11-01-2023, 12:57 AM
America has a power that makes certain people stand out, even the Everyman. The power comes of being ridiculous and naive and believing, deep down, that you're the best. The rat backed into a corner, with nothing else to lose, a feeling of relief that comes over us, even if we've never read Emily Dickinson, and we ball our fists and smile and, like Al Bundy, say "Let's rock."
This is the American Pragmatic Transcendental. We stole our God from the Jews and the Christians as sure as we took this Land from the Mexicans and Indians, and our guilt only strengthens our determination. Our youth is our maturity. The entire planet is an American Film Company, and even our personal defeats, alone and in tandem, see us going down in a blaze of glory.
The rest of the planet is our museum and our own continent is the world's amusement park. Fear, Death and Violence is one of our rides.
Who needs a Nazi in a Dictator Seat when you can have a Jew in a Director's Chair?
And America is merely a paper champion.
Whatever I thought about I felt. Fear, Pain, Guilt, Grief. I was a good wrestler, both as grappler and in the brawling with whatever is handy style. The neurological problems made me dangerous in the ring and behind the wheel. I walked, got rides, used buses and trains. I wandered through woods and up and down roads and slept on park benches. Then more women and their witchcraft that they're barely aware of twisted my emotions. I went on medication and got fat. I not only had no coordination skills, I was now out of shape and ugly. So played the inner games. Drugs and alcohol and smoking and insults and shameless flirting. I acted out Marx Brothers movies wherever I went. I didn't have W. C. Fields' juggling skills, but I had his sight gag and dangerous stunt abilities, and the machine-gun wit of Groucho Marx, and no filter for race or sex or religion or any thing of any kind.
That burned all my bridges. And then I took to the ways of Diogenes, and returned to working out like in my wrestling days. Lost the excess weight. Did magical rituals to balance my competing neurologies, allowing my left hand to know what my right hand is doing.
What I've stumbled upon is the Comedy of Cruelty. Art, Wrestling, Poetry, Magic. This is named after Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, an Experience, like a Mass or a Mystery Rite, a drama of tension and release. The Narratives and Characters and Plots and Symbols aren't important. Experience itself is. All present are being provoked and evoking joyous and disturbing things from within and all around.
Why? There is no why. Pure Experience. Not merely in a book or on a screen or stage, the whole of the world. The Cruelty is what is sacrificed, the very possibility of Cruelty as being inflicted or being suffered. A snuffing out, yes, the word suffered brought that word snuffing to mind, of Cruelty through Comedy. Transfiguration by Embrace.
I see that there is never any choice and that if there is such a thing as death, we're all dead already. Life and Death are simply metaphors, anyway. Like when the giant squid alien hit the Earth, in Watchmen, though it was only a fabricated design of Ozymandias, the warring nations leagued together, as the processes of the mind and body, bacteria, cell and parasite, to give the doctors and their probing instruments hell, and cast out the Djinn of the Disease of the Moment, and get on down the road with our eyes, the same ones we had since childhood, looking toward the sequel.
This is the American Pragmatic Transcendental. We stole our God from the Jews and the Christians as sure as we took this Land from the Mexicans and Indians, and our guilt only strengthens our determination. Our youth is our maturity. The entire planet is an American Film Company, and even our personal defeats, alone and in tandem, see us going down in a blaze of glory.
The rest of the planet is our museum and our own continent is the world's amusement park. Fear, Death and Violence is one of our rides.
Who needs a Nazi in a Dictator Seat when you can have a Jew in a Director's Chair?
And America is merely a paper champion.
Whatever I thought about I felt. Fear, Pain, Guilt, Grief. I was a good wrestler, both as grappler and in the brawling with whatever is handy style. The neurological problems made me dangerous in the ring and behind the wheel. I walked, got rides, used buses and trains. I wandered through woods and up and down roads and slept on park benches. Then more women and their witchcraft that they're barely aware of twisted my emotions. I went on medication and got fat. I not only had no coordination skills, I was now out of shape and ugly. So played the inner games. Drugs and alcohol and smoking and insults and shameless flirting. I acted out Marx Brothers movies wherever I went. I didn't have W. C. Fields' juggling skills, but I had his sight gag and dangerous stunt abilities, and the machine-gun wit of Groucho Marx, and no filter for race or sex or religion or any thing of any kind.
That burned all my bridges. And then I took to the ways of Diogenes, and returned to working out like in my wrestling days. Lost the excess weight. Did magical rituals to balance my competing neurologies, allowing my left hand to know what my right hand is doing.
What I've stumbled upon is the Comedy of Cruelty. Art, Wrestling, Poetry, Magic. This is named after Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, an Experience, like a Mass or a Mystery Rite, a drama of tension and release. The Narratives and Characters and Plots and Symbols aren't important. Experience itself is. All present are being provoked and evoking joyous and disturbing things from within and all around.
Why? There is no why. Pure Experience. Not merely in a book or on a screen or stage, the whole of the world. The Cruelty is what is sacrificed, the very possibility of Cruelty as being inflicted or being suffered. A snuffing out, yes, the word suffered brought that word snuffing to mind, of Cruelty through Comedy. Transfiguration by Embrace.
I see that there is never any choice and that if there is such a thing as death, we're all dead already. Life and Death are simply metaphors, anyway. Like when the giant squid alien hit the Earth, in Watchmen, though it was only a fabricated design of Ozymandias, the warring nations leagued together, as the processes of the mind and body, bacteria, cell and parasite, to give the doctors and their probing instruments hell, and cast out the Djinn of the Disease of the Moment, and get on down the road with our eyes, the same ones we had since childhood, looking toward the sequel.