Justin Isis - Residual Bourgeois Manners Were the Only Thing That Saved Me From Total Ruin

It was raining that morning, and still very dark. When the boy reached the streetcar café he had almost finished his route and he went in for a cup of coffee. The place was an all-night café owned by a bitter and stingy man called Wong. After the raw, empty street, the café seemed friendly and bright: along the counter there were a couple of actors, three spinners from the cotton mill, and in a corner a man who sat hunched over with his nose and half his face down in a beer mug. The boy wore a helmet such as aviators wear. When he went into the café he unbuckled the chin strap and raised the right flap up over his pink little ear; often as he drank his coffee someone would speak to him in a friendly way. But this morning Wong did not look into his face and none of the men were talking. He paid and was leaving the café when a voice called out to him:

"Son! Hey Son!"

He turned back and the man in the corner was crooking his finger and nodding to him. He had brought his face out of the beer mug and he seemed suddenly very happy. The man was long and pale, with a big nose and faded black hair.

"Hey Son!"

The boy went toward him. He was an undersized boy of about twelve, with one shoulder drawn higher than the other because of the weight of the paper sack. His face was shallow, freckled, and his eyes were round child eyes.

"Yeah Mister?"

The man laid one hand on the paper boy's shoulders, then grasped the boy's chin and turned his face slowly from one side to the other. The boy shrank back uneasily.

"Say! What's the big idea?"

The boy's voice was shrill; inside the café it was suddenly very quiet.

The man said slowly: "I can't stop thinking about vaginas."

All along the counter the men laughed. The boy, who had scowled and sidled away, did not know what to do. He looked over the counter at Wong, and Wong watched him with a weary, brittle jeer. The boy tried to laugh also. But the man was serious and sad.

"I did not mean to tease you, Son," he said. "Sit down and have a beer with me. There is something I have to explain."

Cautiously, out of the corner of his eye, the paper boy questioned the men along the counter to see what he should do. But they had gone back to their beer or their breakfast and did not notice him. Wong put a cup of coffee on the counter and a little jug of cream.

"He is a minor," Wong said.

The paper boy slid himself up onto the stool. His ear beneath the upturned flap of the helmet was very small and red. The man was nodding at him soberly. "It is important," he said. Then he reached in his hip pocket and brought out something which he held up in the palm of his hand for the boy to see.

"Look very carefully," he said.

The boy stared, but there was nothing to look at very carefully. The man held in his big, grimy palm a photograph. It was a desert landscape, and in the air, suspended by itself, was a soft pink vulva, its labial lips emitting a steady radiance.

"See?" the man asked.

The boy nodded and the man placed another picture in his palm. The vulva was floating above a beach now, and its glow seemed stronger, causing the picture to look overexposed.

"Got a good look?" He leaned over closer and finally asked: "You ever seen that before?"

The boy sat motionless, staring slantwise at the man. "Not so I know of."

"Very well." The man blew on the photographs and put them back into his pocket. "That was a vulva."

"Your wife's?" the boy asked.

Slowly the man shook his head. He pursed his lips as though about to whistle and answered in a long-drawn way: "Nuuu -" he said. "I will explain."

The beer on the counter before the man was in a large brown mug. He did not pick it up to drink. Instead he bent down and, putting his face over the rim, he rested there for a moment. Then with both hands he tilted the mug and sipped.

"Some night you'll go to sleep with your big nose in a mug and drown," said Wong. "Prominent transient drowns in beer. That would be a nice death."

The paper boy tried to signal to Wong. While the man was not looking he screwed up his face and worked his mouth to question soundlessly: "Drunk?" But Wong only raised his eyebrows and turned away to put some pink strips of bacon on the grill.

The man pushed the mug away from him, straightened himself, and folded his loose crooked hands on the counter. His face was sad as he looked at the paper boy. He did not blink, but from time to time the lids closed down with delicate gravity over his dark brown eyes. It was nearing dawn and the boy shifted the weight of the paper sack.

"I am talking about vaginas," the man said. "With me they are a science."

The boy half slid down from the stool. But the man raised his forefinger, and there was something about him that held the boy and would not let him go away.

"Twelve years ago, I was travelling in outer Mongolia. At that time I was a DJ at one of China's hottest nightclubs, but my life wasn't satisfying. I had everything you're supposed to want: money, women, influence. But it wasn't enough. Spiritually, I was empty. There was a hole, an absence in me, which craved God. Are you listening to me, Son? Without God, we are nothing. But at that time I knew nothing, only that something was wrong. So I retreated to the desert. For days I walked alone, wandering with no destination in mind, hoping that the universe would take care of me. As my supplies dwindled, I faced the sun and prayed to God for enlightenment. When I looked down again, a vulva was floating in the air above me, the same one you saw in the picture, emitting waves of calm. I asked it what was the meaning of my life. And then a voice sounded from within the labia. 'All time and space is slowly moving towards the Absolute,' the vulva told me, 'In the name of thrice-great Hermes, I proclaim the Aquarian Age...'"

The man paused.

"There is no time, every instant is proof of divinity. We are all parts of God - capillaries, perhaps. I realized that was what the vulva was trying to tell me."

He tightened his blurred, rambling voice and said:

"I took care of that vulva. I loved it. Yes...I loved it. I thought also that it loved me. It had all home comforts and luxuries. It never crept into my brain that it was not satisfied. But do you know what happened?"

"Mgneeow!" said Wong.

The man did not take his eyes from the boy's face. "The vulva disappeared. I came in one night and the house was empty and it was gone. It left me."

"With a fellow?" the boy asked.

Gently the man placed his palm down on the counter. "Why naturally, Son. A vulva does not vanish like that alone."

The café was quiet, the soft rain black and endless in the street outside. Wong pressed down the frying bacon with the prongs of his long fork. "So you have been chasing the vulva for eleven years. You frazzled old rascal!"

For the first time the man glanced at Wong. "Please don't be vulgar. Besides, I was not speaking to you." He turned back to the boy and said in a trusting and secretive undertone: "Let's not pay any attention to him. O.K.?"

The paper boy nodded doubtfully.

"It was like this," the man continued. "I am a person who feels many things. All my life one thing after another has impressed me. Moonlight. Sausages. The leg of a pretty girl. One thing after another. But the point is that when I had enjoyed anything there was a peculiar sensation as though it was laying around loose in me. Nothing seemed to finish itself up or fit in with the other things. Women? I had my portion of them. The same. Afterwards laying around loose in me. I was a man who had never loved."

Very slowly he closed his eyelids, and the gesture was like a curtain drawn at the end of a scene in a play. When he spoke again his voice was excited and the words came fast - the lobes of his large, loose ears seemed to tremble.

"Then I found the vulva. And you know what it was like? I just can't tell you. All I had ever felt was gathered together around this vulva. Nothing lay around loose in me any more but was finished up by it, by the vaginal canal."

The man stopped suddenly and stroked his long nose. His voice sank down to a steady and reproachful under-tone: "I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this vagina was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through it and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?"

"Did you try to make it come back?"

The man did not seem to hear. "Under the circumstances you can imagine how I felt when it left me."

Wong took the bacon from the grill and folded two strips of it between a bun. He had a gray face with a pinched nose saddled by faint blue shadows. One of the mill workers signaled for more coffee and Wong poured it. He did not give refills on coffee free. The spinner ate breakfast there every morning, but the better Wong knew his customers the stingier he treated them. He nibbled his own bun as though he grudged it to himself.

"And you never got hold of it again?"

The boy did not know what to think of the man, and his child's face was uncertain with mingled curiosity and doubt. He was new on the paper route; it was still strange to him to be out in the town in the black, queer early morning.

"Yes," the man said. "I took a number of steps to get it back. I went around trying to locate it. I went back to outer Mongolia. I went to every province it had ever mentioned to me, and I hunted down every man it had formerly been connected with. Sichuan, Shanxi, Hunan, Gansu, Fujian.. .. For the better part of two years I chased around the country trying to lay hold of it."

"But the vulva had vanished from the face of the earth!" said Wong.

"Don't listen to him," the man said confidentially. "And also just forget those two years. They are not important. What matters is that around the third year a curious thing begun to happen to me."

"What?" the boy asked.

The man leaned down and tilted his mug to take a sip of beer. But as he hovered over the mug his nostrils fluttered slightly; he sniffed the staleness of the beer and did not drink. "Love is a curious thing to begin with. At first I thought only of getting the vulva back. It was a kind of mania. But then as time went on I tried to remember it. But do you know what happened?"

"No," the boy said.

"When I laid myself down on a bed and tried to think about the vulva, my mind became a blank. I couldn't see it. I would take out its pictures and look. No good. Nothing doing. A blank. Can you imagine it?"

"Say Mac!" Wong called down the counter. "Can you imagine this bozo's mind a blank!"

Slowly, as though fanning away flies, the man waved his hand. His brown eyes were concentrated and fixed on the shallow little face of the paper boy.

"But a sudden piece of glass on a sidewalk. Or a nickel tune in a music box. A shadow on a wall at night. And I would remember. It might happen in a street and I would cry or bang my head against a lamppost. You follow me?"

"A piece of glass . . ." the boy said.

"Anything. I would walk around and I had no power of how and when to remember the vulva. You think you can put up a kind of shield. But remembering don't come to a man face forward - it corners around sideways. I was at the mercy of everything I saw and heard. Suddenly instead of me combing the countryside to find it, it begun to chase me around in my very soul. The vulva begun chasing me mind you! And in my soul."

The boy asked finally: "What part of the country were you in then?"

"Shanxi," the man groaned. "I was a sick mortal. It was like smallpox. I confess, Son, that I boozed. I fornicated. I committed any sin that suddenly appealed to me. I am loath to confess it but I will do so. When I recall that period it is all curdled in my mind, it was so terrible."

The man leaned his head down and tapped his forehead on the counter. For a few seconds he stayed bowed over in this position, his hands with their long warped fingers held palm to palm in an attitude of prayer. Then the man straightened himself; he was smiling and suddenly his face was bright and tremulous and old.

"It was in the fifth year that it happened," he said. "And with it I started my science."

Wong's mouth jerked with a pale, quick grin. "Well none of we boys are getting any younger," he said. Then with sudden anger he balled up a dishcloth he was holding and threw it down hard on the floor. "You draggletailed old Romeo!"

"What happened?" the boy asked.

The old man's voice was high and clear: "Peace," he answered.

"Huh?"

"It is hard to explain scientifically, Son," he said. "I guess the logical explanation is that I had chased the vulva for so long that finally I just lay down and quit. Peace. A queer and beautiful blankness. It was spring in Sichuan and the rain came every afternoon. All evening I just stayed there on my bed in the dark. And that is how the science come to me."

The windows in the streetcar were pale blue with light. The two actors paid for their beers and opened the door - one of the actors combed his hair and wiped off his muddy puttees before they went outside. The three mill workers bent silently over their breakfasts. Wong's clock was ticking on the wall.

"It is this. And listen carefully. I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with?"

The boy's soft mouth was partly open and he did not answer.

"Vaginas," the old man said. "Without science, with nothing to go by, they undertake the most dangerous and sacred experience in God's earth. They can't stop thinking about vaginas. Is that correct, Son?"

"Yeah," the boy said faintly.

"They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love?"

The old man reached over and grasped the boy by the collar of his leather jacket. He gave him a gentle little shake and his brown eyes gazed down unblinking and grave.

"Son, do you know how love should be begun?"

The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered:

"Vaginas. Vaginas. Vaginas."

It was still raining outside in the street: a mild, gray, endless rain. The mill whistle blew for the six o'clock shift and the three spinners paid and went away. There was no one in the café but Wong, the old man, and the little paper boy.

"The weather was like this in Sichuan," he said. "At the time my science was begun. I meditated and I started very cautious. I would pick up something from the street and take it home with me. I bought a foam rubber vagina and I concentrated on the foam rubber vagina and I loved it. I graduated from one thing to another. Day by day I was getting this technique. On the road from Sichuan to Fujian-"

"Aw shut up!" screamed Wong suddenly. "Shut up! Shut up!"

The old man still held the collar of the boy's jacket; he was trembling and his face was earnest and bright and wild. "For six years now I have gone around by myself and built up my science. And now I am a master. Son. I can't stop thinking about vaginas. No longer do I have to think about it even. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. Do you realize what a science like mine can mean?"

The boy held himself stiffly, his hands curled tight around the counter edge. Finally he asked: "Did you ever really find that vulva?"

"What? What say, Son?"

"I mean," the boy asked timidly. "Did you make your peace with God?"

The old man loosened his grasp on the boy's collar. He turned away and for the first time his brown eyes had a vague and scattered look. He lifted the mug from the counter, drank down the yellow beer. His head was shaking slowly from side to side. Then finally he answered: "No, Son. You see that is the last step in my science. I go cautious. And I am not quite ready yet."

"Well!" said Wong. "Well well well!"

The old man stood in the open doorway. "Remember," he said. Framed there in the gray damp light of the early morning he looked shrunken and seedy and frail. But his smile was bright. "Remember the vulva," he said with a last nod. And the door closed quietly behind him.

The boy did not speak for a long time. He pulled down the bangs on his forehead and slid his grimy little forefinger around the rim of his empty cup. Then without looking at Wong he finally asked:

"Was he drunk?"

"No," said Wong shortly.

The boy raised his clear voice higher. "Then was he a dope fiend?"

"No."

The boy looked up at Wong, and his flat little face was desperate, his voice urgent and shrill. "Was he crazy? Do you think he was a lunatic?" The paper boy's voice dropped suddenly with doubt. "Wong? Or not?"

But Wong would not answer him. Wong had run a night café for fourteen years, and he held himself to be a critic of craziness. There were the town characters and also the transients who roamed in from the night. He knew the manias of all of them. But he did not want to satisfy the questions of the waiting child. He tightened his pale face and was silent.

Scramble City (Part I)

Chomu and Patchwork Earth have been friends since the site's inception, so I'm grateful to caretakers Justin Isis and Quentin S. Crisp for not only allowing me to contribute from time to rare time, but also for sponsoring this little project - "Scramble City" will be a novella simulcast at both websites, This today is the first three segments of the novella, with more to follow at a likely irregular schedule.


------------------

Scramble City
A Mash'Em Up


I.

The usual spot, beneath the passing 'rail. The setting sun cast the spires in fading gold. Rocky kicked aside an old packing crate, a translucent garbage bag. The tape around his forearms was shredded, hung in loose ribbons. Beneath one foot, an octet of failed Polaroids; purplish and bubbled. Beneath a cracked and tar-papered skateboard, he found it: the familiar weight, the curve of the chamber, the key with its chain wound about the trigger guard like a rosary. The monorail roared above, eclipsing the whole alley.


II.

The story is known to most: once, there was a great wolf, a fierce and brave hunter, who fell in love with the sun. But wolves cannot court the sun, for they are all promised to the moon, pay tribute in song every time the moon waxes. And indeed, this wolf bore over one ear a white patch of fur in the shape of a crescent moon, signaling his betrothal. Wolves are creatures of the shadows, and disappear as the sun rises. The warmth of the sun was saved for the children of Bastet, who could curl in slices of the sun that fell upon the ground and purr to their heart's content. Such a love should never be, and yet it was so.

This wolf was cunning, as all wolves are, and so he hatched a plan to stay tethered to his love for all his life. He went to the Forger, a dirty man who was the source of all the world's watered steel, and weapons of great power. This wolf entreated the Forger to make a chain that could not be broken, that he could chain himself to the sun.

The Forger was cunning, though, as well, and even the fangs of a wolf paled before the ferocity of the weapons of man, and so he who formed them of the earth. What use have I for your love, he sneered, and taunted the wolf with figures in the coin of the realm – for wolves had no use for money. And so the wolf offered his song in trade instead, for he'd have no cause to serenade the moon anon. The Forger accepted this boon, and he got to work.

It was dangerous work indeed, for to make a chain that would stand the heat of the sun itself, it would have to be struck against the Anvil of Dawn, which existed only at the border of the sun's and the moon's domains.

And so it was, that now Rocky was dressed in the leather breeches of The Forger; with children's delight in his every snarl, as he pulled the lever that sent their carriages through the doors into the Anvil of Dawn. There was a squeal from a little girl, quickly stifled by her mother, as the doors closed in preparation for the next group. Another carriage rolled into place, as a pair of lovers disembarked. The summer heat was soaked into every ground-laid brick, and the light splayed across the labyrinth of metal cordons. At the far end of the line, a dancing performer in a thick felt tanooki suit looked woozy.

The weapon was tucked into his waistband, the key dancing awkwardly against his member.

He helped strap in a pair of twins, who wrestling over a one tangle of cotton candy between them, and when he turned back to regard the crowd, he saw a figure slumped against a tree. The sun was in Rocky's eyes, and he couldn't be sure until the figure turned slightly and he saw that it was indeed a man with his arm in a sling; a man who was now regarding a black squirrel who'd come down the tree to beg for popcorn scraps.

The man was waiting for something, and Rocky closed his eyes, twitched his lips a bit, and then took an unscheduled break.


III.

Another day passed, and Rocky was passing through Little Lyons, in the hopes of seeing Naomi stroll through the Promise Garden which lay beyond its borders. Each storefront in Little Lyons was connected from the inside, with the varied buildings displayed on the exterior as a sort of façade, and the entrances more like turnstiles. Everything was wooden, and that thick, browned wood at that. The displays and shelving looked hewn from ancient, impressive furniture. A cashier in Baroque stylings was ringing up a brace of plastic missiles and an appliqué t-shirt.

“Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings?” A man was beside him, flipping through a book. Rocky started, but this was a man that he had never met before. “But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?”

“I don't understand.” He was allowed to speak, within the city, unlike the tanooki or the kappa, but this was as much a weakness as a strength. Rocky tended not to speak much at all, if he could avoid it. The man smoothed out his scarf, which bore the repeated emblem of Britannia, and smiled.

“I've heard it said that one who knows nothing can understand nothing. Which I suppose is a poetic way of saying 'if you don't know, don't ask.' Personally, I always encourage the asking of questions.”

“Okay, sure.” His hands were sweating. “Did you want an autograph or something, then?”

“So quick to sign your name! What sort of devil are you, pray tell?”

There was a shriek, and they both turned. A young babe was bawling into her mother's shoulder, shaking her head over and over. The woman's shirt was changing color. “Sorry! She's just a little... 'You' were very scary in your movie.”

“Right. I'll just be heading on.” Before the other man could address him further, Rocky was out a back exit, which (owing to the ambiance of the store's thematic conceit) was perhaps the only exit to backstage which was labeled “employees only.”

There was a snake's width of space between the borders of the Capitalized Lands, and he slipped through that space until he felt he'd gotten sufficient distance, and then realized that he was holding the book that the man had been reading. He placed it under his arm. He'd be sent to the White Room if they believed him a thief.

He'd missed his chance to see Naomi. He tried to picture the folds of her crinoline dress, tried to calm down. But he'd been expected.

“You've been avoiding me.” The man in the sling was waiting there. His undamaged arm was flexing around a tourniquet. The man didn't look up, but they knew each other's faces well enough by now.

“What do you want, Nick?”

Nick just shook his head, held open his palm. A trio of chalky pills lay flat in his hand. At least one of them bore a familiar sprite. “You using?”

“Naw. Naw, I'm clean.” Nick shrugged, popped all three of the one-ups into his mouth, mumbled “for the blood,” and then fished out the leather case with the syringe. For a junkie, Nick was a well-supplied and orderly sort. It begged the sort of questions that Rocky did not want to answer.

“They can see us,” he hissed, and grabbed Nick's arm – the needle-target, not the broken one – and hauled him up to his feet. “You can't do this here.”

“What happened to you, Rocky?” Nick lolled his head. “Don't you remember who you are?”

The snake's width was obscured from the Lands beyond with fencework, tall hedges, trees, pitch tarp, and whatever else would obscure the infrastructure. The design, however, was such that there were many viewing ports available, only visible from the interior. Through one of these, now, Rocky saw a figure that could only be a lawman, far out of his jurisdiction if he was patrolling the Capitalized Lands. He was searching for something, or someone. Rocky looked at Nick, who wasn't noticing a lot – the tube of the syringe bounced against his forearm from where it was stuck.

When Rocky closed his eyes this time, it was as if he could hear the thousand thousand eyes of The Architect watching him.

He left Nick behind, walking the length of the borderground as The Forger once had in the legend, the wolf at his heels, approaching the Anvil.

Justin Isis - Philip Larkin Debuts Princess Style™

I'm tired of writing poems about masturbating.




I wish I'd been born a girl.




They told me only girls could wear pretty clothes.




Why can't I be a fucking princess too?




I want to wear Jesus Diamante clothes and stand outside a hostess bar.




I'd have to give up my investigations into topological vector spaces, but that's okay.





Philip, want to do a photoshoot with me?




OH GOD YES




TSUU-CHAN, YOU'RE THE GREATEST!




Philip, what the fuck are you doing!




Get your ass back to the research center and finish your paper on Cauchy-Riemann equations.




Can't I do my photoshoot first?




NO




Dammit, Kingsley




I'm sick of you pressuring me to finish my research.




No one cares about the Fields Medal, only the Nobel Prize. And there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics.




That's because Alfred Nobel was a wanker who couldn't INTEGRATE.





...?

Meditation II: Oneironaut, by Quentin S. Crisp

Meditation II: Oneironaut

O, children of a future age,
Reading this bewildered page,
Know that in a former time,
Dream, sweet dream, was deemed a lie.

But children of the future age, you are not separate; or only so because you know there is no future. And so you sit inside the circle, and I must begin my address across time with the O that cancels time, dialling zero with nothing on the non-existent, telepathic oneirophone. And who is the oneironaut, and who is on the ground, I do not know.

The dreams began in caves - stalactited space capsules. In future, as past, physical travel is obsolete, only the transition of the present moves. I see the cockpit cave where future and past are a single sky of Dreamtime, viewed through a scanner of rock and paint, navigated by serpents and rainbows, steered by song.

There are not two serpents, only one. Watch their writhing closely, and the double image is resolved into single. There is only this rock. There has only ever been this rock. We have not moved an inch. Where can we go? But only close your eyes and a jungle of possibles leaps upon the screen of nothing.

There are no controls upon the console of this rock, but only close your eyes...

The sand is the same in this box, but the patterns change. The colours are continous, but the dream-clouds rearrange themselves with greater ease than mercury, in an endless series of complete transformations, night after night.

I am the oneironaut. There seems to be a problem - a malfunction somewhere. I am aware of distance. I drift in space and since I must breathe, a tube connects me to the base I cannot see. Only through this thin tube, twisting into the distance where it disappears, do I live and breathe. Suddenly, I realise, as any oneironaut must, that this umbilical cord is a serpent.

It writhes, and sinks its fangs into my stomach, injecting the necessary venom. Without this poison there is nowhere to go. The scales of the serpent are a rainbow. They change colours like the pigment of a cuttlefish, flashing a virulent code whose language will be translated in the body of the oneironaut - translated by pain and fever. Now my helmet fills with images of dream. They slide across my visor, like a film upon a screen. I see nothing else. This helmet has become a magic lantern, suffocating me with alien landscapes, other-dimensional skies, pavilions of telepathic conference where invertebrate dignitaries of dream federations recallibrate my concepts and perceptions with wreathes of synaesthetic incense, geometrical dances of universal pandemonium, biological catacombs connecting worlds, fireworks of synchronistic superclusters building to the crashing of a fractal wave, Disney deities promulgating abundant cartoon universes, primogenitors of strange aeons who are mere bacteria in a microcosmic slime culture beneath the dewlaps of primogenitors, which wheels-within-wheels break when the Tao becomes not-Tao into strange aeons curving to vaster cycles that become once more the Tao, from which there crawl and slobber the primogenitors of strange aeons,

At this point the message was interrupted. There is only crackle from the receiver.

The skeleton of the oneironaut, suited, drifts through space, the dreams still playing in flickering colours, an aurora borealis of beyond, across the screen of the visor.

Justin Isis - Kingsley Amis is Tired of Life

Life under late capitalism offers few pleasures.




I spend my days watching Korean dramas and imagine myself sodomising the leads.




'Lovers in Paris' left me in tears.




I wish Satan existed so I could sell my soul for fifteen minutes of licking Kim Jung-Eun.




I try to apply myself to mathematics, to the investigation of Calabi-Yau spaces.




But the Fields Medal won't get me popular in Korea either.

Justin Isis - I Attain To the Level of Fucking Your Basic Hairdresser

A: Okay man, right now I'm talking to you, right, but I mean I'm not really saying anything, you know, I'm just trying to make it seem like we're really having a conversation

A: I mean if you just see one guy sitting there alone it's like...but if there's two guys, right, that are talking

A: ...then it's cool because they obviously have some kind of, I guess, point of interest. Right now we're just getting that down. Say something back.

B: Something.

A: Right.

A: It's like, I read this review of 2001, cant remember who wrote it, but the guy was saying how...okay, you know how there's really no big dialogue in the movie?

B: Yeah.

A: Well like, he was saying that most of the time when people are talking in that movie, it's just to show people talking. Like it doesn't move the plot or anything, it's just kind of the idea.

B: Kind of interesting. So the conversations aren't for exposition; they just create a kind of iconic idea of communication.

C: Hey.

C: Are you guys having one of those metaconversations?

A: What?

C: One of those self-referential conversations.

A: Yeah.

A: You know about them?

B: Wait, no.

B: We were talking about 2001. The conversation started off as self-referential like you said, but then it changed.

A: I thought we were just trying to keep it going.

C: So you're saying the conversation evolved.

B: It seemed to be, yes.

B: But then you jumped in and altered the conversation's dynamic. It went from an extrapolation of the original, to use your term, meta-conversation, to a conversation about the nature of the original conversation.

C: Is that a distinction?

B: Well, of course. Before your intervention, the conversation had arguably turned into a legitimate conversation, that is, a verbal exchange of ideas facilitating genuine communication; but then you subverted that possibility by reverting to talking about the nature of the conversation.

A: What's your name?

C: Alyssa

C: Okay, I see your point, but the current conversation has that expression of ideas too. I think it's still developing.

B: We're talking about the conversation, though.

B: It's become self-referential again. Before when we were talking about 2001, that was a legitimate conversation. Right now, we're having a metaconversation.

A: So, have you seen 2001?

C: Uh

C: Your argument's flawed. We're talking now about the conversation you guys were having before I joined in. We're not talking about the current conversation, therefore the current conversation is not a metaconversation.

B: That's because when you joined in you changed its course.

C: So

C: You admit the conversation has evolved after all; it's not the dead end you thought I made it.

B: Um...no.

B: The first conversation didn't end; it was just continued.

C: If that's true, then my presence in the conversation didn't affect its course as a conversation developing from a metaconversation to a regular conversation. If it was a separate conversation, then this conversation isn't a metaconversation because it refers to a previous conversation, not itself. Logically, you've contradicted yourself.

B: So you think, but by discussing whether or not the current conversation is a metaconversation, it's been turned into one by referring to itself.

A: So yeah,

A: I liked the part in 2001 where that computer flipped the fuck out and took everyone out.

A: Alyssa, what are you doing this weekend?

Meditation I: A Cloud in a Teapot, by Quentin S. Crisp

Meditation I: A Cloud in a Teapot

An aerial view of my teapot - simple china circles bellied over the straight lines of bare floorboards. The blue flowers on the delicate pale-blue background seem blurred by a wash of moving water, like ornamental goldfish. Everything here is hard and intact, crisply focused, as if it could not be any other way, and all the world is reduced to this self-contained minimalism.

The glaze of the teapot gleams. This is the discipline of beauty. The china of the empty pot is cold to the touch, but filled with tea it conducts heat quickly, and when its hot round belly is cupped in the palm of my hand, I could almost believe this was still malleable clay. From the spout there is a suggestion of steam. There is such potential here in this thing so inert and fixed.

This is the main accessory of my ritual when I write. I pinch the knob of the lid between thumb and forefinger, turning it upside down as I remove it to view the contents. There is the swamp water, and drowned beneath, a swirling canopy of green, all of it turning to rising steam. These leaves have been shipped or flown or teleported from one intersection of latitude and longitude to another. They have come to me like a dream comes in the precipitation of sleep, from the evaporation of the sea of unbeing. Pouring hot water onto these leaves, I have brewed up a new cloud containing mountains, forested slopes and streams. When I pour from this pot it will be the curling clouds of the Immortals as seen in ancient scroll paintings that pour from the spout, since within this portalled matrix of bellying circles, every latitude and longitude intersects in infinite steaming potential.

Looking at the spout now, I see the dark brown stains just inside its lip. This is the precious and elegant filth of all culture. This is the stained and wrinkled cheek of the matriarch of a dying tribe. Most of her teeth are gone now, though she still chews the betelnut until her tongue is red. These stains are the superstition and the love which together form the magic keeping the tribe vital and alive. Something is happening now, and the numbers of the tribe are dwindling. She looks out from the treehouse at the mist rising up from the valley, and to the cataract beyond. Where will the spirits of the ancestors go now with no one to honour them in life? A fragile rainbow rises from the falls. The souls are disappearing, one by one, beyond the falls, going into seclusion. Soon only the waterfall will remain. Mist rises, the valley seems to break open.

The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name, and with strange aeons even death may die. O Gaia! O Tao! O Great Cthulhu! The smaller cycle is disrupted, shed like a skin, a shape green and monstrous erupts through the shaking canopy of trees from its sleep - the new shapeless shape of eternity, the ever-mutating Way, the self-transcending forever nameless Name, the root and the mud, the darkness within darkness, the subterrene flow, the gateway and the spawn. A sticky yinyang all tentacled with Tao-slime, beyond Good and Evil.

That probiscidean face!

Now the inside of the spout is revealed in the human experience of time. Time is twisted and turns inside-out. It buckles and chasms, and from out of the chasm comes the cubist rainbow of Dreamtime.

Dreamtime!

The body of the Great Old One, the Tao, is a viscous cloud of green, and the claws are a deluge. Pandemonium foams down the filthy brown spout. I am sitting at a desk in a darkened study, and sheets of paper fill with inky code telegraphed straight from the nightmare of ultimate and infinite blackness in a warning that can save no one. This poetry that purports to uncover the truth of a great doom, can neither confront nor reveal, though the blackness of the ink is the very same blackness as the endless night that swallows all. The message is lost in the vast night of the truth, and the truth is lost in the enfolding meaning of the tiny writing of the message, and there is only an awesome redundancy in this script found in the pitchy void, a redundancy like the scent of a candle snuffed out by a breath of nighted eternity.

The claws of the deluge come. Dreamtime. Pandemonium. The pages are scattered. The last of the tribe. The ancestral spirits gone behind the waterfall.

I pour some more tea in my ritual and uselessly, compulsively, as if enslaved by a telegraph signal from some dreaming darkness too vast to pour through me, I write.

And with strange aeons, even Dao may die. And in Dreamtime, even death may dao.