I once lived in a house in upstate New York owned by the disinherited son of the publisher of Penthouse. In the winter, the snow used to freeze level with the porch, which was raised about a foot up from the yard, creating the illusion that you could walk off it onto solid ground. Once, a friend stepped off the ledge, forgetting that he wasn’t walking out onto our yard, and fell forward and disappeared. In those days, winter was eternal. And I was the friend I’m telling you about.
In Los Angeles, I stayed with a friend who lived near a storage center for the Bureau of City Lights. When we walked to a nearby café, we passed by the fenced lot of the depot, which stretched an entire block. My friend suspected that it had been abandoned, but my friend is not always the most careful observer of his environment, so I couldn’t be sure if this was true or not. I was struck by the huge array of lamps lying on the ground, a scene that felt like an incidental rejoinder to Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008) at LACMA. I read a news article recently about how LA is the city of the future because it is improving its mass-transit system. I think it is the city of the future because it takes the basic result of urban decline (i.e., decrepit infrastructure, abandoned buildings, deregulated public space) and uses it to propel itself forward. It plays its apocalyptic self-image against the plasticized glamour of Hollywood, producing a dissonance that one time gave me a panic attack while I walked through the public gardens in Pasadena with Kate Durbin. In this regard, one LA (there are many) seems to me designed as a science-fictional space, a patchwork of competing visions for how to structure our lives: into irrigated hills, domesticated flatlands, outer and inner social loops, transit brackets. In the future, the future will have ended, and the present will happen behind a velvet curtain in a nightclub at the bottom of Griffith Park.
In its comprehensive styling of known geography, Google Maps seeks the All only to find it cannot exist. Structured by the lack that a totalizing effort cannot contain, Google Maps is a matrix of fantasy and its correlatives, the between-space of representations of the real, altered and unaltered by Photoshop, a surveillance technology designed to render a fixed image of a changing field. In some time down the line, when certain landscapes erode beyond recognition, the most convincing evidence of their former existence will probably be Google Maps. I’m not a futurist except in this regard. Later, with a multitude of mapping technologies that will eventually render it obsolete, the original map will itself become a kernel of the real, distorting our perception of everything that we experience when we experience the so-called natural. Together we will watch the present unfold from afar. Glaciers, snowy mountains, fields: we will understand them only in terms of our seeing them represented online, consigned to the archive because their original, transitional form will have entered a delay between phenomenon and absence. I mean to say that these things are going away. Of course the bison we watch in northern Montana should graze free of our having to see them to know they had ever been there at all, but that isn’t the case.
language is landscape
every word dissipates into its mountains
valleys and oceans
Laurie Anderson once said
virtual reality
will never be convincing
until it has some dirt in it. This is also true for writing
base unit preference: the vowel over consonant
consonants are buildings; vowels their foundation
vowels and consonants are organized
into words organized into commands
language is weather, too. The water came up to 20th street
and 10th avenue in Chelsea
at the height of Hurricane Sandy’s
storm surge
I played a drinking game until the power went out:
one shot of whiskey for every time
the CNN newscaster said “surge.” Thirteen-foot surge
drink
higher than expected storm surge
drink
the East Village was evacuated in boats
Long Island, Staten Island were partially destroyed
in the surge
drink. What does not change /
drink
You are fugitive. I am reverie!
No mistake is made without permission first. At sea, I have been this, with you, thrown into the pile of things moving across us in rhizomatic bliss. Do you remember the early passage in Joe Brainard’s I Remember where he describes throwing his glasses off the Staten Island Ferry? To reinforce blindness with behavior, I return to this moment so often because I have thrown my glasses into the harbor, too. Melancholy, even in its most cloudlike state, is never invisible to others; it is only ever abstracted to its absolute and most potent normalcy until it becomes the environment you exhaust yourself in. Like taking a train upstate midsummer to be by yourself and finding that the entire train is full of people doing the same thing. Pollution is extradition of the everyday, detritus scattered across the mechanisms that create daily life in the first place. Joe Brainard washed ashore of this landscape, among the floating nuances of newly depleted resources like love, kindness, memory. How many modes of production can we fit into this sentence? Disaster is tremendous and overwhelmingly narrow in its concern. Can you name it? And does its name stick?
I once saw the city of the dead in Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss, an ethnographic film about the Hindu burial practices in Benares, India. The city of the dead is not only filled with the dead, it is filled with the living who arrange the ceremonies of the dead, laying them to rest in the Ganges strewn with flowers. I saw this film a long time ago and can no longer remember what the forest of bliss refers to. Perhaps it was ethnography, the central point of the film being its silence — lack of commentary — and therefore the redemption of the anthropologist in Western liberalism. Perhaps bliss is the post-ontological lack after death, things like personalities hovering over the void. I watched bodies get dumped into the river as professional mourners gathered to say goodbye. Today the forest of bliss is on fire. And though I am not dead, someday I will be the flowering death that burns down the temple paying homage to it. Light of the country beyond me, in monsoon time, perhaps the forest of bliss will be a film that plays its demise then turns to ash, which we will stuff in our mouths. My death will reach everyone who has met me, whether they remember me or not. And my death will walk across the plains to the city of the dead to meet me in the forest of bliss, and together we will cork the void that is this mysterious landscape it demands.
In black swan theory, the event that disproportionately redistributes the weight of our attention — scales on your eyes, etc. — is always within a range of predictable options for the present but is usually unavailable to thinking before the event occurs. The new philosophers will spend their last days locked in their cars. It shouldn’t come as surprise. It should come in Kansas, the ripple in the wheat of an ideology made of recycled paper. It should come when we make plans to meet on Saturday for a drink but cancel because neither of us wants to bother meeting in real life. It is easier to text than to upend the present situation, despite its roving paradoxes. There are clouds in my windowless bedroom. If I mention semio-capitalism, what kind of poet does that make you? Doze at the sight of its flowering, wear what is available, wherever you find it. Mercenary delight has already invaded the next world and is finally pushing back into this one. These signs point to the future but to nothing else, and therefore what do they mean? That when I finally bought a mirror I smashed it within minutes? Palms freeze, the world is covered in ice, aliens come from space. The future is traveling furiously toward you at incredible speed and will beat you to your destination to surprise you by its resemblance to what you have already seen. This is how the world works itself into a groove. This is why I chartered a plane, piloted by aliens, to see the city covered in ice. It was, after all, just behind a curtain I could easily part.