He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before.
It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder
inside him that supported something else inside him.
He was unsure what the thing inside him was
to eliminate all future temptation.
When he smoked marijuana he tended to masturbate a great deal,
He’d cure himself by excess.
the memory of his lack of basic decency.
(from DFW Infinite Jest)
I am not what you see and hear,
a truly unparalleled slinger of shit.
Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.
The urinal trickles behind the voices’ small echoes.
And who could not love that special and leonine roar of a public toilet?
Where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions
and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated.
To make the long process of reading David Foster Wallace’s Infite Jest more exciting joyous sensible bearable (and because I am currently finding out there exists new thresholds of boredom I knew nothing about) I have decided to have some fun while at it. I will lift/copy his lines, picked up randomly (or so I think), and make some short conceptual poems out of them. I will not alter the order of text as it appears in the novel. I will also share some thoughts about conceptual poetry, especially on ownership: I have always found the apostrophe (as used to indicate the possessive case) confusing.
Why? I am always in experiment with myself, and outside myself (which is very possible, you see) in seeking for new frontiers, to mean I am always on the look out for metastatic homes I have never imagined possible, and someone else made a surrealist text generator…so why the hell not?
Travelling, wondering, and imagining almost places. Places can come to you. And, I’m learning to be a junky. It’s not as easy art.
I do not own this text. I do not own this text. And I do not own this text. It will be reproduced here without the publisher’s consent. Here is the first instalment.
inside the ideogram of string
lapping me twice before the memory recedes.
My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics
are better than your own,
I’m not a machine.
Eight eyes have become blank discs
that stare at whatever they see.
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
The girl took Hoshino to a nearby love hotel, where she filled up the bathtub, quickly slipped out of her clothes, and then undressed him. She washed him carefully all over, then commenced to lick him, sliding into a totally artistic act of fellatio, doing things to him he’d never seen or heard of in his life. He couldn’t think of anything else but coming, and come he did.
“Man alive, that was fantastic. I’ve never felt l like that,” Hoshino said, languidly sinking back in the hot tub.
“That’s just the beginning,” the girl said. “Wait till you see what’s next.”
“Yeah, but man that was good.”
“How good?”
“Like there’s no past or future anymore.”
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
Hoshino looked up, mouth half open, and gazed at her face. “What’s that?”
“Henri Bergson,” she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. “Marne mo memelay.”
‘I’m sorry?”
“Matter and Memory. You ever read it?”
“I don’t think so,” Hoshino replied after a moment’s thought. Except for the special SDF driver’s manual he was forced to study – and the books on Shikoku history he’d just gone through at the library – he couldn’t remember reading anything except manga.
“Have you read it?”
The girl nodded. “I had to. I’m majoring in philosophy in college, and we have exams coming up.”
“You don’t say,” Hoshino said. “So this is a part-time job?”
“To help pay tuition.”
She took him over to the bed, stroked him all over with her fingertips and tongue, getting another erection out of him. A firm hard-on, a Tower of Pisa at carnival time.
“See, you’re ready to go again,” the girl remarked, slowly segueing into her next set of motions. “Any special requests? Something you’d like me to do? Mr. Sanders asked me to make sure you got everything you want.”
“I can’t think of anything special, but could you quote some more of that philosophy stuff? I don’t know why, but it might keep me from coming so quick. Otherwise I’ll lose it pretty fast.”
“Let’s see . . . . This is pretty old, but how about some Hegel?”
“Whatever.”
“I recommend Hegel. He’s sort of out of date, but definitely an oldie but goodie.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“At the same time that I am the content of a relation, I am also that which does the relating.”
“Hmm . . .”
“Hegel believed that a person is not merely conscious of self and object as separate entities, but through the projection of the self via the mediation of the object is volitionally able to gain a deeper understanding of the self. All of which constitutes self-consciousness.”
“I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about.”
“Well, think of what I’m doing to you right now. For me I’m the self, and you’re the object. For you, of course, it’s the exact opposite – you’re the self to you and I’m the object. And by exchanging self and object, we can project ourselves onto the other and gain self-consciousness. Volitionally.”
“I still don’t get it, but it sure feels good.”
“That’s the whole idea,” the girl said.
I am insensible to the use of electronics wish everything was a fat rat with a winding cable at the back, what I’m I doing standing naked at the railway museum? all the products in the fridge have gone bad there are more sick people in this house I am yet to learn how to arrange furniture I dream now of water flowing out of ampersands. Where does a man go to beyond the dreams of castration? I cannot find the switch that flings us all back into darkness I hear more and more laughter above the ceilings soon they will come to my bed and cut off my hands so many accidents waiting for my permission and I salute them like monarchy grace. What is a baby’s cot doing in my room? why would you expect a man like me to love you? I am the switch made of nothing but jerkin gherkin commas that plunges us back into darkness. We are in a dream and you are chasing me with a spiked weapon torch light asking me to smell your underwear and love you slowly arrange your ointments into groups of three let’s face it if you were really compulsive you’d know what to do with my furniture and restless leg symptom. And these are things I used to enjoy until you sent me a letter saying my favourite living politician had been assassinated 30 years back. It is time to isolate sleep wake up smell each other for treason why is there blood in the toilet bowl? We are in a dream the confetti made up of the opening sequence to Hiroshima mon amour only this time the dust is tablet powder from the bathroom cabinet where there are more contraceptives than painkillers. In the morning I buy you a dozen red roses tied up in elevator cable. In an attempt to reach you I am going up and up and thinking of falling look at you immaculate smiling like a statue that is yet to be excavated part of the lip broken.
the H base, the plain, the double S
like from a house with no children,
bold leap inwards, from your bones
to my dreams and so forth, stillness and bad
photography, a room with a high ceiling,
parts of a collective in Rodin’s studio,
the excavation smell of your sex, draped lip,
black and brown skin, a leaning
towards the earth, weak waist, bison legs,
when it rains for two minutes then back to
a long sun, long urn, monograph, unsigned,
not seen enough of gardens and osterias,
undedicated machine, the white of immolation
doves in Mathews, a short tongue, body
spread like slow speech. a turtle
dreams she has come to hatch.
lack of hair a bardic monopoly
down down the collapsible H base,
the wizard spell of your name.
In a Corolla we pass a grave without a headstone – a man under a pile of rocks set where a dirt road unwinds. His rest is a storey of the arrangement of stone and the music of tyre on dirt. He must have been a traveller before this, a man like I am. He is asleep in the carriage air of certain cold cafes, minding his business. And he can decide to make his way to a nearby waterfall, digging, clawing, crawling. Or he can be my fingers when I bend down to touch the water, the hydra laughter in the Ultraviolet of 58s parked in the purses of whores in a strip club.
He could be a traveller like I am. “One-track minds may lead to their origins. Perhaps I am still in utero, hung up in/by my delivery.” Travelling the world and contemplating a dead man, or what I imagine to be the space occupied by a dead man, thinking about a wine list. This could be the after-life, a secret bunker, the hurt locker of a white elephant.
(I’d like to be accessible, but I am only human). The borders in the sun, unremarkable, the road like any other, there is no beauty here, just a simple grave, my friends and I in a white Corolla, outside a park for white elephants. An unmarked grave is a book of poems.
Thank you for the painkillers. Go to all the places that can be Metropolitan. Sitting in a Somali restaurant on Standard Street I see that my dream was right: rain water is black after all. This city is a reservoir of pain. Leave this place. Go, travel, see the world. See all the white elephants, the unremarkable Corollas, see all the graves in private cemeteries built in the middle of public roads. Go. Find yourself a companion and a word processor. Sleep when you can, for some white elephants are CGI. These are the most beautiful, with bands of light, in places marked as genre film. As for me, I am a carrier, emotion and history do not affect me. If they do it is in the fashion of dust settling on a grave after all the mourners have gone and the wreaths discarded. All I want is a room like this one, with big windows and long paragraphs, the faint smell of fresh paint, an article in the paper about a girl who sings opera, and a fake weapon. There will always be the brief stories of strangers in newspapers.
I want it be known that I offered you all of the bloody goldmines south of Kinshasa, where a man who has been posing as my father says there is stone,
that I had palms like snakes in the dark,
that I offered you a history of alternates moving like burning coal in the dark.
The day was just another night denied to us,
I was willing to give up all the rage
I saw your face in the sleepy faces of immigration officers
Crossing Malaba, Namanga, Nimule, Soroti-
how awkward all our border towns have three syllables,
a trinity of unbecoming in a land of false unities.
I want it be known that I wanted a union. I gave up
my money to a shady dealer and money launderer so that you could have something
for your coin collection,
I made water colours, studies of a bird hatching on rocky grounds, a bird with long pink feet,
the kind of pink under your nails.
I want it be known that I listened to your footsteps in the ground,
an animal used to picking up the music of dead feet, a
nation walking on wheelchairs in a jazz improvisation.
I want it be known that I looked for clues in novels written
by lonely men, I subscribed to the blogs of pan-Africanists and conspiracy theorists,
I bought flowers at the city market and dumped them in downtown Nairobi
when I saw more flowers blooming out of the body of a beggar as third degree burns, pus, broken limbs, fistula.
I want it be known that I looked up to see birds mating,
I watched for signs of your homecoming all over the open fields of grass,
each drop of rain in November was a note in the music
lock of my sheet roof, I went up to the toproof to receive the god music first hand.
I want it be know that skin is just an intermediary, I was willing to offer you flesh tar warm geysers.
I want it be known that I am a young man who has considered suicide, magic carpets lala lala lala floating above the wind turbines of Turkana.
I want you to know that I gave up complex and elaborate
fantacies starring dolls and an Ethiopian Airline stewardess.
All the places in our bodies are loading zones packed wolf dogs,
I want it be known that I was willing to give up my fear of drowning
to investigate the heightened gloom caught between your purchase eyelashes.
Yet yet yet yet yes I want it be known lala lala lala
It is possible to drown in air:
close your eyes and take a ride in PSV zephyr along Ralph Bunche road during the mist of zero visibility.
I want it be known that you talk in your sleep, you quote Negritude, Taban Lo Liyong, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o,
and in the morning you only quote French romantics.
I want it be known that your high school French and German
dismembers, disarms me like our fathers rotation grazing in Mt. Kenya, a woman scattering body seeds in newly dug up soil.
I want it be known about your toes, how selective evolution has been across the length of your body, about insecurities with your big feet and open toes.
How you change on the inside and sing lala lala lala of the day you turn into Gregor Samsa the Lala.
I want it be known that you are the daughter of a linguistics professor who is the progeny of a fisherman.
I want to come back to river fountains and white plume transit Bongo flava and an elaborate fantasy about our first daughter.
I want it be known that your biography is a naming of streets, avenues and lanes of Nairobi as anagrams of your name and the collective day you were lala lala lala discovered in a body bag.
I want it be known that I followed you to Lamu, and that there is not much difference when sex happens in a UNESCO heritage site.
I want it be known that we might have lived in ruins all our lives but kites took us to a godlala second lover place, where the air is a place for mating eagles.
I want it be known that I was willing to shock you with my ignorance of African ideals and my fine grasp of Dante and Irish folk songs.
How I levitate between one hell to another when I think of your absence.
I want it be known that I talked to your body in the dark about tropical fish, hoping you would dream in colour.
I waited in vain for your after-dark lala body to reply, although I could tell from the soft murmuring of your fish mouth that you were still keeping house.
Sometimes a body in the cold room might cough or laugh in remembrance of love laughter.
I want it be known that the body can be an abandoned pit, a quarry for the new Nairobi municipal garbage dump.
I want it be known that you have turned me into a zoologist, searching for signs of life in the moor of mist without rhyme.
I want it be known that I enact a play in sleep, I talk to myself about things I wish to hear you say to me. I talk myself to sleep, which is as close
as I will ever come to your great peace sleep.
I want it be known that I am guilty for a number of fires in my university between March and May, starting with the linguistics department,
a sign of love that you were too busy sleeping to notice.
I want you to know that each time a new planet is discovered I hope you will be a satellite around it.
My friend and I, we walk in a straight line, with him in front, never changing this formation. His voice is the open field of my voice. We walk down to a river that flows with black water and set up for fishing. I don’t imagine that the river springs from a black mountain, although as I child I believed in a black mountain. I used to run into dark and narrow corridors and think of a place with black mountains. I’d set the right conditions for fainting because I loved how the mind, after waking up from loosing consciousness, juxtaposed memories in the spaces where it had lost time. For me this was like watching a film. My mind remains a child setting up a heli and a helipad from Lego bricks and never wondering that it should ever take off. I remain a man of bad analogy. “He is woken up by somebody waking up inside him…”
He talks about film and I talk about poetry. I suppose we talk about the same things. I tell him about my problems with difficult rhymes. I tell him of how seeing ‘archangel’ and ‘responsible’ on the same line in a poem stirs up all sorts of irresponsible things in my head, things I never seem to be able to grasp at. I find that we share things that we are never able to grasp at, like trying to catch leaves as they fall in a storm. He doesn’t seem to understand my difficulties with rhyme. He is a great actor, he appears to use his ability for fluff to explain how everything works. I know he thinks of this as wisdom. We construct a city of white decadence and leave it unfinished. We never mean what we say to each other. I might be the one to blame for this. I find myself listening to the thoughts in my head and in trying to come up with the right words and expressions I loose time and fill up this space between thought and speech with fluff, white teeth and a throwing around of arms, like a bad actor. Often, when we do not understand each other, we talk about women. When I cannot please a woman I resort to fluff. I take off my hat and show her J.G. Ballard tap dancing on my head. There is a way I can pull the skin on my head so that he falls flat on his ass.
I don’t expect to catch any fish. I’m just happy to see children pissing from the bridge and the river winding downstream. It can get so lonely in my head I have to have decibels next to me. I am using him the same way he is using the black river. I use him as an entryway, a dark and narrow corridor. I know he never expects to catch any fish. A black river is a bad actor. He laughs when I tell him to be my psychoanalyst. I’ve been having dreams about waking up near a mountain that blooms into a butterfly whose eyelids close to show the words ‘infinite jest’.
it is not unheard of in the sphere
of things, to think of myself as Sub-Sahara,
and you as the dunes of Wahala.
there are dates on your tongue when we kiss,
it is my task to get rid of the seeds.
when you smile
is like a watercolour
of an abortion clinic.
