CIRCUMSTANCES

 Like a common woman passing by on the street with the bearing of a duchess, her amplified sense of illustrious ego in soliloquy. That whole plot thickening again: the certainty making her play the fool whenever the seclusion of the room was worthwhile, in a typical theater atmosphere. “Ah, K, everything here pleases me: the relief, the color, the noise, and the very breath of the room. These small hotels that fall apart as soon as the owner earns enough to make them resemble his antiseptic dream. The principle of novelty at the forefront of the mind, here, a warm plateau of sweet comfort and intimacy,” Joana said. I felt myself slipping down a 48-hour slope, in the cold, lonely cave where we had fallen. Gravediggers would bury Hamlet at night, but the speed of the drug would prevent him from settling into words. The reshaped image of Joana, now addicted to medication, had become a potential topic of sacred touch. Madness in God as direct knowledge separated from everything else. The sunny purple windowpane, two feet from my nose, reminded me of the play of contradictory lights we meditated on in practice. Macrobiotic altar and practical occultism, in verse. – Tell what, besides that? I'm not sure, tell someone in particular, or tell it like someone writing a book? Now, freed from these commitments to culture, media, and politics, I return to breathing the museum air of everything, of the uninhabited streets, of the encounters between minds, where the approach is a confrontation with the Eternal Return, its prefaces of nocturnal conversations, in the voice of K. There was a time, certainly, when this life lost its ability to compose itself (the beginning of the Modern Era) and now had to be "worked," industrialized, with all its fears labeled "empirically"... and many indeed made this their goal, dazzled by the mirages that a minimal reward insinuated. Let's just say that, from Machiavelli's time to ours, this arrangement has been a very misguided project, requiring a dirty fight to rectify itself," I said and lit the cigarette, remembering the clean, somnambulistic airport. the day before, where I had said goodbye to the readers. I had asked them why they were reading what I had written, and the lucidity of the comedy suddenly heightened the spectacle. Someone had trained them to see idols, or eminent sub-celebrities, as the source of alien tyrannies. The illusory veil used to thrive among the audience was no longer what it used to be; it was rapidly degrading under the pressure of technical empiricism, without a great collective abstraction to serve as its driving force. The truth behind the exact, its specific enunciative consistency, its range of signs on display, self-changing, HAD BEEN LOST IN THE NIGHT OF TIME! – I know I have changed and always change, Joana, but calling me a traitor, a madman, is hysteria; Although I am not authorized to explicitly examine Merleau-Ponty's thought, I glean this aphorism from his last book: "Painture seeks nothing from the inside, from movement, but its secret horns." My exterior is also my interior; extension, my depth. The stroll of my haecceities through the streets takes place, mute or eloquent, unique in the world, with the force of a translating reading, with audience and wonderworker constantly inventing "its secret horns." Art must serve a purpose, right? May it produce virtù, virtues, virya, love of Art and the Muse, but also a bad conscience, or awareness of the evil intentions that surround them. Madness comes and goes, preventing us from shining in logistics and public relations, but proving to be the best kind of garrison, of shelter, in times of hardship, against the Western crisis of general ungovernability. And we wouldn't be underestimating America if we asked, through a Sears Roebuck catalog, for a Prince K to rule it. Military histories and war memoirs on the tip of our tongues, waiting for the interlocutor's provocation. I also knew Wheeler-Bennett, Chester Wilmot, Liddell Hart, and all of Hitler's generals by heart—and also Winchell, Earl Wilson, Leonard Lyons, and Red Smith; and moved quickly from the naive economic tabloids to General Hommel, and from Rommel to John Donne and T.S. Eliot, to nuance passing lies between the stock exchange panels. Sometimes I seemed to know strange facts about Eliot that no one else knew, and to use them as a device to make the earth tremble. What I had no shortage of was intrigue, political hallucinations, and literary discord. – he said. My theory of distortion revealed, fused, was inherent in my poetry, as well as in Joana's hips, in her mad yoga of versification. That remnant of clothing passing over her bare breasts, sliding down her curvy buttocks—then, unsolemnly, the outline of the erected phallus, the sharp note of her waist in the confused chord of our Being. I woke up the next day between four unfamiliar walls, with the taste of music paper in my mouth. The weather was GOOD, the sky clear. I pulled the curtains, which blocked the details from view, and let them in. More strange images of the previous night, of remnants of succubi emerging from the first conversations, in the convenience phone calls; and, later, on the beach, in the car. Energy eaten away by the foreign installation in language. Warnings like drops of butter dripping into a rusty pan, tingling the egocentric poison of the blood, activating a predatory slime within the spine. Spots of energy bubbled in the air, sated, inches from my forehead, and concentric inorganic circles spiraled downward and evaporated against my face. My personal metaphysics metabolized in the morning air, searching for an open bar to force itself into the same empty, preexistent waveform of the night before. At the bar, the poem, written days earlier, was called CIRCUMSTANCES, and its message was clear: "Imagination must not weaken." Sentimentality, perhaps, but also biochemical, Advaita-Vedanta, Nagualist, political, and economic considerations, ultimately, spilling over into my mind: 

CIRCUMSTANCES

 Circumstances: gold mining, in Pará. 

Thinking of the motorized dredge, 

covered in moss, eating bushes 

and aquatic debris. Mud from bloody hands, 

from amphibious tractor tracks. 

And a tiny diamond, self-diamond, 

self-reflective, at the bottom. 

The reflection of each bled plant in the water, 

and someone's torn-off ear on the raft, 

dripping into the river. Dry bread in the pants pocket, hunger. 

The black man in pajamas paying prostitutes 

with cocaine for amulets, voodoo. And mercury 

poisoning words in the air: LOVE - SHIT - MOMMY BURY ME DEEP 

and water pumps protected by tires 

and sacks of flour used to pack corpse parts. 

Sun on red dust, on blue smoke. 

Sun filtered through silent, autopoietic ashes.