Curious Guardians From This Swamp

The following is a read of the literature section of Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak's "A Critique of Postcolonial Reason."

*

As any person who has ever had the chance pleasure of gibbering into the umbra that falls during the ceaseless fury of endless night might know, being is squishy. Cosmic horror is always mired in embodiment and embodied by the mire. So, with pleasure I must say,

If we want to start to something, we must ignore that our starting point is, all efforts taken, shaky. If we want to get something done, we must ignore that,all provisions made, the end will be inconclusive. This ignoring is not an active forgetfulness; it is, rather, an active marginalizing of the marshiness, the swampiness, the lack of firm grounding in the margins, at beginning and end. Those of us who “know” this also know that it is in these margins that philosophy philosophizes. These necessarily and actively marginalized margins haunt what we start and get done, as curious guardians. (175)

So, recognizing our frailties, may we walk without fear or trepidation amongst the ruins today, noting all the while the life that erupts from this swamp. Furthermore, I’d like to hope to invoke a similar performativity of declaration unto the suggestions of Spivak’s own framing of her critiques, such that this initial suggestion be taken as the spell-ing of text as a whole, such that these mossy intonings are cast upon as the den of today’s seminar so as to make the forthcoming sequence a comfy concatenation of occult-urated crimes, as opposed to a stony stockade of stupidity.

Of central importance to Spivak’s discussion is the construction of that which we will later find to be ruinous, noting a tendency “to monumentalize something we call ‘margins,’ where the distinction between North and South is domesticated” (Spivak 170). In this moment, we can note the symmetry of our taming of the inanimate world—stone carved—and the taming of the animate—flesh, also carved up, by the pound. The objectifying of these terms for the sake of debate does need necessarily lead to the reality of their constituents, but, instead, generates new inanimate bodies to accumulate sentiment and to be discussed without becoming a return to their means, a new catachrestic entity. This attempt to even begin a discussion is further hampered by the fact that “the metropolitan anti-imperialist cannot teach the native the proper name of his nation or continent,” for who can remark on “the mysteriousness of the space upon which we are born?” (188). Again we must face down the catachrestic fault in any process of naming, that the sign becomes an echo that we cannot secure to the referent itself so that it must instead go wild in the abstract.

            But our linguistic sensibilities are already at fault for a sense of the abstract. Spivak notes that, “by phonocentric convention a sign means something other than itself whereas a person is self-proximate, even self-identical,” against “the laws of everyday phonocentrism—the privileging of voice-consciousness over any system of mere signs” (149). In this moment, I may be vainly dogpaddling to traverse the schism between term and meaning, rotating in a space that is wrought in highly relieved inscriptions that we may catch on or be caught by. Perhaps it may be the latter since, “whatever remove from phonocentrism we throw the dice, and however phonocentrism is critiqued, the ontic differential between the poet-operating-as-controlling-subject and the woman-manipulated-as-sign will  not disappear” (149). This fault line in conversation is quite likely innate in the patronizing function of most poets, who seem more often than not to be closed off in their own language and choose instead to talk at as opposed to speaking with an individual. In the service of art, a certain sacrifice of the world may be made at an alter to a sunken world of knowledge, but do we descend as Ishtar, leaving beyond our shiny trinkets, or do we dredge ourselves up from the abyss festering with wounds from the assault of Tiamat?

            Now, of course, we have been assuming that this underworld can and is willing to engage with us. This other world is none too alien, though, since, as I have suggested, it is a ruinous place upon which life has crept, so its removal is a matter of forgetting for a moment. In our descent, we must be willing to observe, that “for every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his “voice,” there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked. The “native,” whatever that might mean, is not only a victim, but also an agent. The curious guardian at the margin who will not inform” (190). As we have already discussed, though Spivak puts forth again early in this chapter, the “Northwestern European male philosophers foreclosed the “native informant” in order to establish the Northwestern European subject as “the same,” whether from above or below” (113). But the literary world in its own formations does not deserve much more credit, for it to has sealed off the speech of others in refusing to imagine harder upon the wills of their cast of characters, choosing instead to offer the tongues of those who did the actual heavy lifting necessary to the construction of their narratives. Friday is offered no respite, no rest, no Sabbath for he must be sacrificed at every day, so as to allow the imperial psyche to consolidate itself for a regal presentation of a man of great will and mind dictating to a fool who cannot understand him, a pyrrhic victory at best since “it is a longstanding topos that barbarians by definition do not speak language” (187). Of particular interest in this moment of Spivak’s tropology is the singularity of language that she invokes, provoking the possibility that the barbarian trope is not merely unaware of the subject’s language, but that this raw other does not know any concept of the lingual dance. Of course, we find that our man Friday is more capable than he is given credit for, since “he learns his master’s speech,” and “does his master’s work,” but I would dare to go farther and say that we might excise the comma separating these two phrases and recognize that Friday learns that his master’s speech does his master’s work, a lesson one presumes evident when he commands a bear in English and brings it into motion (187). This might even suggest in part that Friday may be even more aware than we give him credit for since he might have some conception of the great chain of being.

            There is still also a problem in the aforementioned concept of performativity, which one supposes as a linguistic function requires an audience unto its actors. From the outside invades a thought cutting off the natural projection of another people, a deterritorializtion of a fundamental sort such that “a full literary reinscription cannot easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system operating as Law as such, alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of human science busy establishing the “native” as a self-consolidating other”  (131). The universal purported in capitalization—Truth, Law—is but a pure stitching in the flesh of man to overcome the innate cosmic horror of his own internal abyss. Relegated to his own isolation, the play of his being is actualized in a tact more vengeful and childish than he can recognize. This situation would be merely pitiable if he was willing to allow this to be performed in the privacy of his own internality, but we have the misfortune of bearing as witness in blood and being. So in the pursuit of the hierarchy of his will, others are faced with a tellurian turn and made into his own ground, so much so that he debases his own language to make “the word, “native,” which is supposed to mean “autocthonous,”…paradoxically recoded as an unindividuated parahumanity that cannot aspire to a proper habitation” (161). The reterritorialization concomitant of that earlier grab is done unto the native informant, a character who by Spivak’s own terminology one imagines is brought to stand for the trial of these magisterial crimes…and is he not also this curious guardian?

            It is my interest in these “curious guardians” which guides this essay. These titans, who are no doubt the native informant, who remain silent and watching, but waiting and wondering at us as well. We can observe their imperialized entelechia in Spivak’s dissection of Shelley, “Shelley’s emancipatory vision cannot extend beyond the speculator situation of the colonial enterprise, where the master alone has a history, master and subject locked up in the cracked mirror of the present, and the subject’s future, although indefinite, is vectored specifically toward and away from the master” (140). The agency robbed of the native informant has given the master two minds and so a living dialectic within, but this process perhaps instead turns him into his own object while the disposed instead must lie in wait, guarding the knowledge of this split without necessarily a split in their own consciousness, until they too must act. In motion, these guardians are all too aware of what Spivak has placed in a footnote, to be exhumed: “the (ab)-use of the Enlightenment in the interest of building a civil society brings the subaltern discursive formation into crisis, makes it deconstruct” (142). On one hand, we have a silent consciousness who has already been forced to undergo a process of xenogenesis and to incorporate the hoary dust of another; while our other hand must embrace the neurotic who is not able to comprehend his spor-atic potential, his fungal bloom that breeds only in the wild, but which also empties out his own vision.

A transcription error has occurred throughout the genetic cosmos; an im-materialized schism has become the substrate for nominal generation. In Spivak’s quotation of de Man, we might find the incantation when so inscribed animates our golems:

“The faithful translation, which is always literal, how can it also free? It can only be free if it reveals the instability of the original, and if it reveals that instability as the linguistic tension between trope and meaning. Pure language is perhaps more present in the translation than in the original, but in the mode of trope” (162).

Substituting trope for truth, we can appreciate the fallacy of the raw man, of the philosophical fault lines that subsume texts that make proclamations of Truth—capital T—not into science but science fiction. A common mistake upheld is to raise a banner of enlightenment for having slain the millenarian, all the while ignoring that this declaration stinks of evangelion, of victorious message as much as anything else has. The schism in the quality of the discourse we have been entertaining is a derivation of a failure to appreciate the troping of living beings, to appreciate how the ground gives, to fail to see that one is not walking but wading and that shortly thereafter one maybe sinking rather than swimming, preserved in either mode but one seems closer to the truth wished than another. The problem of course is that we have taken the tongue of the life guard, and so who is there to whistle?

Thoughts on "Catfish"

Thoughtlog began around 20 Minutes into the film, and notes were made continuously every couple/few scenes.

It's difficult to watch a film knowing that there is a twist, let alone having some conception of what that twist is, and then furthermore watching a film about facebook which is always about simulacrum anyway. This is further made difficult beacuse my modus operandi is to use facebook to maintain relationships made in the real world and not develop relationships like this because ya know--what apparently happens in this film.

Meanwhile, still, while watching this I want to play some games with the psyche of this story, which is to say both psyche as we mean it now, mind, and the older charging for it: spirit.

Interestingly enough, in the family of interest, there are three women, which can transcribe as the maiden, mother, and crone of myth and two men, which might encode as the "upper" and "lower" horns of the demon, the father being the horns on the head of the demon and the son being the lower horns, creature of the earth and the main challenger of hero Nev earlier in the film.

The whole system is clearly a little fracked, but it would seem that these people are a litle, shall we say, disturbed and, therefore, why shouldn't the be sucked into a world that one would presume expresses their psyche which is contained within a world already filled the possibility of doubt.

On the other hand, this is a a brilliant piece for people who have yet to discover what subjectivity is, which does not mean that it does not have its own value but that it might not be the most valuable thing in the project called subjectivity--wait their adress is 421? Also, good job trying to hide their locaiton on google maps when you displayed the road as you zoomed out and the adress number when you came to the house.

Like most films of a radical bent this film suggests, most of all, that you don't listen to your producers.

Also, clearly only us Jews could get ourselves this far into a fucked up adventure, but still carry along wondering what next magical thing will happen. Sometimes a satirical culture can be dangerous.

Also--and again: clearly, this is an adventure that keeps our heroes constantly challenged so they can't always be sure that they want to go through with the adventure and know what is real, the fundaments of any real adventure being the constant tension of--"should I stay or should I go?"

The beach front scene seems prime evidence for the film being a fabrication, judging at least by the quality of the shot against what they are actually doing, but we can only "trust" the filmmakers, right?

"Most people wouldn't go back," but they aren't most people!

Interestingly, this story could evolve into an introduction about deterritorialization, but it instead seems to have gone into the matrix suggesting that the entire network is fabricated.

Furthermore, where's the rest of the dinner party? That scene was fucking short! At this point, I can't really believe anything that the directors did, and, frankly, I believe that this film has more to do with trusting a director and the film project then it does actual people. That is probably the real point of this story, that, going up the ranks, can you trust an artist in the real world?

Based on the ends of the journey, the suggestion then is that the human imagination is apparently fairly extensive.

Wait a minute, lots of stuff about the twins, but where's something about Vince? ('Oh, wait, he pops in the end and ties everything up with a neat bow of common folk wisdom and faith and prayer.
Fucking yay.)

The film might also suggest that the artist is to not just document the real in the art and then create the real with art, because then are losing a grip on reality.

Now, if there is anything to learn from this film, it is that the word "friend" means a lot, and it is a bit irrational to say that you have 732 friends. But, then, again Facebook has never been something that had a GUI or a structure for subtlety in its description of things. Now, of course you can say whatever you want about most things, or at least there is some sapce somewhere that you can do as much--if not, you can create that space, and hopefully it isn't something that a moderator would snatch away, and, obviously--as the site has grown, pernicious behavior by those who run the site has decreased.

Still, there's no reason to feel bad for anyone here. They were all quite conscious of what could be unfolding for them, but, somehow, they "rationalized" things. If anything, this is more proof for my argument that the use of logic is not always logical, or not always pure--at least in its grounding. Or maybe people need more experiences of ego-death and humbling in their lives, a little more zen buddhism, though bon-po would be a good idea if they can get a grasp of that.

Fugitive Foretellings

Author's Notes are in the Comments Section

*

Their multifoliate eyes spoke for them; their vision was clear as ever the piercing of truth molested a mind. They do not visit us, but rather wait for the shriven material of their semants to fall upon ourselves, our suffering fixed in consequence.

Ah, rememberances of time yet to be unfelt--ground has been broken, let us plant the ululating lotuses...

The killers will be transubstantiated into mites when the stars are right, but tonight I've found a drop of wine from the screams of another of a far off land, brought to me at the speed of light straight to my ear. Electrical stimulus sings through those cries, barks of words I've heard but also ones that were known but never in such malformed and honest measure.

And then I heard the words that drove many others to recoil from the limits of sentience: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

My grips on a language heard through whips of dust--hardly enough to really offer me any rights to ensight, but this phonetic suggestion made by my forgetting tongue never fails to recall it's image in my dreams.

It's the odd man outsider who looks to translate escaped torture records, but the even more esoterrorist transforms a voice's screams without seeing the body that contorted to make such a sound.

For hours my speakers recanted, complacent in what I had apparently asked for a moment ago, and I learned not to flinch. I tried to look for those who would knew my sentiment, but snickering cihldren and gibbering old men were the only ones to answer my call in the day, and I can not say what visited me at night.

---

A few days came and went, thought they were all spent in search of an iota of what ought one not to find. But there are things in this world that hunger, composite and different, and they have a way of ensnaring their prey. So I went to the market to search the tellers and see what was souled there.

You cannot ask me who explained this sacred mystery, for it is not of my way to speak of hauntology, only wantology. And the mystic called me wanting. And I was sated. Suggestions of divine images where affirmed by tales of a long-ago yet to be, so far so that our light will reach as quickly as the death of X-1, which is to say that nobody will notice, and nobody will care. But the screams will still eminate.

"Space is a harsh mistress, my son. I have walked the temporal plains, wrought of the fibers of lost souls and black holes. The entirety was quite unnecessary, their single adventure came when they screamed their perfect name, their perfect being, and made the rest of days so much etymology for all."

The elder raised a cup of tea to me, and I partook of this mystery. I felt unnerved, and I was told that there are reasons for having carpets for sale in any store, but especailly one so fond of old curios. For--in legion, they offer the comfort of a place to rest your weary head, and a comforter to boot, or cleat, as it took me.

I asked who this may be, and wept, myself, to sleep.

---

I know why the other screamed. I see it now, in their eyes, they are like the Other Ones, but lost to their impiousness and thus know only to serve but they can never concieve of how awful their master has become. Their titans crash and bang on tin instruments, with ears even worse for the wear but not willing to sacrifice some of their toys to see how they are played with.

But, still, it writhes in them, as they set me about to dance in this cell of conrete, far from the bazaar. That chaosmos luridly watches me and wriggles with the fascination that I know that it is there, that I can taste it tasting my pain, that my being is conscious in total. The seed of the ugliness that has generated their life has found its end, but it is not The End. An anthropomorphic assertion is a lonely one, and it fails to take into acount a more major literature of the tail of time.

The titans will cower in fear for these things have new names, and with that a new texture to time that will obfuscate the path of the old ways. There shall no longer be a circle of mania or shit, of tragedy and farce, but a single one road leading back to the heart of blood. Soon, we will know that which calls us imagination, and we will cower at the thought of being objects for the play of the transcendent ones, who lie beyond the wall of our sleep, and wonder if it was so bad to be subjects after all.

Don't Be Surprised By Anthropomorphic AI

I've made my point, but let's see how I got there and back again.

Outside the Loews Theatre in Port Chester, NY, just after having the left the movie theatre for the opening screening of Tron: Legacy, the idea arrived within the first few minutes of analysis: why did the programs look like people? Why were they at a club and drinking?

Why's there anthropos in my artificial intelligence? 

My response is simple, "why wouldn't there be!?"

The phrase Artificial Intelligence alone is strange enough since it suggests that we could make a thing that thinks. In the construction of an artificial intelligence, two primary concerns should be the AI's ability to understand us and our ability to understand it. It makes sense to manifest the latter in a human form, since we have some understanding of the language of bodily expressions, and the former can be solved by teaching this AI our language. Binding this digital entelechia to the human form provides the benefit of understandability and the terrifying hazard of offering it everything that's wrong with humanity. Training, raising this intelligence to speak in any human language could spring the threat of it learning all the prejudices already encoded in our semantic web. 

Those biases are not a suggestion of hate in the language, per se, but they are suggestion of why, for example, the AI go clubbing in Tron: Legacy. The precise form of the stimulus regardless, the desire to get fucked-up may be a universal condition of a thinking being. We don't have a heck of a lot of evidence to go on, but--judging by the monkeys who steal drinks from beach side resorts--I tend to believe that there is something to  being conscious that, from time to time, makes one want to be slightly less than so. Though, it is fair to say that the relationship of the chemical alcohol to the brains of primates may help as well. Now, whether this impulse has something to do with a consciousness, particularly one aware of futurity, and the desire to alter it, or whether this has something to do with an intelligent being's ability to process stimuli and its voracious appetite there given, I find it hard to believe that we would develop an AI that didn't have some kind of reward processing. 

So it should make some sense that our attempt to create will likely be in and an imitation, made in our own image and crafted as we craft ourselves. Which is the real trick of the divine texts: the gods are always made in our image. We try to make the Other its own subject by subjecting it to ourselves, and the text of our history that we carry and that could Other ourselves as well. 

The primary concern, though, of Tron: Legacy and, similarly, Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects is not really the AI, Tron or the Software Objects, but about a somewhat more eternal human characteristic: legacy, lifecycle. T:L isn't about Clu and Kevin Flynn, but it is about Sam Flynn and Kevin Flynn, and how Sam had to live in the image of his father as opposed to Clu  who was made totally in Kevin's imagine. I don't have the time to properly riff on Chiang's work--and it's quite fresh so you should just go out and give it a read anyway, but I believe it becomes fairly obvious in the text that the devotion that the two main human characters, Ana and Derek, make to their digients* is no different than what may be displayed in child-rearing. Now, pulling "child-rearing" out is a bit of a loaded term, considering that Ted reflects in the text on the acuity of the digient's growing reasoning skills and in what ways they can and can not be considered "children" since they are totally new forms of intelligence, but the word stands since the emotions described around the relationship between the trainer-programmers and the digients does seem to be like that of a parent, or, perhaps, a pokemon trainer... if we didn't train pokemon to fight but instead, well... just educated them. 

Of course, there is a very serious difference between the two stories: one deals with a world where humans are uploaded into a digital world where AI look like humans, while the other story is about humans interacting with cartoon animals and cartoon robots that live within a virtual world a bit like Second Life. These differences in form are directly bound to the plight of their respective stories. While the programs of T:L are little more than stand-ins for humans, the digients of The Lifecycle at least suggest a space between some kind of pure intelligence that would just explode out of a computer, which would only be nominally artificial, and a mere duplicate of humanity. Clu's dictatorship sees him as being merely a better human, a more demonstratively human, and, therefore, monstrous human figure. The digients, like human children, do listen to and learn from their "parents," but they are also something a little more that is unrelated to their parents and is, instead, internal to themselves. Thus, the characters are bound together by language but they walk together in the shared pursuit of life.

However, T:L's programs are always running, like actual living beings, while the digients in Lifecycle can be "suspended," a full stop on their being opposed to the artificial sleep that the programmers include in them, but  can be accelerated so that they are conscious twenty-four hours a day. The digients suffer a number of metaphysical pains brought on by the fact that they experience the quandary of the cycles of life/death and awake/sleep far more acutely than humans can, never mind the fact that the digients are raised to be cloned, with some of their personality and memory intact, to be sold as a product. The process that is the digient can be halted, called up more or less in task manager or some such and then shut down, but it also can be restarted, and the digient would never know. Ignoring drugs and dramatic illness, human beings have only one skip in conscious and that's when they die and the record stops playing. 

The problem, then, is that Tron: Legacy isn't anthropomorphic, really, since the programs are just people in digital clothing and it doesn't really matter that they are digital beings. For example, the naturally occurring "life-forms" in Tron: Legacy, a new breed of programs that arise from the barren outlands beyond the city of The Grid, are miraculous simply for coming into being out of some wild, apparently unknown, while behaving essentially like any other program, perhaps being a little more curious and [pure/open]-minded, but we only have Olivia Wilde as evidence. However, since the behavior of the digients truly is unknown, given that there is a space that apparently exists between code written and ran, the digients need to be anthropomorphized so that they can be interacted with, in part because an image of them is to be sold and consequently formed into a pet by these consumers while the more hardcore users--mostly the programmers who originally made them--require a tactile set of responses that they can use to interact with, and so we need these characters to wear raiments that we can relate to.

So, going beyond the anthropic principle, perhaps now would be a good time for you to read Stars in my Pocket, Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delaney.

*Which are essentially intelligent tamagotchi--but so much, much more than those words can stand.

P.S.: Yes, I do also appreciate that lifecycle sounds like light cycle.

The Only Cute Baby

All babies are cute, or, to make the meaning align with history, cuteness is defined by babies.

Cuteness is composed of those features that appear infantile and, consequently, trigger an instinctual nurturing response, a recognition of the fragility of the so called cute object. Therefore, to say that a baby is cute would be redundant...

Unless there was something overwhelming abouts its humanity, something powerful in the sentiment of its being that even I would have to choke up, and even I would have to admit that I submit to the transcendental semantic truth of the existence of this "cute baby."

I have found such a child, and I share it, now, with you...

http://current.com/102vo4c

Tinnitus Andunoriginus

--Here we present to you a short parable about the need for demanding more out of your concerts and a dead musical industry, which is perpetuated by your lack of caring.


That, children, is the sound of gentrification.

That, mortals, is the sound of one hand jerking off without a dick.

That, fools, is what exists beyond the iron curtain of irony, which simply spins on a baroque ferrous wheel absent even the interiority that a monad may have.

That, plebians, is part of the problem.

That, you hollow men, is the purest of muzaks.


This, children, is why you can't have nice things.

The Man, Inc.

The Man, Inc.

By Max Simkins

The Part about The Artists

“It came to me in a reverie over drinks, you see,” I said to my attorney. Settled in his office in Tarrytown, each of us with our hands tenderly gnarled around an Old Fashioned, I unraveled for him the details of the night haunted gathering where I set the world into chaos.

            The party in question was at the home of one Yogi, which was carefully organized by his darling wife Booboo. I for one believe what Yogi said in telling me prior that his spouse had meticulously crafted this soiree, designed to celebrate the release of a member of our circle of friends and comrades from jail for a number of different drug charges, and maybe something involving a high schooler--but, her family moved down from the north to the city, and now have no interest in the case.

            Upon arriving at the estate, I realized that my party senses were accurate in their tingling and that it was the worst of all orgies of surface tension, dire to burst despite the knowledge that this would mean its death and not its healing. Booboo brought out booze by the barrel, but not a drop of mellow burns were scented in the home. It was a jubilee, but without music, save for the hoary grindcore of cacophonous conversation.

            But, you must see, that this artist, this performer, this… man that we were celebrating was not a stranger for the jail cells. From the tender age of fourteen, he was active in the marches and rallies against scientology, not that it did any good. His later work as a kidult steered more to the political, and, when he could buy his own beer, his intentions for his work became clear: crush, kill, destroy…

            Through ideas, of course, never through actual violence. And so he braved the media battlefield in the TVs and in the computers, on the streets and on the airwaves, by print and by word of mouth. It would be incorrect to say that he was alone in this kind of practice, but it would be just as untrue to suggest that his actions were in concert with other instrumentations of the feeds.

            So, the gathering in his honor was for another daring legal escape, raucously sung by those who sympathized, those who admired, those who clung desperately to a life—any life—being lived, and the brave few who had frankly nothing better to do.

            The one dire problem with the event was that a good time and good cheer do not make for good conversation. The melancholic might not be any better—though I’ll start the tally soon. Still, I was terribly disheartened to divest a portion of my time to display grace with my temporality because some kid, over ripe at the age of twenty six, was temporarily out of jail, and momentarily out of the clutches of someone who could use effeminate company. Perhaps I’ve eluded these conditions because I’ve virulently avoided being published, and I’d like to refute to great pains anyone who declares the internet—that divinization of Yog-Sothoth—a medium, but it is such a struggle to bore into people about the Gate, the Watcher, and the Key. All the same, there are things that even I’m afraid to say, such as defining the contrary directors who incarcerated him with one hand and pay him for his work with another.

            “No, I am not a fool, dear,” I said to a groupie. I had no idea who she may have been, since, with eyes shut, I had been screaming in the low husk of my voice, procured by drinking on a weak throat and lungs. When I saw once more, she revealed herself to be another member of a foreign gallery courting the artist to work there and, why I’ll never grok. A fleeting glimpse of sorrow passed back and forth in her eyes, and, disliking the pendulum, I asked her to try and tell me of the festivities proper, having arrived quite customarily late and believing that this might take her mind off matters. She told me that he made inexplicable comments, referring to some magistrate on Titan, one E.B. Black, and that he then conducted the audience into a spastic funerary procession masquerading as a conga line. Having led them through the estate and out to the back porch, he discharged his role as the head and declared the millennium descendant upon the death of the human millipede, even if there was barely more than a couple centipede’s worth of feet available to work with.

            A howl. A sound of frantic running. The clattering of glass in a dust-bin, and the cheers begin again, while sorrow still held her. Given that nothing yet had helped her heartache, I dared to be stupid: I asked her why. The question seemed at first to be an affront to her, but the truth was simpler: that nobody had ever stopped to ask. Her problem was simple: she could not comprehend the artist. How could he get away with what he did? How could a legal system apportion him the space to be? And how can this be replicated?

            I never particularly gave much of a thought to aiding the spread of infection, much as it might perhaps hasten the end. Still, an impulse came to my mind that might just help this corporate stooge. The solution seemed simple enough: incorporate. Divide self from soul. Let the self become an image that can be sued for libel and slander while the individual lives free. Sure, one’s voice would become embodied in a specter, but it was better than becoming the haunt of the masses.

            As a corporation, contractual agreements would be the responsibility of “someone” else. In a sense, it would give a person two lives: one that could burn out, and, if so consumed, the living breathing human could fade away. But if they were united citizens—living entity and legal entity, then they could quite likely do whatever they wanted.

            The story seemed fairly comprehensible to her, but she stuttered like someone who had their meaning of life question answered with natural selection. Existential bummer, man; the transcendental’s a theoretical crawling chaos, huh? Not quite—not quiet the problem, though it was certainly an animated conundrum. “But, what about his works? They seem to take on a life of their own? If you’re going to suggest incorporating a person’s speech and spirit, might you also be offering room for other spaces of speech to incorporate? Not just living words, but dead ones…”

            Had someone else not laughed at a terrible pitch inside, I may have been totally and royally fucked as I was struck without response, something distinctly rare. But I smiled, patting her hand and telling her it would be fine. She reciprocated, telling me that, indeed, all will be fine, and she left.

            A vase shattered inside.  I left then and there to avoid somehow being implicated.

            A week later, I retained the services of Bernard, “Bernie,” Bacarat. The sneaking dread of C&D letters were rearing their head because of a series of articles on a new energy-beer that might actually just be “Cocaine” or “Censored” with Everclear thrown in. I’m not a fan.

            Bernie, though, knew better then to believe that that alone should suggest me to him, even though he would offer his services all the same to a family friend. Skeptic by nature, Bernie was a reliable man, but one wondered whether his fidgety behavior was the consequence of delirium tremens or Parkinson’s, or whether all these aspects of him resided within the operating space of a far more chaotic concept as his spiritual fountainhead.

So, I told him my story. And he sat there, perfectly still.

            For a moment, I thought I saw the light of life leave his eyes and began to consider whether I would need to run to the bathroom and tear behind the mirror to find some nitroglycerin. He then brought his right hand over to a silver tin marked with a burning rose, unclasped the top, placed a cigarette in his mouth and another in my hand. Lit, it tasted of Amsterdam Shag, and “Amsterdam Shag.” Only when we were both finished did he tell me the horrible truth of the Aethereal cases. Four days ago, a sudden surge in articles of incorporation were noted by a colleague. Then, two days ago, the suits fell. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of law suits where creations were suing their creators. Artists sued by sculptures and paintings; films sued producers, directors, actors, and actresses, and even some best boys; musicians sued by LPS; video games took their necromantic organizers to court; and, at last, authors were made to forswear and bear witness for their “crimes” in the court of the crimson text.

            I tried to be nonplussed, but I’m not dead enough yet to remain lax before these trade winds, though still not so dead to be swept back to Tiamat.  Was I partner to Pandora, holding her empty box, or was I Heston among the planet of the apes, screaming sweet nothings to Lady Liberty and all those she vouchsafed? Better question, what was I to do about this?

            “I have an idea,” Bernie blurted out, words stumbling with nervous intent. “I have it on… certain authority that the Angelo case—you know the Angelo case, right? Father killed, mother, daughters, those dogs… who knew a pool boy could—”

            I had not a blistering clue as to what he was talking about. I smiled something bright and affirming and nodded.

            “Well, the kid turned out to be a bastard of the father’s and there’s a strong chance he’s going to get off and get the whole estate, though he’ll have to establish a fund for the… help of those poor people.”

            “Uh-huh.” I rapped my left fingers beside the silver tin. Guffawing, he outstretched his palms demanding that I make myself useful of the grace that he offered. He, likewise, helped himself to another smoke.

            “So…let me tell the rest of the story. The attorney representing the little changeling is a close and personal family friend who works at my firm. If I can put together a little bash—errh, that’s not quite—a celebratory assembly for the good sire, I might just invite a certain guest over. Now, if the guest goes around asking questions of revelers, then it’s on his head if he should take as reasonable and responsible the talk that he hears.”

            And so the plan was set.

The Part about The Attorneys

A week later, Bernie called to tell me what I already knew, that, a week further, the attorneys would descend on the Bacarat property for drinks, and for my cheer.

            Prior to the evening, I could peruse no details about the cases, but I was able to flesh out the nature of the two law firms that Bernie had invited for their particular relationship to the case. The firm of West, Bruce, and Laing was of note because their attorneys had filed an obscene number of cases involving creative works seeking restitution against the estate of their authors. Meanwhile, the attorneys of Farner, Brewer, and Schacher produced a deluge of libel cases looking to shut up any person who’d ever spoken their mind, for well or ill. But the clerks and judges didn’t bat an eye. Somehow, all the paper work was right, all signatures were initialed and all the proper processing fees assessed. But…how? Someone had to be covering for the artworks, to make the filing and incorporating legit, lest the works themselves were the real cover…

            Latched onto the minute and hour hands, slipping into the little gateway where the date is held, my watch and I engaged in lurid conversation until the time of the games began, taking company and sweet nothings from cups of coffee and butts of cigarettes. The entire affair of this legal party—Bernie had informed me that there would be no perusing of the silver tin this evening—seemed to me extravagantly odd. The charade of this invitation by my attorney played as oddly as if Sheryl and Shania had taken me back for drinks with the rest of the girls and the Madame…while under the impression that I was a federale. So why, Bernie, are you doing this? What do you know?

            A car was sent for me. I was not planning for this. I’m on good terms with Kuti Kabs for a reason, and not because I like punctuality. I’ll arrive on my terms, on my own; though it may not be directly under my own skill, it will be by my authority. The driver told me that Bernie had sent for me to come early so as not to miss a guest of certain interest. I told him I’d be fine. He said I would and opened the glove compartment, withdrawing a silver cigarette case, which was emblazoned with a rose. “Compliments of the retained, for the detained.” Indeed.

            Despite the deleterious start, the ride was utterly calm and uneventful. No one seemed to be around to smell the slightly fresh cut grass of lawn after lawn, the chemical screams of the weeds and plants desperately trying to summon a savior with their green leaf volatiles in the hope that some carnivorous insect would take out the mean green eaters. It’s a shame they’ll never understand that a Geocoris bug cannot cure their affliction of the John Deere like it could for a hornworm. Poor little zombie plants trying to summon an antiquated god with their dying gasp.

            Pulling up, finally, to the Tarrytown estate for another bit of good conversation on this particular weekend at Bernie’s, and noting my budding out, the driver tossed a canister of Febreeze into the back. “Give it a good spray for me--you and the back seat, if you don’t mind.”

            “Certainly, but will you be around for later or should I contact my comp—”

            “No need, I’ll be around. Just have to pick up the kids from the movies, maybe have a little dinner, and then drop them off at their mother’s.”

            “Sounds lovely.”

            “It should. Shouldn’t it?”

            I never saw the man again. I slept in Bernie’s basement, too burnt out from what proceeded.

            Bernie greeted me at the door, noting the few and far between exploits of the preliminary assemblage. “We all get a hand to play, or so they say,” or so he says, but I thought we’re at least born with two.

            The game was simple: the WBL people were expected half an hour before the FBS people, who would be forty five minutes before a totally separate gentleman from one small firm in White Plains who apparently found out about my questioning, and who had--thus--sought me out. So be it.

The attorneys of West, Bruce, and Laing strolled in with a poise known only to certain theologians, a type of grace that both exceeds our mortal concerns and at the same is actively engaged with them. While they may have taken their sweet time saddling up to the bar, they were quite nonchalant about drinking, sparing no time to discover the intended purpose of a drink. The fast talkers weren’t easy prey since they seemingly knew nothing, their focus gliding around topics political, while outsiders to the exchange perused what other individuals were offering of their time, except for one. One straggler was staring down something on the rocks. I believe his name was Mark.

Well, my new friend, the Mark, was a bit concerned about company parties, which is either what he was told this was or what he was rationalizing this as. He was a nephew of one of the partners, but he didn’t have much of an interest in corporate law: he’d rather be working for the HSPCA, or something like that. Sure as shit, he was not born to be a corrupt stooge.

I asked him to elaborate, and, with his second drink as a nurse, he fortunately agreed to the strain.

The firm had cut a series of deals with major media companies to sue not only the people who were enjoying their work, but now they wanted in on the creators, as well, who were never satisfied anyway. He never told me where the idea came from, but the intimations of corporate power lead me to believe that the parent corporations of these media companies must have baptized their catalog so they could be born again as incorporated constructs. Nearing the end of listing the varying litigants and their litigation he laughed, and, without any provocation, explained himself. The laugh was caused by the utter absence of fight in the authors. Most had simply settled out of court, assuming their luck run out, or that their masters were questioning their loyalty. Apparently, there was one slight difference between these cases and the pirates—aside from the fact that pirates only copy as opposed to stealing original works, the demands of the suits were only slightly beyond the means of the defendants and what the settlements came to be were, given the circumstances, quite reasonable.

An unruly level of banter crashed through the door, heralding the arrival of the second party. They were, after all, the triumphal carriage, which asserted for themselves some right to the volume control. On the other hand, they had no self control. They were well grown and groomed adults who had not so quickly forgotten the phrase “pre-game.” They also appeared to have nothing to hide, or, put another way, they wielded a pretense which they recognized as always actively deployed. Some people are smart enough to be able to revel and reveal some things and not others. But this is no science, no matter how gay it is. This is an art; this is a craft that can’t be bought on Etsy, or Ebay, or Amazon Marketplace. This—this is a legitimate witchcraft and, like all magicks, it has a double edge so it can cut you twice. The secrets of the libel deluge were far from exciting. In point of fact, they were utterly simple: they’re all my fault. They are all my fault. Lawyer after lawyer I asked and they all intimated the same thing. Each line cut me anew, but each explanation dulled over time: they knew that I was some two bit semantic schyster though they never said how, that I was here in search of a story, and that, no matter what I’d figure out, I’d fuck it up somehow. We creative types—we’re all fuck-ups you see. At first, companies were using the shadow puppets ‘cause we were hemorrhaging their money on public relations. But, then, museums, libraries, and other homes of the higher arts got in on the game thinking that they could save the good things we’ve made from the bad things that we are. I told them all, each every one—in each and every individual conversation that I had, that it would never work. They told me to fuck hope because praying to her will never offer me anything.

            People doing injustice to one another in the name of its antipode seems just the same in impetus but only more complicated in execution, a deserving punishment for over educated shit heads. The least that can be said of the whole affair was that we could at least understand what was going and we weren’t having a linen pulled over eyes that we didn’t stitch ourselves.

Finally, Bernie directed me to the main man in question, one man who was visibly altered beyond that which ethanol can. Brow furrowed and head and hand thoroughly entrenched in the process of scratching, he stammered out that he received a letter from a Book to sue Its Author. The Author was in a vegetative state, and His family had long since died out and His friends were long since dead to Him. All He had was His estate. The letter warned that the Man was going to squander the good reputation that He had developed through His writing and the Book would not stand for this, (though I must note, the attorney never revealed to me what tense the Book spoke in, if It ever revealed Itself as a subject in Its writing). The Book warned that all the good, empirical wisdom It contained would be shattered utterly when the Man woke up and that a gag order should be imposed on the Author. The note frequently made references to urgency, and in its closing it was said that the Book worried if It had acted too late to stop what was about to happen.

In the next hour, as the attorney was considering how to draft this gag order, and which judge to send it to, the phone rang. It was the hospital. The Patient had awoke and wished to let the attorney know that he no longer need his services since He had accepted the Glorious King Bufu as His god and attorney-at-law. The attorney could, if he wished, visit the Author in half-an-hour and get in on the press-conference. The Author was in St. Luke’s. The attorney was in Portland. It was a long trip to get here, but he needed to find and tell me his story from the moment that Bernie told him of my own story. He said I needed to finish this.

            I tired of this world moving inexorably towards a certain oblivion. Something needed to be done, and so I stood upon a nearby table and said my peace, “Works belong to their author and are a part of his body, mind, and soul for he is not merely the singular specific aspect of his presence, or that of the other, or the body politic or the body human, but something greater for he is many of these things all at once at any second at a great many consecutive instances. After all, at any moment someone could be reading, could be listening to what you have to say.”

From the end of the room, cutting through the middle of the crowd, a man in a black suit walked over to me and handed me an envelope.

“What’s this?” 

“You’ve been served.”

“For…what?”

“Slander.”

“Of whom?”

“The Man, Inc.”