16.3
Good Americans know the decoration goes one way. Do not tell them any different. Ask them what they’re hanging up, do not ask them why. They are delighted to share in the sway of their commanders, so obedient they do not think they have them. They may spend their lives without epiphany, but they know how to make a sale.
The peals of love can still be heard through speakers in the evening. Immigration is then shaped by stigma, when dead children wash up on the shore, when US bombs are killing them for years. When hearts are barred from changing, change will happen in the brain. Then the world is different. The ones who liked it better in medieval times are ruffled. The ones gone apoplectic go and shoot up someone’s school — they are the fundamental terrorists. They lack the physical and mental shape to be contracted mercenaries, the poor dears. Unable to compartmentalize their thought, they take commands online. The propa-g removes their empathy — they don’t miss it, honestly. They delight in ashly scattering our mewling. They get a charge from worshiping aggressive snakes because we’re loathe to do it. If only shooters had athletic gifts, we would be spared their onerous frustration. We cannot hope that they’d have brains.
Scientists put knowledge where we have to pay to read it, shutting off what we might share. Night obscures the strange brown eyes that want the world’s destruction. Shapes merge together in the lack of light, the eye is drawn to brightness. Gentlemen and dames, glimmering upon the stage, barker for the monolithic entity, that’s stood there uphill on stage right ever since the plays debuted in BCE whenever. Crystals let them know, when they are glowing. They take away emotion, they even work on addicts. Licking crystals is a sustenance when water’s not around. Sleeping with a crystal on one’s forehead grants heroic dreams, leaves sexy indentations. If our hero’d had a crystal in his front pants pocket when he sprang his hurt and love upon her in Nebraska, our heroine would have moisturized his feet. If he’d had a crystal on Black Friday, that so and so would not have wrenched her from his hug, when she was the last one in the shop, and had been so discounted.
SWAT teams get pumped up, shoot a dog. Something will be shot by god if Blacks are not allowed. Cops are sweating through their combat socks, it’s squeaky when they step. Colleagues, failed athletes all, hide their noses behind balaclavas to stop the odor that it brings. They know where it’s coming from. They love the danger of no seatbelts in the ‘tac van. They’re Irish setters frozen, pointing, waiting for direction, in such stress they’ve tension headaches and back pain. They’re nothing to the SWAT of bad emotion in their brain. If not for their helplessness with their own chemistry, they would not manifest, with uniforms and guns, the price tag on humanity, nor be symbolic actors of the drives that drive them. Shooting Blacks is contraception — that’ll stop that sperm. All the no’s they’ve ever heard, they place on other people. Strafing their ingraining, they are the ex post facto justifiers of a corporate personhood that runs their average lives. Live by it or die, they said to all the Filipinos, when they took ownership by fiat from the Spanish colonizers and made hunting partisans a trophy sport in the hundred thousands. That is the legacy of Cook and Smith, the fundamentals of the market — every day in every way they’re getting better, more, new. Replacement myths they foster, under dint of true belief. They cough in country air because it’s cleaner. When their propa-g role model is in power, hurting them with economics, it’s when they feel the safest, when their brows are most at ease. Then their dogs and children can relax, maybe grow up differently, find a peace in woo that leaves the grandkids unafraid and talkative, to other children, through a screen. The hit parade’s forgotten. All the asps have been confounded. The unintended conse-Q’s are weaker than before.
Corporations act without noblesse oblige. They’re stubbornly persistent. They scatter up-turned rakes over the lawn, cover us with opaque lenses, and order us to find the pupu platter. We haven’t eaten in a while, intermittent fasting not to prolong life but cause they want us dead. If not producing in wage slavery, they will want us dead. They outlaw tantrums, then they get their high school athletes in disguise to throw a fit around us. Then our peaceful group is targeted with gas. A fellow whom the NCAA excluded, cause he wasn’t good enough, gets a badge. There is a college hippie up a tree, stopping it from being chain-sawed down. The badge man gets a ladder and sprays toxic pepper up the hippie’s shorts. He was determined not to move, to do his part for the environment, but the spray contacts his genitals. The suffering’s immense. The militarized person/drone who tortures under order has a mess at home, and he’s allowed to go there after, green lights all the way, to hurt his spouse and put his father’s anger in his kids. Not everyone can do this job, he knows, and he feels proud. He feels unique in the exact way he never conjured on the high school field. He doesn’t think of it as torture, the not well paid enforcer. Most days at work are boring. He spends them frozen, pointing, commanding with military presence those who would not harm another person, until an impoverished abused teen boy snaps at what he was born into, allowing the badge man’s superiors to activate his program, which he carries out with automatic relish. At peaceful protests he grumbles at the rubber bullets he was issued, fires them, puts out eyes.
We have what the Mayans had. They made sluice channels in their pyramids for all the blood. Take the others’ blood away from us, we will not stand in it! We will not put a warning in two hundred tongues that consciousness is precious, to not program the mediocre into being drones, that such who would mold and limit consciousness should never be allowed to hold power, for they are certain to misuse it. It is a guarantee. We do not have it in us to toss baby asps into the sea — they do not have it in them not to sting us. We do not have it in us not to learn from their example, implementing anything that makes us tingle. All the norms that frightened us as kids have made their way into the briefcase where the launch igniters stand on tiptoe, straining, sweaty, mad to change a zero to a one at a copper point of contact, getting back at past whomevers, guileless parent substitutes who shaped their thinking (as it were), lopping off their possibility. Substitutes are thus misshapen, and ancient worry makes up pictures for the rest.
16.4
Two lovers separate. They find love with someone else, then someone else again. One plays at love with someone new, later admits it wasn’t love at all, not like love used to be. The other loves for real, with bitterness, stored up not so deep inside. The first feels false and hollow, the second full to bursting. They are deceptive toward themselves — they are able to get by. Love’s face is the jeune femme dozing lightly, the welling up of watching her until the sky is streaked with indigo and heralding the sun. Love is the frowning into consciousness, the cracking open of the eyes, to light upon the features of her lover, lifting lips first thing into a barely held up kiss. Before she yawns or says a word, she’s wanton for a kiss. What follows is impractical for those who long for the eternal, but love has taken over, like a serum in the air that makes them act unconsciously and toward a solitary purpose — combining, partnering, merging all the selves the two have been to one, both letting it exist within the other, as close to primary as we will ever be. It only happens in a new embrace, before a dreary understanding’s at the fore and must be contended with as long as life goes on between them.
They make new life without conception, in the mingling of primal selves. They’ve always wanted that, the room they knew was there by word of mouth but had not known where it was or how to get there until they found each other. It’s doorless, wall-less, and yet roomy all the same, furniture incorporeal, the couch is soft but firm, the bed as springy as they like it, entertainment conjured as they wish it, going at it, living both a shared creation. They are the priority, each one for the other. Love is in the looks they give that send them into action. It’s sensual in water, vapor coming off the skin. Normal air outside the room is cool and shocks them when they’re back there, individual, outside. Love is setting someone’s visage into harmony, straightening a lock, brushing off a lash. Dressing them to our ideal they see themselves ideally. We’re better than we thought because another sees us so. Discomfit vanishes inside us, goes the way of speech and thought, for love is only action. It is nervous, is confusion, is set to right quite easily in just another’s grin. It’s effortless unthinking, she senses that it’s true, and he becomes excited. At long last it’s pastoral, the animals have lowed, the stew is in the wrought-iron pot, the fire regenerating. A barking laugh escapes his lips at her shudder sigh. They sleep entwined, the sleep a pause within their living dream. They do not dream, they’re living one. The longing for it wakes her and she lifts her mouth before she lifts her eyes. Splendor is upon them! He puts his lips to hers so that they’re barely touching. It calls her and she finds the oomph to press them more together. Their front teeth click, for wanton joy has stretched his lips into the grandest smile. He cannot hold the pursèd shape. She laughs at this, a challenge in the note. He senses then what glory is and so cedes himself and makes her welcome as she’s welcoming. Later as they share a bath they note the fire is still ongoing. The stew’s remade itself. Now is not the time to ponder why, may such time never come.
Embrace, they call immortally. All else they say with looks. Happiness, when memory is slain by fulfilled expectation! Next time you initiate it. Take a look at these again with endless fascination.
I want you, meaning act right now. Be there when I call distraught, three or seven times a day. Take my broken family and add it to your own. Be with me downstairs, watching a love movie, when my mother screams in consternation, “I just spent forty minutes ****ing your father and now he” (won’t take out the garbage or whatever). It might be hard to block that out because you’ve never felt that painful intersection of embarrassment and pity, but try — you’ve got it worse than I do. Looking away doesn’t make it disappear, regardless. Figure where to fit that in among your fractured psych. Help me pick my clothes up off the lawn after she throws them out my bedroom window. As soon as we gather some and bring them in, she tosses more outside. Don’t think about the windows in the other houses. You are in love and this is what comes with it. Mom scorned my independence, used it to boost her own. She showed me how to demonstrate — sometimes I do it now. My dad knocked me around. I shut down my hysteria for you, the family’s shut down, you see now we’ve seen all this before. If I tremble just a bit it’s cause I fought and yelled at her before. It only made it worse — she had to be admitted. She still unknowingly ladles out the conse-Q of that. Let our passion be compassion, hold it for vous-même, you’ve got it worse than me. You hadn’t the experience, aware that this affected me, but not how it defined.
Today I walk the line encouraging and herding younger male admirers in my middle age. Mom suffered big diseases while she was rearing kids. Dad was a Jesuit — available for retribution, otherwise not. Forget the time you came to pick me up and he threw you off “the property”– you were sleeping with me in my bed all night within a couple dates. Mom saw something in you, you dumb prick. She decreed it was okay. Dad put it in the place already eaten up inside. You ignored him cause you could, cause you learned from your own saintly rearers that anyone against you is against you for all time.
I placed my love into the sky. The story I believed was true because it had to be. That also was love, which breathes circular thinking — which proves itself by being true, its own tautology. And so it’s part of the young people when they fall for one another. It carries out desire in ways that at other times abhors them, or simply makes them cringe. Love reorients our thinking. It alters who we were in Blakean refrains. Love’s a poor interpreter, knows only denotation, misses what connotes. It’s blithe and blindly confident, as certain as obeying the shareholders, adept at recitation, calm only when post-coital, terrible enough to outlaw the uncertain. Love gives a laminated schedule, then it does not stick to it. Love’s the honking bird that returns to where its mate was run down by a car — it waddles back and forth upon the curb, never crossing when the light turns, stepping off when there’s a break, to touch its beak down to the fateful spot. It lingers where its mate expired. It shifts its weight and honks but once, and that cut off and brief, and lapses into quiet, in recognition of the silence that comes after life. It stays there late into the evening. Then it takes flight suddenly, after hours at the graveside, for what reason in the choosing of that moment we know not, what makes a wake suffice, what observance was completed. We know, or better hope, the flying vertebrate has feelings, that it knows a form of love, and so it knows a kind of grief to which we are not privy. But since we see ourselves in everything, we empathize. The fealty is proper. We’ll stump the olive trees.
Love itself is poor. It has no money and no property. Its clothes are from the penny sack in church donation stores, clothes that are too large for love itself and make it look malnourished, hanging off it. Love itself is without home. It does not sleep, but if it did it would be like camping without tents or sleeping bags, mattress pads or beds of air, and without a little burner on a can of gas, a pot to heat up beans, a fold-out canvas chair, or flint and steel, a pocket knife, marshmallows, sticks — yea even sticks are dear. Love itself has nothing of these things. At best it has an awning on a tenement to expose itself beneath. Love shows itself in need. We looking on it see different for its need. We’re want to supply care — it takes that which we have, saying that is what it needs. For we heroic types it contrives to be in need of rescuing. How sweet of love to think of us this way. Love deems bespoke relations unimportant, creates classes in our minds, makes unrest among the groups that we must manage, those many selves within us, that cast reflections on reality, so that reality is as love sees it, not as it really is. We look for it among the pulling back of former love. The person whom we love’s more virtuous than love itself. The bridges are all bomb-proof, Robert Jordan has no hope.
For all its power and ability to change, it’s weaker than mere circumstance. Circumstance can end it. Love has wisdom of its own but knows not much about us. Not only does it give command, people want that love should have it. There’s much they cannot take (apart from medicine). Love is there to herd them. They’re stunted, and those who see this are appalled (they want love all the same). The followers of love will look around before they speak. They teach us something of ourselves — by aping us we see what ape-like stuff we do. Love senses this and fills us up, as docile as a lamb. It tells us love has often thought of us, that it has plans for us, then takes us where we fight until our death, for love displays great wisdom in our choosing. Love knows more about our consciousness than we do, yet it believes in casting spells. Love’s clothes are custom made by Wiccans in a parlor for tattoos, where the will to live’s contained within a single needled spot. Love pursues its pleasures with the means at hand, not with what is best for us. Love wants to be pursued. Unanswerable, it steals its calls from birdsong, its pheromones from ox. The right costume is important if we’re going to like its songs. Love can go eternally, as far as people know, but it can fall into a coma, flat-lined but for machine-like people keeping it alive. Lads lament la belle dame sans merci, who did not want them more than once, or possibly at all. Then one day, love will rise up from the sheets, and breathe without assistance, and speak the words that we’ve forgotten, that we’ve been desperate to hear, “I remember you, I’m back, I put myself in you.” Then we have the only thing worth living for.