Radical Conditions

The width puppy is a traditional nudge. My fuse rolls into obstetrics & hibernates in the lanolin of pleasure which is hawks. Monumental syrup thermometers processing the heat of a moment as the sap of life brings solar liqueurs to the leaves in mantras of wind. Miscellaneous fondue, your geology is outlets, rocks that I can hold with a sticker in one hand & granite in the other. And this makes me a lapidary man, a nexus of piping & chips, fragments congealing in papyrus. Moses among the reeds. Eyes poised on a page of prose. Quotes like lanterns lighting the brain. 

The older you get the more things that catch your attention lack pertinence. You’re moving out of life. You can feel the drift of that. You don’t need to worry anymore about fulfilling ambitions or looking for romance. It’s all a bit like evaporation. Bits of you rising in vapor. In steam. Like those spring rains that leave a bright silver sheen on the street when the sun comes out & it’s all rising in steam. Barring a painful disease, the processes of transition are tinged with a euphoric nostalgia. You feel more like a ghost. And it’s not bad. You feel less trapped. You feel lighter. Brighter. A little sadder, but badder, a don’t-give-a-shit-anymore laughball who just got the joke.

I’m going to take a leap & say that the earliest experience of art was rendered in a spirit of imitation but whose animations were the living embassies of the human imagination. Meaning we are caught between two worlds. The world of the spirit & the world of the garage. The world of the garage is strictly utilitarian & smells of fertilizer & gasoline. I get in the car. The steering wheel is cold. I start the engine. The garage door cranks open. I back out. And that’s when I realized I wasn’t driving a car. I was driving a sentence across the screen of a laptop. Which proves nothing, serves nothing. But this: velocity is a drug for the savagery of expectation.

The spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations & radical conditions. Wheels, for example, or nihilism. Creation is nihilistic in essence, in principle: the artist denies that life as it is is self-sufficient. I feel a need to get something out there, something about art & representation, something about seeing & silence & the occasional need to break that silence & say something about one’s experience in this life. Which is better, the representation, or the actuality? I’m going to go with the actuality. Nothing happens by itself. Fortunately, most of the gas stations are open. Meteors streak the sky. There are many of us who seek transformation. I wonder what this activity would feel like if it actually made money.

We’re willing to betray our own existence because we only live once: we accept conditions that we would otherwise refuse if we had to live with our decision for eternity. Act in such a way that you may want to do again what you do for eternity, don’t bargain with the eternal return, and if you’ve got an instinct for this sort of thing, this thought, fully assimilated, will give your life the sureness and the lightness of fate: not just any life, but a life. If all else fails, make something up. Angst is good. Don’t brush it off the table. Make it talk. Make it swim. Make it bleed. Make it sing. This is a mean old ugly world. But where else can you find Hostess Cupcakes & cats?