Part Four: "The Crying of Loons"


Spinning a head roll has to spin. HAS to spin. Spin and spin. Spoon
and spoon. I'm on the moon. I'm the moon. Live-Action. Rights,
easy made design. The programmers page affords golden luxuries
spilling out over the set up. Enhanced graphic. 120 new ways a year,
minus five days Yule. Learned that in sundy school. You, you the
killer. No adventure too thrilling to escape being scythed and
bundled, sold wholesale to be ground down and mass produced and end up
fortified in a plastic bag. My tree. My eclipse. My threes series
fleas. I'm a flea. I patch my eye. No spin medical, I'm not a
license to kill. I'm a history for the masses of illiterate deaf and
dumb life. Life beyond your ears, little waster. Spin. Everything
has spin, even direction. Look it up for yourself if you must. Spin
and spin a head spin spins its spin. Spinner it says. Spinner it be.
What? Always a good question. Maybe this time you'll accept no
answer. If we repent.

What is it the drags this face down to the pavement and then up to the
sky? What can't this swirling mass of twisted steel sense as Nelson
J. Rockefeller swims out in its blood and up in a tower a man joys in
his ugliness and the mugger on thirty-third street is wondering in
disgust what a damn jogger is doing with $75 dollars in his running
shorts anyway, but doesn't rilly want to here the story. One karate
chop and the deed's done. Who cares? And it's just the amount needed
at this time. Nate is the name of the large, nonraciallydescript
person who makes off with the cash and runs down the street into this
night's history. That money will change many shit-grinning hands
before the day's done. It'll betray it's own god with a cold
sloughing shrug. Yeah, well I suppose there was a lot of infected
money in that day. Rotten apples done baked the pie before its time.
Yeah, it's never time you fuckers! Drag a dog along the street for a
while and he'll either die in a heap for your sickness or go for your
throat and blood. I wish I could cast off this wicked tale of your
fate New York City, unbelieved by Jon who says that mistake makes this
book into just another lousy lump of garbage and marsh gasses.
Marshes, however, are fascinating places that give rise to many
strains of living--everything from leeches to groundtails and most
exquisite in sound among all those watery minions is the loon, whose
shrills cannot be resisted by anyone. An accidental breach in the
fabric of life's veil of tears, a cry into the ghost world and a
memory of a promise given deep in the bowels of time.

There is a gathering taking place in this city despite all the major
warnings. The motels and overpasses are full. There's no room for
any peaceful births at this headless counting. Peace will move onto a
new people, the old people. This beast will burst its belly.

Loons are a curious amphibious bird with a tapered head ending in an
impressive point. They mainly feed on lakes and can be found in
abundance where wetlands are allowed to persist. By far their most
distinguishing feature is the infamous cry, a croaking howl produced
by the throat that has been compared to the squawls of demons. The
kind mind, however, will see, rather hear, a rhythm to the scream that
is unmistakably melodious and balanced, a richness and deepness that
indeed resonates with spiritual power.

A frog doesn't sound like that, even a big mother bull. I understood
it this time, a roar like thunder, a peel, a ringing singing fate to
the nations, calls to come to grips with the vast sea of unconscious
violence poised on society's needle of culture. The crying of loons
breaks the surface of the lake with a battle resonance--we will stand
now, our mother willing.

Genus Gavia. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
defines loon as "Any of several diving birds of the genus Gavia of
northern regions, having a laughlike cry. Also called 'diver.'" But
then again it also defines Mammoth Cave National Park as "A national
park of 79 square miles in central Kentucky, noted for limestone
caverns," as if the square mileage had anything to do with it.
Mammoth Cave! A loon is also (by definition 2) "A simple-minded or
mad person. An idler." That one's etymology is unattested, but
definition number 1, our handy reference delimiter suggests, is
"Probably from Old Norse lomr. See la- in Appendix." Flipping to the
appendix I'm greeted with the Proto-language of our Proto-ancestors.
Proto. That means it's not rilly true. Nonetheless the
reconstruction *la- indicates "Echoic root. 1. Middle Dutch lollen,
to mutter: LOLLARD. 2. Middle Dutch lollen, to mutter, akin to the
Low German source of Middle English lollen, to loll: LOLL. 3. Middle
Low German lollen, to lull, akin to the Low German source of Middle
English lullen, to lull: LULL. 4. Old Norse lomr, loon: LOON. 5
Latin lallare, to sing a lullaby: LALLATION. 6. Latin lamentum,
expression of sorrow: LAMENT. 7. Greek lalos, talkative: ECHOLALIA.
8. Greek lalein, to talk: GLOSSOLALIA. [Pok. 1. la- 651.]" Low
German, akin to East Frisian lomen, to move slowly, becomes LOOM, "to
come into view as a massive, distorted, or indistinct image. To
appear to the mind in a magnified and threatening form. To seem
imminent; to impend. --n. A distorted, threatening appearance of
something, as through fog or darkness." Paul's Epistemology of Love.
Loom, of course, is something else that eventually made the Dutch and
the English very wealthy. 'Loony' is an informal adjective meaning
"So odd as to appear demented." A loop is a small hole in a wall, or
a million things that go around and around. A loofa is a tropical
vine, or more commonly, it's dried fiberous fruit used by
granola-heads to scrub their butts. Other words on this page are
'Longhorn' a variety of cattle, and 'Lookdown' a species of fish.

Dictionaries are like frogs.

Roll and roll.

A natural history of loons could not begin with archaeopterix, for it
yet has not such respect in the books. Where would one begin?
Perhaps from a modern morphology? They are like penguins in many
ways, like geese in others. They have pointy beaks and beedy eyes.
They got these characteristics from some of their ancestors, others
not. And what about these others? Radiation? Brownian motion?
God's permission? Mutation is by far the best invention for a
changing universe, no? That lookdown and that longhorn aren't two
shakes from a loon. I, of course, am a vastly superior being, a
disembodied non-voice, a blip, a set of typing hands never more to be
referred to to, I-- To characterize the loon as "having a laughlike
cry" is like saying that Mammoth Cave National Park is "noted for
limestone caverns", or that Marie Antoinette was "a famous French
woman with nice hair." If I had to hit your head with a mallet to
make you understand me, I'd be hard up about now. Loons,
loons.....How can I express it? When they cry in the night your blood
becomes rennet, you wake up as cheese.

Spin and spin.

Lollards were nasty folk. Granted, they schooled Huss the Martyr
which fueled the first revolution, and through them the Anabaptists
influenced the protopragmatist alternative societies that grew up in
the Americas in the early nineteenth century, to which we owe much.
Still, when I think of Lollards I think of fanatic Realists, book
burners, effigy smashers, haters of iconography. I work in images. I
wish to make them multiply. The image of the crying loon is my goal
from this jail. Help me hear me.

Soon, very soon.

Breaking over the lake. The sun is about to explode onto the scene,
and the coming of the light sets the tone of shrilled silent
potential. At once the piercing scream blares out across the water,
sending fish and frogs diving for the bottom. Again and again the
beams of blasted squeals squawl up and down the valley echoing into
the hollows and down into the crevices of the cliffs. Deep inside the
caverns eyeless fish, troglofiles, can tell the times and seasons by
the echoes of wind in the trees, can time the organic flows, the
precission needed for breeding beneath the surface of the Earth. We
won't know if its true that some live over a hundred years for
thirty-seven more, if the researchers live that long. Earthquakes
don't kill people, buildings do. Beneath the surface one hardly
notices. Down here life is tough, a meal hard to come by. None of
the animals have pigment in their skins. No appeals, no-one need not
be counted. The numbers are pretty precise--a few degrees this way or
that, their systems fail. Basic feeding, occasional breeding, perfect
waiting: a congress of golden ones in beat step, or so they would seem
in this light. Anything brighter would kill them. And so we see my
friends how early it truly is, early days yet my kichen chums, my hook
pals, my flim flum flay, oddly woodly wa wa way, weigh, wei, we hoop
and we hoop and we weeeee wa wa way dlee poodleechoodlee

"Alright here it goes," says Nick (he's had it!) to anyone with
fifteen feet of him, and throws down his flare. A spark ignites his
sleeve, he has to franticly put out his arm out, and then kicks the
damn thing into the street. "C'mon people! Work hard!" he yells as
is his custom and runs screaming down the street breaking a window
with a stick. "Aeaeaereareraedeaeraderereaeaeaerrrrr!" he roars
through his hidden micromegaphone and snickers under his breath.
Someone in the back hoots and few folks saying 'yeh' start shuffling
up the street and then hooting and throwing rocks. Free agents and
all, no poor dumb peasant excuses. Yelling "yes!" and and hooting as
they go, and then another and another, one head after each other.
Spin and spin. It's because of our headboxes that absolute nothing,
z-particles, are amazingly imperceptible to the Western brain, if
there are any of them left anymore. One could see that even the
weather affects the pull of every electron and quark, green, blue,
yellow, red, orange, and white in between. I could represent you all,
all in balance. It rilly did, it back up, and I could how much?
Done? no..! Save me, save me croutons and tickets and chips, chips
and fish, chips and tough rill tough together look! Thousands!
NO...Zillions! See what I say? I say nothing and that doesn't keep
anyone from judging it all and voting even, no excuse! Probably not
going to see it and that's my point, itness, thingness, that's how we
construct are realities here in the West: Icons and Patterns! Oh
shut the fuck up! Look, lookit it this way: we even call it nothing!
No thing! Nothing! Space and things. Space to be filled and things,
yes even concepts, ideas to fill it. Feel it? Yeh! It's rill!
Rilly rill! But wait! Is it rilly so entrenched? Is it? Those
white spaces between the colored faces--that! that's what some peoples
see. The pause in the Japanese Noh play and what it bespeaks of even
a child's conversational rhythm. The silent Observer of the Yorkish
Noah play and the Cycle of Being of which it is but a figurinig.
Awash in a Sea of Possibility, the Critical Nominalist stares blankly
at the open sky or down into the rushing culvert and knows only that
his communication matrix is escaping into the past as his compatriots
die by the millions throughout the world. So soon so old and ready to
deliquest, so soon no-one to talk to no-one. What can this be? This
question, it is too much, too much loss of hope...even if hope if a
lark... But lo! Wait, perhaps the day will again break! What irony!
What affirmation! What sense of ending in silence this long
conversation, this chattering of ages, and maybe within the pause
we'll find reason.

Nick ducks into a side alley and heaves hard his lungs, pauses, shoves
a piece of Indian squash candy into his mouth and chonks down hard.
He listens for the sounds of the night but can hear nothing but the
drip off the drainboards. A cat walks across a back fence and turning
its head to hear a cricket sees the glow of a shooting star streak
down through the small crack of night sky exposed between the
buildings. Nick misses it but feels the message as a sense of
burning, feels like a volcano inside his head, it snorts out his nose
in big puffs of vapor trails this late night. Ready to go back out
into the chaos he pauses just long enough to get caught in a trap.
You know this scene. In an instant they're on him and there's nowhere
to go but farther into the deadend, dead and dark and lonely, each
step his death easier, and three of them are even white boys and they
snarl as the clubs come up and down, he kicks at their knees and
sprays mace as he see more arrive.

Meanwhile Laura's down deep beneath the City's complex interlacings of
underground tunnels and sewers. She's leaning over a book. A moment
ago she was waste deep in sewage, New York's liquid shit, a moment ago
she was desparetly escaping surface crimes, now she is clean and
calmly reading a book on a pedestal in a well lit marble-tiled room.
It is a taxonomy of loons intermingled with some fool's mysticism. It
is a field of pumpkins. It... It is a book about herself and the
piercing of her mind done by images and screams throughout a year of
experimentation. She thinks she must be in a dream, but realizes that
it is her dreams that are in this book. She can smell her
shit-covered wetsuit in the corner of the room, a reality too intense
to be dreamed or produced by some plug. Or not? No, it's all too
clear. It's all right here. She's swimming through her own shit now,
with clear eyes that can't help but sting. Stupidity, incredulity,
amazement, anger give way to delight at her next move. A certain
someone is about to be emasculated, grabbed, controled out of his own
game. Astonished she realizes how few women could do this task, could
control this shame, could take this masked guilt and run with it like
a goddess streaking across the forest at midnight. At once in her
mind she is Diana in the woods and running. Running for all her wind
and life to catch the fading day for the children of the Earth and
laughs in the face of awesome fear. Leans back her head and losing
not a step yells into the night of the world and the spirit, howls a
piercing note of the driving revenge of life's deep and resplendently
divergent fecundity, a splitting spear, fertilizing force of Life's
Love against the hanging on of bloodless form, idiotic machine
politic, the mighty Golem of feeble social glory.

There's a play that goes with this part. Could substitute for it if
we were any less naked. For a song? Crickets? Down on my knees in
the bar in the back--the few that forgive or don't care. Very calm.
I want to go home but she sends me back. A play that could be this
whole book in another life, one not so vulgar. So why not insert my
wee? Here now! Lo, the stage opens like magic and all are awed
before they can even know the hows and whys--a thousand lies
perpetuated on lost heads, you're mistake, my friend, for believing so
much for so long--no alibis for the late gang, a thousand dancing
girls cross the stage in a flash--eyelashes false, faces false,
nothing real but the shape of their thighs, they pause not long enough
for any eyes to dwell on their hidden fires and as quickly as it
began, before monotony sets in, the lasciviousness of it all exits
right leaving a blank stage and a silence that betrays the idiocy of
the unnoticed musical blarings that drove the fevered pace. The
lights go up on man with curly dark hair and blue eyes sitting on a
stool gesticulating. He's twenty-eight and can't believe what a coot
he's become. The lights coming on signal the frozen time of darkness
as the character is talking mid-sentence in Chicago accent--

Billy: --e 'n y'know? Yeh we used to go down-- There's was this
place--not like some of duh place we got around here, y'know, yeaah,
but down there, y'know? Place is a farm, but they had this one little
place-- I was a student, y'know-- couldn't afford to eat fancy,
couldn't cook, still can't cook, never could... but there's was this
one little place, every Thursday, brats 'n frenchfries and a coke,
$2.37 with tax, man I'd just get in there, starving, and chonk down on
one a dose brats, man, hm, I can still remember it now man. What I
wouldn't give, it...there's jes' somethin' about it, what I wouldn't
give for one of dem brat baskets!

The lights go out and the music comes blaring on. The audience is
jarred out of its seats momentarily and look menacingly at each other,
then startled at the stage. Machinery grinds in the darkness for two
seconds while the violins scream a fit of violence stolen and mutated
from Stravinsky. Just as suddenly the scene change is over and one's
mind is instantly drawn to the realistic demeanor of the now
brightened and utterly transformed stage. A beautiful meadow, ringed
with gently flowing trees appears before our eyes, softened by the
sound of rolling water in the distant. Slowly Mescalito sprial dances
up out of the ground and onto one toe, arms stretched out, his head
back, he falls into a spin and dances round the meadow to flutes and
drums. The audience is inundated with barely audible hemisync tones
producing a range of 7.8 to 7.87 Hz between their ears. The drums and
dancing reach a fevered pitch despite the crying of the flutes then go
suddenly still as the flutes more quietly continue to repeat their
warning several times till silence leaves only the hemisync and
Mescalito crouches low to see the action. Two lovers, arm in arm,
walk into the meadow and hold each other, their backs to the audience,
staring at the sun. They are dressed in a nostalgic rendition of
pioneer clothing, a nostalgia that betrays the loss of the essential
flavoring of the period. They cannot rediscover their lives. They
have come out to the wilderness to see if there are any answers, but
knowing not the questions can find nothing. Mescalito only senses
their despair and observes with pity. Silently he sneaks up on them
and springing in sudden violence kills them with a rock. The hemisync
goes dead. Mescalito, his hands bloody, his eyes wide and wild, turns
to the audience and challenges their stare with his own as the signal
for the room to go utterly dark...

On through the night the sirens roar and the young shout and stomp.
The Fundamentalist Buddhists of America were gone before Nick got
three feet up the street. They're back to Connecticut and their tuxes
saying "I say!" Right out of your tree, go on, leave the whole world
behind. What world, eh? Rocks and bottles are the prefered game, but
any projectile will do. Did the police come out in force? Or was
their show a farce? Ill remembered this side of new treaties. Twenty
years hence and few here will remember anything from this day and the
years it represents. There was blood enough. Nasty bottled hatreds
thrown a thousand years of the peoples and their deprivation. Nestled
in their estates the old and wealthy don't even care that they're
dying. They have shots enough and pills. They've had there say and
goodnighty. Look, bloodletting just isn't my taste so you'll have to
imagine your own split heads and dismembered corpses. Think in piles.
You'll get it right. Meanwhile Constanzi Boy 1, now Ref. Inm. Nr.
Z396874-0011, has escaped with a group of political prisoners headed
for the riots and ditching them hops a ride to Schenectady with the
fleeing minions. He ends up as a missionary preacher in Washington
state where some years later he's murdered by some children he'd
molested. But this night everyone's forgotten his role in this fiasco.
Face it, he's only been and icon for some time. Even ugly John Black
has more power now. As usual, once the rockets start flying no-one
needs to remember what brought them to it in the first place. And
Alfie? He's quickly slipped back into a song--too much fear of pain.
Couldn't stand unlimed light for long. He tried to make it to Alaksa
but we never got that far, eh? Many others escaped into the sewers
and in later years resurfaced one by one, dramatically changed by
their strange subterranean sourjourn, to join the mobs of Indians
filtering back from Western reservations, where they're suddenly
unwanted. But wait! This is a floor cleaner after all and not a
dessert topping and this night has barely begun! Break out your
sweepers, troops, break out Ma's old preserves now gone rotten,
anything to toss out the windows at passerbys. No, they'll be no
looting tonight in CityCity. Everyone's giving everything away
instead, with a lump on the head and a good night Mrs. Calabash and
Mr. Chips, wherever you are, whatever you sow or sell.

Loons are perhaps the oldest family of birds on the planet. The
oldest fossil remains of loons are over 50 million years old. They
spend most of their time on or in water and can dive to depths of 200
feet for upwards of fifteen minutes. Young loons often ride on their
mothers' backs while they swim as protection against pretators. They
have piercing, durable, sharp red eyes. Migrating loons are a sight
to behold, but if one seeks their essence one must go North to the
Land of Ice from which they come. Loonsong tells 50 million years of
life, 50 million stories of the sun's course, the wind's rush, the
moral geography of ocean and shorline, the golden orange sun setting
with a plop into a dark bristling sea. Their's is a life of worship
and toil. Chasing prey beneath the lake, pushing to the surface to
swallow fish whole, and rising up, up, up circling into the spiral
sky. Spanning the biosphere for 50 million years. Lofty heights,
murky depths, sunny days floating on Mamma's back on a chilly lake.

When we left Nick he was about to experience the end of his life in an
alley. "Dead End!" he kept thinking as the blows began to fall on
him. "A Gawdamn sacrifice!" he screamed in his mind, wincing more
from the thought of a sickeningly sweet martyrdom than from the
tire-iron about to render him humanely unconscious. But the blow
never comes and is replaced instead by a smooth rippling sound
breaking out over the back of his neck. He looks up and sees the
crowd running back. He can't understand it until his mind clears
enough to recall what's happened. The cat. "Why...?" The cat
screeched and lept from the wall onto someone's face. That was a
human being wasn't it? The cat. Nice little black kitty. And then
they all ran away. Nick is flabbergasted only for a moment and then
remembers somehow that he's supposed to run away too now. He backs up
two steps and falls into someone's hallway. Someone has just opened
the back door to a flat and admitted him rather rudely. She is the
cat's human companion come like the cavalry to save Nick's sad butt on
this night of despair. Well...despair for the old world--birth for
the new, eh? Nick, fated to die, has escaped death again.
Happenstance often saves an undoomed warrior, when his courage is
strong. Nick slips into a happenstance reality and spends the rest of
Revolution Number Nine Night in Tara's basement flat. She was a
production assistant for Japanese adventure flicks in her day, and she
tells him all about the excitement of it as they sip tea and smoke
marijuana. They don't make love but both have satisfying wet dreams
in the wee hours of the morning and wake up embarassed. Meanwhile
outside, New York comes crashing down around our collective ears. One
would expect nuclear devices would be used, but no, not even
flame-throwers grace the night's sky, nor even a single bazooka. Hand
guns, of course, make their presence felt rather stingingly, but the
rill culprit of the evening is New York itself--the malaise of
mayonnaise ham on rye torment day after flippin' day. No back roads,
see? No place for a motorcyclist to hide and find redwinged black
birds. Interestingly, a street named after Enrico Fermi took the
worst damage. But, I jest, I speak as if the night has passed when,
of course, it has just begun.

"Scream scream" says the crying loon.
"Uh huh uh uh" says the benumbed audience, eyes staring wilder
and redder than any waterfowl in existence.
"Lo lo lo!" cries the loon like a mad preacher coming home at
long last, declaring the game null and void and the actors lost
without a cue.
"O" says the audience in one short syllable as the plot is
revealed and the more astute see that even the very architecture of
the stage contains an amoral smirk of purposefully effaced
self-importance.
"Good night" announces the House Manager quickly as the janitors
rush on stage to do the sweeping and wash the spatterings off the
scrim.

The time has come for Florida Springfield to lead her band in singing
"Holy, Holy Toledo" as they swing their bats and chainsaws roaring
through the city. The Noodle Brigrade has driven them out of the
Adirondacks, and then out of what's even left of the Catskills. Who
could sleep through all this racket? Ghost of ghost sleeps through it
all without as much as a turd for our trouble. He's had his say and
left us with nought but a virtual simulation of how world history
would've ended in 1913 if the Lakota's hadn't killed Custer for us and
he'd gone on to be President. The end is sick. I hated it. And,
what?, you might ask, M., is SDS-R-erected up to? "Up to?" Their ...
hmmmm ... busy programming their own dreams for one, yours for
another. John Black beaten senseless and left for dead by a couple of
Neo-Skinnerians has woken up with the entire scene in his head, as the
delerious often do. They're dragging him into a diner where moments
ago the waitress was making love to a famous genius stood up by his
and our dearest friend--and for that moment of orgasmic bliss the
World, no, the Earth, no the Whole Solar System was her's in a
blinding flash of Phenyl-e' reverse-ecstasy (a way-in the bowels of
the body experience). This is the crowning achievment of a lifetime
of exploration for both of them. Now he'll be off to Disko Island to
invent the next great Universal Theorem, and she--off to a suburb in
Ohio to marry a short man and raise a golden child who'll invent new
musical instruments. For now they're helping John Black regain
consciousness. They sit him down on a stool at the bar; slumping
forward he turns to our lovers and in surprise at their familiar faces
murmmurs "Find Edith. She has something for you. Something for the
war." They stare at each other curiously and then suddenly understand
the city's roar--there is a war. It's been going on for a long time
(many years) though no-one here has noticed till now.

A man in Quebec City, at this moment, has actually been killed by a
migrating goose, who, having suffered fatal coronary failure at
several thousand feet, plummetted toward the Earth at such angle and
velocity as to break a strolling man's neck vertebrae cleaning down
the middle. You may die at any moment and not know what goose has got
you. Leaving this world with no goodbyes--what a waste of pathos!

As the night wears on no-one but Mssr Black knows just where the next
attack will come. Yes, the truth is that the Police have come out in
force, and the National Guard. Turtles wait outside city limits,
sooners, hoping to get a rush on a new day. But Mssr Black is still
half delirious. He's been promoted to SDS Attorney General and is
commanding the Legion assault from his hospital room above the Adobe
Halls complex east of Smithton Rowe--the place is dangerously
understaffed. Alfredo, gone to Morocco for the weekend, decides to
stay in Africa for the extra days that guarantee he'll never be
back--his followers are busy making sure there'll be nothing to return
to. No-one knows where the lasers have appeared from--some future
shock? No-one knows where the Black Buddha will set his feet firmly
in this night's city's soil. Soil! Once again green will grow.
These terminal towers, these, these mountains of hegemony belie place
for sympton. All gone in a flash, in the stroke of an electronic
pencil, a generation eaten up in despair and brilliant flip floppy,
like hitching a ride on a brisky gust to rest with the rubbish twisted
around the barbed-wire fences that free this nation from its many
duties. Three bullets ring at the hospital and the world will never
know who rilly won this war. Someone said she saw Laura with a rope
around some man's neck fleeing in a dingy up the Hudson. Nick finally
does have sex with the movie woman--who, incidently, is distantly
related to the man from Bath now long dead--and gets all the credit in
the long run. You'd expect anything less from history I guess?
Losers are meant for ignomy, even in greatness--a relative term, after
all, eh?

Blood? Guts? Sweat? Mucous? Stupidity? Do you need it all?
Can't you get the picture without me? I hate all this death! How
tall are you? How high does the stack have to be to hide the world
from you? See the death around you as you sit in your boxes? See how
each corner spells out a death, tells the ghost world which side you'd
rather be on? It's all spilling out, all over the place. All the
children have been sent West so I can stand it. We have to candy-coat
the future so that we can dream, ok? But you dream it, buddy, because
it's yours--that's right, you! You in the foxhole! You can't see
nothing but dead people everywhere! You run but you just can't hide
from the cold eyes and twisted tongues, the smell, the vomit, the
hideous, ridiculous despair of it all. Every movie you've ever
watched prepared you for this day. Now that it's here you don't know
how you could've not killed yourself years ago. So let's escape 50
million years to a lake in Manitoba, an archaeopterix lecturing a
fresh batch of loons on the art of subterfuge. No? The Moon then?
The stars? Death in a disco haze I guess. I'm off to Greenland for
the annual rites. And as we rise above the surface of these Islands I
look for a beacon and find instead a place to leave a marker, a clue
for the future inscribed on this little piece of silicon in my lost
little underground stream. Here only the rocks hold onto life, and in
return life holds on to them.

There's nothing left of CityCity. Rubble is nothing. Things without
form or order are trash to be trodden on, not thingness, no exaltation
in this world. You know this scene. The whole damn thing goes away
for no more reason that it came to in the first place. Soon more
beads will exchange hands with smiles, the deed revoked so the dead
can at least rest, if not in peace. And time which takes survey of
all the world begins again as the skyline bullet descends mercilessly
and randomly on the scattered host freeing our eyes to observe the
long hidden ocean horizon where a solitary waterbird hovers, waiting
to once again land on Long Island. A loon come home too soon, but
what's another generation in seventeen to one who in power looms over
the world with a cry to pierce through our particle limitations? An
all-knowing angel 50 million years on either side of this small,
self-important blight. There are trees here waiting to grow again.
Brooks ready once again to flow to the sea pushing their pebbles as
they go. Weeds are what we need! Let this rubble be gone! And so it
goes....



Back to January 28, 1993

_CityCity_ Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5