starving
arts
of modern literature
Selection from Urdoxa: In Eye We Trust
One only truly learns about capitalism while under its big, fat, iron boot. But now youre tired. You wasted all your fine polemics trying to pick up pretty girls at poetry readings, selling all that ivory wit for all the schlock and glitz that you now gorge upon in heaping tablefuls. No, Lenin did not win! The Wehrmacht is still not in compliance with Y2k procedures! The balance of power is lost, shriveled, a doormat someone didnt get around to throwing away. The tired hum of your life is issuing from your own mouth, so remember that when you find yourselfmid life, post-mid-life and allat a church one Sunday morning, easing your guilt into a pew, and taking those one last furtive toothy stabs at Christs body. More chips! And more Wine! Women and Song are now prohibited unless you are the clergy in some retrograde motion toward the pre-Protestant scandal at the Vatican. A hymn is less a song than it is a directed guilty lament set to the crushing organ of oppression, and the prosaic melody of an improvisational virtuoso gone so incredibly wrong. Fallen into the mire, have you? Into the stink and filth of the office tableau, under the elongated fluorescent bulb sun? This is the very last supper, and the boss who is telling you to take a nibble at his heels is not joking! You read the papers, looking for an exit, a sign of hope, or just some smut to ease the ongoing pain but its all old the stagnancy of old news, a bland taste! Were all doing the Kierkegaardian waltz down despair lane becausecontrary to culturepolitikdespair is good hard candy for the soul or for the bits of soul you stitched together from commercially augmented hand-me-downs. And then before you know it, Martin Bormanns at the door with a pair of nasty looking pliers and a small bib. Me eat you! Me eat you! So there you are selling dog shit door-to door to people who are just like you, wanting to see you croak or not see you at all either way! You wouldnt flinch at saying the same thing if that someone wasnt you! Annoyed? You better start learning! Being annoyed may be the first step to being conscious, to outlast those saccharin values that are all the rage of the nearly-alive. The man who signs your paycheck also gives you a small installment toward your own death fancy that! Freedom is shopping! March!
I am being unnecessarily cruel to you, perhaps pecking at you with a serrated beak? Where were your valuable complaints the Night the Lights Went Out?or did you just want to stay politely quiet while the overseers in the Whitehouse played craps with your life? All for what? To battle The Sheik? So what is your dissent worth now? You voted the wrong way again, you putz! When the new fanfare began, whom did I see in new populist spats, doing the whole Lone Ranger bit at the nearest victory pub drinking Orwellian style Victory beers with Victory cigarettes? You were! I saw you! Corner of my eye as I was fleeting past still giving a damn. No more! Hounded enough! Youre dead, old news to us now! With a condo in Florida just waiting for you, your warm crypt, your little makeshift Egypt! Papyri details of shuffleboard and cribbage on the walls, your cat brain mush, and that purloined stick you must have taken from the iron clasp of Hitlers recently deceased body! Am I mistaken in remembering seeing you marching in file with a shovel in your hand, proclaiming in chorus that you were going to build a new Amerika while it was under the deep code yellow, the many too many security threats it had engineered on its own behalf? Keep digging, urban youthyoull hit bottom yet, and thenand then youll have a very large hole indeed. And what was that? Who is heaping dirt on you now?
As I was whiling away the hours, a flask of bourbon on my right, a cigarette pursed between dry lips, my eyes hanging over whatever wonders or just plain orbis oculum hanging down like a mandala, there I was. And there I was. Cock crow over Death's Head Inn, it was going to be another old and older morning. Don't look back, voices competing for gutted real estate belched into the infinite filth of the age, cried. No, hell, not today...
...And how does that make you feel? A bit sermonic perhaps. The trucks creased the narrow canal of the street, their reverberations felt by everyone and no one. Just for a moment [pause, draught of cigarette and bourbon, puff, swallow, blow out through nostrils]. I just didn't figure it was going this way or that really... Ornaments of false festivities past now littered in the room like so many foreboding relics or idols, busted, forgotten, yet still with that terrible gravity that comes of things remembered...
...Smoothing my features against the grainy skylight, now steeped in stupors so bewitched and arcane. My quotidian labours transmuted now into a half litre of cheap wine and a heaping tableful of books scattered akimbo, running over one another in a protracted slow crawl... these books emulating in their fashion a litter of rats, each struggling for food or light or air. Rats like a seething singular mass of parts... Militant nationalist flyers stuck between the thin leaves of Yevtushenko. Bookmark or his poetry? Bratsk station, the longest bookmark brochure I ever knew. Beating perhaps to the dented drum of retrograde censorship, or in memoriam to the unacknowledged 1917 faces never captured in the frame of a publicist's lens.
A silly demographic, and a bloodless moment groping for some academic pleasures. Most obviously! Indeed! Im the finest bastard I know among the good n plenty that makes up this failed collection of social archetypes. But I wasnt like you middle-management types transferring your failed 70s genes in your mad debauch of the 80s to produce that poor excuse of a generation that started circa 1985. What a reich! A veritable Reichsdoof, slow-witted, too young to understand the grunge as a reaction to saccharin 80s vapidity, spoon fed on IT and raves without the benefit of understanding the failed value systems that underpin these developments. All of them born with cell phones in their pockets, portable buzzing bees! Those raves nothing more than a drugged out Frisco retreat, operating like any internet chat group: connected briefly to people whom mean nothing, who serve no purpose but those fleeting desires of the moment. And where were your sparkling parenting skills in this regard? Too worried that the children would turn around and sue you for spanking? Too many long hours at the office water cooler? My heart just bleeds all over my pants for you! Oh, you middle management, middle class, middle-nowheres, living comfortable middle lives! With the midland music as your tired anthem. Not even the least bit engaging! Your Reichsdoof handed down to its technologically imbued repetition smaller versions of you! Prattling plastic while downing your latte, streaming down arterially clogged freeways in your modest SUV And you little 1985 disasters, conceived in the summer of cocaine and store bought love, you will become this as well. New gadgets to idle away your hours until that condo in Florida goes up for sale, am I right? You are all barbarians! You killed art! Your progress is merely a blemish, a Kantian style seizure! Ausklarung uber alles! Morality for sale! Ethics on layaway! In mint green with optional adapter! Conditions may vary! Did you come out here to the vile, vile west, where wildness and freedom became vile at the corporate Midas touch? Thinking that your fortune was to be made, but made for you, spent in your name You overtaxed bastard! Im overtaxed, too, but you wont find me throwing my election ticket away to those devils on the right. And so there you are, marching to the beat of their imperial drum in that long and prosaic chain, that parade of sorry-sick values. But I caught you catching a peek at the other side, at the pot smoking fascists on the sidelines, at all the taboo machines you wanted for your very own. But those unspeakable things cannot explicitly be yours, not in any politically right wing sensenot unless, like your right wing advocates, those electioneering magnates, you take it in quietly on the sly! A whore in every bedroom! Thats the campaign promise that isnt made public, but every tax-hating businessman knows its in the platform!
But have I not railed enough on those like you, preciously you? Most likely! You had pawned your ears for paltry things, things that give you a false sense of comfort and security in the night, those abundant and disposable luxuries inherited from the pregnant age of the fifties. What use is it to go tramping up and down your shared driveway, hurling epithet after epithet of that which you cant hear anyway? I havent the filters you have. No! The unabashed and painful violin screech of How Things Are bats me around like a pin. You have it easy! Torment and despair are things you can hold at arms distance, put in a bottle, or just gloss over with heaping globs of pink sugar! All this for your glorious pageant of pomp and self-deceit. But there is no such thing as self-deceit a paradox! Ah, but the conditioning is just too strong. And just when you think resistance is possiblebam!back into the merchandise mazurka! The mazurka berserka of buy now pay later fiascoes life on layaway, one financial abortion at a time.
So this is the last waltz that I perform, the triple tier of temporal sequences gone awry. Older, not wiser, more displaced. My lungs are pumping in and out like an accordion bladder whenever someone I dont know approaches me with a wide smile and a whole prepared spiel of pleasantries. I run the other way! Might as well be a knife for my throat! I never know who comes under what disguises, maybe issued from some dark copse, all of it pertaining to my living weave with the manuscript, V1.Or serious hard line questions about V2! On a need to know basis, please! Did you or did you not instruct a professional counterfeiter to replace V1 with a clever forgery? A lesson in dichotomies, and me struggling and sweating under the invasive strain of their relentless questions! Peace, tranquility? Ik hab het nergens gevonden! Je mexcuse, mais je ne sais pas ! Ich Weisse nicht ! Nicht!! Take your goddamn urban republic elsewhere to nest, and all your spooky detective stories too! Good-bye forever! Catch you in my rear view mirror and youll never see someone go so fast until youre not even a dotted reflection! That fast! Away! Los! Los! My maternal grandfather taught me well, a nazi officer living in America, ducking and covering from the Nuremberg flambé! Not that he wouldnt have deserved it, but that was then! No proud legacy to call my own now, is there? Wrong place and wrong time is just another way of encapsulating my life! Sicher!
Administrative secretaries looking like bloated toads riffle through a series of those uniformly beige file folders stuffed with information both inconsequential and condemning. My file, somewhere in that alphabetized paper ribcage All secretaries and no bosses, all with a deep case of sangfroid and with the cosmetic appearance of rodeo clowns on their day off. Bland swishing skirts in dull tones. Generic maroon flats or optionally sensible low rise pumps to match the colour of their blandness. Remember this: all your deep and incendiary critiques, penned in the fits of panic and vitriol and fear, penned in the dead of night when you feel invincible, must eventually go through this gantlet of bland photocarbon factotums. And they are invested with the power of squashing all passion and feeling, to render you absolutely ridiculous, out of your environment, sans community. You must please them, you are the knuckle-walking and mouth-breathing unwashed and they are the triumph of the modern age! Oh bureaucracy, Oh administrative layers so numerous and plentiful like the layers of geologic time! Your file is the only bargaining chip you have, and they hold it with indifferent yet protective hands. They shield you from anything that is worth knowing, and then you just have to stand there at the kiosk like a blithering idiot, sputtering one ill-formed excuse after another until they call out next! over your sweaty brow. It makes no difference if you come with tithe, offering, with sacrificial lambs: the administrative organ is the decidedly unimpressed no matter what you bring. It is less of an organ than it is a stone, and so cry or yell at it go on!
My stony princess, stonily indifferent, was wearing a smart cream suit that screamed I occupy space forever! It was a suit for women, whatever that meant. It would only be appropriate here, at the nerve center of irritation, secretarial archetype. She had my file held in chubby hands that tapered into red press-ons. Your file is incomplete she says by rote, the very reason I had suffered this meeting of mind with stone. No matter who is at fault, they are without error. Always your fault! Their crippling slowness? Your fault! How dare you even deign to waste their time! I occupy space, like a plant. You occupy nothing!! The whole office behind her is moving very slowly from cubicle to cubicle, anonymous files constantly being reshuffled in an infinite deck of cards. The lights are harsh and crackling, and the cloistering effect of the unmoving ventilation is matched only by the sense that the whole building is breathing long languid sighs. Could I see er whats missing, actually? Play by their rules, but the rules keep changing without notice! New policies concerning the particulars of your file have just been added, constant revision, and it is all your fault! The particulars of your file are lazy, wayward children that you hadnt the decency to rear with the automatic precision of their super computers. I am the irresponsible parent of all my details. Christ, though they were my details, even I wasnt interested about them! The less I know the better. Details just so many children that shouldnt have been born, send Christmas cards from far away with unfulfilled promises of a visitation in the near futurethe way I liked my personal-not so-personal details!
How do I amend the file? I asked the cockatrice, my feet turning into the same linoleum tile upon which they stood. Bad move, cutting to the chase like that. They want you to dance first and give their silent reproachful disapproval! And you will dance, appeasing these living Easter Island heads that are stuffed into bland fashion every morning! Forms leave you confused, hesitant? Too bad! No time for you! Bureaucratic selection knocks you off the narrow conveyor belt to your doom! Bureaucracy is the orgasm that never comes, and its always your fault, your failed masculinity that cant find its g-spot.
You need to fill out forms 3A22 and 7-QO Change of Address she said brusquely as if I knew whatever strange motley of languages she was speaking. The Tower of Babel was now a computerized series of abstract forms with these pleasant space-occupying bodies acting as cryptic gatekeepers. A rat in a maze, but at least the rat gets the cheese in the end! What do I get for my labours? More mazes! Run till you die! Codes that cant be cracked! Lord only knows how familiar I am with that scenario! I positively own one of those mysteries!
What was the first one again, the 3-8-O ?
3A22, she corrected irritably as if I should have been born with this knowledge, is your application for continuation of interest deposit, requisite for future disbursements of monies owed to you the undersigned, which is distributed to our separate billing accounts department and the head office for verification
I looked behind me to see the cue card from which she was reading. Nothing. Just a wall with a poster reminding me six months too late to do my taxes before the deadline. My confusion was a sudden irritant for her, and I felt strangely apologetic and very, very lost. This always happens when you encounter Kantianism in action: you apologize and feel numb with dread rather than deliver your most heated words like it ought to be. Okay, then, Ill fill out the forms, I said. There was a small moment of silence and stillness. Intentions, unlike my personal-not so-personal details, could not be reduced to paper and limitless code, could not be placed in those paper ribs.
After that pause, you have to go to the registration office on the fourth floor, get the 3A22 signed by the attending officer, and wait three weeks for processing before you can fill out the 7-QO, she said with automatic officiousness on the verge of an all-out scolding. My meek-faced brethren waiting in line behind me would be of no help in the matterthey knew nothing, and were merely only too eager to get their dose of icy comeuppance. Why was I always on trial for incomplete information? It made me want to make a little protective roof with the covers of a Lewis Mumford book, with the ceiling page replete with a picture of the amoral gigantism that was modernity.
Phones ringing everywhere, faxes beeping and screeching behind her, this passionless wasteland of understated beige, a tap with no working red knob Yah, mule! but it never does. Pound at it with slender, frail fists, get nowhere but make a few ephemeral rubbings on Lucite. The plaque in the tiny, religiously tended memorial garden outside the building sits as yet another temple to indifference beside the unmoving and unyielding oracles housed on high in this return testament to the Crystal Palace. Washed down and rapidly emulated Degas and Manets hang alongside warnings, reminders, post-it notes and memos that made the big time as fully fledged posters. A few ferns along the way, a minimalist touch to remind us all that life does exist somewhere Another sad triumph of simulation, another lost round to the growing middle of nihilism under the clever guise of efficiency. Nothing outside pierces this expansive middle, this impenetrable aegis of forms ad infinitum. This is Platos dream taken to its next terrifying conclusion; infinite regress confined to those coming to seek closure on their own formal details.
I was directed to see a Mr. Brandt on the fourth floor, a name I would forget sometime in the ascent of the elevator, then needing to begin anew in the confusion. I have lost my key, and help is too busy to be botheredor covered entirely by lines I havent the patience to endure. But Brandt comes to mind in the moment of my sudden panic. With purpose, I make a request, and Im off to some rapidly erected cubiculum. Brandts name in muted gold letters against a black plastic background, the door made of compressed wood fibres.
He is a forgettable man somewhere in the undecidable range between 40 and 50. His youth has been slowly drained into the ongoing procession of papers over the years, making its fumbling reprieve perhaps during the wacky office party. But its casual Friday and hes wearing a ruffled suitas casual as he gets. This man has the answers, he must I have come a long way to reach this terminus, this sagging seer of over-latted flesh and pointless deadlines. Emails Ive written, never meaning to send He simply must whip and collect my details into some semblance of an order we all can agree upon.
Just then he takes this opportunity to arrange his papers into a tidy little pile while I waited on tenterhooks for his wise decree from the monstrously large and clicking brains that must reside above So, what are you here for?
Failure, crushing failure. Defeat is decisive, but failure is a process of eternity.
Kane X. Faucher is co-founder of Cyberglas: Journal of the Post-Theoretical Sublime. Recent publication credits and activities include Exquisite Corpse, a forthcoming novel with Six Gallery Press, a special guest editor position for a Joyce anthology, an article on Bataille and the erotics of Hegelian Geist in Angelaki, the honour of penning the introduction to an illisible novel by Che Elias, and part of the nascent Zaporia Collective in Kanadada. Full publication credits are available at http://www.geocities.com/codex1977/bio.
