The Eco-Gnomics of Love
If asked to arrange an introductory lecture on love in the time of capitalism, while remaining solidly aware of social verities, I’d decline. Because love’s monopoly on raw materials & exclusive right to draw a base profit from the meat of the rosy matter remain indisputable. One cannot simply go around exploiting love’s destructive traits to build an apologetics for money’s lofty lies. Its leafy green, ever-distant little stars, and butterfly-wing wimple are perverse. Its insatiable profundity, alone, has killed millions. And love will have none of it. What future should we predict for a civilization, when love is expected to come in on a dollar’s terms rather than spin among mis-whist- ling streetlamps? Notwithstanding their common propensity for scatological ruin, the mechanization of every field of human endeavor is a shade too far for love. Not to mention that heaven & infinity are reflected in the wires of its waxen bouquets, whereas capitalism’s dirty flowers merely stink to high heaven, tickle you real good, and then always leave you hankering for more.
To Dada Be or to Be Dada’d?
If one is intent on abolishing any element of warfare that might be inherent in the act of creation, they must eschew both the good sense of a defense and the nonsense of an offense too, opting instead for the sidereal asense of dreaming. I mean, damn the dichotomous! And, damn the dyads, too! Loves, if I die before anyone learns to sing what I write, know that I always suppressed a great desire to go west again, to explore the great unknown, go where no damn fool ever set a besotted foot before… O, what a horror it is, to find this grab-bag of clichés lurking inside the intellectual apparatus or, worse yet, trying to drive it. When manifestations of art and thought conspire toward state-sanctioned displays of ordure or misorder, we must organize and wipe it with Dada. Because when all else fails, dada. And what do we get out of going native in a dada spirit? Nothing more or less than safe harbors in our multiverses and replenished souls of adventure. See, the usual forces that govern us are deranged by the unfamiliar adjunct; i.e. polluted with freedom, if you will. Yes, and married to logic, art would live in incest, save for the acquisition of some alien DNA gained through a little bit of good ol’ asensical, artistic canoodling. And to plane or polish the ores one finds when unminding the mine adds immeasurably to an emancipatory disunderstanding of the known world, of our shadow-selves, et cetera. B/c, to see the Milky Way from here does not convey an adequate feeling of being in it, much less a sense of the spin within the spin of our spiraling in but one of its sparkling spokes, but to live a comfortable life, free of content or strife, is nothing but the conveyance of “adequate feeling,” and notwithstanding its bourgie aromas, it is yet the very measure of that faux-prophetic promise we seem destined to manifest by degrees and to decree to be the universal dream of all free-thinkers. Undoubtedly at present, we’re devoted to the making of this purple breeze & to the movement of our unpicked gnosis. But lest we be found out to be confused and rather ill-appointed, we feign insouciant nonchalance, while stepping out a swagger, passing for connoisseurs, at best, or, at worst, another generic brand of collateral damage in an undifferentiated mass of concombatants, which is to say, dada anyway, + or -.
Mock Poetic Climate
I devise artistically deformed conditions sufficient to concoct a poetry to raze the carrion flowers of our malformed appetites, a lyrical movement to oppose the statically narcissistic satisfactions of a bourgeois will, which should be a breeze, considering how long we’ve squandered our love on candy-coated knives and a pop apotheosis, but despite my best dithyrambic weavings, that auspicious bird of poetic passage defies my abilities & wisdom. It’s as if the ad man’s libertine blessings kindled a deathless flame within the body politic, one which easily consumes any surface-litter philadelphia & suffocates every revolutionary spark. Even the multiplex serendipities of chance cannot surmount or douse that id-led con-flagration which we never cease to serve or to pronounce. Perhaps the complete anarchist could assemble an outfit better-suited for the occasion, a little see-through number, at once risqué and yet desire-retardant; but for my part, the most I can muster is the high-waisted pantaloons of some penny-ante mouse brigade and an “all-you-can-eat” bib I got from Assault Night at the Fandango. You see, it’s not enough to simply feel that there ought to be something more fulfilling to do with our time than watching a planet die as we bite it on the neck; at some point, a poet must react to his absent reflection & cut the fool w/ the waddling ferocity of a sacred clown, to invigorate the revolutionary verse with ripe, well-timed farts & zerberts aimed squarely at the rationalistic, bourgeois notions of intra-generational time and resource management that the recent past has bequeathed to literature & the plastic arts, while asking them still to meaningfully respond to our zeit’s mean poltergeists & to account for all the hatred and vice daily-pressed from the grapes of our patriotic impulses & brewed into an artificially flavored freedom ale we drink to mask the assy taste of willful ignorance.
Art Fight
Swatting at death-charged clouds of joy like an inflatable noodle man selling cars, I fancy a haven for all those, like me, who cycle maniacally as a result of keeping the awful spigots open all the time. I’m awash in illogical nonsense in response to the onslaught of summer verdure wavering like ocean flora in the swampy air, through which blue birds, and red, dart past the sweet, ivory creams of gardenias and sugar mags, while being haunted, still, by the ravenous phantoms of commercial desires and the imprecise shock of terracide’s specter. This is what things have come to: a paradise being fed to ghosts by a gazillion reactionary dolts and rapt voluptuaries. And, if we prevent the beautiful from being redefined as titillations or as high (dollar) art, invariably, it becomes sacrosanct, which is cool and all, that is, until we cross the eyes of the beholders. Then, whatever icon we’d only chosen accidentally, as a stand-in for the “thing” of beauty, becomes the frenzied focal point of a spherical, ideological mitosis. It’s an ineradicable mark of our animal natures, the way we organically herd and then disperse biting at each other’s flanks. And, I might as well aim a grimace at the sun, for all the good it’ll do to wax poetic on any conundrum, but lest I fail to even show in the grand hippodrome of mortal guarantees, this poet shall bite with the best of them. Let the capitalists, theocrats, and bigots go on pretending they don’t understand, but this is an eternal jockeying for power. There will never be a haven for superannuated animals if we don’t cut through the porcine jargon and jettison leadership for service.
