Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 3/8/05: Howl

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

[Editor's note: Uh-oh.]

I apologize, faithless readers, for the long silence.

I’ve been sick.

I feel decidedly strange. Mostly the areas between my toes and the crown of my head. Everything looks a little off –

-think driving the interstate, and beginning to suspect you missed your turnoff a few miles back, and every sign and blade of grass becomes odd and unfamiliar as you examine it, wondering, “have I seen this blade of grass before; have I driven this road; or was it just in a dream?”

So there’s something very small that’s wrong with the world.

The spot in the corner of your eye you can’t catch.

Maybe I have been traveling too much. Or not enough. Opposites begin to seem interchangeable, that’s another symptom. To much sleep or not enough? Too many drugs, or an excess of sobriety? Working all the time, or not at all?

Perhaps, I theorize, this is a feature of the lack of routine in life. Most of the time, don’t we sleepwalk through our days, as if their greatest virtue were in their brevity? “Thank god, this day is over.” We strive to make the time go faster, and a long day is one we dread. The piano plays the tune, and we dance the same dance over and over, waking momentarily to have a fight, make a decision, impose on ourselves some artificial, roller-coaster thrill, and then go back to sleep.

Funny how the thing most of us seem to want most in our lives is for them to go by as quickly and unnoticeably as possible.

But not me, right? I will embrace the moments, I will relish eventuality, I will not slumber through this. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To get off the rails. Out of the Zombie Lane. Even if it means waking every morning without a clue what happens next. Trying to do everything. Or nothing. Making the whole thing up again from scratch.

Maybe I have been awake too long. Analyzing every blade of grass. When you begin to anatomize each detail of the world, like Dedalus, you realize your wings are melting – or was that the other one?

Fear the heat, the headache, it addles the mind, like you’re looking out your eyes sideways,
So you find another cave. Dig in. Wait.
April comes early here, and cruel,
after you’ve hung on through the cold and loveless damp
and broken pipes and frozen sewer sludge
until finally the sun peeps through the clouds and rather than bringing warmth and joy finds you huddled and alone
wrapped in blankets on a talus of bottles in front of a glowing panel full of nothing
and you wake from nightmares of severed hands, and still want to go back to sleep,

Right now, you look crazy even to yourself.

And you think, back to sleep, back to sleep, but the pills don’t work anymore and the liquor is like water and the long days and nights run one into another and another, changing shape and realigning and pushing you further, stay awake, work harder, write more, push forward, eat, coffee, pick your incandescent junkie god

‘cause I am seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

frightened, disowned, running lizardlike to get lost in the desert, hiding in tiny apartments wrapped in the cellophane tangles of their own insanity, or brought down by bombs or bullets or their own treacherous bodies, or just losing the battle on the streets to the computers and machines who take their places

Do you know I have a bald patch on the side of my leg? All the hair is torn away from one spot, the spot where I cross one leg over the other sitting at my desk. Why the fuck should that happen?

The strongest, smartest people I know are scrawling their life away on slips of paper to crumple up and shove down the sewer, unable to work, isolated by their own ideas or forced to suck on the dick of the next guy up the ladder for a meal served from the thigh of the guy below, while the worst run the world from glittering palaces, and the bland the incompetent the stupid get grants and fellowships to serve them, second assistant cog in the wheel rolling over

The screenwriter who won’t settle for a crappy desk job and the poet who doesn’t write anymore and the actress who isn’t going to act in anything again and the would-be politicians who can’t get on the ballot and film stars who can’t get a break and the sculptor who took pills last week cause he missed his next enlightenment going from god to heroin and back again,

and the mad sad flaccid refuse of the world of suspended invisible money; the good and the kind who’ve hidden in the damp corners of the planet, blacking their faces with mud to cover up their own ineffectuality-

But everybody has a fucking screenplay.

Do you ever wonder why they can’t finish them, all the writers? They’re the stories of our fucking lives is it any surprise there’s no resolution, if we ever finished, we’d be worms

Cowering in tunnels while the world falls into the hands of the fucked-up and idiotic, dead from the neck up sheep and killer robot brains with nothing in them, or polished into the floors of glittering condos, a generation of men and women spawned by maggots, spontaneous generation taken to a new level,

Well you said you liked the fucking poetry.

And behind them a legion of icons brought low by mediocrity;
they rubbed all the paint off ‘em before taking them to the stadium for execution,
their helping of pills or cancer or a shotgun to the face or a jump off the Staten Island Fairy
Ginsberg would have loved that one
Except he wanted it this way, if you were just hip enough to the whole
Mystical conspiracy,
You wouldn’t have to die at all,
But fuck him. Dig him up and fuck him,
we should have blood dripping from our teeth, not stars in our eyes,

When the surest proof of the absence of God is that we are allowed to continue to exist.

Because when was the last time you read something that shattered your world and was written by someone that was still alive?

You’ve seen a thousand movies and nothing that was any good; but they’re gonna put a TV camera on you and follow you through the streets, how long until we’re all on television? The end of all discrimination, just wait, and did you really think the CIA wasn’t torturing prisoners these days, and did you really think the war was gonna turn out ok and that the stuff they’re pouring in the water was gonna give you better living through chemistry or that democracy would grow like a hothouse flower in the desert sand and did you ever really believe that anything would get better when there wasn’t anything left to say about any of it and anyone who would can’t won’t too scared won’t be heard,

Fuck ‘em all, but you can’t even say it anymore, don’t move don’t laught don’t dance don’t write, stand frozen eyes on the second star to the left,

Just open your mouth and scream, you don’t need to make any noise there aren’t any words that haven’t been used all up anyway, just

howl

HowL

HOWL

- Nicholas Seeley, 3/8/05

Posted by rjt at March 8, 2005 04:42 PM