SIX APHORISMS
I.
In the enduring night, she bleeds, a silent martyr to sick misery. An itch surges through her veins, a shudder nestles in her shoulders. Awoken from her lethargic stupor, she faces a solitary page, barely legible, and discards it—a ritual of disappointment. Defence by abstraction fails her; the thought of a dull blade at her wrists persists.
A parasite dwells within, and nests in her unconsciousness. It wiggles and feeds and it’s the colour of Tuesday. It wants her to flee – to spread her wings and land among a select few cities in America and Europe. The poet’s proximity to a dream of distant lands is a key symptom of this delusion of the pen. It’s all held off to next fall, then spring, and soon, it rids itself of the tangible and corporeal.
This puppet poet exists only as host, subservient to the little mouthings of a parasite she can never quite place. She may stand before a thousand mirrors, all presenting a separate image of herself, and still, she would embellish the significance of a freckle on her right cheek and wonder if she resembled Sexton
She gets out her notepad and scribbles a line. It’s pretty and nearly complete. Her stomach growls. She forgot to get groceries. Supper time comes and goes, and the bug continues to feast. The poem is complete; the poetry, mere larvae. Words writhe upon the page, and she weeps, knowing they will never mature. One by one, she beats them into the page with her palms, convinced they’re dead. They aren’t. They never will be.
She passes out on the couch and is consumed.
II.
We are a generation hidden among the cadavers of truth, peering into an abyss where philosophers, scientists, and priests lie in eternal repose. From our precipice, we marvel at the ideologues, their funeral cosmetology carefully preserving a song of humanity beneath the shade of an epitaph.
In our alienation from assuredness, we choose a corpse to cling to, captivated by its rotten tongue. With pliers in hand, we extract each tooth, replacing our own, vainly hoping to savor a meal of forgotten rhetoric. It’s simpler to regurgitate and defend these decayed theories, to vilify their burial.
Weary are the hands grasping at our legs as we march along the streets bathing in our golden hue of egotism. We wield the musings of the dead as both weapon and tool, shouting their echoes down the avenue.
Incessant analysis is murder, a relentless dissection of what little remains.
III.
Failure to do anything is a victory contra existence. Satisfaction in such a failure is a miraculous revolt against the faculty of Being.
IV.
Once we fled the primordial forests and caves in favour of walled convention centres, God considered us a wash.
V.
The first burial killed us. It spat at nature and said, ‘We are no longer part of your earth, and we forbid our bodies to be food and sustenance for your system of life.’ So began centuries of normative rhetoric.
VI.
Walking along the boulevards of Montparnasse, I admire a semblance of order. People, and people. Scarves warming their necks, cigarettes yellowing their teeth. It all seems so very consistent. Then I recall that the naked ape is none other than a clothed pretender – a lover of disguise. As if layers of elegance have ever deflected the throes of internal inexactitude.
GIF by Max Shoham.
J.M. Ó FAOLÁIN:
MAXWELL NORMAN’S ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Burial - Tunes 2011-2019 (2019)
Technically a compilation, but one organized with such care for sequence and flow it feels like a massive two-hour odyssey of an album. Burial makes tunes for the fog-fucked city streets, for trees like witch’s claws underneath behemoths of glass and steel. The ambience at the start, on “State Forest” and “Beachfires,” sculpts a hollow cavern as massive as the Hang Son Doong in Vietnam. Driving garage beats like rattling subway trains carry “Claustro” and “Street Halo” forward. And the multitude of ten-minute-plus epics, from the borderline-showcase squalls of sound on “Rival Dealer” to the insistent percussive rattle of “Kindred” and the sonar melodies of “Rough Sleeper,” prove that Burial can sink his claws in and not let go. A masterpiece of 21st century electronic music.