“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.” -Albert Einstein

The best and worst of times are now rubbing up against each other. We are now entering a realm where time is blowing, stretching the screeches of saxophones to the highest tones unheard. Crying through suburban trees and the high rises of a thousand cities, through canyons, forests, and frozen wastes where it sometimes stops. A moment may be all the time we have left. The singer says, “I got the blues this time, this time I got the blues for sure.” Time may be losing control. The players are beginning to look confused. Dizzy¹ ain’t where he used to be; he feels like the numbers have changed, the count is off and the time signatures have been persistently transformed by Salvador². Signed by time means it’s an official document and this document declares we need more time! What do we want? We want more time, all the time in the line! Gather it up, cook it up, and share it with a junky friend. The needle like the tip of a mountain spears an extra second. Place it on the tip of my tongue and I am immortal for a little while. Didn't you check the expiration date? Open the lid and smell; time has spoiled everything. Our packages will never be delivered. The sea I'm adrift in doesn't want me anymore. Time, the storm, is destroying symbols and metaphors. Even when I crash, who will hear me? The hourglass is empty. My seconds like grains of sand dance in the poetry of a heartbeat, pumping life into a tune not yet written.

  
 I’m seeing this like a truncated be-bop introduction. Not talking ‘Trane³ either but Bird.⁴ Bird is the rule of flight. Bird changes the rules of flight. I wanted to take that train but in my heart I knew I could only make my melody connection If I forced myself over the cliff and in that split second, that moment in time that slips by, opens my eye, my wings, hallucinations they may be, catch the wind of time and fly like Bird. Conquering the world, sweat soaking through shirts. Well that’s the ideal, isn’t it? Flying the river of time reveals ancient mysteries, angels, demons all under the hot city lights and I’ll stand on my goddamn head and applaud with my feet. Feet first I’m crawling out of the water. Evolving like a groove, the needle penetrates and reproduces each sound. It comes from a legend. Legends come from another time. ‘Present’ legends are bad jive and ain’t no brother can dig bad jive. Those two words don’t even work together and we need to work together so later we can rest. A whole rest. In a whole rest, I can order my beer, finish it, order another, smoke reefer, and finish the second beer before I take another breath; before I pour my new breath straight down the throat of my skinny, sexy saxophone. That’s the whole point of a whole rest. Stop, breathe the absence of the beat, and then find my seat at the Five Spot Café.
 
Does the racing in my stomach have anything to do with it? It has to do with caffeine, Benzedrine. It’s driving me to the beat. All Beats. There’s Jack⁵ keeping time on the ride. It’s a symbol. A cymbal means something symbolic and to Jack it means one hell of a long ride, the sad skies and holy miles. Not only up and down like the high hat but over and across, (raging continents) high and low, between space and time (Big Bang). When he looks up at the ceiling in the smoke drenched lair in the beat filled air he’s seeing the blue way up there we all crave to see. A space in time. He reaches out his finger, long painted finger. He touches the blue, the roaring high blue, and that's when symbols crash. The beat is turned around. His finger reaching to your finger attached to your hand and the soul in you, which unfortunately spends time (priceless) doing the unthinkable, working to bring home the bread instead of lying on your back soaking in forever to touch the true blew sky in your infinite mind (eternal). Instead there’s a smoke filled sky ruined by distractions, contraptions, yearnings, and regret resigned to the toilet, pushed too far under the bed; behind the beat. The metronome tossed out with the baby in the bath water. Pushed like a syringe, drop of blood on the tip, drugs rushing, and slowing life’s heartbeats, drumbeats nodding in the gutter of existence. Time is coming to make a change. Time is a change from the day without a yesterday. Unzip those trousers, skirts, and suits and get naked in the existential rush of the unknowable universe, (expanding) which is whether you know it or not waiting for you. It will always wait for you because it doesn’t know time. 

(Hey Jack) there’s no repeat sign. Search for the beat that fits in time and you’ll find the Beats know time. Jack said so and so did Neal⁶ and Lawrence⁷ managed to paint those words in time to sign up with. Words dipped in colors of meaning plastered and dripped on the mad canvas floor like Jackson,⁸ inside the painting, inside the moment, spilling his guts. Emotional ticks and tocks howling; every second holy; shot up with crazy new ideas nailed to the bandstand like Christ on the cross, like the set list. Like long precious time, minds’ drifting past pain, past the planet into eternal beats like the atomic clock. And because the clock stops for no one, at least no one we know, until (Shit) too late when our bones have turned to powder and our eyes have shriveled and dried. No sight, no vision in a timeless night; where dark has no meaning and when the clock strikes twelve it counts it out in four beat bars: twelve bar blues, the foundation. Satchmo⁹ swimming in that tune, cutting beats with razor smiles. Drinking, talking, smoking, digging multiplied by three all night long until the morning comes but the morning always comes because even the goddamn earth is a fucking clock. Time wasn’t born of necessity. It’s the only thing that never splits; time ain’t splitable (there’s no atom here), it doesn't catch the next train, it’s a theory only recently Albert¹⁰ got his hands on, got his equations to make sense of the absolute king of intangibles. He makes time begin its slow drip into reality and our addiction is to the idea, the concept, and the enchantment. The ghost-like color of time is printed on the sheet music and fed through amplifiers. The volume includes the destruction of the inner workings of melting, mangled clocks while Allen¹¹ tickles the pubic hairs of every piano he can get his hands on, glissando to the max. To know him is to love him. He takes a photograph. To know time is to dig the no time idea. Know idea what time is.

 (Interlude)

What if I fell into the pit of Desperation and there at the very bottom where the dirt is black as night but clean as the day’s first breath, what if I saw the tiny tip of something jutting up from the cool black earth. What if I began to dig it? If I began to dig it out using my finest archeologist digging fingers - the crumbs of earth gathering under my nails, my hammered nails, until the secret of Time is given to me. The capital T, the lower case: i – m – e. I would touch time and make it mine. Time may be! A major discovery; my life could be backed up, saved in a new file; I wouldn’t have to look back, I wouldn’t have to be concerned (frightened) of the future; I could just be. Be. I’m digging the philosophy of time. I’m reading it now. I carefully slide the book of Time into my rucksack. My moment is to climb from the pit with the secret of time intact back to the surface, back to the bandstand. I’m dreaming of saving the universe, lifting the veil of illusion from the eyes of civilization. Beads of a profuse sweat form on my forehead. They race down my face and directly into my eyes as if of an evil design so my vision is compromised and the moment I move my hands from my sides to my eyes to ease my salty pain, in my attempts to restore my vision, my sack is brutally sliced from my back by a scaly green arm with knife like blades instead of fingers which have emerged from the black earth and are shaking the ground like the rumble seat rumbles in a 1932 Ford; like the rattle and hum of a kick drum. I turn in panic to reach my sack and the priceless secret inside but instead I am hurled by the snaky green arm up and out of the pit. As I venture one step away, Desperation closes like the snap of an elevator door and I am there in the doldrums, the ho-hums of ordinary time. My memory of Time’s secret slipping into the vague blankness behind my eyes and suddenly I am frozen, time is ruined. My temporal knowledge splayed on a cutting board sliced up like Neal’s brains washed clean before sliding into the sewers of nevermore.
  

I said, “where did it go,” You said, “just plain ran out.” I said,” If I had some more,” You said, “ There’s never enough.” I said, " I’m sorry you ever earned your wings, time."

In my dreams, it’s different; I never run out. I’m engaged in a slipstream of endless time running right along side of me; a twisting, powerful current, which is deep and misunderstood. On some levels, it speaks to me in a rushing whisper. Then it sidles up close to me and presses it’s lips, aching with fever and desire, like a chisel on my lips. I cough. My intimacies with time seem vulgar; how dare I touch the untouchable? I’m shocked as to how far I will go but I need to go all the way; there is no other course. Running along side time is a farce; only total immersion will bring my degree in satisfaction and satisfaction in this school will only bring the liquid hands around to surround me and take me down, far down into the writhing depths of murky time where one day I am washed ashore, another grain of sand.

Notes:

1.    Dizzy Gillespie

2.    Salvador Dali

3.    John Coltrane

4.    Charlie Parker

5.    Jack Kerouac

6.    Neal Cassady

7.    Lawrence Ferlinghetti

8.    Jackson Pollock

9.    Louis Armstrong

10.Albert Einstein

11.Allen Ginsberg

Tim lives and writes in mid-town Manhattan. If asked he would tell a story about how he looked over the river Hudson before it had its name. Tim's roots are in Pennsylvania and in Rock n Roll
beginning with Frankie Lymon and Dion Dimucci.
In addition to New York City, Paula, and his son, Adam, attending Mansfield State University in
Mansfield, Pa., are major highlights.

Matthew Battles’ collection of tales, fables, and parables, The Sovereignties of Invention, gives me the same feeling of inevitability that I had just before I reached the glass. The stories not only serve as analogies for the times in which we live, but also they have a prophetic quality to them. One gets the sense after reading these tales that the human race is doomed and we have only ourselves to blame. And if we’re not doomed, then we’re caught in a Sisyphean state of absurdity—minus the recognition that Camus believed would set us free and make life, if not worth living, at least bearable.¹

There’s a line from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Timequake in which Kilgore Trout pronounces: “It was the world that had suffered the nervous breakdown. I was just having fun in a nightmare...”² Trout is referring to his dealings with the publishing industry over a prized manuscript, but the quote can be analogous to the experience of living in the world—the horror of our waking life is not all that different than our nightmares.

Battles’ tale “The Dogs in the Trees” is one such nightmare where dogs, in the process of self-imposed extinction, retreat to the trees to die. And the society that bears witnesses to this, including the narrator, is caught in the trap of the bystander effect—watching with interest but failing to act. The consequences are incomprehensible, but the narrator and witnesses seem to accept this extinction with resignation as if it was as inevitable as the turning of the seasons or leaves falling from trees.

In the title story, “Sovereignties of Invention,” pleasure and pain are contrasted when the protagonist becomes a slave to his desire to record his stream of consciousness with a technological device he receives in the mail. But there’s a steep price to pay—the fulfilling of this one need obliterates all other aspects of his life. In trying to seek more of his own humanity, he ends up with less.

In another story, “The Gnomon,” the narrator is caught in a nightmare in which he cannot resist the magnetic force of a gnomon that draws him and the masses toward it. He knows he should resist it like his friend, who sees the danger and is able to get away, but the narrator can’t stop himself. His action as well as the action of those around him is, like my fall, inevitable.

In all of these instances, the characters choose individual desires (knowingly and unknowingly) over the greater good and over their own interests even though they have an opportunity to behave differently. These stories point out the destruction that human needs or wants can beget and the consequences we face as a result—extinction, addiction, and the loss of our humanity and free will.

Battles’ stories also bring to mind Walter Benjamin’s theory of progress from his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in which Benjamin compares our notion of progress to the angel of history who is propelled into the future while “his face is turned toward the past”:

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of our feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.²

Catastrophe forces Battles’ characters, like Benjamin’s angel, to look back on the wreckage of human destruction. “The World & Trees,” is a story in which the protagonist is punished for seeking knowledge beyond the tree that was the only home he ever knew, and now he’s forced to live in a ruined habitation where he watches his past and all his previous knowledge, which takes the form of the “tree’s trunks,” fall away and widen “the lumberyard of the world”.

In “Time Capsules,” the narrator is complicit in his own and the world’s demise—it’s for selfish reasons that he keeps taking capsules that give him time but annihilate “some volume of space.” This is a universe, the narrator tells us, “…in which nothing can be gained without cost.” Yet he continues—even after he’s aware of the destruction he’s causing. This is a familiar vice of humanity. In fact, it would be hard to name a world problem that wasn’t caused by this kind of self-interest.

The catastrophe in “The Unicorn” is the reproduction of the unicorn’s gift of being able to produce undying energy. Once the masses are able to reproduce and commodify this energy, the unicorn fades into obscurity. But their reproduction is temporary, and ultimately the unicorn finds himself the only survivor in a dying universe. One could read this is as a fictionalization of the loss of the “aura” in artwork as described in Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” where he discusses the loss that occurs when uniqueness is forsaken for reproduction.⁴ Alternatively one could read the story as a critique of the fantasy and the ritualization of “the aura”. By dramatizing the loss of the “aura” in this story, is Battles suggesting that idealizing and lamenting the past contributes to the crises we face in the present? If mechanical reproduction allows us, according to Benjamin, to hold a mirror up to our own faces what are we to make of the ugly little unicorn so “unbearably close at hand” to a universe in the process of destruction?⁵  In either case, the outcome is ominous.

Moralistic. Critical. Timely. These parables are a call to action: wake up and do something before it’s too late. However, the absurd predicament we find ourselves in—is that when it comes right down to it, there’s not much we can do but look back upon the wreckage, the shattered glass and try to make sense of what just happened. But this might not be completely futile; in fact, it might just be, according to Kafka, the only way to survive:

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate…but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.⁶

Notes

¹ Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O’Brien (London, England: Penguin Books, 1955).

² Vonnegut, Kurt, Timequake (New York: Berkley Books, 1997), 62.

³ Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p. 257-258. Print.

⁴Benjamin, 223.

⁵ Benjamin, 251. “In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be stressed, is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography.”

⁶Arendt, Hannah, “Introduction.” Illuminations. By Walter Benjamin. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 19. The quote comes form Kafka’s October 21, 1921 diaries.

Kathryn Mockler is the author of the poetry book Onion Man (Tightrope Books, 2011) and the forthcoming bookThe Saddest Place on Earth (DC Books, Fall 2012). She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and her BA in Honours English and Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her writing has been published most recently in The Capilano Review, The Windsor Review, Joyland, Rattle Poetry, and CellStories. Her films have been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and have screened in national and international film festivals. She teaches creative writing at the University of Western Ontario and is the co-editor of the UWO online journal The Rusty Toque.

Website: http://www.kathrynmockler.com/index.htm

when it is time for the final reading,

we will put you in a vice, and count the density of truths in each square inch of

type. but what use are tools when the pressure drops? what's in a name? the

overtakers of the page are so depraved: there is much to be gotten away with, no

checks, so much to answer for, no one to ask. we skipped pages, drowsed in the

margins, scribbled profundities, left characters for dead, confused connections,

faked left and went right, deserted, premeditated, misattributed, deliberated,

underthought, and lied. we left rubble as breadcrumbs for those who came

next, a trail of trampled rejoinders. when it is time, we will sign NO NAMES on the

long, undotted line.

when it is time for the final volunteering,

to each her own. supposedly we grow, and soon it comes, our moral spur: "we

want to be good humans." then why is it so hard to help people? altruism is like

a horn bursting through skin/there is another heart breaking again/again/again/

at every metronomic now/that's when. People are falling while you are typing.

Looking back over your shoulder, nearing the end, you realize that you are

always slightly ahead of these dominoes of anguish. If you write for long

enough, there will be enough extra time left over to do something in advance.

when it is time for the final listening,

there will be addictions to sounds that feel too real. it is the gauze between your

equilibrium and the end times: you tapped and jazzed, bobbed, nodded, wove,

throbbed, stomped, yearned and yowled and jammed. if they could only read

your lips: it's turning me into a zombie and it feels so good. one cell latches on, then

another, and you know how geometric progression goes. stay here: you are mass

produced for it. repeat: "a real human being." primary colors cannot be created

by mixing other colors, but primary sounds can. there will be no cacophony/

only/one long track of slurry/of what we hear/and what we run away

from/hurry.

when it is time for the final lovemaking,

his eyes are sweating/don't look in/there is no pocket in your shared skin/to

keep the words from getting heavy. reading together, he was the one that could

tell when you were ready to turn the page. his gaze turned it, so gentle for your

fingerprints. did you know that bile doesn't sound that foul/sometimes/better

than vowel. turn the pillow and there are the banished words: temerity, rancor.

the springs just might pierce the sheets - and there aren't any springs. sleepwear

is intended to fit snugly, his eyes are like lanced blisters, and memory is getting

closer to the real thing.

when it is time for the final platforms to globalize,

everyone disallows comments eventually, since bullet holes dent the

veneer. what people think is valuable is what gets passed on, and people have

filthy judgment. a boot, typing on a human face forever? keep your rank clothes

on/bring your thumbs-up-in-a-box/we will start an arson in the

dark/unrecognizable animals move forward out of hiding/with cheekbones like

Gary Snyder. talking has begun to hurt my devices. pretend that we are

behaving like a species that demonstrates longevity.

when it is time for the final drawer in the mausoleum to slide,

do you know that morning cigar the old trees smoke/they stub it out on the long

meadow/tinted like mist/time is a catastrophe that sweeps across us/like

geography that's pissed. we are hoping for something like a sandstorm to keep

us safe from fame. something to cover up the glut the words, pages,

volumes/while all the jokers stepped away for ice, croquet, disease/you could

be a butler/please/that keeps the stone unswept/as time does speechless things.

when it is time for the final writing,

we are programmed to keep it enigmatic, reading. so we always put the book

back in the same place, in a drawer with the birth certificates. it is too easy, and

too dangerous, like crossing over: all symbols are on the side of a sarcophagus.

there are very few who have described what it is actually like. it is time. you don't

have to pretend that you know what a coda feels like anymore. you don't have

to wish for street cred, or lacerations, a safe chance at being incarcerated, or

escaping an act of treason. you don't have to applaud. no one's listening/no one

you say/no one to lean on/you liked to cheat that way/in a book there is no need

for a ocean view/there is only occupancy for one/there is only you.

Michael Vagnetti writes criticism and poetry and has a BA Honors in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He lives in Brooklyn. You can connect with him at:http://about.me/mvagnetti 

I was pretty well tanked, leaning into my crutch and talking to one of my colleagues in the Alabama MFA program at a bar we all often frequented. “He who controls the spice… controls life,” I slurred into his face. A momentary stagger, grasping his elbow I righted myself, eyes shining with alcohol and crazy. “It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion… the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning, it is by will alone that I set my mind in motion.” My eyes fluttered. I was gleaning the source, riding on the back of a massive sandworm: my sour breath of cigarette and microbrew melded with the cinnamon smell of the spice mélange wafting from my subconscious, singeing the hairs in my nostrils with the bar’s humid pungency and the desert’s stifling heat.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

                - Dune, Frank Herbert - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

It was one of my first nights out after I’d shattered my ankle and was laid up for a summer and two surgeries in hot as balls Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In my peculiar transformation that evening at Egan’s bar, I’d turned from drunk misanthropic graduate student into the young and noble son of Duke Leto, Paul Atreides, main character of Frank Herbert’s epic Dune series – the books I was reading during my convalescence – just as he was beginning to understand his role in the universe and undergo the transformation into the Kwisatz Haderach, the übermensch, the messiah. (This, of course, before the books really go off the rails, he turns into a worm, lives ten-thousands years, becomes God, has lots of clone-robot-golems, and etc.)  

My coworker looked at me, half-heartedly attempting to process the nonsense coming out of my mouth, took another sip of his drink, said “Okay, Erik,” and walked away. I scoffed with the certainty of my righteousness and called after him, “The sleeper has awakened!” before collapsing into the bar to order another. By this time in my MFA career the full scope of my self-loathing and scorn had been magnanimously revealed and I had worn out my welcome with the majority of the people in the program. Not that I gave a fuck: I was the Kwisatz Haderach!

“Tell me of your homeworld, Usul.”

                        - Chani, Dune

I first read Dune in Croatia. Or maybe not, I probably read it before that. I think I’ve read the original book 3 or 4 times. One of those times I read it in Croatia. A hostel had a book exchange and I dropped off (I don’t remember) and picked up the first couple Dune books. Nor do I remember what the Croatian town was, but I’m guessing it was Split. There was water. I can see the white-walled buildings. There was a market of tents nearby. I bought a Speedo, Brazilian cut. I burned the bejesus out of my thighs—in all my years they had nary seen the sun—lying up on rocks that jutted over the water, so blue, so unbelievably blue. I remember diving into the water, maybe 20 feet or more down. I remember the impact of the water hurt my head it was so far down. I remember lying in bed in agony from the sunburn; a party was going on next door. They were listening to Michael Jackson. Maybe that’s when I was reading Dune, but I don’t remember reading, I only remember Billie Jean.  Maybe I read on the bus to Sarajevo or Dubrovnik, in Montenegro or the ferry back to Bari, Italy, maybe in Naples. It was somewhere along there.

Things I claim to remember are increasingly fuzzy – age, mischance and libation have combined to widen the fault lines in my memory – the story about getting shitfaced at the bar and making an ass of myself, reading the original Dune on holiday, reading the book for the second, third, fourth time. Deciding in the Alabama heat and the cloud of painkillers and PBR that I would read all of the Dune books again or for the first time – all those written by Frank Herbert at least. These stories are all just guesses cast backwards into some neurological filing cabinet of my mind. They are called the past and are supposed to be factual. But for all their reality they might as well be the future or even a dream: they are simply my interpretation of something that stopped existing the moment it happened.

I cannot say with any certainty what relation yesterday has on today, much less five, four, or two years ago. Yesterday I woke up, exercised, meditated, wrote and went to work. After work I went to a coworkers house and watched a silly but cute movie and ate pizza and talked girl talk (for some reason my younger female coworkers have taken to including me in their girl talk – I wonder about this – do they think I’m gay? Possibly. Do they find me nonthreatening and asexual? Bummer.) That is what I did yesterday. What relation do those actions have to the present moment? I spent money on pizza; if I don’t go to work I get fired, okay. I can now talk with some authority about Whip It! possibly the most cliché-ridden film I have ever seen, but I think it was supposed to be like a tongue-in-cheek cliché, but I didn’t find it subverted my expectations at all, so is that really tongue-in-cheek? While these experiences have been incorporated into my consciousness – my past time – they now only exist in my present. I will only ever write about Whip It! now. You will only ever read what I wrote about Whip It! now. We will only ever have this dialogue, or remember having this dialogue, now.

“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife—chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now, it's complete because it's ended here."
       - Princess Irulan, Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib, Dune

The sad and stupid story of my destroyed ankle is this: one of my oldest friends fucked my somewhat recently (at the time) ex-girlfriend and I found out about it. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it was the circumstance that bothered me – they didn’t even know each other when we were dating. Some bullshit social media connection got it started – I lament the interwebs, though they’ve gotten me laid in unsavory circumstances too. I was pissed, and being pissed, I did what I often do when pissed, get pissed. I went to the bar and had a beer then another and shots and beer and shots and by last call I was trashed, tore-up from floor up. Thankfully I hadn’t driven to the bar (knowing how fucked-up I planned to be), so I began the walk home. There are some discrepancies in my memory as to the exact course of events, but next I remember I was lying on the ground in tremendous pain. I tried to stand, but kept collapsing back to the ground, unable to put any weight on my left foot. After a minute or two of rest I got back up and tried to hop, but no, I had about a half mile to go and no sense of balance. I fell back down. Eventually I decided a break was needed and I crawled back into the side alley of the house I collapsed in front of and fell asleep. After a couple hours shut-eye I woke up and revaluated my situation: I was lying on the ground in the side alley of a frat house with a grievously ugly and painful ankle. After some careful consideration I called Jimmy Johns. Not the actual Jimmy Johns sandwich shop, mind you, but a girl who worked at the sandwich shop. It was my clever nickname for her. Used to my late night phone calls begging for a tuna sub and a blow job, she picked me up and said she was going to take me to the hospital. I refused as our school insurance was terrible and going to the emergency room would have soaked me. I said take me home. No sex or sandwich. I went to sleep. I woke up. My ankle was hugely swollen and probably far worse for having slept on it (twice). In the hungover, puke-tinged light of the morning I called a friend with whom I did not and do not exchange sex or sandwiches. He took me to the University Health Center. Surgery, Cast, Surgery, blah blah blah. Dune. Summer in Alabama. Oxycontin. PBR.

I’ve thought about writing about this summer before, but I figured I might have to read the Dune books again to do any essay justice and there is no fucking way that is going to happen. Why? Time. Yes, the first book is wonderful, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune are decent, but there are better things to do with my life than subject myself to God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse Dune ever again – the shit pulled out of Frank as his health was deteriorating and his son picked up the reigns, and pen, of Daddy’s triumph. The many many hours it would take me to do so could be spent on far better things, like, for example, watching the entire Wire series again. Watching the entire Shield series again. Watching every episode of Star Trek The Next Generation and the Original Series and Deep Space Nine, probably for like the 6^th time each. I could write the sequel to Anna Karenina, though I guess there would have to be zombies – I just googled this and it has been done, but with a cyborg? Same guy? I care not enough to check.      

Then again, how much time can a person actually spend writing? Of the 168 hours in a week, I account for about 35 hours for my day job work week, 6 hours of various transportation, 50 hours of sleep, 15 hours of exercise/self-care (bathing etc), 15 hours of eating, probably 15 hours of dicking around online (and emails, etc), 10-15 hours of socializing, which leaves me with about 20 hours a week to write. Given that my weekends are pretty much chockablock with teaching, I then have 4 hours each weekday to write. Which is really not so bad, were I able to actually write uninterrupted for four hours five days a week. I also forgot reading and movies in my schedule. Reading is kind of a necessity for a writer, so stick that in somewhere too. Movies I can pretty much take or leave, but throw one in every few weeks. Also travel, like vacations, going to the beach, going to the art museum, the grocery store to buy cereal.

“I'll miss the sea, but a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

                        - Duke Ledo Atriedes, Dune

An additional new drain on my time is meditation. It was my New Year’s resolution—that I’ve actually kept! Talk about a mind fuck time killer though. I’m now going to sit here for 40 minutes and do nothing! Absolutely nothing! And I am going to be super conscious and aware of the nothing I am doing. Well, I guess I’ll breathe. I’ll be really aware of my breath. That’s what I’ll do. So I’m not doing nothing, I’m sitting here cross-legged and breathing for 40 minutes. And if I think about that email I have to write or that story idea or how nice it would be to have a cracker, nope, 39 minutes to go. Not moving. Just breathing. But the funny thing is, the more I make time to meditate the more time I seem to have for other things. It’s like all the useless shit just starts to drop away. For example, I used to watch Jersey Shore. I don’t anymore. I used to play this really stupid video game online. Nope. Has the time I have gained been used to write? Not so much.

It does somehow seem like the process is smoother now though. I don’t know, I can’t really quantify it, but it seems like the time spent writing is time better spent. That could be total hocus-pocus bullshit.

Detachment probably has something to do with it as well. To a large degree meditation is the practice of detachment. The theory is that by not valuing the incessant flow of thoughts and sensations anymore than what they are—nothing of any real substance—one is able to better separate from the events in one’s life, seeing them as ephemeral, transitory, and really not a very big fucking deal, rather than from one’s own egoistic sense of what one thinks they are or should be. I also learned detachment from my writing by writing business copy on deadline for 6 years. Try to stay attached to that shit. Try to fight for a word or a phrase (I did at the beginning).  Not worth it, just send it to the editor and let them do what they do. The check’s in the mail.

On the floor outside my bathroom a hundred ants are desiccating a gecko’s carcass. What time is it buddy?

“To attempt an understanding of Maud'Dib without understanding his mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.”

- Princess Irulan, Manual of Maud'Dib, Dune

Apparently the reason Red Lemonade asked me to write about “time” was that I occasionally do a hashtag on my tweet machine called #14st0ry. Meaning I tell a story in 140 characters, such as: #14st0ry Sigmund started at the sound; it was a thunderous ovation of owls, wings flapping and feathers molting and lilting tremulous coos.

I also have one called #HCMinute which is basically the same idea but it’s usually a scene from Ho Chi Minh City, where I now live. An example from Christmas: #HCMinute Santa riding bitch on a motorbike, cotton ball beard flapping in the wind. Anywho, you get the drift. I will leave it to your discretion if these are actually stories.

So apparently, by virtue of the fact that I have “embraced“ the use of social media as a means of story-telling, I am somehow grappling with the fact that, in this modern day and age of tweet machines and face machines and internets toobs, we all have less time to read Dickens. But Dickens was serialized originally, right? – basically the Wire of the day? – so maybe that’s a bad example. I don’t know.

Yes, I suppose it’s true that my work has gotten shorter, meaning it takes less time to read. I don’t just mean on Twitter, but other work out there in the world. Looking at the markets, I don’t know how this wouldn’t be the case. In other words, I don’t think the shortening, the awareness of time, is some artistic or culturally-motivated decision on my part, I am just writing what is available to me – with the acknowledgement that I write to be read. Everybody wants under a thousand words. And I understand it, I mean, reading on this screen kinda sucks. [On another note, I am not opposed to the ebook machines for the lengthy reading – speaking of another total time hole, I read all the Game of Thrones books in about 6 weeks on a Kindle. I am not bragging about my speed here, I am simply saying I read them with great dispatch as I so wanted to be done with them so I could never ever engage with them again. This is very similar to my feelings on the later Dune books. It was just before I moved to Vietnam and I was staying in a cabin in rural Virginia with very sporadic internet and no TV and I read a ton – imagine that! – not only shit, but some nice books as well.  Actually come to think it was mostly pulpy stuff: several James Bond novels. Some Ursula K. Leguin and Martin Amis sci-fi. A book about an existential werewolf by Glen Duncan.]

This essay is coming in at 3200 right now. Say I finish at 3500 or so, I’ll probably pull it back to around 3000, which isn’t long, but isn’t really short either. My comfort zone for work nowadays is either about 750 or 3000, both internet ready and a long way from 10000 or 100000. So yeah, I guess I’ve been shaped by the market.

Back to Alabama and broken me, back in time. Back to my memory of that time: a handful of Oxycontin and a sixer of tall boys. Bob Dylan’s soundtrack to Pat Garret and Billy the Kid playing on repeat.  Stumbling upon a Bonnie and Clyde photoset on the internets of my ex-girlfriend and ex-friend driving around Florida in a rental convertible. Scratching my foot with a wire coat hanger. Staring at the wall, staring at the ceiling, sweating, dripping. Listening to the CD again. Taking another few pills. Cracking another beer. This is time. This is time stopped. There is no such thing. Oxycontin is the spice mélange and I am Muah’Dib, the Kwisatz Haderach.

“I die daily.” 

- 1 Corinthians 15.31

Speaking of twits, I saw one the other day that Toni Morrison didn’t publish her first novel until 39. The writer of the twit, a writer and editor, took solace from that fact.

I likewise used to worry about the fact that I was getting old and all these precocious young novelists were getting book deals. Then I thought of a guy like Sebald and felt a little better. Then I remembered he died shortly thereafter. Time ceased to be much of a concern – in fact, time ceased altogether – but he had enough for Austeritz I guess…  

I haven’t read much fiction lately, aside from a couple Coetzee novels, who I am working on an essay about (since writing this sentence my computer died for a week – it is repaired – and I read three novels including a lengthy Russian classic, so, well, yeah, given the choice between TMZ and Dostoevsky…). I’ve mostly been reading Thich Nhat Hanh and other meditation manuals, listening to Dharma talks on the interwebs and browsing vegetarian cookbooks. Yes, I grant that I am now officially old and lame and even sort of enjoy New Age music – I grant that I have been broken by time and this is my feeble attempt at a repair job.

My relationship with time hovers between depression and transcendence. I am either past time, anxiously planning how to maximize it, or am too melancholy to give a fuck either way. My writing career has never really happened, my relationships have all fallen apart (a different ex is banging a different dude), my country is overrun by madmen and women, I live ten thousand miles away from everyone I’ve ever loved, and none of it matters. It is all “time.” My relationship with these “facts” is all grasping and desire. How any of those problems manifest in my life, right now, I cannot say, because they don’t outside my thinking about them. The fact is I’m writing right now, I don’t want the girl back (right now), my country will go the way my country goes and I like living in Southeast Asia for the time being. I have nowhere, and no-when, else to be. And shit, they’re still like 10 more Dune books to read. 

Erik Wennermark 

Erik Wennermark writes prose in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Follow his
twitshttps://twitter.com/#!/erikwmark"  @erikwmark

Check out :  http://erikwennermark.com    for more. 

For May, Red Lemonade community writers explored the theme of time in relation to works of fiction and their personal experience. 

A Skype conversation between Red Reader #1 and Red Reader # 2, the main focus being the Passages section of Sovereignties of Invention by Matthew Battles. Retold by the participants.

0:23: Skype connection works.

0:36: Skype connection doesn't work.

0:56: Skype connection works

1:13: Skype connection doesn't work.

1:46: Skype connection works.

2:12: Red Reader 1 and Red Reader 2 greet each other as befits two gentleman who have conversed by e-mail on several occasions on matters literary (that is to say, with a curious degree of familarity for which the protocol is not exactly clear).

2:23 : Reader Two comments that 'Passages' evoke a similarity to parables mixed with nature writing. Each touches on feelings of uncertainty from different perspectives.Coming write before the final two stories which addresses broader questions in light of the passing of things. The short tales speak to that fragmentation. The world appears to be breaking apart and new connections are being revealed. Some things are being made anew and somethings are passing forever, Reader Two says trying to sound more erudite than he is.

3:37: Reader One kicks things off with this business of calling these stories 'parables' and all the ways in which that decison effects the reading experience from the off. How this places the reader up on his toes, extra-vigilant, attemtempting to draw instruction from the narrative on top of evrything else. Kind of like ethical sudoku, suggests Reader Two. Red Reader One laughs. Yeh. Pretty Much.

Is it a good thing to burden these stories in this way? The two-reader jury is undecided.

5:05 There is a discussion of the concepts of  nature magicks and ethereal essences which explore the midline between human experience and the outer world in the stories , Reader Two attempts to clarify his thought, but finds it difficult, The conversation goes broad by bringing in characters and scenes from the other books, but both readers have agreed to focus on these three passages, in an attempt to organize the conversation/set limits on the tangents. Setting limits or understanding the breadth of the 'tangents' both readers agree is a subject that the author is addressing in his fiction.

6:15: Both Readers try to put a place and approximate time-stamp as to when and where the action is situated in Passage two. Regarding the place, Reader One is adamant. For him, the whole story smacks of North American from the very first line, and the appearance of the word 'prairies'. He confesses to googling 'North Dakota Prairies' as a consequence of this wording, in the process of following a hunch regarding the protaganist's identity (this prompts a brief good-natured aside about how technology changes a reader's relationship to the static text and grants him enormous powers of sleuthing, like a cross between Inspector Gadget & Sherlock Holmes).

7:34 :In regards to the distinction of the town and the town Reader Two states that he appreciates how the distinction of the two is nicely clarified and forms an interesting distinction between the relationship of the physical construction of buildings and the changing natural landscape versus the human communication and inter-relationship between the townsfolk. Humans inhabit both worlds, maybe the paddler is within the stream between the two? Reader One suggest Reader Two maintain a closer connection to the text.

8:34: Reader One notices – as he is speaking from a local Cafe where he often avails himself of free wi-fi - that the young man and woman at the next table are starting at him with barely concealed disdain. Is it his usual problem with phones and headsets (the tendency to speak into them with more volume than is strictly necessary or wise) or is it the intellectual tenor of the conversation they object to. Do they think of me as pretentious? He wonders. If so then they are wrong.

12:12: Both Readers debate the interconnectedness of the tales and try deducing if the protaganist from the first parable is that same figure who finds himself navigating the eerie landscape of parable two. Interestingly the two raeders contextualise this same stetting in different ways, with Reader One seeing it as post cataclysmic, while Readet Two retains the possibility that the narrator is steering his canoe through the contemporary darkness at the edge of town.

14:21: Reader One is interested in the way that MB conveys a sense of landscape in this story. He compares this to J.G Ballard (no stranger to barren locales, scarcely populated) and the flatness of Ballard's prose. MB, by comparison, is effusive, lyrical, lush, almost epiphanic. Reader Two concurs. Rather than being aligned with the starkness of Ballard, the writing more closely adheres to traditions of American nature writing. Thoreau, etc. Dare one throw Whitman into the mix? Also there are echos of Huck Finn, what with the mode of transport, and the elegaic tenor of the prose. What a lot of Americana!

16:12: Both readers pause briefly – while Skype warbles ominously – but all is good. Their connection holds firm and true.

16:48: For Reader Two, the girl picking berries towards the end of the story is key to its understanding. Meanwhile Reader One zones in on his favourite sentence from all three pieces. 'The trees would go to war for her'. That, he thinks, is both strong and conscise.

17:32: Reader Two talks about the third parable, and once again they try placing the action in time and place. Is the young victim, Neils Ulman's son, or his grandson? What decade are we in? Which century? The questions mount up, and, for all their earnestness, the two readers are, in truth, no match for these slippery tales with their countless unmoored elements.

18:01: Reader Two focuses on the boy's secret identity, and the squandered lore that goes with it. Both reader's consider what innate knowledge means, and this leads to riffs on the limits of human comprehnesion, the process of wonder, the riffle of synapses.

Things are heating up!

28:12: Reader Two cites Heidgegger, and Chomsky, speaking of metaphoric clearings, the recurrent aboreal motif in MB's book; the density of information online and quantum theories of sense (now I get it/now I don't).This is the point at which Reader One's head starts hurting on accout of all this hermeneutical thought and those giddy implications which are too much to countenance in one sitting. Heavy, he thinks. This here is some heavy talk. He checks his watch and realises that he has five minutes to get to another engagement up the road. Not that he's sorry to be running late. In fact, it's been a blast.

After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of an unfolding story.

To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story itself.  -Walter Benjamin

Guess What's Coming to Market  ?

Product Placement in The Sovereignties of Invention

I can't remember how I first chanced across The Sovereignties of Invention, even though it was less than three months ago that this happened. I must have made my way to the Red Lemonade site and  started sifting through its pages, but the precise path leading up to this collection of stories is now perfectly obscure.

Such workaday neglect is entirely natural, of course, and serves to make the online world navigable. Without it there would be no closing in on sites of genuine interest, nor any chance of retaining what I know of them. And so my attention span operates in a Darwinian flurry, making its selections on the fly, flashing past the digital way stations in order to make good progress and barrel through all those incidental gigabytes. But while I recognise that this same flightiness is necessary, there's still something unsettling about the scope of this neglect, and the speed at which I collapse whole pathways behind me. In its way, it makes for a mode of transportation which echoes Gothic horror stories and tales of lost weekends: replete with blackouts, abrupt shifts in perception, and hazy recollections of time ill-spent.

It seems fitting that I should start out by speaking of such things in light of Matthew Battles's own literary preoccupations. And it feels equally legitimate to reference my sense of disquiet, given that there are a whole host of warning signs in The Sovereignties of Invention – chemical, digital, temporal, arboreal – making themselves known after the fact, for want of closer inspection. This lack of scrutiny, in the context of these fictions, is entirely credible and looks all-too-familiar. There is also ample evidence here of another modern tendency: to consider entropy as less a law of nature, despite the overwhelming evidence, and more of a dubious shibboleth to be cast aside at will. This skewed sense of human potential is most acutely rendered in three of the stories – The Sovereignties of Invention, The Gnomon, and Time Capsules – all of which optimise their sense of foreboding by taking place in the very near future.

In the title story we encounter a tale of wish-fulfilment, with a search engine taking up the slack and standing in for the accommodating genie, and the object of desire bought and paid for and then FedExed to the home (although the resulting Beta mishaps are anything but prosaic). The desire itself, meanwhile, turns out to be another product of the age: to refashion time as a leisurely pursuit.

On receipt of this strange device, the provenance of it – as with its operability –  proves a mere distraction to the narrator.  It's quite sufficient for him that the little black box has been accredited by the latest “buzz”. This laissez-faire attitude on the part of the consumer is nicely conveyed:

Instructions were printed in a confusion of languages and scripts on an intricately-folded sheet of onionskin; he tossed it on the table. He knew from the buzz on the tech blogs how the thing worked (or at any rate how it was to be worked; its inner workings, its clusterfuck of byzantine intellectual property and nondisclosure agreements and blackboxed kluges—like the evolved plumbing of the brain itself—were all but irrelevant).

Instead it's left to trial and error to close in on the empirical truth:  that the technology at hand is able to apprehend consciousness in the minutest of details. What we have here, in effect, is Zeno's Arrow as phenomenal thrill-ride, with the narrator strapped in for the duration, beholden to the scenery, lost amongst 'the whole perceptual libraries of triggers and reaction-states and responses'.  No perception, however minor, is exempt from this cataloguing; and taken together they constitute a sensory pointillism, building up a portrait of exquisite self-involvement from which the subject cannot look away. Under such conditions, even the memory of a cough is worthy of intense consideration, while the recollection of perspiring gets refashioned as a tone-poem.

A trickle of moisture, conducted along the surface tension of a saline layer of water mere molecules deep, made its way from follicle to follicle down the hollow of his back. As it flowed downward it left a trail of water behind, of which he could detect the minutest variations in salinity and specific gravity as the individual water molecules gained the energy for evaporative liftoff.

And so an afternoon, in retrospect, becomes the project of a lifetime.

All of which begs the wider question – in light of ongoing developments  – of what will happen when our effective capabilities become strikingly at odds with our lower brains? (And, on a more prosaic note, how do you go about seeking a refund when you've become an ecstatic basket-case?) Here, as elsewhere in the collection, one can easily imagine this work being ransacked by futurologists – in search of actionable ideas – as there is plenty to plunder.

In The Gnomon we once again encounter “buzz”as the prime mover, cold-calling on the multitude,  as evidenced by the opening line.

Inside the conference hall, it was all buzz and business.

Only this time the mystique of the marketplace is so pronounced that delegates at the conference can't decide what The Gnomon does, or even what this strange cube signifies other than its own totemic allure.

Throughout this story, the spirit of Lovecraft is afoot, although it's tellingly updated (with less tentacles and more plug-ins). The set-up here is The Elder Ones As Start-Up Venture, with Arkham (and the Fordism of menace) replaced by Silicon Valley (and the customisation of dread). A situation in which the chilling, geometrical absurdities of an alien mindset are replaced by the intuitive flair of the latest 3D printer.  As a consequence, the prevailing anxiety is not focused on what lies beneath the depths, or beyond the reaches of our solar system, but rather what the hell is in the pipe-works as a consequence of applied R&D?

The truth is out there already, up in the cloud.

In the story Time Capsules, we enter the realm of future shock in its purest form. And whereas the title story concerns itself with the intensification of a single afternoon, here it is the moment's ceaseless reiteration which leads to a curtailment of actual possibility. As elsewhere in the collection, Borges is a discernible influence in the way these spatio-temporal ramifications are followed through to that point where the protagonist starts to run out of spool. Similarly, what Matthew's writing does is to make a virtue of succinctness: the foundational premise that far from seeking to mirror those endless proliferations laid out in the narrative, the short story is best deployed in countering its own prolix conceits.

What gives these fictions added poignancy is that they are posited in an era when such questions are either being asked of us already, or will be before we know it. And how to respond when these conceits move from imaginary premise to actual possibility? More disruptive yet, what happens once the possibilities become common-places?  And how can we retain our sense of wonder under such duress? This book is shot through with these questions.

And still we're only tearing at the late edges of the opening gambit.

Neil Fraser Addison was born on Merseyside in 1970. His most recent poetry chapbook, Apocapulco, was short-listed for the 2011 Michael Marks Award. After years spent in Berlin and Rio De Janeiro, he is currently back on native soil. A novel, The Contenders, is available from his own publishing wing, go-Subsist.

http://www.gosubsist.com/?p=364 A Post-Provincial Novel with New Aesthetic Covers Fronted by an Honor-Box

twitter.com/#!/GoSubsist

When not in rehearsal, some of my fellow actors in the Joan of Arc play made a go at 'willing pennies'. The kind of thing you do as a young tyke at theatre camp. I had brought my parent’s copy of  Richard Bach Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I grabbed it for no particularly reason while packing up. We got pretty good at cloud busting. It was time to move on ‘willing pennies.’  Making pennies appear was the next step in our mental evolution. We were going to become faster-than-light seagulls. One needs to constantly keep the mind of the actor active or at least nominally entertained. Simply paying attention to the ground beneath one’s feet reveals a cornucopia of copper coinage. The higher trick was to will a penny with a certain date and that was pretty damn hard.

The penny would come into existence/ arrive to you (who knows?) and the date would be two to three years off. The insanity of the almost there catalyzed the cognitive dissonance of the absurd notion of coin creation. It was maddening and bound us together in a very odd way. It would be lessened if, you know, it was just a totally random penny that appeared - like 9 years after the date or even 5 years before. Oh no, when willing a 1973 one was met with the phase-in of a ‘75 or a ‘71!  Just enough to keep ya guessin or start a long slide down that slope which fills a substantial portion of the internet today. It showed we were getting close! We were on to something. That's the kind of heightened core temperature thinking that one encounters within a Suburban, Texas summer. We wrote down the date of the next Penny Request next to the notes from the Director in the margins of our script. We each read the book and talked about that superfast seagull. A day before opening night we pulled/created/found by sheer dumb luck/manifested from the ether, changed our memories enough, to find a ’74.  Ah youth, I am more older wiser and/or jaded now...

The Bach book was my first encounter with such an idea. Years later, Robert Anton Wilson would fill my mind and world with 23’s. Burroughs grokked it, that moveable line between text and reality that books often move across. The sliderliness of the informational matrix between element and thought. Copper atoms and texts about coppers. WSB kept a travel notebook which recorded the daily account of his trip, the memories activated by his encounters and third, his reading column has quotations from the books he took with him. Dig this:

I'm reading The Wonderful Country and the hero is just crossing the frontier into Mexico. Well, just at this point I come to the Spanish frontier so I note that down in the margin. Or I'm on a boat or a train, and I'm reading The Quiet American. I look around and see if there's a quiet American aboard. Sure enough, there's a quiet sort of American with a crew-cut drinking a bottle of beer. It's extraordinary, if you really keep your eyes open. I was reading Raymond Chandler, and one of his characters was an albino gunman. My God, if there wasn't an albino in the room. He wasn't a gunman.

Recently I have been reading and helping with social media for Matthew Battles' book The Sovereignties of Invention. I really liked story about the black cube at the academic conference entitled The Gnomon. I had this idea about creating a bric-a-brac object, a shelf artifact that would provide a replacement for the wood pulp physicality of books on a shelf. I kept thinking of creating a small black cube out of resin. Even went over to the local art supply store to price materials. I wanted a corporeal object that would serve to invoke that frisson of narrative aura from the story. I want to encapsulate that feeling and memory, harden them out  and place it on the shelf. I could take them down once in a while and pass and re-experience the tale or just stare at them to travel back to that emotion. You used to get that feeling with your bookshelf too, just by looking at it and running your hands over the spines. It's a passing/forgotten art. So in betwixt all of those selections: resin, memory, evocations, I imagined a small black cube, with translucent swirls. It was the cube from the story, minaturized. I decided I would create one using resin and supplies from the local Michael's. I started thinking about creating a black cube and was running that idea around in my head for a few weeks.

I was even thinking of using it as part of a pretend advertisement: there would be picture of the cube with some text of its mystical powers: Super Happy Fun Gnomon : a mystical toy for all age groups.( Make sure to read the warning label) Ancillary social media book marketing material for the surrounding culture of the tales, expressing its themes and ideas.  I was doing my morning walk before work, to clear the mind and senses, when the manifestation occurred.  There is a fence near the highway, next to a parking lot. I search the fence line because I have found like 8 dollars there. People drop them when getting out of the car and they get stuck on the fence. Bonus! Oh-- something was stuck there by the fence this morning. A black cube. I kid you not. I sucked in a breath. It was lying up against the fence tilted contingently. Deep black, with white sparkles on it- or just some leaves and dusty dirt? For a moment I honestly thought it was made of hard obsidian dropped from the very skies or perhaps rolled in by the tides. I literally stood there for a few minutes and just stared at it. I went over to investigate.  It was, in all reality, a simple pillow cushion for some modular sofa furniture. It's about a foot on each side, a perfect cube shape with a small zipper. I was reminded of my long ago adventures with pennies and time.

Photographic recreation of the original sighting.

 If you were going to create a 'plush toy' and sell it like “As seen in Matthew Battle's Sovereignties of Invention ! - this would be it. Ok- ok for whatever reason someone had this object in their car, truck or van, and like the dollar bills I have scrambled across, the wind blew it over the parking lot, down the hill and up against the fence. Right?  I read too much weird literature and things get away from me sometimes. Did I will the cube to me? How long had it been there, tilted against chain metal fences awaiting me? What is to be done with the gnomon cube by the fence?

It certainly made me wonder about the weirdness of text and life in the margins, a return of the fuzzy, shaky, stringy line between the biochemical electricity of my sizzling mind and corporeal manifestations of very ideas within the world. Sure, it is just a foam-filled black cube with a zipper, something that goes with modular furniture and not a small-resin based cube. It’s a ‘72 Lincoln, just a random penny found underfoot. Then again, all those thoughts about black cubes… This is not an exact science and when things travel on geomantic lines while phase shifting one cannot be picky. Let’s agree: the wind blew some pick-up apartment to apartment Saturday morning moving furniture from the freeway and up and over the fence. That's the story I am sticking with. Cause things don't just plop out from between worlds. Uncanny tales that you really enjoy and inspire you don’t result in the manifestation of actual objects from within the story itself. Let's not discuss albino gunmen. That would leave open a wide margin of error, allow for too many alternatives, too many possible iterations within space-time. It would require a new algebra. We would have to count all the number of the beast and be very careful and wise with our selection of stories, text. There is an uncanny nature to the world that only fiction can tap into, that helps us understand the nether between dreams and waking.  Maybe we need more, (or I need more) Dark Cubes of the heart and soul to inspire sacred pilgrimages. It seems we never stop busting clouds or willing pennies to understand the weird text of our lives

But it does not stop there. The black cube assumed the role of ottoman within the living room. It soon became the de facto resting place for all the remotes and devices. It also is the perfect height to rest your feet while enjoying hours of TruTv. I have a tendency to Take Things Far Too Seriously. My reading of The Gnomon with its ominous pacing, personal media incursions, forced emotional solidarity and swirling religious dervish finale leaned more toward Sir Richard Francis Burton and eschatology. I got really freaked out when I read the first publication of the story on HiLowBrow.com. The tweets and music and time consumption of the dark cube among the palms has a more loose and discreet meaning apparently. My 'found' cube appears to have been drawn out by my own personal musings of the story, and yet somehow achieved the primary purpose for which it was conceived.

- Brian McFarland

You can read the story right here on Red Lemonade.

The original publication of the story can be found here :

http://hilobrow.com/2010/04/02/the-gnomon/

The Red Reader series will publish reader-writer responses to works of fiction. This inaugaral run will include works from Red Lemonade community members inspired by Matthew Battles' The Sovereignties of Invention. Other books will be selected in the future, if you are interested in writing a response to a work of fiction in the future please contact brian AT redlemona.de

Behold:

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-qFp5GhVqZx4/T4cK9GWnbEI/AAAAAAAAB1o/fvn0xyjUl7k/s632/redl4.jpg

Red Lemonade Birthday Bash Across America and Beyond -  May 11th, 2012.

 Our online community portal is a fantastic gateway for writer-readers to meet other reader-writers, etc. Let's 'only connect' in the physical world to celebrate our first year!  If you would like to host an get together at a local space in your area, let us know. Either comment on this post or email brian at redlemona.de

1.  Requesting folks bring a 1 Year Old Birthday card that contains a book recommendation, or literary quote etc to share with others. 

2.  There will be ongoing social media around the event, Red Thread, tweet-up, Skype conference, etc.

3. This is a first action, a gathering at the barricades, an inpouring of the physical into the digital, first steps…baby steps..ONE YEAR OLD steps…let us gather together…

4.  Meetup.com events will be posted in the near future.

5. Fun.

Here is the current working lists: Why not add your Fizzy city or Bubbly 'burb :

David and Richard   – NYC

 It's a gallery space down by the New School in Manhattan, http://www.synchronicityspace.com/ . 

 106 W 13th New York, NY 10011.

Brian – Charleston

TBD.This event will be earlier in day, so I can coordinate Virtual Events from Operations Center

Melissa - LA

The Roost, 3100 Los Feliz Blvd., Los Feliz

Jessica  – Portland

The Blue Monk

3341 Southeast Belmont Street  Portland, OR 97214

Julie - Boston

Bukowski Tavern

50 Dalton Street  Boston, MA 02115

Sheronda –Atlanta

Manuel’s

Jana - Seattle

Gainsbourg Lounge

Giovanna- Valencia, Spain

Local bar  TBD

Space! -and YOU the volunteer, interning for the great planetary Projects of AWE. As part of the Anderson, Wu and Eigenstein SpaceCorp team for hostility, aquisition, reconditioning and peace (HARP), you-yes you!- transform the course of the universal timelines and determine the fate of planets and the destinies of galaxies!

Sure, many live for the feeling of the warm spray of Gorfian blood across your shield-visor as your Vorpsword slices off their final tentacle. And many love the warm tachyonic glow as you trasmit entire corporate complex sprawls thousands of years back in time. Reveling in the enslavement of lesser biomorphic forms in silitransyth mines is a joy that fills the mechborg implantations of the warrior corps of our organization. Long live the Awesade.

But what happens when the last transcruiser departs into the sub-transitional space? Without a doubt, the Core Integrational Facility has been strategically located to maximize communitive control of the defeated civilization. And Now the real work begins: maintenance of the cultural transformative alignments to integrate essential principles into the underlying social networks, management teams and political power structures. One way we do this is by putting our agents in deep cover on the very fringes of society. By manipulating the media, art, written word, the very language on the perimeter- we ensure and cement our long range integration and manipulation of the sociological structure and pyschologies of the populace. 

That's where YOU come in! As an intern or volunteer for the aftertroops on the ground involved with the redistributive enforcement detail, for linguistic entertainment management, ontological negation atrribution, with deployment and encirclement! (REDLEMONADE)

We need folks who live the word, transform the words and can pick up the coffee and donuts on the way in to the office. 

After six weeks of military training (just in case the natives get restless) and language,cultural and behavioral training (facilateted by neuronal implants and cortex restructuring), you will help our team to develop alternative manifestations on the outer civedges of this newly conquered world. They will come to know new thoughts, implanted by our Kulturecorps, a party in each nation transforming social organization. Interns and volunteers become part of the larger community doing the work of our blessed  leaders from the planet FIZZ as we roll across the parsecs.

Contact us with the following core tenements of your concious awareness and pre-set thought configs, a download of your current emotional modulation and Ozonic quotient is always welcome. We, of course will review all the tapes of your intergrated eye-cam and historichip. Please submit the standard : beleif, reichian, integer, adventure and nagual settings to-- BRIAN AT REDLEMONADE.

The planets and worlds of our defeated enemies await, sign up to intern or volunteer today!!