REFUSAL TO BE BORED

 

Desire is deciduous

 
 
 
As we stare at an object (no matter how 
"beautiful") we are always aware that 
something is falling from its highest points, 
and sticking to our brightly-colored shirts 
and dresses. We assume that it will later 
be swept into the street and efficiently 
burned to provide energy to power all those
dirty little factories which provide us with 
plastic hat racks and the occasional vinyl belt. 
Bibelots, ovens, combs and bombs. Those 
factories are then the most perfect recipients 
of beauty and desire. So it often appears we 
have little to look forward to.

 
 
 


 

                                                      SO...
 
      A PERSONAL READING OF  BRETON 
 
 
               Loyalty to systems equivalent to loyalty to beautiful entities is to be avoided as an error.
 
               Systems have no part in beauty, and can remain only temporary utilitarian instrumentations insofar as they 
          promote movement toward objects of desire.
 
               Men’s “ideas” may be seduced into camps of opinion, and thus be violate by those who find such camps attractive.
 
 
               Surrealism (as a system) may be equally assailed once its central “character” is allowed to exit the stage.
 
               Surrealism is capable of becoming stagnant, frozen into placid dioramas of safe vignettes.
 
               The word “surrealism” can be, has been, and shall be misappropriated by charlatans (“new managers”); and although 
          it has not been moved (yet) into a position of “crimes against itself,” it may be judged as having done so by those who 
          desire only to be “assigned” to duties and contracts constructed mainly to contain their desires safely.
 
               Surrealism (this system of sprung desire) will (of course) be assailed most by those wishing to constrain their own 
          frightful desires; by those constricted in pressures high enough to transform soft envy into diamond hard mistrust.
 
 
               As long as man lies to himself and so refuses to liberate himself as an individual from capital corrosions and base 
         trivia and from the merely gregarious – there shall be no sense to life: life will remain a utilitarian and non-sequential 
         parade of duties and segregated urges enforced from above, and only put into action from below.
 
 
               The key to liberty is always prepared to blossom. This key – while always freshly nurtured – will have to contain the 
          seeds of what has gone before (failures, successes, and the barely attempted) if it is to have any useful strength.
    
                But we cannot conceive of these new flowers of accomplished desire as having sprung merely from what we now 
          gaze upon. 
 
 
               We shall shield ourselves against cults of personality by the realization that systems are tools, and by the knowledge 
          that one should not become seduced by only one tool, as this manifests that inflexibility of thought and action that can lead 
          only to all-too-easy tumbles into explanation.
 
               One must remain loyal not to systems but to non-conformity, especially to the non-conformity we may foster within 
          surrealism itself, since loyalty to surrealism as a system may lead to aesthetic mimicry of technique, and of such 
          “effects” as may be purchased at no risk.
 
                Though surrealism is a collective “covenant” (of a guarded mutability) only an informed individual resistance can 
          liberate desire. And, far from the re-education camps hallucinated by our enemies, we call now for constant 
          self-education.
 
                Unanimity of any group not intended to contravene the greater assembly remains suspect; but we must be willing to 
          grant our assent to even untested programs that we intuitively sense are dedicated to the creation of further and further 
          freedoms for the individual man.
 
 
               We must put an end to claims of omniscience (we must foster a scientific and poetic re-investigation of all phenomenon 
          and ideas.) The entirety of human history must be re-opened to this poetic investigation, and must be de-sacretized so as 
          to defeat obscuring awe. At the same time, we must not reject educated respect, and any temporary alliance of minds 
          and bodies formed by illuminated consent.
 
 
               We realize charges of mysticism may be leveled, but we admit it is not healthy to allow men to cling to “human-centric” 
          notions of omnipotent management, because this confession of a “lack of control” fosters a poetic distance, an 
          evocative separation from the objects of our desire. A too-easy capture of all aspects of the re-made world strikes us as 
          anti-poetic.
 
               We may “allow” ourselves therefore to conceive (if only as a mythological exercise) that there may be invisible 
          sources of universal power, if only to remove this world from the killing control of man, and to dissolve the “obvious” in 
          the “possible.”
          DMH
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo of an argentized lily (courtesy of the Metallic Flora Lab, Ames, Iowa)
Ghosts Are the Conscience of Light
”I am nothing, and I should be everything.”
                                  Karl Marx
I.  Light reposes
 
 
          It says little for "Common Sense" that we imagine Sound and Light traveling in the same Space, or that we imagine 
that Light travels in Space at all.
 
          Light reposes. Light dies. In its intended Receivers. In slubbered Sources. Emanations from everywhere simultaneously  
precluding Eminence.
 
          Awareness travels. Particle and Wave. Hook and Line. Relative Light’s parallel Series of seamless Matrices; inhabiting 
a space it constitutes entirely.
 
          Sound flattens in our rented Air. Light (contrarily) is non-diaphanous, machine-polished steel Beams. Industrial Shafts. 
What can Light shelter us from?
 
          Light and Darkness; an architectural concert. Light glowers over. Darkness pools beneath.
 
 
          Death rests between Consciousness ( C ) and anti-consciousness ( AntiC ). A run-off Ditch lies between the adjacent 
Fields. We assume the far unseen Perimeters.
 
          We only dream of sympathetic feed trenches. All fields appear as dry plots from our exploded vantage veined by 
Irrigation Networks.
 
          Sources and Receiver Pools. Dead extreme Boundaries. The Drain directing itself to the purifying Amphitheater.
 
          Abnormal Matter, vestigial Essences are extracted to be recycled or set to Waste. Then the Remainder is routed into 
a feed trench.
 
          It returns to cleanse us.  
 
 
II. A fine grit

          Death is the arena from which Light (as interactive material) is excluded; C is Light mixed with Mind; a fine grit. AntiC  
is Light only; uncompounded silt.
 
          These are the two shores of a slippery tributary. Light is the one element common to both fields. This may appear 
paradoxical.
 
          How may she carry both the recycled trash and the fresh splash of Light? Light, then, is everywhere. But remains 
under-appreciated.
 
          This is due either to a deficiency in Sense or to a non-permeable Membrane set between Light and Death. They had 
become allergic to one another.
 
          Light as substance may only be co-reactive with Mind; as in one of those novelty Chemical Wands, forming Light only 
when the Seal is punctured.
 
          Thus to be in the Court of light without its Benefit; sealed behind Death. This is the physics of horror.
 
          Get the picture: at the very simplest, two interdependent yet unpredictably divergent plots circled and separated by 
iridescent Trenches.
 
          This scheme opens Probability once an imaginable Space impinges upon another intimate space.
 
          Which constitutes a unity of disparencies. A bundled quantity of plots.
 
III.  Robbed glimpses
 
 
          Death courses between the two; never a Thru-Street precisely: AntiC more readily considered from C than vice-versa.
 
          Such a detective act instantly infuses any conception of AntiC with the emollient of Mind. Something is always stolen  
from such a mediation.
 
          One burgles a sentimental simulation of  AntiC. Those who consider these robbed Glimpses a True Representation 
will think it a Comfort of Space.
 
          Nothing can be further from the Truth.
 
 
          Mind forges space while AntiMind forges (lacking a precise term) a continuum of gaps. An unbroken Universe of 
unbridgeable Exceptions.
 
          Sentiment does not enter into this Western ideal of “wide open space” brought to a grotesque Fruition. Finally a Stingy 
Equality reigns.
 
          But it reigns in place of Potentiality. AntiC is nothing if not a World lacking Possibility. A Pool. A Quarry in which 
Deviation, non-objective forms, space-between-spaces, settle in a crust to their lowest points.
 
          Passing through a brief formative kineterae toward a final Resting Ground.
 
          There is nothing beneath it.
 
IV.  Embolism
 
 
          A unity of discrepencies: from an imaginary height the perceived effect of endless and related Couplings would be 
Homogeneity. The subdivision are a matter of microscopic Custom and sheer Brute Effectiveness; lacking Differentiation, 
without Nomencalture, the Universe ceases to “matter.” Death is then a Species of  organized Self-Centerness. Luminescent 
depressions of Death may be surveyed from a conscious Orchard. This Light ( Waste to the Dead ) is prominent in the Mix 
so that other Elements ( the Non-Returnables ) are swallowed by a Brightness. Spectral bulges occur when these Waste 
Products achieve passing equivalence with Light encasing them without their     Knowledge. Manifestations attributable to 
a deluge in probability,” an in-flooding during which portions of a “dike” lining the run-off Trenches embol. Ensuing Ruptures 
prompted by massive surges in Deaths, by uniquely postured deaths, or by naturally-occuring flaws in the “dike” itself. 
 
          As a semi-permeability maintains cell equilibrium and facilitates transport of Nutrients, Waste Products, Information, 
Light’s breaches open that Possibility between Death and Consciousness. Or Death and AntiC. What Material constitutes 
this “dike”—half “our” World, half Death’s? Who is its legal Avatar? Its guiding fetish?
 
          I hypothesize a distinct flutter, an epitasis of crystalline Fog pinned at the extreme end of each Sentiment; the frozen 
Turnstile in every Sensation.
 
V.  Blind ghosts
 
 
         Contrarily: if there is a Deficiency merely in the sensations of the Dead, we must conclude all Ghosts are blind. But are 
they also deaf?
 
          To be forcibly emptied from C into an ocean of Sound lacking Light to act as a medium of Affirmation. Surely to the 
Dead this is perceived as an Inundation?
 
          So, there is an intrusion of auditory Memory. The blind Dead are haunted periodically, possessed by sounds of worlds 
long believed stolen from them.
 
          This phenomenon is possible only because Sound travels and Light inhabits.
 
VI.  Infinitely outdoors
 
 
           The Mind contains the body and like most Containers buffers Liquid against the more commonplace Blows. That which 
we perceive too often as Anguish remains the most tepid shade of Pain.
 
          Many Containers are created to break. The results are predictable: the Body exposed to the World lying in wait outside  
the Mind. Flat Deserts infinitely outdoors.
 
          It is only through the diluting aspects of Mind that Light’s steel Shaft becomes auto-translucent (revealing itself through 
itself). Only through the coagulating aspects of Mind that Light becomes its Objects.
 
          This dilution/coagulation cycle can best be seen at conventions of Shadow and Light: here coagulated into Whirlpools 
of honest Illuminae, there in Shards between the Grassblades, balled into blonde Stones along the Pathways, spiked straight to 
the Sky behind an ebon Tree in the foreground.
 
          Running down the Sides of Themselves like an erotic Gully Wash.
    
 
 

 

 

 

The Fullest Expression of a Hypothetical "Mind" Is Poetry, the Dog
 
For The Love of A Good Machine
 
 
     “A toaster makes  the same product for  myself or – let’s say – the President on the day he slaughters a small village in [insert name of faraway disposable nation]. Undoubtedly, the President’s toast tastes better, due to the sense-heightening benefits of easy  victory, but that is not the toaster’s doing. Or so I believed, until that day I was corrected by a dull braadside issued by a neo-Luddite, whose borrowed syntax’s hollow ring made me fall asleep at the cognition switch .”
                                                                                    Pèse Ludion, “The Veinless Limousine”
       “If machinery is not neutral, then it must be capable of love, and (if a machine is capable of love) it is a natural surrealist interest. Truth is, a surrealist cannot afford to turn away from the experiences afforded by technology, if only because love is waiting at the roundhouse,  and no one wants to see their object of desire in the arms of another man, especially if that man owns a defense plant.”
                                                                                 Robine M. Pitre, “Machines of Affection” 
     “What IS the difference between a “slave” and a “slave system”? One could answer that easily. So why is anyone incapable of distinguishing between technology and a technological system? Systems are built to confiscate the imagination, to lay claim and profit from the pursuits of individuals. Technology is as simple as a stick to swat flies with. But the fact remains, the pencil is NOT the pencil industry, but the booty of the pencil industry. Thus, NOT to use pencils –  so as to claim one is free of that industry – is a vivid error. I imagine many manifestos have been composed using pencils and paper, and – just because the President of Morbidity Inc. uses a pencil – it is a deadly stupidity to claim one is being revolutionary by resisting their use. These are the same people who think they are saving the world just because they don’t use the once advanced technology of the  toilet, and instead shit on the floor. A gesture – yes – but one designed to make you repugnant to your friends, and bring no pain to the captains of the hygiene industry.”
                                                                                       Berlue Rebondi, “Yeti Versus Robot”
 
     There is a critical attachment, a long and oddly flat “wand” which emerges from the Machine’s perforated base and ends in a black fan studded with numerous – delightfully useless – buttons. This monument to progress – a type of preemptive vacuum – works most efficiently upon the louche affections of leftist sentimentalists and other ritualists, and tends to coalesce into a question, a rhetorical flourish equal to the back of the hand (in a room full of children), or to the ironic determinism of the wage earner, and (as it cannot be avoided) it is best to keep watch, if nothing else. Otherwise, we are unprepared to unlock the bedroom with the simple machinery of the key.
  
    Yet, an affinity between this “machine mâchoir”  – brand name Wittgenstein – and those sun-sweetened Dadaists in the collapsible middle-distance critiques those most incapable of de-trooping from their own accumulated orders: there is a “pity parameter” 1 essential to each difficult escape. Romanticism, as applied to the Machine, insists that we “materialize our under-funded residues” and face the world AS a set of serial consequences: that gear is a geraniums, a geranium turns on a whim, and whims turn the gears, and – out the other end WITHOUT conscious input – a human “purpose” is excreted. I don’t know where to put it! I search OUTSIDE, because I DON’T WANT IT IN HERE. 2
     There, quite unfortunately for those who oppose my loving Machine, a certain ecology – a brave circuitry 3 – of hat containers and instrumental music flutters undulates in the air of language. And language – indeed – does get rolled into the garage, the ivory repair bunker, and is hoisted up the backs of the Club of Mute Sophists 4, who gather only to un-gather, fearing a public backlash. What can be done about THAT which hasn’t already been suggested (by lapsed Leninists on stolen bicycles) also be done to THIS? Nothing human: charlatanism collectivized by dull Ludds. The battle-cry “Down with zippers!” brings the faithful out to the free speech park.
     It is difficult – do not imagine we are unaware – to be resolutely appalled by that which surrounds you EVERYWHERE: that pencil is a lever, this skirt is a cantilevered pleasure, those shoes (even!) are both cobbled and oddly welcoming, seductive even. And those who decide to attempt The Dream without language? Fascists of a new sort, or studying to be advocates, their fur firmly stroked the wrong way by natural extensions of human bodies. Don’t use the brush, I understand: it may be seized by the next G-Man and turned into a death ray 5. Can that chance be taken by anyone shrunken to the size of a caveman?
     So, we return to the Loving Machine: she is perfectly undressed and willing. Oh look! She has a pair of glasses on, just at the precise moment we desired a naked face! And how does she make that motor run? Idle meditations are humming in the street, which is also a Machine, as are the houses and the underclothes only she has shed, asking us to manipulate her, when she might as casually have begged Mussolini for a back rub, or conned Bill Gates into digitizing her ardors. Well, how coy of her. Let’s say that a rather randy toaster has just entered a room quietly on its stubby legs, smelling of burnt crumbs, the fragrance of expected developments and eventual progress (into the joining chamber). YOU turn away. I’m staying. The only Machine I despise at this moment is the ceiling lights and the useless buttons. Oh, for the sexual track of the zipper!
DMH
 
FOOTNOTES
1. This phenomenon was first noted by the Squat Enumerists (in their landmark volume, Borders and Balconies) and reiterated in the formula a = t2(z+cm), where a is the number of visible boundaries in an invisible field, t is the number of points common to all boundaries, z is the height of the highest boundary divided by the height of lowest boundary, and cm is the “cloud matrix,” the universal constant discovered by three athletic youths in Detroit.
   
2. Who really does?  The problem is this: if an “outside” represents all that is potential and an “inside” represents all that is grasped, where did the yellow go?
3. The term created by the Viennese topologist Tybur Korlan to describe a mesh of inalienable processes which accumulate over the course of a dishonest conversation.
  
4. A mathematical brotherhood dedicated to rejecting the very air they breathe, because it is also inhaled by CEOs and Hollywood celebrities. Needless to say, their membership tends to drop.
 
5. This has already occurred, shocking the home beauty-care industry into initiating stricter controls against the exploitation of combs. Since then not one hair care product has been transformed into a weapon of any sort. This is proof security measures work.
 

 
 
  Dream Bits

 

 

 

 

     Every dream is pinned by the long diamond of a woman’s breath.
                                          _____
 
     It is Night and you always wear the same gown to Day’s wake.
                                          _____
 
     Night’s weak and breathless felony is jailed even as unclean
     brilliances convene once more their all-white juries to overthrow
     a black romance.
                                         _____
 
     Across the white arm, sleep.
                                         _____
 
     Sleep has one syllable, and that is excessive.
 
                                        _____
 
     All dreams form a continuous flesh in which we are pores.
                                        _____
 
     Our dual nature in relation to the dream: we are the absence of
     dream, and we are conduits of its essential function, which never
     depends upon our position, but upon the position of the dream. We
     are either useful or we are not—to the dream.
                                       _____
 
     It does not matter how deep you dream: the water at the bottom
     is open sky.
                                      _____
 
     Dream’s retreating sugars leave a thick, black foliage. We render
     it into hair oil and nail polish.
                                     _____
 
  The coin of dreams has three heads—like that Greek dog.

 
                           The Blackened Swan

QUACK, QUACK

 
 
BORED ENOUGH TO LEAVE