DECOMP interactive 4

You know what to do? You dont?
well, here are two videos for you, to play at the same time, simultaneous like. when you do. get away. turn out and off and let the serindipidsynchonisticsimultaneouscohesion MELLLLLDDDD into you..

The Pitch....

“OK, most all the great books have been made into movies already, Catch 22, Heart of Darkness ,” Mr. K raised a pencil “the bible” Billy remember don‘t alienate, don’t be rude, compromise. “yes sir… the bible.” “Star Wars” “ and Star wars of course. But now Hollywood is running on empty. What’s next? Where’s Waldo the movie?” Mr. K leaned into his desk “I like where your going with this. I’m sold, it will be like a who done it, maybe more of a where is he.” “That is an idea but I am talking about something big sir. You see the best news a young screenplay writer like myself can hear is that he has been chosen to write a screenplay for a novel by one of the greatest writers in the twentieth century. Now the worst news he could receive is that it is for; drum roll please” “Give your da da da da da da da damn pitch or your da da da da da done.” Bill’s long dramatic arms began to create a second language beside his own “Sir nothing short of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.” Mr. K skimmed through a filing cabinet asked absentmindedly “Who?” “Sir he is world famous” He pulled out a file “Did he pitch for the cards?” “no but.” He dropped the file back in “then I don’t care.” “He’s like the Falkner of Ireland but bigger.” Mr. K looked up from clipping his toe nails. “Who?” ” “Sir he is like the worlds…..Steven King.” He spun in his chair like a little boy “Wow.” With know some of Mr. K’s attention Billy continued “OK as a medium for artistic expression, motion pictures should be able to transcend the mythological, archaic, ethnic, personal and abstract.” “Damn strait those were the rights the Japs tried to take from us” Billy defiantly tried to keep Mr. K on track “but the most optimistic artist will see the overwhelming difficulties in translating Finnegan’s Wake from words to sounds and images……even with Jap interference.
Mr. K drawling tits on the corner of a invoice asked with a yawn “Isn’t Irish, English?” “well yes…. but the English.. .it’s a long story.” Bill would not be thrown of the track by these human slot machine. “ As I was saying, Joyce had always broken with conventional writing styles by employing, what was then considered innovative, Freudian methods to his writing. Novels such as Ulysses took place in the irrational individual metaphor in the form of streams of consciousness. Yet Ulysses had narration, dialog and a plot with a beginning and an end. This meant that Ulysses could be adapted to the silver screen.” Mr K held one hand over the receiver of the phone “Does your pitch consisted of “”my movie will have an ending!?!””
“No sir my story I am pitching is Finnegan’s Wake, and Finnegan’s Wake is a story about” bills body froze in a ready to wrestle position, eyes big. “No one is for sure what it is about. It is a hodgepodge of languages, slang, personal imagery, mythos, ethnic history, puns and nothing short of abstract nonsense. At points, it is the raw material of poetry with cadence but no meaning. At other points, you can see a Christ-like figure morphing from a recently deceased man into the city of Dublin and then into the Eucharist and finally resurrected by spilled whiskey.” bill spoke from a hole in the sky in liquid preachers ecstasy.
“Even more of a challenge for me, would be to make an audiovisual version of this novel, is the fact that it is never-ending. The first line of the story is in the middle of the sentence of the last line of the novel. The novel Finnegan’s Wake is a closed loop.” Bill spun his hands about like a deaf, mime, magician. “How would a screenplay writer adapt this into a movie you may ask?” Mr K shrugged as he looked sleepily out a window “For that matter, why would he make this movie? I will tell you why Boss, a infinity move will run for ever and make money for every, instead of buying a ticket, someone would buy a life time membership. People will get off work and go strait to their old friend Finnegan’s wake, boss it will be us and cockroaches.” looking between his fingers “how will you make me money for ever?”

“Well sir In a normal adaptation, a screenwriter would read from a novel a phrase like “the front of the house looked like an angry old man.” The screenwriter would have something tangible to storyboard and the set designers would have something to work with. They could make a decrepit-looking house with two windows in the front and a door in the middle to form a face. This face could be made to look angry by curving down the windows and doors to create a frown and the siding could serve as symmetric wrinkles. While a normal excerpt from Finnegan’s Wake reads, “Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde.”(Joyce 182) Here he paints a picture with a phonetic brush. Its not just predominantly abstract it is exclusively verbally abstract. I believe I could convert this novel with a little help from Occam’s razor. First, .” Billy‘s excitement began to peel the wallpaper. “I can drop everything but the dialogue giving voice to the character whatever morphing form the character takes. So as to keep the audience aware of who the character is the voice should be consistent and there should be a visual key like a bowtie. Your voice is mighty unique sir. “Well I do do a mean Jacky Gleeson. ” preempting Mr. K’s impersonation Billy continued
“After I completed the more lucid parts of the story, I will need to move on to the abstract portion. To keep to the original intentions of the writer the narration should be rarely change to just visual effect. Like in Fantasia, the lyrics should not be compromised by the visuals. The images could complement the theme and as the text becomes more lucid, the screenwriter could storyboard actual scenes. When I am not sure if I can translate the enigma of any part of the story I will use the text only. The result would be the equivalent to a man with synesthesia coming in and out of a coma. At times, he would wake to a scene from relatively normal life, only to fall back unconscious dragging the outside world into his personal mythology made up of a galosh of all he knows. This dream state would be filled with Freudian complexes, Jungian symbols, family relations, national myths, and nonsense.” Billy twisted himself into tied and untied knots, Mr. K watched like a cat.
“I have reference the films Jacob’s Ladder for the transcending of time, space and realities, and Fantasia to get a sense of image to sound for the real language based abstract bits. I studied eighties music videos which has been helpful too. Music videos must often transcend between direct realities to concept to abstract within the same video. A well-made music video will know when to create a mood, tell a story, or just complement sensations. I have also versed myself in Celtic, and Catholic mythology, Irish culture, and history and mythology in general so I can attempt to properly interpret Joyce’s writings.
The last dilemma in making Finnegan’s Wake into a movie, is to deal with its infinite loop. My fix for this is just allowing the movie to loop back onto itself on the DVD. This way the sense of timelessness is there, the sense of resolution will never come. If it catches on, Finnegan’s Wake could be a Rocky Horror-type experience where fans stay all night at the theater watching the equivalent of the round, “infinity bottles of beer on The Wall.” Generations will pass on there seat, wedding and funerals will take place in the theater. .
The general sense I will try to preserve is that this novel is as disjointed as life itself. Most of us don’t dare to take the time from our artificially goal-oriented lives to realize that our existence is more like the abstract, through the fun house looking glass world, of Finnegan’s Wake than the well structured world of Forest Gump. The disjointed characters that morph into one another is much more like us than the well defined Luke Skywalker. Minds, souls and thought bleed into one another through body language, shared experience, and shared cultures. Our perspective is not as absolute as conventional movies have to convey. Instead, we are constantly in personal reality dream states that would not be easy to define and interpret.
Finally, reality does not conveniently end like a well structured story would have you believe. Joyce’s infinity loop reveals the inconvenient and hard to comprehend truth that time and absolutes are illusions that help us get to our next meal.” Billy lowered his arms like currents and raised his eyes like a porn theaters lights.” “Billy you do realize we make ironing boards here” Bill held his magnificent stare, Mr K looked away and back a few times. “Billy you see ironing boards have very little to do with movies and Billy I don’t even think you own a camera.” Mr. K looked down at the empty factory floor from his window. “I know you just want to help but……….. Fine, fine we will make your damn movie, hell will even make the space shuttle if we are going to fail lets do it big, Billy lets do it big, call everyone back in, buy a camera and a smoke machine what ever the fuck you need .”

Decomp Interractive 3

Oh, this may be the best yet, babies.
My antennae is tingling and my cilia is rustling with joy.
Again, here are two videos for you to play simultaneous, as in at that same exact time. let the audio then burn into your psyche and meld and mold and murder you... dig it.
dig it.
dig it.

PUG GULLEY

PART ONE

"REQUIEM"

“I broke this cheek, right across here, do you see that? That was way early on, probably my first real fight.”

Rachel she jotted down in her little book, while I talked.

“Then, this eye, right above it see when I raise my eyebrows, this one doesn’t go up. This mouse up here, scar tissue.”

“And then, my nose got broke three, four times. My lip busted up, and then my ears, especially this one, I don’t hear out of it so good, you know.”

She looked up and pointed the pencil at me, “What about the rest of you?”

“My body I always managed to keep covered pretty good, ‘cept for lots of bruises, one broken rib, I think.”

I slapped my stomach hard, “lots of padding. But that’s nothing, you should have seen the other guys right?”

I give her a gentle jab on her chin. Rachel is a good kid; she’s a lot straighter than her dad. Lately she’s been coming over and doing these interviews with me, maybe some kind of school project, or she wants to be a writer and needs some subject. Either way, I feel like I’m letting her down, kid probably thinks she’s got a real life contender in her midst, and not some fucking tomato can like she does. Rachel is talking in my bad ear this time.

“I suppose, God made me big. I always figured you should make due with what you got, your natural gifts, and what with being shaped like a mattress, I couldn’t cut it as a jockey or a figure skater, so here I am. That and I was good at hitting people.”

After a few more minutes of banter, her time is up; “Thank you Mr. Hanson”

“Pug”, I correct her.

Pug, alone again, the pug in a little trailer on a square of dirt.

I was ‘Pug Hanson’, or ‘Powerful Pug Hanson’, and early on in his career ‘Handsome Paul Hanson’ (very briefly). But for right now, its just Pug, or if you want to believe that fat prick barker, I’m the Scottish headhunter. I wear a kilt and everything, Bagpipes play on a record while I fight, and I fight not once a month, or once a week, but every night, maybe ten times a night, more than a dozen on a good night. The biggest payoff on the midway, they call out. The barker with the big megaphone in the center of the ring, he calls out, looking for marks, ‘Take on the Scottish devil, Step in the ring with the big Scot, last three rounds and take home two hundred dollars.” So far, we don’t pay out much, we haven’t paid out once, Andy makes sure of that. Andy is kind of like my manager, except he doesn’t know anything about fighting. My old manager used to know a whole lot about fighting; he must have fought his whole life, about a hundred years. He was good to me too, real good until I started losing, really losing. I lost here and there but you lose enough and you become a loser, that’s what he told me. That’s what he told me and then he said he couldn’t wait for losers to turn around and I probably wouldn’t turn around and maybe he wasn’t a good manager for me anyway, and then he left. Actually he made me leave because it was his place I used to train in. I used to have a cut man too, to jab cotton in any holes that were made in me, and patch up any holes that were too big for cotton wads, I don’t have him anymore, but I had to give him twelve percent of each nights cut anyway so at least Im saving some money, and besides Im not getting cut up much. I tried to train by myself but I wasn’t getting any fights, and I was about to lose my apartment because I couldn’t pull a damn nickel not even in a month.

That was just in time, when Andy came to me, he walked in Vince’s gym, the owner nice guy let me train there free since he knew me from before I was a kid. So Andy walked in, more like sailed in wearing a full-length fur coat like some kind of pimp from the Himalayan Mountains.

He tell me he knows about me, that my friend,

“From the fried chicken place, he said you would probably be in here, I think you’re a pretty good fighter.” Even though I don’t think he ever saw me fight. He says he has a way I can make some money while training, easy money. He takes out a card, I got gloves on so he lays it on the ring apron says I should meet him tomorrow if I’m interested. I can meet him at the coffee shop next door, because that’s where he’ll be from noon to three, if I’m interested.

I’m interested as soon as he said money, hungry from living off of like my old man would have said a hot dog and a hard boiled egg, I would have went with him right there.

Karson Brothers Carnival.

That was printed on the front of the card, and on the back the guy’s name.

“Andy”. That’s Andy with his hand out when I walk in the café, he asks me to sit down and I’m pretty cautious at first, he asks me if I want anything, and then when he gives the suggestion that he’s paying, I accept and order some breakfast.

What’s a carnival got? Like, roadwork, maybe hoisting tents?

Not for you, better than that. A real good gig, you got sparring partners, right?

Sure, sometimes.

Well, this is basically just a lot of sparring. I’m not going to lie to you, not professionals, just regular guys, but look you’d be getting paid while you stay in practice, am I right?

He was sort of right.

It took a guy like Andy who was no trainer at all, to train you to fight these kinds of barneys, which was what they pretty much were.

In the ring under these bright light rigs, and a hundred million moths and mosquitoes and June bugs all flying around and dying inside the lights, all was illuminated.

The rubes gathered all around the ring, spilling food and cups of beer, and pigeons lined up harkened by that fiery sermon out that tinhorn.

Sweaty faces looking on a mix of jaded bloodlust and material exhaustion.

....

.

“It’s going to be a bunch of country boys, probably some wanna-be fighters used to box in high school, that sort.” Andy explains, “Tough guys spitting a bunch of trash, all talk. And you might see the aspiring amateur, think they’re gonna make a big show out of it.”

.....

Right now, a fresh faced looking kid was giving the barker his money and taking off his shirt. He couldn’t be a day over 18, in good shape, not a mark on him.

....

“And once in a while, we might get some serviceman on leave, they itch for a fight, like it’s their duty, you know? And they’re clean, too. I think you’ll do alright.”

......

This kid looks pretty eager, I do the bit where I spit and curse and stare him dead in the eye. He’s having the gloves put on him a quick tie job of these cheap Casanovas, the kind the Mexicans use.

....

.

“What about the drunks?”

“The drunks?” Andy laughs, “The drunks are our butter and egg men, man! If if wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t pull in half the bread that we do.”

....

.

The barker rings his bell and the kid starts dancing about, I stand there still for a second and then walk real slow over towards him. Its right now, about three seconds into his fight that all the courage will just drop right out of him. If I look real close I can see his eyes turn to an opacity like that happens when ones eyes look upon the thing that intends to visit very mortal harm upon one.

His shoulders slump slightly as ones shoulders do when the weight of fear is suddenly heaved upon one from where it was once perched aloft, far out of reach.

From here on out, It’s not a bullfight, it’s a foxhunt.

...

..

“Don’t take pepper to the poor sap all at once, get me? You come out pummeling and that’s it, nobody who sees that kind of shit is going to pay to get in there.”

..

.

I don’t touch the kid, I let him regain what he can of himself and that’s when he comes at me full force, wasting everything he’s got almost all at once. I block everything he throws at me; I drop my guard once to let him land a few weak shots to the body.

He backs away and I put a few love taps to him, enough to make him come at me again.

....

..

“That’s the beauty of it, you see?” Andy nudges me with his highball glass, “You get it? You barely have to do a thing. If you use your head, these rubes, these wheats..” He leans in closer,

“They beat themselves.”

....

.......

The kid comes again, flailing arms all over the place and I deflect them. He’s hitting hard, but he’s hitting wrong. I don’t quite punch but I push him back with my fists, and he keeps coming back. Its only a few minutes and then he can barely lift his arms, I make like Im going to hit him hard, but I don’t.

That’s all it takes.

He jerks back once, twice, I land the glove on his head but its got nothing behind it.

He yells at the barker/referee, he’s completely spent, three minutes.

He gives up.

The bell rings again and I have to make show like I did something.

I slump, I breath heavy, I let my hand get raised.

That’s only one,

There’s bound to be more tonight.

Pug Gulley by Anton Kozieja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

THE BIRTH OF DECOMP….

Jonathan was sweating despite the pouring rain.

He was rushing down the dark street towards the only light burning, grasping his precious cargo beneath his coat trying to keep it dry.

He stopped, reaching finally the stairs to Professor Boswell’s residence. The old brownstone harkened not to his approach and his breath was visible in the dim porchlight.

He paused, feeling the weight of the package in his arms, making sure it was still with him. He hesitated for a moment, and then rang the doorbell. From a window on the second story the Professor called to him;

“Jonathan! What in Reich’s name are you doing out there?”

“Forgive me sir, it was imperative that I came over right away, I think I..well, I have something here I think you would want to see.”

“Whats that? What have you got there boy?”

Jonathan looked up squinting in the rain.

“Can I come in, sir?”

Without a word, Professor Boswell cranked the window shut.

Jonathan stood in silence surveying the street.

“Well, come in, come in, boy.” The professor had appeared at the front door and ushered Jonathan inside. “Get in before you lose what little you have left of your senses.”

To surprise, Jonathan noticed that, despite the late hour, the Professor was not in his bedclothes. In fact a fire was burning and open books on the large desk suggested that the professor had been absorbed in some research. Perhaps he finally translated from Etruscan the writing on that brittle animal hide he had received anonymously in the mail. Or all that talk about evaporation, mercury and a crucifix taken for nonsense, but granted into light a graven truth.

Without announcement, Jonathan held out his hands. They held a package the size of a book that appeared to have been hastily rewrapped in brown paper.

The professor looked down at the offering and back up at Jonathan.

“What is the meaning of this, son?”

Jonathan began, breathlessly; “It’s just as your grandfather had told you, and your uncle, the Abbot. You thought they were suffering from some kind of schizophrenia, towards the end of their lives, those letters, those letters that they had written you..”

“Those letters…Yes, something had afflicted those men, or it seems the same vile spirit had infected them … their reputations never did recover.” Boswell gazed out towards the darkness.

“Yes, “ Jonathan began, “but you see, you may have been right all along.” He led the professor to his desk and lay the package down, removing the paper.

“Look.”

A leather bound notebook in dark brown, well worn and tattered sat before them.

For quite some time the book said nothing, neither did young Jonathan. The professor however was quite vocal;

“You barge in at an ungodly hour to deliver me some anonymous sketchbook? I hardly think this is in evidence of-“

“It’s not anonymous, sir.” Jonathan interrupted. “Look, here.” The lad opened the front cover and inlayed in gold upon the first page was the single letter “P”.

“So it was him.” The professor declared.

“This can only mean more malevolence, more ignominy, don’t you see? Upon my name, the name of my family. This..this man, this black spot, this pernicious vile growth of an individual. He is not a man; he is the plague himself. He has been the harbinger of complete death, not just of the body, of the soul itself. And he is upon me.”

Jonathan spoke to the professors turned back; “Perhaps there is some answers here.”

“There?!” Boswell cried.

“ In my own obituary!?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From the Case docket of Dr.P

“A mortal case of decomposition and malefactions”

ENTRY ONE.

Having had a very unpleasant return trip back into Philadelphia, and having no business in Philadelphia at all, I had resigned myself to my own quarters, a room I had been renting from a deaf woman above a tobacconists for the last two months. The best landlady I had ever had, although my recollection of her is vague. She was a very devout woman and very pleased when I told her that the murmurs she thought she had heard in the night was me praying the rosary.

Shortly after me arrival I was visited by that Dane, Rosencrans, acting as an errand boy for a particular family.

Rosencrans was sick from years on the street, his lungs rattled as he coughed wet into his fist. Because I knew him long before he had lost his pedigree and because he served a purpose to me, I often kept him “fed”, as they say. On this night I wrote him a prescription, which he took gratefully and stuffed into his greasy overcoat.

In his pitiful manner, he began to relate the story of a young boy, the only son of the family, describing the catatonic state he lay in, the deathly pallor of his skin, pausing every few moments to cross himself and whisper a “blessed be to God” under his breath.

As an addict, the Dane knew how to lay it on quite thick, but theatrics aside, I was very interested in the case, particularly when the Dane began to describe the few moments of lucidity that occurred during the young son’s otherwise comatose condition.

As he related it; “He calls fer the strangest things, you see. They said he wants rotten fruit, and the corpses of dead birds, he sits up, you see, in his bed, his eyes rolled back in his skull and he points out his limp hand towards nothing. They said he even called fer a shovel and they asked why and he yelled that it was fer to bury himself with.”

I asked him if he knew if the boy were being fed, or otherwise well tended to.

“Canna say sir, I caught a glimpse of the poor child, blessed be to god, and he looked to me to be nearer to death than to any other visage, that’s fer sartain.”

ENTRY TWO

I have paid my first visit to the new patient, the young boy in question. I have found him a most disagreeable subject, unresponsive to any stimuli at all, and after spending already two long nights at the bedside I have yet to see any sudden relapses into perspicuity such as had been described to me, by both the Dane and by the boy’s own father, a man of otherwise obligatory respect.

ENTRY THREE

My patience had been tested and nearly exhausted by this case, when suddenly, as I was about to rise to leave, I witnessed myself the young patient’s outburst. Indeed he rose up in his bed, his eyes blank, pure white and his arm extended out to me like Christ calling out to St.Matthew and he called out to me by name. I scarcely understood much of it under his mumblings and drooling, like a raving idiot he was. “French Canadian bean soup…mother is the best bet…go not like a gentleman..” this much I could make out. I had noticed that in my haste I had set my journal down on the bed and his foot, as a result of convulsions now rested upon it. I thought little of this until I returned to my room. Upon opening the book again, I saw now that where his foot had rested, blank pages were now filled with writing, only in that corner where his flesh was. Every page, unfinished paragraphs, written in an unknown hand. Nothing of use, but enough to urge me to pay another visit the next day.

ENTRY FOUR

I arrived at the family home with a new journal, and asked to be alone with the patient. I immediately placed my blank notebook under the patient’s body. I waited.

ENTRY FIVE

I convinced the family to allow me to remove the patient from their home and place him under my personal care, where he could be tended to around the clock. What I read in that journal after I had removed it caused me much distress. Out of nowhere, apocryphal writings had emerged, where blank paper had been now blood was stained and unseen fingers smeared invisible ink. The patient made no move towards recovery, but that concerned me little.

I am fascinated by what is revealed in the notebook so much that could not be known by this patient, which could not be known by any human being.

I have to go further.

ENTRY SIX

Over the course of the last week, I have repeated the same procedure of placing my blank journal beneath the body of the patient, but I have noticed an interesting development. It seems that where I am placing the books, where they are in terms of the patient’s body, greatly affects the resulting output that emerges in them.

When I place a journal under the patient’s chest region, I notice the writings in the book strangely pertain more to the humanist poetics, that is if the words were actually written by a human, which remains to be seen, namely matters of emotion, and long diatribes of want and longing. When I place them anywhere from the waist down on the patient, the writings as they were, tend to be concerned with the more base instincts of men, absolute vile descriptions of lust and hunger, not only of sex but also of food, of inhalants, of intoxicants, and of other various stimuli some yet unknown to me.

When the books were beneath the limbs of the patient, they emerged containing pieces of rigid structure, Haiku, and notes on mathematics, although none of the mathematical theories written about were either accurate or founded in any logic. These I could scarcely read without consulting the book from the other arm, or leg, for sometimes one paragraph would continue in another book recovered from the opposite arm.

Most intriguing of all, was when I had placed a book beneath the patient’s head.

I have allowed only a few forays into this realm, as the output that appears is by far the most disturbing. Never in my own nightmares have I even begun to imagine such abominations, such depraved visions. Even the most offensive minds that I have encountered, even criminals can not compare. These particular books are precious to me, I can not lend them even to my own research.

ENTRY SEVEN.

Subject weakening.

Unresponsive to outside stimulus, Intravenous nutrition basically rejected due to thrombosis.

Physically; Patient incurable.

Written output still strong, same practices produces same results.

….

Patient unresponsive.

.

I hope to keep patient alive as long as I can.

..

Transmission strong.

..

..

..

.

Journal Ends Here..

.

Decomp Interactive 2

Two videos for your approval. Play them both simultaneous like. Get close to the screen, and back away slow like a magic eye poster. let the audio burn into your cortex and manifest back into shape while you sleep too big for your little head oozing our your nostrils

My Real Dad is a Poem

My father would say get your head out of your ass like most people said hi. To be fair my head was in my ass. Though my ass was a Lewis Carol labyrinth. My father did not say get your head out of your ass to be helpful nor did he know it really was up there, he said it like a skunk raising his tail. My dad was later locked up leaving my head up my ass.
I was left unwanted as a leper dodo chick in a graveyard city, my lobotomized umbilical cord a ectoplasm limp dick in my hand. My dry, empty, hungry, opiate socked so desperately wanted to brim over with unconditional love. But where could I find love, I wasn’t in school so cool teacher was out, bums worked for a bit but the wanted to tell me lies and get hand jobs. Bums did teach me things like, go to university libraries to sleep. Libraries also had erotic picture books you could get off on ( thank you, you art fucks who tricked school boards into believing art was not porn). I also read. I read women's erotic dreams, every word of Orwell, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Whitman, Hess, all the beats. I would walk out with books and read them under bridges and at that weeks job, laying cable, digging ditches, cleaning bee hives, loading barges anything that was under the table and would hire kids. All the while I would let characters from novels kill themselves in my stead. One day under a bridge, sixteen, no shoes, no where to go, cold, Old Crow for antifreeze, I found hope for us all in a poem.
It was Bukowski’s “Maybe Will See”. It was an unassuming poem but it summed up the modern world that wanted me to jump of this bridge after I was done with my libation. I had read Charles before and like most kids, identified with him. But he never gave me hope, he only confirmed my apathy. But he wrote this poem as a older man, my old man. He was leaving his mindset of a drunken blue-collar worker teetering between nihilism and nirvana. Instead, Charles was entering a state of reflection and cautious optimism. He no longer wanted to point out the pointless; he wanted to impart wisdom into the world, to me. I needed to be lifted from under, like Persephone. The poem opened with one of humankind’s greatest endeavor, and a modern boys canvas, space. Charles was born in 1920 and he saw my angry empty womb unfold; spewing shinny slugs of plastics, televisions, and computers to the moon. His poem did not give a fuck about the details of cosmology; he only glosses over them, reality was the metaphor. What was important for him, was not the mass paradigm shift from our caveman’s fear of change, a hungry Cronus, to man as Prometheus unchained, dissecting with sight. The use of the new goals like the moon was to distracted us from a 19th century that killed god, his corpse the infinite vacuum of space. We are not genetically predisposed to shoot for the moon, but it keeps us from doing bad things to ourselves, like macaroni art for the insane. This poem is about humanity’s need to escape from itself so it does not do self-inflicted damage. He was a hopeful parent of a thin blue heroin addict, he administered methadone as a still born eucharist. Man needs to channel his infinite violent energies into something mysterious and infinite like the universe, sexy isn‘t it.
Bukowski showed me a dichotomy of humanity in this poem; he shows a curious inventive side and a war-like, suicidal, and destructive side, Charles, like all men and women of his age, had lived to see war after war and many innovations, and he prefers our preoccupation with innovation to war. Seeing new shiny things replaces man’s ever-acute nihilism with curiosity.
The title “Maybe Will See” has a desperate optimism to it. He believes our growing understanding of the universe is a distraction from doing bad, but he leaves another avenue slightly open what if humanity does finds something? He gave me a glimmer of hope and maybe my distraction turns out to be the Holy Grail. I new from that day that teleological bullshit is better then being eaten by the vultures of apathy. My belly button healed over and I knew then I was my own mother and father. I was nameless on the edge of the Dao.