I have one of those faces people see everywhere. Half god, half devil: my halo grows fangs. I’m missing a missing tooth. With all three primary stressors, I’m overloaded with reasons why they’re dead. And poor Michael too, now, by his own hand. Suicided through guilt, like that was a thing. (If you can’t live with yourself, live with someone else instead: my example is here to be followed.) Did everyone just up and forget how to forget? And so what if my sister arranged for a car to take me across the border. Did nobody ever have a sister? Do people not every day digest the indigestible?
I have one of those faces people see everywhere, a face you can’t see through or around. An onion-skinned face, garlic-smeared to preserve the like for like. I hide my scars with a pearl choker; you see about as much of me as you do Édith Scob, face-fail after face-fail. The price of rejecting the faces of the dead is having no face at all. I became just one more species of chameleon in Madagascar. All the lemurs I could eat. I got schooled in isolation: 88 million years of it. (Never want for quiet that quiet.) I tried to recruit for L’eglise de Philedelphia, for Christine and mama; but no one was having it, no one into a religious cult they couldn’t fuck their way out of.
In near constant sunshine, gods hide in damp spaces, in dicks, like fleas. They say Emmanuel loved me: an unconsummated, unrequited love. They give me no facility to love my best friend. We go grey. We are lovebirds where they can’t see us. Our grey heads in a vice thinking the same one thought. Beautiful godless coma of causes. I have unrequited consciousness of who you are. You don’t scare me: I’m inanimate with pain. If your family isn’t soil, you cannot know. If you haven’t actually done what you always thought would remain that way, the thing so huge you get lost inside it, then you cannot understand. It’s beyond you, beyond space-time; I’m rewriting the entire cosmology of why the future kills. SpaceX took my brain to the moon, brought it back in the shape of a footprint.
When I dream of volcanoes, it’s not Vesuvius I see but Mons Rümker, like when I buy my favorite monkey meat in Belgium, and spit it out for the magpies to nosh. You know this tendency toward defacement (or do I mean displacement?) is killing me, right? Creepy how that spate of wincing at the who and what of myself should result in this exact cross-infection of personages. All this needless babble in folded space. Skinned rabbits dragging their fur back on, eyes and mouths kept open with toothpicks. All of our centuries loop on this moment, this moment of fatty dreams and frightened seagulls splayed, swooning. The filthy broth of the sky. The unknown children. The unknown wives.
I depend on the disease of any part of any body. Some fool’s disease. We come together in terms of convenience. Our too-perfect sanity a promiscuity of opposites, so promise me convulsions and religious excitement, because years later nothing will have changed. Strangers will still be asking for directions to the nearest parodic consecration, to the gallery of galleries, the quintessence of stupidity around what corner, because Baudelaire, because art must be stupid, because I am the exemplary moron, and because my subjects are one now and dead, my afflatus airless, my muses merged and murky without a sound.
My art is so many words. My art is this wall, this thickening of space. A brain with too much plasticity will render you helpless; I’m a nascent jelly in search of a mould, a cortical bulge drooling from a pressure crack in my skull a few millimeters inside the right scoop of my receding hairline. You can’t bring the dead back to life with a sonorous inflection. Walls and screens are not bodies. Like this we are all blessed, the world merciful after all. I now know murder is a clumsy instrument for redescribing my frustrations with ultimate secular meaning, but we work with what we have.
I come to think of them as merely apostrophic, and them the same about me. I think of them the way a prisoner would his next conjugal visit: a place in the wider world in which to place myself, to establish some corporeal connection, albeit contrived, albeit destructive, cruel, and painful. Life outside the abstract’s such a strenuous dupery.
I’m pursued. I hide away. I wanted the future, so I killed my family. It seems I’ve murdered so many young things, scarcely born some of them – and yet already too old before I started. There is only the problem now of what comes next. I make a kind of Bilderatlas (you remember Aby Warburg?) for something that never existed. My family is a lie; my dead family is a lie. I use my head as a coal hammer, smash it over and over. I read de Selby’s The Layman’s Atlas out of the thinnest, skinless air. I’m here for the solution to the impossibility of the new: an atlas of nowhere and of nothing.
I add to the walls every day; it’s my way of moving beyond them, of turning my defoliated family tree into something living. Embracing my indecency, I take heed of Crevel, and no longer spend my life getting old. I am iterative the way liquids are iterative, the way blood seeped from their vacated heads before I covered them up, before the sight of them turned supplemental to certain baseline empathies, before their performative hiatus excreted an unsanitary mesh of proto-realities beyond the control of even my flair for virtuosic elision. How can I make art out of them? How can I not?
These walls are my plumage, my floofy epigenetic coif, my lustral monomania. Reality does not come close. I insulate: my acquisitive tendencies escalating to the point of depleted muscle mass and sensory suffocation. Only with my invagination complete will I breathe again, see again, move again, the remains of my crushed organs spontaneously rejuvenated in the finely tuned centricity of this one true work of art.
I make a wall like every obsessive makes a wall, by adorning an already existing wall with all the fragments of my obsession: photographs, pages of highlighted and encircled text, connecting strings, newspaper clippings, maps, timelines, rainbow cork board pins scattered in discursive yet meaningful arrangements. It will be my wall of failure: of the men I didn’t apprehend, the prostitutes I never killed, the convicts I never rescued, the banks I never robbed. My wall of disquiet. I will keep adding to it until I am forced to include adjacent walls. It will spread like a fungal infection. I’ll place a viewing seat at some precisely measured distance, where I’ll sit for hours studying what I’ve done (by failing to do anything). There will also be tables with computer monitors, at least three, probably four, similarly-sized, playing looped videos of things and people pertinent to the investigation – the investigatory detritus of my non-investigation – to which my eyes will travel when the stillness of the wall becomes oppressive.
On the wall, down by the skirting, is a photograph of Paul McCarthy shitting into his own mouth. There’s the big white beard, the cap; I’m sure it’s him. I wrote his name on the back. It’s there to remind me of something, but I’m not sure what. It will come to me. Sometimes one of the monitors will play snippets of Painter or Experimental Dancer. I sourced them from UbuWeb and they help to contextualize the seriousness of the wall. Above that same monitor are photos of my family: five separate portraits, five separate smiles – one of them a little off (as if maybe they knew). Pinned next to them is Lorca’s “New York (Office and Denunciation),” where I have underlined the many of those that smash the sky to bits. Some might consider this juxtaposition bad taste, but it’s all in keeping with the provocation of the wall itself.
The crazy wall is an extension of the investigation or crime board – often referred to as simply the board – and the crazy room an extension of that. I guess, the thing is, I want too much of everything to the point that I settle for less than I started with. I sit in my chair and smoke and look at what I’ve amassed. I just sit and smoke and think, as if an answer is on the way. As if the answer that arrives won’t be a further irritation, another irresolute itch in some inaccessible area of the bodies we’re trying so hard to sleep inside. We are mangy in our chairs. I think of it as a kind of theology of moments, a laboratory of furtive howling. I hear myself talking in some unknown dialect. I voice as if from a lurching sea.
The meaning of futility is such a delicate thing. The appetite that consumes itself. The vampiric consumption of my thick French blood. The one question that never goes away: What am I avoiding? Everything a distraction from whatever the answer is, but then the answer’s not there. Or it’s straightaway lost among the trees, with the forest on fire, with the squirrels turned to charcoal, with my yellowing eyes and skin, my failing liver.
I could be heard developing a belly. Sleeping vertically, suspended by my feet. The irrelevance of a disposition.
I have to get out of here: I’m forgetting the weather. What do I have to do to become intolerable to myself? There was a moment right before I shot one of them, I forget which, when the rifle bullet itself seemed so very precious. Such a weird concentration of emotion in such an inert lump of metal. People will say it’s displacement, but they weren’t there. No one was. Even I wasn’t there, not really.
I sometimes like to imagine I’m holed up in an apartment in some dilapidated project in America. I look at pictures of them and see myself on the other side of one of the windows. I never go out. I have a silly amount of locks and chains on the front door; it would be easier to come in through the walls. I keep pictures of the best ones pinned up in a row: Queensbridge Houses, Robert Taylor Homes, Magnolia Projects, Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini Gree, Hotel Iveria, Avalon Gardens, and Imperial Courts. If I live there it’s because it’s too dangerous to go out. I immerse myself in something insanely abstract and esoteric. I live inside whatever it is I’m doing, and barely eat or sleep because of it. Sometimes it’s an art form so intricate and extravagant that nobody has ever come close. Other times it’s a philosophical theory so convoluted and arcane that it fills thousands of pages of tiny spidery script and hand drawn diagrams that would take a lifetime for anyone else to decipher. I imagine the same thing contained in just a few lines, the brilliant simplicity of which will belie the decades I spent searching for it. Surpassing the Duchampian revolution in art, this discovery will reconfigure the very fabric of human meaning. It will make it mean something. No one will ever again wonder why it is their senescence feels so vicious.
At a certain time on a certain day, at a train station in Paris, I could see in people’s faces how they didn’t want to do this anymore. They’d soaked up their lives and were full with every new kind of emptiness. I followed the rules. I refrained from smoking. I didn’t talk to anyone. I took my secrets to the grave – the one in Fourqueux, unmarked, posing like nature. I swallowed all the acorns. What was left but waiting? The meditation exercise at the top of my voice. And then nothing. No saplings in sight. Only bad guts and a mutilated tree, and the young trees that refused to grow, because my stomach wasn’t soil, wasn’t a labyrinth of nutrients, but thin air, the sedimented nothing of my habits.
I glom what life I can from this infinite fatigue. What kind of man prays in every direction at once? I’m clammy to the bone. Let us alone with our technology and our sorrow. Our sorrow without history. Our history prescinded from our insulated state.
I’ve spent these years in a shrinking room running my brain through a meat slicer only so I can piece it back together again. And only now do I feel ready to turn failing upwards into an art.
It’s like I’m John Holden in Night of the Demon when I need to be Julian Karswell. But I’m also the John Holden that nothing happens to. No demon arrives at night at the behest of an enigmatic devil-worshipper – unless the walls themselves are demons, and they are, of course they are. Everything is theory till the end. I attend my conference and nobody gets scared, because nobody really believes. I’m scared all the time now, because all I have is what must happen but won’t because it can’t, but will and must and at any time or never but soon…
I regret that art must say something even when it deliberately says nothing. I regret that art does not have anywhere near enough regrets. My art is I regret art. The art of this regret is that the only thing it leaves behind, as its remainder, is itself art. But the future of art is not more art. The future of writing is not more writing. The future is more and more becoming less and less. The future is luxury masquerading as need. It’s a baby born inside years of swallowed vomit. It has more than two heads; it has heads like we have hair. I say we as if I hadn’t shaved mine off, as if my scalp isn’t a disguise, as if the walls now weren’t too close to externalize my flailing arms, my running legs. The bodies of ma famille resurrected in this airless chamber of what’s left, the artwork consuming all physical space, everything outside growing farther away. Adieu because I feel them now. Adieu because it’s time.
No more room. No more air. No more. All of it.
I hear toneless, monotonous voices. They say I’m difficult to keep alive, like orchids. They sound like the legs on a mechanical frog. The speakers are sick and their voices sometimes wordless, with long pauses between one sound and the next. I specialize in not falling asleep. Behind my eyes there’s just this blue vapor, the maladroitly forged ontology of another world citing names as substances to touch. With my eyes shut I am all the drains of history. The waste of all of it flowing through me, cumulating in some imagined blockage to form the ultimate daydream. My thoughts agglutinative and stood on end, vertical without stopping.