Sowers of Nothing (ELECTRIC DELIRIUM 1.2)

We rush to a blindsided core. Low rise in the shade becomes hip action--the bleating rush of the Normal say, step away from imagined or hypothetical risk. (Is it a fact?) Let the mass of drowning bodies knead common suggestions into the gentle tissue of your mind and decide by the voice of popular opinion how to think yourself back into the life you yearn. Learn to weave. A dilemma for the picking: it swirls as predictable safety or comfortable cause. Yet, whispers Rosaline, tonguing the cheekbone, the inner gum, this way of interpreting fails to tackle the bugbear of human problems: the herd.

(What do we deserve when the core is lost in the slush?) The muck persists, deepens by default depending on our perverse decisions or talkable truths. (Interpretations?) Those insoluble sharks batter the roof, rain gunshot choices into or out of life's open windows like brain bits in the drained swimming pool of Ballard's summer home. Her bedroom window implodes. He rips open the walls of her sunken home, tatters to shreds, wrist to ankle, live on stage.

The mind is a pole, is a stage in Osaka: Rosea exists in mire, wallowing in bursts of stagnated perception. Life lived from the bottom up. This humdrum man, though, he thinks neuroscience or the study of the organ itself is the thing . . . the end is all. Completed. It's over once a human comprehends it. A wilted rose dies clutched in the dead bard's teeth.

We dig up conscience-tunnels, pluck the play-flower of present choice for fun, run aground, past this dimly lit, though not to be underestimated, stage, and open door upon empty door, to nothing, for the lights are a pulse flickering in the perceptual performance of ourselves, our starring role renewed afresh, momentarily awash in becoming anew again until the end credits roll and we roll to the finish of this pornographic feature called life. (Did we love? Did we do as we said we would?) To the ochre. It's a new reel. It's digital. (Where is the audience, Rosaline?) Everywhere, dear, wait. Most people weep their lives to the grave, flounder in spent tears over their own misappropriated judgements, assessments, or contestations, political agendas, epistemic circles, or predictions, assumptions, justifications, predilections and habits. Most, though, falter in mediocrity, but not us, Rosea. We are the makers and dealers of the constructive nothing, the blind sowers, stitching and botching lives to realign and weave the threads of our phantom past into a tapestry of unutterable beauty; toss those threads to the consequences.

Watch them float in the mire. Set them afire with words, the director yells. Applause, unending. He watches the crackling smoke fizzle and die charred in a heap. He's dancing. Mock solutions mask life's progress, the motto of the well-read few. Still, to know is not all, not nearly enough, though, she cackles, shrieks over the uproar of crackles and squirms, belches and worms. The crowd is sizzling with dreadful anticipation. Knowledge stumbles in this field of hopeful life-homes. We study life-making. Keep hoping the lie will come true. Keep honing in. Are there consequences to hope unacted upon? Dig them up! For knowing smears tarred facts to mind-flesh, wrangles us to the laughing cane of other people's opinions and influences, their inevitable slump into being correct, in their, how shall we proceed, modes of culturally relevant social misunderstanding. It's all muddled down here. For some, the yearn for more life is not the yearn for more answers, but the yearn to dissolve in the art of re-making a life of questions, a mental scrubbing. It's vacuous. This is the real treasure, a foundation of inquiry and imagination. And, in this vein, the blood warms over her shivering skin in the morning. It's Rosaline's ritual solitude. She reminds me of Rainer. I'm dim.

We die alone, Rosemary, all of us in time will die. From the window at this time of day, this dying day, plucking and squeaking, night reigns over mind as the mind projects onto the night's dark chill like a moon made of salt. Rosalind, wait just a moment longer. I'm almost done. Morning has come, the director muses, the final performance is set to start. Cast out of sleep and onto the stage, he stumbles to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the toilet, and into the lounge (a kind of stage, a vignette, a shadow puppet cloth, a deregulated zone, a frame). But, back to the kitchen in the dark of a stagnating time, pre-dawn revelry, nude, he scratches out sleep tears, trembling visions of unanswered holes and spots: the day unfolds blurred in its delivery like a professional courtesan working the rounds of a bathhouse dumpster. Alone.

We are enmeshed in the present, thrown to the future, wet with the past, and in this tangle of human thought, must act, even though every non-act is itself an act of an act interpreted by many or one. (Who do you think the other really is? Is so much built up by how we are able to talk about it? Cherry pickers, all of us, selfishly, proudly each to one's own. It seems contextual, yes? Systems, yes?) Today, we begin work on the remake (as mentioned above). It's always the performance, as will be explained, that explodes the horizon. There will be a marriage. Rose, don't lose it. Doubt matters, but more than trying to catch the Real, focus on the unknown ideal, Rosemary, the consequences come either way. Choose them. You're growing. Prepare yourself, the director warns, storming off stage. Always prepare yourself, he repeats over and over. Wait. (Always?) It's night, as always. (Where was my head just then? What was I thinking about? Does somebody have a light to light the dark of this dark room, just a trickle of doubt, to help illuminate the sad denial of these too bright mornings?)