by John Griffin - December 6, 2007
I
The day I fell down off my take-off I was abducted by absence. That was the same day I travelled into tomorrow to arrive at yesterday. I took one sconce at the stars, set a stellar course but found, as soon as I was fairly off my arse and airborne, that I was actually among the stars already, like Menippus, and, gazing out the window on the earth below, who should I see sputtering along, jandering, as it were, brash as a water jockey without a saddle or a harness, but stirrupped with blades nonetheless, but myself (or, the self) of course. Indeed, there I was taking a good long run and jump, catapulting my carcass upwards and onwards, flinging myself into flight, but landing everytime on the flat of the old fannybag, and with enough humility and shame to wish to presently dash my brains out. That I haven't done so before this is a mystery to me. What good am I? Can't even work up the gumptiousness to switch off.
Anyway, I learned in that aspect of suspended levitation, being my own object of replication, my own recurrence of my own self in a spot (as if I'd swallowed a damn mirror and looked at myself inwardly, reflectioning), that I could take a good long gander at this, size it up that, get the full measure of t'other, and so on and so forth, but I saw mirrored within the very solution to the quandary that has troubled meta-physicality since that flock of cock-strung Ionian handjobs first set us all along the wrong path, deliberately: I discovered that me and it are one and the very same. I'm not talking here about no Humean aetiological nonsense, nor about any of that pessimistic or cynical nihilistic Nietzschean hand-shandyness, I'm not even talking about that lack of imagination, creativity, sympathy, empathy, that makes homicidal homo insapiens not sapient enough to not be themselves, if you get me. I's talking about the only equivalence worth talking about, the only solution to all our ponderosity and locutions, that we are the blessed and damned world we inhabit. There is nothing, not even love, that is not some dangling modification of yourself or myself or herself or himself or, yep, themselves out there, below us, me, on the good old sad old earth trying to fling myself off of it.
Archimedes wanted a lever big enough and a place to stand to move the world! Whatthefuck was wrong with that fatcat? Just give me some ballistic device with enough uumph on the recoil to fire myself into orbit. You won't see these sorry hemorrhoids never nomore again. Got to admit though I've been chasing that delusion so long seems like it's the other way round now. That's how all these compulsions finish though, aint it, with yourself not knowing whether 'tis coming or going you are, and your fulcrum somewheres in the centre there. And there you go again – accept one model and you're rightly bollicked ... no way to undo your undoing. The worst is movements, trends, fashions, unanimity, as if all those tabulae rasae knew their arses from your elbows. Forget about them. If everyone forgot about everyone else, and acknowledged to themselves, that none exist but themselves, then just maybe there'd be enough fertile manure at the base of consciousness for the Golden Root to take rule. As it is, everything's all asswise: and the only ones a pecker can trust for sure are the part-timers, the nixers brigades, the unprofessionals, anybody who has no stake in the humanitarian business. You give any of these do-gooders the slightest berth at all and they start up with all their social contract bullshit, setting down rules and regulations, passing laws, citing the other guy for this and that, and before you know it we're right back to that ass-bandit Archimedes again, looking for a phallus priapic enough to boink the world off its axis.
That's why I says it over and over again ... that nobody else exists ... so as to stop myself. It's the only sure-fire way I know to cease and desist from all this making your damn business my damn business, as if I truly could give a thinker's fart about your zits and pimples and puss-filled pustules. Don't you see all this professional saint-in-the-hood bestiality, the sheer proliferation of piety and prayers and goodness is nothing more than proof positive there is nothing rather than something? O sure, tell me about my neighbour and his travails, lecture me on charity and agape and forgiveness and do-unto-others. For the love of God, stop't, there's no one out there but your own damn self. Check it out. Atomism! Bedamned! Solipsistic meanderings? Yes, if you wish. Narcissism with a suggestion of negation, buttered in dialectics, sprinkled in Epsom bon mots and garnished with rodomontade on a bed of platitudinous sanctimony. No thanks! You get to feeling after a while of flitting around like a moth that the flame will singe and consume you sooner than later. You populate the vicinities of consciousness with enough toys and trinkets and you end up realizing you're only compensating for the empty illusion that there's nothing left but illusion, that the real has been evicted from reality, that spectacle is all there is and that that rumbling indigestion is nothing more than the soul's unrest in a miserable indigestible low-inducing pit-stop. Sure, more is less, so desist from all this accumulating, stocking up, multiplying, adding, proliferating. subtract instead, take away, pare back, refine, distill, empty house, evict, purge, shit it out, there you go, vomit, excrete, just have the holy sacrament of unleavened self. Then you might waft away on the haft of a grunt, belching to yourself, "indeed, I am off and look at me go." Whipydeedoo!
II
It's never the laws of the other guy that oppresses us the most; it's our own impositions, scribbling, codifying and the obeying our own laws and injunctions, expecting, for example, or even believing that our own puny struggles for order and control, and the exercise of the will in that direction, will ever actually accomplish anything. The world's indifferent to our anguish and laughs at our vain attempts. That doesn't stop us (and why should it?), but really the only things we will are those events that have already taken place. Every idiot thinks he has predicted the past and takes full credit and kudos for knowing yesterday's News. The worst are the "See-I-Told-You-So's", even if they never predicted diddley in their whole lives. 'I knew that was gonna happen', they exclaim, 'could've seen that one coming a mile off', or 'I always knew that wasn't gonna work out too good,' or 'exactly as I predicted'. Yes, indeed, tell us all about your abject haruspications and timely tergiversations, you chicken-livered cocksack. Fill us in, if you please, on how you saw history aswirling in that crystal bollick of yours, how the snowy cyclones spun your vatic and sage prophecies into a nice creamy curd, like the airy turds that you shat out by the truckloads. Or perhaps you bit your lip out of timidity, and only chose to break the wind of your silence now because ... hell ... you've nothing to lose anymore, and the whey has hit the fan. You deliver your predictions based on verifiable facts after the facts to demonstrate how you knew today what we all knew yesterday, and then you luxuriate in the Sirrocos of your own sighs to inform the world that 'if it had only listened to you everything might have turned out differently'.
I hear you. I concur, my sorrowful nipplet, why indeed should you care anymore what anybody says to the contrary, for it's well-known in certain esoteric circles that you created this world and every damn blasted piece of garbage in it? Not only that but everyday that you live and breathe you recreate this vale of visages in your own image. That's right! It merely reflects your good old, sad old self endlessly. Why? Why, because you'd have it no other way. Trouble is, though, we all do the very same as you, which ain’t an "issue", as the psycho-babblers love to say, until it comes due to pay up, and then each is subject to such a whining display of red-arsed, yellow-bellyness that even the eunuchs get blue balls. Who did this? Who did that? Who cares who did the other? What'ya gonna do 'bout it? Clean up and move along! Can't live with shit, can't live without shit ... 'cept no one wants to drop to their knees to wash away the bile stains. Spleen everywhere, bubbling over, boiling, seething, foaming and letting off steam, but none will turn the heat down! Would it help if I said the stains do not even exist? For as soon as Mr. Puke divests himself of Master Puke, and Master Lad does his Pollack number on the floor of decency, then all has already ceased to exist. Evidence, you say? What evidence? There is no evidence! No clues! No traces! What? No ... No! This is surely what happens when Mr. Piece begets young Master Piece, or so Myles would've had us believe, and Miss Piece avoids Master Piece because Mrs. Piece was left in the lurch, or church, or so they say. Where to go from here ...
Apparently, Adam has no need of a navel either, but he found plenty use for an apple. We're the exact opposite, yet there's still no chord affixing us and our ragbag of amniotic divinity to some great unmoved placenta in the gutter. We're at the part of our arrival, however, where we no longer need navels or buttons or pineal G-Spots for the "Almighty Tickler" – Sounds awful like the name for a dildo, don't it? God – our Cartesian dildo! Where's your umbilical rope, you devil you? Cannot tell the good guys from the bad tubing any longer! Never could! But soon enough the Ab Ovo will cede to Ex Nihilo, and then time will truly stand stock still, and then we can all fly at the exact same moment that we stand still – pure time travel. Pigs with wings, tenor elephants, short-hand vermin and an entire menagerie of phantasms in the cage of the mind. But, really, the only things that time travel are News, information systems, lies, the very same lies above as below, before as after us, pumped into as expunged out of us. News – everywhere present at once, and a billion of us blinking at the blinking tubes of lies at once: Information without any joy or individuality. God in the News. God as News. God = Information. When but to know all this is to die, to offer oneself up, or to enter into the virtual contract, to surrender into the CTV, to become actor and voyeur of your own trepass, for everywhere the Camera Eye invades who you are, everywhere it televises your essence, plays you for a fool, and casts you in an infinitely recurring commercial to sell you to yourself, half-off, new-and-improved You, 20% Extra for the same price, a bargain, so how the hell can you pass up you? Hell, stock up, buy two or three, no limits per customer, plenty of Yous where you came from! Take away the damn cameras, our sweet benevolent tyrant, and the compliant dog in you will continue to sit and heel and wag and bark and beg and lick.
Whether you like it or not, you are all actors in your own reality shows starring you. It's the story of you you cannot tell except by such virtual charades. Your narrative is no longer possible where you represent yourself only by summarizing the movie in your brain, the movie with you as hero, villain, protagonist, antagonist and catalyst in your own unfolding farce. You look dapper, my suckling one, even if you'd no more know how to cultivate a cabbage or a spud than you'd be capable of coming back to earth, and outstaring the glare in the mind's eye, you star-dweller you! You move without any of the special effects, you perform your own stunts, you're an anamorphic Wunderkind, no need of dolly shots for you, for you're rotund enough, no duping, tilting, over-exposures etcetcetc, until the everyday banality that is you back-pedals itself by fiat of fade and frame and focus and montage and optic sounds into the virtual para-doxa that is glorious, inimitable, blockbusting no-mere-2x4-You! You steer yourself everywhere into the virtual, just like the religious instinct was channelled in its turn into every sort of pie-in-the-sky pseudo-vatic gobbledygook. Now everything and nothing is you, just as everything and nothing was the pantheistic deity, while in between we're all Agent Smiths cloning ourselves back into the vortex, or matrix.
I suppose if we remained airborne long enough we'd repopulate the entire planet with nothing but a billion of our clones, but then we'd be culpable for all of history. Thankfully, we've not yet met reality, or enough of it, to run that risk. I knew a Magritte clone once who claimed to know a corkscrew, whose name was Joy. What Cockation! What Gulpinosity! He claimed if he and the screw got together and made an epic of their exploits what a serial thriller that would be! That they haven't already done so is owing in no virtual way to the fact that each held out by refusing to become the medium of the other's reporting. 'No plugs!' They cried, 'No USB umbilical chords to the power supplies', hooking each up to webs of intrigue, where the rails of on-line/off-line rise then fall of fortunes could enact their em-powerments. Basically, neither wished to advance illusion over noetic certainty. Bollocks! Neither could imagine anything but the illusion, which is why their artificial selves supplanted their real selves, and the residue of their remainder couldn't excite either long enough to continue. Let it be known that the last thing artificiality knows for sure is artifice – that's even a step below the low, in the pits, the gallery, the docks, like subtlety coming from schoolyard heavies, the goons who throw their gravity about to bully their superiors out of reason or common-sense. 'O we fear you and your corkscrew because you've contorted yourself into a tantrum'. Don't bother making our case for us, you savages, etc. The only realities thus far are the mediocre excrescences of mediocre minds. No wonder Johnny God-Lives Fichte left the lectern, grabbed himself a blunderbuss and ran out in the streets to expel Napoleon's advancing missionaries: Now there was a man who knew the noumenal significance of an actual corkscrew!
John Griffin is a writer living in Ireland