Theory Is a Scream Slowed by Vintage Technology

The internet went out in the office I'm working and I don't have an analog tablet in my backpack or a pen or pencil to use	I can't be in my office because today kill the mice and rats day, it's colder, north end of campus construction on the old people harvesting facility has driven the rats to south campus, my office sniffing glue toxic		Weird not hearing from Trump, not volted my missing the volts tells me I volunteer for jolts	There was no paper and no pen or pencil in the empty office I was sitting, not on empty shelves, not in empty drawers, if I had needed to communicate one last message and the wifi was out I never could have reached you!
My first daydream Coup On! Wad Cholf resigned as Himmler, WHY! and wouldn't cutting off the Internet *be* one of the first steps Cholf's replacement would order when activating Homeland Security to protect democracy	I had bars on phone and could have thumbed myself and after ten minutes had boinked the app but wait! the radiant life giving Sun of wifi appears, will I remember to put a lighthouse and pen in backpack tomorrow?	Five students who could have returned to work this week according to campus emailed me today their parents don't want them anywhere near DC for foreseeable future and it ain't covid	AND WHERE ARE THE PARDONS, DON	^^^^ I just found my current but abandoned lighthouse tablet and grey felt bag of Lamy Safari fountain pens, all but two of the pens comatose, in need of deep nib cleaning, into backpack they go against another digital crisis
Didn't you think and predict out loud some version of Trump's cracker revolution long before we knew Trump would be cracker messiah?		Did you think, in this country, our shitlords, coked out on capitalism, wouldn't over-coax enough crackers into a Hallmark moment that captures the cracker insurrection with bodycounts?	The old people harvesting facility's construction continues apace, one facilities friend told me covid's been a blessing and constrcution schedule pushed ahead, our shitlords have moneyed old people to harvest, and pronto	We do now own just short of twelve and a half acres in Michigan, I had a $50 unpaid bill on an ATT account from 2007, I was the delay, once I got that fucker paid, easy

 

 

^^^ Morton Feldman born 95 years ago yesterday, I wish I didn't have Doctor Sevrin ears that love the sound but not the death grip of good earphones	The terror of Liberals in a time of insurrection	Vicious impotence	<<<< To ask an obvious question: how can the Democrats continue to blame the dispossessed working class for their own immiseration if they can no longer tell these people to learn to code, since learning to code necessarily entails enmeshing oneself into the massive electronic surveillance and control mechanism we’re now declaring off-limits to anyone whose beliefs fall an inch to the left or the right of the Democrat narrative du jour? And what are the implications for everyone else? Ours is a flimsy society built upon layers and layers of obvious contradictions, sure, but what will things look like when those contradictions are enforced with the viciousness of our carceral state, even as they shift as rapidly as social media demands our perceptions to change?	Accelerant not catalyst
Citizenship is a myth	W(h)ither America?	Waiting for George to exttay me my ntifaay instructions on my Whisper 2020 ecoderday ingray to elltay me who to nuffsay		A sentenct typed to my boss Bookkeeper in real email: Not a big deal at all, just wanted to counter the thought that I had abandoned them. With media equipment taking up so much space now and the ILL closet off-limits and you're having told me to only designate one carrel for access storage it seemed a reasonable choice.
The overton window is an elevator	Mediacracy	<<< As it stands, we’re deep into Hardcore Class War. The Top of the Scam Gang are in full control. The remains of “Democracy” have gelled into Mediacracy. Ahead, there’s nothing but ruthless purge, protracted crackdown, censorship, blanket surveillance, smashing of civil liberties, a single narrative, overarching cancel (in)culture. It gets worse: next week, this paranoid apparatus merges with the awesome machinery of the United States Government... Cui bono? Techno-Feudalism, of course – and the interlocking tentacles of the trans-humanist Great Reset. Defy it, and you will be cancelled		Feldman the second most important birthday on January 12 in my life

 

 

LECTURE ON THE HISTORY OF THE HOUSE

Claire Schwartz

Before the alphabet, there was the house.

A proto-Semitic hieroglyphic symbol

depicting a house becomes the letter b.

beyt, beit. beit lechem. no house : no bread,

no book, no baby, no babble.

b b b b b b b b b b

When the temple was written, the destruction

of the temple was written.

The house scripts its defense.

(The house writes the fence.)

In the beginning, there was:

 

                                       A) night                A) tent

                       B) day                   B) house

A: The letter, scoring the darkness.

Q: In the beginning, what was?

A: The beginning.

Q: What answered the question silence asked?

 

the alphabet : ruin of silence

      The only way back: through language, language

      destroying the silence. The shadow language casts

      is silence. No language, no shadow. No know, no

      no no no no no no.

To ruin your knowing in your mouth

and dress the ruins with your best tongue.

 

First the temple, then the book

leading back to the temple.

So the interior is measured, apportioned.

walled square footage : living space

It is settled then.

            A house is a home

            and other embroidered facts.

It becomes you, your craft.

            Birdhouses, henhouses, doghouses.

            Like us, like us, we chirp.

                                    (Who’s the bird now?)

The problem with liking is

                      the conflation of desire with similarity.

We form our mouths to fence we in.

We fence our forms to mouth we in.

babble : b b b b b b b b b b

Inside the house, the family.

Inside the family, the house.

Inside the tower, the princess

           does not dream

           of the tower.

Theory is a scream slowed by vintage technology.

                                                           “Touch me,” Amira says. “Touch me.”

           The model of  the house is the size of  a house.

           You confuse the conditions

           that make something possible

           with the conditions that make

           something necessary.

You don’t see thinking as an emergency.

You own to prove you cannot be owned.

In owning, you sign a contract of possession.

           The ghost tells the story of the house,

           but none of the other tenants know how to listen.

You lock yourself out: morning.

You lock yourself in: night.

Ownership is a chronic condition.

Install a camera to conjugate the strangeness.

           The house draws your speech like a bath: sink,

                      yard, repair, astroturf, neighbor, clean, handyman.

                                 That good good light.

           The first bedroom makes you sad.

           The second bedroom makes a baby.

           In the corner of the living room, the whole globe

           spun by children.

It’s more than the Accountant told you it would be.

Which came first, the fence or the yard?

Ink on a black page

     A poem wrestles the ghost with its limited mouth.

        A poem touches the hip of a ghost.

        In the dark, a thousand names bloom.

     No country comes of that night.

Because you needed a fence to limit your loneliness.

Because haunting needed a form.

What is wild? That which cannot be measured.

                                                                                       “Amira! Amira!”

Or: to produce a thought of the outside

from the inside and use it as a tunnel.

But you didn’t know you were inside.

           Someone laid the new bricks

           around you while you slept.

You skinned animals and adorned your captivity.

Modern architects called the surfaces of  their buildings skins.

                      Your skin was light.

                      Your skin was feathers.

                      You dreamed of another.

           You lit a match.

Your child named it sun.

house _________

          A) trained

     B) broken

Inside the house, a man hits you.

Then you understand:

your body is the window.

Inside, you are already outside.

Next door, the Soloist domesticates a tune.

Poetry is a door without a house.

           Theory is productive of the known.

           Poetry is productive of the unknown.

                      How, then, do you know

                      what is true? These walls, this foundation,

                      in the pages of glossy magazines.

                      The newspapers scratch their heads.

                Again, the hunters, budgeting.

At the end of the day, you return to what is not common.

Debtor, debtor

Put on your best sweater

The magic’s fled, the milk’s gone bad

There’s nothing left but weather

What is desire fulfilled?

           A) satisfaction

      B) rot

           The man reaches through his woman.

                           The sound of a thousand plates shattering.

                           A butterfly impaled by a human name

                           tumbles through the light like an angel.

Your dreams become modest, smooth their skirts, stand up.

The house is without simile.

Inside, everything is alike.

A deed is bad magic, ownership the spell.

Your yard, polluted with growth.

The head in your oven,

your most faithful tenant.

 

 

                                  Amira sits under a tree, unpinning the names from things.

                                                                 She releases the names to the wind.

                                                        The wind churns the names to pigment,

                                                                                  carries the colors off like

Oh, I know what a house is.

A house is my knowing.

Knowing is faith absent doubt.

           When doubt is cleaved from faith,

           where does it go?

           (A caucus of ghosts, cackling.)

Knowing casts no shadow.

Let me turn my face toward my life.

Let me live inside it forever.

The Dictator’s name,

scrawled in the Dictator’s hand

on the I-beams of your house.

That is the law.