#inkisadrug

[beforeafterrobots]

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Places we have loved and Place we loathed

Italo Calvino’s thin novel, Invisible Cities, can not be emulated. It’s bewildering magic and strange charm cannot ever be copied. There is not enough inkjet printer fluid in the world. What an amazing book. Full of puzzles and profound pieces of vision stitched in patterns that shimmer and mutate with each blink, with each reading, with each coming back to and going away from.

The book is unreadable. Or, one should say, unread by the reader even as she turns pages and jogs behind the threads that lead to far off places and wind and twist into the clouds and when she blinks again she is in her bed, holing the book between her hands, bags unpacked under the duvet with memories of the journey just traveled peeking out of half zippers and warm sweaters and rolled up sand eating beach sand like a midnight snack.

What is the book about? You’ll ask yourself in the morning as you lick your toothbrush and breathe in the real world.

It is about the place we’ve been and the places we are going to and the places we’ve never been and the place we find ourselves to have arrived at without having ever left.

Hum. Pump.

Hum. Pump.

Hum. Pump.

Fooooooossssh.

The book is about history. And the histories inside it.

The book is about a place. And the places inside that place.

It has no end and it hardly begins. The middle is somewhere near a vanishing point that appears like a vampire when you look up from your desk, relieved to find the world is still there and sad that is now so unfamiliar without having changed one bit.

Invisible Cities is an astonishing book about the places that live and die and live again.

It is a book about history.

[beforeafterrobots]

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash - Nabokov (Lectures on Literature) Provacative. And a touch dogmatic. Such is the man. But he stirs a familiar feeling. In lit class, one always battled in the beginning preconceptions about a particlar novel and it's subject matter as you began to read. A natural thing. With every page turned and each "detail caressed", however, those preconceptions withered and gave way to wonder and curiousity as the universe of the specific novel sucked you deeper. The more you tried to impress your own world view on to the story, the more the style and structure of the work of fiction pressed its force on to you, until that initial opinion you held was transformed to something entirely different. It is always the details that matter, Nabokov seems to be saying. Genralisations. Truncation. Pretty theoretical bubbles, have no space in the garden of literature.

[beforeafterrobots]

Esteem

Each personal tragedy, a brick. A bad game of Tetris. 

[beforeafterrobots]

Misanthropy

If the Terminator had (or is it will? Or will would have) read the classics, or was at least smart enough to pretend to have read and hated them, and his mission was to crash through space-time on Father's Day, circa 2029 of course, in a side street in Parkhurst, he'd advise, in grof monotone:      

Listen. Once your cute little twanging brat of an offspring sprouts their first cavity, you should immediately start saving for the gastric bypass bruh, obviously, by investing in a tailor made - yes made by an actual shoemaker - financial instrument available over-the-counter at your farthest Home Affairs office. Hasta la vista, biaaaatch    

NOTE: "Grof" refers to Czech psychiatrist Stanislav "Stan" Grof, noted as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a researcher into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness, and is said to have once said that "Whether or not we believe in survival of consciousness after death, reincarnation, and karma, it has very serious implications for our behaviour." 

In the video on his website, though, Grof does looks like a Klippies and Coke ou.

[beforeafterrobots]

Awoke

I wonder about liberation aesthetics

How much can we recover from the wreckage

Disfigure our heroes livid

Need a liver transplant to keep it lit

Late capital time bomb ticking

[beforeafterrobots]

Apla in Summer

Marcus Gar... Derrida.

Sankara’s ghost watch our souls march into troll farms

Language seeks its host!

Teargas the canon,

smoking tar

Sorin’s eye sleepless from Sodom to Doha

Frying pan into famine

[beforeafterrobots]

The time it takes

‘‘Tis the time of the the year for reflection by listicles so here’s mine, as a time capsule for past me.

The time it takes to write,

A poem: 3-4 months plus emotional upheaval

The time it takes to write,

A rhyme: Six to eight hours cigarettes and a single beat on infinite loop

The time it takes to write,

A short fiction: two hours preceded by other reading impatience and patience and a lung full of sad anxiety

The time it takes to write,

A paid for piece: One to two weeks every day spent in agony reading in circles jotting marginalia till I’m pale and the night is too

The time it takes to write,

An essay: A week and a Wednesday possessed by dark coffee, hatefulness, setting fire to friendships even if you get close enough I can bend space

The time it takes to write: Forever in this lifetime at least

[beforeafterrobots]

Was

A raindrop kissed his cigarette just as he brought the flame to his to his lips to take a second last drag.

It was 3 am but already a lost, confused hadeda was screeching her lungs out somewhere in the foul sinking grey sky.

His thoughts were everywhere. The limerick about beans tasting like smelly jeans he wrote in primary school that was published in the school magazine. A joke yesterday about pay day loans being the greatest thing about the festive season.

Why couldn’t he sleep. Worse, why couldn’t he finish the story about a mother and her young daughter sitting a table waiting for the knock of policeman - came to ask about a rape. The two of them flinching and nodding and doing unfamiliar things with their bodies every time a piece of furniture exhaled and blew dust off their memories of a fear that was coming. It was coming. It was always there.

Drag the “was” out along your tongue please. For inflection you see.

His rap name had been “Was” in high school.

Why had he even started the story? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything except these words and the taste of his teeth.

The tree shivered again and sprayed him with wet bullets, reminding him of his plan. He bit things before he used them, pens, nails. Flesh as well. Especially. Nonhle would know, and she at least would have a memory of him. The teeth marks would remind her. Remind her of everything, of something important about him, how he had important ideas, how he had never hid the evil in him when it mattered. He bit her lips when they first kissed and her back when they hugged for the last time and in between anywhere else where she wouldn’t expect it and the skin was tender enough to register not lust not passion not malice. Something singular.

The thing was that she hadn’t understood the gesture, the theory and feeling behind the first note that reappeared at the end of the song.

It was a warning.

A bird falling dead from the sky.

Anyway, he had been sincere or at least poetic, she just hadn’t understood it. Didn’t care to. No none had cared to decipher and untangle what was. What it was he was trying to mean.

One last drag as the foil coil of the filter sizzled and went cold.

He stood up, counted the cuts on his arm and made one more linear incision . Five etched on a prison wall of skin. The phonetic symbol for past tense.