Doctor Brew[8031] Do my restless fingers astonish you? Even Balaam’s ass beheld an angel saddened by autumn leaves. How do stories come to be companion pieces to their work designed to detect desperate witchcraft or darker devilry … be wary and watchful while on our long walks together in the moonlight. Shall I whistle in your ear? Moan with my eyes closed? The operative word, Nurse Blunt, you have already suspected that a great white flower snaps shut in daylight sleeping. The magnetic pole & the watery conditions of icebergs floating in a featherweight winter meadow as a cold stone brooding about the world ending tomorrow. East is Wild West is East is all the same now : the world is a mountain home on the range.
so what am I writing for? to make a thing? perhaps that is (in the end) enough. so that there will be beautiful things … who I am even if I … no, even if I wore a mask, they’d still see through this shabby part born to return abnormally to the edge of destruction (a bottle episode : Hell wasn’t always a place of torment, it was just the place you went after you were done with your body, a place full of naked souls) … in what way is this substance at all suggestive of a liquid when the sealed quartz tube contains nothing but smoke & ash? Such flavors are subtle: I intend to go West — going West is beyond any doubt ,,, when I was young I could fly in my dreams, now I ride my horse on a boat in search of a portentous & mysterious prehistoric monster come back for a second underground nuclear test. Once I rode my horse Gonzo down the aisle of a 747 jumbo jet in search of a stairway to heaven. Below me the wild & distant seas boiled
from Space Pirates (a WIP):
The wild boys might have given up their amateur pursuits … every healthy wild boy loves roaming for friendship … but Kathy continued her elevations with twin purpose until she came to the gangplank leading to a great whale-spotting ship : its industrial-sized hold open to the sky above … waiting. A sailor scaling the mainmast shouted: It’s crazy to go to sea when it’s the end of the world! Kathy felt a mystical vibration invisible to human eyes. The ship was an ancient structure carved from oak, incongruous, out of place in this modern marina with boats made of glass and metal moored to concrete jetties with gleaming stainless steel chains. To the uninitiated eye/ear the musical fountains ,, centerpieces of iron-fenced gardens flanking the harbor evoked memories that needed washing in a psychic soap (she sniffed her armpits, all clear) : all this is not without meaning when cooled by blackness.
when hope is just another lie (do you believe that? macho macho man) … something the 80s sold to us : is it just me? as I walk down Poydras Street in New Orleans, I hear the chorus of “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley, not even a song I cared for particularly when … is it still popular? … and that feeling of being there or having been there that feels a little bit like joy : I hope … I buy me some of that, thanks. They meant it as a lie (to sell something), but it was a lie that was true. What they wanted was that we would be convinced … fool me once! … that hope is for pussinboots. Yeah, capitalism is bad boys of summer, but guess what! it hurt so good, don’t it? What I know is that it felt completely different to be alive then, and that feeling was real. I was happy. A lot of us were, we privileged middle-class white kids living in the suburbs … our garage bands, guitars and synthesizers, the robot sound of the future is now.
Kathy couldn’t sleep. She got Philip K.’s number from Herman’s little book and called him: it went straight to voicemail. Kathy whispered, “Call me … no, seriously, give me a ring, we’ll do lunch & hash out some scheme, a collaboration perhaps. We’ll call it The Red Tape. Or The Pink Ray. Visit me in San Francisco some time soon. I’ll be leaving on this whale spotting voyage soon.”
Queequeg, Ishmael’s cowboy sidekick…told Ishmael that the sea was the true Wild West…One day Lily White Buddy, said Queequeg, America will be all settled & domesticated all the way from New York to Frisco, but the sea…the sea will never be tamed.
I need you no more than a degree above the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting nuisance. The sea is a romantic landscape with boring sunsets. I’d much rather view a sunset from land where I can hear the twitter of birds and see the glow of light caught in the branches of leaf-laden trees fluttering in the listless breeze.
and speaking of hashtags (I'm still trying to figure this social media thing out) I'm going to start using #TheIrrealists to mark posts as part of public exchange of how to use #ExperimentalWriting to break up repressive social structures (in the mode of Kathy Acker #KathyAcker & William S. Burroughs #WilliamSBurroughs) ... and others
for more context see the essay by Kathleen Wheeler I posted earlier this week, here it is again
https://dalkeyarchive.substack.com/p/reading-kathy-acker
One of my experimental writing & publication projects is #NovaLetters , here's an example of a "deeper cut" which introduces Burroughs' concept of "coordinate points" mentioned in two of his cut-up novels
https://write.as/leadworth/coordinate-points
for fun I'm testing out applying terms from #DoctorWho to Burroughs' Nova concepts. A little for everyone.
