the full expectation of getting off at the other end. There is no reality; they were never really out of control. Just like a cliché, there is no danger of expressing anything new or unique.

It’s the Pavlov’s bell with the bovine audience salivating and chewing on their safe illusions like the herd munching on the cud. Emotion – an abject or ecstatic, indescribable force pounding through your body. The feeling and any uniqueness is pre-digested, a soggy molten mush – ding, nom nom nom.

Rear Cellos Rot

I’m being partly jocular of course; word’s can mean many things depending on context and use – I’m being purposefully provocative with my ‘interpretations’, but what I want to show is the rut I can get into with the light – to me it all seems the wrong way around.

The ‘rollercoaster’ implies a structure that humans ride to a resolution. The assertion that I want to make is that the phrase necessitates confusion between language and emotion.  People look into the words like little mirrors and see the something they think they recognise, they take that reflection stick that image like a pastry cutter over their emotion. The mirror image isn’t the real thing, it’s an image, a static, flat copy that seems to refer to something out there, but does not. The mirror is the out there that creates the thing it refers to. Hmm, What? What? What? Yes! Yes! Yes! Basically there is misrecognition between language (the structure, the words) and the emotion (that chaotic, fire-breathing, elusive wisp).  Those empty meaningless Valentine’s Day flowers are what create the affection and bond of the ‘powerful and transcendental love’, not the thing that refers to it. Platitudes, clichés, turn the Real within into a banality, a safe, fettered, loveless marriage with the silence.

Art Closer Role

Take your hammer and break that track of the rollercoaster you’re riding to bleakness, let yourself fall – jump off the rails of pleasure and free-fall into the wind of bliss.

All I’m really saying is it’s better to burn down the fairground than reduce yourself to the mechanics of boredom. Clichés are admissions with little bars, don’t lock yourself in; you don’t have to overhaul the planet, unless you are Socrates or Jesus, just piss into the darkness when it counts, create, innovate; you are not special, what are you trying to protect?  Hang your head in front of oncoming traffic, you might be surprised what happens.

MG