Given by matterhorn

book three IN A SERIES CALLED

• TWO DOLLARS • JKJ ATL

•

GIVEN: MAY 2014

BE STILL. KEEP MOVING

A P R E G N A N T PAU S E B E L A B O R E D B Y A B E L LY F U L O F B A L E F U L P R E S U M P T I O N

two

EAS TER IN THE WE ST END OF ONE OF NO RT H AME RICA’S SO UT HER N STAT ES

TRUTH

IS A MULTIDIMENSIONAL NOTION.

E V E RY W O R D , IF A SK

,A DM

ITS

TO AN IN NA T EC O NT RA R INE SS .

AS WE

grind down to the final years of literate manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s supremacy over tribal man, the limitations inherent in the linear narrative structure of our various living languages begin to show. The pallid, flat insufficiency of any one of our common tongues begins to reveal its age and unravel our intercourse when we must

OVER-QUALIFY EVERY STATEMENT LIKE A LAWYER ( cont inue d on p age 7)

F O U R F I V E

7 IN ORDER TO BRING ANY LIVE THOUGHT TO MARKET.

WE ARE A PART OF A PROCESS BY WHICH DUMB MATTER IS

ANIM ATE D.

WE FEED ON SHIT AND SHIT IT OUT AND CARVE OUR SHIT INTO TOTEMS OF EXTENDED EGO.

ARE WE THE CLEVER BASTARDS WHO MASTURBATED TECHNOLOGY FROM WITHIN THE SICKLY SCROTAL SAC OF SACRED ABSTRACTED PAIN, OR ARE WE MERELY A BYPRODUCT OF IT? THE COMMONPLACE ASCENT OF LIFE ESCALATES ALONG A LOGARITHMIC CURVE INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE INCREMENTAL TICKTOCK BREAKDOWN OF SHIT INTO ENTROPIC MUSH .

THERE IS A SURPRISINGLY PROPER PLACE FOR PSEUDOSCIENCE ALONGSIDE OUR RIGOROUS AND CANONIC INSTRUMENTS OF SCIEN TIFIC METHOD. THESE PARODIES OF SYSTEMIC COMPLETENESS, MAPPED UPON AN ARBITRARY ASSORTMENT OF STARS, ARE THE DARK MIRRORS BY WHICH WE MAY BETTER SEE OUR INCOMPLETE SYSTEMS AS THE DISTORTING LENSES THEY ARE.

OUR DEVICES OF LOGIC HAVE ALLOWED US TO BUILD UPON THE FOUNDATION OF AGES; THE BRICKS OF THIS FOUNDATION ARE BOOKS, WHICH ARE FUNDAMENTALLY A MEANS BY WHICH ONE HUMAN MAY SHARE THE VIEW FROM BEHIND ANOTHER’S EYES. THIS ALSO ALLOWS THE DEAD TO INFORM THE LIVING, AND THUS ENABLES THE RISE OF CIVILIZED MAN. THUS DO WE EXTEND OURSELVES BEYOND OUR MORTAL CHARTER; THUS DO WE TAX DEATH WITH AN ITEMIZED ACCOUNT OF OUR LOSSES. BURIED UNDER MOUNTAIN OF PAPER, WE XI ARE AYET RESURRECTED BY THE BOOK.

BUT WHAT IS OUR MORTAL

CHARTER? WE ARE A CHATTERING RACE OF GOSSIPS AND SNITCHES WHO PUNISH LIARS ONLY FOR THEIR FAILURE OF IMAGINATION. PAST AND FUTURE BELONG TO THE STORYTELLERS, BUT THE PRESENT IS A GIFT WE REFUSE TO UNWRAP.

(continued on page XVI)

We are a living language writing itself into a thousand monkeys. from a tree made of manuscripts still twitching with corrections, excisions, alternate versions, revisions. The grain of the text splinters down to solvefor-x exegeses on our selves in our plurality of singular I-cells. A gentle calculus of genetic automata, rocked like a baby by a generational pendulum governed by an impenetrable, irrational pseudoscience of blood and tides, then iterates a multivalent torus, made hot and fresh

and delicious in a dozen dimensions. We grow up determined not to become our parents. We are absolutely determined that everything about us should be self-determined.

17 We look around and see nothing that does not contain a reflection of our faceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;clearly, this must be a sign that the world has singled us out for a fate none else could read. The path of least probability seems always to be the most painful.

We punish the flesh to liberate our spirit from the path of least resistance. We hit bottom at some point in our search for our true selves, and we realize that all we are is the motion of our own descent through a vacuum; we are but that dissonant whine between nothing and the set of all nothings.

Years later, what sickening vertigo accompanies the unwelcome kiss of an absolute-zero brain freeze? We reel around the slushie fountain until we can sea our find-legs. [sic] we can see. NOW we see how we look from above as we are rolled along the axes of our lives like a metal ball on one of those maze puzzles—you know, where you have to keep very careful, very deliberate balance or else you’ll perish in the pit? But we’re the ball, not the means by which balance is achieved and pit is avoided. We see how obvious and ordinary all our little individual flourishes have been.

NOW

(cont inue d on p age 20)

be . s

reading, thinking and observing, we elevate our minds to planes of lessening noise. By engaging in conversation according to certain tenets of good faith, we read others with a catholic interest. No one is uninteresting; everyone willing to play the game of substantive rapport must be

l l . kee p m .. ov i n g

1. Man is the microcosm. 2. By

given: e mbra

c ed a s a fe llow truths e e k e r. If you c an’t m ode l othe rs ’ mind s w it hin your own m ind w e ll enoug h to s pot the sc am in the ir she llgame of s e lf , then

you haven’t listened well enough. you haven’t listened well enough. 3. It falls upon you to hack the path

that links you both on the human terrain. A predictable interaction insulates you from harm and gives you the privilege of fixing a higher tone of exchange. Small talk makes us small; agreeable disagreement make of us a vast containment of multitudes—we become a landscape of portraits. Truth w i l l e lude yo u u nti l you’re s o wro ng you’re l oath e t o live .

5. Entropy increases as a function

of our voracious appetite for narrative cuisine. Matter crumbles in our hands as we masticate it into pattern. A deliberate aesthetic informs our choice of pattern, and thus do we revise the story of who we are and what kind of world this is.

A set of rules established as mealtime etiquette functions here by analogy: chew before you swallow; allow each morsel to unpack its full nutritive library before its richness is digested in the reductive acid bath of your intestinal mind. What waste remains as ordered brown ordure is entirely a function of your ability or inability to perceive..

7. One benevolent conceit among many

we may employ is that everything in our lives happens for a reason. But it would be fruitful to understand that everything happens for a reason because we use the protocol of reason to interpret the things we see happening; we see causality because we use the proprietary language of reason—which is narrative—to render

20 21

[A gruesome clip exhumes itself from its grungy fin de siécle glacier of non-lethal lifestyle interface (once known as MTV): a baby’s head lolls atop a grossly overpaid specialist in vibrational lockpicking—it is

engaged in an act of public escapism, chained and caged. Its voice is a sound like a million souls crying out for a third encore and then shutting up and going home; and everyone has a wood-grinder

for an esophagus, and down their hungry gullets go every forgettable mediocrity they’ve individually purchased from the media marketers of their day. And the voice says something about being a rat in a cage being

enraged, but really the rage only ever comes when the rat can see its cage from the outside—and not only that, but see it for what it is.]

•

∞ ‰

ẉ ḢḀ Ṱ Ⱥ ṝế

Ẅ ệˤ ʡ

Given the right conditions, Life is inevitable. Given thumbs, and the ability to Speak across generations, we are inevitable. As we organize our thoughts, We break down the world. We mirror ourselves in Machines of animated matter. What is the issue Thereof this union? To walk on land, Creatures born of ocean Had to learn how to Carry the ocean inside them.

What will we be when We can carry our entire History within ourselves? Remember: we evolved From primates, but There are still Primates. We will be as pollen, Expelled from our Flowering earth, Which will be Withered in our wake,

Time is our medium, As water is for fish.

As has happened And will happen again In countless iterations,

What would it look like If we could peek our Heads out of time?

World without end, Amen amen.

And we see how vulgar we truly are, how common; oh, how it rends our hearts to lose our special blankey with the corner we’d suck on in the primordial night of our darkened bedroom. Where once we felt so designed, so prized, now…now it’s like this: we’re stuck in endless, infinite-lane traffic, going nowhere; we rage and cry in our cars, burning fuel with impotent despair, until eventually we die. We see how ubiquitous it is, that sense of uniqueness we’ve assumed as our birthright, unquestioningly, from way back within the thick walls of our fortress of solipsism. It hurts like hell for a while, and we howl like animals, because this is how it feels when our animal sense of self is finally,

fatally effaced. It takes a little while for your eyes to adjust to the clarity, and your limbs may falter under a lightened gravitational load, but soon you’ll discover all your new superpowers, like x-ray vision and telepathic control over rats, and you won’t miss your Kryptonite keepsake of identity at all. A cartoon by B. Kliban comes to mind; a man on the beach is staring down at the imprint the back of his body has made in the sand. Here’s an extra credit art project: do a self-portrait by creating advertisements for all the products you buy on a regular basis. Tailor them each for the target market of you, and try to make the ads such that they’d be unlikely to work on anyone else. J. K . J O H N S O N 0 4 . 2 0 . 1 4