TOPIC - Due 9/1 - Album Review

If art has any practical use whatsoever - and it's obviously arguable that it does - it lies in the fact that the art you allow into your life (and soul) plays a significant role in the life (or soul) you build for yourself. So our assigment for this week is the rather trite album review, with the hopefully un-trite twist that I want it in the context of your life - not necessarily the story of how the album came into your life or what specific events it affected (though that's all welcome if you so choose), but rather of how you've incorporated it into that life. In other words, don't just describe the album, but try and show what about it is so compelling that you've incorporated it, or some piece of it, into who you are.

If no music has ever had this kind of effect on you, then just take the week off.

Word Limit: 1000 words
Time Limit: 8 Days

Get to work, gentlemen.

Going Down

And thus began my downgoing.

She had asked me if I would a few days before and I'd said 'Of course.' I didn't, and don't, trust anybody who'd say 'no' and find his excuse for so saying legitimate. The delay was due to the regular lack of certain pre-requisites (privacy, time), and as short as possible. The act itself was in no way perfect, but sloppy and clumsily enacted in the way that all such mixtures of enthusiasm and inexperience are - the bumbly nature of the execution forgiven in view of the generating passion. As is usually the case during your first exploration of sex with whatever girl happens to be first, we were too well informed by internet porn, sex education, and the stories of the more experienced to be naive about 'discovery,' but nevertheless were swept along by that impression.

She straddled my face (man is something to be overcome), staring at the uncurtained (recently, accidentally torn down) bedroom window. She soon would forget her concern, but at the moment it was taken up by the thought of some pervert with military-standard binoculars or a zoom lens-equipped camera - still if we were only somewhat, video if we were very, unlucky - would be aware of the teenage girl living through there, and would take advantage of the unobscured view. I didn't have the same concern, my focus occupied by the suddenly alien clitoris dangling a few inches above my nose. As always, the thing itself was more complicated than anticipated and my 'education' was practical and useful as a post-modernist on quantum physics (or most other topics). Face-to-cunt seems overwhelming when your sexual experience is restricted to the most basic variations on the most obvious positions.

But who, who, whoever Mr. Blue might be, I'm not him, and I wasn't to be discouraged by inexperience or unfamiliarity. Nor do I find the average cunt in any way repellent. So this particular cunt, hovering mysteriously like the Independence Day spaceships, was far from being insurmountable, and I pulled off a reasonable, if largely incompetent, facsimile of something thousands of boys and girls have done before, with the desired result. Routine (or sub-routine) stuff, except that we both were in our roles for the first time and naive enough to believe in them as fully as I, at least, ever would.

Young love is rarely beautiful, more closely resembling a tenderfoot skateboarder's road-rashed nipples than the crap peddled by Nicholas Sparks and virtually every teen movie (especially those most devoted to gross-out humor); but youthful sexual exploration, the flush of first times and the rush of discovering how many of them there actually are, can be.

Her gaze went from the window to the ceiling to the inside of her skull. Any lack of confidence I had felt was dissipated by the first sudden gasp for breath, and each succeeding moan's growth in volume moved me closer to complete confidence. She sunk down onto my face and squeezed her legs together, locking me into a sensory deprivation tank, only my hands on her waist and my mouth around her clit still in contact with the outside world. I was a tongue; she a cunt.

But you've all had oral sex, or will, and I don't care to get into real details. Mine is not a mouth for those ears, and this is not a paean to clit-licking, however it might seem at the moment. To make it more I could easily turn the preceeding story into a clumsy metaphor for, well, virtually any first experience with something suffering from a stupid stigma and the promise of difficulty, but which is ultimately rewarding. But that would cheapen both that generic act and my own experience, which, if comparable to any number of other first tongue-runs, was real and specific.

We're used to having our metaphors do a lot of heavy lifting and have a fondness for seeing our own particular situations as nothing but microcosms of sweeping universals. The hangnail I can't root out is a stand-in for the intractable, ineluctable misery in my life; a waiter's boorish service is what's wrong with this country today; a broken heart symbolizes the world's cruelty as surely as as the previous month's tandem shower symbolized its rightness, security and unity; a decayed house surrounded by McMansions is the symbol of how the real world has been drained and replaced by a plastic pre-fab pretending to be the same; any one of these examples represents every fuck-up involving metaphors. All bullshit.

The Eternal Return, in Kundera at least, makes all of our actions nauseatingly heavy. This is, I think deliberately, wrong. That is not what it does. Rather, it makes them concrete; no action can stand in for another, as we would apparently prefer. The Eternal Return is not literally plausible, but is a good way of looking at your own life and actions; their significance do not sound throughout history as permutations of the same eternal situations, but are what they are. Exactly and only what they are. They are not written in water or the juice of diseased fruit, but rather in your blood, the only ink leaving words you may love.

Getting back to my story: after a few hours, a healthy number of orgasms, some shifts in position, and a brief nap, and with a sudden shock of concern that her father could have easily heard us, I sat naked on her windowsill, as I usually did, and watched as dawn's first glow warmed the far end of the horizon, burning less brightly than the tip of my Lucky Strike. That was my morning, and the day began.

So, two preachers walked into a bar...

I walk the Earth a man amongst men, a comfortable geometric happy marriage, a cyclical brotherhood, a confessing member of the best genetic drift, the winner of the human race. I love you and it stuns me to see you destroy yourselves.

I walk the earth a God amongst Worms. I see the distended belly of your gleeful idiocies, your epistemological pimples and cultural Ponzi schemes. Never forget your games as games, and your lies as lies, you filth. I have never been one of you, and thus began my downgoing.

Crazy is a deviation from a behavioural mean. Alien cultures have crazy so different to ours that we want to bottle it up and take it home. Psychic borers, zombies, evil spirits, haunts and ghouls abound and they appear to be every bit as real as our sanitised versions. Best of all, crazy does not cross over. One man's devilish possession is another man's loss to explain. Our culture is squirreled away deep inside us, and we cannot explain each others aberrations.

If everyone does it, it must be normal. If it is normal, it is reasonable. Then call me wilfully, gleefully, utterly mad. Point at me and call me names, please. Every suspicious glance is beautiful. Can one disagree with everything? Is the best in us badly hidden or absent?

Man is something that should be managed.

Man is something that should be overcome.

A brain is such a splendid structure. If it was turned on the potter’s wheel of Baby Jebus, or coaxed into being by the ebb and flow of a million, million generations, the reaction is still the same... fucking hell, this thing is spectacular. It is so complicated we are reduced to hurling bricks at its edges to see what falls off the other side. We cannot take it apart and see how it works. We cannot properly look inside. We are blind men looking through frosted glass.

Have you ever considered the sum total of the interactions which went into your present construction? How much action, dynamism, brutality? How many switches were flipped? How much churning, how much pain? What of your passivity in the face of these sprawling centuries of all-in brawling? Do you have no responsibility to move your feet of clay just a little faster? Why do you sit? We have no answers, so you stop asking questions just as everything is starting to get interesting? Nothing is more arrogant than a yawn.

I can hear you now. Stop that. You are trying to ruin something beautiful.

I have my reasons, trivial being. Your glittering city is a pastiche of worn concrete and street corner whores. The sooner you realise, the sooner you will kill yourself. What after that, I do not know. But it is the way.

Can you really live your life like this? Do you really think you can embody this kind of anger? Do you know how ridiculous you sound, and how little people care of your railings?

I cannot wear my thoughts on my sleeve. I too must eat and walk. Your kind has left me with very few options - I could be a hermit, or a prophet, but would you open your kind and reasonable face to such a madman? There was a time you might trust a man who rose up out of a sunset, but such a face you have now! Look at your precious little cheeks.

Do not ridicule me. You are a tiresome adolescent in a world that needs men, and you do not know more than I do. Do you know above all others or all else? What of your alleged intelligence?

What of your compassion? I am your fellow man. Surely that is the most forgivable of sins.

Well. What of hope?

What OF hope? Shall we put it on the shelf with the other jollies follies that have run their dash? Let’s. Let’s shine it up nice and keep it next to the silverware. What could a war-ape possibly do with hope? Stupid child.

The Enlightenment will return.

Experiments cannot be wrong. They only ever fail because we cannot interpret the results.

The human spirit will defeat you.

You are the guardian of the human spirit. Take off your clothes.

This is my morning, and the day begins.

This is your twilight, and I will miss you. But you will go.

There isn’t enough room in this head for both of us.

Suppose there is. Suppose this dynamic never fails, never falls...

...then we could be here quite some time.

Autobiography of sorts

Years ago in the midst of an over-binge in heart of Adelaide, I found myself surrounded by some very angry and drunk people questioning my right to sit at the counter and nail all the free beer at a party I wasn’t necessarily invited to. In order to avoid being hauled out and beaten in the street, I pushed away from the front bar and staggered through a horde of unwashed drunks into an adjoining corridor. There, completely filling the opposing doorway, was a swirling blue vortex of power, glowing softly from within and pulsating with a raw sentience. I recognised it instantly as the Alpha and the Omega, the First and Last, and it spake unto me:

“You are my living Word on Earth. Go forth and tell the people.”

And thus began my downgoing. It was a freefall, then a slide and a deafening thud, a severe clobbering and an utter rout. A message from the Overgod this may have been, but it wasn’t exactly a useful one. But in those dark days at the beginning of myself, at the fringes of my recorded existence, I didn’t have a long way to fall. When I had recovered from my rout, locked in a tiny apartment with no lights, no food and nowhere further to regress to, I realised the only way forward was over myself. Thus I began the climb over the molehill that mistook itself for a mountain. I realised that I was very likely wrong about a lot of things I had held as absolute truths, and as I began to probe these truths I found them to be empty and discarded them. As my old existence unravelled and the foundations I formerly stood on crumbled away, I took a jump – a living man over a dead one.

Formerly I was blind – a shackled, limited beast, roaring its rage and energy into the dirt, absorbed by the earth and crushed utterly by gravity. But here I was blinded, for my head was in the clouds- was clouds. For in the absence of the gravity and foundations, I had no truths to cling to whatsoever. The flying spirit may have no use for gravity, but even eagles need somewhere to land. In freeing myself from what I knew, I had nothing. And so even as I set to work determining what was truth, I found myself utterly paralysed by my lack of knowledge. Every truth I could uncover threw up dozens of questions that urgently needed answering before I could patch together anything of worth. And over a long period of time the questions crushed me. I felt myself sinking under their weight, useless to all. This must be how a relativist feels when they’re uncertain of the correctness of relativism. I began a second downgoing, spreading dread and uncertainty and half-digested truths that may as well have been lies. I was swept along and down in a flood of my own making, clashing against others and sometimes emerging victorious, sometimes beaten.

Man is an obstacle that must be overcome, and I rose again, for in the rubble I had discovered that a few truths suffice. A few truths as hard and unyielding as stone are worth any combination of open questions and gropings in the dark. Thus I had discovered sight, and I saw that I was in disarray. I armoured myself with my truth and set up my gods in my own image. I arrayed myself so as to display an unbroken line to the world. And in this state I took up my spear, for in my downgoing I had also discovered war, and a love for the charge and countercharge, the manoeuvre, the sound of spear on shield and the headlong rout of my enemies. But I had yet to face my equal, and I foolishly negotiated an eternal alliance with myself, my only possible target for expansion in the long run. In gleaming armour I smashed all the minor entities that wouldn’t cast their lot in with mine. Nothing stood before me and my auxiliaries, but when all my minor opponents were defeated and I had nowhere else to go, I broke my alliance and declared war on myself.

I trust only those truths that are written on the wall in blood. All else is ephemeral to me. I believe in hardness of mind and hardness of heart. I believe that courage is only found in self respect, which can only be found in self discipline. I believe in my gods – they are carved in my image. I believe in that which I can stand on, that which I can wield, that which I can hurl at my enemies.

So I stand now at the gates of my only true enemy. He is like me: he is me. He is soft and weak and lazy, but he is the part of me that provides me my impetus, my momentum. Formerly I lacked substance, so without this part of me I could make no impact on others. Now I am hard, and strong, and girt for war. This other part of me is poverty, dirt and miserable ease, but it is strong in its own way too. It is the part of me that slots in with society, that associates with the Grek, that softens the blows that we all must take from day to day. It is massive and impatient and violently hypocritical. It is what I despise in others and it is a horror to behold in myself.

The war drums sound as the sun begins to rise over the battlefield. Here I face myself, my only true enemy. I will attempt to finally eliminate that of me which is the Grek. Should I fail, I will burn out and become like many people I formerly knew – a clever Grek, rich in cunning and commerce but devoid of any true being. If I succeed, I will have new territories to conquer and will gain new heights, unshackled by the falsity and mendaciousness which I have carried along with me all this time. I cannot let more days go by – as I sit idly and parade before the battle the strong part of me grows comfortable and weak, and goes to join the enemy rather than fight.

The war drums sound as the sun rises over the battlefield. Here I face myself, my enemy.

This is my morning, and the day begins.

TOPIC, due 16/8/06 - "Zarathustrian Bouillabaisse Freestyle"

Whoopee and hooray. Without significant implosion or noticable stupidity, this topic is due exactly six months after the very first Word Wars post. We should light a fucking candle or something. Or, we could just change it all the fuck up a little.

Topic: Not specified

Structure: Not specified

Length: No more than 1000 words

Conditions:

• Must begin with the phrase "And thus began my downgoing."
• Must end with the phrase "This is my morning, and the day begins."
• Must include any one of the following phrases "I am not the mouth for these ears", "Man is something that should be overcome" or "I love only that which is written in blood."

Due 16/8. Write hard.

Love for the Flag

I love the colours red, navy blue and white that make up the Australian flag. Red and blue favour every complexion. But I would never paint them on my face as we see during football matches. Love for the flag is intensified during football matches, and then it is not worn to materialize one’s patriotism for one’s country, but a uniform to attach yourself to your team. Here’s hoping you’re barracking for the winning team, because after the game, tears will smear the paint off your face, and the flag around your shoulders will droop sulkily. Nor let’s forget the unfortunate non-breathing qualities of polyester. A polyester flag wrapped around your shoulders on a hot day will end up sticky and stinky.
I look not to our flag as national identity, but as an fashion statement. Unfortunately, it is out of vogue outside the footy car park.
Threaded with the first British fleet claiming territory, what’s it to younger Australian generations who aren’t going to lie back and think of the mother country when seeing the union jack in the corner of our flag? Many want the Australian flag changed to something more “Australian”. Already it holds little resonance with young generations.
Though the Union Jack helps touristy knick-knacks bring back the flag as an accessory. Tourists can lie back and sun bake in a flag bikini with appropriately placed stars. Miniature flags have also been seen painted on the talon-like nails of women who pay too much for acrylic nails, and they aren’t even retractable. There are also miniature paper flags on toothpicks clasped between the clip on hands of plush koala key rings that take up several shelves in “bargain” tourist shops.
The flag is most commonly seen in abundance at football matches, and this is often when the worst comes out in people. An over excited crowd screaming at one another in the crowd and to those on the field. Sure, you can privately regard these flag-wearers as fools as you watch them on your TV screen or when you pass them in the street, but remember that this is also what is reflected to the rest of the world. And this is when the flag is recognised. Oh, those fools must be Australian, American, French, Irish, British, you say.
I rarely notice the flag unless it’s at half-mast if someone of importance has passed away, or if someone’s trying to say sorry, or if it’s made into dubious clothing for the tourist market or mouth-breathing sport watchers.
What love can there be for something that is often seen as a must-have commodity in a football crowd, or as a cheap souvenir. It’s a uniform for your team. And I think mine’s lost.



Alice Trout

The heart of the Dream

It was a long, hot summer day, many years ago. I stumbled up the steps to my apartment and fell in through the open door, reeking of sweat and bad wine. A few weeks previously I had signed up for another tour of duty in the Armed Corporate Youth League and was preparing for this mostly by getting drunk on the beaches of Brisbane. I had paid some cash to attend another of their Reinvigoration Camps which pop up randomly around the country. But my purpose for going to this brainshit was different from that of the other glassy-eyed freaks I associated with. I had some Serious Business to attend to – getting to the heart of the national character. Equipped with the contents of five or six Hunter S. tomes, a cheap polyester Australian flag and an assortment of drugs and booze, I was convinced I could find the answers on the road. One thing the Corp. was good for was an ever-ready invitation to get the hell out of town, so out of town I got.

American literature is a poor primer for getting to the heart of the national experience, unless the national experience you are looking for is American. The end result of this bizarre quest was several near-death experiences, a week-long hangover, an impressive sun-burn and Roo Hell, which was a six-hour sojourn right through the heart of the Australian Dream. Either that or it was a 120 kmph death-drive through a drought-plain littered with the corpses and soon-to-be-corpses of thousands of kangaroos in a shitbox crammed with some of the worst criminals I have ever met and a very, very fucking scared Brazilian. After playing the long odds and counting myself lucky to only be a few hundred dollars down (and not, for instance, dead), I had failed to draw any conclusions about the national character, except that the country itself probably wanted me dead. As I lay there in my own filth in that disgustingly hot oven I called a home, I gave up thinking on the topic for the time being, and committed myself to surviving God’s own hangover. The flag had somehow survived, also.

There are some questions that merely getting drunk and generally wasted and piling into a car can’t answer, but those weren’t the kinds of answers I was equipped to find back in those fine old days. If anything, I’m even less equipped to find them now, but as I sit here drunk off the incomprehensibly cheap wine that I’ve managed to replace my blood with over the last three days, the readings and thinkings on this subject wash over me in uncontrollable waves. At least I’m suitably crushed to not bother standing against what I’ve come to realise.

Not all that long ago, I was a patriot. Patriotism is fun. You can wave flags around and watch movies about the Nipponese and jeer at the Indonesians and so forth. The police are your friends as they march by in carefully practiced cadence, and the state holds the sky up for you. Flowers bloom and children smile and you’re mates with everyone at the pub as long as you’re a patriot too. But, if you’re in the habit of not trusting even your own motivations, a voice can be heard in the back of the brain. “Bullshit”, it says, quietly at first and sporadically, but building in frequency and volume as time passes, “BULLSHIT”. It’s a well known voice. It’s the voice that you hear when you watch commercials or listen to the radio or read anything by Ann Coulter. Something is amiss. I began wondering – what do I really owe these people? What do I have in common with them? Suddenly my compatriots at the bar became strangers, their smiles cruel jeers, their jokes and hollered exhortations to patriotism crude racism and stupidities. I had to get away, and drunk, and quick. So here I am, drunk.

What’s wrong with nationalism? In short, it’s bullshit. Nationalism is defined as a group of people who occupy a territory who have a shared culture, history and ethnicity, etc. People get pretty riled up about it. It’s basically tribalism taken to an extreme level, and that chummy feeling of commonality you have with your fellow mouth-breather while you watch the world soccer or barrack for an ally in a war is one of the major factors that caused France to boot so much arse during the Napoleonic Wars and hastened the utter collapse of the European dynastic governments. The problem being, of course, is that exactly what territory, culture, history and ethnicity actually is is open to a huge amount of interpretation, and woe betide anyone or any group of people who find themselves outside the most popular interpretation of the day. In order to foster the commonality of which I spoke, a national myth has to be fostered in which certain personalities, attributes and events are glorified or demonised. This myth must then be accepted by everyone in the nation. The people who accept this myth are patriots. The people who do not are traitors, or worse, foreigners.

Every modern country has a national myth that is so heavily drilled into the heads of the humans who dwell in the country that it usually goes unquestioned. This is what I found when I dug deep enough for the essence of the national character – not what it actually is but what it is composed of. By and large nationalism, patriotism and flag worship is a waste of time and energy that no serious person would concern themselves with. I apologise for the lateness of this essay and its general crumminess and length, but I have been very drunk lately.