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The obsession with inked objects – oriental fans, tattooed arms on the lady who lives upstairs, manuscripts composed by the founding fathers when they were in the mood for something light, like satire or biography – will get you noticed by those who already have their affairs in order. Who pretend the Earth is one great big chaise lounge someone took to the curb. But such blessings as they claim are in all actuality as irregular as Addison’s heartbeat. Things that wait for the moon to phase in just right or the waters to rise above the flood wall before they’ll make their appearance, stick their heads up just long enough to get shot at. Or sketched by those who make a living without a camera as a way of commenting on the modern world itself. You see what it is you’re missing, they seem to say as they parade about in the most outlandish garb or duck under train trestles just when you thought there was nothing to duck under anymore. Only white hot deserts where one may bleach bones. Assuming one brings them along, of course. In a burlap sack. But there’s the rub. We have no more need of solidity, of the firm undercarriage and the primeval design than a man has need of ontological speculation when his toaster won’t work. And that‘s why we squander every trip to the marsh, why we pursue one another like jackals. And then there is an interlude, a catastrophic pause that seems at first like it was written in intentionally, placed there by someone who knew what he was doing. But on closer inspection turns out to be an accident of the grammar. Of the rules that make such composition possible in the first place. Strange, brittle things you may look up in the encyclopedia if you feel the need. But are really best left to operate unnoticed and unmolested, just beneath an otherwise perfect surface. -- first appeared in 580 Split
Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro. Available from Otoliths Books.
Furiant, Not Polka, first published by Moria.
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