Scratting around, a round, writing around, rounds, pounding heart rate thrust my chest through my ears and forcing my stomach into my frontal lobes. In Capgrass Syndrome the lesions, those scabrous points of decay on the right side of the brain divorce, so it's thought, the recognitive from the emotive. Whilst you may recognise the face of your lover or father or brother there is no emotional response and it is this which leads to the peculiar features of Capgrass where the person thinks their family is full of impostors. Symptomatical of the emotional basis of truth. Truth emotes, gains a certain valence and lances through us. One doesn't cognise the truth, or recognise it even, or establish it or argue for it or touch it, one smells it. We know the truth. Belief is everything.
Switch flicker. High twisting bifurcation and cleft, breakage, hole, whilst not holed, held. Smelled. The shit-smell of masturbation Genet reckoned he had because he always used to jerk-off in the outhouse when he was a kid. Life could never have ran smoothly, of course.
Of course. Of the course of true love; they say it never runs smooth. But then smooth? What would that be other than the removal of edge, the lack of sharpness and definition. Definition in deed, de finito, of the finite. Infinite. Spiral comet tails invasion, witnessed in midst of concrete and jungle jagga. Not then, once, standing in forests of verdant green, disputing the feud and resorting to blood to feed thrice born young.
Never believe anyone, except me of course. The arrogance of the insane perhaps. Never believe the truth since this lie lies heavy within us. Never believe the lie either. Lie, to lay with you is to fall delicately through the opening of the abyss. I could freefall fuck, sex in mid-air, conjoin bodies amidst the heavens and then slice the chute from my back to crush in the aftermath of orgasm the frenzied boredom of lifestyles.
Grind scrapes layers of skin from the fingers and my nose metaphorically erases itself as I place it back time and again. A gain arises from the persistence, though the loss of something no doubt accrues. Yet what of it? We all lose, we all win, the terms are meaningless. If we all do anything then anything becomes nothing. We all differ. We all die. We all lie. But we are not all happy. At times we have are will been be be.
Fuck em. Let em lie. Sleep sweetly in the scent of my sweat and lie discretely behind the small of my back. Rest my sweet, to feet defeat and reach high again, here in our past and so there, here, epistolic, systolic, the sense of loss, lost, losing, absence, no longer a certain present loss, no longer a certain presence, always confusing me, always contusions, conflutions, conflations inflated beyond apparence. Here, no, something else, peculiar in its peculiarity and worthless at the same time, achieving perhaps the intimate absence. I love the intimacy crated, typography revealing, lying nature of it all.
Intimations of intimacy perhaps ride a well adjusted scripting carefully clarified and understood by the participants, just as the well acted piece brings out certain truths about human experience in the midst of what is a lie. Truth and lie. Sometimes truest truths are situated in the truest lies, the scripted always apparent scribing, the notion of the script, as cript and cryptographic remembrance and con text and 'scrip' as in prescription as in pre-scribed as in mediating medication. As past and future script allows a certain notion of combination and futural presence of the past. The script flows down from the past yet reworks itself towards a future within the presence of its act. The script opens much that benefits from returns in terms of returning to and that turns again around a similar theme, though perhaps the script needs to be broken too, in time, with the slightest twist, a perception of a turning away, of an unwillingness to face front.
The body twists away from us as we address it, the fish twists in the catcher's hands until it skips and drops back into the water. Or a twist of lemon, a hint. The twist seems to bring with it a lack - Of honesty presumably, or maybe clarity, that we might assume exists in the facing front stance, in the face-to-face, what is shorthanded as an f2f in the domain of e-mail and electronic discourse. But of course the twist is much more slippery than this, itself twisting away from definition in terms here even more so given it the slightest twist.
Twist again, last summer dance through sound divined down from land above screen type hype. Hip, hip, come on eileen, on john, on your chest, between your breasts, watch semen splatter the glass and smear the words of the screen like three dimensional saving grace place. There, out there, coming out there.
A page of the web, the net, perhaps even the interminable internet, intermittently producing garbage and gall, written in code, html. The html code projects the pages onto the screen, we never actually get to see the text, the real page. The net is an intensely coded structure, decipherable, constantly devious, java scripts and weaving blinking texts and the view-source button to steal the coded jewels of this weeks walk. The web designs interpretation into itself, designs signs that betray themselves and leaves markers and traces within its borders. It is intensely infuriating, inspiring, as it does, a mimicking of such sleight of hand on the surface and in the surface.
The surface, as poor a metaphor as it is, tending toward a complementary notion of depth, also holds as merely the entrance to the water. The ripples reveal a depth that is not the real water any more than the tension determines the edge. Sur face as not a top or a sheen but as a door or entrance, as a face on the body. The surface behaviour of the net tendencies is one that tends towards the superficial - the behaviour of the surface - the pond-skater, skimming wildly without even a glimpse that this is possibly an entrance. This is nothing other than the fetishisation of the web. That too in a way reveals something, perhaps because the fetishising opens up - and in this sense no longer skims -the surface superficially but rather skims the surface judiciously, aware of the surface unlike the pond-skating passivity.
Each page slight ripple, rainbow glints of light as eyes elide another realm, space, face slight return, turn through pages which aren't pages. At first I always thought of the web as a large self-published magazine but then the very vibrato of its voices forced through. The pages stages in journeys of boredom that glides drifts pulls mauls a permanently exiting world. The spaces beyond beyond, beyond even the fingers initiating the codes, enable such frisson. Spaces, places, laces done up tight on boots walking the night, facing through distances no different to any other. Walk down the road then the knowledge of further spaces. Look at the eyes and elide again, as soon as the eyes slide back towards slight return. The slight return moves deftly towards a look, glances lances momentarily through any singularity or through the glass glance rooms, interiors of memory filled walls or ramshackle halls of residence and precedence or cells of confusion, each shut shut as darkness declines the day and the light of objects to observe fails, leaving only other eyes remaining.
Each page speaks to me. It wants me to listen. It wants me to look at itself and yet not to. Viewsource, look at the physiognomy of the page and its very point, the very line of course, it disappears, no longer the vanishing point of the horizon on screen on line in line over page but rather the cacophony of noise that an other language makes within the non-speaking visitor, where words no longer even exist, showing the existence of words relies on more than a noise. Even a sound relies on more than a noise. Even noise relies on more than noise.
So you surface inside each page, abstract semantic markers perhaps but this is only from behind; in place there is just lines, not even abstraction until we begin to draw together, gather together, return to, return from, return into, turn into, never resting. Each screen screams, wrests from us the face we give it, then wrestles elision with frisson when perhaps only elusions enable the initial filtering of fiduciary contact. Then beyond trust there may begin a thrust.
Through a slight breeze again settling into a subtle sliding of keystrokes and key strokes, the light at the end of the tunnel returning, sight shifting. Each of us, though memories of returns, invade spaces through which others thought their life went. Each of us slips our tongue into the hole. Placing moisture on the positive and negative, tasting the electrical charge of the battery, before slipping once more into reverie. Early memory.
Here then once I found this. "Eva Lucy Alvarado was born on Thursday, Janurary 25th, at 3:56 in the morning, at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. Although premature by about three months, she emerged quite a healthy baby, screaming and weighing in at just under three pounds. At first, doctors were worried that she would need to receive a drug called "surfactant" to get her lungs going, but her lungs were just fine upon entry into this world. Apparently, the steroid that her mother, Rennie, received just 72 hours earlier, when her labour began, had done the trick. Or perhaps Eva Lucy, tired of doing the salsa in her mother's cosy womb, had decided that she was good and ready to come out."
Another file site combed and obscure hidden treasures gleaned. Peculiar file name extensions engender for obscure reason desires to view. And here, then, once more, I find, again, again, again, finds. Once more. Ever more.
"Now, just over a week after her birth, Eva Lucy has been moved to a quieter place in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at U.Va. Hospital, and she is gaining weight steadily. Her move to "D Pod" means that she is doing well by all measures, and simply must gain weight. Right now, she is on track and gaining an average of about an ounce a day. With sufficient weight--and body fat--she will be able to perform a feat that we all take for granted: gain weight and maintain body temperature at the same time. When she does that, then her proud parents can take her home."
Public domain. In the public domain. What was once what once was. Clogged. Water logged. Surf slow, surface low, deep in the horizon or deep red pink warm alveo. Lie again, thread through, slip into silk dip into. Logged on. Threading though crowded rooms, life and soul alveoli. Branching sponge soft pink flesh, pig lungs, tongues, fresh. Deep rhythms.
Surfactant lines the lungs and is thought to open the ability to breathe; it is, if you would stretch the analogy, a condition of possibility of life.
I grew up on a pig farm. At christmas we would get a bonus from the scum that ran the factory, a whole pig. Literally, whole. Every last bit from the balls to the brains. A pig is remarkable in its similarity to the human form, its organs parallel ours in shape, size and organisation to such an extent that it is the prime candidate for transplant donorship - indeed there are already the beginnings of animal arm type invasions, cross species transplantation.
The pig lung lolls on the table as though basking on a sun lounger. It sinks into the surface, spreads out, yields to the touch. Nipple. It is still warm to the touch, the granularity of the surface, linear undularatory. Smooth grain. Skinless. Breast. Neither meat nor flesh, an inside giving way yet pressed further, resists, presence.
Her arms raised above the head, open, attached, flat. Breasts rising to meet destiny. Nipples pushed hard forward, volunteers for testing. Bitten hard, sucked against the palette as mouthfuls devoured, glistening saliva rides the curve towards the caress, into the musk of concave depth, the distant gap, the gentle discoloration under the arm.
Pink flesh yields to butchers blade. Cuts light. The lung yields and opens, riven deep, depth. The sides of the slash lean backwards beckoning the knife inward as the carcass dissected. Silver glisten conversation as meat wrapped obliviously.
The lungs of the pig, its lights as they are called, fascinated me when I was young, when the meat of the animal was more than plastic wrapped product's of capital's disturbance. The lightness of the corpsed capillaries, which gave it the name with which it is ordered in a butchers, seemed to speak of a luminescence in the centre of the body, a purity. If there were a soul, I thought, it would be found in the lungs.
Feeling the force of the light as an erotic experience burning deep within me a sense of intimacy with what was consumed. The cut of the blade and movement of opening welcome as the slices were craved, slivers of soul more sweet than any communion wafer.
The lungs form a descending system, operating at the micro scopic but supported by a hierarchical branching structure that ascends to the central core operating, if you would stretch the analogy, as the systematic categorical framework of life.
Systemic plural present, system of plural presence, like letters from unfaced arrivals. When I was in prison I would receive letters of support because of what I had done, daily deliveries of encouragement chip up we're with you comets missive mass, a little light in the dark hole, light tone, always opened, the opening welcome always troubled by distance of the done deed, letter read, dear etcetera et set er ah. Done dunning, dunno what to say but, need to say, slay politely the presence of the face. For those who wrote I was often no more than a number, MW1054, but I had facial features displayed across news casts aspersions on activity through depiction infliction of fighting police.
Done dunning dunno thumbing through, assonance, the pages of my life style manual align. Cool air sleek hair running through fingers sublime sign divine time wine of, assonance, mine. Speak to me from your navel, of your umbilicus tail ridiculous snail mail fail ure remembering. The post lost most often. That letter, was it a or b, perhaps even z, said as an american would, or could. Zee and two noughts. Compared to zed as in zedsdead the zee always sounds so twee. Polite language of delight full carnage, that's the americans four square towards the fight, light spilling over sweaty brow as blood from the boxers mouth falls 'nto the front row done dunning dunno.
Each morning after unlock they would trail up to the wing office, plastic formica tabletop presence, loved ones scattered in a pile. Name call, roll call rolling through each man stands towards the eloquent absence reminded rewired necessarily of the outside. Peculiar ritual of the letter getting, that oddly embarrassing glance each gives the other as they reach above the heads to grasp another missive from the missus peeling off one by one until the dregs remain, the remains of today's episode.
Done dunning. Dun down light down lights up thrown. Fingertip slips, skin slice covered clown. Duck down. Up down. Through town. Cuticle. Slivered silver embryo. Working, dunning, through lights down alightin candle sharp words in the dark. Reading you, communication ablation, elation letters of provenance love and providence. A two z through v and b, thee and me.
The screw evidently enjoyed this ceremonial humiliation, particularly as the session progression reveals the last remnants, the moment of vulnerability that lets in the little dig, the spade of grave diggers delights.
Letters through lice, twice, thrice, speaking in tongues caressing lungs distant divining exit sounds breath, pining, even though this would be too be nice as lice. And how did you mean this? Mean this, meanness, mean line divined, median meander. Absent again, absent gain, a gain absolved through allocution, locution, your candle burned skin double time. Done dunning.
"Looks like nothing for you today"
"No guv" he says, already trying to get out of the office, rapidly wanting to put a stop to this chink in the armour before the grave is dug too far. He has his back to the screw, arms raised high trying to squeeze through the scrum of six other cons entering the office in search of some titbit to lighten today's tedium. He's got one more layer to go, only one other bloke to pass before he's at the door and down the landing.
"That must be a week now without anything ... "
here it comes he thinks
"not even a dear john. Must be hard waiting a?"
He passes out the door as the last words pass out that fuckers mouth. The screw is smirking, just enough twist to the lip, just enough glint in the eye. He turns to glance back as he finally moves free, just long enough to catch sight of the light flash glint. Like a song on the radio in the morning repetitively throbbing and looping through the day, he knows even before it works that this day isn't going to be a good day.
Rippled spine define censor. The pages alive strive to reach through strip search forays with letter knifes and wives tails the sigh secretly repeated forlorn lost time determine. Open letters. To open is to own, to take that way, why did you open my mail this morning? Open the door through which I stay. Open sewer revelation appellation appeal unsealed.
For the first time he now owned a letter knife. Pewter present celtic scrollwork handle, life knots tied down to brown paper wrapping slice torn even rip, or even tear. It was a present given in the first anniversary of release. Ure mail now torn neatly just as the censors opened it in prison, gashed with precision in blunt proximity. Each missive mislaid envelope betrayed time past post.
Lined through living life, knife, gash slash crashes to echoes of doors that enter dead ends. Living lines now lay boxed and bound in bundles surrounded by elastic ribbons dust gathering sediment sentiment. Daily daily diaristic. Strings of past stinged and stringed as the past.
Let her caressing letters leave momentarily past present. Each morning mourning ritual aspirant hopes breath short lived passion. Light height of the days drear unless sense, perhaps from yesterday, of dread dead hand landing. Withdrawal without opening, always that opening already opened first glimpse gone.
He watches the mail delivery, foetalic first mention drop through the gash in the door floor take the mail. Watches from the desk, screen busy papers and electrical currency click opens as mice scuttle across. Picks up the morning mail, snail garden given streaks of gum done through the night flight passage. At the desk returned he sits and pushes the paperknife into the corner hole pocket to tear rip open spine remove fine lines no longer, just drudge smudged marks of mistaken accounts. Letters used and thus confused with letter caress. Screen placement incapable replacement for nostalgic disaster of dis apparent opening. By return.
There is little left in recall call me back from past post to future front door frottage. Open in there where the time chime sounds bell, words bathing through breathing dew. Rubber signs, bouncing checks upon my knee, sending decks of cards free spiral trial. Shuffle the deck of memory presents resentfull story. Here we go again, back in the run again through the time past. Rubbing signs together, spark lit light, tonight call you back to me. There was a time when I wouldn't drink wine.
Openings close openings. The opening moment forgotten, breath brief thief. Can you remember your breath? When adminstering oxygen to the patient the danger lies in an overuse of the assistance such that the body forgets to breath and thus the patient would enter a danger zone. Assistance requires resistance. The slide slice, succint sink of blade into flesh. Caress. Each phrase phase fazed face.
Wouldn't you like to know, wouldn't you like to, no? Why forever and never do we wish this closeness. You cannot open close, close by me, autre chose. The wind pulls hard at my coast, toast taste of freedom, winding through lanes of traffic absence, country lanes descent towards the beach. There they stand, two figures of fun, run through waves of light filling eyes, flight of mighty sea three present. They stand in front, canute-like, present to the salt dew settles upon their skin. Wind pulls my coat again, the pull to my coast.
The page turns, another lie line down, moments bereft adrift. Letters of the past, let us of the past recall call me back. Dear John, I know this must be hard to hear but. The hardness of hearing close openness refused, closely, openly. This culmination.
He knew before he ever received the letters of deceit, simple receipt of time spent past given. Even before he said it he knew it, though it was only with the saying that the knowing arrived. He, new before the sign knelled, foreknew.
Surface of page time, lines of crinkles, opened to view within public domain the screw screws you, screwed into him, the sign of the time spent past now gone. Each page of lines, each face races through his mind, signs upons signs of signs of sighing resignment. Each page suraces again. He takes all the letters, every received sending, every gift of death, and places each won moment beside the other up on the walls of his cell. A wall of signs layers their lovers lair, layer upon layer, around and round he goes, pasting, tasting, wasting the words of wine he never used to drink.
Each page faces and is faced, face to face, nose to knows, intimate absence. He calls back to time to sign again from when he went through the gates of hell, through the steps of tyranny and escalating democracy. Each page surfaces again. Pasting these letters each sign realigns itself to form a new figure, not any more of fun, none would call it this. Pasting each sign up high, even the ceiling now bows down to receive receipts of time, promises fresh visions, new horizons, long times.
The letters are pasted to the walls with porridge, a traditional method in british prisons for adherence to the walls. He soon runs out of porridge however, after the first few months of times, and thus resorts to excrement mixed with piss to form a smooth paste just firm enough to take itself to the cell. On and on, lone night draws through, the oxygen spew breath of letters left behind, each day was a new day, a new letter in the line. His breathing is pasting itself, he knows he must pace himself, race himself to the line time after time. Dew time comes dining birds catching worms. Perhaps I will come back as a worm and fly in the stomach of a dove, he thinks.
Through the slit of the cell door we could, if we so wished, at any time we desired, see this public domain. With restrained pain boredom reigns time after time. Yet at the end of that particular corridor, on that particular night, in that particular cell, in that particular country, pain retrains itself from restraint to taint the sky with the dye of death. Won by one the letters form a new word, a new sign - time, it says, is over.
When I came out of the cell door that morning the smell was breathtaking. I had to fight to get my breath back. I saw straight in through the back of the screw the signs laid out so resignedly. In the middle of the cell the green painted bed with its green cotton cover over the green woolen blankets glowed in the light of the morning dew. The window had been removed between the central bars, the putty clearly scratched out methodically and silently. The walls were obliterated with a papier-mache design of lines of past love above a hell death cell death. Upon the bed he lay, yes obviously dead.
The screw puked and slid down to his knees, to pray in a pile of vomit before the altar of humility. I stood entranced by this new dance. Grunting noises, like pigs feeding frenzies, appeared to arise from beneath me and soon the screw moved. "Urr fuckin cries' all my t". He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a smail trail of vomit along his left cheek. "Stand here and don't fucking move" he says to me as he piles through the blokes in the wing, crashing out of their pits into another days dry bones. Zeeboy next door has seen it too and I can hear him now telling me he ain't gonna fucking ang around ere, before he goes inside and slams his door shut. Clearly the news is spreading as I can see a small group of cons at the end of the landing looking down my way. One of them walks toward me and I just pass my hand across my throat. He stops and turns to the others who all disappear towards the showers. No doubt there will be fun tonight, noone likes a death on the wing.
I turn back toward him. He lies in this bizarre beauty, paradoxically peacefull amidst such violent carnage. I walk into the cell and stand just inside the doorway at the end of his bed. I might almost be visiting him in hospital. In his mouth is a balled up sock, prison issue grey nylon. He is naked, or at least has no clothes on. Naked tends to involve the sight of skin and there is little to see below the neck that isn't covered in his insides. The most noticeable thing though is plainly the sheet of glass that stands clear through his stomach.
The floor is sticky still, the blood mixing with puke adhering to my feet and squeezing its way through my bare toes. It is surprising how long it takes to comprehend quite what has happened here but the image is now beginning to come into view. He lays on his bed, his arms askew crucified almost, except they hang limp, unattached, like his now dead cock. He is skewered on a sheet of glass that is somehow rising vertically from the bed, as though he fell back onto the device, impaled himself. The difficulties of such operations flash before my mind before the sheer depth of the colours overwhelms me. Dark reds intestines and bright luminescent scarlets, with verdant greens and ochre browns on the walls. Image intensifies. I think briefly about dropping that tab I've got hidden in the cell but soon reckon on there not being enough time to get a hit before the screws will clean this up.
The glass rises through his body from just below his groin to past his navel. It is a new cock, having severed the old version on its way through. He must have propelled himself onto the sheet, arse down hard, cobbled together hari-kiri. The smears on the glass show signs of hands and struggle, suggest that somehow after plunging himself onto the lethal shard he still had enough energy to pull the sheet through him some more until it reached his sternum and poured out his lungs. Soul spilled spoil.
Before collapsing. Sheet written death. Come to me. Come in me. Scream thought muffled sound, stuffed like a turkey before christmas. Gob shite. Pull you fucker. Christ almighty mary mother of god, here's the angel bitch. Here's the angle bitch. I want to see my soul. Here's the angle bitch, by return. One, tow, fear, for, I know an english gentle come. Pull you fucker, see the tear, there! there! At last, at last, once more into the breach you fucker, once more, once...
Time stands still for the dead. For the living it rises to meet us each time we stop to let it catch up. Keep running in order to stand still for never ever sever the lost times past. Here, once, occurance disturbance tends towards violence resurgence, imago arrives, final return.
From the page each line disturbs mine time, mine of time, time of mine. Fine weather side, in dark screen deline heats hate is late. Each line mine. Each time thine. Each fine wine, drunk despite fires sight, respite, gives one more presence in this permanent potlatch.
Though I may never be here, there, no doubt, is an intimacy in my absence. In deed I in fact intimate their absence. In fact I in deed intimate their absence. In reality there is no loss, only step on step on time after time, line after line after line.
Matt Lee, .
Copyright © 1997. Last Updated - 21/04/97 14:30:22