Anthermic

Once more round the bend, once more to upend. Time again spinning ass over head, time again to drop the Elephant Word balloon like lead. This weeks image:

Was it cold? Was it only the sensation of heat leaving his body? A negative reaction, neither endothermic, creating nothing, leaving nothing, no bonds, no connections in its wake, and not exothermic. Anthermic. Was the word just a way to relate the abstraction of lose, the loss of heat, its at times painful diffusion, leeched out by invisible forces, by things that could not be seen, could not be heard – could only be felt? What kinds of things would, could, do something like that? Where would it come from, and why?

The sunlight was coming head on, bounding in heavily and deeply yellow, packets of heat quanta nearly spent as they brushed across the world, tracing lines upon the surfaces of the room. The last few degrees of the angle that makes the day. Did the sun keep it away?

The eye tired and ready to close, the head slumping, the shoulders sunken. Shadows blurring out the form of the baseboards, the moldings strapped to the walls and now retreating from the firm lines, blending black, melting into the joint of floor and ceiling they conceal, losing the rigidity of their shape, softening in the dark. But beneath a blanket there is warmth? A force like the sun, that would drive them away, the gnawing maws on the other side of sight. But a few feet of woven cloth?

There are no blankets here. Only the stiff back of this chair. Only the feeling, leeching, like unsaturated rock, deep in the darkness. A place for fasting, retreating from the world, enduring their privations, their feasting. This place will be the seat where-in I endure them, my cave, my Alverna.

scringer terpem

A bit late in posting the Elephant Words story from last week. Thanking Givers takes ol' Bones up into that part of NY state where when you point at a map and ask, what is in this area, your friend says "Nothing." They're not quite wired up out there is what I am saying.

Here is last week's image, and this week's image will be forthcoming in another couple days.

Diane sat herself down on the couch. She raised one leg up and rested the heel of her boot on the table in front of her, put the bottle to her lips and tipped it back. She lowered the bottle down onto the buckle of her belt and closed her eyes. She pictured her sister sitting on the edge of a dock, legs dangling over into the water, trying to hear the splash of the water over the sounds of the party, the chattering voices. Her sister in a cotton dress, a slender scarf around her neck. Dragonflies buzzing nearby. She couldn’t picture the sun in the sky, as if it were an eclipse and the world had turned diffuse with thin, sickly, dying light, the colors all fading into shades.

“Is that a scringer terpem?”

Hideous. No hair, except ratty bits at the sides of his head, brushed out and bushy like all the sad young topiaries would ever hope to be. Dark-rimmed glasses with bits of silver on the temples, expensive jeans from a trendy shop down on Broadway, a stylish sweater. His forty-ish chin and the line of his jaw was raw and red through the stubble he’d grown out since early that morning.

Already she was tired of thinking about him.

“A what?” she asked, wholly un-amused.

“On the table.” There were two packets there. One looked like a candy wrapper, opened and likely half empty. The first looked like a packet, but it was a guitar pick.

“What is a scringer terpem?”

“It’s a prophylactic. A condom organically made.”

Hideous and now nauseating. One in ten thousand of these kinds of guys is actually genuine, actually worth half a damn and capable of telling you something about books or music. They’ve been outsiders with two good god damn’s of a rat’s ass for what anybody wanted them to think and they are living in spectacular lofts and having dinner parties full of photographers and musicians and fashion-fiends. Some have probably even met Bowie. You can see it in the way they walk, in how they’ve dressed themselves. How they look you in the eye. How they know to leave you alone when you are sitting on a couch resting a beer on your belt buckle. If there is a universal signal for leave me the hell alone for five minutes, it is a beer on the belt buckle. This guy is two years into books on how to seduce women, on image shaping courses and more than likely a little baggie full of blue triangles. He is bloated around the eyes, newly divorced after leaving his wife. Addicted to porn, too chicken shit to skip a day of work, probably in banking and responsible for processing promissory notes. He doesn’t even have a secretary he can fantasize over in the stall of the bathroom, touching himself with his pants around his ankles. He doesn’t even have an office, doesn’t know enough to leave a body alone, or that esoterically bringing up a sexual reference in an unwanted conversation ought to be punishable with violence.

Diane’s bare shoulders flex into the couch, pushing her forward. His eyes follow her about six inches below her collar. She closes her eyes as she stands up, then opens them again when she is over his head. There is a radiator behind the lounge chairs set up in the dining room by the window.

“That’s a packet of mints. I’m going over there now.”

IMELICHOLIDON

I got all stumbling upon Elephant Words some months back, oddly enough, just about the time the daring dude behind Dead Rat's Press was gathering up a small army of ne'er-do-wells for yon Postcard Fiction Collaborative.

It's switched on, let me tell you. As is our one and fine Dilettantsia's new Candor literary magazine. They say it is a place where women can spar with text and culture. They've sold me.

But getting to the elephents and their words, I decided I'm going to embrace the burst culture a bit more fully, for a stint anyway, and elephant it up from the sidelines (and like most things, it's all Warren Ellis' fault. So once a week, from here on through the end of the year I'll be posting a story that's wandered out to the road from the dark corners of my skull and hitch-hiked its way to you here.

This week's inspiration:

IMELICHOLIDON

He had something to say but didn’t know how to say it. He had been trying. Wandering the aisles he scanned the arrangements of the produce. Stacks of potatoes, melons set out alone. Heaps of apples on one side, and the next line over green beans. He compared the prices with the shapes of fruit. Kiwi, $.99 each. Oranges, $2.59 per bag (they were in season). The wooden racks reliably holding the cauliflower and the broccoli had the sense of a stall, a farmers roadside stand, of an outside world brought inside among the metal shelves, the plastic labels, stand-up coolers, and the cardboard displays. He got lost in the basic commerce of food, of sustenance, and when he found himself again he was still unsure. Still mute within the thing’s importance.

He read books, taking in the characters, their voices. Translating their desires into words, their words into the coded messages of their desires and passions, of their hatreds. He copied out passages that worked and passages that failed, and he wrote over then in pen where he should put his own words, stealing the cadence of the other writer out of the thought his own paces were unsuitable to the job.

Reciting out loud he addressed picture frames and mirrors, the shoulders of his shirts hanging in the closet. Notes were typed on a typewriter, outlines drawn with webbed diagrams in notebooks, but it sounded wrong. The words didn’t look right on the page, the meaning taken away with the sound of his voice.

Walks in the park found him trailing joggers growing ever distant or staring into the bottoms of the fountain.

At the movies he looked for the shoes the actors wore, the movements of their shoulders. He watched how they turned their heads when they followed their eyes or how their eyes moved after they turned their heads. How their motions conveyed the expression of their person, of their character. He listened. He mouthed along with the words once he had seen the film a time or two, mimicking the movements of their jaw in impersonation, to capture the voice, the resonance of the palette.

There was an old Hi-Fi in the closet. He tried different arrangements of the speakers. He pointed them at one another, away, inside of windows. He took out a microphone and read onto tape. Continuous sections, then fragments, then he used a dual deck to splice the material together. He felt as though each run-through the sound degraded. Each re-dub created more and more static. He put on CDs and read through the liner notes when the music played.

He tried to name it. He called it Roger. Helios. Imelicholidon. The Trigger. Cage. Belfast.

A séance told him he was the reincarnation of Robert E. Lee. He walked around his apartment with a saber strapped to his hip, and used a southern accent he imagined a genteel southern general might use. He said y’all once or twice.

One morning he made breakfast. He just made breakfast. He didn’t try to think of how the pattern of the yokes or the distance from the bacon on the plate would look and what it would mean. What the flowers he had run out that morning to buy said standing in the vase on the table. How the fullness of the orange juice glass mattered.

Last night, he had said it. Said it the right way.

He talks in his sleep.

On Promethea, and our need for Her

They posted this over on Newsarama today.

To say that Promethea sets me off is an understatement. When I write, I try to clip the very lowest edges of that story with my reaching, out-stretched hand. It is a mountain, like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or Blood Meridian, which I have set for myself to cross when I approach a story.

The asshole in me regards anyone who is not suitably impressed by Promethea as a story and an artifact worthy of awe in a very poor light, and the more enumerated renderings of those comments said asshole makes are sentiments I keep to myself.

I truly and utterly love this story, and I'm very happy with the comments I wrote, so I wanted to post them here as well.

To tell you that I nearly cry every time I read issue 17, at the image of Christ on the cross, would compel you to take up immediately and read the entire series (if you had ever actually met me, such would be the impression you had of what strokes of evocation it would take to induce such a reaction in a person such as myself).

I am many things, mostly yeti, but surely not what any reasonable person would consider a christian and sure as hell never cry, but that scene, the evocation of that image, is the most pronounced rendering of Jesus I have ever encountered, and does more to reconcile the nature of Christ’s value as a figure worthy of the highest regard than any words ever uttered by a pastor asking for a tithe.

It IS a long, drawn out essay on magic done as a comic book series. But name anything even remotely like that? “Everything is magic" is entirely the point and has never been made so completely and with such applomb.

The storytelling weaves together Moore's musings on magic and the nature of imagination, and J. H. William's pages, his layouts and paneling, and José Villarrubia's coloring follow in richness the examples set by Eisner or Steranko. They break out of any commonplace ideals set for modern comics storytelling to create something singular, something that holds up a mirror to ourselves to show we are, in fact, capable of much more than we have ever been lead to believe. I for one appreciate that sentiment.

Promethea incorporates nearly all of existence into the story. It is not a mistake that Moore uses a significant portion of the text to mirror the content and ancient role of the tarot and the kabbalah, because both of those systems served to provide a cosmological framework for a time when science was not capable of doing so. They were structured schema organizing observable phenomena into a coherence with the unexplainable chaos of life.

That Moore was able to realign these elements with our modern understanding of time, evolution, and nature I think is actual magic, because he is able to use such admittedly esoteric quanta to the effect of compelling the reader further into a story which illustrates, again and again, how the value of humanity MUST rest not in our derisive contempt of the mistakes we have made, but in how we move forward from failure, in inches by the decade at times, towards being worthy of the time we have on this world.

The christ scene, and countless others, strike at the base of what I believe, and by projection (because I have never met him but I argue he believes the same), Moore believes: that humanity has, and will continue to, attack, destroy, and punish the people who have found through their own awareness, talents, and abilities the means to make of us a better people and a better world, but that through the suffering of fools and tyrants and despots upon those who seek to remove chains and hatred we find the road from darkness up into light.

Moore exults, and I freely admit and support this, writers, as well as artists, poets, philosophers, and teachers. He exults those who would bring us light, which should be pretty obvious from the title, and I am thankful that he does, because there is not nearly enough of that in this world.

The Day of Attrition

I have no juice in my gonads of creativity at the moment. I am stealing everything. I'm robbing Warren Ellis blind. I just tackled Chabon, punched him in the back of the head, and ran off with his notebook. His wallet I tossed into the bushes where he’ll never find it, just the way we used to do it in high-school. If Robert McKee wants my blood he can come and fucking try.

In the meantime, I need a crutch, to hobble on my ill-fitting writing legs up these uneven hills with jutting rocks everywhere that don’t hide any secrets more interesting that telling of how a big fucking block of ice the size of Canada once raped the shit out of this place. Not exactly impressive.

That dog is wearing a foot-brace, or a wrap or something, and he still doesn’t look as ridiculous as the fat old man in a Montauk t-shirt and running shorts. Still need to get into the bathroom seeing as how I’m not actually competent enough to drink coffe without snorting it all over myself like an idiot, like this orange shirted dude here.

You could choke on the humidity out there and I don't even need to think about a jacket for another three weeks yet that dude has a parka on and moon-boots. He is also holding an open umbrella under a dry, overcast sky and carries a plastic bag filled with what looks like rotten weeds so there you have it.

The problem is still mine, because these people are offering me gold, more shit than I could ever want, and I can't mine a fucking thing out it.

Time just to throw away the shovel, shut down the drill, and just dig my fingers into the rocks until they are bloody. Someday it'll all be interesting again.

Worn, Torn, Yet to be Reborn

Kicked in the gut today, so try as I try, there was nothing for it. A moment maybe somewhere in there, when it looked like it might come out into the light, but really all for naught. Got run pretty deep into the ground yesterday, face-first into the muck, to suck and choke on blubbering sick pooled thickly in the gutter, and all that.

I've got egg on my face, a stone in the pit of my stomach, and a stake in my heart. So no more blathering.

Go listen here: Kalpana

And we got some new stuff up for Septermber: Postcard Fiction Collaborative

Jet Boy Meets the Angel of the Odd

Think the kinda place where no one cares
What your livin for
And Jet Boys so preoccupied
He don't care 'bout before

I do well to remember this, because I look back now, at folders and files and backed-up verbal ammunition, and it occurs to me that I've been going about all of this very, very poorly. I've kept too much space between all of the buckets, when they could be closer, the little slithery tentacles and pokers and things playing with one another. What do they say these days, you have to let kids get dirty, get em all covered up with germs building those 5th dimensional ecologies where size doesn't matter. Or maybe its sixth.

I'm still trying to get around inside Ideaspace, with Alan Moore reeling up out of grain of wood and the patterns of sidewalk concrete and telling me things I can barely remember in the lower dimensions. Apparently he appears before Warren Ellis in a flying hoverchair that may or may not be capable of traveling through 7 dimensions.

Get to be my second favorite prime number today.