A record-breaking heatwave in late September

There is no basis for basilisks
extending glances slyly wayward
from a dark cove. A rare September
heat baking rocks along streams
welcome lizards to lay.

I've never met a gila monster
but I wished I wore his skin.
A September like napalm swells
like summer and neon suns.

I have no birthright with skin
like this. Scaly, poisonous pieces
slough off in tiny fragments.

For once this heat feels nice
capturing time in the waving
horizon of asphalt emissions -

because I am not ready for winter
when estranged loneliness creeps
along a molting spine.

Africa settles as an abstraction
in my heart. The desert monster
doppelganger of my likeness
sits near an Arizona soundstage
on a well-crafted movie set
(like the Three Amigos
after leaving Hollywood).

The doppelganger watches me
as I watch television dispassionately
and google philosophical fragments:

"alienation" "postmodern"

"borges map" "loss of the real"

"Steve Martin" "wild and crazy guys"

"solitude" "suffering"

"Wisdom of Silenus"

"Obama's health care plan"

"right wing political violence"

"1968" "political memory"

"Algerian sunset"

I think about basilisks dispassionately
turning me into stone and feel
slightly grateful that they are mythological.
They then dispassionately turn
toward my doppelganger that
dispassionately turns away.


As Albert Camus got older
he lamented the loss of landscapes
appearing in his notebooks.

He married several times
and died in a car wreck.

I, too, love the desert landscape
and can lose myself in the
scintillating refractions
of sun and stars off the sea.

And simulated desert landscapes
feel almost as desolate
sparkling ironically in pixilated
Las Vegas hues.

There is a place for me in the desert
beyond the basilisks by the lizards
and the blinking text marker
of my word processing program.

And now we're concerned with Simulations and Simulacra in this instance...

There is a campaign to boycott Guitar Hero 5 because of its depiction of Kurt Cobain that has been growing quickly across the internet:



In this brief clip we see Kurt Cobain talking (out of context, or, more correctly - with no context) about how he's been turned into a cartoon character. Then the clip shows footage from the game in which a virtual Kurt is doing virtual performance of a song that I'm sure he never would actually have performed.

There are many clips that demonstrate this strange simulacra of Cobain performing unlike he ever could have or would have before in the game:



These "performances" are, indeed, tacky and probably disrespectful to his death and the legacy of his life as an alienated superstar that struggled with his superstardom and his self-esteem. But this just underlines a greater issue that games such as Guitar Hero bring up.

Simulations are generally the mode in which the gaming world is heading toward. First-person shooters involved crystal graphics and real physics represented in the movement of the characters and projectiles and explosions/gunfire. Racing games are becoming more and more "real". The Nintendo Wii is very popular due to the simulated physical acts that control gameplay. Before the Wii we had Dance Dance Revolution and simulated dancing. Before that we had Duck Hunt.

The history of video games goes back to Pong, which in a sense is simulated ping-pong, but the distance between an authentic experience of ping-pong and pong was so great that there was no question of the difference. With technological improvements, games seem more and more real and also have become more of a total experience.

While I understand the outrage against Guitar Hero 5 for this depiction of Cobain, I think it misses the larger cultural problems we are experiencing in the world of simulations and the following simulacra. Simulated experiences are replacing reality. Guitar Hero in no way makes you an actual guitar hero, as evidenced by the world recorder holder in Guitar Hero, this 12-year-old boy:



Given that the boundaries between real and simulacra are already completely blurred, if not that reality has already been mostly been replaced by simulacra, then I find it interesting when people suddenly find something that offends their sensibilities when all else doesn't.

Is it because Kurt died? It is because of his seeming authenticity that we felt we a relation to (despite not really knowing him at all)? What is it that which repulses us so much about this experience?

I would suggest that it was simply poorly done. The magic of the simulacra is that the creeping world of simulation slowly encroaches on reality and we don't realize the incremental loss of reality. Kurt clearly is not Kurt when he is singing and moving unlike how he'd really sing or move in the game. It is a cardinal sin, because it outlines so clearly for us the emptiness of the representation. We glom onto the metaphorical meaning of Kurt as the rare authentic musician and feel repulsed by the perversion of the metaphor - the metaphor has been flipped upside-down.

This is so much more easily fought against using the strange digital world of YouTube. Archival footage abounds, and is easy to isolate and use in a digital campaign. How ironic that the best way to fight against this digital perversion requires jumping onto the same playing field so readily.

Guitar Hero 5 made the cardinal sin, we aren't supposed to feel this incremental change, else we feel the unreality of situation. Instead of feeling comforted by this generative reality, we feel constricted by it. But it is already too late... because we are only complaining of the choice of Kurt Cobain, not the system that could create this problem.

We are left in a system of incrementally losing the "real" and incrementally fighting this loss with the larger causes that are already taking place in the simulated playing field. The simulacra has extended over the plane of the real, and this battle highlights to the extent to which this has already happened. The colonization is total, and ever-growing.

"[T]he silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art." - Albert Camus, from his Nobel Prize banquet speech

Too many accept the horrors of the world as unavoidable, unfortunate, and thus - best not to be thought of. This is the playing field of the artist - delving into pain that is found anywhere across the world and connecting it to ourselves.

I am struck by reading Camus how closely we share an understanding of existence based on confronting absurdity with a sense of rebellion and resistence, but I am struck more about how his conclusions about what to focus on is so strikingly similar to mine. I knew nothing of Camus as the WWII underground journalist fighting against the NAZIs with his Combat publication. I knew nothing of his obsession for human rights and his hardline stances that alienated him from his philosopher friends.

Independently, I came to many of the conclusions Camus did about existence. Independently, I hold the same strong beliefs about justice and caring for those in the worst situations. The connections between the philosophical backbone and the humanistic inclinations we each have must be strong. Perhaps a rebellion to the absurd with holding a head high is tantamount to holding your head high and staring into the depressing beast of the brutality happening around the world. Knowing in your heart that you cannot end absurdity is not a far step from staring injustice in the eye knowing you cannot end injustice on your own either, but by God, don't flinch from it. Stare the injustice in the eye, and respect those who are unable to step away from their injustices by being in solidarity with them in your thoughts and deeds.

I am not afraid of failing in these consuming matters of justice, because I accept from the starting point that the standard for failure is so high. Feeling connected to the rest of humanity in suffering is not a failure, even if you cannot change that which you feel so painfully close to your heart. Feeling that pain alone is the beginning of success. Solidarity in the human condition is such a fundamental philosophical stance, and everything can flow through it even in the face of otherwise experiencing the most painful and confusing states of alienation.

Realignment

I saw parallax trees
illuminate things in between

at first it looked far away
the tiny flowing dances
tapping exposed roots
scintillated spins

then I realized my error
the movement revealed

just how small

everything is

I was so much closer
than I thought

but far behind
the giant flailing tentacles
kept my attention
beyond the swaying trees

I realized my terror

wispy tendrils
polluting the sky

off-colored contrails
oft smaller swirls
shrink the horizon
by contrast

((sickening contraction))


forget everything
don't think of me as a dreamer
don't even fucking touch me
unless your hands are real

there is no cause of our time
so we repose

a female figure skater
slammed into the ice
in slow motion
rankles my memory

her partner misjudged everything
and I laughed incredulously
as I viewed the video

because it is kind of like that

how much trust they had
to get to that level of competition

I returned home to an ecstatic dog
twirling at my feet

he has no idea what it is like
but he feels fear and sadness
and in that way I can love him
because he is not so different

he just doesn't know the thoughts
echoing in my head at night
as he easily falls asleep at my feet

and for that too
I find it easy to love him

And we've reached that point...

where all of us need to collectively tear our own eyes out.

we stole a shopping cart
and drove it to the canyon's edge

the premeditated act
was reflective of something
about growing up here

we acted more excited than we really were

below us stood craggy rocks
littered with other debris

cars, bottles, cans splayed out
dotted with torn black plastic bags

a disembodied moldy dollhead watched us

with a running start
we pushed the cart over
exploding apart in all directions

it was loud
and sparks cascaded out
speckling dots refracted
off the spiralling metal

then we left
never to do anything like that again

give me nothing
everything must be earned
even disappointment

The Incident on the Farm with the Horse

1.

every beast has a belly
a filly a foal a folly

when she bends over
licking the afterbirth
off the lifeless mass

when the farmer finds her
standing over the body
unwilling to move

and when she protectively
charges the old man
driving him to ground

a gentle breeze swells
across the canyon
heavy with the scent of pine

burnt by a hot sun
now receeding to night

burnt by the sun
the night's brackish kiss

2.

last he woke in a hospital
at his daughter's side
as she slept

the breathing apparatus sung
metallic notes

rays of light slowly crept
across the musky yellow walls
gradually filling the small room

the heat was heavy
like a deep sigh
from an ancient dream

3.

it was lucid and vacant then
nothing like the silence
of this empty bedside

I'll write about Babylon instead of dreamless empires still dividing the land. I'll write of hanging gardens that captivated each new invading army. I'll write of things that never happened to me. History (in its grand allure) will cover the typographical landscape of my mind and I will learn to suffer as an historian: with a faint scholarly smirk of disdain for the present.

It is with this understanding that I can see myself equally as likely in a life past to vigorously attempt to protect the great library of Alexandria as to be one of those who rushed in to destroy it. The acts are equivalent, but I would hate myself now if I were to discover that it was I who brazenly destroyed these records of the past in the heat of the moment.

What I would have failed to have realized then is that the system of meaning would be radically changed thanks to new media. I would have failed to understand that the abstraction of metaphorical thinking related to the referent and the value of its meaning would be overtaken with a vast skein that covers the entire terrain. Each of us is a survivor in a life raft occasionally eyeing others baring the sea. At certain points the currents intersect and at those strange moments the abstractions become real. Apollo and Dionysus begin to sing and paint a whirlwind of a song. The sun cascading over the water destroys every referent with blindness. In this ecstasy of the moment we share Oedipus's fate and in full agreement bellow out that "all is right with the world."

We know what Oedipus saw once he plucked his eyes from his face, but we rarely name it. At times I think about that girl that fell down a pipe and it took days to pull her out. Baby Jessica is a full-grown woman with kids now. No one can understand this because she will always be Baby Jessica. She will always be that girl in the deep, dark hole that people so desperately tried to save. Now she has a scar on her forehead and she ought to be grateful for that; most of us aren't so lucky. Most of us look completely intact, but when we don't our scars are usually aren't telling the truth either.

I have different stories to tell, and as such I realize that truth. They are stories regardless of everything. This is how I became my own historian and why right now I choose to write of Babylon and hanging gardens. I can close my eyes and see myself there: perched between the Tigress and Euphrates rivers in the heart of civilization feeling at that moment as if I were in the center of the universe. The flicker of awareness that this location will be a site of reoccurring violence and intrigue will contaminate the back of my mind just enough to want to enjoy the moment even this much more. This breath will be lost in its own time.

The Deep Breath

1.

The breadth of a breath
that tight squeezing sound
as if a heavy roller car
inched forward on the track
by a strong steam engine

heaving the husk outward
a shooting star filled with rocks
limply cascading along
smattering its heft fatly
sloppily shouldering all weight:

You can't speak of love
whilst your identity creeps along
like a lost night in a trolly

the wounds of a fingertip trace
felt against exposed skin echo
faintly in rattled breaths.

You can't speak of love
as a paltry evening light slips
to a dark shadow ellipse

eclipsing motion and memory
neurosis emphemoral effigy
to replace shame with blame.

If you think I know anything
look at the wind pressing the trees
to bend and sway so sharply --

watch the windows shake
and listen to the screen door
whistle cathartic coughs.

If you think I know anything
gather up those breaths
and swallow full the night.

2.

Your life is forfeit when you are born,
but believe me - it makes no difference.

I swallow gods and Pokemon monsters
while riding a 6-pronged buck.

My hands are empty now
but, by god, they are strong.

3.

I dreamt about a train last night:
it moved so slowly across the land
billowing smoke and sound proudly.

The train was black and heavy
and carried me with it.