`Hate,' Case said. `Who do I hate? You tell me.'
`Who do you love?' the Finn's voice asked.

Press play:


Read:

Futurist Manifesto of Lust by Valentine de Saint-Point (the beautiful woman pictured above)

A reply to those dishonest journalists who twist phrases to make the Idea seem ridiculous;
to those who only think what I have dared to say;
to those for whom Lust is still nothing but a sin;
to all those who in Lust can only see Vice, just as in Pride they see only vanity.
Lust, when viewed without moral preconceptions and as an essential part of life’s dynamism, is a force.

Lust is not, any more than pride, a mortal sin for the race that is strong. Lust, like pride, is a virtue that urges one on, a powerful source of energy.

Lust is the expression of a being projected beyond itself. It is the painful joy of wounded flesh, the joyous pain of a flowering. And whatever secrets unite these beings, it is a union of flesh. It is the sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit. It is the communion of a particle of humanity with all the sensuality of the earth.

Lust is the quest of the flesh for the unknown, just as Celebration is the spirit’s quest for the unknown. Lust is the act of creating, it is Creation.

Flesh creates in the way that the spirit creates. In the eyes of the Universe their creation is equal. One is not superior to the other and creation of the spirit depends on that of the flesh.

We possess body and spirit. To curb one and develop the other shows weakness and is wrong. A strong man must realize his full carnal and spiritual potentiality. The satisfaction of their lust is the conquerors’ due. After a battle in which men have died, it is normal for the victors, proven in war, to turn to rape in the conquered land, so that life may be re-created.

When they have fought their battles, soldiers seek sensual pleasures, in which their constantly battling energies can be unwound and renewed. The modern hero, the hero in any field, experiences the same desire and the same pleasure. The artist, that great universal medium, has the same need. And the exaltation of the initiates of those religions still sufficiently new to contain a tempting element of the unknown, is no more than sensuality diverted spiritually towards a sacred female image.

Art and war are the great manifestations of sensuality; lust is their flower. A people exclusively spiritual or a people exclusively carnal would be condemned to the same decadence—sterility.

Lust excites energy and releases strength. Pitilessly it drove primitive man to victory, for the pride of bringing back to a woman the spoils of the defeated. Today it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press and international trade to increase their wealth by creating centers, harnessing energies and exalting the crowds, to worship and glorify with it the object of their lust. These men, tired but strong, find time for lust, the principal motive force of their action and of the reactions caused by their actions affecting multitudes and worlds.

Even among the new peoples where sensuality has not yet been released or acknowledged, and who are neither primitive brutes nor the sophisticated representatives of the old civilizations, woman is equally the great galvanizing principle to which all is offered. The secret cult that man has for her is only the unconscious drive of a lust as yet barely woken. Amongst these peoples as amongst the peoples of the north, but for different reasons, lust is almost exclusively concerned with procreation. But lust, under whatever aspects it shows itself, whether they are considered normal or abnormal, is always the supreme spur.

The animal life, the life of energy, the life of the spirit, sometimes demand a respite. And effort for effort’s sake calls inevitably for effort for pleasure’s sake. These efforts are not mutually harmful but complementary, and realize fully the total being.

For heroes, for those who create with the spirit, for dominators of all fields, lust is the magnificent exaltation of their strength. For every being it is a motive to surpass oneself with the simple aim of self-selection, of being noticed, chosen, picked out.

Christian morality alone, following on from pagan morality, was fatally drawn to consider lust as a weakness. Out of the healthy joy which is the flowering of the flesh in all its power it has made something shameful and to be hidden, a vice to be denied. It has covered it with hypocrisy, and this has made a sin of it.

We must stop despising Desire, this attraction at once delicate and brutal between two bodies, of whatever sex, two bodies that want each other, striving for unity. We must stop despising Desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality.

It is not lust that disunites, dissolves and annihilates. It is rather the mesmerizing complications of sentimentality, artificial jealousies, words that inebriate and deceive, the rhetoric of parting and eternal fidelities, literary nostalgia—all the histrionics of love.

We must get rid of all the ill-omened debris of romanticism, counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty. When beings are drawn together by a physical attraction, let them—instead of talking only of the fragility of their hearts—dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies, and to anticipate the possibilities of joy and disappointment in their future carnal union.

Physical modesty, which varies according to time and place, has only the ephemeral value of a social virtue.

We must face up to lust in full conciousness. We must make of it what a sophisticated and intelligent being makes of himself and of his life; we must make lust into a work of art. To allege unwariness or bewilderment in order to explain an act of love is hypocrisy, weakness and stupidity.

We should desire a body consciously, like any other thing.

Love at first sight, passion or failure to think, must not prompt us to be constantly giving ourselves, nor to take beings, as we are usually inclined to do so due to our inability to see into the future. We must choose intelligently. Directed by our intuition and will, we should compare the feelings and desires of the two partners and avoid uniting and satisfying any that are unable to complement and exalt each other.

Equally conciously and with the same guiding will, the joys of this coupling should lead to the climax, should develop its full potential, and should permit to flower all the seeds sown by the merging of two bodies. Lust should be made into a work of art, formed like every work of art, both instinctively and consciously.

We must strip lust of all the sentimental veils that disfigure it. These veils were thrown over it out of mere cowardice, because smug sentimentality is so satisfying. Sentimentality is comfortable and therefore demeaning.

In one who is young and healthy, when lust clashes with sentimentality, lust is victorious. Sentiment is a creature of fashion, lust is eternal. Lust triumphs, because it is the joyous exaltation that drives one beyond oneself, the delight in posession and domination, the perpetual victory from which the perpetual battle is born anew, the headiest and surest intoxication of conquest. And as this certain conquest is temporary, it must be constantly won anew.

Lust is a force, in that it refines the spirit by bringing to white heat the excitement of the flesh. The spirit burns bright and clear from a healthy, strong flesh, purified in the embrace. Only the weak and sick sink into the mire and are diminished. And lust is a force in that it kills the weak and exalts the strong, aiding natural selection.

Lust is a force, finally, in that it never leads to the insipidity of the definite and the secure, doled out by soothing sentimentality. Lust is the eternal battle, never finally won. After the fleeting triumph, even during the ephemeral triumph itself, reawakening dissatisfaction spurs a human being, driven by an orgiastic will, to expand and surpass himself.

Lust is for the body what an ideal is for the spirit—the magnificent Chimaera, that one ever clutches at but never captures, and which the young and the avid, intoxicated with the vision, pursue without rest.

Lust is a force.

"It makes life more complicated, but it's also the reason everything is worth doing." - mom, yeah that mom

...is the same this week as it was the week before that, and the week before that. we'll be flying Viper CAPs in conjunction with heavy raider pickets from the base ship. those of you who just came back from six-day planet hunts will get two days local duty before going out again. remember, the first one who sights a habitable rock will get this fine oral hygiene product. it is the last tube of toothpaste in the universe. gods know most of you need it.

our mission is the same this week as it was the week before that, and the week before that.

planet hunters, make sure to draw long duration provisions. if those clapped-out FTLs go down when you're out there, you're gonna get mighty hungry waiting for the SAR birds to find you.

as you know, the mutiny has thinned our ranks. we cannot give all you Raptor jocks back-seaters. savor this alone time, but do not whack too much. we need you to conserve your O2. learn to savor your alone time. wank as little as possible. conserve your O2. planet search assignments are on the duty board.

be advised, the repairs will continue to cause sporadic power outages.

engines start at 0710.

good hunting.

when you are gone, and reason gone with you,
then fantasy is queen and soul, and all ;
she can present joys meaner than you do,
convenient, and more proportional.
so, if I dream I have you, I have you,
for all our joys are but fantastical ;

and so I 'scape the pain, for pain is true ;
and sleep, which locks up sense, doth lock out all.
after a such fruition I shall wake,
and, but the waking, nothing shall repent.

she said "keep wearing the tie. you'll only make friends that way"
so I straightened my knot, rolled up white sleeves and started the day.

Fred Madison is always trying to escape.
Pete Dayton is his escapist fantasy.
The Mystery Man is all manners of insecurity.
Dick Laurent is dead.
The highway is a metaphor for attempting to escape.
The fact that it's dark means it is unknown.
The Möbius strip is a storytelling device.

It's like discovering a new part of yourself when you hear a song that you've been intimately familiar with for so long, at a different point in life than when you originally heard it. In fact it is exactly that. Discovering a new part of yourself.

I am taking time tonight to watch Nine Inch Nails perform The Downward Spiral live in it's entirety. You can also see it in several formats here [link]. I am no longer finding bits and pieces in this album. I am seeing an entire piece. When I was younger TDS was an expression of my depression and feeling of alienation from people close to me and there sense of generally everything. The music was a blur. I knew though there was something more too it. Something more detailed in expression I just couldn't really see it. So I appreciated it and took from it what I could learn. Now it is beyond clear. Now it nearly pricks my skin and turns my stomach and I'm sure it's supposed to and I still am at no loss of appreciation.

TDS is, in it's own way, a cautionary tale about loss of self. Losing oneself to external and internal forces both emotional and physical. Anger, government, religion, status quo, jealousy, ego, lust, depression, self-hate, abuse and addiction are all represented. An aural landscape of falling, failing, losing and abusing placed as the backdrop to a modern nihilists depressive cycle. It is most certainly timeless and yet still of a certain time. The worst part about living a literal downward spiral is that you can only see it from the outside in small ways while it is happening but so crystal clear when the crash is complete. It fits like perfect puzzle pieces that have the bitter knowledge of how many truly good things had fit together in the past.

And so like finding new meanings in songs or only really understanding a situation when you have lived it something happens during the last two verses of the final track. At no other point does the idea of familiar things having a new meaning or that bitter knowledge of the falling, failing feeling happen than...

If I could start again, a million miles away. I would keep myself, I would find a way.

There is realization. Not in claiming that you know the self destruction, addiction or abuse because you are in the midst of it. It is the classic meaning behind hindsight being 20/20. Seeing clearly. There is no remorse. There is only self preservation. The final fight of a wild, rabid, injured animal. Lost and burdened with the knowledge of "If only I had seen, instead of saying that I knew already." But time is a concept. The only thing that exists to our perception is here and now. There is only the present moment. We never really know the breadth of what is happening.

Keep yourself. Share what is shared in kind. Essentially be good.

birthday, today

There have been times in my life where I wanted to reach out of my own skin. Something breaks and tells me there's a freedom outside of this and I want it beyond desire. I want it like an imperative that personified, becomes impossible to diverge from. Like a narrow path with tall thick tree walls set on both sides. A broken K-wall. A dark car crashed into a ditch. An overcast sky.

The times when pattern recognition is a burden and fate is "not without a sense of irony" to a bleeding point. Sometimes both of these shapes happen in exacting moments or spans of time that carry a certain perceived alignment. It's the moments where "alignment" is not precise enough to describe the poetry of the pattern. It's almost holy, sacred.

Like home.

It's like being chased by something that's building a path for you. Imagine the concept of an 'inverted trap'. A syzygy of bread crumbs leading to the monster at the end of the book.

But it turns out the monster is yourself. You yourself tied down the pages. You yourself nailed the barrier. You yourself laid the masonry. You alone designed the pattern. You engineered the connections. You draw the perspective, write the poem and build the model. You, however, still turned every page. You build other people homes because you can't find one of your own.

Because you're always escaping something. Yourself the impossible prison. A bird in a cage with the door wide open. The frame and the masterpiece.

I gladly am falling humbly on my knees at the altar of a dark star. In the same buildings where she started her fascination with repetitive form and where I am finding a nexus inside myself, an aleph of repetitive formz. Humble to what I have done, lost and still seek. My body has become that begging bowl and I have woven my tears into a black bhikkhu robe.

The humility of washing each others feet. Heeling sores and wrapping them in clean cloth.

My heart recedes to an acre, a clearing. Elevated over the harbor. It's beat will float gently on the surface of the Hudson, tethered to a pier by the longest cord, pulling at your stomach. A contour line on a very private topography. That leads to a little light house and never relents.

...and the moon will be damned.

nega-decisions are the easiest to non-make.

shes the one I live for
I live alone

All is good was good is beginning and has not ended.

Are you now, or have you ever been?

I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.

A black book:
ALBUMS CA. AGRIPPA
Order Extra Leaves By Letter and Name

A Kodak album of time-burned
black construction paper

The string he tied
Has been unraveled by years
and the dry weather of trunks
Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War
Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen
Until they resemble cigarette-ash

Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite
Now lost
Then his name
W.F. Gibson Jr.
and something, comma,
1924

Then he glued his Kodak prints down
And wrote under them
In chalk-like white pencil:
"Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919."

A flat-roofed shack
Against a mountain ridge
In the foreground are tumbled boards and offcuts
He must have smelled the pitch,
In August
The sweet hot reek
Of the electric saw
Biting into decades

Next the spaniel Moko
"Moko 1919"
Poses on small bench or table
Before a backyard tree
His coat is lustrous
The grass needs cutting
Beyond the tree,
In eerie Kodak clarity,
Are the summer backstairs of Wheeling,
West Virginia
Someone's left a wooden stepladder out

"Aunt Fran and [obscured]"
Although he isn't, this gent
He has a "G" belt-buckle
A lapel-device of Masonic origin
A patent propelling-pencil
A fountain-pen
And the flowers they pose behind so solidly
Are rooted in an upright length of whitewashed
concrete sewer-pipe.

Daddy had a horse named Dixie
"Ford on Dixie 1917"
A saddle-blanket marked with a single star
Corduroy jodhpurs
A western saddle
And a cloth cap
Proud and happy
As any boy could be

"Arthur and Ford fishing 1919"
Shot by an adult
(Witness the steady hand
that captures the wildflowers
the shadows on their broad straw hats
reflections of a split-rail fence)
standing opposite them,
on the far side of the pond,
amid the snake-doctors and the mud,
Kodak in hand,
Ford Sr.?

And "Moma July, 1919"
strolls beside the pond,
in white big city shoes,
Purse tucked behind her,
While either Ford or Arthur, still straw-hatted,
approaches a canvas-topped touring car.

"Moma and Mrs. Graham at fish hatchery 1919"
Moma and Mrs. G. sit atop a graceful concrete arch.

"Arthur on Dixie", likewise 1919,
rather ill at ease. On the roof behind the barn, behind him,
can be made out this cryptic mark:
H.V.J.M.[?]

"Papa's mill 1919", my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of
cut lumber,
might as easily be the record
of some later demolition, and
His cotton sleeves are rolled
to but not past the elbow,
striped, with a white neckband
for the attachment of a collar.
Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.
(How that feels to tumble down,
or smells when it is wet)

II.

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.

Now in high-ceiling bedrooms,
unoccupied, unvisited,
in the bottom drawers of veneered bureaus
in cool chemical darkness curl commemorative
montages of the country's World War dead,

just as I myself discovered
one other summer in an attic trunk,
and beneath that every boy's best treasure
of tarnished actual ammunition
real little bits of war
but also
the mechanism
itself.

The blued finish of firearms
is a process, controlled, derived from common
rust, but there under so rare and uncommon a patina
that many years untouched
until I took it up
and turning, entranced, down the unpainted
stair, to the hallway where I swear
I never heard the first shot.

The copper-jacketed slug recovered
from the bathroom's cardboard cylinder of
Morton's Salt was undeformed
save for the faint bright marks of lands
and grooves so hot, stilled energy,
it blistered my hand.

The gun lay on the dusty carpet.
Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up
That the second shot, equally unintended,
notched the hardwood banister
and brought a strange bright smell of ancient sap to life
in a beam of dusty sunlight.
Absolutely alone
in awareness of the mechanism.

Like the first time you put your mouth
on a woman.

III.

"Ice Gorge at Wheeling
1917"

Iron bridge in the distance,
Beyond it a city.
Hotels where pimps went about their business
on the sidewalks of a lost world.
But the foreground is in focus,
this corner of carpenter's Gothic,
these backyards running down to the freeze.

"Steamboat on Ohio River",
its smoke foul and dark,
its year unknown,
beyond it the far bank
overgrown with factories.

"Our Wytheville
House Sept. 1921"

They have moved down from Wheeling and my father wears his
city clothes. Main Street is unpaved and an electric streetlamp is
slung high in the frame, centered above the tracked dust on a
slack wire, suggesting the way it might pitch in a strong wind,
the shadows that might throw.

The house is heavy, unattractive, sheathed in stucco, not native
to the region. My grandfather, who sold supplies to contractors,
was prone to modern materials, which he used with
wholesaler's enthusiasm. In 1921 he replaced the section of brick
sidewalk in front of his house with the broad smooth slab of poured
concrete, signing this improvement with a flourish, "W.F.
Gibson 1921". He believed in concrete and plywood
particularly. Seventy years later his signature remains, the slab
floating perfectly level and charmless between mossy stretches of
sweet uneven brick that knew the iron shoes of Yankee horses.

"Mama Jan. 1922" has come out to sweep the concrete with a
broom. Her boots are fastened with buttons requiring a special instrument.

Ice gorge again, the Ohio, 1917. The mechanism closes. A
torn clipping offers a 1957 DeSOTO FIREDOME, 4-door Sedan,
torqueflite radio, heather and power steering and brakes, new
w.s.w. premium tires. One owner. $1,595.

IV.

He made it to the age of torqueflite radio
but not much past that, and never in that town.
That was mine to know, Main Street lined with
Rocket Eighty-eights,
the dimestore floored with wooden planks
pies under plastic in the Soda Shop,
and the mystery untold, the other thing,
sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight
when nobody else was there.

In the talc-fine dust beneath the platform of the
Norfolk & Western lay indian-head pennies undisturbed since
the dawn of man.

In the banks and courthouse, a fossil time
prevailed, limestone centuries.

When I went up to Toronto
in the draft, my Local Board was there on Main Street,
above a store that bought and sold pistols.
I'd once traded that man a derringer for a
Walther P-38. The pistols were in the window
behind an amber roller-blind
like sunglasses. I was seventeen or so but basically I guess
you just had to be a white boy.
I'd hike out to a shale pit and run
ten dollars worth of 9mm
through it, so worn you hardly
had to pull the trigger.
Bored, tried shooting
down into a distant stream but
one of them came back at me
off a round of river rock
clipping walnut twigs from a branch
two feet above my head.

So that I remembered the mechanism.

V.

In the all night bus station
they sold scrambled eggs to state troopers
the long skinny clasp-knives called fruit knives
which were pearl handled watermelon-slicers
and hillbilly novelties in brown varnished wood
which were made in Japan.

First I'd be sent there at night only
if Mom's carton of Camels ran out,
but gradually I came to value
the submarine light, the alien reek
of the long human haul, the strangers
straight down from Port Authority
headed for Nashville, Memphis, Miami.
Sometimes the Sheriff watched them get off
making sure they got back on.

When the colored restroom
was no longer required
they knocked open the cinderblock
and extended the magazine rack
to new dimensions,
a cool fluorescent cave of dreams
smelling faintly and forever of disinfectant,
perhaps as well of the travelled fears
of those dark uncounted others who,
moving as though contours of hot iron,
were made thus to dance
or not to dance
as the law saw fit.

There it was that I was marked out as a writer,
having discovered in that alcove
copies of certain magazines
esoteric and precious, and, yes,
I knew then, knew utterly,
the deal done in my heart forever,
though how I knew not,
nor ever have.

Walking home
through all the streets unmoving
so quiet I could hear the timers of the traffic lights a block away:
the mechanism. Nobody else, just the silence
spreading out to where the long trucks groaned
on the highway their vast brute souls in want.

VI.

There must have been a true last time
I saw the station but I don't remember
I remember the stiff black horsehide coat
gift in Tucson of a kid named Natkin
I remember the cold
I remember the Army duffle
that was lost and the black man in Buffalo
trying to sell me a fine diamond ring,
and in the coffee shop in Washington
I'd eavesdropped on a man wearing a black tie
embroidered with red roses
that I have looked for ever since.

They must have asked me something
at the border
I was admitted
somehow
and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter
across the very sky
and I went free
to find myself
mazed in Victorian brick
amid sweet tea with milk
and smoke from a cigarette called a Black Cat
and every unknown brand of chocolate
and girls with blunt-cut bangs
not even Americans
looking down from high narrow windows
on the melting snow
of the city undreamed
and on the revealed grace
of the mechanism,
no round trip.

They tore down the bus station
there's chainlink there
no buses stop at all
and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku
in a typhoon
the fine rain horizontal
umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath
tonight red lanterns are battered.

laughing,
in the mechanism.