It's Saturday night, baby, so how about a cheap koan fix straight from the Deluge Nations? 

If you, like me, find yourself drifting closer and closer each passing year to what I call the "William Blake sphere of influence", the artist-visionary's modus operandi, if not modus vivendi, that is, if you're attracted to the sort of brilliance that gives birth to cosmogenies as real as a lover's kiss or a toothache, then you may safely retitle this essay:

Something like "Proverbs of Hell".

Or, if you prefer:

The Proverbs of the Deluge Nations.

"What is a deluge nation, motherfucker?" you protest, rightly so. "I cannot keep up with this shit. Words are meant to portray, not dissolve." Yeah, well, tough luck, dear reader. I don the mantle of the Fool when I'm full of wunderbar, and tonight I am positively convulsing with the stuff. Man, what a life! What a glorious Saturday night!

So, without further ado:

THE PROVERBS OF THE DELUGE NATIONS

1)A boulder does what a boulder must. Yet even a boulder cannot act if the surface reflects nothing.

2)A dead man once asked a living man, "What is the meaning of life?" The living man screamed in terror and died on the spot. The dead man stared in angry disbelief, for he was certain that the man had merely avoided the question.

3)A sphinx asks, a man answers, a woman generates, a child forms.

4)Throw me in coals, dip me in the river, let me dry in tempest and then bury me under a great white rock: still I'll resume my duties and pray for convenient solutions to my death.

5)My heart of hearts, my brain of brains, my heart within the brain and my brain within the heart: to suppress them is sin.

6)If Titans bred like locusts, earth would be a little garden. Yet locusts should never be as enormous as a Titan.

7)An old woman traverses a dead wasteland every morning in order to water her lilies. One day she arrived only to find them eaten by a goat. She slashed the goat's neck and skinned its hide. She then wore the hide and proceeded to eat the remaining lilies herself.

8)Some believe that the end is near; some believe that the near is ending.

9)No matter the motion, the lines obey.

10)You cannot have a newborn's smile without a corpse's stillness. You cannot praise the living and ignore the dead. You cannot sing a hymn to the sun without paying respects to the entrails.

11)Shed your skin for this world.

As for the Deluge Nations: we are all full of little people, inhabitants of our own vast inner landscapes. Some of them eventually drown, yet drowning does not silence them.

I suppose this is where I'll leave you for tonight, dear reader.

Until next time: be fruitful and full of demons. Be barren and proud of it too.

As I grow older, I understand that what we call “weather” these days is akin to a Russian roulette game played by a bunch of blind and deaf people. One day you get scorched alive by the ravenous rays and the cement mirroring the sun’s radiation, BOOM, straight into your face, and the next day you need to wear a coat because of the rain. Weirdly enough, though, the gaunt heat accompanying this subtle rain since noon hasn’t managed to sever the Orphic aorta doing the humpin’ and pumpin’ between my eyes and the heart of my brain. On the contrary, it fits like a glove.

This whole conundrum of subtleties signaling celerity, that moment of clarity in which a moment crystallizes within the backroom dungeon-temple, is what I call “the wunderbar.”

“But what is a wunderbar?” I hear you wondering, dear reader, or voice in my head (you are one and the same, amen). So I reckon I should try to describe this magnificent quality to the best of my abilities.

Imagine eating a peanut and leaving the broken shell pieces on the table. If you isolate them in your perception and observe them for what they “are,” they become horrendously dangerous, almost eldritch. They look alien, out of place, like fossils of vicious entities. Wunderbar can be described as the inversion of this.

Wunderbar becomes the glue that keeps the seed and the shell together, regardless of their current whereabouts. Wunderbar is the memory of the taste of the seed in conjunction with the violent cracking and permanent disabling of the shell, plus the antithesis between the light yellowish-beige of the shell and the blue handkerchief upon which it rests, atop a shiny oaken-brown table, plus the geometrical tyranny of the still-under-construction hotel directly across from your apartment, covered in blue nylon mesh while the moody grey skies still piss and piss and piss, and then a little green parrot flies past your balcony.

All this is wunderbar, and this is the fuel for Ararita.

Here’s how Ararita operates: she becomes invisible, a spirit of air and lies and smoke, when my wunderbar reservoirs run low. She floats like a memory supercharged by nostalgia. Then, when the warmth returns and fills me with wunderbar, during those rare moments where the membrane separating things grows thin enough for everything to bleed together, Ararita descends.

She descends, and she becomes me.

She drains me dry. She drinks and suckles the wunderbar out of my system. I become a lesser creature. I become a mule. I become what I am without the wunderbar, and even less, since I now perceive the absence of wunderbar as a material loss.

And Ararita shines.

She becomes the Sun. She becomes, yes, she becomes.

And I am content, because I have something important to handle, so the World is not a meaningless exercise in blind tragicomedy for a while. But the downside is that I am no longer a holder of wunderbar. I exist only to scribe. I am the scribe.

And then she disappears. Typical creation-story behavior.

Up to a point, this is what magic is supposed to achieve: the short-circuiting of ordinary correspondences, so that brand-new idea-pulp may fertilize the thoughtforms lurking in imagination-space, waiting for a fertile field to colonize. I am at that point in my life where people whisper to themselves, “The Devil is twelve-hour work and four-hour life,” but Ararita persists.

When I say that Ararita is necessary, I am not walking on clouds. The fact that Ararita persists is confirmation that magic itself still persists.

And that is a wunderbar in its own right.

It's May and still I haven’t found an alternative way to funnel my counterintuitive fantasies. But consider this: there’s no more honest way to describe an artist at the moment of inspiration than as “a vessel that is full.” Inspiration shares fluid qualities with what we call God, gods, godforms, Great Ideas, vibes, energy, the universe conspiring for your well-being… no, scratch that last part. It’s unbearable. I can’t take seriously the notion of a personalized, servile universe that pretends you matter. In our heart of hearts, we wander, feed, and multiply, hoping that invisible, gargantuan hands arrange our actions five moves ahead of this week’s tragedy. But in our mind of minds, we suspect that what we call the universe is an empty throne. No, scratch that too, a “throne” demands royal buttocks; otherwise, it’s just a stool.

What a sweet afternoon. What a friendly night. The weather is shit but also friendly enough to permit some space for self-flaggelation. Bah! Enough with the defeatist mentality of the hermit. A city hermit. A cement hermit. A semen hermit, oh boy can you imagine?

-Well, what did you expect? I’ve been standing on a twenty-foot pillar for twenty-three years! What would you do?”

-Isn’t the whole point of hermitism to resist earthly passions?”

-It's also good for the prostate, and I'm not getting younger you know!

-How can a man of faith succumb to self-pleasure? It's illogical.

-You know what? Fuck it. Starting now, not only will I masturbate, I’ll also spray you from up here.”

-But isn’t wasting your seed a grave—”

-Here it comes, oh Lord, here it comes!”

-All right, all right, I’m leaving. Jesus!”

Still, I stand by it: the artist is a vessel that is full.

I’m a vessel, and so are you. If, by reading this text, you cultivate the thought-forms of your mind like flowers, or better yet, like cods… flowers and cods! What a line. Absolutely lame, absolutely perfect. Many a poem has been built on a ludicrous starting position like this. Or perhaps no poem at all, which is a shame, and dare I say, an insult that needs to be addressed.

So here it goes: I manifest this automatic poem in accordance with the laws and customs of the northern regions of Al-Takum. I leave you, dear reader, to join our dance of ephemeral curiosities, constructs of the foggy mind, exciting new failures that keep the blood pumping. Till next time.

“The Flower and the Cod”

Round Round Round along the jeweled fields,
the lily wanders and the poppy springs.
Aroused by the honey nectar they excrete,
the flowers dance in fertile need, yet—

Down Down Down into the deepest depths,
the cods rejoice in violent death.
The bigger fish devours them all;
for them, the sun is useless scrawl.

Here’s a beautiful image to visualise on a rainy day: a gorgeous blue flower in the middle of a turquoise pond. Suddenly, upon closer inspection, you realize that the source of the blue isn’t a flower but a bird and that a malicious greenness, ever-spreading, is conquering yesterday’s turquoise. Now that I think about it, this image isn’t really about a flower in a pond, nor about a dead bird being swallowed by a swamp. It’s about the penetrating Order of forms, which drives the world in bolder directions…I’m joking, of course. Don’t fall for it. I’m a fool. Yet even a fool knows that there is absolutely no Order of Forms in the universe that supposedly exists; only impenetrable walls of random misfortune, chaotic waves of greedy points of interest. That’s how seeds are planted, and that’s why there is both a flower and a dead bird in the swamp-pond. A flowbird in the swampond. I adore such precious trifles. This is “Ararita” in a nutshell.

“Ararita” is precious indeed—she truly made me a better person. Ah yes, she's a "she", by the way. It's true, she made me a better person. I’m an angel now, my friend. Just kidding, just kidding. Did you fall for it this time? I hope not.

“Ararita” is no ornament. “Ararita” is gathered like broken glass from the floor: each shard a tiny cut on your fingers, gradually infuriating you. Oh man, “Ararita” pisses me off. She is really the death of the mind’s wunderbar. No magic remains. All squandered. Finished. I’m not joking—but of course I exaggerate.

“Ararita” blossoms when you deny her the chance to expand. She expands anyway, because that’s how her inner landscape remains immortal. Have you heard of that deep-sea jellyfish that, every time it is stressed or injured, returns back in time, transforming from an old, withered sack of tentacles into a sweet, plump, youthful little drop? That is the real wunderbar! And that is precisely what “Ararita” is not.

“Ararita” remains unmoving in a timeless, ever-expanding straight line. She inspects herself eternally, methodically, curiously, to find the “exact what.” What am I even saying? “Ararita” isn’t some kind of philosophical or artistic pseudo-manifesto. “Ararita” is fermented like Greenland shark meat. The taste of both, a mixture of ammonia and oil. And yet, I truly sympathize with her two protagonists. Protagonists—proctagonists—proct-agonists… there, once again I act like a fool.

And still, even the fool knows these two Small Ideas are up to no good! Surely they mean trouble! In truth, they don’t do anything in particular. They observe. They slip into the Mood—and by doing so, they drain the magic from everything. They drain the magic out of all things, just to slip into the Mood, that place where Wunderbar dwells… and by doing so, by sucking out the magic from everyone and everything, they rob me of my Mood! Imagine that! Those two foul little assholes… I function as their battery, and by draining me, they thrive. Like little blue flowers in a pond, or dead birds in a swamp, they flourish as they bleed me dry. What a nuisance.

But then, why do I love them so much? Oh yes, I adore those two little devils. For devils they are, haven’t you realized yet? They are the right and left brain lobes of Satan… just kidding, just kidding. Shame on me. No, they are merely cogs in the machine, pieces of an organism. No, that’s also a lie. Cogs sometimes rust and stop working. But I don’t think these two will ever be in danger of that. That’s where their bile comes from. What a life! What fascinating little bastards.

What a universe, what a World! A world filled with luxurious silence, a symphony of precision. At the same time, a place of flesh, screams, magnificent slaughter. I love this World of Wunderbar and its glory. I love what it promises. I love its order. I love its chaos, I love its violence. I am in love with its persistence, which turns the flowbird into point and line, the swampond into a surface, the deafening silence into a whispering dog-hum.

That is why I am glad to admire this World through the eyes of the fool, because as the clumsy step falls in love with the discreet puddle, so does Ararita stretches across like a horizon, eternal and unspoiled, immediate and bloodsoaked, proclaiming that "until the movement finds release, let movement rise and never cease"... Yeah, I can vibe with that, I guess. At least, until the wunderbar is drained yet again...then the process starts anew. Man, Ararita really pisses me off so much, that I think I fell in love with her.