Soot

She lifts the candle. Gives it a sniff. And, holding it reverently between her fingers, sets it precisely one and a half palm widths from the table’s edge. Though unlit, she’s careful not to create a wind-wake with her movements. She slides her arm through the air, and lands her hand upon the book of matches.

She jacked those matches from Nightclub Sorentine.

The length of her fingernails lend a birdlike style to her movements. With four sticks and a thumb, she rubs the matchbook open. Her eyes at last adjust to the darkness; she sees every matchstick but one.

The missing she used to start her stove. Tomato soup can be delicious, but only if you believe in it.

Deftly, razor nails as wedging tools, she separates the third stick in the front row, dislodges it, and silkily turns the back of the matchbook towards herself.

And strikes.

A bloom of light brings the planes of her face into being. Irises contract. Eyebrows draw dancing sticks on her forehead. Her nose elongates as she guides fire to her candle.

Scented. By which Wal-Mart means: scentless to humans.

With a touch, the flame is passed. This is her favorite moment: the passing is not transfer, but infection. Give a toy, the receiver keeps it. Give advice, and you don’t abide by it yourself. Give yourself, and he owns you dead.

But give fire, and the room gets brighter. Watch the flame eat a wick or a match in crawling motion, fire pulling itself sideways by its own feed. Destruction at its backside, a reminder that the Universe doesn’t come cheap. A reminder that you, too, hazel eyes and cranky spirit and dead-end job and sex with the occasional orgasm, will pay for the privilege of lighting a candle one day. You too, she reminds herself, will be soot.

Which of you readers remember Wendy Hagden, of Unadilla, Georgia, USA? Do you recall the truck stop restaurant where she worked? Hands in knots, legs more swollen every day, and a smiley-smiley-smile that delighted everyone — including some customers, with furtive hands, a bit too much. What of her bat in the attic? Did she ever shoo it from her place? Of course, as you may already know, it wasn’t really her place, but rented from some slack bastard who believed his sole responsibility was to own the house and collect rent.

Do you remember Wendy?

Her child, Susan, despite all odds, became an actress. Studied in New York (and never told her mother how much sex and drugs she had in school). Did many commercials. Became near-famous with the amount of commercials she did. Ad agencies loved Susan’s gift for frigid allure. Which meant she could promote sleeping pills, undergarments, checking accounts, deodorant, and politicians with the same steely intellect that both gave credibility, and, as one producer put it, “makes you want to fuck her.”

Anyway. Soot. Both of them.

I say this not to bring up the specter of death in a gloomy voice. You’re the one who makes it gloomy. I can’t do anything about that, unless I decide to change the mind of the World — which I’m considering, but which can wait for a moment while I write. I bring up the subject because it distresses me what you choose to place in time capsules. Printed material. Fashion trends. War reports. DVDs. A lock of hair. As if Wendy were defined by her hair! [note: are they aware Strossian-Von Neumann DNA-extrapolation is pure crap?]

Don’t you know that you pay for all these things?

Why is it never you store the real moments? The instants you are capable of making true, like testing the microphone, choosing from the menu, catching a cold on vacation? These are moments truly worth fire’s wrath. They are the Ungh of life that, when the match is near consumed and Wendy puffs it dead to stop the heat at her fingers, leaves a legacy of the impossible.

Ask Saturn. Or Jupiter. Hell, even Mars (after the revolution). Ask SN 1604. What you accomplish, in the nothingness of your dullest days, are miracles.

And for that, you pay. Nothing’s free but Will, and, I can tell by your obsession with credit cards and furniture design, efficiency is of no concern to you. I shake my head at your idolatry of worthlessness [note: might they construe that as harsh?]. I, a billion times smarter than your Saganuk — or is it Newton in your time period? — have been dumbfounded by you. For that, at least, you can be proud.

Listen: in the fullstore — or rather, “the end” — whatever you choose to do, be you Wendy enduring the lecherous gaze of every strung-out trucker (lesbian or not) daily, or Tariq the wanna-be-rapper whom his mother just cold-cocked for eating fish with his hands, you will get the bill, and it’s the Law that you pay it.

I am a collector.

But don’t get your hopes up. I’m not your fictional “Grim Harvester.” There is no such thing. I cannot be negotiated with, because you establish your own death. Think “cholesterol” or “cigarettes.” Why do you now live to 150, while those before you had but decades of life? You educe your own final instant; I have nothing to do with it — nor can I influence your longevity.

I’m a simple collector, after the fact. Or rather, archivist. Yes. That’s the better word. A soot collector. I got into this business to witness miracles. But now, seeing which “miracles” you choose to emphasize and spend the zero-point reservoir upon, I must say that I’m tired, and want out. It’s a shame that I live under tyranny — the kind that allows me my opinion but not my will — and cannot change jobs.

Resufferant! Look at all that self pity I just wrote. I’ve been collecting for far too long.

Anyway. Allow me to “just say it.” With admiration of you and love of myself, in an act of Ghandish civil disobeyance (which the cabal will undoubtedly call “treason”) and knowing full well I risk Dispersment of my pattern all over Series 7, I hereby break the Greatest of Laws.

Let me tell you about Wendy, and what happened after she extinguished her match.

Out of Range Month™

Well, that’s it for my political posts. At least for this month. It’s getting stale around here, and while everyone around me dives into some creative NaNaBloPoNoWriMoNoJoBo event, I’ll be damned if I let myself get cranky and snarky in the meantime.

I haven’t thought of what I’ll be doing this month en lieu of NaNoWriMo (which I’ve participated in before), but I’ve decided that it must be something just as challenging, and significantly out of my range. The deadline is tonight for my decision; I’m vacillating between a few ideas I’m thoroughly afraid of. If I can’t make a decision, I’ll be flipping the fateful coin on the matter, and getting down to it.

What I’m saying is, it’s going to get weird around here (hopefully), so you’ve been warned.

See ya on the flipside!

Firefly, with gentle hand, amazes

Wow. Just. Wow.

Spam darkly: the new writing game!

I never thought I’d see the day when I said, “I like spam.” Either the compressed meat or the e-mail kind. But today is that day.

Anybody notice a significant change in Spam 2.0? No longer do I get Nigerian business opportunities or chicks who are “so lonely!” In fact, the exclamation marks are all but extinct. I’m now dealt the innocuous: “Re: your tickets”, or “Your account,” or simply “[none].” Whispers from the subject line yawningly promise dull quotidian maintenance ensconced within. How thoroughly boring. Are those the new findings on what people deign to click on? If so, it may be time to give another species a chance to do great things on Earth.

However, there is hope. The results of a random number generator and basic linguistic construction offer spam haters like me to at least take a second look before pressing delete. Like random tarot cards or a cybernetic form of bibliomancy, Spam 2.0 subject lines offer moments of zen-like insight. Possibly even inspiration:

Klutz operator.
King of Pharrmacy (I really enjoyed that double-r slur)
Banana dispassionately.
Ashen jet lag.
John Broadly.
Sandblast concession.

I almost want to save my spam, with its brilliant names (Nora Grace, Montagu Singleton) and neuron-kinking subjects, to use as a pick-me-up during a day of idea drought.

Almost.

I’m tempted to run with spam inspiration the way this person did. But for now, I’ll be pressing the delete key. I’ll hold out until Spam 3.0 is released — from the white paper, bayesian profiling will give it the power to title itself after the embarrassing moments in your past you never wanted anyone to find out about.

I can’t wait! Nor can I resist:

ashen jet lag
creates this klutz operator
drowsy, absent and hallucinating
a banana, dispassionately.

Gurp.

Wrote a lot of stuff. Don’t dare post any of it. So instead of hanging around a slacker like me, perhaps you’d like to read a quirky, smooth-talking tech writer I’ve been web-stalking lately, Annalee Newitz. There’s effortless poise in her writing, which is very impressive because she tackles new technology subjects — not the easiest thing to wrap a sentence around. She provides links to her published columns at her blog, and I encourage anyone to check her out, geeky or not.

Word salad train wreck

As an exercise in honesty and shame, I offer an example of a word salad gone wrong. If you can bear reading it, notice how I snap out of it, bitch at myself, then try again with riffs on the word “life”—ultimately abandoning the session.

It served to clear my throat, maybe, but not much else. The danger of word salads is my embrace of sloppy, listless thought (disengagement?), which this one shows quite nicely.

I have no idea what my mind did wrong here. I just couldn’t catch a wave.

Philadelphian flags roared above the shouts of firemen. Unknown licks of flame tickled their extremities, sending shudder pens vaulting towards the stars. Lefty picked a nose pimple, walking upwards upon the air. Superhero? Hardly. Techno-bust? Maybe. Though the story cannot tell you where it came from; you’ll figure that on your own as scrollbars get your click.

Acidic lunch hasn’t strutted mint enough to show him how land (as in farm, not airplane) made down. Clearly, amethyst won’t purplate you if you keep it from the sun. This is the Mars conundrum. Is it sand, or is it burnt sienna? In reality, it matters less than the shadow turquoise. Turquoise can be blue, green, or under a shade of red that produces orange. But it is still turquoise.

Which is why monkeys don’t pick their anuses on sundown. Scent stays well in the heat, just as pain grows acute in the cold. Not! I, or rather he, am upset with Easter. She never liked it. So we found something better to do than hand out eggs. Which I thought was a great decision on your part.

Did that cover it? All forgot everyone. But that’s absolutist, extreme, without the pan pan under-shazamm that is so indicative of spatula wielding.

Ah. This tires. Perhaps because—I hate “perhaps.” I use that bastard word so fucking often I want to pluck its vocal chords out.

And what is this “under-”? A prefix suited for the mystic, or the hypnotist? If so, then what of “Banana”, or all the “B” words? There’s an algorithm for that, ‘cept Reimann isn’t around to draw it on paper, so we’ll never know.

Yesteryear, or Eonyear, what became of you? Life, live, livid, livery. Liver. Is that what we are, the living? Livers? And those of us who avoid direction, preferring the world to guide us into slots that steer our flow, aren’t we half-lifes, Chopped Livers?

Nonsense as inspiration

Word salads are a blast. They are a writing game of my own invention, based on a symptom of schizophrenia. I use them to inject a little (okay, a lot of) non-linear thinking before I bear down and start writing. Try to rearrange the synapses, if you will.

Sometimes I do them solely for self-entertainment. To enter a dream world where words don’t quite match up. Other times I find deep meaning hidden in the randomness of my word choices.

Here’s how I play it: I write structured gibberish. A cut-up without source. Unlike the true schizophrenic symptom, my word-salad pieces tend to have a subtext beneath them. Or, rather, a structure that sounds familiar.

The content, however, is total bunk. Rabbits sealing the colors, ball bearings subduing smirkiness, that kind of thing. Something like LSD without the L, the S, or the D. I continue until a non-verbal pattern or “spirit” takes hold and drives me to the end of the piece. Sometimes this spirit actually becomes a real, fresh idea. My word salads have been utterly disjointed, they have been surprisingly cogent. They’ve offered secrets I’ve hidden from myself, too.

The fascinating part of all this is that usually I arrive at a new idea 90% of the time. Most of them small, but damn, much easier than staring at a blank page for hours, toiling over what the topic of “honor” may offer. And the results are fascinating, if not useful. Sometimes I go back and rewrite my gibberish to make it closer to what I “meant.” Whatever that means.

It’s a jolt, to be sure. But I also pay a price: if I do too many of them, I cannot think in a straight line at all. I jump. I bump. I get clunky and lazy, accepting any mushy idea as valid. And I don’t run the kinds of reality checks before I jot something down, so I tend to write some pretty funky stuff expecting the reader to just “get it.”

But as a temporary boost, sort of like a few hundred CC’s injected into the heart, it does wonders. I haven’t been doing too much of them lately, and I’m the lesser for it.
Here’s an example from my endless collection of word salads. Please realize that this is different from any other word salad, and every other word salad is different than it. It is the way I do it; or rather the result of the way I do it. Yours may, in fact, be much better, wackier, metaphoric, sonorous, imaginative, dull, and so on. I did get an idea at the end of this one; can you guess what it was?

God, when shall it remend? I nought on subsidy for daily shift. For why? So can I at least complicate with the daemons when finally they offer outré? Or would you not like that? What would you do if I did? Punish me? Harm me? This mix has already chaffed my craw. Like rot removing skin, bone revealed to the air, punishment already embraces me. I am tied to the mailbox. Feet missing, eyes but semi-circles of their former selves.

So what? Which horror can you bring me more? Let me help you: place a coffee cup like Tantalus a foot or two away from my sip. Lay a danish on the yellow line of a blur-busy highway. And tell me it is mine, if I leap to get it. Place a nude beauty of ardor to my right, and tell her to serve a cackle in my ear for every ten giggles.

Your wrath is puny, Lord. Though I’d be a dishonest man to say it had no effect. But still, it is puny. For the mind you installed in all of us has acclimation calibration. Samsara is my world, Lord, as serving drinks is to a barmaid. So I choose the outré. You can lick your own cunt, not mine. I defy myself, damn myself. But damned if I’ll tolerate your keen sense of judgement—or is it humor of the Blackest kind?

It’s selfish, sure. “What have you done for me lately?” But you are Lord. Should I hold you to a lower standard than my Earth-bound comrades? Should I emblazon you with gifts and subsequiousness and capitulation and love and all that shit you so greedily desire, with nothing in return? What kind of welfare God are you?

And then to open my spleen and dump it upon the ground for no good reason but that I hungered for a Danish. You’re insane. A psychopath.

And I defy you. My last act shall be the gift of Spark to the world.

See if Your Airiness can compete with that.

Clichés are stolen souls

I like two Bad Things: rhetoric and clichés. Rhetoric because it is large, sweeping, and full of vision—until some pundit uses its power as an elixir to make his shortness taller. And clichés because they are such charmingly pithy phrases that everyone wants to go to bed with them.

Clichés get a bad rap. At birth, they are singularly powerful observations of truth: a blooming awareness in the mind. You can save nine stitches when you spend time on one. Hamlet was being cruel to be kind. And it’s true: the road less traveled is far more interesting. How? Let me count the ways…

But over time and over use, the pith of a once shiny phrase dulls, and we’re left only with the abstract idea, its words a train that delivers thought with no imagery. Overworked and exhausted, this memetic poetry becomes vernacular, hackneyed, “to be avoided.”

Ironically, the better the phrase, the more at risk it is for becoming overused. Sad that the most resonant utterings of mankind get filed under “bad writing” nowadays. It’s not their fault for being superlative! They were well-put at inception; what arrogance makes us believe that we can rewrite “water under the bridge” into something more poetic and sad? For such an “accomplished” playwright, I like to joke, Shakespeare sure did write a hell of a lot of clichés.

To let clichés play with my mind once more, I spent some time over at the Cliché Finder. I know there are better sites out there, but Cliché Finder retains the clunkiness of reader-submitted clichés, and sports a random feature that will throw them at you, ten per fistfull.

It’s instructive to read a cliché out of context, and honor its native essence. Most clichés are born smiling, and rekindling the life back into one is as simple as pressing your imagination into it.

For example. “Throw the baby out with the bath water.” This is terrifying.

“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye”: is this not as well?

On the other hand (he lifts his left hand for contrast), Cliché Finder hosts some duds (bombs too weak to detonate) as well. Some clichés are entered incorrectly—“Eat your cake and have it, too”?—while some phrases are not clichés at all, but hackneyed jargon, common language, a play on clichés, or famous quotes. “Hunky dory” may be a popular phrase, but it is as much a cliché as “A-OK.” Which is to say, not at all.

So what is a cliché? In its looser sense, cliché could mean anything trite, from horror movie plots to the ubiquitously poached “war.” But I think a proper cliché must a) be a common phrase, and b) still hold wealth inside it. It can delight unsullied, imaginative minds—like those of children—still today: “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

The creator of The Cliché Finder, Morgan, offers a small treatise on the subject. I’m not sure I’m happy with his definition: “a metaphor characterized by its overuse.” Is “on the other hand” a cliché, then? What makes this phrase any dirtier than “However”, “in contrast,” or “but”? It is a metaphor. It has been overused. But is it really a cliché? I’d like to say “no,” because it has imagery, yet no insight.
It’s a tricky puzzle, defining what a cliché is. But I shall stick with my earlier definition: A cliché is a phrase so charmingly pithy that everyone has gone to bed with it. It can be a quote, but only if people do not use it as such. There can be no attribution, hidden or overt, that remembers the author. “All’s well that ends well” is a cliché. But “making the beast with two backs” is not. A cliché is poetry that has settled amongst the people, powerful beyond its author. Timeless, universal, and offering bon mots, a cliché, when cleansed of its patina of repetition, is free revelation for the masses.

It’s a diamond in the rough. A precious jewel, and—if eaten properly—food. For thought.

Blank prose

Bah. Sometimes I suppose a person just can’t write for shit.

Instead, I will dust off one of these old Naked Crunches of mine, trim it up a little, and deliver it without a care.

(warning: disturbing imagery)

Tenderness at the Burgundy Rapture

We’d—meaning Aji and me—let our hairs touch in a game of our own invention, “Laudation,” always carried out secretly at cafés.

In broad daylight was our favorite time to do it. In front of others was even better. Surreptitiously naughty, the back of my arm hair met the electric of hers. With skin apart, feel burned pure.

Exquisite, our table games. Laudation became our secret dialogue. Arms “lackadaisically” positioned upon the table, we projected and received the flow of emotions, mutual admiration, lust and annoyance — all hidden in the prickling of our hairs. We indulged in the varieties of silence, sipping tea and flirting with the language of eye contact, before the window explodes and shards rake through our cheeks.

A wide-open dumbfounded look upon her face: is this really happening? From tenderness to horror in microseconds, we are blasted out of the world. This is our consummation. No marriage, no proposal, plenty of flirt yet no coitus, we lingered too long upon the hope of the future, the backs of our arms never/always touching as we sipped our tea.

But this moment, birthed in anguish by someone who felt wronged, someone who gave herself to God or Jellyfish Ultra, or someone who thought they were saving us from ourselves, serves upon us in sprinkling, tinkling glass burning fresh in burgundy, an end to romance.

Aji’s face splits open in an unnatural twist of flesh.

I regret we never kissed.

Her eye divides in two.

Maybe we’re sideways on the floor. Maybe we’re airborne. Darkness swells about me, confusing my perception. I think, “the politicians will never know the tenderness we delivered today. Instead they will ride our deaths like a horse to power.”

Aji smiles minutely through her facial destruction. She is happy I’m next to her at this moment. I want to smile back, but I have no jaw.

Minutes ago, we teased each other. Which particular body part might our wrinkles grow on first? We expected to die together in old age.

But this day, with all its faults, isn’t so bad.

Black.

Morality precedes religion? Salman Rushdie on Faith & Reason

Wooohooo! All the author interviews at Bill Moyers’ Faith & Reason are up. I’m saving Margaret Atwood, with her darling little “happy witch” pose, for my own personal finale.

For a week, I denied myself free speech hero Salman Rushdie’s interview (click on “watch the interview online”) because I wanted to savor the anticipation while I enjoyed the others. I finally broke down, though, and clicked the link.

Rushdie, as the President of the PEN American Center, helped initiate the Faith and Reason event; his interview is longer and addresses far more topics in the political, religious, philosophical, and imaginative realms than the others.

The man is brilliant.

But he’s so smooth about it, humble and precise, that the complexity of his mind goes unnoticed. He talked about everything. Far more than I could encapsulate in one post. The Danish cartoons, the transformative power of the artist’s imagination, 9/11 as a hinge moment, how cultures are becoming increasingly incomprehensible to one another, his new-found joy of ordinary life, and much more.

Most interesting was his idea that human morality precedes religion. Religion, he posits, grows from an attempt to codify the moral instinct already built into our DNA. He points out that all art began as sacred art, and from this, implies that art and religion go hand in hand, and that the need for religion may be like language: a natural inclination of the human species, which gets fouled up, revised, politicized, and abused over time.

He also complained that there’s not much secular lingo to describe transcendent experience, and implies that this may contribute to atheists gaining the stigma as men with no moral guidance.

I found the part about morality as antecedent to religion so fascinating, I had to pause the video and mull it over.

It’s hard to argue with Rushdie, but let me try: I agree that religion is the language of morality we’ve developed. It’s rough and simplistic, but one must learn to grunt first, then write in iambic pentameter. One only needs to inspect all the religions out there to realize that, despite what any believer might believe inside his own faith, all religions are at their base, secular. Or at least humanistic. Only the biases of the mind entice one religion to claim absolute arbitration of morality, truth, and behavior.

That is essentially what Rushdie says, but I add this tidbit: we need only recognize that religion is an adopted moral language and lifestyle to get over all our hang-ups about it. Einstein used the word “God” differently than anyone else; he recognized that it was an unfortunate part of the vernacular needed to describe unprovable, yet still worthy, concepts.

And this is where I think many atheists and believers alike fail. The former asserts that fantasy is not real, therefore precariously dangerous; while the latter contends that truth is divine, and must never be challenged.

But I say that religion is a chosen, not given, symbolic language of morality that, in response to uncertainty, fills the gaps where we aren’t bright enough to devise ways of acting ethically.

“Chosen” changes everything. Not only does it implicitly recognize the sheer power (and worth) of imagination, it puts the responsibility square upon the believer to answer for his behavior. He cannot claim “God said so” to win an argument because, in the end, it is he who bought into the belief for one reason or the other, so it is he who must justify it. Therefore, a believer’s ideas of restricting or oppressing other people can be criticized as ideas embraced firstly by him and only subsequently strengthened by his religion.

With religious diversity in mind, Rushdie also warned against moral relativism, faintly echoing Sam Harris’ contempt of religious moderates.

In a nutshell, moral relativism is “live and let live” applied to morality. “They believe in cannibalism, and hey, that’s their religious prerogative.” But Rushdie admits that there is a paucity of language to describe absolute morality within the secular world. We’re just not experienced at it. One must always bring God into it. “Atheists are obsessed with God,” he laughed.

I agree with him here. Relativism is a dangerously slippery slope of self-justified apathy, and I believe people are not philosophical enough nor bright enough to discover the bullshit and oppression hidden within the ideology of “don’t rock the boat.” There needs to be a new lingo to describe what is right and what is wrong without bringing religion into it; too many religions on earth, and certainly too many political abuses of them, make the current religiously tainted moral vernacular (“Infinite Justice”) unacceptable.

Rushie suggested that Democracy was one of the ways to manifest our innate moral sense. With Democracy we can, unlike archaic religions dependent on absolute verity, adjust and improve our morality as we go along — without destroying the idea of Democracy. Slavery might have been wonderful 150 years ago, but is appalling now. We argued about it, killed each other over it, changed it, yet still retain our democracy.

Religions change, too, of course. Rushdie mentioned this, but didn’t give it the time I expected. Christians don’t stone women for adultery today, for example, nor do they beat their wives with a stick no thicker than the thumb.

In my view, these subconscious revisions of religion’s authority are done on the sly, and dysfunctionally ignore their own divine text. Such “adjustments” are entirely subtextual, never become explicit law, as in a Democracy — in other words, there’s no chance to say “Whoops. Sorry.” and move to a higher level. Eventually, divine books will internally contradict, show their age, and yet are kept that way — believers would never countenance an edit by anyone other than God himself.

I’m convinced that today we are on a threshold here, where many minds, like Rushdie’s, have advanced to a state able to articulate and obey a moral code without adopting the entirety of a religious system.

But many minds haven’t. Most people recognize the golden rule as the best piece of moral advice ever given. But with all the evidence of others getting ahead through shrewdness, a person tends to reconsider the value of such an ideal. Some folk still need supernatural help to become less selfish; and I’m okay with that.

But: I say religion as authority figure will fade. Must fade. Because if it grows, it may kill us all.

Like political parties, where a person can both believe in conservation and remain a Republican, religions may adopt a welcoming flexibility. They’ll evolve more explicitly. They won’t lose social influence, just their absolute authority. That’s what my brochure says, anyways.

I doubt this could happen in my lifetime, of course. I need only look at Lebanon — or hell, most of the Middle East — to see how far we have yet to go.

The whole interview is worth a gander. Beats the hell out of American Idol, for sure.

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I have two other posts on this series, if you’re interested: The Burden of Belief, and Bill Moyers Delivers again: “Faith & Reason”.