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November 29, 2005
THE AFTERLIFE HOTEL (three takes)
“What kind of a hotel is this? There’s a dining room, but half the people at the tables have nothing in front of them. They’re just sitting there like condemned. They bring you a menu and it only has one thing on it. Like, swordfish.”
“I wouldn’t even call that a menu. It’s more of an announcement.”
“It makes you wonder why there were so many choices at the restaurants of old. Back in life.”
“Well do I remember that dream in which the other woman was my wife. I was leading this double life, and I was married and had this other woman, and I woke up in a panic and actually checked to see that the woman I was with was the other woman—my wife in real life.”
“Who was the dream wife?”
“You had an affair with your wife? In a dream? What rubbish!”
“I remember once I woke up and I was lying on the bottom of a rowboat.”
“At least it isn’t waffles.”
“I can’t get a focus on her; as soon as I wake up she disintegrates so rapidly I have no information about her anymore.”
“Is this one of those repeating dreams.”
“Or artichoke hearts! God how I hated those! Hope there aren’t any of those around.”
“Let’s consider all dainty items of food.”
"Seems futile, though, doesn't it? Hating something! Actually I only remember that I hated it, not actually hating it . . ."
“I was nibbling her ears!”
“Luckily it still had oars, and I was able to get out of the marsh and back onto the lake. Eventually my memory came back.”
“That sounds like it’s from a movie. You probably suffered a movie transfusion dream. You won’t be having any more of those now.”
“I hardly have any other type than repeating—all my dreams are episodes now from an already well established situation, which only happens in dreams—the only access I have. . .”
“Like the one in the old house. Where you eternally fitfully ramble between floors, and sometimes find that secret stairway? Sometimes that long room where there are experiments set out with . . . tinkertoys and stuff. That—”
“How did you know?”
“Because that is a stock dream. Everybody has it. Or most people. Or one small percentage of people chosen to be infiltrators because of their . . .”
“Don’t reveal too much! The anathestic might not be worn off.”
“One night I was at my computer, it was really late, early in the morning, and I had the ashtray on a chair next to me, I put my hat over the ashtray and, guess what, my hat caught on fire!”
“Fire when ready, Gridley!”
“Who is that old man walking in a stately swinging gate on the old country road in . . . it must be England?”
“Why Wordsworth of course.”
“He isn’t that old you know. And if it looks like he is talking to himself it is because he isn’t crazy but composing his poem. He get’s the rythmn from the walking, one imagines. He gets back to the cottage with quatrain after quatrain memorized.”
“My writing methods are very different. I’m more like a kid on a bicycle, who goes faster and faster and crashes in the driveway for lack of brakes.”
- TWO -
"You are frightening me."
“Gridley was the gunner, you see, on the first ship about to attack the Phillipines, and my great grandfather Oscar, see, he was also on the deck with Admiral Dewey when Dewey said: Fire when ready—this is back in history. Whew! History? What is that?”
“We’ll get to that.”
“And I have all this stuff about the plumber and the electrician who were a double plague upon our house last summer. It was frightening and hilarious, even at the time I saw it was frought with absurdity and meaning, another classic right in our own house , which I don’t even have to leave—”
“What do you mean, you have all this stuff?”
“So, getting back to the main point, who are the witch women?”
“Ah yes. They spend all day dealing with damaging information about people, heard from other other people, and then redistributed, by the witch woman!— after she’s stirred it around in her stewing pot which might be a—”
“I wanted to know WHO they are; I can well imagine what they are.”
“Oh. So you want to know who they are.”
“Stuff, and more stuff! Never did get organized! Never did bring the paint cans from the basement out to the curb. Never did—”
“But if you know what they are, you would know who they are—they stand right out once you have the category.”
"So?"
“And if you don’t have the category, knowing who they are is just spurious. So I am obliged to not tell you who they are. Take that!”
“It is not, in itself, a bad thing to be a witch woman. In fact they think of their work as a positive force; they are busy all the time, and can’t help themselves. It’s up to us to . . .”
“Is this one of those things that only you understand?”
“How should I know?”
“And would you please resupply the lemonade, it’s life-like sweltering hot out here, the patio stones are burning my feet.”
“So much we will never know, pray tell, stranded here, at the Afterlife Hotel.”
“That almost rhymes.”
“Everything almost rhymes.”
“If they wanted to live, they could have. Of whom do I speak?”
“They can’t kill me as long I have all these other voices in my head. They can’t snuff out the whole lot of us in one fell swoop, I wager.”
- THREE -
“He’s in a note-taking mood. He’ll sit staring into space, and presto! make a note. His hand obeys his brain. He’s a marvel to watch. Then some more pressurized time goes, and you betcha!—”
“Another note!”
“Wonder what it is. The brave soul reckons, and the evil genius replies: another observation which, still, does not reveal . . . “
“One note erases the last, and we are left with . . . “
“Chairs askew, and the moon rising unnoticed in the left-hand corner.”
“Sponse and response.”
“A sense of eternity.”
“I say, thinking is diving into intervals lately.”
“And from my great unfinished poem I quote:
In the disconsolate, air-conditioned coffeeshop
The random person at my left seems not harrassed—”
“Save it!”
“We are in a world nobody has envisioned.”
“I don’t think we are even in the world anymore. If there was a world. Could be . . . there never was a world.”
“It was provisional. Preparatory. Mind-boggling! And now—”
“Well now my wit is sharpened in isolation. My body is gone.”
“Those parts of the landscape, and the history, which were hypothetical remain . . . unfinished. Because . . .”
“It really was up to us to establish truth!”
“These are all viable statements. Anybody else got one?”
“Everything is best with cheese melted on it.”
“That will do.”
“Viable?”
“Most people that I ever knew aren’t in fact around anymore. When I think about it, damn it, hardly anyone made it through life. If we tally it up where did they go, Don Massell et. al.?”
“Don Massell? The name is familar.”
“Only a few are on record as dying, the rest seem to have snuck off. Maybe the world is just a temporary stopping place, not even the main map.”
“The main map! Jesus!”
“You know what Louis Pasteur said right before he died: he said: “It’s not the organism, it’s the terrain,” Louis Pasteur said, right before he died.
“You mean maybe life is just an outake, not the main movie?”
“The question about these people who say things right before they die is: how do they manage it?”
Posted by mortimer at 05:33 PM | Comments (4165)
November 21, 2005
Rules & Taboos at The Virtual Monastery
Each monk is allowed a single stack of salty round crackers, to take to their television cell. There is no on/off button on the hand-held remote. Nor does it seem that the thing really works for selecting channels, or else this monk is just incapable of remembering numbers.. Changing the channel is ill-advised if he doesn’t know what he is going to get, and he can’t be sure of returning to the program that is on, which is a football game. Always a football game! It is always a Sunday in mid-November, when a newly recruited monk is ushered into his television cell, where the kick-off is about to take place. Even though he hardly considers himself a fan of this seasonal sport, he is unable to resist taking sides, and once he does then the game really, or apparently, comes into focus. This must be one of the techniques with which the authorities remind, relentlessly, newly recruited criminal minds, I mean monks, of their hometowns, their confused childhoods, their failed employments, their wasted nights at the pool table, etc. etc.. Some of these memories being very true, others just roughly assimilated. Which is why, more than the escape from problematic life itself, it was the desire to focus and think uncluttered and unfettered, to find a new path, that was behind the decision to join the serious misson and program of the virtual monastery, to begin with.
Right. Don’t get the idea the monastery is living in the past. Electricity is used, all the latest technology has been inplanted, at the monastery, somewhere--just not in the regulation of the monk’s personal living quarters. Furthermore, the monastery is right down the road somewhere. And furthermore many or the monks dress in street clothes so you can’t tell who they are, standing in line at the Convenience Store, sequestered at the Tavern, in close conversation with others fundementally disguised, waiting at the bustop in the rain, etc. etc. You have no idea who might actually be a monk, or who is bereft . . . Though one thing is clear, noboby ever decides to become a monk and then returns from that fatal self-image.
Late in November an important decision has to be made in regards to a monk’s personal appearance, his beard being the lynchpin, so to speak, and the choice being rather drastic since it is wont to dictate a monk’s whole scheme of work and leisure for the coming winter. This decision is made on the night before the first snowstorm of the season, which in Rochester reliably happens right before Thanksgiving. This decision is to whether to trim the beard and now scraggly grey locks, back to that
professorial look one had once. Before chaotic thoughts made the monk, forgiveably, forget his appearance. The decision could very well be: make no attempt to trim the beard, and start wearing only black and grey clothes; take long cold showers and slow one’s step, so that, if one is a poet an entire stanza of radical polysllyabic verse can be composed--in just exactly the time it takes to walk that metricly from the Pharmacy, say, to the Dormitory. That this decision about his beard is likely to influence the work assignment he will get for the winter months is the major factor in his deliberations, tonight. Let's make it so! The night during which the temperature plunges and the first spectral snowstorm sweeps down over the terrain from Lake Ontario.
Standing at the Drive Thru Pharmacy window, he orders a package of plastic razors and a can of shaving foam, though he had not actually confirmed whether the night would see him at the mirror. It was shameful to have to stand at this Drive Thru window, as a car pulled up and stopped just so its headlights made him seem on stage for the ordering of night supplies. You could already feel a chill in the air. After getting his shaving supplies, his chocolate bar and whatever, his pack of short cigarettes, he ducks back into the bushes which border and hide from scrutiny the grounds of the monastery. It was just a fact of the way it turned out that the 24 Hour drive thru window of the pharmacy was located right there on the winding paved road next to the walls and bushes of the monastery. There were three other drive-through windows located at places along the edges of it's grounds, ill-defined as they are, so a monk could do his Banking also, and there was a place where you could buy kegs of beer also, though I would like to see a scrawny inmate rolling one of those on a dolly through traffic.
Though the monastery made its own beer. Along with Monk's Bread, that was one of its chief sources of income and means of keeping monks employed, monks that is who were not ready or never would be qualified to become copyists or even bookbinders. Other jobs were available in the community, such as running Bottle Redemption Centers in one of the major supermarket chains; but a monk was not formally identified as a monk when working in a job like that, though he might be rumored as such. These jobs were characteristically lowly, and ones where no personality was required, where in fact the slightest appearance of personality, or higher ambition, would make the job impossible to perform and impossible to witness, for those who were, say, returning their bottles. The most anonymous job of all, I always thought, was that of the receipt taker at the exit from the underground parking garage at Midtown Plaza. (I have never found out if that guy is a monk; there is no way to easily ask him.)
Yes. Only a monk could endure that job. But if endure, then flourish. That is what I suspected. Various high forms of monkhood might be unrevealed even to the novice monks themselves, who, as security guards, immobilized attendants at utility paying centers, traffic cops and school crossing guards, library clerks, etc. etc., were only capable of staying on these jobs because of the psychological condition (being a truth-monger) that imprisoned them there. Only a man who believed and knew himself to be at the center of a conspiracy could endure obscurity at this level.
So! When he got back to his cell (where, this time, there was no TV) and reckoned with exactly what he had bought, and laid these few items out on the bureau, below the mirror where his begrutten face looked back at him like for a new summons of meaning, our importunate monk reflected, as it were, on a big flaw in the proceedings. The blue plastic razor blades were in conflict, as objects, with his understanding. For if the monastery was rigorous in its aims, and its appearance of rules to guide an initiate, that is to live in a sacrosanct history, free of the influence of technology, then products of this technology should also not be allowed. They were like contradictions! This is difficult, and it produces major doubt as to the reality of the monastery itself. Is it really possible to avoid the infiltration of even these tiny microbes--I mean evidences of the real year it was in reality?
But of course this was the major project for thought, which a monk was destined to face and consider. What science had made taboo was the study of history, he knew that. It awaited him everywhere, in the consideration of anything, it dogged him on his walk back through the golf course, back from the Tavern, back, back, always coming home. It was the question of whether reality was a historical event at all. Or just a happening outside of time. And that is certainly a simple way to put it. Enough to virtually put off the dinner guests, he was thinking. What? Memories were beckoning, as he took care to stay along the banks, within siight of the artificial stream that wound through the golf course. There were no golfers any more, and the clubhouse had been absorbed by the monastery, which changed nothing in the appearance of any buildings, didn’t even take away the funny fixtures like flags and golf ball washing machines that bespoke of former spell-bound days. The tennis courts, where another obsolete recreation was fashioned, retained a kind of abstract force.
He has to stay within the imagination, to travel there unchallenged. Thus, as he walks slowly back towards the monastery, it becomes increasingly distant, an impossible prospect,. and the world expands it’s terrain, its lush artificial trees and unnatural labyrinths to give him space for thought and time to ready his own biography. It is amazing to be constantly thinking about what life could be like, or used to be like, and yet never be fully impressed that what is right before one is life. As if experience could never qualify, considering the concepts!. Vague, powerful concepts drove our monk, indeed!
Posted by mortimer at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2005
The Triumph of November
November is the month, when there is maximum equilibrium in the world. Keeping with the major theme--in the storied monastery, in all respects the merciless light in which the monks have to work, is most favourable in November. We are restricted to sunlight which comes through the fairly low side windows of our working quarters. The older monks have attained the ability to work in the courtyard by moonlight, and then inside deep in the forgotten recesses, by candlelight, brittle and the color of leaves also, but leaves not in nature, but dreams where people are dying. In daylight the courtyard is filled with strangled-looking, fist-shaped yellow leaves, so deep the sandal-clad feet of the monks who labor there are sunken to the ankles. Grey moonlight tints and reflects off these leaves--I imagine that it must. Now and again a loose page from a monk’s manuscript, disattached from his clipboard, is picked up and sails in an errant wind, or because of the steam powered heating fans. And these pages simply commingle with the yellow leaves, which are quite large, forlorn, numerous-- and appear themselves to have such an elaborate network of veins and rivulets, that one can imagine they are text-laden too. Though they are not.. For the production of immortal books, perfect paragraphs, stanzas of indelible verse, are rendered without the copyist knowing what text they are ever intended to fit into, because, the great assemblage is incomplete for lack of truth. This is to be understood; the monks are deprived of the truth, on a small scale as they work to preserve history, and a large scale--as conflicting reality closes in. It is a matter of equilibrium, and here we are, as if always in November, at a point of recognition.
We do know that the main text that the monks were working on had to do, in this period of history, with the question of whether life itself was significant. Life was occurring, no doubt, but was it significant? People were conscious, maybe, but their consciousness was challenged, on the basis of whether their thoughts about being alive, had anything to do with anything but being alive. For being alive was clearly not a sufficient situation, as anyone thinking could know. It just had to be part of some story not totally revealed in the relatively flimsy, though ecstatic, experience of being alive. You see, in the modern epoch, which is always now, and in which these monks worked--being alive--the idea that life was all sufficient had reached its apex, and ordinary people, with whom the monks identified closely, were hampered by the idea that what they did in their life was the sum total point of it. Thus, the very structure of reflection, which requires a discrepancy, had vanished. No one could make reference to any security they might have once presumed, in their thoughts! In the past there was a huge part of the terrain that was shrouded in mystery, and there was no possibility that life itself held the key to anything at all. Eighty percent of it was dealing with obvious phantoms. To be alive was largely spent in rejecting, editing, saving parts of the world in memory bound for . . . where, pray tell! But now the victory of the world is almost complete.
Which can be put many ways. Like, the consciousness of an actor is shifting close, to that of a spectator. Or that November has triumphed. The sheer restricting force of its light, creates a vacuum.
Posted by mortimer at 08:20 PM | Comments (14034)
November 07, 2005
Teddy Brewster Outfitting His Other Self
The fact is people who go into the Mega-Bookstore immediately become more in the mood, to buy something other than a book, as soon as they get in there with all those . . . books. That is why the bookstore increasingly puts other things than books in their path; and the sales figures prove that this is true. That customers more eagerly lap up the other stuff. Calendars, greeting cards, chintzy, I mean fancy, gift editions, stationary, games, bookends!, all this stuff flies off the shelves. And the Bookstore Cafe is full of people who are not even slightly interested in a book tonight, thank you. The public events on the second floor are not well attended, but they are just put up jobs anyway, except for the occasional Celeb; the store manager, who must be behind a one-way mirror, certainly knows that. Oh God, everything is public relations. One has to outfit themselves with an ironic attitude towards this world.
The question a monk, an idler, a scholar, might want to ask, though, is: if the bookstore is better at selling other things than books, then what store is it that is good at selling books? Maybe the Shoestore. For it is when trying on a pair of shoes, at the Twelve Corners Shoestore, that Frere Fractious, whose outside name is Teddy Brewster, finally has a dawning realisation that what he is now assigned, on high, to read is--well that shall be kept a secret, until he finds it at least. Or maybe the store that should be selling books, since the bookstore is so uninterested, is a furniture store; they have a lot of empty shelves. Or maybe a habadashery.
To seriously be a monk, consider most are required to wear their hooded vestments most all the time. For they may be struck with the need to go into prayer, which requires they pull their hoods over their heads and keep their heads bowed, at any time. In this Order (The Order of the Just and the Unjust), prayer is not regularly scheduled, but regularly anticipated, and this requires discipline, for a monk is not to engage in spurious prayer, but only in prayer as he is called upon to do by God. Since God speaks to individual persons and monks, knowing this perhaps better or more strenuously than other persons, the distinction between true prayer and false prayer is indeed most serious, and most perfidious, as not only has a monk to deal with himself in this matter, but a monk, typically, can not avoid a certain suspicion as to whether his fellow monks are in their prayers acting upon a command of God, or misunderstanding themselves in a natural human effort to appear more prayerful than they really are.
A monk is required to keep his side table, the round table on wheels that he pulls up next to him when at the computer, free of all materials not related directly to his direct study of the month; well, he wouldn’t be a monk if he didn’t naturally require this of himself. A monk’s implements, choice of reading materials, his ruler for underlining passages that a monk might want to refer to later for reference or permanent memorization, his tensor lamp which, in the case of This Monk he brought with him from the other life, as it had been a hallowed item there first, maybe the most hallowed of all objects as he sat by the small circle of light late and later at night, after his parents and his three older sisters had gone to sleep long ago, as in legends . . .
“Where was I?” Teddy was apt to often ask himself. Indeed! A monk was often precisely in that position where all that he could do was to engage in a reiteration of his own sense of self, a self which was becoming steadily unhinged, refitted over the years with slacker clothing. So to speak! More and more one was prone to prayer and slow sulking fits, to a choking silence. This piebald monk, with his sad pumpkin face, is not penalized directly, for spending long hours organizing and admiring his baseball card collection. Certainly! Though neither is he encouraged. Never openly reprimanded or criticised on the spot, but still never encouraged--you could say he is indirectly penalised. It damages his soul, his self image; the long hours accrue a sense of guilt, which would be secret except that the very walls of the monastery seem to have eyes and ears. And thank God, it isn’t secret anyway, for that is the worst kind of guilt, which only the bearer knows of the burden of.
It was hard to tell with some of the rules at the monastery whether they were enacted for practical, economic reasons, or for discipline alone kind of randomly applied. Like the rule about only allowing two ice cubes in any drink. Was this because there really was a shortage of ice cubes, or not time or manpower enough to manufacture enough ice cubes for people, I mean monks, to use as many ice cubes they really wanted--and two is clearly the bare minimum as far as ice cubes are concerned. Or--which seems more likely to me, who am not a monk, but a passionate observer of this monastery (which is a huge consuming metaphor), I ask, is the two ice cube rule a way of teaching monks self-discipline, on the theory that any rule and the more rules the better, is good. Not to put too complicated a construction upon it.
November is the month when there is maximum equilibrium in the monastery. In all respects, the merciless light which the monks have to work by, is most favourable in November . . .
Posted by mortimer at 10:59 PM | Comments (4328)
November 01, 2005
Photo-Nihilism & The Landscape of Oblivion
“Photo-Nihilism”. It means taking pictures of what isn’t. A generation ago, the tagline for populist photography was the advertising slogan of Eastman Kodak: REMEMBER IT WITH PICTURES. Relentless marketing of this idea put cheap cameras in many eager hands. Family events, holidays, vacations, memorable occasions, these were their subjects. But now we are in a different world, and the use of photography might be to render that which is . . . forgettable. The stunning, never-to-be seen again world as vividly selected and seized by the person with a digital, automatic, free processing, camera. The new subject: a glittering wasteland that has been experienced by an existential witness. The riot of the present, precisely not going into any memory bank.
The “Kodak moment” was for the scapbook of the personal past, preserved only in the sentimental intention of the snapshot amateur. These scrapbooks were only randomly consulted; in fact the suggestion that photographs could preserve memories was a ruse, an advertising ploy that never had any basis in psychology or reality. General, untrackable, memory loss was more the result. Now, the unforseen, newly exciting job, which has a giddy generation enthralled, and comes with a devilish technology to aid and abet it, is to document the world that is looked upon but always disappearing. The landscape stared at in wonderment . . . and captured because it is in fact a picture of oblivion. It’s tagline shall be, that it RESISTS BEING REMEMBERED.
Posted by mortimer at 05:32 PM | Comments (5445)