WHAT YOUR WEEK HAS IN STORE

You’ll notice a subtle change this week in everything, a slight irregular shift from yesterday, a transference of some dynamism, simple profound and not in anyway explainable. It’ll be the inscrutable infringement of a new element, a different kind of light than you’d ever seen pouring down over the street, or newer air, or some inter-planetary re-alignment; everything clicked just to the left of normal. In short, a whole new world, but one not so different from yesterday’s, though different enough so that you’ll have to ask what is it; noticing an extra buoyancy in your step as if gravity had been reduced; picking up a peculiar extra fidelity; another section added to the color-field spectrum. It’s like someone turned the real in reality up a notch; everything’ll be a little more urgent, just that much more primal; your whole environment’ll buzz slightly with significance and vitality. Somehow you are closer than you ever have been to what you really want. 

Is there a word or phrase that’s currently sloughing off glowing sheaves of radioactivity? Think about this word. Describe a remote and foreign landscape. Night is coming on soon. Address the reader directly. The reader is always alone. Employ an allusion or quotation stolen from general esoterica. Do not pander to the reader; the reader owns and uses a dictionary. Everything here will be seamlessly weaved into a textile or fabric strung among the rotation of the thirteen coordinate signs of the monoculture. In this sense it is the airport that moves and not the jet-plane. Less abstract semiotic structures can be referenced often by simply describing the ruins of some human edifice in the landscape: vacant cities, bunkers, collapsed churches, roads. This is a work that anticipates a total computational comprehension; the advent of the prescient-omniscient machine that speaks the human. Here readability is primary to sense. Remember the genre is Speculative Non-Fiction and is relatively uncharted territory. Do not let the reader rest. The reader must not rest. Never let the reader rest

Don’t be too alarmed this week to be sent away north via train toward some as yet unknown gloomy estate in the moors where a shadowy benefactor awaits you. Trundled from bed in the middle of the night and stuffed into clothes — not even your own clothes — and escorted by the orphanage staff to the train station where the train will tear away from King’s Cross as if it were the real tearing away from reality. Not to mention the terrific North Atlantic rain beading cross-wise over the window glass showing back to you your imperturbable face as the train punches thru the endless night. And beyond the glass… shadowy hooded figures flying beside the car. What are they? Dementors? Or a fantasy due to your tendency to hyperbolize? Imagining bad situations worse is a habit of the speculative mind. Perhaps you should pursue a career in science fiction? In any case whole novels’ll walk abroad over the muddy fields of your future landscape.

An invaluable and ancient Egyptian death mask carefully filleted, cut up in order to retrieve those pages of sacred text from which it was composed, texts containing facts that support American evangelical culture — your favorite culture. How much would you destroy to be granted one more year of life to hang around Wichita? Would you tear down the sphinx or topple the temple at Luxor? Every time you go to Starbucks an Iraqi child has her arms broken. I’m just kidding. I’m not kidding at all. But what’s that in the trees across the field? There in the bracken? It looks like men in grey uniforms with muskets. Must be reenacting the civil war. No matter how cage free, how happy the chicken was, it will still fry in the pan while you drink wine in the candlelight with friends while Nina Simone sings as the dark night of the winter solstice falls fast from the sky on the large supple bosom of evangelical America in the Christian kingdom of Wichita. But who will that be knocking on the door?

Shot like an exocet from Echo Park you’ll wind high the gears in the Ducati and absolutely howl! into the Glendale freeway’s heavy traffic not even merging anymore but taking all four lanes as your own right to corner steeper in an exercise of absolute agency—and damn the recidivism!—you’ll tear up to the Ronald Reagan, the entire LA basin turning under your wheels, the distant mountains making a giant rotation about your progress, now screaming south on the 405 narrowly nicking the mirrors of so many Sunday drivers who never had their needles threaded so neatly, as you sing an adagio that, like Glenn Gould’s humming above the piano, is an expression of joy in the task at hand and so blazing down Ventura to exit on Laurel Canyon, you’ll ignore all red lights to rocket now up the brute hills, your tires blackening the hairpins, up to the ridge where the sun glares over the ocean as you plummet down into west Hollywood to careen on Sunset and seeing no cops in Beverly Hills, passing celebrity after celebrity in their sluggy mercs who can ignore your life all they want but there’s nobody, nobody, nobody can handle a stolen motorcycle in LA like you can

Which reason is so epic and cosmological that it begins to retreat into the obscure, the downright abstruse: that cosmic aloneness is the bride of existence, okay, but do the design choices of your hotel room have to be so hellishly hotelish? A good question, but with a lame answer. Then, driving a rented car beneath the hills in the heavy haze of a Burbank CA dusk, trying to assimilate any old which way into your current situation, a dude will yell at you: “you’re alive!” And ‘ratiocinatin for a moment, you will surmise that, yes, that is true and even, at this juncture, rather profound, until it comes to you and you gasp, shuddering: “Oh Christ!” punching the steering wheel, “I’m alive!” The feeling can be difficult to take, I know. Only what’s really going on is that you’re driving without your lights on and what the dude actually yelled was: “your lights.” Which’ll be a relief.  As if, for the moment, the gods have extended you a reprieve… But will you really need to go back to your hotel room so early in that long L.A. night?

It will be a bit shocking to find out that you’re actually a clone. So it goes. The first and real you is no doubt drinking fernet branca at a sidewalk café in Paris with David Sedaris; then south to the schooner to go deep sea diving for Spanish doubloons. It may not be your fault that your other one is more interesting than the you that is reading this. But still one may want to consider the screwier repercussions of this weird situation or some tricky questions anyhow, such as, why are you living the life that you are now living? And does the fact that you can think of a better life reduce in quality this only one you’ve got? What would it mean if David Sedaris read this? (The series of Sedarises is endless). Your clone’ll sing several bars of Don Giovanni in Italian and powder its talons in the mirror. There’s always a you who’s wickeder than you are to your other one. 

Which will be particularly devastating when walking to the podium at the poetry event of the year you’ll trip over not even a real leg but an imaginary one and stumbling you’ll swing your arms wildly both of which carry a manhattan each because it’s that kind of poetry reading and you just can’t read if it’s not getting drunk in here, and so one manhattan lands in a poet-dowager’s purse drowning her pet field mice and the other leaps like a frog to sail whistling past the president of poetry himself and right into the eyes of his esteemed mistress, Miss Corruptibile, who is allergic to whiskey and whose face swells up like pink bread dough. Were it not for your poet’s ironic self-reflexive dividuation ability, the outrage and contempt would be enough to quash your self-regard—let alone your career in poetry—for years to come. But even as you fall, you are able to watch yourself fall. Which makes all the difference—but goddammit you need another drink. 

A transparent glowing-blue romantic poet reenacting his death again and again: lying and sweating, rolling over and over, swooning and dying plus subsequent death rattle, all as if he were in bed, though he’s hovering three feet over the shallow snow of a starlit aspen glade. Is it a sign? Maybe. I don’t need to tell you that you’ve already passed the anniversary of your own death in some future hold-out in the mountains. But so what. Poets die all the time and does their consciousness hiss any less? That you’d so charm, so play, so bereave “the dragon-world of all its hundred eyes” only to die; that you’d die because poetry. But under the crystalline nicks of the cold sky-at-night, the young poet dying there in the clearing’ll be a little more maudlin: for isn’t it a bit ostentatious, a bit too histrionic to die so poetically? I mean isn’t writing any poetry at all, ever, already overwrought?

It is never very clear where it is that you are when you walk across these strange landscapes of the future, whether you are in the land of the dead, or in some speculative corner of the multiverse or that your life were actually to change in no way you can anticipate. So the vortex of security checkpoints, flight delays, airport bars, sudden lift-off, interminable sleepless hours in the blowing dark of the jet high over the Atlantic, more bright airports, a taxi, a train, are none of them commensurate, nor apparently antecedent at all to your standing soon on the sodden headlands above the wintry beach in the remote north of Scotland, a place no normal human wants to stay for long just as the cold sun’ll retreat redly down the sea and the wind’ll turn brutal from the north bringing in the rain. But hiking toward the castle hulking in the wet dark, though the precedent for the current setting may not yet register, you should not doubt your own senses. You’ll head toward the fire in the hearth and it will welcome you, lending heat to each and all, the shade no less than the corporeal.

Examiners dressed in hazmat suits will number and photograph your wardrobe, pick apart your medicine cabinet, vacuum your bed sheets, collect the hair from your sweaters, number each of your possessions, lining them up on a vinyl sheet on the lawn. X-rays of your garbage, complete assemblage of every trifling picture, every folded receipt, an audit of every book you have not finished, a history made of your failed projects, scanner portrait of your genetic code, the master catalogue, the total and comprehensive inventory of the constellation of things that create your daily life; the derisory mirror of your identity as owner. Your dirty laundry, even your dejecta is necessary to them. All information is uploaded to a waiting server whirring in the tundra in the Northwest Territories. Your gene sequence analyzed, your psychology and physiognomy comprehended in total. Predictive models of your future generated from same in order to compute preemptive adjustments to premiums while zeroing towards a more effective target market. Everything will be put back in the right place just before you walk in the door.

A supple blue and dark tapestry depicting a global narrative of destruction and terror across vast landscapes of catastrophe all sown in silver thread with the utmost craft and elegance. Startled to think of it early one morning you’ll leap from your bed-chamber and down the long hallway: “I must have it!” Your factotum’s eyes shine like mercury from the vault. “Find that tapestry. Do what ever it takes. Any price!” Dealers are called, museums, galleries, private collections, the artist herself, but of the tapestry no sign; it’s vanished from the face of the earth. For this failure the factotum isn’t treated nice. But after anger comes stupor and finally defeat. Being as rich as a lord used to mean that you could get what you wanted when you wanted it. Such thwarted demands makes for unwelcome circumspection. Retiring to your Room of Brooding to meditate on the futility of desire, you’ll slump on the floor in the dark and eyes adjusting to the gloom of failure you’ll gradually see on the wall the tapestry. You already own it. “Get rid of this tapestry! I don’t want it!”

If the box arrives this week it will conclude that period of your life that you have lived up to now. Exciting. However should the box fail to arrive you would doubt that the box were ever to arrive. The snow in the streets will have melted, revealing all this winter’s trash; isn’t spring just the worst? But still even after such a wait the box will not have arrived. Belief in the box’s arrival is good in the early morning just after waking to the too-loud scratchy pre-recording of the muezzin booming from the tower, when stumbling about in your nightgown excited for the coffee, thinking: yes the package will arrive today, I can feel it. Still by early-afternoon when you’ve come down from the coffee, startled witless by yet another call to prayer, you’ll again doubt that the box will ever arrive. But lying in bed at night, listening to the automatic gun-fire in the distance, just as sleep alights up into the branches of your mind, you’ll receive again the resilient and incorruptible belief that the box will indeed arrive. - See more at: http://www.around-around.com/arrival/#sthash.nzsvr6MN.dpuf

Charles Ray’s Baled Truck

The full scale shape of a crushed and baled pickup truck (but not the truck itself) carved and etched from a twenty-eight-thousand pound block of stainless steel so that it would appear that there might be air in there but really it’s metal all the way down. Rain on Chelsea—rain in general across the eastern seaboard. And such a rain too that even though you’ll be late you’d not wish to leave the refuge of the gallery, empty of all but the truck and the docent who pays as little attention to you as if you were some species of flora that were native to art galleries. Dark, thunderous rain over the car hoods and the street, figures flashing by, running in a panic. But in the quiet gallery the oblong block of crushed truck, coffin-like in solemnity (as if something had died) but shiny as a new dime, makes the long bright room more religious than art-world, and lends the truck’s idea a holy and mysterious will that crosses out your own. You’ll not have so much a profound experience of art, but rather a profound experience of your own weird happenstance. It’s as if you’re the one that’s been cast.