Tag: fiction

Without Criteria: Laramie

On By NW FilbertIn Alias Harlequin, Art, creative writing, death, desire, fiction, identity, Travel, WritingLeave a comment

Picasso - don quixote

Laramie shoots and kills.  Laramie loves and captures.  Catches and release.

Riding along the ridge, singing, swearing, singing.  This journey’s a long time coming.

The need to get away.  For autonomy.  To be self-called.  To begin after all of this and that.  Recall and resound.  Taking stock.

He’s always been this way – a little undomesticated.  A touch of untamed wild.  Never finding a place.  Never quite belonging.

Boundaries forged by relation and response (-ability) all forwarding to limits, cages, toward constraints or restraint he can not abide.  Each vocation or program, discipline or field, replete with vocabularies and methods, praxis and behaviors misfitting to degrees he finds it hard to accept.  A ‘lone wolf,’ ‘self-made man,’ a patent failure or ‘with no name.’  Renegade?

He rides.  The shuffling flanks feel heavy under him, providing awareness of his own weight.  Considers Alias, and thinks how both do not belong.  How adamant and vehement he himself cries freedom, how Alias skinnies and wriggles past the gates.

How neither could ever be said to have ‘succeeded.’  How both (in his mind) would never have failed.  How neither and both are alike.  Neither and both are so different.  Neither and both alive.

Rides on.  Too old for all this but he’ll camp out tonight.  To prove to himself that he’s old both and wild.  Yet.  That he aches to be tamed and untame.  Yearns to belong, independently.  The want for a self that is selfless.  The urge for a course without banks.

Laramie wants to be world, alive.  Wants to be fertile and virile, viral, untrained.  Wants claimed and confessed-for, wants derided and praised.

“We’re the renegade scholars,” sometimes he would say, “learning the lingo and undoing like acid its heart.”  “We master and tell of its weakness, expert novitiates in all.”  “We unwind and unravel.  Travel and root.  We are rhizome,” he says, “drawn out from anywhere.  We absorb and vituperate, ingest and expel.”

He rides, and he rides, in love with the muscling flanks.  The wind tearing through hair and beard, blistering cheeks, stinging his eyes.  There are tears.  Laramie swallows.  The sorrow and joy are one.  Life and its death copulating…heaving and sweating, oily and dry to the bone.  He is brittle.

Laramie is needing to stop, and he feels it.  His body is singing – pain tells.  Time is ripe.  There’s an end.  It is coming.  Unrolling his pack…here it goes…

Alias Impassive

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Alias Harlequin, depression, Experience, fragments, loneliness, longing, Loss, Melancholy, Uncertainty, Writing8 Comments

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Alias awakens to disquiet.  Comprehension out of joint.  The motions, the motions, but nothing complies.  He does not feel so he touches the knee of his son.  Yes, he seems to be there.  Words with their sayings and tellings aren’t meaning.  Perhaps he hears.  Feels he doesn’t have pants on, but perceivably they’re there.  Goes to bathroom, masturbates, conjuring images of his love.  Disconnect.  He is not sure that he is here.  Or where it is he is.

Not the trees, not the road, not his car.  Many things are missing.  Not his thoughts.  Not pets, not postal service, not sky.  He’s come unfastened.

The motions, the motions, he makes coffee.  The motions, the motions, he showers.  But did he use shampoo?  Deodorize his pits?  Remember the drop of cream?  Are those his feet?  Walking into work they all take notice.  Is he bleeding?  Checks his hair, his face, his clothing.  Is he stinking unawares?  Deactivated and decoupled, unable to correlate.  He’s in his chair.

He’ll go for water.  He’ll check again.  He’ll look through letters, notes, to-dos, he’ll use his fingers.  He seems inoperable, confused.  They’re noticing.  He hasn’t spoken.  He puts on music.  Sits again.  He looks at language, hears some sounds.  He’s not authorial, nothing gives direction, nothing issues commands.    Disjointed and isolate.

He tries to sleep.  The dreams don’t follow, the eyes don’t rest.  He is confused.  He is detached.  He looks at pictures, attempts a memory.  Everything is near and quite intangible.  Everything is distant.  He cannot cry.  He cannot feel it.  He isn’t thinking anymore.  Something is unhinged.

The motions slow, the motions blur.  Not conscientious.  No recognize.  It seems there are duties.  It seems related.  It seems forgotten or never begun.  He’s too much there and not enough.  Unavoidable and out of sorts.  He cannot hide and there are others.  He tries the motions, and the motions, and they’re still without sound.  He can’t compute.  Head in his hands on his desk.  His eyes are burning.  He can’t find pain, locate discomfort.  No ability to take account.

He pushes objects.  Cuts his palm.  He walks again.  The motions, the motions.  There is no wind.  The sun pervasive.  He sees some plants.  They are not there.  They have not grown.  He is alone and everything knows this.  Dissociated.  He’ll try again.  What will he try?  He’ll try the motions, he’ll try the motions.

Alias motions with his hand.  It comes undone, it does not signal, there is no shadow.  Too much shadow.  He looks around.  There are the others.  They seem to wince, to look too much, to look away.  There is no commerce.  There is no passage.  He sits again.  He hears a sound.  He thinks the hearing.  He tries his luck.  There is no luck.  He wants to realize.  Anything.  Something.  Perhaps.  Maybe.  Motions, motions, motions.  He is not moving.  Things are vacant.

Alias impassive.  He tries to speak.  No one to speak with.  He works at thoughts.  All misremembered.  He’ll try again, he’ll try the motions, keep at the motions, the motions.  All the motions he will try.  He has no purpose.  The motions fail.  Vacuous and without intention.  Was only trying, was just to see.  He cannot see it.  The motions fail.  He moves again.  Things are dissolving.  Disestablished.  Without relation.

He calls the dog, he has no voice.  There’s no response.  He is within a vast alone.  He is not happy.  He is not sad.  He’s unaffected.  He tries the motions.  He tries again.  After all he will stop trying.  Sometime later he’ll give up, but now he tries.  He tries the motions.  He tries again.  He is disquiet, and without end…

Homo Scribus Attonbitus

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, Experimenctes, fiction, identity, Language, Literary References, meaning, Philosophy, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

a text from the archives…ready again, relevant, near…

hand eye heart

Homo Scribus Attonbitus 

(2012?)

Alias Alone

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, friendship, human, identity, Language, loneliness, longing, Loss, survival, Writing4 Comments

“it was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever.  Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost.”

–Samuel Beckett-

The silence.  The separation.  The solitude.  This is not novel, not uncanny, not even irregular or unexpected.

Betwixt Alias & Laramie, in fact, it would not be unusual for 1-3 years to pass without interpersonal communication.

The interruption, irregularity, or stretching intermittence of intimate interaction (current parlance “intensive interaction” – what they’re calling genuine conversation these days – a sort of treatment or therapeutic method for the autistic or ‘disabled,’ – akin to the ‘Talking Cure’ of psychoanalytics past) wasn’t really odd or unexpected or otherwise for Alias…merely unfortunate…he accustomed to his cycles and wishes, routines and desires – never mated very well with the world-at-large…his surround.

Still somehow Laramie’s “off” was different.

Perhaps.

No matter.

Alias driven back to Kafka, Beckett, Jabes, and other authors of silences whom he’s long aspired to – wishing (not so secretly) that he might require only some genuine solipsism or solitude, a kind of retreat or reversal from the cultural logorrhea (social media posts, artist’s talks, professional blogs and listservs, tweets/tumbs/grams & feeds) –

incessant reports on one’s self

– disgusting yet enticing,

If other humans ever happened to ‘like’ or ‘follow,’ ‘share’ or ‘pin-it’ or – could it be – actually care?

Alias entering thickets alone.  Laramie “off” (in every way his ‘right’).  No human (living, warm, alive, and responsive).  Alias turns to the ‘mind’ (texts, images, memories, dreams, literature, language, art, thoughts) – in any case or scenario – some abstracted cerebral, cognitive-capacity, the Human Imaginary.  The Pretend.

Meaning.    God.    Religion.    Truth.    Santa.    Satan.     Logic.     Math.

His pet feline “Luna(tic)” and fractured Chihuahua “Gizmo” as company.  And printed literature.  Recorded music.  Playback audio-visual-cinematography.  Machinic animations.  Pornography.  Movie.  Television.  Photographs.  WHATEVER.  Virtual Realities in the place of persons.

Attempts to stay alive, carry on, delude oneself that meaning and reason and experience and expression had validity and representation, communication and comprehension, and so forth.

To “keep calm…& carry on.”

Breathe.

Or…whatever.

Laramie: “OFF”

and

Alias: (“ON”)?

never the twain shall meet?

well, occasionally

(he says, he thinks, he imagines, she says, someone hopes)

The HUMAN (Alias surmises) – ‘an interminable thinking-speech,’ Alias think-speeches, “surely I read/heard/saw/overheard that somewhere.”

It’s Alias alone…free(?), unfettered, allowed, supposedly “ON”

Laramie – “OFF,” Alias sighs.

(and therefore no way to ‘think through’)…

***********************************

Point is, Alias thinks as he murmurs and walks along, there is no meaning, purpose, or point to it all.  “Think-writing” Laramie once called it (re: Alias’ poetry) – “simply inscriptions of progress, er, process…languaging what happens in your miniscule portion of the world (as you know it).”

Think-writing, write thinking, “fuck you!” Alias thinks (writes).  “How can one think without someone or something to think ‘off’ of or ‘with’ or ‘in relation to’?”  Alias grumbles – “yet you’re ‘OFF,’ gone, along, beyond, and so remains me, it, this ‘against,’ ‘in relation to,’ this withless ‘with’ (all versions of the same) ANYthing, EVERYthing, NOThing.”

Something!

“OFF” said Laramie, he

said to Alias, “simply ‘OFF’” like a switch, a light, a life, a dream, a thought, an inception of memory, an hope, ON/OFF, ON/OFF, there/gone, here/gone, you/I, yes/no,…’OFF’ said Laramie, he said to Alias that day, that last day, that latest traversal, that…

…dream,

imagining, encounter, hope, wish, Alias imaginary…

———————————-

…because no one cares, and there is surely no reason to (Alias ruminates).

Having always wanted, desired, craved (it might even be said) to be some strange, unrepeatable and unique (or recognizable) combination of human/person/lover/writer/philosopher/musician/writer/virile male and sensitive, omniscient (no, not ‘omniscient,’ not ‘all-knowing’ but ‘all-considering,’ ‘all-comprehending’ and ‘-allowing,’ ‘understanding’) homo sapien.

There is never any reason (Alias considers) that he should (in any way) be special, “special,” and yet, and yet…

There’s no smidgen of doubt (Alias i. e. Harlequin, piecemeal patchwork of human male – a man, a father, son, parent, professor, laborer, home-owner, some-time partner, friend, teammate, band member, student, child-like adult, mature-seeming child, and so forth…animal, patron, caretaker & guardian, public, customer, businessman, blah, blah, blah, descriptor, descriptor, word, word, term…) that Alias i.e. Harlequin, in relation to Laramie James Backstagger, in relation to J, J, K, T, A, H, O, I, Sam, Franz, Helene, Clarice, mom, sister, dad, daughter, cat, dog, cow, instructor, stranger, landscape, realm, city, genre, language, world…

wanted, even craved (it might be said)

being “special.”

Alias Harlequin.

Alone.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

A thousand shades from cynical to fine…

…medium nor method, mechanism nor machine matters…

…it’s simply the persons involved…

…the choices they make…

….ways they behave…

…what is made of it…

….making and interpreting…

…given the day, the moment, the situation…

…without matter or evidence or reason.

The world happens.

And then we die.

And then world continues.

Happens (for us) (me) (Alias) (Laramie) (you)

No more.

The equations very, VERY simple.

Here & Gone

Heaps of trouble in between

Self-causation

-regulation

Autopoeisis

 

 

Worstward ho

On By NW FilbertIn Language, Literature, meaning, Parataxis, Samuel Beckett, WritingLeave a comment

Worstward ho

samuel beckett

Laramie begs “OFF,” or, what happens is parting

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, communication, fragments, friendship, identity, loneliness, relationship, Writing2 Comments

What happens is parting…

The incommensurable does not lie outside of language.  It is language.

– Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica –

“Off” bothered Alias.  It aggravates Alias that Laramie only and simply, states and declares the term “off.”

Strikes him as unfair.  Short-shrift.   Foregone.  An easy conclusion.  A self-imposed or autocratic EXIT.  Cheap escape.

Conversation (that day) silenced (muted) and dulled.  It soured.  When participants elect not to speak their minds or piece, peace or conflict, new tensions are introduced.  Silence [chosen, selected, fought for (or against), willed] intentional silence effects scenarios like speech.  Withdrawal.

Alias tells him; ‘Refusal to speak equals a sort of speaking.  We are both ‘in it.’”

“Off.” Laramie repeated, simply, only, just “off.”  And, “the switch can be binary, non-complex, Alias, simply a choice – ‘I love you,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘I would prefer not to,’ – ‘no,’ – OFF – please allow me that.  I am tired.  You are my friend.  All is well.  It is good.  Life is hard.  Love is pain…OFF.”

The large, long, horizony cosmic swath of atmosphere containing and surrounding human interaction (in this case, in any case) snaps.  It fractures.  The environment (in this case, with the pronunciation of ‘OFF’) simply breaks.

There is quiet (as in) silent (as in) absence of sound, stillness of action, stasis of communion, of commerce, connection –

VACUUM.  REFUSAL.  A plea and a begging to STOP.  QUIT.  CEASE.  To not continue, to NOT go on.  A demanding request for an end.

Laramie states, speaks, invokes, complains, retorts, confesses, professes, declares and pleads and laments, quite simply, to his dearest, nearest and closest confidante, companion, friend and interlocutor – “OFF.”

Laramie chooses.

Alias wants to honor…

grieves, requests, rescinds,

carries on…

evoking ambiguity, anonymity, fiction and untruth.

The calf.

The finch and bluejay and weasel.

Deer, cow, pasture, thistle.

Friends and morning-glories.

The sun, the air; clouds and mid-day.

Company.

Revoked.

 

The Sickening of Stories

On By NW FilbertIn creative writing, fiction, Language, meaning, stories, Writing4 Comments

jose-parla-broken-language-exhibition-haunch-of-venison-recap-1

I am not certain why stories sicken me so.  By “sicken” perhaps I mean something closer to depletion or boredom, gluttedness or exhaustion.  By stories I mean shaped texts of language – narrative fictions, philosophical arguments, journals and declarations and ads.

“I don’t know why I told this story.  I could just as well have told another.  Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another.  Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”

– Samuel Beckett, The Expelled

It has something to do with that.  My own writings sicken me faster than others, but all writings, once entangled in plots, developing characters, or pursuing a narrative…tend me toward disgust.

The motion of “progress,” falsity of construction, illusion of meaning begins to fray as language gets “handled” or forced into order.  The squeezing and pressure and molding of shaped texts, especially as they develop into sections, seem bound to conform to the size of the creator.  Many texts start out wildly, with chaotic promise, almost infinite exploding potentials – but threads develop, and lines, sentences form, and shapes, causes and results, actions and repercussions, and ever so surely the mass is twisted to the size of a snake.  And then I’m tired, exhausted by “how alike they are.”  We are.  It is.

Language imploding and exploding.  This is what I want.  Language available like elements.  Language operative in a chaotic surround, like experiencing.  Language that doesn’t know next.  Language becoming, not necessarily or even especially something – just becoming within/without human.

So I read words, less to learn or be entertained, less to follow or empathize, less to argue or understand, and more to exist in a sea of potential communication and commerce, to respond, to be open and closed by each term and their relations, to go on.

As if language were oxygen, blood, water.  As if language were soil.  As if language were all these mystifying, crazy, strange, different and unknown others surrounding us everywhere.  As if language were environment.  Context.  Medium.  Not tool.  Not machinic.  Not discipline.  Not function.  Not at our service or in our control.

We know that it’s not.  It does indeed possess others – carries and transfers multitudes – times, cultures, histories, humans, vagaries of meanings.  It is untamed and unpredictable, available and unsolvable, like ourselves.  But we often use it for us rather than in or with us.  We often torment it into cages and patterns, (I’m doing it now) – forced representation, desiccated potentials – marks of expression or intention or persuasion or telling.

I declare.  I unravel.  I investigate.  I express.  I guess.  I wonder.  I commit a sound to form.  It leads.  I resist.  I say.  I listen.  It leads (each of us in particular ways).  I resist.  I ponder.  It takes shape.  Incites.  I want.  I resist.  I query.

Doing and undoing language becomes the only way to use it and avoid strangling it down to my size.  Persisting and resisting, experimenting and erasing, canceling / canceling-out, backwards, forwards, at the angular.  Listening to others.  Throwing in, throwing away.  Desist.  Insist.  Consist.  And delete.  Chaos and pattern.  Detangle, knot up.  Fracture.  Fragment.  Avoid.  A void.  Void and null and emergent.  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  The attempt to leave open.  It suffers to form.

Sickening me.

Laramie & Alias Conjure in the Woods

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, farming, identity, Language, Loss, Melancholy, Reflections, WritingLeave a comment

wordless wednesday-woods-trees-long-winding-road-dirt-road

Laramie and Alias followed the tree-lined road into the woods ostensibly seeking a lost calf trapped at the stream.   Lost and trapped.  Deciduous acres.  They shuffled the gravel in silence, which evolved to branches and leaves – a crackle and whisper.

Considering age and death, feeling lost and trapped – Alias.  Laramie pursuing a calf, something young.

“Sorrow is sorrow,” Alias vocalized in his head or his chest, his throat or his gut – wherever we hear ourselves.  “Aging – decay.  Watching one’s world erode.  Losing and trapped in the stream.”

Luckily alive after all of these years, Laramie felt hale and sturdy.  And the bluejays, the owls, finches and starlings.  The titmice.

Alias thought he might keep living each day “if I could think of at least one reason, event, thought or experience that justified enduring that day.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Laramie contributed, aware of Alias’ delimiting logic, “for you’re the only sanctioned arbiter in that case – fixing yourself to a very strange loop indeed.”

The trail of the calf, sunken hoofprints.  Age faltering for beauty, youth, and strength.  “someone refers to this as ‘an attachment to loss itself – a condition otherwise known as melancholy,” Alias intoned.

“For fuck’s sake Alias – is this how it’s gonna be?  The ‘apophatic’ way?  Via negativa? Only what isn’t there, what ya haven’t got – jabs at the pure potential?”

Fox, weevil, deer, cow.  “You’re only 54,” L declares.  “In a culture worshipping youth and perpetual childhood – the nubile and ageless and free – augmented and cyborg,” Alias retorts.  “Not me.”

“I told ya I choose ‘OFF’” Laramie chokes.

“I demand or command or beg of it,” he continued…”OFF.”

***************************

Alias the Conjurer

I drill and devour.

A storm, a tornado.

Construction.

Destruction.

WHO cares?

Effort.

A human with language.

HUMAN                                               LANGUAGE

Writers and speakers and singers and parents.  Wise men and theorists, children and fools.

LANGUAGE

SYMBOLOGY

DEATH (finitude) & LANGUAGE (infinite abstraction)

Grandiose and meaningless at one go

(not to overreach nor undersell).

It might matter

It might not

BEING

(we don’t know)

A bone.  A tomahawk.

Human creativity as, is, a war against death.

Fizzles & sparks.

Last ditch.                                                                                                                                                   Activity.

                                Efforts.                                                                                                                 Attempts.

LOVE

HOPE

ridiculous realities

MAINSTAYS

MAIN STAY(S)

In the main…

to stay.

ON

ON

ON

ON

To persist

Insist

Continue

                (against death)

Against death

Against death

– to act, to do, to create –

TO CONJURE.

************************************

Laramie rides.  OFF.

Alias goes further, deeper, further…on…(in)…

INSISTS                            PERSISTS                              CONSISTS

I, as human, consist as what I persist in insisting on.

= a composite “I.”

 

Ends – the Means to Get There; or, Laramie says “OFF.”

On By NW FilbertIn Art, death, depression, desire, Language, life, love, meaning, Writing7 Comments

ON OFF image

I drill. I devour.

Kafka, Blanchot, Derrida, Bartleby.  Pessoa, Nietzsche, Jabes, Beckett.

Into the absence of hope.

Of language.

Of body.

I drill and I devour.

Myself.

Vitality.

Capacity.

I try to think my end(s).

I want to get there.

I would like to make it to the end.

I would like to make the end.

I think.  I serve.  I love.  I ask.

I care.  I touch.  I say.  I listen.

I am not fulfilling.

I am never quite what is wanted.

I have never been “right” for a situation.

I am a person who tries very hard to be what is wanted.

I am a person who tries very hard to offer what is “good”.

How would I know?

– what is wanted?

– what is good?

I do not.

I am incapable.

But I DO know:

I AM NOT THAT.

(do not) BE HERE NOW.

simply : do not.

“I would prefer not to.”

“I will not”

No reason.

No anwer.

We are just humans.

Animals.

Purposeless.

Pointless.

Without reason(s).

Without meaning(s).

Without.

Still we go on

(for now)

Still we keep on

Still

On

On

On

OFF

(he said, said Laramie to Alias. “OFF.”  He said, said Laramie to Alias.  And then he was gone.  Really.  Gone.)

Sometimes it happens this way.

Sometimes.

OFF

Simply, over.

[Often, in my case and experience.  They come, they go.  There is a rush of blood to the brain and the loins.  There is something I assume the others refer to as “hope,” – some reason to live, to go on, to pertain.  Then OFF.  Binary.  Digital.  Technology.  Culture.  Beings-in-relation.  ON/OFF.  Lights.  ON/OFF.  Progress.  ON/OFF.  Will.  ON/OFF.  Love.  ON/OFF.  Value.  ON/OFF.  Need.  ON/OFF.  Mood.  ON/OFF.  Everything binary.  Irrational.  Abstract.  Illogical.  Happenings, events, occurrences.  ON/OFF.  ON/OFF.  Life.  ON/OFF.  Life.  ON/OFF.  Life.  ON/OFF.

Life.

ON/OFF.

We are coming to an end.

I am coming to end.

We each come, to end.

The End.

 

 

Laramie Poeticus

On By NW FilbertIn Aging, Art, being, Compromise, Experience, fiction, friendship, Language, life, meaning, nature, Poetry, Writing5 Comments

Laramie liked to think himself a poet.  One attuned, natural, native to his world(s).  He liked to think he had unique feelings, perhaps an “insight,” an acute attention – that maybe he saw just a little bit more than others saw.  And was able to say so.

A farmer-cowboy type from the upper Midwest, he played a lot of sports and performed muscled labor – at times enjoying the solitude of pasture rides and the company of large mammals.  He felt a “care,” not sure for what, suspect he’d call it a kind of “connection” – with crop growth, animals, the waters and the skies.  And felt he could say so.  And he could sing.  Musician, farmer, cowboy, son.  Husband, scientist, laboring man.  Father, friend, and “poet” (he might say).  Laramie James Backstagger, dearly known to Alias.

“When you’re making it – forming words or music – do you feel somehow that you’re ‘getting it’?” Alias might ask, as they ambled the fields chopping at thistles, remedying fence.  “Do words add to experience or just chop it up?  Diminish?  Reduce?” Alias chimed.

Laramie would go silent, plodding along, smelling and listening.  Looking.

At times they’d play basketball, tennis (this was all in their youth, Alias having blown out his knees at the pigskin).  And careful.

They both went on to cities: education, enlightenment, the ‘experience’ of cultural promises.  They still had their debts to pay.

“I mean, when you ‘see’ it, or ‘hear’ it, are immersed – it’s not seeing or hearing or sensing – am I right? It’s just being – and then – ?” Alias prodded, “and then – what happens?”  “You hear language, or find it or forge it, dream times or ‘intuit,’ you consider ways you’d be able to MARK it – note it down (letters or score) – recount or recreate it – even extend or rescind it – and that all seems like media to me: communication: expression or history or talk…but reduced.  Reduced to what YOU can comprise or compose – not the ‘same’ as the moments, trembling in the web, and borrowing, borrowing, borrowing – from the wind and the trees, weather and bees, family and learning, working and friends – and our culture! – all funneled and cored to some desiccated fraction of bone – eviscerated – ‘HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’: some words or an etude or painting.  Even action.  Even sowing or reaping or pruning or care…’HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’ – wow!  Really?!  Amazing!  One moment made this?!  AND WHAT CARES?  WHAT MATTERS?  WHAT PURPOSE OR POINT, BENEFIT OR CONSEQUENCE…the next ‘now’?!”

Alias could go on and on like this.  Often doing what he’d just described or decried.

And Laramie’d slow, maybe stop, often sit, and stare out.  Have a smoke (he didn’t smoke, but pretended – his children and wife didn’t like it).  And Alias would drink and get wiser.  A little calmer and sad.  And all might go quiet, save the world always humming.

Laramie Backstagger sighed.

“Well?  Whadda ya think?” challenged Alias – “how is it for you when you speak, feel or sing?”

And how would he know, ailing Laramie?  Been too many years of conflicting events and results and mixed feelings.  Too many miles that worked out without working, or failed for the working too much.  “I’m uncertain,” he said, “I’m uncertain.”  “But you’re pushing at something in me.”

By now Alias was off on his own like a mammal, had concocted a scent for to trail.  Maybe the ache was for sharing the thing they were sharing: agreement.  Maybe to get through the whole business at once, simultaneously.  Maybe to not be divided and different or just pieces of things – to be doubled or tripled or multiple?  Harlequin – pieceworked and patched, back then and now and some future.  An assemblage, a collage wanting melding.

“All uncertain,” Laramie said.  “I can’t know, just I do it and feelings will follow.  New ones.  Pains from smashed understandings, joys from promising starts, aches at the poorness I lend them – but something goes on, carries forth – it don’t end with the birds and the breeze.  The words have it too, and the voices.  The shapes and the meanings and lines.  Even tones.  It goes on, both the good and the ill, and I’m part, or it seems such.”

“How ‘bout you?” Laramie wants to know.  “Why do you carry on and keep blabbing,” he taunts.

“Just to borrow,” Harlequin murmurs.  “Just to steal.”  “To have something to say.  To keep silent.  To wish that it might carry on.”  “It’s what we’ve got, all these things.  Try as I might, I don’t know what else to do, and at times feel compelled, god dammit.  Like Foucault or Blanchot or Spinoza.  Or Buddha or Christ, Kafka or little Jane,” (little Jane was the crazy old lady – lived two miles from the Backstagger’s farm – she’d sparkle to company no matter the cause and just cackle and croon – mixing nonsense and stories, opinions and facts, just talking and talking and talking.  No one knew if it ceased when they left, it never stopped within range of the hearing).

“I hear you” said Laramie, “I see.”  To which Alias always replied “But you don’t – I don’t know that.  Have no method of saying it’s true.”  And they’d keep walking on…toward night.