The Content of Social Explanation

Precisely because of the present,                the national obsession with 
uplift 
                                                                   and 
open doors and 




choices
and


finally, 


alternatives.  (Their [           ] proliferation presented as endless.)


This feeling? Manufactured. This knowledge? A fabrication, A
bowl 


of 


pills. 


Home is a closed circuit where my vibration, indistinguishable from yours, is no different than the fluttering of a flag in still air. A phenomenon explained by science, by principles of aeroelasticity.

The Sounds of Love

more like:
The Bonds of Love in the Age of Late Capital: A Romance


Time. Why I do not know but I am certain that getting off on the 1/2 hour always feels worse. It's made to.


The design. How to make it a part of you. How to develop an infrastructure efficient in 
Disappointment Management. 


(I need not worry about him overreading, overhearing, knowing, and yet)


And yet she, even over the sound of her chosen instrument even within the vacuum can hear, 
even                 these                clicks 
disguised 
draw her near.


     The moment passes.


     She: outside the door, hitting it, caution to the wind
     Me: inside. now with my charge (and a different kind of pushing) BE STILL. 



 Bitters. best served in a dry Manhattan. 

distressed, perplexed, in despair, persecuted, forsaken, destroyed and

saved by this thought: that I, like all things, will turn to waste

                         and now a preface where I intended a tractate. 

for years in my bed I lay awake convinced I would soon be dead. That he and she, my parents, they, not they but their hired gun, would do me in. That I would go--gently, resigned (of my civilized departure) I was certain. That I believed, at age five, that this---immanent death---was my lot. That I believed--

I. No longer a broken consciousness, but one bid to live
   by the most pious disturbances. it's a, it's a wonderful, life is beautiful, the beautiful mrs., mr. smith  
   goes to, or, all over again. Never again
   would anyone (not ever would
   anyone) mistake these
   For a few dollars more. 


II. For the love of. Terrifying that we mistake, collectively, desire for death, even when & where
    perfectly illuminated.
    We, royal we of this impervious colony, we expect:   cinema instead of newspapers. innovation by
    machine living. feeling robots. eugenics, still, to solve the problem of too menny. 


Would that my hand could learn to betray (you can take the girl out of. you can teach a dog. but you can't lead a horse to), could find itself, could feel compelled to say to write to you must say words as long as their are any about her, my mother. But she is dead, and my bereavement, if and where it transcends the immediate loss, the loss of her is (me: metallurgist not metal worker) deformed, a filament through which my body is able to receive the blow of additional loss.                
For my
                         part I confess that I never valued life as she did. I never thought myself fit to live beyond    
                         December. A moment of recognition, metallic taste, a preface to my mouth, my nose, my


                         lungs filled with the dirty water of the Detroit River, the detritus of industry.  No
                         black tongue, neither rocks nor blades. The absence of a sharp edge. And still---


the trouble with parasites is


What is a preface but a manifesto? And if, when, even after we realize it is all only a question of parsing


conduplicatio. each thing a repetition of the self-same. saved: we will turn to waste. i will fill your lungs. you will bite your tongue. 

this, in spring, in october

I.  The persistence of an image. The image of a noose dropping from the sky, the ceiling, from inside my  

    umbrella, from the marquee downtown, from the marquee that spells: MIDNIGHT IN PAIS. That 

    rogue r, refusing illumination. 

    I wish it would drop. 

II. In Paris. In Paris we decided--we decided, we or he, oh who can tell! who can tell sadness from love? 

    -- we decided that Paris was overrated. The polish, the pretense, the pork! Proof positive of sustained 

    anti- semitism! But they didn't know you were coming, I offer. They always know. It's like this 

    everywhere, sweetheart.  Just another country. Pais.  "He stuck his head in my mouth, scratched away   

     at my larynx – perhaps a small seed of death was stuck there."

III. Those objectionable flourescent lights, they make this stream possible, make this car-go. I crane my 

      neck upward. I see inside the squares and am sure I'm getting cancer. 

IV. Will it be this way, always? 

      What, precisely? 

      

      It, that irreverent referent. 

      What, in the century that will follow my death and all the time before. What has been constant? 

      Name me, crushed larynx. The other parts influence only timbre. To prevent the localisation of the  

      inflammation it has been the habit to apply leeches. Where does writing originate for you: From the 

      larynx, from the imagination. 

American Savage

American Savage

 I do not presume to claim that

                                                    Yet I know, moreover, I have discovered.

 Here I could see clearly 
 (It is clear to me that)

                                                     I have seen and I am suffering.

I am personally more and more obsessed by

I have felt with incomparable accuracy,
                                                     That America is full of
                         have spent all of my time absorbing (the task of accumulating and increasing)
                         and am becoming well acquainted with (the state of things)

The atmosphere! le monde quotidienne.

American civilization is based, in spite of its early traditions

                                                     That life in America is full of

                                                     the strange [“How much does he make”?] the inhuman. 
That life in America is based, in spite of its early traditions

Prostitution is paid kindness. The classic question is. Here in Newark I have been able to gauge.    
Often I have had the impression that life in Amer-

ica is based             on an utter disregard for human emotions.

in that there is no world in which we may refresh eachother

I. The dream was unimportant. 

   That it reoccured last night in the form of a second, a more public act, does not grant it greater import.  

   I'm learning, on a curve 

   (or maybe I'm leaning) 

   to be suspicious of persistence. 

                                                                         (she married her stalker, but it didn't last. couldn't.)

II. I tell myself this, but I was no less tempted, yesterday a.m, to use this space to record and think the    

    dream through. I began to write, but my fingers locked, full stop, mid sentence. It was not that familiar  

    feeling of kinetic mutiny causing me pause---that internal phenomena that causes your hands to  

    abandon ship on a foreseen (prosaic) nightmare---but fear. Fear of expressing myself too simply.   

    Fearful, too, of being understood. 

                                                                         (i meant it. pain no words can render)

III. What persists: the detritus of details. longer hair, his, not mine. an auditorium. red, velvet seats replete with cigarette 
      burns. a flash of a scene, rounded by dialog. the sudden appearance of a former teammate. "Engaged," she says, 
      presenting her ring (and her fiance).        enter: lady macbeth.  the slow rise of a murderous impulse---hers not mine--- 
      that I can feel no less.

                                                                            

                                                                           (please show me to the lifeboat). 

There, rest. No more suffering for you.

I sit in a room, my office, typing at my desk. In front of me, at eye level, is a plant ( just the right amount of sunlight) that I will very likely kill, and my thoughts go from here to my mother. I think thoughts (inchoate) about rootlessness and the impossibility of living beyond her. 


I think about this house, hers, and what is left of her. I think: I want to write about it, I want to write about it all, but my eyes are fixed on this plant, this thing, this reminder of what I will never again have: a mother to tend to it (to me) to make it, the plant (this life) better than it is. 


 Recompense for the six others that I inherited--and killed--after my mother's death, this plant, despite living past its projected expiry, and despite my watchful eye (eye level) is wilting. Yet rather than transplant it, rather than do the very thing (fertile ground) that will keep it alive, I do nothing. I commit to no plan of action, but continue to obsess and observe it but myself too, in the face of it.  Contemplative, I cannot but think after nine months of staring that I must want the plant to die, that it the plant, my mother's green thumb, lost on me doesn't matter much.  I recognize and rise as music fills the room that I have tried but failed to render it, this plant, analogous to one of those things dripping with sentiment that have come to serve as proof of life, like "the silver" for families of greater wealth, or the wedding veil bag the dress, how could she wear it, so primitive? for those with mothers who had weddings. 


My mother, of course, had neither, but she left me nonetheless, and with the perfect knowledge that "fair" and "deserving" are adjectives to be reserved for the qualification of a supreme fiction she never complained, she lived her pain, she worked her whole life and saw death and was stunningly beautiful.  she lost what little money she had and then her hair and use of her legs and then her life to cancer and used sparingly, if ever, and only as the faintest praise.