– 46 –

Let's Clarify About the Trees

You think I don't see the trees?
I see the trees.
And love them and cherish and all that transitive-verb category.
Just because I don't talk about them all over the place—
they prefer that.
They can't stand people who just go up and subway-grope them
and talk about them
in front of everybody like they were OJ's wife.
That's not photosynthesis, that's blushing!

Whereas I never even acknowledge their existence.
They appreciate that.
They cherish me.

Safe

This safe keeps waddling into my office
Hear it down the hall ka-ching ka-ching
sits without an invitation always the same opening line
‘If you were any good you could crack me’
Sits there I try to amuse it and it laughs but really
There's contempt in the way it sits there
and I share that contempt

Module Five:
‘Late-Bourgeois Suffering: Does It Count?’
A Forum for Discussion

– 48 –

Ergot

(To the Memory of the German Peasants' Revolt, 1525)

I just read this interesting historical article by some professor in Colorado. It turns out, according to his article, that the great German Peasants' Revolt was the result of a dietary problem. They ate ergot— winter bread cupboarded too long. Acid-heads, that's all they were. That's what started it. Not the fourteen hours' fieldwork or the beatings or the lice or the hunger or the cold—no, it was the ergot. They neglected to say no to drugs, and so got in trouble with the law.
These explanations always collect, nacreous, around the unbearable. ‘What you can't swallow, you have to vomit up’—and how can an assistant professor at the University of Colorado (Denver) swallow the unrelieved, unfunny, absolute horror which was medieval Germany? The minutiae of twenty generations of utter unending misery—no, no, it's too much. Invent another explanation! Um … I got it!— they just ate some bad bread! Yeah, that's it! It's an anti-drugs allegory! We can get funding for this!
So the prof thinks back to a censored era of his life: he unlocks the memory he kept from the hiring committee and even from his de facto ex: the secret files on that time he took acid to impress that gorgeous hippie girl up in Aspen, and had such a great time—except no, he can't tell it as a good time—who'd fund that? No, re-remember it as some kind of ‘bad trip’ … that's the safer way, the tenure-track way … he begins to formulate his thesis: mobs of medieval German peasants, looking like slimmer versions of himself in designer rags, shout guttural abuse, and shake sickles, axes, hoes, high in the smoky air. They're wasted, man!
High on illegal mouldy bread, mobs of greasy shouting peasants burn down the Palace—the only building of any architectural interest in their dialect area. Let them eat cake; it keeps longer! The prof begins to giggle to himself, thinking despite himself of a Naked Gun version

– 49 –

of his new shiny anti-drug thesis … Leslie Nielsen putting the cuffs on a scythe-wielding gaunt medieval peasant … too much like the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, though. He can't stop thinking up variations on Marie Antoinette, though … something about her and Nancy Reagan, it's too perfect: Let them eat erasure, let them be arrested for drugs, let them be explained, go away,stop complaining from under the ground all the time, we're trying to eat.
He remembers the airport and feels calmer. Thank god for Stapleton Airport outside Denver. Just look at it, inhale that public carpet! It erases the ergot, nullifies that giddy vision of emaciated walking pain, hundreds of thousands of staring ulcerous zombies marching in the snow singing hymns, well aware of what awaits them when the Landsrat has had time to organise their extermination. God, how they must've stunk! They cannot be endured. Leslie Nielsen can't arrest all of them. Only Stapleton Airport—specifically those fake-leather rows of seating by the gate where the plane from L A always comes in … that's the only cure, somehow, for obsessive giddying over the Peasants' Revolt. Inhale the ghost of that fake-leather and public-kevlar carpet smell, the smell of negation, the peasant-repellent aerosol. Yeah … just visualise it, dude … that wonderful waiting lounge … It's like a syllogism: if Stapleton Airport exists, then there was no Peasant Revolt. Well, Stapleton Airport does exist; therefore there was no Peasant Revolt. But there was this ergot thesis; that's fundable. There's an article in that.

– 50 –

Gnats

A school of gnats. A trigonometry of gnats. A facemask of gnats. An intellectual history of gnats. A subatomic collision of gnats. If you could see them slowed down they would replicate the history of Western philosophy for the past several centuries, those loops that tail back on the one above it now circling to the right, the whole mass moving faceward as a unit, but far more absorbed in its intraloop collisions, like a gnat solar system. A diagrammed history of the Tasmanian Devil, an animate tornado, face-sized and flying faceward. A gnat galaxy. Gnat almost-kisses. Buzz-saw Micro-taunt. Or if you prefer, Macro-molecule, suspended midair in this halfworld illusion we have to inhabit cause we're such an old design, we bio thing, we Macintosh for dumb user thing, we crummy embarrassing phenomenal human-scaled middle world, middle earth, where we have to live even though they proved it doesn't exist and is neither of the true places: neither tinily-holy quark graffiti nor fearsomely-ogric milky shake cosmos; all we get to be is middle-sized and middling actors in a ‘natural setting’: ‘park’; green grass; ‘museum’ mdash;but you have to believe in them even if you don't, because if you don't you'll bump into things. Archaic designmdash;us. Designed to focus on middlesized things moving at middling speed. One of the leser families of a lesser village. In this least of all worlds.

– 51 –

A Shark Comes to Meridian Street

Long day, long day … and now this slow truck towing a boat in front of me. But wait, there in the back of the boat; a fin. Tall. Tailfin. And the whole gestalt kicked in: a shark. That sacred outline any proper child can draw: tail fin, dorsal fin, F-16 nose, dead dot eye. And mouth. With blood. A grove of white rose-thorns embedded in that pale bloody mouth.
The truck had a right to go slow now, and I followed with respect. As soon as it parked, my empty street filled up. Everyone came to warm their hands at that shark. They were desperate, shifty, like starving Africans around a relief truck. Videoing it, worshipping it, rubbing the canvas nose for luck.
My conclusion: We starve! —And dare not say so.

Logic

When you weed a garden you are coaching weeds.
You are Darwin to the weeds, shaping
The perfect weed.

If I have not yet seen the worst spider I will ever see,
Then the worst spider I will ever see is waiting for me.
I await my spider.

Hence garden-gloves.