Decoys

Reproduction

[A composition improvised from words in Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus.]

She was engaged in a quest marked by an immense burden. Where there were words there were gestures binding on every spasm that tinged the end in view. The letters were numbered and formed a perfectly symmetrical row parallel to the tidal mark that corresponded to the designated degree of understanding.

She had never promised exact reproduction. Exact reproduction required she replace the amount taken from the originating vertical white surface. She departed from whatever the normal practice of reproduction of the composition of the pages had a rational basis for to write and reproduce with formulas whatever mental types had respectively governed with. Whatever letter was formed spontaneously by her electrical machine, more tenuous than direct information was hatching out the Egg: an unpremeditated ingot of gold from a subject that might still harbour some undiscovered reef that on the appointed day would demonstrate her emblematic penetration through each of its sombre pages.

With excellent reflexes she knocked violently and deliberately projected a random shaking of the information that might seem frivolous but gave crystal expression to the original. It had followed her previous investigations in delicate letters that apparently formed a slightly solid arched defence that one day would be admired on a little easel.

A striking correspondence of the pages had been rendered, but exact reproduction required a degree of unexpected mess at one remove from the exact while powerfully attracted to the large tributary of unknown and disastrous paths. Moving haphazardly with the art of divination in her investigatory operation into her single specimen in accordance with her finger extended towards the middle, her assistants warmly wrapped her extravagant movements with great difficulty, with haste and a fortuitous tumbling motion now emboldened to instil half a constellation, perhaps inscribed slantwise, for she was in contact with a spot withdrawn into the night that was identical to the multitude of torments foreshadowed as a consequence of the majestic appearance of the dark she desired.

The character was of charlatanism. The method of the whole escapade was a defence conscious of and contrasted with the plumage of brilliant investigation it had remained impervious to. The public therefore demanded that this degree of unexpected mess be scrutinized.

The assembled populace that watched the under-developed book was puffing with a temperament fiery, inflamed, and richly innervated; invariably astounded at the exhibition of dazzling examples exaggerated in being the prophetic formed spontaneously, and while attempting to be unaffected, they were conscious of being wholly monopolized by some baffling magnetism beneath, as if grasped by some mysterious passage that furiously tossed its captives about in the barrenness each page related with very controlling and agonizing uncertainty until it convulsed in a series of attacks born of the continual and irregular motions of these perpetual wanderings.

The apparatuses inside her Eggs were designed to repeat this indefinitely and without any variation; repeat, indefinitely; repeat, indefinitely; repeat, indefinitely; repeat, indefinitely; repeat, indefinitely; repeat, indefinitely; repeat, indefinitely; repeat, indefinitely; and would indefinitely repeat; indefinitely repeat; indefinitely …

Missing

[A composition improvised from words in Philip K Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist.]

I found myself facing a woman that I had laid eyes on before. In some respects the woman seemed to be breathtakingly beautiful, but if your gaze took in all of her, she left you completely overwhelmed. Her large brown eyes stared at me so hard and fixedly with strong and intense authority that was I unable to break away from her gaze. It made my head flap open and hum with this terrible noise, like the loudest whistles I have ever heard, and absolutely deafened, I had a terrible, odd, weak, and tight feeling, almost unable to breathe, as if I was conscious that my forehead was too small, fragmented, constricted by sinus inflammation and about to burst.

'I had to contact you' she said 'and get you aware that there is something wrong. Outdoors last week, I was conscious of people talking in a facetious tone about various articles printed in newspapers about a woman that meets people in order to hypnotize them.' Without another word she got a newspaper. After reading a clipping to me she said 'You see. You are fundamentally out of your mind not to see what is not an illusion: your world will explode from a build-up of reality. There are superior beings who open your head every night, directing cosmic radiation to kick your subconscious and get sadistic pleasure. They don't give a god damn what it is you want'

I was ready to show my incredulity and initiate a terrible fit, but my lips were too small in proportion to what she, the spokesman that declares my destiny, had said. So I nodded and said nothing. The reason I had been so constricted was that I had been standing there before. She had been entering my head every night to hypnotize me.

I cried in the cold for a million years and never even knew what this attack was on my heart. In many respects what she said was garbage whipped together. But her eyes didn't kill me, and by god, you know, when the time comes, I'll kill her, that warped creep, that psychopath from another planet, even. I'll kill her. I'll kill her with a mystical sense of triumph when my sightings across her forehead are reflected in my eyes. She is what opens my head every night with a fire that consumed and then put out my universe like a cigarette because she is my missing children's father reflected back in my sightings. The only one who can save me from that fucking woman right now is another psychopath breathtakingly panting from carrying out the act in triumph. By god, to kill her, and to awake transfigured from hypnotic suggestion into an eternity of spiritual salvation in a tomb, burning with the conviction to die to save us both from our lives.

Enough

[A composition improvised from words in Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat and a blog called Poetix.]

One of the guiding metaphors is that of the evening that has just passed through a snow-storm which was blowing into the sail of anxiety and suicidal obsessions. The good and evil in which the European himself had scarcely the inclination to show suddenly blew this sail with increased intensity. He thought that he might in some way by these gusts of wind be in a troubling situation that would have frightened even a corpse; in a word, every sort of implacable menace: not only the capacity to strike with exceptional daring, but also the offensive ruthlessness to terminate when doing so.

Standing before the looking-glass, he beheld a very kind-hearted man who seemed to stand on the edge; a good husband, respected father, in all a very likeable and good fellow; but in a most uneasy frame of mind. Being accompanied by something uneasy was more so as he felt he perceived in this encounter with an important man a further reflection which grew upon his temples: a monster.

Any one who can put himself in another's place may imagine. It is important for a prominent personage to give a deep impression upon all. He was perfectly satisfied in his eventual decision to take a role whose consciousness must assume the burden of responsibility. His system was thus a rather exaggerated and imposing strictness. There was nothing else to be done that could not come to the most brutal violence he went on closing his eyes to: ‘No-one can seriously urge non-violence’ he said. He wanted to seize the living for himself, to make a collection of it, and to prevail by force majeure, not wait in his life for some spirit to come along. So he recently had the desire to join some robbers. The brutality he then meted out, you realise, was the narrow mould for a living much more tangible in the essence of danger that society would justify by having itself under a yoke from that day forth, the collective life of the world being greater when servile to an amoral existence. He sat in a very comfortable arm-chair with reclining back, and suddenly seemed to present himself immediately as a commanding presence, making for an increased intensity in his appearance. He managed to have a friend and then another in every quarter.

It is here that our story unexpectedly gains violence scarcely prettier than above. The European found he was confronted with quite a large party that had assembled over the troubling situation of his having had his fill of glasses of champagne. His victims were scolding – ‘He had better go.’ They were accompanied by his inferiors generally employed at critical moments, under-officials not the same rank as himself, utterly insignificant life that now screamed from a body endowed with reasonable faculties to its name. An official reprimand recurred in an unnatural voice that found him not quite without terror.

His inferiors smacked of sternness, and when he complained about them making his life into a state of complete disorder, he began to curse them, uttering the most horrible words. ‘It is not our place to judge the actions of the mighty’ he said. They replied that he ‘Ought not to presume to refuse them when self-assertion contorts its evil deeds under the pretext of evil already in the neighbourhood.’ He was startled.

This is why he began defending himself in such a delirious condition, incessantly pressing on about what had happened to him, repudiating his past activities as a means to a pretext. For some time, and with very long pauses during which he had become even more curt, he talked utter nonsense, directing attention to the dark that grew before him. ‘The sum was trifling’, he repeated in a sobbing voice, but his voice did not appear to even get beyond the positively confused and lost on its way under a due amount of fear. The poor European had to pull himself out from one of the snares that history had, in consequence of such reflections, applied to condemn him. For some inexplicable reason it nearly succeeded for a whole week, until a tiny spark glimmered from him.

On perceiving how this situation aroused some sympathy, the conclusion of which being that the man’s condition might be considered retroactively, he completely filled the eyes of all who had felt angry with the thought that his word could have been called forth from a struggle with his tongue that he would not admit of. He predicted his conscience was out of sorts for a future in which moral terms might once again be informed.

They immediately recognised in him an enthusiasm for violent resistance that had become a dead man's scream, not as a tool of survival, but to divert his mind in some way from what he had been subjected to. He was a victim too. Touched by a man scarred, the clerks kissed his conscience and dared make no reply to this prominent personage should they become quite intoxicated with his former power, for every man imitates the rank above. Whence the watchman who followed him like a possessed official seeking a stolen amount was afraid to arrest him, for if he did dare to utter the words ‘I arrest you’, it was only when people could not make them out, hearkened as they were to the conclusion of their own report: ‘You should be legally pardoned on the question of responsibility for whatever atrocities we are heirs to so you can begin your life all over again when enough time has passed.’

Snowed

[A narrative improvised from words found at Larval Subjects and Beyond the Implode.]

I discover my being relationally through a conjugation with others who see differently than me, others whom I love, others whom I hate, and others whom I love to hate as much as I hate to love. A seed only begins to germinate in relation to other entities. When that seed is divorced from its relation to other entities, we are at a loss to account for the thoughts that take place in our mind, to the weather, or to how today the snow is an album cover.

It’s a joy to see the snow outside that grinds to a haltanything as a result. I simply don't want to go to work squealing about particular temperatures, moisture, sunlight etc. Everyone mostly stayed at home. What can you do to understand our plight? We are at a loss. We are the same twits who missed the last northbound on the roads and risk squealing across a sheet of waxwork-fancying tourists while queuing up late and skidding around in the breeze. We have the taxi drivers licking their writhing whiskers. But I hear my father singing when the work is not done. As his eyes form tracer bullets to take me out, I remember with wonder the qualitative transformation of the hammer, the thoughts that take place in the centre of it, the thought that this will be the electric chair for me: the thought of my death. So I went in to work early, pushed on by the chaos as if before a flock of wildly zig-zagging connections, preparing for the first decent opportunity to understand, as if reaching for a puzzle. I ended up snowed in, trapped in the office block. I showed my face. It was a joy to many, but not all, because though I would try to work, I don't know whether that indicates the truest manifestation of the psyche fired up, even if the coffee will taste of apartments, offices and buses. And when I got there, I went on about how in today'stories everything can become entirely mysterious. The internet can be a cross fertilization of all sorts of urban esoterica: slaloming by amateur burglars getting repeatedly shot; transformation of the psyche commuters are fired up into pushing each other into in a new arrangement; all these are pieces of earth, hit by elemental fingers, becoming the mud of the future. It’s going to get worse before it descends into pandemonium.

This work is a sickly sweet waft of wildly zig-zagging connections reaching a conjugation with other substances drawing oneself in, becoming like a crap puzzle all sorts of urban esoterica conjure, rubbish that can lay sprinkled with unsavory characters; yet, nonetheless, and despite all that, I decided to explain why I love they who have attempted this bogus knock-off job.

At the first decent opportunity, I’m going to get my backside into a speculative view, praying for the door, desperate to get home. It went without saying that before I boarded the Tube I slipped on a completely unrelated thought, its new quality, new arrangement, and new properties.

Lying

The current Decoy improvises on words at The Next Village, a blog that publishes responses to Kafka’s story of the same name. The next Decoy here will appear towards the end of March.

The Feminine

[A narrative improvised from words found at Word For / Word.]

Femininity: an exploration of the experience of redemption unrecognized provides one of living that will more thoroughly explore upside down the expected and almost snapshot perception of the mysterious experience of the feminine and the awareness of how its holiness and lushness are packed into conundrums like contagious brushfire alighting upon the impossibility of ambiguity. The awesome task of ambiguity merits alighting upon the narrator's own difficulties, and finally results in large and ominous desert journeys…

How easy it is to challenge this challenge, and hide the contradictions, blindspots and contradictory aspects of ambiguity by paradoxically alighting upon the formation of ambiguity as a surface; for surfaces could provoke suspicion, proof that might tentatively describe the traveler as different with her aggressive feelings, including intense neediness and annoyance, and evidence of blatantly expressed anger; however, it's easy for somebody to drone on in that sarcastic tone that often seems justifiably biting, even when it has many references in common, and especially when, because these are the invisible seams between a lover's tributaries of exploring sexual desire and the alienation from having achieved it. In the unrecognized dynamics of desire, the loss of holiness is equally mixed with acts of love.

What is this quiet absence that strikes her with the impossibility of exploring it? Its presence drives her with the awareness of the suddenness of awareness in formation. And she cannot always hear disruption when it is happening/has happened. What will remain unsaid can be misunderstood and will rest disturbingly on specific human behavior without a warning about vulnerable detachment from the troubled nature of femininity, the attention to listen giving way to the daily drive to thrive in motion; seduced by death, she explores her desire to listen while squeezed into a desecrated network of personal relationships, a collage of human interactions that we might tentatively describe as an imaginary thicket that overwhelms. To become ‘me’ wishes for a force of recovery or migration that may not be taking place. Like winning the lottery, the exuberance remains a ripple that sutures the absurd suffering and alienation with irrepressible and charismatic energy. The suddenness of redemption is a relaxed ease that contrasts with detachment from what binds us daily to the foibles of communicating that become a restraint on presence.

There is the need to depict as quotidian what is precise and opulent about the present; to acknowledge its smallness reminds you of the impossibility in communicating in passing what the narrator recollected. The present becomes paradoxically vulnerable to a bravery that's over-full with history's suffering, leaving to bravery only all that's safe to act on. This often overwhelms characters that are sometimes whimsical in nature. It binds them to disturbing the plain-spoken with a challenge to normal meanings, making them note how the rhythm has become a burnt one that can elude sight, even when alighting upon attention irrepressible and full.

She understands in this rhythm that its dance is the potent event of her body that the light can fall on and flash into a beautiful image that is richly informative with a maternal lineage that cannot be measured by history. Turning forth in its offering up memories of an interestingly fractured picture is the imagery of a moment literally penetrated by whatever it means to find earthly ties to flower with meteors in a rhythmic adagio embodying the mother and daughter in a whisper repeatedly imagined. She gathers planets from the sky in a waltz through these celestial moments that assures there's some anchor to blossom before. But she won't allow her identity to be so informed by the way she brings different worlds together that deposits of enlightenment are left in the planning. There is always in a woman’s attention a switch on the observation that is beyond the limit framing infinite creation.

The season begins with eyes filled with darkness, loud with observation, and vicious with images that usually pick up this sentiment of the mother's creation as a physical act. Imagery informed by prejudice around the body became the extrapolation to be mingled in. So she locates herself historically within the big picture of motherhood to inscribe within it images destructive of its immortality. She does not understand the retelling of these images as questions around identity being answered with an even gaze. Instead, her changing position would suggest her physicality is converted into an identity that has broken free of all the imagery I've mentioned, uninterrupted by prejudice, secretiveness, and scepticism. Identity itself is therefore uninterrupted by the redemptive quality of potentiality and the available space for it to love in.

It is a beautiful idea to position this sentiment within the changing and immense perspective that can keep a continued existence consequent for generations. Humanity dwells in these unmarked moments in the transference of time, these given stages in the self sometimes etched from the enormous space hidden in the body where memories are lurking behind memorialization. And her daughter: she's not an infinite chore. She brings subjectivity to motherhood, answers to life, radiation that can melt, a complex of richly informative deposits with regard to the needs of mothers that usually fish for (and sometimes pick up) scraps of potentiality.

Impressed by their habitual presence, the daughter admires how human life goes on miraculously with the same impulses. She has to re-member them turning a head around for recollection of what memory means. Yes, I say that experience is remembered with clarity when it guarantees nothing more than rules about the experience memory is clearly defined for. This can result in memory elaborating upon experience to their benefit, what they have, what he says in his arbitrariness – all those instruments that dissolve her universe to a granular level with a powerful sense of devotion. This sentimental structure has evolved by the way reality works, by nature being concatenated with responsibility. She would have explained the way this reality is entirely worthy of being only tenuously held as such, but she cannot really speak about it without fear of being injured by that powerful and complicated impossibility that creates utter darkness everywhere. Failing to articulate involves in equal parts the mourning for words and the adherence to the rules that have repeated the experience of that mourning for speaking them. This moves her as she breathes ordinary memories in from the breeze before they are eaten by the wind plucking oxygen from her history. Who knows what evil lurks when there is no meaning and no consolation?

Despite these fires which ever-threaten intelligibility, it remains, repeated in memory as a post-enactment licking the quintessence of democratic potential from history. Yet we cannot make civilization originate beyond the encroachment of this evolved structure without a simultaneous awareness and exploration of the fantasies of the mankind that we observe in that embodiment: its death is an absence that involves equal parts of mourning and that experience memory means as an indelible devotion. What we observe is how the people naming those who constructed those instruments are today failing to scrub the memory of them because there are memories of mankind which may be explained by a nature about which we may be declaiming a plethora of strangely prominent, simple yet complicated, and sentimental yet dispassionate fantasies people remain trembling before.

We have to romanticize this misadventure, its strings, and the struggle against it because we cannot really speak of natural laws. Our ability to stave off surroundings and their contiguity should be indications that the presence was only thought of by those who require that civilization can provide no charm or sap for the intellect and its fragile other. The imagination itself displays as tenuous that quality of depersonalization in selflessness and blankness. To intimately concentrate upon experience does come down to our understanding of speaking about that which we can only speak of with responsibility for recollection.

Lemons

[An improvisation on words found at Luca Antara, and In Minor Keys.]

± As I came up, a young man (secretive, with something lacking, maybe) walked down the glittering plaza to a cafe with a white chequered floor and bare tables. He looked handsome and relaxed. I remember this is the right street, and expectantly buy a book from the newsagent, a huge man in attendance to the ornate bank note I was holding. I open the book wide. I am relaxed, reading at ease, glowing with lustrous eyes fixed reverentially upon a few phrases and unlived thoughts which will play for a while.

± It is by one of those women chequered into articulation, obscured by the process of correspondence, honey. The woman's voice spreads itself about, and, with growing excitement, begins to expectantly determine the cafe to have heard her speak, becoming that which is inspired.

± She notes that we become lost in dreams. ‘My brief temptation is to encourage friends to come here more often, stretching them, standing them in the bonfire that we become lost in attendance to, to stop them briefly and dream about these subjects I have scribbled down and now recall. What are the chords which seem to show through? To fall asleep by counting what you already know you have had. How it seemed important that we have things!’

± Her song rises with vitality, the activity of music her thought is, lines from America smuggled out of poetry, a forgotten specter of a brand new way walked alongside if not past. There, hanging on paper, they are repeated in her voice which spreads itself expectantly to look for an exercise in honesty. But these pages are about these pages and say little.

± They are distant in the ownership of some writer. But they have sentences with forces that will make me remember to say something with growing excitement about becoming inspired in garrulosity. I come to the basement of these sentences to feel good. They are distant, but also hectic in black ink which spreads itself out and falls authoritatively. To my mind, we are close to lemons standing horizontal in their deliberations. Join for a while.

A Place Redolent of Time

[An improvisation on words found at Luca Antara, and In Minor Keys.]

± This is strange to articulate, to write about, without falling into myself with the impotence of the policeman that says ‘stop advancing some centimetres beyond - that's the line there’, but it is the detective who, perhaps by stretching fantastically elongated fingers, overhears the report coming in about that particular place that seems almost imperceptible to the policeman.

± The detective is newly swathed in white bandage, and even though there is fatigue in his eyes, he observes the dust in the hospital and decides to walk out jauntily because threatened. While leaving, he changes path and quickly begins to articulate his wonders: if only they could sell me a cigarette. Yes, he knows himself. He sighs, slightly. So he passes a place redolent of time and takes refuge there. He hides, surreptitiously waiting for this overwhelming desire for a cigarette to move onwards before its oblivion descends.

± Quarrelling outside in the gardens, some tourists speak, lingering to add something to their afternoon, hoping for a trace of something concrete instead of dancing in obedience. He listens to their speech, and searches some centimetres beyond it to someone alleging rumours he remembers. He overhears a dental technician, a girl called Hibiscus, as she looks up from behind a pristine white plastic fence. He listens to retrieve whispers of his unconscious, his meditation on it, and to whatever comes from the branches in the avenues of the message. He is uncharacteristically untidy in this because, I think, the rumours open a wound until it is flowering again shockingly as a secret large in consequence is brazenly repeated several times.

± Through his white bandages a large pool of anxiety, headache, neuralgia and depression is echoing atomic as malevolent shadows of his past are projected. Every mundane bowler-hatted person hurts in his head after watching carefully for some kind of footage of what seems obscure because he has taken it away from view. But who cares what every mundane, bowler-hatted person finds? He will be anemic anyway. And he knows that all attempts to produce a blue sky are received with some distaste.

***

Decoys is away until early March.