Garett Strickland lives in Portland, OR. He's the artistic director/producer at Unwin-Dunraven and the editor of PLINTH (forthcoming). He records and performs in a conceptual jazz-noise ensemble called CLOTHES. He's a metaphysician. He makes books and tapes.
THAT THEY DROWNED, that was a surprise. You fashion a raft by binding their bodies together in a tangle and set off down the riviera. Piles of burning furniture fanned by the wings of big moths diving between scraps of fabric trailing sparks as they dance up out from the bonfires lined along the city’s banks. You feel tan. There’s a breeze. Again you inspect the map, the schematics. Eyes closed you rehearse in mind the soundings, trace with your fingertip their signs in the air.
By the time you arrive in front of the theater your necrotic gondola has bloated, rotted apart. Ready? asks Blanchot on the radio. Ready responds Blanchot. Your grappling gun finds its hooks around a gargoyle’s neck near the southwest spire. You scale the wall, climb in through an unpatched hole in the roof.
Crawling in the dark you tear your knees, your palms. Splinters long as splints. Your blood mixes thick dust blanketing the scarred wooden floor. Now you’re blind in a corner you can’t get out of, down low under an angle impossibly wide and breathing. Here this is, you figure, and resign yourself.
Cough, sputter,
unconsciousness.
In the TRAVELOGUE OF AN IMMOBILE NOMAD our pilgrim speaks of the nomad’s vision with the tape recorder. This during that time he’d given up speech, saw himself seen as a lack, a man-shaped recess in space, an outline receding in an obsidian hallway carved by his being’s flinging backward away from the things of this world, of encounters. What had been his blindspot (the body) became a door he turned to passing through, drawn into that emptiness as by a great wind. The edges carved to what had been his edges in the world of persons and things tightened the deeper in he shuttled. He felt himself contracted, reduced unto his vanishing point –
– [ and there he was floating, outside of space and time and all made things, a tape recorder in his hand and he was speaking, his-speech-the-recorder umbilical, symbiotic, generative of something prior even to potentiality, creator of the deep on the face of which the light would one day move. ]
Splash. Water in the face.
Soft focus sharpening.
Here’s Blanchot. Thought we lost you. Your wounds, you notice, have been bandaged. How long was I out? Don’t ask such inane fucking questions.
We’re in the projection room. The lead detective, you notice, is bound to a chair, his throat cut. The hostages are piled sleeping at his feet. Oh, you say, you found them. I was almost certain they’d drowned.
On top of the projector, your dossier. Retrieved. Your gaze follows the flickering film passing thru the tiny window and into the auditorium. The backs of anonymous heads perfectly still, facing forward in the dark in a shared yet private immersion. You wave.
SOME WEATHER WE bring round with us, shepherded or clung dragging behind, intersecting cone-sphere-tetrahedrons, distortions birthed of the mirrors we’ve made ourselves, kept, tho burdensome, as pets. And if some innocent is drawn up into our cloud, their form as they’d known it seeming so much shrapnel returning to a source inconceivable? They’ll just gotta deal. More often than not, this is where that happens.
The flame does its thing reflected in our table’s drinking jars here at The Others Club. You imagine the flame at the heart of the beverage, and indeed the beverage believes itself a brother to the flame, does its best to burn. There are plenty things, yeah, you’ve learned to enjoy. A scuba dive like this one, your fellow patrons: hated, desired, both.
Desire, says Blanchot, his feet up on the table. Who in their right mind would want that..? Tho at times it’s unavoidable, getting swept into currents obscure, the pull of a body toward a body as tho against one’s will. Game of magnetic chess played in the backseat of a car you don’t remember climbing into, have no idea where it’s going. You’re under a blanket with a flashlight, murmuring. You move your pieces, having no notion of the rules, and are surprised when the white ones slide or repel in response. Why, it’s practically enough to give the illusion that you aren’t so absolutely alone.
Ah but Blanchot, says Blanchot, you forget what it is to have your center felled, the voluptuousness that strikes one unavoidably when given over to such vertigo. And why not trust, when all else is considered? There are certainly worse ways to be led to one’s death.
The waitress brings the check and winks. You emerge and invent the drizzling night. Blanchot is drunk, held up by Blanchot, his arm around his shoulder. They stumble off. You pop your collar and walk.
When you were a child, you’d slipstream easily into a dimension in which you were the only one. Nonetheless, evasive shadows, distant silhouettes. A coat’s edge darting around a corner. Maybe even yours. Could be, those days, you were following yourself. This one you are now, pacing late empty streets you’re unable, suddenly, to recognize.
YOU ARE STANDING in the garden forecourt. As you gaze at the flowers its molecules yawn. The closer at anything you’re looking, a dilation. Each clump of dirt with its mouth open moaning, the sound of hollows overtaking nature’s face.
Blanchot lights your cigarette. Nice compound, he says. Shouldn’t be too difficult to access its keep. Yes, responds Blanchot, but the coral currents of its sanctum-chambers, the situation of residing even so long to traverse. The smoke creeps into your eye. It stings. You squint as tho against the sun.
Consider, for example, the jumpsuited Italian as a plumber of depths, travelling thru worlds primordial but constant, the majority of life even now fungal and learning to walk, or else reptilian, leaping awkwardly, the hoist of their wings nothing against the weight of the shells they’ve not yet cast off.
CARAPACE,
SARCOPHAGUS
and who can say if there’d be anything left?
The light by now has finished falling. You feel your shape blending with the shadows in the spaces between the leaves, as if to draw you in beyond the gates. You flick away the cigarette, take out a flask, swig, hand it to Blanchot. Still have a key to this place? you ask. Whiskey sprays from Blanchot’s nose, he guffawing, doubled-over choked.
BLANCHOT SKIS DOWN the mountain, stops and fires his rifle into the spine of the jewel thief. The movie is over. When the final customer has left the theater you lock up, take off your clothes, climb up on stage, and speak before ghosts. Those words suspended there still. The words themselves remembering, tugging like a magnet.
I am standing on the husk, says Blanchot to Blanchot. What are you doing now that we’ve ended, Blanchot? I feel like falling in love.
The planet tortures its whores under your heels. No one has seen you dance and lived to talk about it.
Your foot feels its tile. You lift the tile reach down and pull a carved box from the hiding space. You unroll the vellum found within. It says a sound. Blanchot intones.
We talk // about // the mixtape.
You spin around and chop your mistress in the neck. She falls, the floor falls with her. Blanchot and Blanchot plummeting in each other’s long arms. Their spinning bodies receding into the black leather folder of your dossier. Yours is a tough case, I admit. But I think we may be able to help you. Quick, mark this vellum.
We are drinking scotch and chocolate in the Lodge. Here it’s possible to seduce anyone. Blanchot has traded in his suit, a more distinguished shade of charcoal. The waiters bring cigarettes on little silver trays. There’s electronic jazz coming from the speakers at our table. The second dessert arrives.
Is this your first ending? asks Blanchot.
You slowly nod.
Leave me out of it, he says.
An old spy film is playing on the TV above the bar. You’ve seen this one before, tho in this version the actors’ conversations between takes are shown. The globe opens in the boss’s office and out comes the booze. Advice about grappling hooks. Discussions of last night’s season finale.
I heard there’s going to be a movie, the actor turns and says to Blanchot. I’d pay to see it, he says. The actor smiles // and for a moment // his mouth hangs there // as the bartender changes the channel.
On the night every attorney in the hotel was murdered, you say you were at home, in your room, making an animated film, is that correct?
Nod for me. Yes that’s good.
And in no way did you intend to enslave the human race is that right …?
In front of you Blanchot pours a glass of water.
I suggest you drink that.
I AM THE OCEAN.
I am the tide. I am the rise and fall of a wave on a shrub laid in the earth. There are limits to my destruction, but not many. People, they say, “Where have you been? Ain’t seen you in a while?” I am always gone and leaving all the time. This is a mode. I forget what I learned to learn it again, to learn it better than it can.
Do you know what it is to wake from a dream unknowing? You were there and now you are here where do we begin from there. When last you left, it was unexpected and it remains still. I cannot remain still.
The door swings open white cube. There are bodies and objects, differences. Spaces exist between the bodies and objects. Some you can drink and some you can eat. Inside the white cube the cube does a noise. The noise is the bodies and objects coming out of the noise, like cartoons come out of the dark. It’s white in this cube. The noise isn’t white. The noise has no color but the colors come out of it. Noise makes objects emerge to ear, choppings from the body-objects. The nails that hold the room together turn in their sleep and loosen from the wood of walls’ embrace. [ . . . ]
: : : : :
I’m making a report of sorts (explosive sound). Tho certain oaths as it were undone to do so. In an age of new popes certain truths untethered can only be the way, need of the idea of the new. There is no secret no spark that will not in the very eye of night of time not rise as a shifting color from its source to know thru to us as each other. I release an animal day after day recoaxed to form from the wrecked hide & bone rended dissembled by dogs and gathered in a garbage bag, released at our wide edge of woods. Songs unheard unspoken in the sound-film.
The ECCLESIA at the circumference-is-nowhere, we’re a bridge. We’re chaotic, indigenous to blood, and refracting in every direction. The sublime, the grotesque, the liminal and the devotional are constantly excavated, birthing new edges and boundaries to be explored. It’s in this that we, in our research and efforts, render all (other) expression possible.
In armchairs we here in the zenithal crux of the Azonic Lodge map and sigilize with thought the hidden canon, burn up or birth to throw the shapes that find their purchase.
TALL IS MAN
a PALE LIMP CYST
to speak a
TETRIS GRAMMAR TONGUE
AI EIS AI OU PHAR DOU IS EI OU
[ [ [ I have come in great rest in order
that we may give rest to our light in the root ] ] ]
We go down to Chaos to save the whole Light from it,
lighthouses slow rising from the blowholes of great whales
as their mouths no longer sucking lemon open
and the rotating beams as they meet they touch
describe the teeth of the crystalline cogwheels archoniked.
: : : : :
The first exoteric face of the ECCLESIA effloresced in Portland, OR about six years ago. This the only assembly as such going back epochs previous, tho still retaining past methods and likewise those existing on the mirrored fold of our future. In this way members are always emerging, realization actualized in the mystery school,
out of focus / triple-exposed
green room monitored and radioed,
shrinking and expanding of the unground
supporting the Fire in Thought.
Here you sense some other metaphysical machines. These constructed in long-standing cloistral projection, beam hatched of past sun-crust wombing swarm to burst forth each fully formed. In the rafters of what was called sky we take up with the echelons.
Hail fellow. Hello sister.
If you’re with it you’ll know, ya know ya know.
Whoa now you get it you feelin’ me.
Ha ha yeah you got it.
Here is your staff and your tablet.
THE TABLET GIVES RISE TO ITS OWN EFFACEMENT
: brilliance is worthy only in the dark :
: : : : :
So I mean yeah come in have a seat. You want anything to eat or drink? It’s only as hard to get comfortable as you make it so they say. But bitterness embarrassment futility doubt regret disappointment is some of the best fuel never talked about. As you can tell we’re talking hear but the words seam funny in this great degree of silence we’ve soared like a box-kite outside.
Anyways I wanna play you this song. Listen to this song. You’re gonna love it.
: : : : :
TIME OUT RUNG ROUND CAGES ORBIT TONSURE SHATTER CUNT FOLDS BLOOMING CREST OF CROWN BOWL PASS IN WELCOME WEB SILK FLAME POUR IN THRU NOSTRIL FACING OWL FACED UPWARD CATCHING DIVING HEART BARB UNDONE ORB EXPANDING US TO THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS MOMENT
[_______]
ON NATHAN’S BIRTHDAY we went up to Olympia to pick up Jason. He’d been traveling. A few months gone I reckon. Nate’d been living in J’s room all heart-broken up in the Nad, watching the entirety of Breaking Bad in the course of a couple weeks. I did as much as I could re-watching with him, loving it, deep-reading the world it meant to be there gangsta-style lonely and for real with my best friend all shitty and suffering, digging the vicarious world of criminal pathos to sovereignty .
So on the day he was born: Nate, Tyann, and I drove up from Portland to pick Jason up with some acid. We found Jason who’d been pretty impressed with the novelty in Washington of whiskey in regular stores, who’d walked for miles drinking only whiskey for days, and crashed wherever in the course of not needing anyone at all.
We got him, drank and figured where we’d drop. Ty’d gone to Evergreen so we figured campus would be the best place to do it. We went ahead and did and as we approached the forest a kid straight out of the 90′s (“You guys like Alice in Chains?’) led us into the woods without a flashlight and we built a fire out of Emo Steve’s negative psych assessment he’d left around the shrine in his trapper keeper.
SOME TIME AGO I had a breakthrough: I discovered I could hate my food. I was at a bar and ordered a burger I knew was a good one. I’d ordered it before and had every reason to look forward to it. I was in a shitty mood tho, so when it arrived, I made it the object of my disdain and aggression. I h(ated) the fucker GONE, right out of existence.
You always hear people say things like, “I demolished that pizza,” or, “I murdered that salmon mousse,” but how often does the appropriate emotion coincide with the act of eating?
Boldly I say, Fuck Sustenance.
Nutritional, cultural, social, or otherwise.
I began to think about and experiment with Gratitude. Much of the past fews years of my life have been spent in pursuit of a pious, modest asceticism and a general thankfulness toward what little I’m ever blessed with. I’ve got some roots in Christian Mysticism, and I value the perspective of wretchedness before the awesomeness of Divinity, the worm-like tininess we occupy even as we are loved and ultimately embraced in undifferentiated Bliss.
But what about getting things done?
Being God is the only thing worth doing.
