This is a bit from a short story I am working on.
Look at the history of beauty and you will see that great beauty is the byproduct of absolute horror.
DAY 1
All I have is two hands, twenty-six letters, and the truth.
DAY 2
Lets all drink. Drink to life. Drink to death. Drink until your entrails rot within. Drink until the muse can no longer find you. Find you alone, in darkness and vomit. Words create you, become you, alienate you, at times cause love. They are the nothing that is. By definition they define. They bind without translation from heart to heart, from mind to mind. Control them so as not to be controlled. Work to understand them, nothing about them is permanent. Their meaning has already changed for me. They age. Some live and convey. Some never reach paper or air never having a chance to become. The universal mind remains incomplete. Drink to that. Put down the glass and dream of music to heal a corrupt and tortured world. I am not yet prepared to become a memory, yet.
DAY 3
I sit in a room. I sit in a chair in a room. I sit on a gray chair in a blue room. I sit on a gray chair in a room painted blue. I sit on a gray overstuffed chair in a blue room. I sit on a gray overstuffed chair in a blue room with a short tan carpet. I sit on a gray chair in a blue room with a tan carpet surrounded by objects. I sit on a gray chair in a blue room with a short tan carpet surrounded by objects created by man; the exceptions are several fish a green potted plant and myself. I sit on a gray chair typing in a blue room, short tan carpet, living things mix with man made objects. I sit in a gray chair typing in an attempt to extract meaning from the man made objects that surround me. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room typing in the hopes that brilliance will spring from my fingers onto paper with the dream of becoming immortal among the passing. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room, with blue eyes, eyes with the ability to take in the shapes, which surround me. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room typing, trying to describe that which my blue eyes see. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room typing to avoid becoming as soulless as the brushed aluminum lights above my head, lights that jut from a black base several inches to my right. The aluminum contains wires that then branch off into five shoots that mirror the five shoots of the plat which sits potted diagonally across from the lights. I sit in a gray chair, the room is blue or rather the walls are blue, I am unable to distinguish any particular color with which to describe the room therefor I am describing the room as being blue because of the walls which are the reason that I call the space which I am occupying a room, the walls are blue not the room. I sit in a room with a black entertainment system, the television and stereo are black, the VCR is black, and a black suitcase sits in the corner it has been there for some time. I sit in a room with blue walls. I sit in a room with blue walls typing, my left leg rests on my right leg at a forty five-degree angle, and my pants are blue and white. I sit in a room typing; my right foot rests on a short tan carpet. I sit in a blue room typing nothing about what I feel, I could write like this for days without giving you any sense of the room in which I sit nor the feelings and emotions which are rushing through me as I type, this room can never be accurately described it can be seen and experienced but never accurately described. I could write about the room in which I now sit and you will never be able to see it as I do, now how can I ever be expected to describe others or myself or an emotion accurately, it is impossible. A sense of this room is all that I can offer you, a sense of myself is all I can offer you. Yes it will be fragmented and jagged in its tone and form in order to crate a feeling within you which comes from me, it may never work, it may be futile but I guess it is as noble as anything else. I sit.
DAY 4
Oh great muse, oh Diane goddesses of night. Oh shit something come to me that makes the clatter of keys become music and redemption. Tireless noise, a finger dropping to key triggering a mechanism. Clack; ink on page in a preconceived form. Puts enough of these ink blots together and uncover the psyche. What a dirty unsophisticated process I have let myself become a part of. I should have become a painter, regardless of the fact that I have no innate feeling for the medium. Writing is conducted by the mind and fingers, and sometimes, with luck, the heart. But painting requires the entire body to become involved. You can cover your own body in paint. You can swim in paint. Masturbate and mix the result with paint. Paint visibly stains you, becomes one with your skin. Words roll away, water off oil coat. Paint moves and congeals without sound; it does its job without chatter. Words must be written, typed, or uttered. This vulgar thing.
?DAY 5
Imagine this. What if the only possible method of creation was suicide? A shotgun blast to the head and you are understood as blood mixes with words scattered across the wall with a virtuosi touch. It is your deepest thoughts, your untold desires, beauty, density, ecstasy for all to admire and no bleach can was it away. A drunken businessman hangs himself in his study. His dog pukes on the floor. Empty bottles dull the leather of books, created by the deaths of others. So he kicks away his small footstool by rocking back and forth. He descends, his neck snaps, the rope holds his weight and a symphony bursts forth from his twitching body. The whole world hears his song, they stop, they listen without being asked and this man who has never played a note in his life has created more beauty than any living person on the planet. Finally they understand. No questions would be left unanswered the song is their for the questions, containing all answers in terms of one man. A beautiful young actress with red hair slits her wrists. The result is more powerful than any abstract expressionist ever dreamed possible. A housewife overdoses on pills and vodka, the Guggenheim is put to shame. Well I put in my time muse. Im here; you know where to find me.
DAY 6
Writers of my generation have gone in a direction of excess. Not that I am not impressed by some of their works but they can be, at times, nauseatingly over the top. (I just referred to a number of faceless millions of approximately my age as a generation. That was a mistake. That was ridiculous. Oh well, I started it.) Too superfluous with their words, no one is careful; no one crafts, least of all me. We ripe open scabs out of rage and boredom and expect the public to lap up the blood. We give nothing but heart-aching realism. Gone is sacrifice. Gone is the greater good, for we can see none. We would rather drone on and on in the guise of genius about cultural phenomenon. Blather about pop culture. Self deprecate and self-refrece as a means of showing you, the old and vapid, how witty and classless we all are. We are brilliant. We have something to say. We can right the wrongs of the world with self-richness and narcissism. Oh, woe is me but dont feel bad because at least I am not an empty shell of sixties rhetoric. No, I know better than you do. Civil rights, sexual freedom, Vietnam...please, we are so beyond that. We are so politically correct in our scathing denouements of all that you stand for. Bullshit! We are empty. We are fatherless. We are tattooed and pierced because our skin makes us uncomfortable. Do you wonder why I gave up writing? Do you care? Do you have any concept, Mr. portable laptop, of what that work was about?
We need to look back. We need to look back with fresh eyes. What work of literature in the last a forty or fifty year has any power of its own? Is it not all slight nods and winks to the real writers of the past? Is this a stupid question? Are words dead, has the language changed so much that it can no longer be beautiful? Must it be a fluffy, cute, sensational, life affirming, life hating, one sided...have we forgotten that words can last centuries without loosing their desired impact on a reader? Will anything of this new century last beyond the point when society forgets about the sit-coms we make fun of yet base our lives on? What is the greatest sentence ever written? Who will write the next great American novel? I thought I knew these answers once. Once I knew much more than I know now. Would you like to know where that faith and knowledge went? Do I? Am I just typing to hear the sound of keys striking paper? Am I screaming into the void for its own sake? Do I really believe that this process will bring me immortality? Did Hemingway? Does Voneguett? How much must one experience before they are valid as an artist? Have I walked that tightrope far enough? Would I be a better writer if I were a junky instead of a fucking drunk? At least the room around me has disappeared for fifteen minutes. My heart rate is stable. My breathing is deep and controlled. I have lost myself in the process. I have remembered what I forgot. I put down the bottle. I have focused without focus. If I didnt hate the Buddhist subtext of it I would call this meditative. Or have I simply fallen into the trap of picking at my own scabs, how does the blood taste?
DAY 7
This machine just keeps humming. My head is killing me. Every day, day in and day out, Oh, just a drink or two, do I even think to fool myself with the old lies? Give in, you give in anyway. This kind of justification is of no use to anyone. This whole process of pretending. I think being inside is getting to me. No one is here, but I can hear their wheels turning outside. I can feel their voices. The door is locked. Is the door locked? The door is locked. At least on the streets I was faceless, they where scared of me. I was the dirty insect. They knew not my fear of their crushing boots. In hear I am at their mercy. After a shower and a pair of Larrys clothes I am victim. I am subject to their rules again. Eating, sleeping, this halfhearted attempted at writing. Theyre breathing down my neck through the walls, eight stories up, locked in a room.
For the sake of clarification I am actually writing on a laptop computer not a typewriter. I just fucking hate to think that I am using a computer, its against the principal of the whole process. There is no click, clack, click, and clack. So, if I refer to this machine as a typewriter you will forgive me. I need to hear the sounds of the imagined typewriter keys. What difference does it make anyway? Who am I writing to? Whats your life like? When was the last time you had sex? Are you drunk? Are you drunk because you believe that it will produce some sort of artistic epiphany? Are you drunk because you just cant deal with the pair of threes that life dealt you? How old are you? You no nothing about me. With very few exceptions none of you ever will. With that said, you cant judge me. You can judge only the words and the form that the words take. You can only take what I choose to give you. That which I can not articulate or choose not to articulate is mine and mine alone. Im not even sure if I believe that! Am I hiding something from myself? If so then this entire work is evil at best. You are a conspirator. You are creating this work. You are imposing your own thoughts and values upon it. There is no intrinsic meaning hear. If youre looking for answers or a hero, look elsewhere.
DAY 8
I cant describe the simplest detail, no one can. Meaning is created within. I am only giving you a set of tools. You have to build your own tree-house. Away from it all, height in trees, alone with the wind, breath.... Equinox or Solstice. Do you know the difference? Am I a better person for knowing? You can all do this you know. You just have to shut off the fucking TV, put down the bong and write. Create your world. Think. It cant hurt. Who fucking knows you might become famous. Thats what you all want, isnt it? Im not going to belittle Warhol by putting his quote in here. One of handed comment and thats all they remember you for. Most people dont even know that you are the one who said it, they just know the stupid phrase. Does that piss you off Andy? Or do you just look at us all through your sunglasses with your mouth open and say WOW! You, such a beautiful person and so many that I have never known and so few that I do. The ones with the talent, the ones who live with fault and beauty, The honest ones, (No one is entirely honest). The people who sweat in the middle of winter. The ones who will watch the same movie five hundred times and cry at the same part because it hits something so genuine inside them that they dont even know what it is.
Look at the history of beauty and you will see that great beauty is the byproduct of absolute horror.
DAY 1
All I have is two hands, twenty-six letters, and the truth.
DAY 2
Lets all drink. Drink to life. Drink to death. Drink until your entrails rot within. Drink until the muse can no longer find you. Find you alone, in darkness and vomit. Words create you, become you, alienate you, at times cause love. They are the nothing that is. By definition they define. They bind without translation from heart to heart, from mind to mind. Control them so as not to be controlled. Work to understand them, nothing about them is permanent. Their meaning has already changed for me. They age. Some live and convey. Some never reach paper or air never having a chance to become. The universal mind remains incomplete. Drink to that. Put down the glass and dream of music to heal a corrupt and tortured world. I am not yet prepared to become a memory, yet.
DAY 3
I sit in a room. I sit in a chair in a room. I sit on a gray chair in a blue room. I sit on a gray chair in a room painted blue. I sit on a gray overstuffed chair in a blue room. I sit on a gray overstuffed chair in a blue room with a short tan carpet. I sit on a gray chair in a blue room with a tan carpet surrounded by objects. I sit on a gray chair in a blue room with a short tan carpet surrounded by objects created by man; the exceptions are several fish a green potted plant and myself. I sit on a gray chair typing in a blue room, short tan carpet, living things mix with man made objects. I sit in a gray chair typing in an attempt to extract meaning from the man made objects that surround me. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room typing in the hopes that brilliance will spring from my fingers onto paper with the dream of becoming immortal among the passing. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room, with blue eyes, eyes with the ability to take in the shapes, which surround me. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room typing, trying to describe that which my blue eyes see. I sit in a gray chair in a blue room typing to avoid becoming as soulless as the brushed aluminum lights above my head, lights that jut from a black base several inches to my right. The aluminum contains wires that then branch off into five shoots that mirror the five shoots of the plat which sits potted diagonally across from the lights. I sit in a gray chair, the room is blue or rather the walls are blue, I am unable to distinguish any particular color with which to describe the room therefor I am describing the room as being blue because of the walls which are the reason that I call the space which I am occupying a room, the walls are blue not the room. I sit in a room with a black entertainment system, the television and stereo are black, the VCR is black, and a black suitcase sits in the corner it has been there for some time. I sit in a room with blue walls. I sit in a room with blue walls typing, my left leg rests on my right leg at a forty five-degree angle, and my pants are blue and white. I sit in a room typing; my right foot rests on a short tan carpet. I sit in a blue room typing nothing about what I feel, I could write like this for days without giving you any sense of the room in which I sit nor the feelings and emotions which are rushing through me as I type, this room can never be accurately described it can be seen and experienced but never accurately described. I could write about the room in which I now sit and you will never be able to see it as I do, now how can I ever be expected to describe others or myself or an emotion accurately, it is impossible. A sense of this room is all that I can offer you, a sense of myself is all I can offer you. Yes it will be fragmented and jagged in its tone and form in order to crate a feeling within you which comes from me, it may never work, it may be futile but I guess it is as noble as anything else. I sit.
DAY 4
Oh great muse, oh Diane goddesses of night. Oh shit something come to me that makes the clatter of keys become music and redemption. Tireless noise, a finger dropping to key triggering a mechanism. Clack; ink on page in a preconceived form. Puts enough of these ink blots together and uncover the psyche. What a dirty unsophisticated process I have let myself become a part of. I should have become a painter, regardless of the fact that I have no innate feeling for the medium. Writing is conducted by the mind and fingers, and sometimes, with luck, the heart. But painting requires the entire body to become involved. You can cover your own body in paint. You can swim in paint. Masturbate and mix the result with paint. Paint visibly stains you, becomes one with your skin. Words roll away, water off oil coat. Paint moves and congeals without sound; it does its job without chatter. Words must be written, typed, or uttered. This vulgar thing.
?DAY 5
Imagine this. What if the only possible method of creation was suicide? A shotgun blast to the head and you are understood as blood mixes with words scattered across the wall with a virtuosi touch. It is your deepest thoughts, your untold desires, beauty, density, ecstasy for all to admire and no bleach can was it away. A drunken businessman hangs himself in his study. His dog pukes on the floor. Empty bottles dull the leather of books, created by the deaths of others. So he kicks away his small footstool by rocking back and forth. He descends, his neck snaps, the rope holds his weight and a symphony bursts forth from his twitching body. The whole world hears his song, they stop, they listen without being asked and this man who has never played a note in his life has created more beauty than any living person on the planet. Finally they understand. No questions would be left unanswered the song is their for the questions, containing all answers in terms of one man. A beautiful young actress with red hair slits her wrists. The result is more powerful than any abstract expressionist ever dreamed possible. A housewife overdoses on pills and vodka, the Guggenheim is put to shame. Well I put in my time muse. Im here; you know where to find me.
DAY 6
Writers of my generation have gone in a direction of excess. Not that I am not impressed by some of their works but they can be, at times, nauseatingly over the top. (I just referred to a number of faceless millions of approximately my age as a generation. That was a mistake. That was ridiculous. Oh well, I started it.) Too superfluous with their words, no one is careful; no one crafts, least of all me. We ripe open scabs out of rage and boredom and expect the public to lap up the blood. We give nothing but heart-aching realism. Gone is sacrifice. Gone is the greater good, for we can see none. We would rather drone on and on in the guise of genius about cultural phenomenon. Blather about pop culture. Self deprecate and self-refrece as a means of showing you, the old and vapid, how witty and classless we all are. We are brilliant. We have something to say. We can right the wrongs of the world with self-richness and narcissism. Oh, woe is me but dont feel bad because at least I am not an empty shell of sixties rhetoric. No, I know better than you do. Civil rights, sexual freedom, Vietnam...please, we are so beyond that. We are so politically correct in our scathing denouements of all that you stand for. Bullshit! We are empty. We are fatherless. We are tattooed and pierced because our skin makes us uncomfortable. Do you wonder why I gave up writing? Do you care? Do you have any concept, Mr. portable laptop, of what that work was about?
We need to look back. We need to look back with fresh eyes. What work of literature in the last a forty or fifty year has any power of its own? Is it not all slight nods and winks to the real writers of the past? Is this a stupid question? Are words dead, has the language changed so much that it can no longer be beautiful? Must it be a fluffy, cute, sensational, life affirming, life hating, one sided...have we forgotten that words can last centuries without loosing their desired impact on a reader? Will anything of this new century last beyond the point when society forgets about the sit-coms we make fun of yet base our lives on? What is the greatest sentence ever written? Who will write the next great American novel? I thought I knew these answers once. Once I knew much more than I know now. Would you like to know where that faith and knowledge went? Do I? Am I just typing to hear the sound of keys striking paper? Am I screaming into the void for its own sake? Do I really believe that this process will bring me immortality? Did Hemingway? Does Voneguett? How much must one experience before they are valid as an artist? Have I walked that tightrope far enough? Would I be a better writer if I were a junky instead of a fucking drunk? At least the room around me has disappeared for fifteen minutes. My heart rate is stable. My breathing is deep and controlled. I have lost myself in the process. I have remembered what I forgot. I put down the bottle. I have focused without focus. If I didnt hate the Buddhist subtext of it I would call this meditative. Or have I simply fallen into the trap of picking at my own scabs, how does the blood taste?
DAY 7
This machine just keeps humming. My head is killing me. Every day, day in and day out, Oh, just a drink or two, do I even think to fool myself with the old lies? Give in, you give in anyway. This kind of justification is of no use to anyone. This whole process of pretending. I think being inside is getting to me. No one is here, but I can hear their wheels turning outside. I can feel their voices. The door is locked. Is the door locked? The door is locked. At least on the streets I was faceless, they where scared of me. I was the dirty insect. They knew not my fear of their crushing boots. In hear I am at their mercy. After a shower and a pair of Larrys clothes I am victim. I am subject to their rules again. Eating, sleeping, this halfhearted attempted at writing. Theyre breathing down my neck through the walls, eight stories up, locked in a room.
For the sake of clarification I am actually writing on a laptop computer not a typewriter. I just fucking hate to think that I am using a computer, its against the principal of the whole process. There is no click, clack, click, and clack. So, if I refer to this machine as a typewriter you will forgive me. I need to hear the sounds of the imagined typewriter keys. What difference does it make anyway? Who am I writing to? Whats your life like? When was the last time you had sex? Are you drunk? Are you drunk because you believe that it will produce some sort of artistic epiphany? Are you drunk because you just cant deal with the pair of threes that life dealt you? How old are you? You no nothing about me. With very few exceptions none of you ever will. With that said, you cant judge me. You can judge only the words and the form that the words take. You can only take what I choose to give you. That which I can not articulate or choose not to articulate is mine and mine alone. Im not even sure if I believe that! Am I hiding something from myself? If so then this entire work is evil at best. You are a conspirator. You are creating this work. You are imposing your own thoughts and values upon it. There is no intrinsic meaning hear. If youre looking for answers or a hero, look elsewhere.
DAY 8
I cant describe the simplest detail, no one can. Meaning is created within. I am only giving you a set of tools. You have to build your own tree-house. Away from it all, height in trees, alone with the wind, breath.... Equinox or Solstice. Do you know the difference? Am I a better person for knowing? You can all do this you know. You just have to shut off the fucking TV, put down the bong and write. Create your world. Think. It cant hurt. Who fucking knows you might become famous. Thats what you all want, isnt it? Im not going to belittle Warhol by putting his quote in here. One of handed comment and thats all they remember you for. Most people dont even know that you are the one who said it, they just know the stupid phrase. Does that piss you off Andy? Or do you just look at us all through your sunglasses with your mouth open and say WOW! You, such a beautiful person and so many that I have never known and so few that I do. The ones with the talent, the ones who live with fault and beauty, The honest ones, (No one is entirely honest). The people who sweat in the middle of winter. The ones who will watch the same movie five hundred times and cry at the same part because it hits something so genuine inside them that they dont even know what it is.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Anyways, hi
Pith