The Three Greatest Arts

… if oratory be the art of speaking well, its object and ultimate end must be to speak well.

~ Quintilian

At the first station I took a leak, at the second, I bought a watch.

The third, there was a stand selling plush kitties, at the final, there was the car waiting.

Art is always expectant, imperfect, ephemeral. We don’t wonder too much about it.

The warmth of the crotch is always eternal, spiraling into the memory like a worm.

A bore, an ice-fostered whisper, a bore, a drill, a bore, a breaking-point.

Thank you.

So, the first art: THEOLOGY.



A slut that rapes sweetly.

I remember a conversation about five summers ago when I sought to show my lady that my grasp of a certain concept was not quite like the grasp that the others had, that it was harder and softer (paradoxically) at the same time and quite the thing to be desired … to find at the foot of the bed, red, horny, and ready for the end … oh yeah! To find the source of All. It’s not hard. It’s now. Myself. Take it or leave it. That’s what IT says.

Thank you.

Now, the second art: PHILOSOPHY.

An irredeemable purveyor of anxious thought.

Someone who orders books, someone one cannot trust. Someone … that’s it.

A one.

A footstep in the hallway as one tries to sleep. A plan for the future all fallen to hell. A plague, a stylish nymph, a tribe of women slavering like hounds.

Fuck philosophy! Too many toads. I’d push her out the window, if I were Bukowski, but like him, I’d only have that devil HER crawl back again.

Suck the Triad: POETRY.

Demotion recollected in tranquility. Devolution tortured by its opposite. Demonstration of the lust for life that renders pointless the fangs of the omnipotent ONE.

My teeth want to bite but I’ve a calcium deficiency.

Specter I. {& Only}

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear

~ T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

A prompt ending is preferable. But much of life persists, against our wishes. And what is a wish but a specter or phantasm of reason? At many levels reason fails. It is not at the level of the impersonal that such failure sends the person into an abyss of self-doubt, despair, and finally: the terror of dissolution. No. It is at the level of the personal, the part of us connected with this vibrating world of factuality and the dehydrating self-concern of others, that we finally see, with two eyes (and with infinite loathing), nothing but reflections of the hideous form that is desire.

If the above paragraph sounds out-dated and Romantic, it is because all that needs to be said has already been said – one needs only to listen. One can waste time teaching Bataille, the Situationist movement, the post-modern monsters who seek only to create more text for university classrooms, etc. (and we’ll have a Blast doing it!); but to do so is to ignore the fact that it’s all over. We are done. We have had done … with everything. The end of the story is this: there is no story, there is only the specter of a soul seeking salvation. And – dear God! – there is no such thing. Nothing at all.

The ignoble smile of a woman, which promises only future disappointment, is a far more bitter and organ-grinding poison to me than alcohol! I’d rather rot poisonously from inside, the gin coursing through my veins, than crumble alone in the darkness of a woman’s apathy. Her eyes do not appear! Whatever they were. I no longer remember the warmth of her gaze: only the harsh glare of her own personal – to me impersonal – light.

When one stands upon a hill of power, a point from which the world is observed and all is planned … When one stands such, it is hard to believe that the mind is finite. It is hard to imagine that humankind ever conceived of something so absurd as the Infinite. Damp cellars and dry brains seem more like it … a conglomeration of the human condition.

I remember an afternoon in Liverpool, fine ale pouring from casks beneath a well-worn counter. The stench of ages, and all that … But so what?

I remember a morning in New Orleans, fire under my feet and terror in my veins. The glory of dying youth!

I remember an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and eyes and infinite future and love and clandestine sex and prompt reciprocation of my emotions and a glorious revelation of shared ideals and promises and something that must be written and the power of a man and a woman contra naturam (speaking Latin as we went) and a sign and a signal and a whiff of life and lips and kisses on a subway platform not willing to say goodnight … I remember all this and die like a monster writhing in its own filth

Prose Poem, with some quotes

... Though I have lost

Much lustre of my native brightness, lost

To be beloved of God, I have not lost

To love, at least contemplate and admire,

What I see excellent in good, or fair,

Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.

Milton, Paradise Regained

Liberalism, in thought and life, is a virtue. The dim green mists of Merovingian or Carolingian spaces give way to the porcelain perfection of an English countryside, and finally to a clapboard puritanical hometown where everybody knows your name. To be recognized immediately for what you are (as Christ recognized Satan in Paradise Regained)rather than for Who you are, is to be dragged onto a cumbersome subway platform at 2:00 AM by some weirdo who needs a place to stay and a little swig of whatever you've got in your laptop bag. She demands a prose kinema, indeed. Sapphic charms and Attic graces notwithstanding, when there is snow on the ground and liquor in the pouch, it takes little effort to induce a confession of love. All who draw breath beneath this sickly sun desire love, and all who desire love fear death. Nothing novel about that! Once in the bluest of moons, however, we encounter a force that rends us, and forces a view of primordial notions unconnected to the personality. The peace of the materialist - for whom all emotion is but an outpouring of chemicals - gives way to the war of the idealist: for whom Life is a series of steps, on the way to a firm platform from which to address eternity. Only, there is no eternity, just as there is no "I". I used to think so. I used to pretend that I had something to say, a message for the world. I used to think that art would subdue idiocy; that idiocy would give up its chaotic secrets, and lend to art some unpredictable something that would permit originality, once again. Not hardly. Faulkner said it well, in his little Nobel Prize speech:

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

Over what, exactly? Over what will we prevail? I look about me and see no enemy but the deception of my own nature. Sartre was wrong: there IS such a thing as human nature. It is in our nature to selfishly draw others into our cocoon of comfort, where we feel all will be well, if only enough people would place their rubber stamp upon our decree of autonomy, and fall in line with our will. Everyone does this. Parents want children who will mirror them; men want women who will praise them to the stars ... and women want the same from men. The heroic life is a necessary myth. An enemy is necessary. To be liberal means to grant freedom of action to all, and to glory in the diversity of this egregious globe.

una salus victis nullam sperare salutem

~ Virgil