Am Like

Topic withheld to create tension

 

A person [name withheld to create tension] was seen doing something [action withheld to create tension] in a place [location withheld to create tension] at a particular time [temporalization withheld to create tension] for a purpose [reason withheld to create tension].

When asked [by whom?], the unknown subject [why unknown?] responded [how?] that s/he [what?] had engaged a legal firm [any particular one?] to answer questions that could be asked [examples?].

In response [to what? withheld to create tension], an eyewitness [anonymous? withheld to create tension] gestured [is this intransitive? grammar suspended to create tension].

 

***

 

The time had come for the boy to leave his father's junkshop.

He packed up his meagre belongings. Clothes, money, a Bible, the music of Beethoven, the watch his mother had given him.

He went down into the junkshop, the bag across his shoulder.

"Father," he said. "It's time for me to leave."

"Ehh? What?"

"It's time for me to leave."

The father set down the screwdriver he'd been using to fix a table.

"Very good. There's a lot to the world. I wish you all the best."

"Goodbye."

The boy left his father's junkshop, for the wider world's junkshop.

 

***

 

My alarm went off at 7:30 A.M. I had been dreaming about traveling through a grid. I rolled over and sat up.

I let the song play through. "Stay." Less than two minutes long.

I shut off the alarm and stood up.

I was standing naked.

My legs uncertainly carried me to where yesterday's underwear lay.

Having pulled them on, I went into the hall and I walked down the stairs one step at a time.

I went into the front room, turned on my computer, and took a cigarette.

Then I went down into the basement.

 

To be continued????

 

***

 

The New Tamburlaine: A Novel

Book Two

PART ONE

Chapter One

1.

 

The heroine, befitting this Fresh Start, is now named Janet. She is in the castle; she was brought there by her Uncle because she's to be forced to be wed to evil Italian Count Lario. She, this first night (it's 3 AM), is in a room that's not within screaming distance of anyone else. She hears a kind of scratching behind one of the wooden panels. She sits up, exposing her naked breasts to no-one but you. It cannot be her love--Frederick Stout--or can it be?

 

***

 

Exercises in Style

 

Notation

 

At the outdoor kiosk that leads down into the Metro Centre, 5:45 PM. A tourist woman with a shopping cart receives advice on directions from two strangers who proceed to help her to the elevator that goes down into the shopping concourse.

I take the stairs down, to go to the washroom.

I leave the washroom, and thence through the underground concourse head down halls to where the subway is.

I come to the sunken end of another elevator'd kiosk. The same tourist woman is receiving directions from two other strangers on how to get up.

 

***

 

While Bob and I were out hunting yesterday, we came upon the strangest thing. Some shouting we heard meant something weird was up, some kind of like religious shouting, so we took our time getting closer to the critter who was doing the shouting. Then, there he was, a safe distance away. Some kind of religious fanatic, in an old sleeveless red robe and nothing else. He was ranting, stomping, demanding a miracle. He put his arms out like Jesus on the cross. Bob and I raised out shotguns, aimed at his arms, and blew 'em right off. A miracle!

 

***

 

The group packed it all up. They packed their clothes, their dishes, and their playing cards. The lake watched with hostility. They packed up. They packed their compact discs, their towels, and their novels. The clouds watched, counting the minutes. They packed their things. They packed their maps, their umbrellas, and their astronomy charts. The ground beneath their feet regretted having to support them. They packed all their stuff. They packed their condiments, their tents, and their portable barbecues.  Fire was watching, making sure they didn't take anything of his. They packed their back seats, their trunks, and their trailers.

 

***

 

"I'm writing an opera."

"Really. What's it about?"

"Glad you asked. It's about a couple of married astronomers who take a trip to Europe and find themselves drawn apart, into other romances, somewhat good and somewhat bad. Think Journey to Italy meets One From the Heart. I've got to put in some foolery for the second act, then in the third act they get back together. It's going to be two and a half hours long."

"So, why did you make them astronomers?"

"Well, I thought of making them English profs, but then I thought: why not make them passionate?"

 

***

 

Helicopter overhead. Why is that? It seems to be circling. They must be after someone. Here I am, just walking to work, minding my own business. Boy, it's loud! Who can they be after? It's early, there's not many people around. There it is, overhead. What can this all be about?

"There he is. Easy to find, he's so routinized. Phone tap tell us he's regular as clockwork. Easy target. 'Well, Mr. Writer, where will you hide when we really come after you?' Okay, that's it, end of dry run. We'll get him when we have to. Oh, hell, fire!"

 

***

 

This deep blue lake water looks extremely cold but it is not cold once you are in it for some time. It becomes pleasantly warm. You can see soft rocks down beneath in his clear water. The surface is flat when there's nothing to disturb it. Such as wind or a tossed pebble or a bubble from below the surface. Open your eyes then keep then open. You expect to see fish in here? You aren't me. You can't see fish. I see hundreds. This deputation is all on the fin. Down here, under the surface, away from you, us.

 

***

 

Because I want to I said,

to Nigel,

The central problem,

the problem that's bigger than any other,

at least as far as teaching is concerned,

is that we don't have the least idea how learning happens.

What can get an idea into another head?

It's not magic, is it?

We've spent all our effort with this Cartesian system,

yet meanwhile,

we don't know how any of the images of the body get into the soul,

where they're manipulated into facts.

Somehow,

everything has come to us,

to see,

to know,

and that's what I mean,

we don't know anything.

 

***

 

Halfway through that September's journey, we took account of our confusions.

Across the entirety of that which we called our cabin, that which we also called our world,

things we had needed, had thought we needed, had thought we'd need, had thought we'd need need,

alongside the ghosts of things we needed later but didn't have and would never have,

we sat, thinking of how our journey had started and how our journey could end.

We fell asleep, and in that sleep we went from the first half to the second half of our journey,

missing out on: something sweet?

 

***

 

There she goes, always wanting to know what happened next. "The book is over," I tell her. "Nothing happens after that." But still she needs to know what happens next. I tell her,  "Nothing important happens after that. Do you understand?" And she can't believe it. "There has to be more. Do you really expect me to believe this Happily Ever After stuff?" "I don't see why not." "Nothing is happy forever. Bad things are bount to happen. I statissical." "Talking to your father again?" "No. It's just something I know." That child is wise beyond her years, I'll say.

 

***

 

The New Tamburlaine: A Novel

Book Two

PART ONE

Chapter One

2.

 

The wooden panel shows us a bower festooned with garlands of lilies. (They look damp by a clever use of resin.) In the middle of the bower sits Venus herself, all fleshy and naked. Adonis is peeking in; he has high, firm buttocks. (Unseen to us, he also sports a magnificent pole.) A clever use of resin has the mont of Venus also glistening. Wait, or is the standing guy Hephaestus? Where's my Brewer's? Okay, so it's some guy. Could be a mailman, I suppose. Or the gardener.

 

***

 

At the circus I saw a stunt done for the very first time. Five thin guys and a strong horse. First, one guy was riding, then he hopped up and to the left as a second guy hopped onto the horse's right, left foot right stirrup, right foot left stirrup, and the guys clasped wrists. Then two other guys jumped up, got supported by the two already on the horse, they were all fanned out now. Finally the fifth guy jumped up onto the shoulders of the two latter guys, feet on shoulders. A big horse-and-human pyramid. Creepy ass crackers.

 

***

 

Don't you get the idea that everything, everyone, is really quite lame? Don't you ever look and see that no-one is really making much of an effort? Everything is just good enough. Nothing is really top-notch. Meals are okay; to get something really good you have to pay a hundred bucks, but even if you spend a hundred bucks, what you get is only worth a hundred bucks. No-one makes any real effort, any real sacrifice. Why do you think that is?

I think it's because no-one really gives a fuck. Really. No-one cares that much. All we want is to get through the day, maybe get some sleep at the end of it. Any effort is only to effect that. Some sleep.

So, no-one gives a fuck about anything. It's all just a muddle-through. We know life ends, we know we will die, but we really at heart don't care that much. (If we did, we'd act much differently.) Plus we have the cheap grace of knowing everyone else at heart doesn't give a fuck either. So we're not bad people there. No-one really cares about anything at all. And who cares if oblivion is all we can expect?

 

***

 

Note on Language

 

Ours is a living language. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

A new way of saying said or say or will say has come to my attention.

Am like or was like.

All three tenses can now be expressed with those two words, while the context is relied upon to provide the tense.

Let's try it, shall we?

Jones looked at the bower and said, "Behold."

Jones looked at the bower and was like, "Behold."

I said, "Do you love me?"

I am like, "Do you love me?"

Thus will 16-year-old girls no longer be left out.

 

***

 

Roller Coaster Tour Guide

 

"My name's John, and I'll be your guide for the next minute and fifty-three seconds, looking straight ahead, you can see the sky, nice blue, I'll get back to you in five seconds, we're coming over the peak, here's the first drop, don't they look like ants, to our right there's the ground, now above us is the ground again, To your left you can see the lake for a half-sec, built in 1989, checked daily, ahead you can see we're coming to the end, two more hills, platform, have a nice rest of your day."

 

***

 

This is how I blame my mother.

Though I was not a very bright child--quite the opposite--, I could read well. My mother encouraged this, and let me read to her often. I'd read aloud and read aloud, night after night.

(Did you know Hemingway thought men had a limited number of orgasms available?)

Now, forty years later, I find I have very little to say. (Out loud, that is.) I go through my world barely uttering a word. Mary hates it. But, you see, it's because I used up all my aloud words so long ago.

Mother, mother.

 

***

 

"If you're looking for inside information, you've come to the right place."

"Okay, great. You know about the OISE guy and his child porn?"

"Of course I have. He was also politically connected, you know."

"Yeah, so: what was it? What porn did he create?"

"He wrote a how-to document on grooming children for sexual abuse. How to make a child obedient, to alienate him from his parents, to normalize all perversions."

"Sounds like a lot of work."

"It was actually easy. He took the TDSB's policy paper on sex ed and edited it slightly for a mostly overlapping demographic."

 

***

 

Prince subject to experiment

 

At 4:24 PM GMT today, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy who was quickly spirited away to a dirt cave somewhere in the midlands where he will remain virtually isolated for the next sixteen years.

The boy's father, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, no stranger himself to the sciences, is foresquare behind it. "Will the unlettered lad say he wants to fly a helicopter?"

The unusual move is the handiwork of the Head Royal Physician, Dr. Madd, who recommended the procedure to settle once and for all the thorny enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

--22 July 2013

 

***

 

On the other line, I am going to take sixteen old stories and write sequels to them.

 

Farmer's Markets are the Special Olympics of agriculture.

 

I will choose them, and put them together in some kind of order, making a whole new narrative of interconnected stories, very spiderweblike in appearance.

 

Oh the things I go through for my Ideal Reader!

 

Since I haven't chosen which ones.... What's the math?

I can start in January, no, whenever I started.

I think I've got them printed up.

Since I'm on 28, there's ... a whole lot to choose from.

Randomly I suppose.

Children

"If you're looking for inside information, you've come to the right place."

"Okay, great. You know about the OISE guy and his child porn?"

"Of course I have. He was also politically connected, you know."

"Yeah, so: what was it? What porn did he create?"

"He wrote a how-to document on grooming children for sexual abuse. How to make a child obedient, to alienate him from his parents, to normalize all perversions."

"Sounds like a lot of work."

"It was actually easy. He took the TDSB's policy paper on sex ed and edited it slightly for a mostly overlapping demographic."

 

***

 

Prince subject to experiment

 

At 4:24 PM GMT today, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy who was quickly spirited away to a dirt cave somewhere in the midlands where he will remain virtually isolated for the next sixteen years.

The boy's father, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, no stranger himself to the sciences, is foresquare behind it. "Will the unlettered lad say he wants to fly a helicopter?"

The unusual move is the handiwork of the Head Royal Physician, Dr. Madd, who recommended the procedure to settle once and for all the thorny enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

The Method Actors

When we're up there, if you want to meet your lover, over in Gravenhurst, then go, I won't stop you. I know I'm not enough for you; I can't even put a sentence together. That I can type means nothing. Go to him, go. I'll stoically wither and die. I've made you too sad; I can't help it. You should have something happy. I can't make you happy. Whoever you lover is, he must be someone good. Easily better than me. But that's no challenge, innit? Happy times I wish on you. Let me die; two years and six months.

 

***

 

Who is Killing the Great Method Actors of Ljubljana?

 

"Yes, you! You thought we'd never catch on to your repertoire and its tragic characters! Mary Stuart, King Lear, Oedipus, Willy Loman, Phèdre, all you could think of, adaptions of Karenina, Appointment in Samarra, Death in Venice! The actors could only method act, never having been properly educated in the gestural languages of the English and French, and they all killed themselves during their productions! How diabolical! You, Mr. Director, are going to jail for a very long time. And I'll see to it the court restricts you forever to ... comedy!"

Tourist camera stolen

 

Because in a photograph, so certain branches of materialist science tell us, even a holiday snapshot taken without care (especially the ones taken without care), all of the past--a boat, a sky--can be read backwards in time, so too can the atoms and colours (the primary and secondary sense significations) be followed forward in time, into the future, where we can see, through the frame of the photograph itself, Daughter, aged twenty-three at an arty party and high as a kite, staring into space when the ratty couch moves slightly and a voice says, "Hi."

Unseen the camera sees (that is to say 'unseen' for none of the four subjects of the photograph, i.e. the people who are in it, being two adults and two children, are looking at the camera, while simultaneously at the time of the click of the camera's shutter the photographer himself is not looking at the camera but rather through the camera) the subjects of the photograph, being in a sense the authors of the photograph qua photograph for they, as a corporation, as a family, requested that a complete stranger take a photograph of their selves standing in front of a lake cruise boat.

The fact that a camera picks up every single detail of a person--every single external atom--who is the subject of a photograph including facial characteristics and therefore quite possibly the mental processes of the subject and furthermore the very imagination of the subject as it is occurring not just in the present but the past and the future, unconsciousness and sub-consciousness included in the mess that is a person's mind, all there for anyone with the will to look closely enough, is a fact to which we shall soon return.

Instead of starting before the light that made either any sort of camera (obscura) possible or even any laws of optics possible (insert ontological joke here), we can start with the creation of all the light in that imaginable moment of making everything visible and/or invisible in a single moment at the beginning of time some time ago (which you can consider a day ago, a week ago, so relative is it), light that we now know can be reduced to something on the order of seventeen particles, and which can piece-by-piece pass through any aperture onto any plate since the beginning of, see above, time.

Unseen, the Instamatic camera sees, not itself because it's just an obscura after all, a plate and an aperture twisting light right to left and up to down, constructed by the Kodak Corporation in just two days in Rochester, New York, then shipped by ship across the lake to Toronto and thence by train to the Oshawa Centre's Simpsons store where it lay for two months before being purchased by Father who knew his wife would like to have it for the trip to Kingston.

An hour before the camera was stolen, in the hotel room, Mother, still in her slip, sat down on the bed, picked it up, opened the back of it, noticing the black sleekness of the walls of this the closed room of the thing, thinking how dark it must be in there, how lonely the film must be, and how much meaning could be taken from it, namely, the story of Plato's Cave, with the camera only seeing reflections, believing that language is up side down.

Through the photograph and in the future we can see Daughter as she, at an arty party and high as a kite, turns her head and crosses eyes to the strange voice that said "Hi" to her (not having thought about the event of the photograph since two months before when she and two of her roommates had been talking about things stolen wherewith Daughter had talked about the trip to Kingston with her family), seeing a nice-looking guy with a bottle of beer in his hand, deciding then and there she was getting fucked that very night.

Behind the subjects of this eternal photograph (notwithstanding that in the future it may not ever be developed, still, it does exist even if it is only ever a plastic plate that has been exposed to the sun in three layers of colours and one layer of white), is a lake cruise boat called the Island Belle, a replica of a Saint Lawrence River steamer, fitted to accommodate 250 people if one wished to hire it for a wedding or a party, but which is now for the purposes of the photographic subjects a vessel they will take for a so-called Discovery Cruise of the Thousand Islands.

The Son, a very visual child from a very early age, who saw and would see the camera's click and the figure of the photographer in his mind's eye from that moment on, three months later, in October, knowing the camera would never be recovered and caught in some morbid attitude, takes up a pen and paper to recall the view from the iris of the camera, recalling the positions in which he and his family stood, with a boat behind them and with a sky behind the boat.

In time there is the now in August in which infinitesimally the shutter of the camera Father gave to Mother is simultaneously open and closed for you must recall all the hullabaloo about Schrödinger's cat for that applies here, for here we have a fragment of time in which it cannot be known if a photon has breached the plane of the aperture of the camera or not and there's no way to ask this photon, "Hey, are you a particle, or just part of some darn wave?"

I'm sure you can't help but see far into the future along with me through the snapshot where you see Daughter and her man the morning after the arty party not in her shared accommodations but rather in the man's house which is much more let us say civilized what with a mattress not on the floor but on a genuine wooden platform from which they did not stir except to get more drugs or liquor but never condoms because Daughter didn't care what the future held disconnected as she was from her family and having no hope save for the man's protective arms on a Sunday.

The camera is noticing that, at the moment of its click as light hits its plastic plate, the four standing there, who are so obviously the subjects of its impression, are of different shapes and sizes, from highest to lowest and from fattest to thinnest being 1) A middle-aged man (smiling) in white shorts and a blue shirt 2) A middle-aged woman (smiling) in a blue dress 3) A boy (smiling) in grey shorts and a yellow shirt and 4) a girl (not smiling) in orange shorts and a pink shirt with her hands clenched at her stomach.

Further into the future of the photograph we go, where and when Daughter and her man are living together with all their stuff combined, where and when they are painting paintings and photographing photographs funded by his full-time job at a university's chemistry lab (from which he steals interesting chemicals), where and when they are still learning about one another's pasts and likes and dislikes, and where and when Daughter, alone one afternoon, shamelessly snoops through her man's things, discovering a small wooden cigar box which she proceeds to slowly open.

The son, as we can easily see prospectively through the camera without the opportunity to err, as he grows and as he becomes a man, perfects, for the sake of unconscious nostalgia, conscious ambition, and sub-conscious anal eroticism, his mastery of the pencil line and the paint stroke using as his subjects, oh, anything one can name: buildings, pets, flowers, vases, tables, automobiles, monsters, hands, legs, cocks, birds, clouds, fire engines, parties, abstracts, cunts, newspapers, garbage piles, streetlamps, landscapes, faces, beaches, speeding ambulances, skeletons, prison bars and tin cups, and twenty pictures of four people in front of a boat.

The camera, looking on Mother as she holds her purse, sees the recent past wherein Father gives the subject of this sentence to her, saying, "I hope you find a good use for this," with Mother responding, because she doesn't really find photography all that interesting, non-committally, "Maybe I can, on the trip," thinking Why for me, what does he mean by it, don't I have enough problems, now I'm the family documentarian, and she thinks How can I get rid of this, maybe I can drop it in the river, I have a mind, I don't need pictures of July.

Unseen, the film not only sees, but hears beyond its casing, hears Kingston in July, hears the young man say to Father, "Excuse me, sir, can you take my picture in front of this boat?" whereupon the Instamatic camera feels itself carried, and raised, whereupon the camera's shutter is quickly opened and closed, whereupon it is lowered, moved horizontally, and is changed from hands to hands, whereupon the young man is heard to say, "Thanks," whereupon Father says to his wife and his two children, "What a nice boy."

The camera, having arrived in Kingston two days ago (because we are eternally in the present for cameras are fundamentally all about the present and are fundamentally always in the present we use the present tense at all times for there is only space in a camera), looks through a circle but only reacts to a square which means it is seeing though not recording parts to the sides and to the top (all reversed of course) but the camera doesn't know the formula for the minimum amount of ever-lost information though it (the amount) is as fixed as an image on a plastic plate.

The July Instamatic photograph, taken twice so to speak, once with a click and once with a dash, will be developed as part of a chemistry experiment, will be hung up to dry along with pictures of Fort Henry, of a Holiday Inn, of a sunset, of a sign reading KINGSTON 40, of three people at a picnic table, and of a gas station, will be looked at and laughed at for some time, will be left on a coffee table for two years, and will finally be put in small wooden cigar box that will be opened slowly by Daughter.

This camera now is closing its iris and its aperture through which according to the factory specifications has provided enough information to the film and its chemicals to ensure that an image (though upside down and left to right) of four people standing in front of the Island Belle has been made now and forever while at the same little minute the photographer is already planning his getaway because he has the opportunity and the will to simply rob this family of their camera and their photograph without so much as a fare-thee-well because we all have our natures and this is his nature.

Always at work, sometimes cursing drunkenly about his vision to the few friends he has, always checking how light falls on things first closing one eye and then the other to see that what he considers to be his subjectivity is in two places, the Son, 5H pencil in hand before a cotton duck canvas primed and ready for whatever he has to offer and La Mer on the CD player, closes his eyes to see what this week's project is going to be while somewhere far away, maybe in a landfill, the glass of an iris is whole or in parts.

The Island Belle, which can seat so many strangers from far-away places such as South Africa, Japan, and America, does not completely fill the photographic frame at the moment of the fabled click, for the stranger taking the photograph is no stranger to photographs, knowing as he does that, if possible, the boat's size should be a subject of the photograph, and for that reason a patch of blue sky with a bright cumulonimbus cloud can be seen above and to the right of the back of the boat which is called the aft.

Daughter, carefully holding the photograph to the light, sees herself, her sister, her brother, and her parents staring at the camera and smiling, unaware of the future and barely conscious of the past, concentrating merely on the moment there in Kingston in front of the Island Belle, about to have something change forever with the click of a shutter, shutting down the moment and sealing it up; and Daughter put the photograph down and recognizes her home qua home, there with her man, her photographer man, and she wonders if he knows it's her in the photo; and though she doesn't take a match and burn the photo to ashes, she is suddenly aroused by the idea of stabbing someone—anyone—to death.

An hour after the Keystone camera was stolen, back in the hotel room, Mother, as she sits down on the bed, is thinking about time rather than space (though both are implied by the action of said camera), thinking about these two children of hers, thinking about how old they're getting so quickly, of the promises from her husband that the camera would be recovered, comparing the lost camera to the end of the world, thinking about how meaningless photography is in the end, how much of a lie permanency is, how much she now hates her husband.

The camera, unseen, felt the trembling finger on its trigger, felt the finger push down on the trigger, felt its shutter open and quickly close, capturing thereby an image of four people in front of a train, felt the light press against the film and leave its stamp there, felt itself fall then travel quickly horizontally as the photographer-man ran but knew not much else, did not hear Father shout, "Hey!", did not know it had been pilfered, didn't know the room it wound up inside, didn't care about its environs (all environs being equal to a camera), and was completely indifferent to who possessed it, being just an ordinary camera.

The camera, operating on the principle of light being wave, particle, whatever, captures a picture of four folks in front of a boat, and a long time passes and I'm not talking about a day or a week or a month no I'm talking about a bazillion years passing, to the point 'whereupon' there's like no more energy in the universe to be used thermodynamically, so to turn back the clock to that moment, with the to-be-thief photographing the family would require more energy than all the energy ever, thus all time ending with not unlike a whisper, and the only good part is that all that is forgotten must necessarily be forgiven.

The Son, sitting not merely in a posture which could have been predicted by someone who somehow studied the Instamatic photograph taken thirty years before in Tobermory, of himself, his parents, and his sister, but also in a posture that describes limb by limb a sense of breathlessness brought about (reading unconsciously) by an exhaustion of cathected loss like a child astonished that he finally hit the target with the arrow or like the sense in the morning after losing one's virginity as the memory of the event slowly re-inhabits one's mind, says, simply, "I have finished."

Having had the shutter click and having lowered it down, the photographer of the family quartet, a teenager who is, like them, a visitor to Kingston, knowing his own family was set to leave later that day, in just a few hours in fact, and judging the four he has just photographed quickly realizing there is no way any of them could ever catch him neither now nor ever, runs off with the camera he knew so little about, never actually having before held a camera, without looking back, up into the July holiday crowd as fast as he can, never stopping until he'd reached one of the cheaper motels.

How did all this come about, asks the camera fifty years after it closed and opened its shutter one unspecified day in Kingston, Ontario, that its creation, faded ochre with time, would be still around, against the odds, in a photo album possessed by Daughter and husband, and looked at with question by a boy and a girl who never knew their grandparents but rather knew how to hunt and how to fish, having heard many times how the miracle of their genesis lay within this small white edge cornered by black right-angled triangles with equal legs?