On a day to day basis, more and more artists, semi-artists, and pseudo-artists are migrating to the Grind. Sitting not too far away, a group of three intent on being theater impresarios. They’re talking funds and grants. Having never received a grant, I have nothing to contribute to their conversation. I do know this: as the years go by, I get more impatient with the material demands of daily life. It’s enough to make me desire some kind of permanent grant, just for one less thing to worry about. I’m already gnawed at by impatience— the sense (call it the Faust sense) that there’s nothing left to experience. Being monied would at least be different. The gratuitousness of temporality— you use up resources, reserves, but even if it’s done wisely there are still days, weeks, months, years left to fill. Wordsworth spent forty-three years spinning his wheels; the rest of you lot got out early. The problem with the human race is that it derives most of its sustenance from illusions. The great suburban illusion I grew up with is that one should take steps to secure the longest possible life. Don’ t drink, smoke, take drugs, or engage in promiscuous sex, so that you endure to achieve a ripe old age. Quality of time takes a not particularly close second to quantity. I’ve noticed something else— that you can extend a worthless and meaningless existence as long as you want, without altering its essential vacuity. It may be more intelligent, spiritually, to get in and get out. Not that I can’t imagine living to a ripe old age: it’s possible. But I refuse to abandon my pack-a-day habit to an ethos that aligns prudence with emptiness. And, where the female race is concerned, I can be taken by force, stealth, or stratagem. Most human endurance is shallow endurance. I’ve seen married couples discover, in extreme old age, that they don’t know the first thing about each other.
Then, there’s the intensity and dedication that can be brought to language. Linguists tell us there are an infinite number of potential sentences. Language, itself, is infinite. But because language is the expression of necessities (i.e. we communicate what we need to communicate), if there’s no need to speak or write, nothing should be spoken or written. As I follow line with line, another silence is covered over. There was no need for poor Wordsworth, after 1807, to lead a bitter life. But because he couldn’t shut up, he did. Fame, also, has sunk to nothingness for me; love hasn’t. Does love involve anything but humiliating intimacy? I’m not convinced it does. Someone like Dana never thinks of death (or love), but of shortcuts to material prosperity. I feel the weight of her emptiness more than she does. She misses, as Trish and others didn’t, what a penis might be worth.
I’ll admit: I waver, about intimacy. Actually, I recently spent a (not particularly physical) night with a Wiccan lady, and she laid down an intimacy gauntlet I wasn’t expecting her to. She admitted that the following insight was post-Wiccan, too. The basic purport is this: if a man sleeps with a woman, and shoots a load into her, that’s it. That’s Mother Nature’s marriage insignia. They are then man and wife. It’s the apogee of intimacy. It can’t be porn, and it can’t be a prostitute— any level of professionalization, and the spell is broken. But that’s how a real marriage manifests in the world. There can’t be a condom…the mind reels. Refusing to do a Julio Iglesias routine in text here, I nonetheless know who my wives are, if post-Wiccan is taken to be as legitimate as, say, post-modern. Kate! And poor Dana, who must kick the asses she kicks in the world from a dry place, unlike Jena Strayner. The real, raw thing, like raw time. The likes of which is not orgasming now, to be real, as I’m getting bored with all these shenanigans.
Hung,
Adam
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