Oh, what horrible landscapes are conjured in the dark laboratories of the mind, what terrible and unnatural curvatures of the skeleton, what obscene spectacles of red. All of the burning and the death and the emotional goodbyes that can be imagineered for the sake of empathy. All of that wasted raw humanity which has squeeled pathetically like murdered pigs on so many forgotten mornings across the barons of time, fallow fields in all directions fertilized by these nightmares which persist night after wretched night. When the artist is at war the sound of its pacing down empty and insane streets, boot clacking in a labyrinth the only center, the only end of which, is war.
Morning coffee is interupted by the faintest remnant of the clanging of swords and the consumer’s bliss was ruined. All of a sudden the coffee tasted of blood. Like one loose string in a winter mitten we watch the lie unravel, together we work to dismantle what our selves struggle to challenge but the Television silences the weak attempt, yet always the artist is somewhere behind the scene which the eye flips twice in the process of understanding.
The artist is in a nightvision town under the whistling of bombs and then, in that one moment in which so much changes, in which fragments of metal distribute themselves bluntly through the fine fibers of people’s treasured histories and so many stories are cut so short in this fifteen second news reel style of rendering time and life obsolete. When the commercials come and society was given its directives still the artist thought about the bombs and the nightvision and the severed lines and the pain of… how many people?
Worlds are created and destroyed. People who did not exist before were now already dead. What does an exploded building even look like?
The artist detains these secret collective memories of the things that we have done in a detention facility in the lands to the north of the mind where nobody ever wanders. The artist feeds these criminal histories just enough so they will survive. They are cruelly interrogated again and again. Tell me who you are? What have you done? Why are you here? The artist, furious with the situation they have been forced into, takes all of their aggression out on this figment of our imagination.
At night, after hours of fruitless interrogation, the artist stares for one-thousand miles to some place behind the whiskey walls strategizing the next days maneuvers.
The enemy is restless and persistent. It allows one no rest, no time to sleep. The enemy besieges the individual, forcing a caged existence from which the artist can only gawk out at the enemies horrid form.
The enemy is a seething and awful thing. It is all the self-mutilation that one desires when one knows that what is happening is completely insane and one chooses to accept the responsibility of feeling that which everyone else is afraid to feel. Regret. Anger. Sadness. An overwhelming sense of disapointment. A lingering belief that we have turned the Garden of Eden into Hell meticulously over ages and ages and that there is no escaping this. The enemy is a ruined chance at grace. The enemy is time alone with horrible memories. The enemy is the face of a friend of yours, burning forever throughout the rest of your nights from a burning HummVee because you could never understand that kind of pain.
The Individual War on Terror.
What a flimsy weapon positivity is. What a useless gimmick. One can not well wish away the travesty, yet it is all that the artist has. That and a hope that with understanding, with a processing, with proper articulation, this beast may finally be slain. It has been a hundred year vision that the DADA, through the patience of its practitioners, has fought with this infinitely headed thing, its absurd and whimsical sword impossibly ungainly, the rigid and well defined skin of the thing perfectly organized, impervious to hope.
It eats only money and sews pain into the hides of its people to reap sorrowful harvests with hideous machines constructed like monsters amongst the other nightmares of children, these things preening with guns.
Will this war never end? Begs the artist of the universe at large, pen stalled upon another love letter to nobody in particular, when a grave thought, that it has all been such a magnificent waste, descended upon him in the cold.
The Paper Trail 