This is all verbose juvenile sludge, but its my juvenile sludge, so it goes on the website regardless. granted, a lot of this work is borrowed voice. Im a lot more focused on constructions than like literary phrases i guess. I get a lot of joy from stringing words together
Short story 2.
Santa Verónica lay in stupor, ochre dust and pale light languid through. Heat not merely temperature but thick presence, woolly, shrouding the soul. Time kicked from its trajectory, revolving- a condor circling over carrion.
The carpenter tired, the saw's rhythm slowing to ragged breath over the day's heat. Since dawn he laboured, hands blistered from sweat inside his gloves, macerated. The cut wood would become a door, a door for a house that would stand empty, for lack of those to fill the houses that already stood.
The day was done, he walked to the town square where gypsies had arrived, a dying lineage who still peddled promises of a mysterious world. But Santa Verónica had no more room to be enchanted by the curious, nor by the silk kites that refused to fly in the stagnant air, nor by the binocular whose extended sight only revealed misery. The gypsies begged and pleaded in the derelict square where cobblestones were missing like the memory of rain, where the fountain had been dry for so long that children thought it had always been merely decorative, a stone monument to the idea of water, choking on dry leaves.
He went home, and the memory of his love clouded his vision, her hand missing on his cheek but wondering also about a particular distance she had cultivated in those final months, a remoteness that seemed to require great effort to overcome even for a moment. Her affection was merely a charade she could only maintain when energized, a performance that exhausted her? They had married young, as people did in those days, and perhaps he had been most of hers, until he wasn't.
At the market the food was scarce and what remained had little air of rot about it, vegetables collapsing into themselves as if trying to disappear entirely. The shopkeeper, a severe man whose severity seemed the only thing keeping him upright, explained that there was drought in the arable areas beyond the mountains, that the earth itself had decided to stop giving. The carpenter purchased what he could with coins that felt lighter each time he spent them, and had another negative interaction with his landlord who lived in the adjacent room and who seemed to believe that proximity granted him certain rights to complaint and accusation.
That night he dreamed about his wife weeping alone in a corner of their room, hands covering her face as if her grief were something obscene that needed hiding. When he lifted her chin she stared at him without a thread of recognition, as though he were a stranger who had wandered into the wrong dream, into the wrong life entirely.
Work again. The saw moved through pine and the hours moved through him and by afternoon storm clouds rolled in for the first time in an age, black and heavy with the promise they had forgotten how to keep. Water ran through the town in torrents as he ran home, and he stood at the window watching the streets transform into rivers, watching the dust become mud become something almost fertile. Time passed in the gray constancy of rain. Late that night his landlord returned, and the carpenter heard the door swing open and shut with a weight that seemed wrong, and slept to the sound of water drumming its fingers on the roof.
The next day was the Feast of San Cristóbal and he had no work. In the town the gypsies had vanished as gypsies always did, only leaving the memory of themselves and wheel ruts already filling with rainwater. Near the church he overheard men speaking of a jaguar that had been seen at the edges of the mountains, moving through the rain with purpose, and he thought nothing of it because men in Santa Verónica were always seeing things that weren't there, or perhaps seeing things that were there but shouldn't be.
At the market the shopkeeper's wife stood behind the counter, and when he asked where her husband was she said he was recovering from illness, though the carpenter had seen him as himself the day before, the strength of his severity supported by a starting selection of the towns produce, exercising the privileges of ownership. The carpenter bought dried beans and stale bread and went home.
His landlord was there with his face wrapped in bandages, gauze wound round and round like a cocoon from which something terrible might emerge. The landlord launched into a self-congratulatory soliloquy about being chosen, about receiving truth, about how the jaguar had come to him in the rain and confirmed what he had always known, that he was just in his character and righteous in his beliefs, that his grievances were holy and his anger sanctified by forces beyond human judgment.
On the second day of the holiday he returned to town and saw that more people had been wrapped in gauze, the poor unbandaged and raw, pieces of their faces simply gone as if carefully excised by a surgeon or a priest performing some necessary removal. And yet there was an almost religious calm over everything, the wounded moving through the streets with expressions of beatific certainty, as though the absence of their flesh had revealed something essential.
He spoke with the cobbler's son, a boy who had been rejected from the vocational school for illiteracy and who now had a gash in his cheek deep enough to expose the white of his molars. The boy said that the jaguar had revealed to him the word of God, and that tomorrow he would begin preaching in the square, and his voice was thick with conviction and blood. The shopkeeper, returned to his post with his jaw bandaged, explained that the jaguar had given him knowledge of when the rains would come to the south, that his stock would be bountiful, that he had traded his face for futures.
The carpenter began to wonder about the divinity of the jaguar, and the ultimate question that had been weighing on him took new form. Perhaps this creature, whatever it was, could tell him whether his wife had truly loved him as he had loved her, could answer the question that had no answer in the ordinary world.
He worked for three more days, and on the evening of the third day found his landlord collapsed on the floor of the adjacent room, door hanging open. When he peeled back the bandages he discovered that almost nothing remained, that the landlord had been transformed into something mummified, a muscular form from which the organic shell had been carefully removed.
And yet the question persisted.
He went to the edge of town where the mountains began, following the path others must have taken. There he found her, not an animal but an amalgamated statue constructed of sewn human skin, a patchwork deity puppeted from somewhere inside, moving with the terrible grace of something that had learned to be alive. The jaguar smiled loudly.
"What would you like to know?", in a voice like rain.
The carpenter asked his question, the one he had carried since before his wife died, perhaps since before she had married him: "Did she love me as I did her? Did my wife truly love me, or was it only façade?"
The jaguar considered this with what remained of other people's eyes, and then it spoke, offering nothing more than a platitude, the kind of wisdom found in barbershop almanacs: "Love is what we make of it, the effort we put forth. She stayed with you, didn't she? That is love enough."
Men emerged from behind him with a straight razor, their movements ritualistic and inevitable, and they removed part of his face with the precision of those who had done this many times before. And yet the carpenter felt content with the simplicity of the answer, despite understanding clearly that it was ridiculous, that it was nothing dressed as revelation, because it had pacified the question that had been eating him alive, had given him a story he could tell himself about his wife and his life and the meaning of both. The simplicity of the answer, however banal, had pacified the storm in his mind.
He went home through streets where others walked with their faces wrapped, went home to the room where his wife was not and never would be again, and discovered that he could live with not knowing, now that he had been told he knew, having felt the peace of the mutilated.
[wrote as an llm allegory but thats kind of a cringe topic]
Here and now! (best read aloud). subject matter is kinda cliche. Dont usually write lyrical stuff but it was fun to think of the compound rhymes.
The news-noose tightens round' the messenger's neck, mess-anger spilling from the static attic where panic attacks the manic.
I’m no cosmic courier, just a thought-knotted augur, caught in rough troughs of doubt; I sift drifted motives, riffs of mis-gifted notes that float, then throat-choke out: gloat.
You were cable-able once, table-stable in the prefrontal cradle; now cadence caves, braided waves invade and fade the laid-out label, Cain an' Abel- pain and fable.
The under-mind’s mine hums, drums of rumbling numbers, mum-murmurs tunneling under slumber, plundered wonders thunder.
Memory-wires fire embroidery inside. I ride slide-sides of pride that hide behind collide-tides, indexing vexing hexes in cortex annexes.
Each impulse pulls dull gulls of comfort over rough buffer; thought traffic hacks its own static, manic-panic loops but stoops into intimate topics.
Still traceable-embraceable-erasable, the power towers within, twin spins of grin-thin sin begin to pin the din, then dim.
Communication becomes communion: quiet riots pilot diets of private climates; I rewrite night’s bite-fights until insight lights the tight sight.
When signals dwindle they kindle subtler drums; the hum becomes crumbs I thumb through, new clues glued to bruised views.
[inspired by mf doom, obviously]
Sundial
Top down light. Theres a lot of kinds. Top down, Lights! - boudoir photo shoot. Top down, light - top chop shop slogan. Top down, lite - discount top chop shop slogan. But im most interested in the top down light that occurs at high noon in places like ecuador, or ecuatorial guniea, or any other place on the earths belt that isnt named for it specifically. ( i have since realized that due to earths tilt this does not occur at the equator but instead at about 23.4 degrees north or south, hence the term lahaina noon, named for lahaina hawaii). Everything looks like a poorly rendered video game, or like when you were a kid and put a toy in the bathtub underwater and it seemed to be cartoonishly flat. I like the idea of complex events removing information. Usually flatness is unintentional, or a symtom of a lack of budget or whatever, at least artistically. Maybe not for concrete pourers or roof installers or computer chip builders. I stand corrected, flatness is rather rare, its noise that isnt. It all comes back to noise. Anyway, overhead light, the world looks rendered poorly or whatever and then you see the people. Noses casting shadows down the face, cheeks hollow. everyone looks gaunt at high noon, especially with the sweat of the heat. Of course, bodybuilders prefer overhead light, makes their striations pop and their viens defined, but everyone else hates it. The recently bedded especially . Im not actually much of a lamp person. I mean, I have a few lamps in my room and sometimes Ill turn them on to read if I have allusions about being quaint, rain pitter pattering overhead, symbols illuminated by the warm dull glow of incandescent filament filtered by a plaid lamp shade... etc etc. normally though the lights stay off completely, my room instead filled with the light coming from my window whose blinds I cant quite close. too high up, and too far away from my loft's edge to reach. makes me wake up at sunrise every day, id say with the birds but I have to drive aways to see them. surrounded by concrete without the people, not even crumbs for pigeons. Just office building after office building. maybe thats why I think about light, being awake when most people are sleeping, watching the sun creep across glass facades that reflect nothing back but more glass, more concrete, more of the same geometric repetition that makes you forget what organic shapes look like. The shadows move but theyre predictable, mathematical, like someone plotted them on graph paper and said "here, this is where darkness goes at 7:23 PM" Its not mysterious shadows, the kind that dance and shift and hide things. Its administrative shadow, bureaucratic darkness that knows its place and stays there until the sun moves exactly twelve degrees and then shifts accordingly. slow rotation of the sun across identical surfaces, marking time like a very expensive, very boring clock.
Short Story 1
He sits imprisoned in a foreign land, unknown vegetation under his feet, prickly, with a patronizing hostility, punishing those unaware of what is and what isn't. Men converse in strange tongues, lashing at each other with fricatives and guttural sounds from the deep recesses of their throats, ironically, likely uttering mundane actions, pleasantries, or anything uncharacteristic of the harsh wall of noise emanating from their mouths. The climate is cold, yet with a powerful sun, such that the world is momentarily plunged into an ashen winter depending on the clouds overhead, a nebulous reel of film modifying god's sunnier projections. The boy walks quietly along the white walls that enclose him with a languid expression on his face. He watches the other members of his entrapped clade toiling for as much as he can bear, then tries to dream as much as possible in an attempt to escape from the desolate reality that restrains him.
He has no memory of a prior experience, or from whence he could have come, possessing only the most rudimentary understanding of the local vernacular, enough to express desire for elementary substances: water, food. The other members, despite their suffering, care for him with a pitiful curiosity, and the wardens turn a blind eye to the ghost which encircles the world.
Once, in the boy's scanning of the walls which enclose them, he discovers a particular dark patch on the expanse of usually uniform concrete. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small painted strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. They speak of hope and splendor, of sorrow and tragedy, of love and hate, words that feel familiar yet unattributable, like the blurry recollection of a face one might have met, a reflection in water. Fragments of great tomes and scripture, some extensive record of a humanity reduced and flattened to some region of scrawled text, things past. Picking up a charred stick from the ground, he inscribes a reply, and begins the trudge to the glorious goal of slumber.
Over the course of years, they engage in their quiet conversation, leaving messages for the other to read. His correspondent writes of what had been, and he writes of what continues to be. As the boy becomes imbued with the context of history, of himself, he begins to age, flattened time expressing itself within the body, the awakening of some ancient, dormant pathogen. The boy, now the man, becomes more extensive with the length of his replies, the wall covered in miles of symbols, as if some mythological spider had danced around the perimeter with brushes attached to its legs, eventually becoming so densely overlapping that the walls seem to be entirely covered in random noise, only intelligible by those who constructed it.
The man becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of his correspondent with the zeal of an individual who finally tastes what they have missed, severed serene solitude. Denying himself his once prized sleep more and more, hoping to catch them in the act. Only when he finally succumbs to exhaustion does he discover another portion of the wall layered in barely intelligible script, and once he finally musters the ability to remain vigilant throughout the entire course of the night, the replies cease entirely.
The man’s insomnia becomes permanent, try as he might to atone for prior obsessions. As the mind becomes more and more exhausted, he begins to forget the meaning of things, the name of the grass beneath his feet, the food he eats, and finally, most destructively, how to interpret the expansive mass of black carbon before him. Reduced to an infantile state, he finally sleeps once more.
The boy wakes from his slumber confused, no memory of prior experience, or from whence he had come. He settles into a kind of routine, the other members caring for him with a pitiful curiosity despite their suffering, and he begins to explore the perimeter of the gray walls before him. Once, as he walks, the boy spots a lighter patch in the usually uniform wall. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small carved strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. He picks up a rock and begins to scratch in a reply…
The walls are covered and uncovered by the shadows of expression, clouds overhead passing through the light of the world, marked and erased by an eternally restless figure.
idk I kinda like abstract photography
For everyone outside the contemporary art world, in other words, those not subscribed to the dogmatic cult that believes in the reverence of found objects transubstantiated into the divine, those not contained in the basis spanned by deleuze and danto, (which, to the surprise of MFA’s everywhere, is most people), contemporary art is often unintelligible. We walk into the museum and we see great canvases covered in stuff and installations of more stuff, and we have emotions ranging from indifference to bemusement to the occasional huh thats kinda cool, laugh at the competitive bibliographies and lexicons of the labels, and go home, or just beeline to the permanent collection to look at the impressionists. People are generally aware of the game even if they dont know the specifics, the corrupt appraisals, the curator as canonizer, the gallery the alchemists round bottom flask, yada yada. For the longest time I was perplexed as to why art critics and aesthetic philosophers did not maintain their own artistic practice until I realized that they’re the ones with the craft- its a writers game, and if you don't know their language, forget it. The art itself is fish fossils, the artist the pure intentioned village idiot who digs up these permineralized chunks, it is only when taxonomically categorized by the scientist do the bones come alive, imbued with context, history. Those who actually draw or paint or sculpt or engage in some sort of artistic craft (which I guess am semantically separating from an artistic practice) feel, I imagine, quite similarly, although they might perhaps have a little more anger at the current state of affairs depending on how moralistic they are and if they depend on their craft for a living. I'm mostly ambivalent about it all. I like some contemporary art, and most of all I truly appreciate bullshitting for the love of the game.
All that said, there exists another, parallel community- contemporary Photographers, who seem to be affected by the inverse affliction, an amnesiac’s memory of their history and a pointless technical fixation. (Of course contemporary fine art photography exists, but it often feels subordinate to the 'major' mediums, segregated in specific wings, treated as the commercial cousin of fashion, or valued purely as an archive of things museum people find interesting (usually other artists). Contemporary photographers, as a population, seem to be rather obsessed with things that are, from the perspective of one who has spent ages attempting to develop skill in figurative painting, not that hard. I don't state this pejoratively, it is merely a state which results from the camera as a technology. “That democratic machine”, in the words of Susan Sontag. All of the technical elements of image making are iteratively made easier by ones own personal team of engineers, often to the logical extreme of dishonestly, the adjustment of the content of the image to some more perfect standard. Of course all of these adjustments are only additions to the ultimate fact that the photograph is produced all at once in a single exposure, a half second at most, in all but the most extreme of cases. Practically the entire population has access to perfect cameras, it feels obvious that the point of photography now should be to subvert and obfuscate. Additionally, the medium is unique in that there is always a boxer's chance. It is simply impossible for a figurative painter to 'accidentally' create a masterwork; one either has the knowledge or the practiced intuition. But in photography, the technical barrier is so low that the execution itself becomes a non-factor. Because the 'how' is negligible, the weight shifts entirely to the 'what' and the 'why’, especially over a series of images that demonstrates consistent intention. Go be more conceptual. Stop with the sunsets, or whatever.
Essay? written when I was 16, really angry and immature. You can tell i was taking euro at the time, id edit it but it is what it is.
Nothing exists in a vacuum, and certainly not me. My character is my own creation- the thoughts, words, and actions said and done to me interpreted in my own patent manner, and yet the subunits of those perceptions are borrowed, their complexities divisible into common, shared elements, inherited genetically, socially, culturally. My grandfathers were awful men, by all stretches of the imagination. Arrogant drunkards, all 3 of them criminals ( 2 in the legitimate sense of the word), the third a soldier, and entirely absent in the raising of their children. The worst was my mother’s father, of the hobbesian persuasion : nasty, brutish, and short. As such, she developed a hatred for the virile latino, Ulibarrí’s (1) horse. Quick to anger and quicker to strike, patriarchal, womanizing, the universal constants of the struggling man. And yet, she married its mirror, masqueraded as a different flavor. Absent are the beatings, the confinement, the overt disrespect, but in their place: verbal lashings, a refusal to help pawned off as ‘inability’, and a hidden mistress. The origins of my existence are not love. The label of love was given to the fetishization of a foreign woman and escapism, packaged by gauze, traumatic adhesive, and delivered with an unconscientious acceleration. Of course, can anyone blame my father? Can anyone blame me? When does the child, dominated by its progenitor, make the transition to an autonomous body? Does it ever? Parental determinism extrapolated out from an original sin, the devil's serpent, Quetzalcoatl’s blood (2). Yet we know it has agency, almost from the very beginning, it utters sentences never heard before, has natural conceptions of fear, or love, unlearned intuition. Or are those yet another form of inherited trait, evolutionary instinct.
I, naturally, attempt to distance myself from those who came before me. The pendulum’s swing, the Hegelian reaction, the third law pair. I lack the previously necessary adaptations of fiery passion, obstinate stubbornness, abrasives generated for the purpose of increasing friction, barely holding on. My disposition: agreeable, at times to the point of sheepishness. My appearance: softer. My romantic and sexual preferences on the periphery of the northern American zeitgeist, and certainly that of conservative-catholic-hispanics. Through the media I consume, I have attempted to find alternative role models for a more positive sort of masculinity, reading, watching and listening to all manner of different perspectives on what it means to be a man. In mere moments I encounter more varieties of opinion through the modern shifting kaleidoscope of information than my ancestors might have experienced in lifetimes. Hence the problem. Infinity equivalently comprehensible to 0 within the human psyche, indeterminate forms, the internet's firehose overexposing mental connections to null, to paralysis. What remains then, is the constant, generational influences. My relationships are consistently short flivers of sensationalism, antiquated biases are replaced with modern misconception. Youthful revolution exactly that, cyclical motion.
As I begin to grow into my body, to graduate from an androgynous, amorphous, state into a more clearly defined figure, the distrust remains, but directed at the self, insecurity, generationally sharpened to a point. Muscular definition derived from a late interest in athletics alien to skin and bone, the use of my anatomy upon another giving the sensation of self-violation. Introspection, like invasion.
These are the rivets of my armor, personal reasons, explanations and validations that construct my overdominant adaptations, useful only within the environment for which they were created. Your tone of silent anger, your tact, your political machinations of discontent were entirely alien forces. You are older than me, yes, but even if we were equal in age you would be still , wisdom a function of lived experience. Similar upbringings, but you have not hidden behind failure.
The genesis of our argument was inconsequential, but I augmented its impact to an extreme degree, expecting reciprocal retaliation, as if I was playing an adversarial game. You looked upon me, a bitch unwilling to engage in the “playful” melodrama of her pups, an older brother doing schoolwork. For all my attempted auto-interrogation, I have only attempted to externalize the blame, to translate it upon another medium, avoiding personal responsibility at all costs. Even this admission is yet another way to accomplish the above, selfish abuse to absolve a conscience. Such a ritual occurs periodically, the indulgent desire for reconciliation, a mind so egotistical that it believes acknowledgement of its own wrongdoing as ultimately effective, and the acknowledgement of the acknowledgement even more so.
(1) referencing El Caballo Mago, a short story by sabine ullibari in which the horse represents masculinity
(2) another creation story
What my dreams look like
Homogeneous uniformity
Like groundhog days or dead horses
Papal hymns, repeated verses
Isn't it funny?
Escapes wasted
“what has”
Not what could’ve or should've or would’ve or wouldn't have…
Why bother really, with all future locations?
Suppositions and Propositions and Dispositions
Bark-in’ general*
Obsession with advancement
Brittle little coverings
Can I not be left-
Bereft of prescience, of foresight
To my myopic deposition?
*bark in general (brittle little coverings), Barking general, as in officer shouting orders,( obsession with advancement(
A helpful technique for me to clarify the meaning of a word to myself is to consider its opposites. Lines- inverted
Contour and Value, antonyms disjointed by a linear absolutism, lest marks fade into others.
Discrete demarcations, marked or not. A zebra's photo negative the same figure shifted, absence defining presence, presence absence.
Queues dissolving into scattered points. emptiness the inverse of many? or the singular against the crowd? Depends on your attitude, the additive or multiplicative inverse
The playwright chooses the latter, naturally, always an attempt to scale their voice: not silence, a beat
Connections fray. Dropped calls, snapped clotheslines releasing their burden, garments tumble, mud-stained, free.
Clothing-lines canceled, clearance cubbies.
.Disorder, at the end of the line
peripheral patterns
Everything has an unstable foundation, a noisy floor. My ringing ears, the swirling patterns against my shuttered eyes (phosphenes, they call them), the gain of a microphone and the haze on a lens. Our subconscious automatically subtracts most of it from our perception, and we’re equally harsh when we tune our instruments. Low cuts, high cuts, slicing the pie into the narrow sectors of essential information, expected results. Consequently, always suppressing more than just the noise. How much do I ignore that I’d rather actually observe? a funny joke at the end of the table, a cry for help drowned by the whines and rumble of construction. What patterns are so consistent that I mistakenly brush them off? “Oh, don’t worry, they’ve always been like that.”
Idk, I feel like I miss a lot