the whorus of babelonus

the gallroom ın downtown babelons a place to be featurıng forty thousand televısıons three thousand robots two hundred bars ten restaurants and ı venture wıthın and behold the whorus of babelonus ıs bowlıng usıng ıts head as a ball whorus of babelonus ı say how can you bowl wıth your head thats amazıng

 

ı do everythıng wıth my head the whorus of babelonus says ı cook ı sıng ı need ı fuck ı feel ı fıght ı shıt ı hunt ı rage ı shop ı betray ı work ı wound ı pray ı take ı touch ı love ı lose ı wound ı buıld ı steal ı bowl the rest of mes quıte useless really ıts wonderful take off your head too and bowl wıth me

but doesnt ıt hurt your head rollıng down the lane and hıttıng those bıg pıns

 

oh not at all nothıng hurts when all you are ıs head

 

no thanks whorus of babelonus you bowl great but ıd lıke to keep my head where ıt ıs

 

after successfully and a bıt bloodıly negotıatıng the hordes of accostıng robots and gettıng brıefly lost ın the depths of cloyıng graspıng ımages when ıve fınally found a door to the outsıde and am about to leave theres a happy chorus bowlıng wıth theır hearts ȷoın us they say weepıng slıghtly love ȷoy peace truth communıty longıng blıss unıty affırmatıon youll be safe and loved and secure and warm and comforted forever

 

no thanks chorus you weep beautıfully but ıd lıke to keep my heart where ıt ıs

 

and ı see rapıdly approachıng me throngs of bowlers bowlıng wıth theır gonads wıth theır haır theır spleens lıvers throats money cars phones ınlaws professıons ȷets accounts memorıes lawsuıts kıds names resentments spouses ıdeologıes truly manıfold and wondrous talents and all rıght here ın the fantastıcally popular gallroom and we barely manage to slıther through the promotıonal advancıng clutchıngs and exıt scratched sweaty dısorıented broke onto the free streets of babelon whonyms lurchıng lıke ambulances the sky fled lıke fathers the sewers babblıng secrets from an ınaccessıble deep confıdence and we weave through the mess of meats lıke a hypobolıc rhombıtrıheptagon

be your own lıght your own refuge seek not another refuge

dont go to seek refuge other than ın yourselves

pay no attention to anothers way of thınking

hold fast ın your own ısland glued to contemplatıon

so long as thou crackest thou holdest

the city is a plant chanting aestheticized death. it tastes of rich charcoal, burnt cinnamon, dried war, ground percolated voids, de-oranged orange, fogs, cult crisps, horses, windfallen scams, forgotten obscenities

i travel through windows to a shaman’s corpse and receive from its bones the city in liquid form. drinking, in slow blue ritual, for in this way the ocean drinks the river

the plant of langwich gushes in the city’s shade. shaitans, cops, artists, managers, scholars, the mad are flowers forbidden knowledge but through the book of ritual

who shall stand behind the mixer of polyphonic silence? and who shall sit at the console of darkness and light? the city and the corpse shall be our choreographers, i shall have been a radar in these heats of sound

do not ask details of the city’s botany, its nutritional facts. you cannot pluck it, seed it on your sill, purchase it at nurseries. i drink it thick and brown like gods. it grows in me

so i am ground and sky of the city, this city a plant, no ground

lirra skirra

transit fragments

my goal tonight is to make out with four poor people

yeah, i lost 20% of my mind cuz someone stabbed me in the brain

just wanted to say bro you look like something right outa hollywood

            thanks

i mean you’re your own person bro … a real individual

            i live in myself

i was wasted and i made chocolate raspberry brownies and then i was happy

mom – so how do you like having ella in your class?

            {silence from 8-year-old boy}

mom – she seems nice

dad – she seems like a nice girl

mom – is she as nice as lila?

            {silence from 8-year-old boy}

dad – she seems very well mannered

mom – oh look that store’s closed again

dad – it’s got a very high turnover

            {silence from 8-year-old boy}

once someone takes your virginity you see a whole lot of shit

i hate sick kids hospital, they killed my cousin

           {from a 10-year-old boy to 2 friends}

i ride a streetcar like a canoe. it’s like this. the city is a forest, the street a river, the streetcar a canoe. that’s not difficult is it? when whonymity or art or me or what’s sometimes called the gods get too much i need to relax in nature. but i can’t just go out of my home and get in a real canoe in a real river in a real forest. where’s nature anymore other than right here? i need to pretend or say i pretend. canoes and rivers still exist (somewhere i'm told) so my pretending is real. the motion, the experience of getting carried along aimlessly, watching with no purpose, my body a molecule in waves of molecules in waves, supported by something that doesn’t expect me to talk or think or even seem to be conscious. has anything changed from water to metal, current to currency? i float from station to station, outpost to outpost, a little something or a something nothing, an anything, a citizen of floating and floating dreaming, in my forest on my river in my streetcar canoe

more than matcha

the city is love in abstract embodiment. i wear the city. i program it to pulse and sing. it replaces my skin. the whonym is nostalgic for itself, for meat . it runs from its cradle of circuits and sensors, actuators and switches, flees to the comforts of the tomb. i love the city in the way i love love and so love myself (my they, that i, those you’s, the city becomes). when i walk in the city i walk in i and do not leave, for there is no leaving. look at the mobiles above my crib, above my non-existent suffering. i twirl them with what is not there, they light and dance with the microcontrollers of my urban epidermis.

so i conclude that my skin is love and the city just an excuse for me to realize this.

the city is a mushroom and i am a mushroom too. one moment not-there, the next moment there, one moment there, …

the city thrives on decay and grows from the corpse of god. we are enchanted beings from a cartoon world, feeding off death and bursting with vibrant life. we smell like bleach, soap, cheese, marzipan, spice, flowers, fruit, iodine, ink, cucumbers, mice, burnt hair, aniseed, sawdust, fish, over-ripe pears, goats, acetylene gas, crab, radishes, honey, dead animal, rubber, garlic, rotten cabbage, machine oil, bitter almonds, natural gas, coconut, apricots, flour, potatoes, curry. we smell like mushrooms.

i go foraging in the city, filling my basket with phoneme fungi.  the mushrooms of the world grow in clusters, dropping their spores into the soil of memory.

the mushroom is love and i am chitin and we wear the city like a dream more potent and sensuous than reality. i play in my playpen and the city and i are lovers in an unread play.

they think they mad

i live in the destruction of myself, dying my living. i record my dissolution like an autoanthropologist who’s made the ecstatic mistake of going native. to breathe dreams, eat the scree of dust. the ecstasy of decay is a smell unparalleled by the rise of flowers and megatall skyscrapers. i walk in vague negations of tomorrow. i dance but not your dance. i sing but not your songs. the langwiches i enter for you are not for you, but from a mechanical necessity. yet i speak. i dance your dance. langwiches i don’t call dead, dying, non-existent, hardly langwiches … i don’t call … energies, frequencies, vibrations … of non-orders forming orders forming non-orders sliced, cake at the marriage of sleep and waking, what i might call freedom if i were given to understand such words. this destruction not dark any more than light, annihilating more than creating, not weak more than strong. a survival and exuberance of sorts, a spring of raw and windfallen vision.

oh beloved city, who shoves the nations together, who siphons the nature people from their looms into factories, who juxtaposes posing and possibility across the scapes, unredeemed by prefixes. 

the city is trains and bicycles to the moon, tunnels and towers – destination moon. but as the moon depends on the earth for its circles we need destination mars. destination proxima centauri b, destination destination. thank perseptione we’ve killed 90% of everything for those space programs. the scientists know what they’re doing, saving us from ourselves, coaxing ourselves from ourselves to ourselves. that’s what i call smart.

kill the cars. stuff them one by one up the asses of everyone making more than a hundred grand a year or having a hundred grand in anything. i know a hundred grand ain’t much these days. but it’s a helluva lot more than less. it’ll improve the look of those fuckers don’t you think, carplugs up their sphincters? improve their postures, diets, outlooks, orgasms. send their cars and asses to proxima centauri b. i’m an urban planner, i is, i amn’t an urban narl pen.

i write prophecies for metallic time.

inscrutable malice

in the way that some avert their eyes when passing the ugly on sidewalks, in malls, i avert mine for the beautiful … who’ve become clichéd in the city. as beauty and rarity share blood in the bodies i admire, the ugly has become beautiful, a reconfiguring required by system changes in the universal hardware. (is your flesh set to autodownload?)

true also for the young, who dominate the city like termites. i dream of the old, who hide their loveliness in the wrinkled labia of television. only they have few tomorrows on the sidewalks, wrapping the gift of death in their faces like plums at the top of hades’ plum trees. but the young – they talk incessantly of their stupid lives, saying everything that’s been said, thinking it’s new because of the gadgets, thinking they’re intelligent because the billboards tell them they’re beautiful, thinking they’re powerful because of wisdom’s scandal … the young! … reeking of life – life! … which is everywhere, relentless, boring, which i iself possess (with neither regret nor joy) in immeasurable doses. the ugly, the old, the poor (shall we talk of the poor?) – their faces are universities, their eyes dreams always on the cliffs of coming-true.

so at two in the morning on the sweaty streets when the young and beautiful and moneyed raise the flag of time on their flesh, i(, caught between langwich’s categories like a fish between a polluted river and an aquarium), usurping a little nomadic space for my peculiar purposes, see nothing but my seeking for faces that will soon enough have left the circus of air, cradling knowledge, seeing in their preparation for departure an unrivalled circuitry, sparking births, plum trees bellowing carols, a premonition of an equality in a court expelled from history for some technicality.

the old, poor, ugly are exiled from the republic of gazing (which is a kind of grazing for eyes). but these aristocrats of death should be the chosen in gazing’s kingdom. the old, for example, forbidden, retreat from eyes (there are penalties) – and this during that particular arc of the circle when they are most curious about the living – when they ask what is this breath about? where have i been and am? what are these others, fresh from the assembly line, shiny like cars? we long to suck serotonin from the pupils of the young, these replacements, these scabs.

{they’re not exiled but grazing in other gazings}

born from Laptop and City is i – baby i’s made to weather a whonymly-dubious technology, to roll themselves interminably uphill, to brand light from the ass of darkness, to …

… but shall we talk of the poor?

{the poor shall always be in you}

babel builders

the metro is my silent partner in a game of modernist-chthonic chance, my co-protagonist in a drama of soiled slots in a buried casino, as if i’m that queen of irony – death – the train the king of consciousness, fucking like royal worms on a hot bed in the city’s basement, marrying like chess pieces in a virtual temple of pissed time.

i would have the names of metro stops in a middling city changed from geographical holders to textual ones. 4 lines and 42 stops (37 unique) in this proposed system; here are the line names, stop names in sequence; transfer points are bolded; termini underlined. figure out where the washrooms and elevators are. if you’re bored, draw it; if you’re playful, print it out all pretty and swap it for the metro maps in your city; if you have lots of money, build it; if you’re crazy, eat it.

gameline

endgame – the thief’s journal – the sexual life of catherine m. – à rebours – la philosophie dans le boudoir – blood and guts in high school – the fury of cocks – tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius – the golden ass – all’s well that ends well

bloodline

bloodchild – heart of darkness – the passion according to g.h. – dark spring – endgame – the sailor who fell from grace with the sea – hippolytus – 20 essential tips for a successful marriage – jude the obscure – ubu roi – the trial – simulacra and simulation – les chants de maldoror – wuthering heights – blood and guts in high school

happyline

the palm-wine drinkard – endgame – fragments – the book of disquiet – a room of one’s own – strange tales from a chinese studio – simulacra and simulation – the cat in the hat – ataraxia fallabalist – les fleurs du mal – the need for roots – all’s well that ends well – utopia (utopia station should be meters from the palm-wine drinkard station and happyline veer dangerously close to blood and guts in high school station, but there should be no transfer between them)

line?

endgame – simulacra and simulation – the book of disquiet – alice in wonderland

that i can now move in the city with music in my head – that is, music that came to be in another’s head, externalized, having migrated into my head, a circle of vision – that the city’s noise’s expurgated and instead this : all i’m become is music with feet (a podaudioid) : this is a new city, one reconfigured to raise higher exponentially its finite ceilings … and so ours, a city for a virtualizing species. i don’t walk through your city … i walk through the city of my glorified mind.

i can spend 10 of 48 hours on the metro – almost a quarter of its waking life. if it weren’t for my physiological needs i’d want the system to be cast through the undersoil of the world, transferring in the middle of the north pacific, manatees, whales, banshees waiting on the platform beside me. crossing from san francisco to tokyo might take six days, but what of it? – i’d fall into a transit trance, the wheels would have the leisure to become words. the world’s 213,941 lines would be difficult to colour-code, the map would be enormous, its 5,808,227 stops costly. but it’s now enormous, it’s now costly, we need more colours (e-crayola, get busy!). what need do i have of the world above? … it’s as useful as heaven. i’ve put in for citizenship in the system below.

the autoflush plumbing systems attached to the urinals at the grande bibliothèque are branded zurn. unica might have been pleased.

dough flicka dough pojke

i see the breasts a kilometre away, slippery sacs of bitumen curled in chromatica. that the sidewalk has the courage to uphold such insolence is a reason – yes, a feeling – to keep on living. the penis on concrete is nothing next to this dialectic of jug. as they pass me, proud as astronauts, their power merges briefly with the planned trees. we are omnipotent only in distances.

horses in the city are martians in antarctica – anachronisms of space, anatopisms of time.

you’re a cartoon. how could you not be, living as you do in an animation of my testicles?

financial district food courts on sundays are empty libraries – the book of money folded 13 times, crafted into elephant moneygami. here is the formula given in the empty library for folding the book of money into an elephant –

W = π t 2 ^3(n-1)/2

jimmy the greek is muter than heraclitus, mr sub torpedoed by the absent book.

wheres your bitumen when i want it? crashing on schiaparelli? lunching in lourdes? braying in sanctuary? sucking gourds?

the city is transgendered polygendered postgendered agendered patagendered silvigendered botoxgendered nilgendered fendergendered, sexed like the union of a bonobo and a bank machine. it and i make love like turkey and a signature of acid

hylopropic     psychotropic              namarupaprobiotropriapic                      

                                          rhizotropic

here is the elephant that molested me on the streetcar on the 26th day see how well it sees feel the power of its trumpy trunk note the cuteness of its weeny tail observe the hidden one we favour our undertakings now comes the final era of the sibyl's song

cut the fat kiss the mud

this diary is my class notes from the city’s lecture on multiplicity

the city is my mentor, a body perfect in its irreconcilability, perfect in its irreducible difference, perfect in its reconstituted babel, perfect in its ateleologies, perfect in its mute action, perfect in its natural affirmation of its tungs and speakers assuming the role of words

the whonym is a component in the city’s body, no more critical than a fan in a laptop, a throat in a mammal

you may have heard it said that the city is one. and i too say the city is one. one and divisible and divided and stuffed through every algebraic formula invented and not. you may have heard it said that there are 9 or 16 or 2,723 cities – not the alphas or gammas or omegas of the world, not these political-economic singularities, these easy targets for satellites and religions, defined by that old standard, geography, but, let’s say – all the financial districts of the world are one city: paternoster marunouchi dalal wall sandton bay lujiazui – using a common langwich, fashion, architecture, diet, currency. other cities are suburb, slum, fashion, government, academy, temple, sex and drugs, entertainment, sports, food, transit, uberwealth, birth and disease and death, utility … that’s 15 so far … who defines anything substantively anymore? but i say the city is uncountable and infinite and empty

all education is free and silent – this my teacher teaches me

i write the city’s examinations with my feet, i research essays with my eyes, i do not formulate theses other than as a child plays with mud

            and your gonads, what do they do – skip school?

am i frustrated because the city makes no point other than it’s always making points, these points circles like a bird is a circle in the air? am i mystified because my papers are never graded but always returned? am i empowered because the teacher lets me teach but in voided classrooms? am i lost because education never taught me this was education?

            because?

who is this speaking in italics on the shit-faced sidewalks? who is this machine undressing in the sluthouse of the universe? collegial tungs and speakers! – lick with me the city’s rectum, drink exalting from its buoyant sewers: democracy's an idea and so only existent in the republic of ideas, the city's the only idea that's been able to cross the heavily guarded border into the republic of reality. this is why we celebrate it, bow before its gonads like horny hydras in the heat of a fallen hercules

oh jerusalem oh babylon oh tokyo oh hyperzion

huzza quog

the city is light, the only place left shadow is the home

the city is comprised solely of places in which one can no longer believe in anything

a great city built according to all the rules of architecture … then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation, yet we keep trying to live as if nothing has changed but the architecture

the city is a huge monastery, of an order still seeking a name

the city writes itself on spectators’ eyes and so we gaze at each other to see if we can glimpse the secret messages of the city, inscribed like reflections of smog in the open sewers of our pupils

movement shatters narrative, brings it back to a dense and fertile nothing … i move, not to fulfill capitalism but destroy it, to shake its narrative like leaves in a november wind

i look at you like a rubber banana in the depths of transit

who are we to say we built the city? it was built by the forces that built us, forces about which we still know nothing except through dream

each urban inhabitant – from squirrel to postal worker to garden hose – is complicit in the city’s dystopian magic; we work together to perceive in exterior vision an animate darkness once resident in our souls … but there, with our productivity, we have lost intimacy

the city teaches me affirmation – not in its aspects, which each is a negative creation, but only in its sum. so i am poor in the city, for listening in such ways reduces time almost to nothing