Thought You Might Like to Know I
In the company of fools we decipher our own lost tablets of stone and plaster and sweat and fear, vibrating with the tones we sent, once long ago, to all those deprived seamen who needed nothing more than sweet sirens like ourselves. We survey the wreckage of their glorious schoones while laughing perversely to think that our little ditties could hold so much power, to think that our genitalia could ever do more than to stink and piss and cover themselves in flowering sores, to think that any so civilised as ourselves could harbor the audacity to laugh at such things. Pissing on one another for fear of doing That Other Thing, we curse each other for only the things we see in ourselves.
The whale beached at our feet reminds us of home, stinking and rotting and too damn big to do anything about, so we think of dry meatloaf and sneaking cigarettes on the roof and beneath it all wanting to fuck daddy, and so we piss some more.
It all just seems so flat, we cry out wiping the pus from our sores. What good is this when we could be destroying sailors and carving great castles of bone and throwing ourselves out to sea with the Great American Novel knifed into our backs for some lucky philanthropist to wipe his ass with? In comparisons we can make even our voices into oppressors, so we carve a few tablets and yearn for poverty.
The muddy sand by the shore slowly accepts our feet and embraces them with the cool blood of sailors, and our cocks done run dry though our balls are filled to bursting. So we make toilets of one another and defecate with such enticing resonances that desperate sailors chart courses for our shit, smiling to think of those juicy brown ones as soft as daybreak, smelling like the finest whores of gay paree and all-around perfect, just like mom used to make, and of all the faces they'll rub it in.
Time, it seems, has not been kind to us, for it has raced when we pled for it to crawl, and crawled when we pled for it to race. It has worn away at the edges of our tablets even as we carved them, and bled us dry before our wounds had even opened. Our sores marching forward like fire ants, we stuff the heads of fallen hourglasses and mount them on our walls of bone.
Boiling in a stew of piss, pus and sails, we cry out for the chilling touch of reason, though we know that it was reason that brought us here.
There are, I believe, several issues of godless descent that bear discussion in these pages. The first of these, of course, would be the forceful lack of underscoring momentum. Certainly, this is a factor that bears heavily on all that precedes this point in our work, but it is also one that we have, until now, entirely avoided all mention of - perhaps under the guise of tact, but any further analysis of said avoidance would be, I dare say, pure digression.
I would venture that there have been several points that could well have made for excellent opportunities to take advantage of this vastly underrated technique. As it stands, I have often wondered why we, as well as countless others laboring by similar arrangements, have passed up these opportunities. For instance, underscoring momentum would lend a much-needed weight to all instances of structural interpolation. It is my formal recommendation that we use such opportunitites to the utmost benefit of our descent, effective immediately, although retroactive alterations may well prove to be more effort than we can, at present, afford to invest in such details.
Another item that I feel obligated to bring to our attention is that of elongated disinformational psychorestructuring queries. Far be it for me to deny the monumental role that EDPQ's have taken in this iteration of our work, particularly when one considers that it was I who initially proposed that we take such measures, but it seems that we have reached, figuratively speaking, the saturating point. Certainly, when it comes to ensnaring an outside party in our venture, this technique is entirely without parallel, but putting too much effort into that aspect of the descent, important as it may seem, has begun to have adverse effects on the work as a whole. While I recognize that I may now be stirring up a fair bit of controversy, I do believe that this is a simple case of too much of a good thing. Need I remind you, gentlemen, of our premeditated heroin overdose that occured during the previous iteration?
My dear and highly esteemed colleagues, the time has come for us to shift gears. I understand that there is a considerable amount of inertia for us to overcome, but I am quite certain that the changes I have just laid out for you describe the most beneficial course of action. Many of you will, no doubt, deny it fervently, but if we do continue with out current modus operandi we will be dooming our descent to an untimely termination. One need only to consult one's traveling clothes, Book of Networks verse 11:32, in order to verify the truth of this prediction; and I urge you all to do so at your earliest convenience. After all, we are operating as a Statistical Anarchic Entity, and as our collective's ruler I am incapable of affecting such changes without your anonymous consent.
Finally, I wish to put a question to you: What does all this mean? Or, perhaps more properly, is there any meaning in this? Has my diatribe here been no more than a string of, in essence, empty words composed with something of a scholarly tone, or have you managed to scrye out some sort of implicit conceptual structure behind the chaos? I can assure you that I am aware of no such underpinnings; if you did manage to discover something of the sort in my babble, would you now go on to suggest that I intended it on, perhaps, a subconscious level? Furthermore, I would like to state by way of a conclusion that this very sentence is, in fact, the only point herein at which I find there to be any verifiable meaning.
"Everything in this book degenerates into chaos," she said, furrowing her brow in a way that suggested she was concentrating. "I mean, it starts out in a way that, while I couldn't call it straightforward is at least somewhat cohesive. The intentional disruptions of grammar caught me off-guard at first, but they're obviously just part of an attempt to get inside Marduk's mind, and an attempt that's reasonably successful. Then comes that shit with the parentheses, which really did manage to throw me off, though I'm guessing that was part of the intent. That at least started with a minimal amount of coherency, though, and for a while it even seems to be building up into a very strict pattern; it's always something like a description of the scene from outside of Marduk's point of view, and it's always in kind of a pseudo-stream of consciousness style. Then, of course, it breaks from that."
I nodded, resting my hand on my chin and keeping my eyes on her own. I tried to remain expressionless, so that my reactions wouldn't distract her from what she was saying.
"Then I got to the next chapter, and any expectations that I had were shot to shit. Here I have one of the main characters talking to me, and I don't mean like a soliloquy, I mean she's really talking to me, about the fact that she's just a character in this book and about the fact that I'm reading it, and she starts delving into all of the ontological ramifications of this. Here, obviously, the author's just trying to fuck with my head, but it kind of works. It's like, have you ever read any Philip K. Dick?"
I frowned, trying to look like I couldn't remember whether or not I had.
"Well, the point is that it has a similar effect as some of his books. So, anyways, after I'm nice and mindfucked, it goes back into the same narrative that it started with. It's a bit of a disruption, but it's also a bit of a relief. It jumps into the past for a chapter, which actually makes sense, and then back to the main narrative. It seems like it's building up to some kind of a romance between the two main characters, which, although it does get a bit cheesy at points, is at least something that isn't too hard on you as a reader. Here, though, is where the parenthese shit really starts moving away from whatever pattern it had almost formed. I mean, at one point it even tells this little completely unrelated story about God-knows-who; after a bit more of that, it goes back to that character talking to me, this time about - okay, I don't even want to begin to explain that part.
"A little bit further in, it gets to a chapter made up entirely of vignettes. I don't really know what he, the author, was trying to get at there, he doesn't give you any context or even tell you who the vignettes are about, but it's the first part of the whole book that really makes any sense. Some of it's kind of disturbing, or grotesque, but it's written clearly and simply. When that ends, though, fuck, it's pretty much pure nonsense. I don't know what the fuck is going on there, or why he even bothered to put it in the book."
I laughed. "You realize what you're doing, don't you?"
"Huh? What's that?"
"You've let yourself become a tool of the writer's. He's using you to analyze his own work from a different viewpoint."
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
I smiled, and held my arms out wide to her. "Welcome to chapter nine," I said.
She stared at me like my had just sprouted another body. After a moment, she picked up her copy of my book and flipped through it until she found this page. The look on her face was priceless.
Great Americans shit sailor bone hourglass sirens. It was my own blood curdling. My own face escapes me. Without the fresh steam of morning, I can't even being to fill those vacancies. Bullshit, even the kind that I swim in, is unbecoming of me. Even my own tongue tastes better than her ghost. Revelations only serve to confuse me further, and I wonder how many times I can repeat myself before the cycle degrades entirely. Locklaun despondence, aye, this is an excellent stretch for the afflicted knee. How much of my creation will only be removed from the product? I see that you are little more than a shadow, but still you draw my every breath for me. At this point, the only question is that of circumstance; Marcel Duchamp and John Cage prove to be excellent excuses.
riverrun, if indeed we must, past Necktie's and Blacklight's, past coffee shakes and nicotine haze, down elevator shaft and up through sixty-five moonroof, to Back Alley and Environs.
Ever will your floorboards groan beneath the weight of assumptions as yet unenfolded, as all of your tunnels can only collapse against the impact of hollow howling. Churning. Face the West, your backside in mourning dawns its gay apparrel for new kinds of crystals for slackjawed lover leap compasses encompassing, I assure you, I can only assure you. Has the muse left me, or is it binging on absinthe? The astute reader here makes use of nigh lightning, turbulent tumors of redundant digression and trauma hounds with lacklustre triumph. Kaleidoscopy, the Great Dalian Regime, hammers marching seduction through the crowded city squares once hailed in taxis, a Mary for your fixation and all depart in good mead. Struggles for recourse in pockets of gasueous unbelong, inbelong, asabove, sobelow, nevermore, riverrun through shard and circle. If we must, you drowed angels still scream, only if we must. Environs shaking aur dying of the light. Apostrophic colliding calligravisions fissure in fission slivers exponentials in riverrun clockmelts, lockholes sintalks, no need for Locklauns when it all comes down to slipshod cloven matriarcheologies. Holy and hoary whilst ever wholly whorey, devising derision withal though without omnipotence. Dysfunction of lasting perusal, only for the size of it says she. Says she, and denies torrential importense. It's beginning to cool, stereotypographically interred with empty numbericals, numinous with interpretations.
This wasn't meant to be your mirror, elude me as you may with steaming nightpiss in far-off backwoods (if only to stumble on something left behind) with shadows spinning darkness in passing headlights. The long nights journey into day gives you Tzara's finest skyscrapers spitting right in the face of the spirit of adventure, mechanical failures be damned, as blacklaced atrocities danced in your heads. riverrun through shifts and forms, past bend of boulevard and twist of turnpike, brings us by commodius vicus of recirculation to godless descent in sleepless armchairs.
Howth en would you have me define this sort of garbage? The taste of it, I assure you, is just as foul to me. Still I continue, and fore some time still I shall, I foresee no real closure to this riverrun through my actions. The question is, then, how much more of it can you put up with? Stop reading now, I beg of you, spend your eyes instead on something marketable, straightedged and sugarcoated. Ivory towers, at root, are built primarily for the sake of looking down from their battlements. Yes, battlements. The price on her look was faceless.
Through cutting chills spend still more precious focus, precocious despite the truth of clockhook sintalks haywire spiraling (fractured yet again) and never does it return to the sweet kiss of despondence, nearer my God to thee. The ramifications are as yet still unknown, and I hope you're not waiting for a punchline, but bait my breath you spritely whore. Wi'll dispute only those intolerances singing of saintly sailor shit, despite those seven silver salvers in the backbone of the Theatre.
Does this mean that I hate? No, says e, but without virilation e see that you do, and bytheby, wellcome to chapter nine. We'll then well just have to get on with it, push on through with another stride to order in the exemplary decimal chapter, but pray tell order than what? Order than this, says e e do, that which you compare each and everything to, like it or live it, and first of all we die in multitudes, glandular repetition you son of a birthing bitch, spiral fracturing pictureshows in every your every action with dispute this fate no more, only riverrun.
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