Vitiligo
----------
Skin is an organ—the largest organ in fact an organ of apparent continuity in actuality broken at every micron by crevices, craters, mounds, pores, volcanoes and sporadic eruptions – this is what Vitiligo said. Vitiligo is a horse who would often speak in English to reclaim his lost European ancestry. He would often speak, mouth full of grass-- “hat mat god damn fish confusion sustains art confidence buggers it”.
----------
Skin is an organ—the largest organ in fact an organ of apparent continuity in actuality broken at every micron by crevices, craters, mounds, pores, volcanoes and sporadic eruptions – this is what Vitiligo said. Vitiligo is a horse who would often speak in English to reclaim his lost European ancestry. He would often speak, mouth full of grass-- “hat mat god damn fish confusion sustains art confidence buggers it”.
Vitiligo
is also a disease of the skin where patches of skin living in the periphery
start losing their political inclinations and begin to reflect every bit of
light they are exposed to without absorbing anything. Well, complete apolitical asocial is for
albinos who originated from Luddites, for the Vitiligo-afflicted it’s an
archipelago of color and non-color.
“Spotty” some would say but they must understand that paleness and a
non-color are not the same. Again that’s not me it’s all Vitiligo speak. I am
often happy sitting by the stream called history and not really noticing
anything occasionally pulling out a long grass stem and nibbling grimacing at its
spooky sweetness-- probably Vitiligo is diabetic and has taken a leak on these
grasses myriads of times making them go sickly sweet. Too late now that the
barn is pretty far and so is the bougainvillea-clad water well. Confusion helps
you to not notice many a things but some always push the curtain away and
intrude; a vivid green cyan and yellow locust for example alighting on a
shoulder disjointed from sense of structure.
Vitiligo
is a ghost horse at best no one could exist logically with some part here while
the others riding forgotten asteroids escaping pull of nature or Vitiligo is a
strayness imbibed in desert sand for river or beach sand only knows hostility
of water strain and claw marks eliminating each other for eons ongoing you see
a history full of struggle is alright but for a unit of history i.e. an object
or organism at any level of complexity providence must take over and rule
either you belong to this or that you can’t be both bird and fish I know you
will talk about Paramecium about Platypus but aberrations do not make society
you see.
Too
late that Vitiligo suddenly detaches his mouth from the context of grass and
says “dingo bouillabaisse ravioli a color is ambivalent and glows when excited
but darkness is a stream of utmost solidity which knows no excitement no taste
but digests everything to annihilation even when you throw the night vision of
a coyote at it’. It’s not that it needed saying I have even seen his non-color
glowing in days of moody rejections his political patches unable to pacify
their neighbors despite their throaty neighing. I know by not noticing history
that someday he will bite a chunk off my face and yet not being familiar to
history and even Luis Pasteur and Robert Koch I remain placid.
Vitiligo
is a male horse and often maleness in horses does not go down too well with the
society and business you see male horses can’t race their balls obstruct them
at best they can be used as studs but for a horse with a condition it’s not
considered too polite to talk about their imposed cessation from the gene pool.
Let’s talk about an alternate future then about being a dreg horse pulling
carriages full of horse manure. It’s not bad in hindsight—is it-- makes sense
too doesn’t it --philosophers carrying their own manures and dropping some here
and there in mud in harvests in butcher shops during civil war selling horse
meat-- you see philosophy always needs a bed better if the bed is made of
friction and confusion where it’s minced ground pulverized to a state of
liquidity a mind will reshape it someday according to its own shape. I know it is all insane even Vitiligo is
that’s why I have been given this job to kill him.
The
world never needed art it just needs a sense of art that can be sold to utter
strangers to art can be converted into fashion statements true confusion is
anti-marketing at best a short-term sense of confusion can be used to build an
atmosphere of insecurity and then relieved of it with newer products. Sell east
to west and west to east and then sell the east sold to west to east announcing
a newness that has recently adhered to it making it more exotic and let’s say
more relevant in these changing times. I know skin is just an organ and in art
it’s not polite nowadays to talk about its pigment-driven reality in medical
business melanoma is alright but in other terms the thickness or thinness of
integument should actually matter.
Vitiligo
tells me once he was free of his affliction Garibaldi rode him in those times
on his boat all for exhibition on nauseating waves and after reaching the shore
rode him down to the smithies where the hooves were shod in lead for lead is
the color and texture of history heavy and seeping leaching percolating forever
into your ego and it is endowed with a sense of direction so what if the
direction is ever downward ever succumbing more and more to the concept of
gravity and thus acknowledging levity as a logical counter thesis. Vitiligo
says patches of his skin took the lead and retained their pigment but he
rejected some consciously and those became non-color. It was down to choice you
see I was a destrier once way different from rounceys and coursers my ego
couldn’t let the lead take over. I don’t know what to believe you see the story
seems a bit too tattered at the edges it’s easier to trust a philosopher than a
story with funny edges. That’s speaking in tongues why don’t you say it—a book
too well read is not to be trusted.
I
am inclined to leave now after sending a round through his thick mottled skull
seeing him drown in his rancid brain under the horse chestnut tree shedding its
foul odor and thorny fruits…
What’s
that?
That?
A dispenser
What
does it dispense?
History
Why
would anyone need history?
To
build context
Why
would one need context?
To
embed objects and make them meaningful
Vitiligo,
the ghost pain. Again. So is context subject? If so how can one deal death to
it? I can accept death of object as such at least to join the mourning crowd in
rain and despair and feast. Death to subject death to context isn’t it an
oxymoron? If subject is dead where exactly do you find a wall a window a home a
crowd where do you get the space to fit in? If you don’t fit do you imagine
yourself to exist in actuality? Vitiligo smiles his putrid pathetic blunt
smile; a thing born must die context subject anything existence nonexistence
doesn’t matter. Don’t you get mystic it’s no use chaos does disintegrate an
object but tell me how a context is disintegrated? A subject is not exactly
born you see not physically if the disintegration takes place it’s only in the
concept of it inside a disintegrating brain an idea a value doesn’t die it may
change at most but no death no effing death…
I
recline on the chestnut trunk ignoring foul smell ignoring the ugly fleshy
thorny nutshells even ignoring his rancid brain feeding rapidly evolving flies
and maggots question is will they talk if they how would I find my way amidst
this crowd of insane thoughts…
Perhaps
Vitiligo is just a thought and the creator of a thought is a brain collecting
ingredients from a world known to it where a yellow bus stops outside the
Yellowstone and is already pre-enamored with the concept of giant sequoias
continuing to grow for thousands of years after taking off from ash laden earth
where ghosts of predecessor forests burnt by Indians now have created a context
for the myth of a redolent phoenix. Now
when you mention concept a concept is part alien you see it’s neither here nor
there it’s both a bird and a fish because a brain makes a concept partly on
physicality and partly on ambiguity which is directed by history, mystery,
mysticism a sense of wonder and surrender.
Vitiligo
says he truly is an unbeliever who is a whole self by himself in reality who
has learnt the method of detaching a concept from ambiguity and thus his self
is not controllable and is in no need to die just for losing something as trivial
as context that I should show some respect and refrain from using my gun as his
self is never that objective goat munching on anything and everything with
equal savor. I am the bite you see not attached to a mosquito or a repugnant
wolf. I am a fence-sitter have always been and find no reason to jump forward
or back and unless the recoil of my gun makes a true destitute out of me I
decide to sit by the flow of history beneath this foul smelling horse-chestnut
amidst ghastly fruits lying everywhere and he calls them fruit of knowledge oh!
is it so I say to you buggers you believers and nonbelievers always need to
impart some mystic quality on objects to impress well I am not impressed to me
death is an end and that’s it and it can happen to physicality and who cares
what happens to ideas values I am merely here to kill and leave the scene
behind freed from consequences and meaningfulness and I am not at all disturbed
by it as long as I am the master of my own thoughts. Self is about interest if
not mastery alone… and Vitiligo fits there somewhere in the scheme of interest
but mastering him is an ordeal and when not looking at history I am not worried
about him biting off a chunk of my face and slowly chewing it and my torn part
quivering with a ghost pain in his now dead maw it’s still in my interest to
listen and gauge his insanity as I have seen patches originating near my finger
tips after I went to elect my interest in a duly secluded booth.
Yet
I am here to kill him and stop this madness assaulting my ego with its
maddening tendrils spreading through the integument through mounds crevices
pores craters volcanoes and eruptions…
Organ
donors
It’s
a forest alright. You see trees even I see them and the undergrowths dense
obtrusive swampy patches miniature in size but not malice and there are insects
and leeches and a pack of dingoes an occasional leopard a shallow river a
kingfisher now visible now not and it’s merely an organ donation camp we will
be donating our old kidneys valves an occasional heart and they even have
arranged for harvesting neurons.
It
was bitter there you see low income groups living in ghettos eyes set in
grills and limbs masquerading as jacket hangers voices crooning tunes detached
from lyrics snatched in miscarriages and then came the psychoanalysts who would
teach us about anxiety about totems and a chilly river that they said flows
through our nerves without us ever knowing it and that dreams are for all and
winter is for those who could afford it.
Of
course no one can afford winter no one can afford burial under a leaden sky
dispensing wet ashes when no coal smolders anywhere in the known world yet we
die of asphyxiation in this rarefied dreamworld that didn’t need any taxes be
paid you see we even grew beards and shaved looking at each other for no object
can describe itself until another object comes along to describe it and it’s to
the tune of something Geroge Oppen once said dear old George who would chisel
his way through a piece of wood and would see how the edges clash and the
meanings lost in shavings resist cadence and cadence in music is about finality
that’s a what a nonnative English speaker like me should know for finality is
almost always about acceptance about inhabiting a dead space while the shavings
fail to burn and simply rot when the affordable spring raises its head from
under the snow.
Scattered
in benevolence that’s what shavings are and then you obscure them with feelings
with pain not realizing pain is a lonely expression that fails to touch though
its concept travels from face to face in a charade ever oozing vague memories
contemplating pain as such and then you enter into night picking up pieces in
dark not recognizing any but picking up anyway crumbling some in eagerness.
‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’ George Oppen, Of Being Numerous: Section 1
Yes,
I remember the ruined window and even sitting there looking at a dusty carousel
broken scattered giant cogs the animals faded only the memory of their
rotations clinging somewhere indeterminate in their frozen stances as if they
all will come back to life if they could afford a winter but I don’t remember
the old town the abandoned shacks and the earth and the salamander speaking you
see the Spring obscured it all.
You
see the forest and even I see it even through this confusing transliteration
and a leopard returns with a rabbit in its maw dripping bold gray lines all
over it was and it always is about the grace of the hunter versus the grace of
the hunted hunger never figures in it and when it all ends mercy is just distant
cicada drones and we are here in this organ donation camp that even has a facility
for preserving empathy.
