Thomas Lowe Taylor -- I CAME HERE WITH NOTHING IN MIND

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Underwater sand floats by harmlessly, spinning around the peninsular glanshead where it sperms upward from deeper harmonies the balance of which are expressed in simpler designs left by receding waves. An inherent flatness calls the day perfect, for what's paradise to the razorclam might just be an alternative to claustrophobia and cityscape inhabitants of what's wrong in a world laid bare by its own success. Were we at the peak of what follows less than perfect in ourselves with no escape for the others, we'd leave them in a trice, no steaming platforms filled with drying skulls in the jungle for Tarzan to ape them in his own silence with barely learned gutterals and the slant of the afternoon inside your own belly another skin grown inside out or lengthened from one step after another, leading nowhere. So I came to the edge of everything expecting nothing and finding more than that, more than the cold shoulder of what'd been the habit and practice of man's unhumanity to himself, listing children among the ancients or their own displacement into forced labor camps as the destiny of the species to feed upon itself like locusts in the full moon out there on the meadow after they strip it bare they begin in earnest on eachother, fulfilling a seventh year's prophecy of cannibalism among, uh, more socialized displeasures to end the century on the hopeless note of no succession in the animal kingdom but the fierce witness of the survivor and the death of the poet hanging on the crossroads of what is to follow and the eventuality of its succession into coffee table books of the next millennium, or is this just too much on everybody's mind, such as it is.

No sense of welcome could foretell a sense of the last survivors gathered here on the edge of a planet, at least this one, where the forward rush of what supremacy might endure a last salute into a foreboding of what lies ahead of anybody at any time, but here it is extent and song in the midst of too much of too much for too few and not enough of too much for the rest resting in their own destinies, with "no whining" written in blood by the elders for the rest to devour like a witness or a sign of what will follow fallow on the current end of things. So in the kingdom of nowhere he was a majority of one unto his own particular mode of behavior carved out of wood and paper. Mists blow across the summer sands just ahead of you, yeilding into solemn invisibility the notion that you might remember what is not there in the first place finding instead a chaos of multitudes in their own solace skanking the night away in a fervor of lasting intensity. No matter in the mists of chance, you might say, but a hold or a stance or a miniature departure. We'd handled down the long waves of the day before into a lasting colony of rest on a planet that has forgotten how to remember. Taught, of course, to do that. We'd found a particular rush or blur of the immediate in not remembering anything at all, a "modern" foolishness confused with richness and passion and a pain which itself became confused with history, whatever that is. And he began to remember what had not been there before, qualifying agents of notice and inclination began to warp into an abstract composition without edges. This was the new.

It was there, a fluttering bird in the reflection of a window inside the house he was confined to, stuttering and sleeping in fitful recollections of what had been unknown until now. There was this signing at the center point of nothing, a qualifying sentence which left the paragraph out on its own, waving flags and beating drums of its own insignificance. Love is the composition and the sensual realm its theme in this lust and pun of the disorder. Reverse homeostasis, we call it, when fever is so high that it takes off and runs for the border, burning the brain in one fierce flush of power from the inside out with no image but expulsion. Here in the garden. Fast waves of the last tsunami wash us over into the silent bay inside the glanshead of the penisunsula, a long white pole of sand running north from the bridge of sighs and moans on the other side where pale faced Others hold fort and center into the next day. You can hear the drums at night, paling out into the cosmos from loud speakers stacked one on top of the other to penetrate the odd rhythms of the body politic in one last concert for the grateful dead and their successors in the dance of life. We celebrate the end of time with our own anthems, pealing aside one belief after another until what remains is a stairway to heaven paved with slippery substances and a nutrition which might shell out the recluse from his attic plane. Better to forget than to remember. After all, one might not make the final connection and be left on this plain, er, plane, er pain. Clear enough to see through. It was.

Flat brackish waters of the inside realm are choked out with muffins of grassy, communal platforms resembling doubt as much as pressure. Small, red berries roll across the continent to encounter hazelnuts across the river and giant gnats to the north, See-ems for sure--huge, glazed insects bear away small children and the eagles that use them for target pracatice. Once a gnat went across the sun at fifteen thousand and the shadow seemed like an eclipse on his eyes when he looked up to understand the sudden coolness in the house. No return but a destiny, the blacksmith under the tree in the center of the village or the bricklayer with his book of codes. They are all there to remember them into the blinking blue glow of the tube in the bedroom with its own agenda for perfection--don't touch that dial. If you've ever seen one of them meditating at a bus stop, don't bother to break in, there's nobody home at the center of the universe, only an immutable process grinding us into bits of sand which then blow under the surface of the waveforms like another thick, gluey soup of elements in some primordial rainforest up the coast. Inland sweatlodges are rented by the hour by busloads of small, beige and sand colored vistadores on holiday from other time zones around the bend and bending colorfully after rodeo stars in the night breezes which waft sooner than not. Here is splendor and calm and the slow perfection of remembering what is not there before you think about it, so why think at all but wash in the slow agony of being human in the arms of the beloved when she comes up in you again and rides the white pole into the sky, moaning aloud at the center of action when it leaves you gasping on the shore and whining for forgiveness. Bleat you might. This tortilla, this tipi of white canvas, this mushroom in the soup on the table, all of it suddenly new and undescribed. Striding the coastal paths. Bulling the rush and sentinal of the parting seas at the destiny of this last, straight walking stick leaning up beside the door.

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Fume' donkey, or another new lust. Bottled in rheum and turned aside. Masking sentimentos hurry into the ballroom for the last charade. The string quartet opens with a slow dance as dancers curl around the edges as a virgin is laid out on the table in the center of a darkened ballroom and a bra is strapped over her small breasts. She bursts free of this ritual and dances nude with her consort, a magician who emerges from the dark edge of the crowd. Their hegemony is fierce and placid, butt held and firm. I'd come too far to go away, so I stayed at this machine, attaching myself to the keyboard with duct tape and good intentions. Gradually this picture of the rest emerged, and what makes it clear is the similarity between the disparate elements indicating some elocution and doubt which can carry the proceeds out into other spaces on the planet. It’s purely a matter of magnitude and the disposition of these elements across a field of action. That’s what results in results. Don't spin it.

And so a quiet desparation becomes louder, and you kind of wonder if the prophecies are simply an extrapolation of heightened states of being. Being at all, that is. Indicating a clarity or a response at least to the random density of thoughts themselves arrayed into disorder and sequence and that's all, one thing seems to follow another, but then that can be disabled, too. If everything just "happens," there is no need for signification or display, only a necessity for synchronicity and disposition. Huh, you grunt. "The mind has imprisoned you," Bly wrote. Screw him and his silly vests. It's far beyond simple enslavement, its a form of possession and an escape from sensation altogether. Sentiment and the sentimental, form and the formal, those are the oppositions. If anything is to get off the ground, it'll be darkness in a forest ballooning out from the wave form like a gaussian curve gone mad, encryption and disfunction the codes of the age, like, I dunno, find out for yourself where the water hole is, and when you get there, you'd better be armed, at least two of them, for there's no one hand waving free in this emptiness, only the fires of the cities burning out in one last orgy of reproduction, the tax roles breaking out like statistics of consumerism mixed into a soup of extras.

So the magnitude might be immemorable thought whose components become transparent in their relation to each other. It's a slow dance in the moonlight with hands held in the last glow of the planet's fecundity. We might be forgiven, but by whom? Ourselves? First you must remember what you at first forgot when you arrived here, like the others, with nothing in mind. No simple tabula rasa but a decision and a commitment you come to in the moment before sleep when such decisions are pondered and made, stuff below the surface even You don't understand. Yet the inherent hubris of the details themselves overwhelms free contemplation of the nature of the choices and the depth of their involvement with the larger magnitude as that which predicates the evidence in its appearances and contradictions. If synchronicity it be, then, the spontaneous noticing and related associations into action which we make in the course of "progress" are more deeply imbedded in some anchoring of the self into its disturbances, and even the cuteness and smartness of our conurbations leave you breathless on the shore gasping over your release from the clear, overwhelming wash of the ocean of the sensate realm that you blink and cough at first, clearing your throat of the detritus of your own passage.

A slight wind offshore polarizes the birds in their status on the roof. Right at the peak where they sit, the gulls have colored the roof white with their shit, while the new garden and lawn laid in only last week look sparkly and new. You think they'd try to get the birds to go away, but no, they accept them as part of " life at the beach": your roof covered with birdshit. Down at the store, large men in aprons help you find the talcum powder and carwash. "Can I help you?" they boom, following instructions from the owner who wanders the parking lot picking up cigarette butts and the stray pieces of styrofoam blowing across the black macadam. He pauses "What is this?" he says, standing in the middle of the kitchen, a roll of paper towels in his hand. It's no Yorick there but a product from the alien realm, a twist of leaves and branches perforated into a cylinder of white stuff which can hold a two ton jeep while you wash hydrochloric acid over it for two or three days, no, it will not tear. You can make sails for your aegean transport filled with amphorae of doubt and still beat out the opposing turks by two or three years. In the stillness of the lower depths of the boat, wood creaking and leaking creosote smelling gak from the pitch pine of the material self, there in the hold sits the thinker, legs crossed, bong in hand, his eyes wandering off into the nowhere of remembering what was not known nor experienced before existence called him into consciousness, it is here in the dark of the vessel that you see the passage of the multitudes and the skin of the lion as he paces back and forth in front of you. And holding your pathetic book in front of you like a shield or a weapon, you notice in his eye a distinctively familar look, a contact of sorts between one thang and another, between the self and the object of its obsession--recognition, acknowledgement, a disposition to recollection you can not ignore for all its complexity and directness, for all its essential obscurity and profundity, mixed as they are in eternal bondage, er, bond.

And so I came here with nothing in mind and found the place for what it is, and having found that, chose not to disclose its secret nor its location in the wild places of the edges of all that had preceded and pushed it into its "last stand" episode of doubt and remembrance. It is in the darkness of the quest itself that love answers the call and leaves you spinning in the dark with blasts of light belittling all that had appears to be real. In the hereafter, you say, it is like that, with burns and fathoms of light bending the shapes of objects into less ethereal but more superficial sentences not filled with mystery or obfuscation but cleared for the inquiring mind to use as material for its own substrate. The door opens and you meet your other self coming in from the other side, and a sort of "who are you" thing develops, a silence which extends into the poem and out of the song into a newer destiny which has no time and space and yet carries you out into something where you have been before, not a locale exactly but a reminiscence and a strain, a sound of familiar music, no deja vu but rather a deja new, seeing something for the first time and acknowledging it as such. The rest follows as an elegant fortune leading you along the way into who you are or were in the first place. In the now of forgiveness. In the here of sensation and relation, in the yes of intentions. You are the screaming tree carrying its sacrifice into the fire like a cord of oak dropped on the front porch by an unknown stranger, his pickup just now turning out of the driveway at the end of the road and heading off into the woods. The phantom woodcutter. His hat cocked to one side and sticking out like a tongue or a wooden caique.
Flat work is what we call it, conceptual stuff which exists in no realm at all and only finds expression in the plastic and inevitable realm of the page. Without the page itself, it becomes even more evanescent, leading one into a cluttered and particular age without any image of itself beyond the setback of the visual feedback loop filmed and videated onto consciousness by a series of mechanisms manipulated by other blind people. The inductive fallacy, the cargo cult of the present which believes firmly in the evidence it has yet to receive. Silenced by a flood of drugs, its dissidents bought and sold for their pure juices, marketed like ibogaine to be injected mainline into the sentient cortex of being in order that the controller remain invisible. Bloodsports. Competitive sex. All the rest man endures onto the plane of consciousness to obscure the real questions which can only lead one out of the wilderness to this edge of nothingness where the last survivors huddle together in the profane glow of a body cult. The eternal hot dog on its seven year bun. Pickles by any other name would be the god of us all, and for one small second we believed in what has come eventually to be described as a fashion statement, a new menu on the billboard of choices, an alternative to headbutting and fondling by policemen in the back of a fast black car as you drive up to the governor's mansion. Full glow of the cannibal restaurant (How May We Serve You?) fills the air like rancid vat. You wonder at the end just what the movie is all about, where each dead end is in turn an opening into another realm; you wait for the ship to come in, you wait for the column to be filled, you wait for the fires to subside and you eventually wait for a bus by the side of the road, bags and baskets filled to overflowing with what you sought to remember and which eluded you with the sureness of time itself. And where love is the anchor and the glue, you have somehow forgotten where you stacked the paper. She is there at the window, singing a song you haven't heard for a long time. The sound of your heart beating one and two, like something from the polka king on a Saturday night, counting off the days between now and the future.

Red and orange and blue and velvet and lace are the colors and textures of the sign which follows you into the void without pity or regard; in the particular moment of the sun beaming through your eyes, you illuminate all that falls before you with the essence of your own questioning, and where the poem leads into the nature of the choice, you feel a pull as you throng forward into the presence of your own sensations; and as love illuminates a moment in your heart where you reach outward and into the gloom, you find time itself framing the signs of the hours glowing beyond the generations and finalities as the ultimate statement of what went on inside you before you thought about it all; and in the silence of your own questioning, you hear the march and song of the forgotten aliens coming up out of the ground in front of the house, out in the driveway where the new doghouse seems to have grown larger in the night and where footsteps begin to crunch and growl at the onset of the formation of the new hours and seasons in their own insistence and passion. You grow in the dimensions of your own question and flash forward into the new from the status of your passing; here is a forgotten language expressing itself in your new beginnings, here is a light you didn't notice before, glowing in the skin of your own desire.