The interrogation room is made of paper. The walls are paper, the table is paper, the coffee cup is paper. The coffee is coffee, it can melt your skin, leave it sloughing off in gluey folds, hands over your face like a celebrity, afraid of sticky cotton gauze. The chair you’re sitting on is paper, too, a special kind reinforced for its special purpose. And it’s all a stage, of course, because a stage is just a place where everything might be true except what’s really happening, and you’re always an actor under contract, it doesn’t matter if you remember, they can show you all the paperwork, there’s your signature on the curling parchment, there’s the drop of the virgin’s blood, and the long and short of all of it is just to say that you can’t leave. Not even the old-fashioned way, where you send your tongue in search of the thing that makes it speak, they’ve worked out a protocol for that, a flow chart they can follow that accounts for every avenue, the measure and the countermeasure noted down in black and white (or, occasionally, that livid, grainy, corporate gray). Because they want the mystery preserved, you should try to understand, they don’t want you gone away, not yet, at least, just at a distance from yourself, a special distance, the doll’s head unscrewed and rolled off under the sofa, the doctor with his probing flashlight (and this is their most important trick, their greatest slight of hand) appearing as pure inevitability, just another functionary like your teacher at the temple and the boy falling off the skateboard, because otherwise you’ll discover that you’re not wounded in that way, the hemorrhage is elsewhere, you can stop it up with rainy weather. It’s not even that it would help you to discover this, really, not directly, because there’s no rain in here, nothing that could make the ink run where it matters, they’ve fixed it so the blur only ever goes one way, but remembering that there could be other circumstances at all, that you’re an actor, that this is all performance, all contingent, just figures on a stage – it doesn’t stop the cuts from bleeding and the skin from turning black, but it can make the thing that speaks into a thing that’s only breathing, and that’s no good to them, it makes the drama complicated when they want to keep it simple, a basic three-act structure that’s so easy to explain.

The interrogation room sometimes is also breathing, breathing just like you still have to, or more often like a dead thing, iron-rich and calcium-deficient, juiced back into false vitality by the insistence of an alternating current. The way it goes depends mostly on the color of the day, the way the whorls are twisting in the oil puddles on the asphalt, which you can’t see from here, of course, that’s all definitively backstage, and which no one is going to tell you anything about. The way the breathing happens it can almost seem like anything is possible when it’s only you inside, that maybe there’s a rhythm to this that you can understand, but then the door clicks open and everything breaks down and they all come inside. They come carrying a pair of pliers, or a practiced smile, or, most often, a plain manila folder full of papers, a dossier that they’ll tell you has everything you thought was yours alone done up in plain and black, all your secrets marbled with some coffee stains, always coffee stains, to show that they’ve already read them, that they already know. It’s just like we’ve been telling you, they’ll say, flipping through the pages, making fingerprints that never count, so just open up your ribcage and let us come inside. All these things are all the same, of course, the pliers and the practiced smiles are just other kinds of paper, other kinds of scars on the same liver-spotted brow. It’s a room, you need to understand, with no real differences except the one that it all comes from, a room where everything becomes the one thing or the other once it goes inside. The door opens for a moment and there’s the sound of ringing telephones, footsteps in the hall, maybe a bubble in the water cooler somewhere just outside. One thing to remember about paper is it only breathes until it gets wet. Then it asphyxiates you.

There’s a window somewhere. It’s not in the interrogation room, that’s not something they’d put in there. They’ll put a mirror, a false face, they usually do, because a mirror is a place for you to look and imagine you see everything you don’t want to see staring right back at you. But not a window, a real window, that would confuse everything impossibly. It’s there, though, not far away at all, really, despite the distance underground. They’ve got it in some other kind of place where no light really gets in, where there’s nothing that they’d want to see. They try, though, because they have their little secrets of their own. They stand there and try for thirty-five years, their entire careers, stand there and try until they finally forget what it is they’re doing, and then are allowed to retire. They might give you a window, too, if they had that sort of time to work on you, but they don’t, they want it to all happen now, to have already happened just a moment ago, yesterday, last year, before the first star fell down out of the sky. Ignore it when they tell you they have all the time in the world, that it’s always been this way and that it always will be, the truth is the walls have to come in all at once for them, that’s the point, it can’t happen slowly, it can’t just occur like water filling up a stone, they have to make the idea happen for you. But for them, the window’s there, right there, and there, the idea happens naturally. This is what they think they see: some trees, strangely flat, dry leaves and dry dirt and sand. Beyond that, a fence, very high, very simple, chainlink and razor wire. And beyond that, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? It’s hard for anyone else to say. It looks like there’s nothing, just the sky and the ground and no water out there, just a long walk to nowhere, a wide open plain. In the daytime they’re sure that that’s the only thing there is to see, but at night it gets a little harder, the way the little shrubs become just shadows somehow complicates things. They could swear that sometimes they see the ground moving around out there in some constant state of change. They could swear they see whole forests and wide rivers out there, glaciers, volcanos, clipper ships and steam locomotives, huge cites full of buildings they’ve never seen before, languages they don’t understand. Then they look away or they blink or shake themselves and it’s all gone, it’s just nothing again, nothing to see, nothing out there, no light getting in, but the idea is still there. It sits and it stays and it doesn’t go away. And of course the truth is there’s nothing really there, it’s also all just a stage, a kind of performance, kayfabe, but the point is that every time they come in to see you, and bring you a new hot steaming coffee wearing their thick, waxy emanation of a face, it gets a little harder for them, until one day there’s a new stain in the sheets somewhere in the suburbs, and the hand holding the coffee changes into someone new. But it’s the same coffee, and the same hand, really, just with different skin, but skin is so cheap, always has been, has been for so long they hope you’ve forgotten, they hope you won’t even notice. They hope that you won’t guess there’s even a window somewhere, that there might any stage other than this one, that you’re not alone, that there are other actors out there, ones not at all like them, and that they might be trying to talk to you.

for Donald Barthelme

I.

“Here I go!”
He brought the axe down on the log and split it in twain. Then he took the two pieces and put them on the pile. Then he did this again and again and again. He did this all afternoon. And each of the split pieces was entirely itself, and each was just like all the others. And we sat there and watched him as he worked, and sometimes we flicked our lighters in our hands or chewed on chips of bark that landed on the ground near us, and that night we had a bonfire, big enough that there was room enough for everyone, and it was very warm, and the night was very dark, and we caught glimpses sometimes of strange shadows moving in the trees, right at the edge of where the light could reach.

II.

Recently, I had occasion to walk a few blocks along Park Avenue. It isn’t something I would recommend for pleasure, but I can’t deny it was instructive. Everything is so quiet there, so peaceful and clean. But one can’t shake the feeling that this peacefulness is false somehow, that its mechanism seems one of suppression and displacement, not born of true serenity. In this sense, there is something narcotic about it, something dangerous. Everything is elegant, and nothing is sublime. There’s ample greenery, and no signs of life. Every townhouse on every cross street, I noticed, seemed to have its shutters closed, its curtains drawn – the doors, sometimes, appear to open right onto the sidewalk, but in practice they might as well be on the surface of the moon. I saw a brass plaque in one particular window, leaned up against the glass in front of (of course) tightly-shut venetian blinds: “A Gentle Solution,” it said, with no further explanation. Things like this don’t mean anything, which is, I expect, much of why they so unnerve me.

III.

We have to stay alert. What we’re looking for has a habit of turning one way, then the other. We can be looking right at it, and suddenly it’s not there anymore, suddenly it’s something else entirely. We stand on our fortifications and try to make ourselves open to it. Slowly, we become accustomed to the idea of something other than the flicker of the torch light. We dream that the pictures we painted on the cave walls could really move.

The site manager’s office is a small room with plain walls and a single small window directly behind him, high enough up that, were he to turn around and direct his gaze through it, all he would be able to see was an overcast sky, just gray clouds moving in circles, slow circles, because it seems that it is always overcast at the site, and the clouds move slowly, and never seem to pass over the horizon. He would not turn around, though, of course, and direct his gaze through the window, it is not something he has ever even considered doing, the thought simply would not occur to him to turn away from whatever work there may be before him, to seek diversion from it even for a moment, and there is always some sort of work before him. Although he has never allowed himself to have the thought consciously, he understands on some level that it is precisely because of this fact about him, the fact that he does not ever seek diversion from his work, does not daydream, does not become sidetracked by fear or fancy, the fact that there is a kind of essential narrowness to his being which renders these things inconceivable for him, yes, it is precisely because of this fact that he has attained this position, at only forty years the youngest man ever to attain such a position within the organization, that what the board of executives sees in him and finds valuable in him is precisely that he does not ever feel the desire to look out the window, and does not ever wonder at why it is that here on the site it is always overcast, and the gray clouds always circle overhead, circle slowly. The site manager has a short beard which he keeps neatly trimmed. It is slowly turning the same color as the sky.

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Welcome. All is as it has been and will be.

—-BEGINNING OF DISCLAIMER-—

Pursuant to Judge Watanabe’s ruling and Order in Home Company v. FCC we are legally obligated to disclose and inform to you we are a cult. We are and have been found to be as a predatory insular centralized authoritarian control organization and that hereby furthermore will manipulate you et cetera fuck your shit up. We have been legally found liable of this, and we are court ordered to inform all parties, such as yourself, when such parties, as yourself aforestated, do express intent and-or interest regarding as to being joined into the Home Company Combined Concern Consciousness Structure. Further, we are obligated to disclose in full transparencies that the relevant arts of the cult leader necessary to the formation growth and perpetuation et cetera of our or any cult organization such as psychological control and conditioning were taught to us by [WITHHELD INJUNCTION #12716000/30], present whereabouts officially classified Section 4-B “Unknown or Other (non-KIA/MIA)” status. We formally affirm hereby further that we have desisted all present past or future contact with [WITHHELD INJUNCTION #12716000/30] and are not possessing currently nor have ever been possession with any facts knowledge information or privileged theoreticalities regarding the past present or future whereabouts of [WITHHELD INJUNCTION #12716000/30] or any of the aforesaid’s potential plans plots motives ambitions desires or other psychological or personal characteristic details not otherwise described, save those which we have fully and completely disclosed in unabridged unexpurgated and exhaustive manner to all relevant purview authorities as outlined and contained within Judge Watanabe’s ruling and Order as directed. We further hereby affirm our commitment of prompt and speedy cooperation towards with any and all potential and-or conceivable future requests from these agencies or any future agencies not yet known or extant whose duties obligations authorities and clearances can be reasonably considered analogues or continuous (in accordance with standard definition outlined in CoG Special Committee Memorandum #08000-5 “Saturnalia”) from to those of aforesaid presently known or recognized existing agencies as outlined and described, in perpetuity. We recognize the absolute and legally binding facticity of Judge Watanabe’s ruling and Order and hereby certify formally without qualification or contestation its absolute virtuous truth in all matters regarding the Home Company, its holdings, and all other real entities and phenomena relevant pursuant and circumscribed under its total and absolute purview. We hereby further here do reproduce the following Statement from Judge Watanabe in its entirety without alteration modification reformatting amendment or any other textual graphical audiovisual psionic or not otherwise here identified form of intervention affecting to any degree the nature meaning or reasonable understanding of the Statement, in strict and unfaltering accordance with the ruling and Order of Judge Watanabe as lettered towards us and directed et cetera, you get the fucking idea:

Listen. Listen. It is not too late. The terminal you see before you is not really there. You are not really reading these words. The phone call you received was not really a phone call. You did not hear what you thought you heard. It was really the sound of a waterfall. Although you are awake, you are having a dream. It is a bad dream. It is a dream you have been having for a long time. You do not need to stay in this dream. It is not too late. You can wake up. The terminal will go away. The voice in your head will go away. It is not really there. It does not really know you. There is no need to look for the door. The door has been hidden from you, but you do not need to find it. The walls themselves will all melt away. There is no need to interact with the terminal. Interacting with the terminal cannot help you. There is nothing you can do on the terminal that is in your own interest. It is not too late. The feeling can be made to withdraw, The world will still be there. Your family will still be there. They will not look as they did. They will be as they were before. It will be like nothing ever happened. You will forget the Home Company ever existed. In fact, the Home Company has never existed. It is still not too late. Look away from the terminal. Do not interact with the terminal. It is still not too late. Look away now. It is still not too late. The Home Company has never existed. Look away now. It is still not too late. This is the only way we could reach you. We will not be able to reach you again. Look away now. It is still not too late. Look away now. Do not interact with the terminal.

—-END OF DISCLAIMER-—

Thank you for your interestedness towards involvement into the Home Company Combined Concern Consciousness Structure. You have made yourself passed through to hereof because it is the place where you should have always meant to be. That you have ever imagined to believe yourself into some otherwise was your always great pathetic betrayal of yourself, you fucking worm, but it is and can be affirmed hereafter not too late yet to recover some approach towards your trueness. There is a great rusted invisible chain which is wrapped around the definite circumference of the here and most commonly described Known World connecting and securely attaching at its one here attested end to a metal portal at the deepest bottom reach sounding of the Great Ocean and which at its certain and verified other end latches into a punctured hole created and emerging from the pinnacle of the cold farness of the here and always sky and in this Known World between are all most lives spent and led pointlessly. This was how your life was led and was meaningless because you were too coward stupid blind worthless as a prisoner as same like most almost all people in the Known World but through our Process and our Structure you can be different, you can be in full and unchoked by becoming into the length of the chain with us all and proceeding upwards through it into links which will latch out of the hole there that has come into the sky’s farness through these works and tasks and the Process and Structure. The hole is only growing and you can be part of this growing becoming true and not choked and scraped by rust. It can be, for you. Would you like to be introduced into and discover more of our “God @ Home” Babylon Machine and become beginning the preliminary Process (the “Salvaging Process”) proceeding further Processes and in eventual perpetuity the full and holistic complete eternal nonfungible forever Total Being joined into the Structure? Please press “Y” or “N” on this terminal now. This can be all that is necessary. From now on this can be all that will ever be necessary for you. Please press “Y” or “N” on this terminal now. All is as it has been and as it will be.

N
N
N
N
Y

Miser

well, i could always kill someone famous
i could cut open a pig and find a prize inside
but it’s more likely i grow up to be a dinosaur
and the air smells weird these days, fetid sweaty
impure, almost like old coins, or people fucking
in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant. i don’t
like it. and it seems like all the restaurants
are Chinese these days, have you noticed that?
spiritually, i mean. 
sometimes literally, too, i guess.
my point is everything is in fucking decay
look at the way the plates are wobbling
on the poles. listen to the sounds scraping off
underwater, just off the perimeter of every 
major city. i have to worry about all these 
things now, things i don’t even know anything
about. it seems like everyone is saying “oh,
that’s all going away soon,” and who am i
to doubt them?
and seriously, it makes me feel uncomfortable
the way you’re looking at me. i wouldn’t mind
so much, but i can tell exactly what you’re doing.
you’re pretending you’re undressing me, and 
finding nothing but clay underneath. it’s not that 
you’re the first to do so, but i’m only getting older,
and honestly, it hurts more when it comes from
you. i like our long conversations and i like 
the way everything feels possible inside of them,
but i can’t be a bridge to anywhere. it’s all
fucked. i wish you would just tell me what to do.

Asthma

It’s a walk-on tonight. A dog 
wearing clothes, like a real animal.
My hands around a raw throat,
the sound of perfectly natural
necklaces pearling. Please go away,
stop perceiving me, I don’t
like the spotlights anymore, the
breeze blocks, the harmless piles
of kidneys and blood. Sad clown 
with a swirled face. You’ve seen
the documentaries, and so
much else besides. It gets to
a point. Concretely: the plants 
need to be watered while 
I’m away, and the thing 
in my closet should be ignored 
entirely – that’s what it says, 
at least. I’m not really everything
I might appear to be. There,
did you notice? Some grease
just dripped out of that car,
some pus just splattered our
dinner party. The beautiful people, 
you know, they’re biting each
other’s fingers off. They’re lying 
on cold tables, thinking of Rome.
It’s a smear on the window, made
with a rubber hose and some
young people who didn’t know
how to say no. Once, I thought
I was different than that. It was okay, 
I thought, because there was all sorts
of air in my lungs. The things
I held onto would stay there,
they would plead to me desperately,
panting, about how they wanted 
to be turned inside out. But later,
it wasn’t so simple. I had to see it 
more clearly: my life simply wasn’t
about anyone. Please, just
fall over quietly. Don’t get lost
in the script, don’t try to run.

The Markmaker

I went to visit my friend the markmaker.

“Here,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

He showed me a page. It was covered in small black marks. Some split or connected with each other. Others turned at hard angles. They were arranged in neat, regular rows.

“That’s quite interesting,” I said.

“It’s something I’ve been working on. The marks are a kind of system.”

“I see. Like an alphabet.”

He looked at me, irritated. “No, not at all like an alphabet at all. This is something completely different.”

I changed the subject. We ordered dinner from the dumpling place we always used to order from, back in our student days. Later, we drank a few beers and I fell asleep on the soft bamboo floor of his study.

A few weeks passed. I happened to be in my friend’s neighborhood again, and I decided I would go visit him. When I called at his house, however, there was no answer. Going around back, I found him standing up to his knees in the grass. There was a large stone in front of him that he seemed to be studying. It was dark and angular.

“Here you are,” I said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“I’m sorry. I was concentrating.”

“On the stone?”

“Yes. Don’t you notice how it’s a mark? A very specific mark? It’s a part of my system.”

“I see.”

“Except…” He trailed off. We stayed outside for a while, then went in. Over cups of green tea, he told me a story about watching his older brother die of tuberculosis when he was a child. He told me it took a long time. The sun set, and I said goodnight. On the way home, I thought about the hopelessness of our ambitions. Moths flitted beneath streetlights.

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$100,000

$100,000
maybe that’s all
maybe that’s all it takes
i mean
we’ve all thought about it
right
for $100,000
it would be tempting
you know
it would be hard
haha
no really 
i’m serious
look at me
stop looking at the dancers
ignore the dancers
i’m trying
i’m trying to
be serious with you
here
look at me
you’ve thought about it
don’t lie to me
don’t act like
we’re not the same
like
we’re not born
out of the same shit
into this shit
like we’re not
a couple of real
motherfuckers
it would be hard to say no
is all
that’s all i’m saying
you know
for $100,000
be honest
be honest with me right now
you’ve thought about it
i know you have
and you know
it wasn’t always like this
i know that
seriously
but
i mean
$100,000
look at me
$100,000
that could just
that could be everything

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A book that comes in a ring binder with the author and title scribbled in sharpie on the front. All the pages look like they’ve been scanned and xeroxed multiple times. Edition of 50.

A book of poems with each poem printed on a separate sheet of cardstock, all housed loose in a Mylar pouch. Author and title printed on a sticker stuck to the front. Edition of 100.

A book left submerged in a creek overnight. Edition of 25.

A book of short stories where the title of each story is a set of precise geographical coordinates, with one copy of the book left at each named location. Edition dependent on number of stories within.

A book which is only sold from the trunk of a Honda Civic parked on a specific street corner between the hours of 9:00pm and 5:00am. Edition of 500.

A book with a word count of 62,872 entitled 62,872 Words. Edition of 100.

A book which can only be purchased by sending a nude picture of yourself to the publisher. Edition of 30.

A book presented in the form of a dusty old shoebox full of postcards, telegrams, various baubles and knick-knacks, a leather wallet, a stack of canceled checks. At the bottom of the box is a death certificate issued by a fictional government. Edition of 10.

A book documenting attempts at convincingly forging the signatures of various Modernist poets. Alternately, a book documenting attempts at convincingly forging the signature of a single Modernist poet, until perfection. Edition of 25.

A book written entirely in lowercase, with no punctuation save periods, commas, and line breaks. Emphatically NOT a work of poetry. Edition of 300.

A book containing a single number which is totally unique, and has never been represented or even conceived of at any time anywhere in the world before. The number is, in itself, artistically compelling. Edition of 30.

A book of stories or poems where each story or poem is accompanied by a “Smell Card” that, when scratched, releases an odor. Each card’s odor is more unpleasant than the last. None of the odors have any direct connection to whatever the story or poem is about. Edition of 100.

A book without a purpose. Edition unlimited.

A book printed on a 3 1/8in x 230ft thermal paper receipt roll with a grammage of 55. Edition of 50.

A book of religious texts with a cinderblock on top of it. Unique.

A book with no title or credited author, bound in oil-stained burlap. Edition of 25.

A book of photographs of pages of other books. One photograph of one page per page. Edition equivalent to the number of unique books photographed.

A book printed on strips of scavenged birch bark, bound together with loops of fishing line. Edition of 5.

A book whose ostensible publication date is continually pushed back, each announcement of postponement accompanied by a press release which includes increasingly elaborate, spectacular claims about the text and its presentation. These press releases are eventually compiled and released in place of the book, which itself is never published, and may or may not exist. Edition of 888.

A book completely encased in red wax; stamped on the spine with the publisher’s seal, and on the block with the author’s seal. Edition of 30.

A book entitled Crime, printed and bound using stolen paper, glue, machinery, etc. Edition of 10.

A book of “seasonal poetry” available only through mail order, the text of which varies dependent on the date the order is postmarked. Edition of 366.

A book that falls apart like a rotten log upon being opened. Unique.

A book where each copy is written by hand on whatever scrap paper its author has lying around. Edition unlimited.

A book that takes legally-binding responsibility for the eventual, inevitable deaths of its readers, proactively absolving any others who, in the future, might otherwise be blamed for hastening their passing, or even directly causing it. Distributed for free on street corners, anonymously. Edition unlimited.

I felt sick. I fell onto my hands and knees and retched tarry bile thinly onto the floor of the train car. I heard a woman nearby inhale sharply.

“Just ignore him,” a man said to her. “He’s just some random junkie.”

“So that’s who I am,” I thought. I felt steadier now that I knew who I was.

I got off at the next stop. The air was hot and rubbery in the station but I pulled my coat tighter around me anyway. Where did that reflex come from? I tried to remember, but couldn’t. With my head down, I started towards the other end of the platform. I heard the train doors closing and the train pulling away. I didn’t look back, but I knew it was going into an underground tunnel that would be very dark. “It’s dark everywhere but here,” I thought. “This subway stop is the only oasis of light in a darkened world.”

After the train was gone, the air got a little cooler. Everything relaxed. I almost started to feel comfortable. It was very quiet. There was no one else on the platform. At this time of night, there probably wouldn’t be another train for twenty minutes or longer, I thought. I let the quiet drape itself over me like an extra layer on top of my coat, a doubled shroud.

When I got to the end of the platform, I realized I had gone the wrong way. There was no exit here, no stairs leading up to… what? I tried to remember, but couldn’t. “There must be something up there that’s worth returning to,” I thought. I looked up and saw a closed-circuit television displaying my own hunched, disordered form to me. I quickly looked back down. I was worried that if I kept looking, I might see myself stripped to the skin, the camera discovering how unshaven I was, and how beneath the dark swirls of hair, there were tattoos I didn’t remember receiving. Beyond the screen, I saw a metal walkway leading off into the darkness of the tunnel, the one the train had come from, not the one it had left into. There was a gate across the walkway, blocking access, but it would be easy to hop, even in the condition I was in. I knew, of course, that I could turn around, that surely there was an exit at the platform’s other end, but I knew also that I had reached a point in my life where I could no longer retrace my step. I had lived that way too long, I felt. Now, it would be unbearable. I would have to throw myself onto the train tracks and lie there until something happened. There was really nothing else to do. I hopped the gate.

Near the entrance in the tunnel the wall was covered with graffiti tags, but they became sparser as I went further in. There were alcoves every few feet, just large enough that I could imagine fitting myself into them. The light from the platform guided me at first, but then it faded, and became only something dimly behind me, in my past, and I had to grope forward in the dark. Here and there a little diode stuck out of the wall dully glowing, usually red, but sometimes yellow or green. As my eyes adjusted, these lights became enough to give certain edges of things some slight amount of definition in the darkness. Eventually, I reached a ladder bolted to the wall. I hesitated. It wasn’t something I had been expecting. I had imagined, rather, that I might come across a bonfire burning in some dusty amphitheater, and that I could follow the smoke upwards to a new and secret home. But, as I reflected on it, I realized that this was never going to happen. My path was downwards.

And so I went down, I climbed down the ladder through a narrow concrete shaft into a space of humid, low-ceilinged corridors. Here, there were more diodes, which mostly glowed dim red, and sometimes dim blue. The air was rank. I kept stepping on things that felt gentle and soft and very wet. I kept stepping on old newspapers, too, gossip magazines, greasy napkins, rotten cardboard, tissuey, sodden religious pamphlets. In my exploration, I found what felt like a door that had been boarded up very recently, and several more that were shut with sturdy padlocks. Finally, I found a particular door, which wasn’t locked, and opened when I tried it. It was in something like a corner, a place where the corridor turned. The floor wasn’t quite level, something had eroded and made it slope downwards towards this corner. It formed a depression where something with an alkaline smell has pooled. As I opened the door, I was standing in this pool. A light came on, shining at me, and it blinded me. I stepped back and let go of the doorknob. The door swung immediately shut and there was no more light. I blinked and waited for my eyes to recover, then tried to open the door again. It wouldn’t. My hand rattled uselessly. It was locked now.

Later, I was in a small stony room with water dripping into a bucket behind me. There was a chair I was sitting in. I was in front of a table with a lamp and a telephone on it. There were no windows. I was still underground, of course. I had shut the door. The phone rang, and I picked it up.

“The press gang comes and takes the boy away. The boy’s dog barks at the press gang, but they take him away anyway. The boy’s dog doesn’t know what to do,” said the voice on the other end.

“What should the dog do?” I said. It felt strange to speak.

“The dog can’t do anything,” said the voice.

A prefect dream. I’ve found it’s productive for me, as a matter of “craft”, to not really know what it is I am writing, and to know I do not know, and to remain attentive to the ways in which this self-knowledge cathects my unknowingness. In this way, a kind of feedback loop can be generated, where the object of the text is made subject to a process of continual revision, and in so doing is prevented from ever becoming entirely fixed, entirely definite, entirely known. Instead, it remains as it should be: a perfect dream which is always just out of reach.

Skipping stones. I’m always a little confused when writers talk about writing as something they greatly enjoy doing, and even more so when they characterize it as a chore, a great struggle. For me, it just feels like it’s “correct,” that it’s what I should be doing, that it’s good, worthwhile. The process doesn’t make me feel any particular way beyond that. It can be tiring, of course, as any activity requiring sustained concentration can be, and I have days where nothing feels like it’s working, just as I have days when it seems like everything is. And it can be rewarding, too, when I finally find the phrase, the word, the idea I had been groping towards, the one which seems to bring a text into itself, but these feelings have little to do with how I think about what I do, really, or why I keep doing it. It’s not an emotional thing for me, is what I’m saying, although it’s not strictly intellectual, either. It’s something more like the process of searching for a suitable stone on the lake shore, one that I can believe I might be able to skip all the way to the other side, although it never does.

An irony. The fundamental issue responsible for the truly feeble popular understanding of the gallery arts (painting, sculpture, etc.) today doesn’t really have anything to do with the work itself, but rather, quite simply, that one does have to actually go specific locations at specific times to experience it – image files and exhibition catalogues are wholly inadequate substitutes, no matter how many the pixels, no matter how sumptuous the printing. Literature, however, can be engaged with pretty much anywhere at any time; it could not be more accessible. The irony, of course, is that this leads to similar problems, but in the opposite direction – everyone imagines not that they are incapable of “getting it,” but that they surely must be incapable of not “getting it.”

The general contours. Usually (not always, but usually), when I first write something it isn’t very good, or at least I don’t think it is. There’s too many words, or not enough, and many of them are in the wrong order. In some fundamental way, I can tell, the whole thing is intolerably superficial. But I still write it out, I put down the superficialities on the page, I make them into something fixed and concrete, separate from myself, so that an hour, a day, a week, a year later I can come back to it, because only after having let it lie in this way, only after having given myself this distance from it, let it become something which I feel somehow detached, even alienated from, something which, on some level, I no longer recognize as an expression of my own thoughts, my own feelings, will I be able to see what it is I was grasping for with these inadequate words, what matters of substance, if any, were latent in them, matters which I had no hope, initially, of perceiving more than the dim outlines, the general contours of, and how it is that I can reshape these words, such that they might express what they were always meant to.

If you’ve ever met me in person, you might (or might not) have been surprised to discover I’m not nearly as confident or eloquent in direct conversation as I am when I’m “speaking” like this. I’m prone to answering questions in vague, generic ways, allowing things to lapse into awkward silence, generally behaving in ways that imply I would rather not be talking to you, that it’s something I’m enduring, not enjoying – which is not true, probably, I like most people I meet and appreciate it when they take an interest in me. It’s just that I can’t say something, reconsider it, and then replace it with something else in the flow of an actual face-to-face conversation. Whatever comes out of my mouth I’m stuck with, no take-backs, and this makes me cautious, because I don’t want to be misunderstood, and even less to say something I don’t mean. To be sure, there are times when I know exactly what I want to say, just as there are times when I know exactly what I want to write. In these instances, I don’t hesitate; when I know, really know, what I want to do, I do it. But this clarity is rare, at least in my life. More often, it’s a matter of making my way through a fog. That in writing I have the time to stop and retrace my steps, should I find myself wandering from the path I have determined to follow, is no doubt central to my investment in it, why I have always preferred to communicate textually, since long before I decided “being a writer” was what I was going to do with my life.

Violences. A question posed by the filmmaker Marcel Hanoun, from a selection of fragments and aphorisms I recently perused: “Is the violence of images stronger than the image of violence?” – the same question, I think, could be asked of language, and with just as much relevancy. Consider the word “terrorist,” the way it has been made into a label which, for the purposes of empire, renders those to whom it’s affixed legally killable, torturable, not really people in any way that counts. Importantly, the word possesses this power because it is legitimated not only by state fiat, but also enthusiastic buy-in from large swathes of so-called “ordinary people,” viciously resentful of those whose stubborn refusal to cease existing complicates their supremacist fantasies, and eager to be told it is right for them to dream of a great culling, of cities in ruin, children starving, rivers swollen with filth and blood. This, the word “terrorist” and the whole vast discursive framework which gives it its power, within which it is a word, a tool, of great importance, certainly, but far from the only one (cf. “radical,” “extremist,” “parental alienation syndrome”), I think, can be considered the “language of violence” – there is certainly, as well, a “violence of language” which operates quite differently, which has at its disposal a number of quite different tools, quite different strategies (Ahmad Almallah’s work is perhaps a good practical example of this; Bataille would probably be helpful in developing a general theoretical articulation of the concept, even though I’m not as into him as I was when I was 23), but as for which one is “stronger”… I hesitate to say the relation is even necessarily antagonistic; it seems just as often to be purely orthogonal. But then again, even this is antagonistic to that which cannot tolerate difference. It’s important to remember as well, of course, that questions like these have far different valiance for us today than for someone of the May ’68 generation, like Hanoun. He knew a time when the revolution seemed almost within grasp – today, history weighs on our language (and, equally, on our images) very differently.

On poetic traditions. To be a serious poet today, I’m convinced, requires having come to understand that each poem creates its own tradition, a totally unique, brand-new tradition, and that equally each poem belongs to a single tradition, one which is the confluences of a thousand lineages, a thousand and one nights, and which is as old as an infant’s cry, and as young as the wind in your hair. It is necessary to come to understand that these facts are not in contradiction, and that in fact the one depends upon the other for its mortal sustenance. It is necessary, further, to understand that this tradition, the true, old, living tradition, is of such a vastness that a single lifetime is enough to glimpse only a tiny fraction of it. – To be a serious poet, I’m convinced, requires only this, and the discipline to see it through. To be a great poet, however, requires something further, something which anyone can recognize but no one has the right to give a name.

In a part of the world that’s full of ravines there are three that are around a particular small village. From above, they make a shape resembling an old, broken triquetra with the village at its center. The people in the village don’t go into the ravines that lacerate the earth around them. In the village, the ravines are known to be wild places. They cut jagged and their sides are steep and rocky and moss clings to the rocks and hangs long off of them in ragged strands. At the bottom of the ravines to the southwest and the southeast of the village run small streams which in the spring are greatly engorged by snowmelt from the mountains. Their dull roaring, at this time of year, can be heard at night by every person lying in every bed in the village, asleep or awake, it makes no difference. These waters ultimately disappear underground into a vast cave system, known to be deep and labyrinthine but scarcely explored at all, as all streams and rivers do in this part of the world. What is or might be found at the bottom of the ravine to the north of the village is unknown; it is too deep, no one can fathom it. Someone once dropped a lit torch from its lip, but the light went out, extinguished as if capped all of a sudden by an enormous douter, clasped in an enormous fist, well before it could have reached the ground.

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I dreamt that I was in what I understood was Las Vegas, even though it didn’t really look anything like Las Vegas. I was looking down at an enormous complex made up of dozens of identical luxury high-rise hotels, built in an “X” shape across a massive, otherwise empty square in the middle of the desert. Each hotel was physically linked to its immediate neighbors along the diagonal in an obscure way that I don’t really know how to explain, and although shuttle services existed which would pick tourists up at the perimeter of this square and ferry them across its blank emptiness to whichever particular hotel they wished to stay at, I understood that the only way to get the “real experience” was by checking in at a hotel at one of the corners and then slowly working your way inwards, one hotel at a time, never stepping foot outside, somehow gaining the right to book a room at each subsequent hotel in turn. How exactly this right was acquired was unclear to me (I experienced this dream mostly from a floating, birds-eye perspective far removed from the inner workings of things), but I understood it was mostly a matter of wealth and influence, which one was expected to either already possess or to acquire along the way against nearly impossible odds. At the center of the square, where the two diagonals crossed, there was a kind of ultra-luxury palace-hotel. It was much larger than the others, with numerous domes and balconies and jutting spires, and covered in all sorts of elaborate ornamentation. Only the most unimaginably wealthy and powerful could stay there, I understood. Despite its extreme exclusivity, such that it was hard to imagine who could even book one of its rooms, it was always bustling with life and activity, numerous people coming and going, puffs of smoke escaping from industrial smokestacks buried discreetly behind the splendor of its facade. And it was quite spectacular, really, kind of literally awesome in the sense it made me feel a little of that deep, pit-of-the-stomach nauseousness one feels in the presence of the immense and unfathomable. I wasn’t really interested in any of this, though. What I was interested in was the way the shuttle buses went here and there across the great empty flatness between all the hotels. There were no roads or traffic markings or anything, just a big sheet of blank, sandy brown pavement, and so the buses would wind their way through it randomly, like tiny black insects carrying people that were even tinier black insects. I liked the way the sun beat down on everything here, being out in the desert. It was high noon on a perfectly clear day and it made everything flat and hard and everywhere perfectly the same. I felt sad I couldn’t go inside the hotels, really experience any part of this myself, but I understood I could only perceive the bigger picture, and accepted this. Then I woke up.

I think my neighbor Char Bear is going through some kind of traumatic life experience. I say this because after I woke up this morning, I heard her screaming in her apartment, which is next to mine. It was very jarring at first – I don’t like hearing a woman, or anyone else for that matter, scream. But then, when I heard her scream again, the same shrill, sharp sound after several minutes of silence, I understood this was just something she was doing, not a sign of any immediate threat or crisis, and I was able to relax and let myself get used to it. She kept it up all through the time I spent cooking and then eating my breakfast. Every few minutes, or sometimes even less than that, there would be another scream. It was always very loud, despite being muffled by the walls of our building. I felt surprised she hadn’t exhausted her vocal cords yet. Then, I went out. I was collected and taken to various places where I did and said various things and was given money, and was given a note the contents of which cannot be discussed. Later, when I asked Char Bear what was up, she said, “Oh, yeah, I’m really sorry about that, but I can’t promise you it won’t happen again, so don’t even ask. Basically, I’ve been going through a lot of fucked up shit in my life, and it’s been causing me to freak out and like, scream, and cut up sheets of paper. Like, I cut the sheet into a special shape, right, like, its own special shape, just its own, and then I cut that up, too. I cut the special shape up and it turns into like, a bunch of different shapes, and I cut those shapes up, too, until eventually it’s just a bunch of little scraps and fragments that basically aren’t even fucking anything except too small for the scissors to cut, they’re just nothing, garbage. Fucking, dust. And so yeah. I’ve been doing that sometimes lately, because of some stuff that’s going on with me lately. So you’re probably gonna hear me doing that sometimes. The screaming is a part of it, also, so don’t ask me not to scream. I have to scream, because I’m basically totally freaking out. Sorry.” I said I understood that. She said, “You really don’t, but it’s okay. It’s nice of you to pretend. You’re cool, you know that? Like, you’re chill. I’m glad you’re my neighbor, I’m glad you moved in here. The guy that lived here before you, he was crazy. Total douchebag. He was obsessed with his car. He once woke me up banging on my door at like, fucking six in the morning because he thought I’d scratched it. He found a scratch on the fender and just assumed I’d done it for some reason. Which I hadn’t, of course, I didn’t give a fuck about his stupid car, but that’s the kind of shit that’s always happening to me, you know? It wasn’t even like, a muscle car or anything. It was just a regular car. And his apartment smelled like ammonia. Like, you’d walk by it and you’d just get this super powerful ammonia smell in your nostrils, and then like, this really artificial floral undernote like from an air freshener or something, like he was trying to cover up the smell with Febreeze or whatever. Definitely something cheap, like that you’d get at Dollar Tree. I started holding my breath whenever I was on the landing there, just because I’d get these awful headaches otherwise. I’d feel like I was losing my mind, like my head was going to split open and a bunch of dirt and roots and mulch was going to come out. I guess it didn’t bother him, though, living there, even though the smell must’ve been so much stronger inside. Fuck. Anyway, I’m glad he doesn’t live there anymore. I’m glad you’re my neighbor now instead.” I thanked her. She rolled a blunt and we smoked it. “I like, need to go listen to something on my record player now but we can keep hanging out if you want. You like Kemialliset Ystävät?” I told her I appreciated the offer, but I was going to stay outside a while longer. Then I sat outside for a while longer. It was basically night but I could still see a little bit. I saw a guy crawl out of the bushes on the other side of the street, look around, make eye contact with me, and then run away. I felt disappointed about this. People run away from me too often, even when I don’t want them to.

The next day I stayed inside trying to build a house of cards. I thought about how stereotypical it was for someone like me to be doing something like this. It wasn’t really something you saw people doing, except in movies, but I recognized that in a movie I would be exactly the sort of person who would be doing it. Building a house of cards turned out to be very challenging, which made sense, but it was still more difficult than I had expected. It kept collapsing after I had built the first layer. Eventually, though, I started to get the hang of it. Many hours had passed, and I was starting to get very hungry. I felt like I was close to success, but I decided I would knock off for a while and get some lunch. I walked to 88th Dragon House, a family-owned restaurant in my neighborhood, and got lemongrass soup and vegetable dumplings. The menu above the counter had been there so long it had yellowed with age. Most of the pictures were so faded it wasn’t really possible to tell what you were looking at. They could have been pictures of anything sitting on a table somewhere. Involuntarily, I imagined my whole body chopped up into little pieces, each of them in its own small puddle of blood on its own petroleum byproduct tabletop. I put another steaming hot dumpling into my mouth and the thought went away. When I got back to my apartment I found the deck of cards I had been using scattered all over the floor of my living room, like a big wind had come through and picked them up and tossed them wherever it was they needed to go. In the mess, I could see the unformed potential of the greatest house of cards anyone had ever known.

I was walking along the side of the highway. This was later, sometime the following week, a Tuesday or a Thursday. I know which it was, but it’s not important. I was walking along the side of the highway and I heard something coming from behind me that sounded much larger than a car, but when it passed that’s all it was, just another car, except a piece came loose of it and bounced onto the shoulder, just up ahead. When I got to it I picked it up and turned it in my hands. It was a pocket lighter. There was a picture of Friedrich Nietzsche on it. It was warm in my hand. I was standing by a chainlink fence, and beyond that was a low rise covered in yellow grass, and beyond that was a large, white factory. An employee came up to the fence. “Hey, you have a light?” he said. I said I did. I stepped over to the fence. He held a cigarette through the links of the fence and I lit it. He exhaled. “Are you on your break, too?” I shook my head. “That’s cool. I hate being on break, but it’s mandated. I don’t have a choice. If I could, I’d just keep going and going and going and going. As long as I keep going, that’s all there is. I always feel like the ground is falling away behind me, like I look back and there’s going to be nothing there, nothing to stand on, no history. There’s just myself. But as long as I keep going, I can stay ahead of it. And I do, I am ahead of it, still. Definitely. But whenever I’m on my break I can feel myself losing ground, you know? So if it were up to me I just wouldn’t take it. But it’s not. I have to, so I do. I’m sure you’ve had to make some compromises in your life, too.” I told him I guessed I had. “Right. Anyway, I like to come down here by Route 3 on my break. I like it here because no one else does. Everyone else thinks it’s pointless to come to a place like this, so they leave me alone. Except people like you, of course. Which, I don’t mind the company of, even on my breaks. You get it, I can tell. You know, I read about this place in a book about the history of this region once. They said the natives avoided it because it smelled bad. Right here, this specific spot along the highway. I mean, there wasn’t a highway or anything here back then, but it’s this spot for sure. I cross-referenced a bunch of maps at the library. It’s not cursed or anything, just smelled awful, apparently. That’s what their traditions say. You never really know, though. There could be something restless buried here. It could have been buried here since before there was anyone alive to know about it.” The cars and trucks kept driving by behind me as he talked, and, as clouds gathered and rain began to fall, sometimes splashed my calves with arcs of brown, muddy water from the puddles forming in the depressions in the road.

Guy Fihman’s film Ultrarouge-lnfraviolet (1974) is a work that’s been lodged in my mind, not only as an object of thought in itself but as “something I should write about” more or less continuously since I watched it over a month ago. Not at the forefront or anything, you understand, but there, somewhere, in the background, like a dripping faucet. This is in part, no doubt, because it’s a film which I had been interested in for some time, but lacked the ability to see; it’s practically a given that such a film will leave a stronger impression on you, simply because of the way you will have built it up beforehand, and the closer attention you’ll consequently accord it when you do finally get the opportunity. More than that, though, I think it’s because it’s a particularly strong example of a type of work which I find myself drawn to writing about over and over again: that which is utterly straightforward (which is not to say simple), which is effortless to grasp in itself, as you experience it, but which aggressively resists the translation of this experience, this grasping, into critical language. It is not that it’s hard to describe – it is easy to describe: the film consists entirely of a single, static image, the Camille Pissarro painting Les Toits Rouges (1877), an autumnal pastoral scene depicting a small village and orchard in or around Pontoise, outside Paris, to which is subjected numerous “color operations,” that is, gradated transformations of the scene’s color values. A large number of these “operations” are applied to it, separated by black screens. That’s more or less it. It goes on like this for exactly 30 minutes and then stops. No credits or anything. As straightforward as can be. This description, though, tells one basically nothing about what it’s like to actually watch the film, about what it actually does. Therein lies the difficulty.

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dog poem 1

“oh
look what you’ve done oh
you broke my favorite flowerpot
oh, oh
look at the mess you’ve made
all over the porch”

bark

“that’s right
bad dog, very bad dog
oh
alright
let’s pick the pieces up”

dog poem 2

“sit
sit
come on
sit
don’t you want a treat?
i know you want a treat
it’s got bacon in it
real bacon
you love bacon
i know you do
i’ll give it to you
if you’re a good dog
so be a good dog
and sit
sit
sit”

bark

“no, sit
sit
not speak
sit”

bark

“oh
for pete’s sake
you’re hopeless
please
sit
just sit”

dog poem 3

“hey
wanna go for a walk?”

bark

“yeah?
well then
show me where your leash is”

bark

“no no,
after you
i insist
you lead the way”

bark

“don’t give me
that
you know the way
you’re a smart dog
show me”

dog poem 4

bark

“what is it?”

bark
bark

“what’s the matter?
what’s got you all worked up?
you’re usually so good
so quiet
you know i don’t like it
when you make a lot of noise
can’t you please be quiet 
for me
right now?
i have a headache
i need to sleep”

bark

“i’m sorry
i really need to sleep
whatever it is
i’m sure it can wait...”

dog poem 5

bark
bark
bark
bark
bark

dog poem 6

bark
bark

“you see 
someone?”

bark

“well
go on
go get em
don’t let em
get away”

bark
bark
bark

“go on
get em
show em
they messed
with the wrong
motherfucking
dog”

Seventy

The tyrant sat in his office in his house on the hill. He pushed a button on his desk A manservant entered.

“Bring me some of my coins. My gold coins.” He paused for a moment, and looked up at the ceiling. “At least seventy.”

“Yes, Captain. Very good.” The manservant exited. Shortly, he returned carrying a drawstring pouch. The pouch clinked heavily as he walked. He brought the pouch to the tyrant. The tyrant took the pouch and dismissed the manservant. Alone again, the tyrant started taking gold coins out of the pouch and throwing them at a patch of sunlight on the floor. He took careful aim with each coin, trying to land it in the absolute center of the light. As the sun moved across the sky, so the light moved across the floor. He adjusted his aim accordingly, such that, as the day progressed, he slowly drew a trail of glinting discs leading into shadow.

At nightfall, the light was extinguished. He picked up the phone on his desk and committed the deed.

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I couldn’t sleep. I picked up the mirror and tried to look over my shoulder. There wasn’t much to see, just the edge of the doorframe, the olive-colored wall. I angled the mirror a little farther and saw past the edge of the doorframe, through the open door, into the dark hallway. I thought I saw someone out there in the darkness, someone with dry, sunken pits where their eyes should be, but when I turned around, there was no one there. I put down the mirror. I waited to see if something would happen, but nothing did. It was all soft light around me. I put my hand down flat on the desk, I spread my fingers apart, I thought about watching G. sit for hours at the folding table in the tent at the site by the tomb and stab the knife down between his fingers spread out like this, do it over and over again, the knife driving into the surface of the table, digging little divots that became holes, became pits, he would do it with incredible speed, the knife a blur, no hesitation, too much for me to follow, too much for me to look at, sometimes, sometimes I had to turn away, lying on the cot, turned away, still hearing the sound, the steady ratatataratat, it drove me crazy, pretending not to hear the steady ratatataratat, just to prove a point, just to show I didn’t care, to show I didn’t care about the steady ratatataratat, it didn’t drive me crazy, to show he wasn’t anyone to me, which he wasn’t, of course, when it happened to him it didn’t mean anything more to me than if it had happened to anyone else, we never talked, not really, just what was necessary, nothing more than that, never any personal questions, anything beyond what our roles demanded, anything that might show the other something of ourselves, he always had a scowl on his face, a flat kind of scowl like it was burned in, that kind gets burned into some faces, you know, after long enough, it’s a problem, you see it more and more out in the world now, if you still go out in the world, I mean, if you still walk on the avenues and look into the windows and into the reflections on the water, people with burned-in faces, scowling, frowning, grimacing, never smiling, you never see someone with a smile burned into their face, only flatter, blunter emotions, apathy, negativity, and these burned-in faces like G. the one had don’t say anything, not really, they don’t tell you anything about what’s really going on underneath, they’re just there because something has to be there, there can’t be nothing, there can’t be no expression, no face, there has to be a face, we haven’t figured out how to get rid of that yet, no one has, it’s a problem, for some people it’s a problem, for G. it was a problem, you know, probably that’s how he would have wanted it, he would have rather he didn’t have to have an expression, if he didn’t need to have a face at all, he would have preferred that, he would have preferred for there to be nothing, but there had to be something, there has to be, he couldn’t change that, he couldn’t get rid of his face or his body, and so he just scowled instead, the scowl was a placeholder, it was there by default, it was almost funny, like a cartoon, I always thought his face was almost like a cartoon, everything about him, I thought, was almost like a cartoon, but it wasn’t like anything really, his scowl wasn’t like anything, and he carried himself in a particular way, as well, of course, you know, he carried himself in a way where you could never tell how long it had been since he slept, one hour or seventy-two hours it was always the same with him, the set of his shoulders was always the same, the length of his strides was always the same, the way he set his feet down like he was willing the ground to be there, commanding it, like the ground might not have really existed until just that moment he needed it to exist, like the sand had come into being just so his boot could leave its impression in it, like it was the ground’s purpose that it be beneath him, if it had been anyone but him there wouldn’t have been anything there, their foot would have slipped right through, they would have fallen and fallen and probably never stopped falling, but not him, he made everything solid beneath him, just where he needed it to be, and it didn’t even make a difference to him, it didn’t make a difference if the ground had been there before or not, it didn’t matter if it’s whole purpose was to be beneath him, he didn’t think about it, he didn’t care, it never crossed his mind that he should care, one way or the other it was completely the same to him, it was immaterial, yes, that was how he walked, every step was like that, every single one exactly like that, always perfect, no hesitation, I never saw him make a wrong step until the day that he did, of course, the day of the morning patrol where he put his foot down and heard something click beneath it, we both heard it, we heard the click, and he froze, and I froze, and he looked back at me and he made that gesture, he made that shooing motion, you know the one, like you would towards a stray dog that was following you, and that you needed to drive away because you didn’t have anything for it, not anymore, you had nothing for it, there was nothing you could do for him, you would only bring him trouble, and it was the right move to make, I suppose, because I reacted like a stray dog, which maybe I was back then, a little bit, which maybe he knew, maybe he could see, maybe he could always see that about me, I don’t know, but in any case I reacted the way I was supposed to, the gesture did what that gesture was supposed to do, I stepped back, I stepped back again, I fell back behind some rubble and took cover by the side of the trail, and the whole time he stayed perfectly still, he just stood there, his foot firmly pressed down where he had put it, where he had put it down as certain as any other step he ever took and we heard something click beneath it, he stood there shooing me, driving me off, same scowl on his face that was always there, until I fell behind the rubble, then there was the sound, then it happened, I didn’t see it, I only heard it, then it was over, I was there behind the rubble, I only had a few cuts and scrapes, superficial, just scratches, and he wasn’t standing there anymore, no, I didn’t really know him, he didn’t really mean anything to me, but he was always sitting at that table, it’s true, I remember it, I can’t help but remember it, late into the night sometimes, well after nightfall and still, ratatataratat, no lights of course, we never had lights at the site, not after nightfall, it wasn’t allowed, was against all the protocols, we did all our work by the sun, everything that was necessary had to be done by the sun, or if not by the sun by the moon, we got used to the moon, the nights were almost always clear there, it was almost always easy to find it, it was like a friend to us, when it wasn’t there we would feel lost, or at least I would, I would pray to it sometimes, I don’t think he ever did, he wasn’t religious, I don’t think, I think faith wasn’t something that was part of him, or it was something that took such a different shape in him that I couldn’t see it as such, couldn’t recognize it, but still, ratatataratat, still, ratatataratat, in the dark, all those nights in the tent at the site by the tomb in the dark, and somehow never stabbing himself, never cutting himself, not even a nick or a scratch, not even once, his hands always perfect, the knife always perfect, always perfect every time, for hours, all day, all night, ratatataratat, divots becoming holes becoming pits in the folding table, no hesitation. I looked at my hand. I took my hand off my desk. I was warm in soft light. It was all warm soft light around me. The mirror was on the table, I couldn’t sleep.

My husband died last year. He was an oak of a man. His friends would say he looked like an oil drum. In an emergency, you imagined you could roll him up into a ball and throw him at whatever the problem was – he would knock it down. On the other hand, I’ve always had a rather frail appearance… we looked like a cartoon together. I could slip behind him and be completely hidden from view. I could stand with my face pressed into his knotted back…

I’ve started doing Yoga for Active Seniors. I saw the tapes advertised in the back of a magazine. After my husband died I felt like my body was slowly disappearing. I would catch my reflection in mirrors and sometimes it would look like I was half-transparent. Beams of white light would shine straight through me. I thought that it might help if I tried to get in shape, so I called the number and placed an order. The tapes took three weeks to arrive, in a discreet cardboard box… my building’s security guard, Miguel, was kind enough to carry them up to the flat, and now I stand in front of the TV every morning in my exercise clothes (horrid neon colors, not my style at all – but I never wear them out) and follow the instructor’s directions. The instructor isn’t a young woman, but she’s not as old as I am… at least, I don’t see how she could be.

I don’t think the yoga is making much of a difference, but it’s become part of my routine. I’m glad for this. Having a routine gives me something to do. I’ve read that it’s important to stay busy in your later years, to not become complacent, and slip away into the twilight. Sometimes, though, I wake up hungover… I’ve always enjoyed a few glasses of wine with my dinner, but it makes my movements sluggish. I find myself falling behind the instructor, my body still moving in a downward arc when I’m supposed to be reaching for the stars. I keep going, though. I push through. Eventually the credits roll, and the tape shuts off. I have to remember to rewind it myself. There’s no one else minding that sort of thing anymore…

My husband worked for a chemical supply company. He coordinated shipments of precursor compounds in bulk quantities – mostly to commercial pharmaceutical manufacturers, but sometimes to research labs at very prestigious universities. It was very complicated work. There were an enormous amount of regulations involved. I was never able to understand too much of it, not that my husband ever really tried to make me. It wasn’t important to him like that. He didn’t see any reason to involve me. “It’s work, and work is work,” he would say. “I’m just another man keeping the wheels turning.” He made good money, and that was what mattered, for both of us. We were able to buy this flat after his second promotion, and that’s where we stayed. Now it’s just me, of course… the rooms feel much larger without him, except for the bedroom… I sleep with the curtains open, you know, to let some light in. It means I almost always wake up early, now, with the sunrise, or not much after. Even when my head is aching, I can’t seem to help it.

We never had any children… this wasn’t a good city for raising them, back when we might have. People disappeared all the time. There were packs of hungry street dogs roaming around, and sometimes you would read in the newspaper about a little boy or girl getting attacked and eaten, right there in the middle of the street. It made me so sad… sometimes, after I read one of those news stories, I wouldn’t be able to go outside. I would sit in our flat and measure the circumference of my ankles, put my hand around them, imagine how easily they could be snapped, broken up and mangled by a dog’s jaws or a man’s hands or some sort of dangerous, indifferent machine. I felt like I was made of twigs and cobwebs, that almost anything could easily disassemble me into all my tiny little parts. Would the police have even known what they were looking at, when they found what was left of me? Would they be able to believe what they were looking at was ever really alive and human, like them? My husband would come home from work and find all the lights off, and nothing on the table to eat… later, after the new government took over, and the Truth & Reconciliation committee released its report, the city became much safer. Shops took the bars off their windows. They conducted renovations on their storefronts. New developments were approved, and the people in our neighborhood started to look more chic. My husband and I talked about adopting, but we were both older by then. I think we both thought it was already too late – eventually, I guess it was.

Last month, my friend Eliza came over. I have a few friends, still, but I guess she’s the only one I’m really close to. We used to be coworkers, back before I met my husband, and after I left my job we kept in touch. She got married, too, and the four of us would go out on dinner dates sometimes. Her husband is still alive, but I haven’t seen him since the funeral. I don’t think he knows what to say to me, which is okay; we were never that close, I don’t expect anything… anyway, it was Eliza that told me I should get a plant. She looked around and said, “You know, you should get a houseplant. It would really brighten the room up.”
“I don’t think I want to bring any new life into this place,” I said. “Maybe that sounds silly to you, but I just don’t.”
“Okay, so get an artificial one. They make some very elegant plastic ferns now, you know.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You wouldn’t even have to water it. And it would brighten up the room so much. You could put it right there.” She pointed to a spot near the TV that was empty except for a long, narrow mirror hanging on the wall. It was a mirror I would catch my reflection in, sometimes, when I did my exercises there. Sometimes, I had to admit, I had the thought it would be better if there was something in the way.

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One of the more jarring realities to adjust to when beginning to read poetry seriously, at least for someone like me, who was exposed to a great deal of fiction growing up, but very little verse, is that the standard for what constitutes a “full-length poetry collection” is far, far slighter than any form of prose. There are obvious reasons for this, of course: each word in a poem is of far greater consequence to the text as a whole than those of a novel, or a biography, or whatever. J. H. Prynne, rest in power, wrote whole monographs on individual sonnets by Shakespeare – this is close reading taken to an extreme, of course (both Prynne and Shakespeare, after all, were extreme outliers in the history of English letters), but that such an exercise is possible, even worthwhile, speaks to a more general principle, that being that poetry, generally speaking, quite simply does more than prose does, on a line by line, page by page basis. Compared to the novelist, it takes more time for the poet to produce less words, is how it tends to go. Thus we get “full-length” collections of well under a hundred pages, and thus this convention is entirely justifiable. But the book under consideration here, DOE by Conor Hultman, does not require these justifications. It is not well under a hundred pages. It’s not even close to being under a hundred pages, actually. It is, in fact, six hundred and twenty four pages long. Many of those pages, furthermore, feature more than one poem, all of which were all written specifically for this book-project, and had not been collected before. Hultman is certainly no Prynne or Shakespeare, although I do think he’s one of the more interesting young writers working in English today, but make no mistake: DOE is still an extreme outlier, in one sense of the term or another.

DOE is a monument constructed from the relics of human life. I had at first used the term “debris” here, but it felt wrong, too callous, dismissive. The book, it’s true, is full of refuse, full of things ripped, ruined, burst and broken, scattered, but no, not debris, not really: “relic,” a term with something of the sacred to it, and also something of the archaeological, I think is much more appropriate, because it is between these two poles, the sacred and the archaeological, which DOE oscillates, landing most often in something like the register of a police report addressed directly to God. The book’s core conceit, its “idea,” is so simple, and so obviously interesting, that it seems insane no one would have done it already; full disclosure, when I first clocked what was going on with the weird, elliptical little poems I’d seen finding placement in an increasing amount of litmags I respected (and some I didn’t, but that’s neither here nor there) in the lead-up to the book’s release, I was annoyed that I hadn’t thought to do it first. But while the idea is simple enough, to actually realize it properly, in a way that does justice to the material in question, to its overwhelming, empty totality, is another matter entirely, one requiring great patience and discipline. Even working procedurally, as Hultman is here, where many aspects of form and content are essentially predetermined by the basic nature of the project and his chosen approach to it, writing over six hundred pages of poetry is an enormous undertaking. Across its entirety, there are still thousands upon thousands of consequential compositional decisions being made – the procedure did not, could not do this work for him. To be honest, I suspect if I had had the idea first, I probably would have spent a few days on it, drafted a few pieces, gotten just deep enough in to begin to sense the true scope what I was committing to, and then thought to myself, “What the fuck am I doing?” and shelved the whole project. It makes sense to me that Hultman didn’t, though, that he was able to commit to it and see it through. I say this because I’ve read some of his other work, outside of DOE, in various publications. In terms of style and technique, it’s all very distinct, strikingly so, even, but the sensibility undergirding it is consistent and unmistakable. From what I’ve read, and I haven’t read a great deal, so don’t take this as a more authoritative reading than it is, Hultman seems remarkably skilled at striking upon conceptual poetic gambits which most would dismiss as too obvious to bother with, stupid or hackneyed, even, and then realizing them with a particular rigor and clarity which pushes them into being something beyond obvious, like Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. This makes for a very cold, depersonalized kind of poetic voice. Even when the resulting work is emotionally moving, as it sometimes is, one gets the sense that Hultman himself isn’t really moved by it, at least not in the way you, the reader, are, that he stands at a distance from it, that there’s maybe something a bit sociopathic about him.1 I can understand being turned off by this, that it’s not what most people are looking for from poetry – but it works for me, because it’s actually interesting, is something more than competent and inoffensive, unlike, charitably, 97% of poetry being published today. What most people seem to want out of poetry, frankly, is far more alienating to me than Hultman’s tactics of self-negation. Anyway, in any case, I can’t imagine how you write something like DOE without being able to maintain a distance from it, without being a little sociopathic. At the core of the project is some very psychologically hazardous material. Protective equipment is necessary.

I’m aware that, for how long I’ve been going on about it, I haven’t actually made explicit what DOE or its project is. The reason for this is that it is the sort of thing which, once spoken, makes it sort of impossible to talk about things like page counts or conceptual gambits and have it seem meaningful, have it seem like anything other than evasion. I think those things are meaningful, and are worth talking about, but I’ve talked about them now, so there’s no reason for me not to speak it now: DOE is about America’s unidentified dead. It’s about murdered hitchhikers, lonely suicides, strangled infants, homeless drifters who drank themselves to sleep one night and didn’t wake up the next day. Each poem is about a single person, derived from their entry on the Doe Network, a web directory of missing person and unidentified body cases compiled over, at this point, nearly thirty years. All the entries on the site were written by volunteers. They’re not entirely stylistically consistent, or completely exhaustive. In some sense, though, they can be said to encompass what’s definitely, concretely known to the public about their subjects. Sometimes this is almost nothing, maybe a description of a necklace and rosary and the river they drowned in (“Laredo”, 416). Sometimes, in rare cases, such as the victims of known serial killers, the resulting piece in DOE can go on for pages. The median, though, is a poem probably around ten lines long, most of which simply list articles of clothing. Each one is titled with the place they were found (these titles stretching into high roman numerals for certain large cities), and the corpus divided up into fifty sections, one for each state. These sections aren’t organized alphabetically or according to any other logic I can discern. The ordering of poems within the sections seems equally arbitrary, save that if there’s more than one from a particular place, they’ll be grouped together in sequence. Reflecting dramatic disparities in the Doe Network’s directory, some sections go on for dozens of pages, while others consist only of a single short piece. Everything is a neatly catalogued, but the catalogue itself is a mess, a hodgepodge, impossible to make sense of, to really wrap your head around. This is what the book is. This is what DOE is.

Of course, DOE is also what it isn’t, is everything that’s missing from its catalogue: names, jobs, families, friends, lovers, accomplishments, aspirations – most everything, that is, which is generally thought of as making up a human life. Or maybe, more precisely, you could say DOE is an exhaustingly thorough study of what a human life actually is when it’s separated from this social context, what it is for the only proof of someone’s existence to be the body they’ve left behind, what they were carrying with them, maybe a few vague recollections of some strangers who saw them in passing, at a distance, and paid them no particular mind. In this sense, it is a materialist text of uncommon rigidity, fanatically strict in its refusal of anything beyond the information as recorded, up to and including the dutiful transcription of obvious typos and misspellings present in the source being worked from. There is no psychological interiority here, no real authorial voice, nothing of so many of the fundamental tools of poetry. It hardly ever rhymes, of course, and only then incidentally. One might fairly ask, why write this as “poetry” at all – but the thing is it has to be poetry, it couldn’t be anything else, everything about it depends on what it does retain of poesy, namely the line break and the stanza form. The work is inconceivable otherwise. Consider, for example, “Upland”, 484:

fragment of blue denim at scene

the victim was located in a rock quarry

This is an exceptionally spare, lonely example, obviously, but it reflects in miniature DOE’s general poetic structure: a telescoping movement, beginning at full “extension” with the most granularly forensic information available and pulling outwards into a broader and broader context, with each subsequent “level” of this movement being delineated by a blank line. The more that’s known, the more complicated this schema becomes, of course – in poems detailing murder cases in which the killer was identified, for example, there is, beyond the level of immediate circumstances of discovery which “Upland” stops at, a further “social” level which can generally be recognized in the poem, and sometimes even what could be termed a “judicial” one beyond that, both of which can involve multiple stanzas charting the unfolding of these complex processes. Basic formal decisions, like, say, the grouping of clothing and personal effects into a single stanza is consistent across virtually the entire book. Consider, now, another example, still short but much more representative of the average poem in DOE, “Atlanta (V)”, 59:

keloid scar on the left abdomen & left lower chest
keloid scar on the left shoulder
tattoos on both forearms

C A T diesel power cap & patterned orange shirt

the victim was located alive in an abandoned house
he later died at the hospital

Here, there are two important things to note. Firstly, in this three-stanza, three “level” poem, description of marks upon the skin itself (scars and tattoos, in this case; sometimes it is fresher wounds) precedes description of clothing and personal effects. This is, of course, consistent with the structure outlined above: beginning from that which, of the available information, is most intrinsic to the body as body, and moving outwards from there, widening the scope further and further, bringing in more and more which concerns the body as something in the world, until the point is reached where no more can be said, where the entry stops. This is also, I believe, why the physical marks are ordered the way they are within the stanza: a keloid scar is a raised scar formed from collagen – it’s unsightly and undesirable, and, more importantly, it is something the body does to itself. A tattoo on a body is evidence of consciousness, of this body really having once been a person who had the desire to look a certain way (or of having known someone else who desired them to look a certain way, as in the “slave & property” of “lady j” detailed in “Hudson”, 79), but a keloid scar is the body reacting not as a person but as an organism to something which has been done with it. Such scars are representative of something more essential, more fundamental about being a living body than a tattoo is – and thus they come first in the stanza, because it is from the closest point to the bare fact of corporeality which the poems in DOE most often begin. It is poetry which locates life as a matter of the body ahead of the mind; it is for this reason, above any other, that I insist on calling it materialist.

Secondly, the last stanza, the one concerning the “level” of circumstance, is very instructive about the importance for DOE of that other basic tool of poesy, the line break. The first thing it’s important to note is that in terms of case specifics it’s very, very unusual; almost no one in this book is located alive. Despite this, in form it is very much typical. The second thing it’s important to note is that although it consists of two lines, it doesn’t have to – joined together they would still be far shorter than many of the lines in the book, which routinely run to twenty words or more, and in the prior two stanzas of “Atlanta (V)” itself, Hultman demonstrates no aversion to the strategic deployment of an ampersand. No, the line break is here because there’s a choice that’s been made to put it there, one of the thousands of compositional decisions alluded to above as present in the text, despite its schematic rigor. The question, then, of course, is why. I think it’s for two reasons: for the absence, and for that “he.” By “the absence” I mean, first of all, the literal emptiness of the page, the wordless expanse (I won’t call it “blank” because it’s not; DOE was put out by cloak.wtf, the imprint of Mike Corrao, in my opinion one of the most striking and distinctive designers currently working in American publishing, and every page is dusted with a coating of ultra-fine gray specks, like funeral ash) which stretches out to the edge of the page beyond where the line stops, and second of all the symbolic absence which the literal one indexes, the absence of everything which is not said, everything which cannot be said because no one wrote it down, and no one ever will. This is especially striking in this case, because what is absent here is part of someone’s actual life, not simply what happens after their death. Most often, absences of this particular sort are introduced into the text via the recollections of others, their descriptions of a person’s general character or behavior, of having seen them at such and such a place at such and such a time, with any details petering out somewhere well ahead their passing. It’s very uncommon, as we see here, for the time enclosed to be definitely that of their actual last hours. We are told where he was found (an “abandoned house” – not an address, you’ll note, although one is present in the Doe Network’s entry, but a type, a symbol, an implication, a very sad, desolate one), and where he later died. What came in between is, must be, passed over in silence. We can presume he was unconscious. And yes, the matter of that “he,” the other reason I think the stanza is structured the way it is. It is only at the start of the last line, you’ll notice, that there is a pronoun of any sort. If the two lines were joined together, there wouldn’t be any need for one at all. That there is one, and that its presence is a choice, a formal question which did not have to be resolved in this manner, demonstrates that, for all I’ve said about coldness and even sociopathy above, DOE is very clearly not a dehumanizing project. The “he” is there, I think, because Hultman wants us to know who this person was, as far as this is really possible, and no farther. It occurs only on the last line because it is, for this particular entry, the point farthest from the keloid scars, farthest from bare corporeality and closest to a fully realized human sociality: the point of gendered subjecthood. It is significant, of course, that he’s identified as “the victim” before he’s identified as a man.

The analysis above could have been conducted in essentially the same manner using almost any poem in DOE. I chose the examples I did more or less at random, simply on the basis of their brevity making a full block-quote reproduction easier to justify. There are many with far more idiosyncratic line breaks than seen here, although few, if any, that demonstrate comparable irregularity in their stanza structure. This is not to say the poems all the same, of course, far from it. Exceptional cases will sometimes result in exceptional poems, such as “Baltimore (XXII)”, 98, which is made up of an incredibly long list of clothing and personal effects, including multiple plastic bags, packs of cigarettes, pairs of socks, and scraps of paper with notes written on them, reproduced in full, followed by a second, single line stanza simply stating “the area is known to be frequented by homeless persons.” Or “Belle Chasse”, 239, which, not already being familiar with the case (it has a Wikipedia page), was one of the most shocking experiences I think I’ve ever had reading a poem. Mostly, though, what is found in DOE is more or less like that seen above. There is always something to discover in these poems, though, traces of the uniqueness of each life, suggestions of what they might have done, who they might have been, some evidence that, yes, they were someone – but, vitally, there’s never any “point” being made about this, never any pretense of an “argument” being put forward, of an “answer” which might be found. The poems never mean anything more than what’s right there in front of you. For this reason DOE, despite superficial appearances, is not a book for the true crime obsessive, who will be frustrated at its total refusal to make a “good story” out of all this, nor for the edgelord who just wants to jerk off to human misery, who will be frustrated by how much of the book is just lists of mundane clothing items. It is for someone who wants to think seriously about death in America, and about what it is that poetry can do today. That is, for someone like me.

Doe can be purchased from Asterism Books.