dreamless night

And hadn't you also heard or read that the world tilts on its axis ever so slightly every year so that the angle made the earth like a piece of metal when the sun hits it just right and it becomes just as bright as the sun itself? Hadn't you heard that it was getting hotter because of this tilt, this ever increasing tilt of the earth, which was inevitable and not humanity's fault, not our cars or emissions or Aqua Net but plain and simple entropy, or was it atrophy, or was it apathy?

Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we've been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.

Who am I to defy nothingness? who am I? who am I?

I don't say: far away life is real with its imaginary places I say: life here is possible

Today, of course, it is all an art market, the whole of American commerce. We can’t make a toaster anymore, a VCR, or even a decent faucet, but we can create desire. We can make fetching footwear, beautiful games, exquisite motorcycles, hot TV, great rock-and-roll records, and dazzling movies. Such artifacts constitute our principle contributions to global commerce. The alternative discourse of embodied dissent, however, has all but disappeared. Those customized and hopped-up objects and images we might expect, that demonstrate against the standards of the republic and advocate their own refined vision of power and loveliness, are nowhere to be seen — since power and loveliness themselves are presumed to be at issue — as if they might be talked away, along with the image, the object, and commerce itself, as evidence of human vanity, so that art might more closely approach the paper body of bureaucracy.

If we do this, then we can stop regarding the art world as a “world” or a “community” or a “market” and begin thinking of it as a semi-public, semi-mercantile, semi-institutional agora — an intermediate institution of civil society, like that of professional sports, within which issues of private desire and public virtue are negotiated and occasionally resolved. Because the art world is no more about art than the sports world is about sport. The sports world conducts an ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete. The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things — or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out.

So here’s my suggestion: At this moment, with public patronage receding like the spring tide anyway and democracy supposedly proliferating throughout the art world, why don’t all of us art-types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue — that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered, in its ordinary state, unredeemed by courage and talent, it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do. We could do this, you know. And those moments and those functions would not be diminished in the least. Because the presumption of art’s essential “goodness” is nothing more than a political fiction that we employ to solicit taxpayers’ money for public art education, and for the public housing of works of art that we love so well their existence is inseparable from the texture of the world in which we live.

The harsh realities of violence, rape, sexual trafficking, child pornography, and hate crimes require that we keep a tight rein on the abuses of power that pervade the politics of sex. The poetics of sex, however, are often politically incorrect, thriving on power plays, role reversals, unfair advantages, imperious demands, seductive manipulations, and subtle cruelties.

After surviving that hell, would he still have been the kind of person who made choices we could understand?

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

How lush the world is, how full of things that don't belong to me —

I try to win you back, that is the point of the writing.

Dear friend, dear trembling partner, what surprises you most in what you feel, earth's radiance or your own delight?

What could such glory be if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you permit yourselves to open once, who would never open again? Because in truth I am speaking now the way you do. I speak because I am shattered.

I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see. And as I watched, all the lights of heaven faded to make a single thing, a fire burning through the cool firs. Then it wasn't possible any longer to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.

... I remembered watching her "put her face on," as she called it, and wondering if one day I'd be like her, a beautiful fish in a man-made pool, circling and circling, surviving the tedium only because my memory can contain only what is imprinted on the last few minutes of my life, constantly forgetting my thoughts.