Thu, 19 May 2005

Revisitation One: My Take On My Take On All This
(this is based on deb’s “my take on all this”, available at www.neuron.net/~snow/mytake.html. thanks to kyra, who gave me the idea in a sideways kinda way.)

No one could be certain whether or not the ship was sinking. There was no reason to think it was. No water was coming up over the side. No abrupt shift in the balance of the deck, no lurching, no portholes in view of nothing but breaking waves. Yet the animals were pacing in their cages, crying out for something no one seemed able to identify, and the captain was nowhere to be seen, spending yet another night in his cabin, with her, soon to be forced to put rigor and structure to his notions of love.

Constantinople did not like parties, but tonight he was restless and didnot want to be alone. He ended up along with the rushing tide of hisfriends at an unknown compartment. The music was blaring from unseen speakers hidden in the edges of the room, practically unseeable, and it irritated him not to have a face with which to connect the music. Constantinople played his music only for himself, and a few friends, of whom none of the throng who had led him here could truly be counted. He cursed himself for having so little discipline and in the same instant cursed his cursing; he knew he didn’t like parties and yet had come anyway. He started making his way toward the exit: an excruciatingly slow process through a sea of unfamiliar jackets, earrings, beer bottles and outlined lips. He then saw her, and he stopped, and did not know what to do.

If you, the reader, are with me, imagine if you will she is sitting in a corner, hands clasped together, legs crossed, eyes staring far off. Perhaps across the water, to a sea-port town — do not look too closely, for if she senses our attention she may discontinue her fantasies. “To begin: all writing is an act of love. But this is saying nothing, so I must continue.”

She had no need to look at him as he said this, for they had been telepathic for two months before they spoke to each other. They quickly discovered that they each had a different native tongue:

-mis palabras no puerden espressar lo mucho ce te amo.

-what does that mean?

-words cannot express how much i love you in spanish.

-oh. shalom, ya hachoo omlette de frommage.

-what does that mean?

-hello, i’d like a cheese omlette in hebrew, russian and french.

-french, bah. je conchie la langue francaise.

-what does that mean?

-i shit on the french language. in french.

-ah. no se sabe lo que quiere decir.

-we don’t know what that means. in spanish.

-in any language, even.

This seemed not to be a problem, until those fateful words:

-so you only love me in spanish, then?

-no, you misunderstand. the sentence was in spanish.

-so what language is your love in, then?

-um…i, i don’t…

At which point their still-budding affair was in desperate need of a translator.

—-

Constantinople was ok. He had good friends, a good ship, and a place to hang his circus for a time. He had chosen these. There is no need to look too far, he thought, to make myself happy. At times, impatience would creep its way into his otherwise slow and purposeful movements, particularly when he thought of her, as paradoxical as your favorite paradox or woman, which may well be one and the same. He would then go to the main deck, which looked out not upon the ocean (which would have certianly been a safer and more reasonable use of the room) but upon a model he had made by one of his crew, a perfect model of the view from Constantinople’s left rear balcony, the one which juts out from his bedroom over the city, both his love and his nemesis. He thrived and died alone, in the city, each model scaled to show the change and cycle of time in his town by the crewman who recieved news of Constantinople’s town by sealed and coded messages sent from townsfolk in his employ — at least until the town was overrun by devils who emptied them of their organs and salted the earth where the town once stood. The crewmember, whose name is best not said (according to the impotent author), modifies the vast model of the town as though this never happened, imagining wht changes would have taken place, should the lives of townspeople have never been stopped, or had they been made to stand and breathe again.

Such acts are not unheard of in the town where Constantinople is from.

—-

What happens is, she says we’re going to run away, off to the ocean, and you say no, you don’t want to anymore, those were in our younger days, now you stay, and you think of how she hasn’t really laughed since you called her crazy, not crazy like you thought was so romantic when you were spending your schoolnights with your panties around your ankles dreaming of getting out of whatever town your story contains and so ready to fling yourself screaming into the gaping maw of lunacy where all passions snarl and claw and fuck out of the unadulterated knowledge of what it means to be alive, no, you called her crazy like the women who count spilled beans on the dirty tile of the grocer’s floor, the crazy that makes you sad and sick and more than anything embarassed to watch, pissing in your pants and sucking on sores crazy, the playtime romance as dead as the light in your one good eye. You want her to stay and you want her to leave and you can’t tell where you’re going. You want her to stay and keep an eye out so you can get away with the {secret} when all the time she’s trying to whisper{it} in your ear:

want you to get down on your belly
want you to get down on your knees
want you to put your tongue inside of me
before we speak any more of your loyalties

but you won’t fuck her anymore, you say, and she gets very cranky.

Of course, we all knew who would give in the end, now, didn’t we.

—-

It seems so silly, now, to look back on the first wave of private practice geneticists and their creations, so sure they had solved all disease and malformation by rooting it out at the source code. So many supposedly perfect superbabies designed by questionaire and sequence splicing unable to stave off even the most meager of diseases, so many collapsed skulls, so many eyes gone sightless but such a movie-star quality of blue. It was soon a disreputale thing to be a geneticist, at least one who left academics for the big bucks of baby farming, and soon all the strip-mall labs went up for grabs again, the once-proud doctors sifting downward into the lower bardos of Aryan Nation backroom “repurifications”, third-world gender modifications, and the once-again prolific freakshow, of which no circus is complete without one.

A young old man resembling a lion brings all of his cubs out of the closet and sets them on the ground throughout the room. Their legs, which have never been used, have no strength, and need time to get used to the sway of the ship which the majority of the passengers scarecely even notice now. He watches them struggle to get from one unbouded section of carpet and sees that it is good. he begins to purr, one long deep purr rumbling contentedly, as if from the depths of an extinct volcano. He returned the cubs to his closet; he was to meet the captain tonight for reasons still unknown. This seems only fair to the geneticist, who is well-versed in the flux and shift of the merketplace; he has been many things before he was a geneticist, and will most likely be many things after.

The man talks to the cubs in their language, telling them he loves them, and they understand.

—-

Follow the waiters once they’ve left the table down to the bowels of the ship’s stern side. Follow them down and past to the kitchen where the staff runs from the butcher and hides. Watch him dance pas de deux, pulling cleavers from his boots as he hacks at the men and the walls. The chefs get him unarmed without a hint of alarm and lock him in the back bathroom stall. Through a crack in the door you can listen to him roar and bellow at whoever goes past. Were you to ask why he’d just sputter and sigh and swear that this time was the last. “I don’t know what I’ve done ‘til lucidity comes and wipes all this blood from my sight. I just want my knives, and to dance side to side, and to slash all your eyes by tonight.” Now the meat’s gone bad in the store. And the chefs are all tired and sore. And the butcher who dances in violent trances is cutting a hole in the floor.

—-

so, beardslee, you’re in love again. how beardslee of you.

you don’t understand. this is different. i have to think this out.

think this out?

she’s demanding proof of my love being a portable expression.

extricable from the terms you’ve fallen back on.

precisely.

are you at all familiar with the rules of logic?

—-

She liked good conversation. She only got a chance to have it when she was taking a break from her job, which was to be locked up with tiny scraps of paper and put on display down in the hold, performances every hour on the hour. Actually, this was only one of her jobs as a Certified Metaprogrammer (BM, Portstown MetaTechnical Institute and Grill, class of Kali Yuga). Nobody seemed to know what exactly a Metaprogrammer was, least of all an actual Metaprogrammer, who was either whacked to the gills on whatever chemical Consumer Responsibility magazine said the kids were doing that week or laying around in a stupor, but they were being sought for council by crisis-striken Post-Metaprogrammers, who used to be Metaprogrammers until the bills got to be too much of a hassle and really, let’s face it, laying around convinced you know the secrets of the universe won’t get you any closer to getting laid.

One of the ways Metaprogrammers occupy themselves, according to her instructor Gibreel Macadamia (who had a doctorate in Metaism, which is accomplished by suggesting the concept of Metaism without any of the core elements of Metaism through use of all concepts learned in Cheap Irony 205 and Pointless Cleverness 380), is to take all of the energy which would normally be used in torturing others and use it to torture themselves instead. This, which was always a sure crowd-pleaser, is known as the Small Knot, or Loop in the technical jargon. But nevermind that. Remember, what may seem obvious to the reader may not be as obvious to the author.

She spent lots of time below decks when not working, terrified of the sky,which seemed to suggest that the porthole view from her display case was not entirely accurate. To silence such fears she spent her time in the eddies and whorls of the seemingly endless party which passed from compartment to compartment, oblivious of time or lack of necessary mission equipment. Through this process she became shacked up with another Metaprogrammer, who explained his job as “enlightenment through captaining”, a tried and true Metaprogrammer’s trick. She had her doubts of his affections, despite his pleas, and all was nearly lost until a Translator showed up. She invited the translator in. His presence was a gift, of sorts — she had good reason to believe that they did need him, though perhaps not in the way he expected. This good reason is called Intuition, in the technical jargon.

When Constantinople, which was her partner’s name, got back from whatever he did atop the ship, he was pleased as Kool-Aid to see the translator because they were old friends and everything was simply complicatedly marvelous. He informed both of them that their difficulty in expressing their love was bound with their use of multiple languages, and would have to be stripped clean with the burning blade of symbolic logic.

“you see,” the translator said, “all writing *is* an act of love, if we are to equate some essential quality as being present both in writing and in love. discuss amongt yourselves and present me with a validation of that statement by 2200 hours. in the interim, i must check on my closet.”

—-

Maggie was a doll, primarily, except when she was bad, during which times she was a menace to society. Maggie was not the sort to do evil herself, no. She would suggest evil to others, evil which would occasionally take root and find a willing participant in the heart of whoever heard her voice. Being a doll, and a circus-doll at that, she came across many who would follow her hinted orders, which has made the cargo hold where the circus is staged a place sticky with salt and blood. Her hair was red, and she made songs with her hands, like any puppetmaster.

In college Maggie had studied theatre until somebody of consequence told her she was a bad actress. At that point being a bad actress was generally a synonym for someone who wouldn’t put out, so Maggie put out like nobody’s business and was still called a bad actress, so she burned down the theater and hitched a ride to the coast. Many people do not know this about her. They do know, however, that Maggie like to get into situations, primarily out of boredom, like someone trying to run from their shadow.

She once wrote research articles for a polygamous Hindu-Italian slumlord who wanted to marry her. She once crashed a wedding party and sang Ted “The Nuge” Nugent’s “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” in front of three hundred hokey-pokeying relatives of an unknown couple. She once took a fourteen year old suicidal genius hom with her to make sculpey-beads and, well, you get the picture.

Today she took out a slice of paper and began a letter to our woman, who lived on the other side of the ship:

“been having too much fun. sick to stomach. making friends
with an upstanding young man with strong hands and a solid
understanding of musculature. he’ll be crazy soon enough,
and we’ll be home soon enough. drugs and kisses.”

—-

It should be of no suprise that the translator/geneticist/gadabout, whosename is none other than Theodore J. Krabdovik, was once a Metaprogrammer too, until he was disbarred for certain unseemly incidents involving hope and patience. During that time he had written “The Translator’s Theories”, a seminal work in the Ted Krabdovik canon, portions of which survive against enormous odds.

“There are some metaprogrammers who think that torture is wrong. I have a hunch that there might be interesting results were our normal ‘Iadic’ loops opened up to a slightly larger controlled loop called, for my purposes, a ‘Diad’. Following this might be ‘Triad’ and ‘Quatrad’. For a more complicated understanding please see Figure 31-B [ed: these notes have been lost], which demonstrate how this theory holds to the Metaprogrammer’s Credo that if it feels wrong, do more of it, you wuss. Since developing this theory I have found some willing parties, who have been willing to experiment, and I have published my findings below, demonstrating the Metaprogrammer’s Credo that all problems can be solved via a quick fix, which generally consists of putting something in your mouth. [ed: this fragment is here cut off.]”

Ted looked at this fragment and wondered if there was something here he should remember, while he brought the cubs back out and watched them take their first steps.

—-

One of the chefs went to check on the butcher, hearing nothing from inside the stall, afraid to hold his ear to the door. The chef noticed water coming from the crack in the door and nearly realized what was happening by the time the hinges burst and the door slammed him into the far wall, shattering his bones, flooding the hall.

—-

There were once two people in the story and we have, you and I, experienced our first near-miss together. It’ll be nothing but from this point on. The party is over, the band has disbanded, and someone has started screaming. By day she dances alone, as if the steps could bring back what once was, and ancient battle in which she is the victor. Her jaw is clenched almost by habit. She is visible and vulnerable and has left a trail of clues, followed by you and I, after the fact, so sure of our notions.

—-

In the tide a weathered piece of looseleaf paper finds itself before us. It hopes we set it loose when we’re done.

Professor Hinkle, my love:

I have set upon the task as has been laid out and have run into some unexpected difficulties. I am as sure of ever of my convictions but have not been as able to solidify these notions structurally. I have no doubt that I am closing in on the solution in due time. This note is simply to keep you updated on oour progress:

x = writing, which is operantly defined as “a grammatically-ruled means of communicating information”. You may disagree with me on the grammar aspect, as you’ve explained your displeasure at the notion of still-living languages being encumbered with artificial rules of conduct; however, it is my argument that it is only due to a grammatical and syntactical skeleton that exceptions and variants on its rules can be said to exist at all. As such, the intent of communicating information belies the use of language, and thus if one is serious as to this definition one will take great pains to clarify the communicative process as much as possible. Is that not why we are doing this in the first place?

y = love. There is no proof of love, just as there is no definition of love. If it is not expressly manifest in the situation it is not there. The mention of an unprovable statement invalidates the compound statement ~x -> y. Since we cannot prove that y -> anything at all, we cannot even set up a transitive proof of the equivalence of x and y to a third statement z, not even if z = futility, operantly defined as the inherent inability to achieve set goals — we don’t know what the goals of love are, or why it makes people do the stupid things they do.

I can’t prove anything. It’s there or it isn’t.

yrs,

Constantinople Beardslee

—-

For nearly a century sailors have reported seeing strange animals off the coast of a small country which will change names and presidents and graves in the next few weeks, one more time. The animals are the size of large dolphins, but built differently, and despite swimming at high speed they seem to be furry mammals, but no one has ever seen one close enough to verify this. At night, while the crew sleeps, it is alleged these animals use their claws to climb aboard and feed off the storage lockers below deck, able somehow to bypass locks and doors. In the morning all that remains are paw-shaped prints on the deck, leading back to the ocean.

—-

She has been on a ship in the middle of the ocean without wind, and she is a crybaby but she laughs instead because it looks better on her resume, but when she is not laughing she thinks about exploding and how the stars don’t care at all whether we return, and how this thing has all been done before but she still reads it. I still read it. And you are to me everything I can’t have, I reach out, I want. That’s what I do I reach out

my hand

[which is very very very small]

the day the dream is turned off is the day she dies. it is not real. it is a dream. we are far. far. far.

in the morning our skin is sensitive and it feels good to touch you.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #