Discussion → ENIGMATIC INK: LOCUS OF THE ENIGMATIC POLYGENERATION

• 
  Tom Bradley

  Mar 29, 08:05pm

  
  

  ENIGMATIC INK:
  LOCUS OF THE ENIGMATIC POLYGENERATION
  by Tom Bradley
  (reprinted from Exquisite Corpse)

  "...you're not supposed to have any sense of place... a sense of place orients and guides you, is like an extension of The Self into geography, your Who gets all secured in a landscape..."
  --Hugh Fox, Icehouse and Thirteen Keys to Talmud

  Not many publishers offer an inaugural list spanning three generations (if they were rural Mormons it would be four), almost as many genders, three times as many genres, several certifiable genii, and the same number of mutually contradictory cosmologies as there are monikers on the roster.

  Make that seven--

  V. Ulea, Forrest Armstrong, Hugh Fox, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Duane Locke, Jase Daniels, Justin Aerni...
  The first, with ease, within her polyverse,
  subsumes her brethren's sixfold Weltanschauung.
  A numen of topography will fix
  the cosmic wants of Forrest and of Fox.
  The fourth disdains all undemolished space,
  yet will not see the spirit un-proudfleshed.
  Bright tutelaries poetize the fifth,
  affording him a broad terrestrial bent.
  The final two portend a world too strange
  to be encompassed by the alphabet.
  In her illustrated novel, Snail, V. Ulea, the proud, beautiful Odessit ("a nationality, not a residency"), stalks Schrodinger's cat as it thrives and rots in many interlocked worlds. In this case, the kitty's shaven, declawed and quadruply amputated, but has been compensated for these depredations with a strange logarithmic spiral of calcium carbonate--

  Each time you walk along the winding gloomy corridors of her mansion streaked with the moist glowing in space curvatures you wonder whether you are alone, or she is still hiding in the mucous dusk building a bridge between the mansion and your fearful mind.

  You cross the bridge, and your fears come to life, formless and slimy, coiling around your every nerve and whispering to you words about the Snail.

  The eponymous gastropod encompasses and comprises the theoretical-physical worldview which V. Ulea refers to as her polyverse. How does one arrive at--meanwhile, no doubt, departing from--such a curved space, unimaginable by most? More to the point, how does one come to inhabit these commingled strangenesses so naturally that one can, with communicable ease, write these lovely "storylettes"? One suspects an accident of birth--not hereditary or congenital, but, ironically, in the old-fashioned Euclidian sense of lieu de naissance.

  Say, time gone by, in an appropriately time-warped act of precognition, the Milesians anticipate their harbor catastrophically boogering up with Maeander mud half a millennium hence. So they select a point on the future Bulgarian coast where silting presents somewhat less of a problem. And, right there on the former splashing grounds of Jason, Orpheus, Theseus, et al., they plant a colony and name it Odessos. If we slide five hundred kilometers of plain old physical space along the northeastward tendency of that Euxine brim, meanwhile fast-forwarding twenty centuries in oldfangled time, we will have arrived within the ken, and under the sway, of another proud, beautiful Russian, a hippophiliac empress, no less, who mistakenly decrees the identity of the former burg to be that of the latter. Thus become entangled the two political entities, taxonomically and mythopoeically, if not in a quantum manner.

  Give it another couple hundred years, and a genius is born in the misnamed locale. To the extent that she identifies herself as Odessit, she grows double, dual as any wave-particle. Naturally, under such circumstances of chance and choice, she will invent/discover the Quantum School of fiction, and will pioneer Predispositioning Theory as applied to art and literature--for, as V. Ulea says, "Between chaos and order is an intermediate stage called predisposition."

  So, let ambiguous Odessos-Odessa be our leaping-off point into the chaos we're crossing. Let seven enigmatic ink-slingers serve as our psychopompoi, and hope against hope to arrive at order, or at least to make a predispositional pit stop or two along the way.

  Further along our anti-continuum we come to yet another incorporated municipality, a harbor city not unlike V. Ulea's hometown: a literal scene to be made here and now. And here, in violation of both the letter and spirit of this essay's epigraph, we locate the next two entries on the catalogue. While chronologically separable by a multiplicity of generations, Fox and Forrest can both be associated, in the spatial sense, with a single mundane population center.

  That may seem paradoxical, given the elder's facility at traversing the galaxies in their baker's dozens, which he does as beautifully as V. Ulea sauntering among the dimensions. A second prodigious accident of birth is suspected. This time it's neither genetic nor geographic, but theistic--as in born again.

  Say Hugh Fox undergoes a converse, inverse, obverse and contrapositional version of the maternal deathbed scene that plagued Stephen Daedalus' mind. And, instead of refusing to be pussy-whipped into kowtowing like a papist, Fox finds out he was a Jew all along. Does he, like the glam little harp before him, demur from taking on all the complexes which religification-under-pressure entails?

  Fuck no. We're talking about an actual matriculated student of Borges, a writer of nearly ninety books, Bukowski's biographer. Hugh Fox can handle anything. But, even for such a mentality, going kosher's evidently not as easy as Sammy Davis, Jr., made it out to be. The first drastic measure is to send his estranged son on a spaceship through thirteen galaxies representing as many keys to his newfound folks' holy writ.

  Before your father died...he made a series of tapes, re-creations of what he considered to be the main events in your life. He was a great one for imago-spectrum taping...I stole one copy of the tapes at considerable risk to myself... And I took that copy, broke it up into thirteen separate segments, acquired thirteen tapemachines in the galaxy. Or I should say galaxies.
  --Icehouse and Thirteen Keys to Talmud

  It's hardly to be expected that the author of the above could be pinned down to any sort of asphalt specificity, that he, no less than normal folk, would have Cartesian locality, right down to street coordinates, fixed in his gargantuan heart. But here's Fox nailing a particular parcel of three-D real estate in tenseful time--

  In deep-REM tombsleep, dreaming (back) into olde streets ...(London, Boston--1890--Chicago?) when doorways arched and windows on the street curve curved, you closed up rooms with middle-close doors, and you were (green leaves in an after-rain, window-sun reflect-shine) young, and you were young and you were young and you were...

  Ice (steel) hand between (plunge) her sleep-tits, the 1890 street bundle-whorling up into a bat-wing-black cone, sun-blot-out, shrink-compress into...

  Eyes open...

  The big icicle next to the hot water pipes, dripping, 11.3 mos. a year, dripping, and caped, canopied over her...

  And here he is on the same topographical topic, in an interview--

  I mean take a town like Boston... there's a huge, vital subculture... Ibbetson Street Press... Cervena Barva Press... The Bagel Bards, who get together and read poetry in Somerville... it's a vital, alive society...

  Please fixate and focus now on those very Bagel Bards. They are ensconced among the scones in that most extreme example of all spatial-temporalities, a bakery, whose pinpointable presence in this solar system's present disposition happens to be as follows:

  18-48 Holland Street
  Somerville
  Davis Square
  Boston MA 02143

  --if google's not mistaken.

  With sandwiches going at twenty dollars a pop (according to one disgruntled online reviewer), it seems likely the bards all have tenure. How would they react to their franchised enclave being invaded by a penniless kid from the rough part of Boston who dropped out of high school in 2007? And what if this youngster, making his entrance--which is to say creating his point of ingress--reached out an unwrinkled, unarthritic, yet masterful forefinger and caused the Somerville bakery wall to melt like sour cream on an unfrosted Jewish doughnut?

  Of course, after recovering from their shock at his means of making the scene, the Bagel Bards, being poets, would embrace the beautiful boy and buy him a fifteen dollar latte, in unconscious hopes that the dairy content might speed the day when he no longer shames everyone by looking so god-damned good--for he is impossibly young. The lad could be Hugh Fox's great-grandson, if this nosh pit were languishing among the savage Latter-Day Saints in the unincorporated municipality of Panguitch, Utah, instead of metropolitan Massachusetts.

  As it is, he's Bostonian in the same way that V. Ulea is Odessit: not just in spirit but bodily as well (a duality unacknowledged by more than one of our seven authors). This enigmatic Keats, this chaotic Rimbaud, is none other than Forrest Armstrong. And in his unjaded newness he starts from assumptions which his elders must hypertensively huff and puff to arrive at. Here he is penetrating a storefront in his beloved native city--

  They stop short and turn into an alley. Dead end.

  "This the place?" Bill asks.

  Nail holds up a finger and smiles. He strokes the cracks in the brick wall and it starts to radiate like a blacklight. Bricks melt and drip down the wall in embryonic sludge. An opening emerges--marijuana smoke billows out like steam from an exhaust pipe--Nail dips his shaved head inside and drops through the void like a fetus. Bill follows and the hole closes.

  In the city, the only trace left behind is a weed cloud dissipating into the stars.
  --Asphalt Flowerhead

  Forrest Armstrong bursts in upon these places of commerce so handily. Dare we hope this native Atlantic Seaboarder will one day pull a similar Joshua on the East Coast Literary Establishment's walls, and make them, too, melt with a flick of his godling digit? Gone, fucking finally, will be the bloated Brahmin days when American lit's "sense of place" was determined by a Beantown hack like William Dean Howells. Coincidentally in the very Gay Ninety which Hugh Fox evokes above, Howells, author of that stupid abortion about Silas Whoozit, forsook the twats at the Atlantic Monthly for an effectively identical clutch of twats to the southwest. In schlepping his fat ass the 190 miles from Boston to New York, the equivalent of two thirds of the distance between the real and unreal Odessas, he is said to have "brought the literary center of the country with him," thereby, presumably, effecting a huge epochal discontinuity in the Annals of American Literature. And then, a hundred or so years after the fact, the Atlantic Monthly itself dogs William Dean Howell's steps. The Odessos and Odessa of our own Argonautic coast become quantumly entangled. And, as I sit here in my Nagasakian position-momentum, I wouldn't give a fuck if the resulting rend in time-space sinks both of them under a mile of submolecular silt.

  Long before email and the web made it obvious, Milton knew how wrongheaded this fetishization of locality is-

  ...horror and doubt distract
  His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
  The Hell within him, for within him Hell
  He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
  One step no more than from himself can fly
  By change of place...

  A more or less recent fiction editor of the abovementioned overblown ass-rag once proclaimed there was "not a single good writer in America" who didn't send his best work, "first and immediately" to the following Cartesian coordinates, from which all unsolicited manuscripts weren't re-snailed unread unless accompanied by an SASE (can't you just taste the mollusk mucus on the backs of those stamps? Can you even remember the doomed relic called postage?):

  Atlantic Monthly
  745 Boylston Street
  Boston, Massachusetts
  02116

  --as in:

  ...on Boylston Street a commercial photograph
  shows Hiroshima boiling.

  Gasp and genuflect at the unmitigated glamour! What a privilege to have one's saliva regurgitated back in one's face from such a lofty fucking flyspeck on Maya's map! This fabled curb sounds like the perfect place to squat, trousers about ankles, expose one's own boils and take a big steaming, fly-attracting catharsis. It's the second most popular Back-Easty place one fantasizes about going up in smoke, in dreams whose skies are filled with jumbo jets that have been laden with nukes.

  Hiroshima does indeed come to the mind of the present reviewer, who coincidentally spends his current incarnation commuting between there and Naga-etcetera. This undulant resident of those burgs, each boiled as any bagel, daily walks past rubbly remnants memorializing walls that, with the help of fuddy-duddy Einstein, not glam Heisenberg, really did melt and radiate black light and ooze Armstrongian embryonic sludge. We proper Boom Towners don't need to resort to commercial photographs, as Lowell did in his cushy Back Bay. And it's Forrest Armstrong's Boston, and his only, which we would never wish Hiroshimized--though it's Forrest's that is more than resilient enough to withstand any number of apocalypses, the most drastic of which must be the prodigious lad's own fictionalization of the place, as here--

  The city shudders when the only familiar face disappears. Leaves blow in circles overhead like razors. Streets feel like massive corpse with weathered gray skin as Nail cuts across Landsdown...

  And here--

  Streets dripping halogenous and running off the frame, revealing (space) at his feet, neon screens skeletal in the (sky), architecture ignited and glowing hot blue like laboratory flames. Time runs jagged like cut-up film and the building glow burns out like an overcharged light bulb. I am alone in this city as I am alone in my head...

  And, yes, by the knotted bowels of Christ, here--

  The city at night: a thousand molten steel skeletons with sedated fire burning in ribcage, lungs and skull. A calm hush over the streets, blue gloss the stars, tires to cement and car sounds but everything seems to come from a distance as if Nail, Bill and Luis walk in sealed-off reality glitch--the world around them kept out by nothing but a paper-thin sheet of fog...

  Leave your Euclidian space; quit your Quantum, too. Fuck Schrodinger and his house pet as unambiguously as they can be fucked in a multiverse where a cat's ass is no doubt interchangeable with the dewclaw on its elbow. Stuff like Armstrong's nukes all pseudoscientism to nothingness. This is not semi-gelled abstraction, but concrete composition--Asphalt as well, in the molten Miltonic sense. Armstrong turns the walls of all our complacent nosh pits to Asphaltick slime, such as sizzled from the Infernal Bridge--

  Smooth, easy, inoffensive, down to Hell...
  ...the work by wondrous art
  Pontifical, a ridge of pendant rock
  Over the vexed abyss...

  And, while we're speaking of vexed abysses, of spaces nuked to nothingness, of an art every bit as wondrous as Forrest Armstrong's, let's just unzip all the way. Call in the wrecking ball and turn all four walls of that bakery to embryonic sludge. Send starchy food items flopping everywhere. Rest assured that Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink will maintain a presence on the disintegrated premises.

  Were you aware that every demolition site in every town, in every Odessa, in each Boston and all Hiroshimas, is a sculpture? And did you know they're the work of the next personage on our publisher's catalogue? Our fourth author has heroically slapped his proprietary signature on all such entropied city blocks and decreed them his own. He is the new Tom Joad, minus the latently gay Henry Fonda lisp:

  I'll be all around in the dark--I'll be ever'where--wherever you look. I'll be there. Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, and the guy suddenly fragments into a soupcon of semi-differentiated weirdness on the fungible sidewalk, I'll be there... I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an'--suddenly their earlobes begin to resemble a bundle of coat hangers being insinuated on the whirling blades of a noodle shop's exhaust fan. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know that bgIKdi-j;KjyyyL998u-jn;Kgh and all sorts o' whacky entropic stuff like that, you know? I'll be in the way our folk eat the minerals uppity violins excrete, doo-dah, doo-dah. An' when our folk live in the houses they build, except those houses have less structural integrity than what flops out of a noisy vacuum cleaner bag--why, feck me sideways, Maw, if I aint a-gonna be there, yep-yep-yep...

  Unshell V. Ulea's snail now, to make it a slug. Gigantize it. Give it a handful of supernumerary eyes and a creator who is prophet of the Xylowave, philosopher of the Totimorphous, proclaimer of the Transexpansion Numeral Unit. Yes, as we cross chaotic space-time we have arrived at the fifth planet--which, of course, comes fourth in line, worlds being merely upgraded macro-micro particles and Heisenberg being hard at work in this uncertain construct. We have landed on Jupitter, to be as precise as possible in circumstances of advanced entropy.

  If the Milesians, time gone by, had been blessed with a copy of his Sometimes Never, instead of going to all the trouble of planting a colony on the Black Sea shore as security against the boogering up of their harbor, they would have stayed put, proudly planted a signpost in the Maeander mud and billboarded the words--

  BY GX JUPITTER-FUCKIN'-LARSEN!

  --and the Odessits of today would be laboring under a different misnomer.

  Everyone has an Odesso-Odessa, and they all contain multiple Hiroshimas exploded by this particular author. That's how polyversal he is--though it's not clear how "quantum." His notion of street address closely approaches, from random topological angles, the multiple worlds which V. Ulea calls home. They are next-door neighbors but one-to-the-xth power.

  Disorder is GX Jupitter-Larsen's element. He gets merely a pleasant buzz from the narcotic which knocked such a seasoned head as Hunter Thompson unconscious: the "amplified erosion" of the empty TV channel. What is it about this man's cosmology that makes him, in his own words, fetishize entropy, instead of treating it with the same mildly benign indifference which the wise man turns upon the most organized of existents? After all, as the wise man says--

  Ephemeral are compound things.

  Perhaps an answer can be found in the following passage, where Jupitter-Larsen lays out his program--

  Passages of random letters represent nothingness, while whole sections of entirely self-invented words represented the spiritual. Regular words are reserved for the deeply physical.

  Note the three abstractions and the assumptions that underlie each. For all his radicalism he proceeds from a spiritually bourgeois position, the pitfall yawning at the mental feet of someone who assumes that a difference obtains between spirit and nothingness. The universe is, finally, dual in nature, and the crack in its big ontological ass lies smack between nothing and something. To assume otherwise is the characteristic failure of the occidental imagination, and is the basis of all outright anthropomorphic monotheism. The moment you, even by so much as a boson's worth, impute substantiality to what you have decided to call "spirit," you're already halfway down the slippery slope to phallic worship, and bishops with big hats shaped like the glans penis who hide under your bed at night and jump out the moment your head hits the pillow, first to fistify, then to theistify you like a teenboy.

  But there isn't an author alive who wouldn't gladly be reamed by any number of silken-chasubled goblins in exchange for the ability to prophesy uncannily as this--

  I try to pen every piece as if I were taking a hammer to a typewriter. That is, to be hyper-aware of every word I break onto the page. I never go into a trance while writing. Nevertheless, while smashing out the words for this noise novel, several stormy visions kept appearing before me. Some were dreamlike. Others were overwhelming emotional conditions. And others still were divination-like. Many of those I found meaningful were incorporated into the novel. As I myself am not sure what the following portents might mean, I give them to you dear reader now, as is, in no particular order:

  A young man will ride out from the northeast. During his 15th Kettleday, he will take the preparatory measures needed to subdue the winds' lasting effects. Without meaning to, he will edify the phraseology of a gutter macrocosm.
  --Sometimes Never

  Is Jupitter-Larsen playing John the Baptist to Forrest Armstrong's Christ? I thought that was my gig. But no other interpretation is possible. Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink is reissuing the New Testament, Revised Deviant Version.

  Like all true prophets cursed with the Cassandra gift, GX Jupitter Larsen is mired in matter by default, regardless of how beautifully disorganized that stuff is. Only a matter of degree separates him from Croesus in the counting house: the latter autoeroticizes over gold coins, the former proprietizes every vacant lot his imagination can encompass. He is constitutionally unable to attach to matter the numen which redeems the ecstatic atheist's mood, at times, at least. Unavailable to him is the spirituality which godless poets ascribe to the mundane, however speciously.

  Which brings us to the patriarch of the Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink roster--rather, it were better to call him the eldest sibling: Duane Locke, whose Odessa, whose Boston, whose Hiroshima is a "sunny and tropical Tampa slum." His eponymous Yang Chu conceives the human body as "...singularly by itself the source, origin and creator of what in popular parlance is designated as 'spiritual, sacred and holy.'" Duane Locke concurs with that assessment wholeheartedly, and defines himself as a "terrestrial mystic" a la Keats.

  Locke has locked onto these views as staunchly as an evangelical theist holds the opposites. If this poet would momentarily allow himself, just in a hypothetical manner, to entertain the spiritual-material duality and the widely misunderstood organizing principle from which it follows logically and justly, the double doctrine which is simple inborn commonsense on the far side of the Khyber Pass, it might preserve him from the itemized despair in certain of his poems. Here's an example, depicting a world where the sea shores are--

  Polluted by dark glasses,
  Sun tan oil, surf boards,
  Badminton, volley ball,
  Burlesque show jokes
  And palmetto shacks
  Serving pina coladas and pin-ups...

  --a world where--

  ...A diluted and distorted Platonic-
  Cartesian conception of reality
  Has turned this beautiful earth
  Into ugliness and the people
  Praise and participate in
  Popular culture...
  --Yang Chu's Poems

  This is a delectation of contempt, an enshrinement of bitterness in verse. If the only numinosity you consent to recognize is wrapped in a sheath of generated existence, no wonder your gorge rises at its abusers and causes you to catalogue their crimes instead of glancing over them with the slightly bored sufferance that is the blessing of disinterest.

  The abovementioned twin principle, namely Karma-Rebirth, runs the manifest universe and/or--without doubt--all and sundry polyverses. Only that assumption serves the requirements of Logic and Justice. Only that working hypothesis obviates theodicy and prevents us from blowing a cosmological gasket, if not immediately, then at the final moment (hence so many unpleasant deathbed scenes). Terrestrial mysticism sucks you into the selfsame good-evil dichotomy, the overestimation of material existence (and presumably antimaterial nonexistence as well) that gives the impulse to damn, that plagues theists, and leads them to plague everyone else with their bishops under the bed, and makes them juxtapose words like "volley" and "ball" in a poem.

  But, of course, this hyperevalutation of the sensible can lead to much beautiful poetry, as well. Semioticize GX Jupitter-Larsen's gargantuan five-eyed slug, put it out to sea, and you get this beauty--

  It is esoteric this sea slug,
  Blonde-beige,
  On a rock ledge,
  Seaweed and salt-spray sloshed. But
  There
  Is
  Only a modicum of human awareness
  But a surplus
  Of human hermeneutic assumptions.

  What arises, this sea slug
  With its silver-shining, swirling trail
  Across white-streaked, criss-crossing
  Blued stone

  Is conceptual enquiries.

  One can only be grateful that the unsheller of the above quantum snail, though yearning for Keats' "life of sensation rather than thought," is not entirely able to live it.

  Two more impossibly young people fill out Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink's roster. Like the others, Jase Daniels and Justin Aerni have restricted the presentation of their Weltanschauungen to the flatness of paper. But the eyeballable illusion of multi-layered depth has been effected by these graphic novelists, simultaneously confirming and gratifying their grumpy elders' apocalyptic consternation that the whippersnappers among us are Darwinizing beyond mere wordful language to some strange new pictorial encryption. This climactic pair of kids self-generate illusory worlds out of cheek, pigment and idiosyncrasy, giving us an invisible depth of space by means of opaque matter. For all this grammar-mired geezer knows, they've arrived at the profoundest cosmogony of any on the list.

  But, of course, all seven, being cis-Himalayans, are constitutionally doomed to labor under metaphysical misapprehensions. Fortunately, such errors are mere sidebars to the more important consideration of pleasure: specifically the gratification derivable from the way these masters express their wrongness, heptafold, sublime. The mystico-scientism is less important than the timbres of what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed. Regardless of the bogus hypotheses they entertain, and for all the multiplicity of their theoretical boo-boos, pleasure is the principle these artists run their real lives on. And, like Paul Claudel, they need beg no pardon for writing well.

  Weltanschauungen, however earnestly professed by the immediate consciousness, are mere mental fads among scribblers. We're all just trying to give a few copies of our books the widest possible angle of dispersion, in the hope that someone might accidentally bury a fragment of a page in a jar in the preservative desert, Qumran-wise. All contrived explanations of the world that may or may not obtain on the far side of our dust jackets are just temporary means of distraction from the unscientific horror of being remaindered and pulped. In the meantime we busily concoct for our output critical neologisms that might hawk a few vendible price units. We're almost as prolific confecting generic tags as we are writing stuff to paste them on. We secrete names of Movements for the mongers to itemize, and busily stake claims to the most squalid promo gimmicks, as we fall prey to the teasefully withheld blandishments of that Babylonian harlot best described by Andrew Gallix--

  ...an increasingly reactionary publishing world driven by marketing departments (who have transformed "literary fiction" into a genre) and their academic lackeys (in thrall to the Booker novel)...

  --and Jonathan Penton, of Make It New Media:

  And when we live with the sort of impersonal, venal corporations that control Twenty-First Century industry, literature suffers. The so-called "publishers" that currently produce the majority of America's books don't understand or care about literature that does not immediately make a clear profit. They put fiction and poetry next to blockbuster movies and celebrity tell-alls, and do not see the point. And they haven't just purchased our printing presses-they've purchased the names of the publishers of yesteryear, and attempt to harness the goodwill once generated by these publishers, portraying themselves as the continuing keepers of culture while pushing books down the eternal spiral of the lowest common denominator.

  Either spirit exists or it's a phantasm--or maybe it constitutes some mentally masturbatory Heisenberg quibble that doesn't exist but nevertheless obtains. In any case, the most intimate access we have to the collective soul's ungenerated immateriality comes in, and on, books. In this postlapsarian shit-hole of an earth, the naked spirit is presented as nearly unencumbered with existence as it can be via a thin layer of inky molecules on paper (a hundred-percent green, in Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink's case). A book is the closest the insensible can come to being sensed, as John of Patmos knew. In his insular malnourishment he made a bagel sandwich of it:

  And I saw a mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And he had in his hand a little book open...And he said unto me, Take the little book, and eat it up.
  --Revelation 10:1-2, 9

  Writing, if good, transcends time as handily as space, and constitutes the only human permanence. We have no idea what the kithara sounded like before or after Milesian Timotheus added a string to it. Apelles' paintings are lost tantalizations. Meanwhile, Plato's dialogues are realer, more present, than the dork in the next cubicle.

  And, just as Soul is captured best in print, so proportionally vast is the sacrilege that occurs when literature gets stolen, raped, pimped, whored-out, used as corporocratic asswipe. This makes resistance to big media nothing less than the most important dharma of generated existence. HarperCollins vulgarizes the only non-ephemeral part of us. And despite the majority of our seven authors' cries denying the existence of the "s" word, they will all join in the following exhortation--

  Extend to "communications corporations" the same malign neglect with which you treat the stupid movies their books are churned out for no other purpose than to be turned into. Wish them entropized into papier mache by the blizzard of broken glass that will result when globally warmed hurricanes move north. Leave them languishing at the bottom of a demolition site to warm the thermically equilibrious heart of GX Jupitter-Larsen himself. Supercellular mesocyclones can blow the Big Apple all the way up the Brahmins' fart-hole, for all anyone who loves lit cares. Odessos-Schmodessa.

  Let proximity itself go down the same municipal sewer system. Digital connectivity has rendered physical locality irrelevant and made polyversality the new thing. A generically schizoid reviewer can be sitting right here in Nagasaki writing an article for a magazine in Baton Rouge about a publisher in a London quantumly bilocated, spookily acted upon, in Ontario--and, throughout the entire transaction neither a single cubic inch of flesh will have been pressed, nor gustable cock sucked.

  To the same degree that carefully drafted prose sails above extempore gab, the quality of schmoozing has been enhanced. When a school of scribblers eschews congregation at a specific longitude-latitude, what the PR folks call "the presentation self" gets wholesomely idealized. When, to paraphrase Hugh Fox's epigraph, the Who gets unsecured by landscape, all the somatic curses of generated existence are stripped away. Once space has been erased by the miracle of email, so has time, in terms of its effects on the human frame.

  The envy inspired by exquisitely smooth foreheads and cheeks; the superciliousness engendered by wrinkles and arthritic gaits; the mutual revulsion that results in commingling the disparate B.O.s of maturity and im-; the disharmony of voices cracked with senectitude and late teen hormones; the ambiguous eros ignited when the androgyne grace of late adolescence rubs against grizzled moobs; the subcortical whiffs of the Freudian family-disease that obtrude on every animal awareness when figures substitutable for parent and spawn rub elbows, when personal encounters take place among people separable by more than a sibling's number of years--none of this signifies through the hermetic medium of the internet.

  In a creation where particles can spookily act upon each other at a distance of quadrillions of light years, and, in the meantime, the foreclosed home right next door, upon being scheduled for demolition, spookily begins to sport the name of our fifth planet in disembodied black light--the seven ages of man are as days in the week, and a generation can span an open-ended number of decades.

  In a universe ruled by karma and rebirth, "generation" is a bad word, denoting as it does the stifling of spirits in coats of crass skin, the greatest disservice that can be done. Nevertheless, Hugh Fox got to christen the Invisible Generation, Andrew Gallix the Offbeats. So I'll invent a name to embrace Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink's stable. It will be a "sticky statement," many-worldly enough to encompass the catalogue's quantum proclivities, and will also contain a mnemonicism referring back to the brand name from whose womb this septuple existent is undergoing parturition. I'll make the name doubly apt, as these writers produce electricity as well as useful heat:

  The Enigmatic Polygeneration

  Is there a greater pleasure in this or any other world than what's enjoyed by such a gathering? Pound knew it. Ginsberg knew it. Plato knew it. And who is the Agathon of this drinking party? It's publisher Wayne Groen, whom I have interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.
  Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink: Locus of the Enigmatic Polygeneration

  More Tom Bradley at: http://tombradley.org

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