The history of the cocktail has its roots in the XVIII Amendment. There was a shortage in the supply of good alcohol. Soda Jerks found they had a new life as mixologists watering down the unpalatable taste of bath tub gin with sweet syrups and juices in order to make desire as sweet as possible. This kind of history is a vice.
The vice squad patrols history and recently it has taken to revising, in so many liberal forms: revisionist, revisiting, reinventing the winners and losers to find out if the golden rule holds water.
In the 15th century, modern Gaul, or the Iberian peninsula had a rampant desire for G-d. Social engineering rendered flesh into ash. It seems this is a history of viciousness. Still, desire works itself into the equation, on both signs of the operand, there is the fact of intervention: one man hand god hang man the other. Burning things isn’t new in human history.
There’s the quest for fire, to burn is to control, maybe Benjamin meant the burning bush instead of Adam’s power for bringing things to life in the garden, to life is to be burned, man’s a weatherproofing. Without fire we’d still be living in mud huts.
Fire is a chemical change– raw energy desires fuel and renders it into carbon. We refer to ourselves as carbon based life forms.
Celan uses the term black milk in his poem Todesfugue. Being poetic means being misread. The black milk of Celan’s Todesfugue isn’t a metaphor, it is the fact that milk with ash turns black. This is a concrete fact in an openly metaphoric body.
There’s room for intervention: what does desire have to do with it? Without spending too much time describing unfathomable reasons– there was the desire of history running into the desire for scapegoats.
I wonder if marketing can be applied to human tragedy – how’s it possible to sell destruction? It’s the 21st century and the sale is on for
ribbons–
flags–
experts– resolutions–
plan(e)s–
chiefs–
panels–
reviews–
committees–
alert levels–
supply–
budgets–
support–
bases–
effort–
(extraordinary) rendering–
combatants (invented or otherwise)–
parliaments–
constitutions–
G-d (wholesale desires)–
elections–
distance–
[the] dream (A- or otherwise)–
medals–
the ____ of one–
____ strong–
fliers–
literature–
[paul] wolf[ensohn] [blitzer]
‘you sending the wolf?’
‘Oh– you feel better– motherfucker?’
‘Shit negro– that’s all you had to say.’
There was a debate in the poet circle that [we]’re responsible for the war. Curiously this is a desire too. However a stretch for the poetic imagination – or otherwise engaged consciousness – the poet’s desire for a space in society to be more than fanciful abstraction – a heart ache in prosody – it is the control of language that makes commodities of destruction in short supply. Price figures – a return on investment – only if you collect every soul. What is the return on the written word?
Ancient societies believed their language was sacred and that writing it down would kill the word. Word is telling me that I’ve written 620 words (now 623). Being a writer is bloody work.
Alcohol as interlocutor presents a simple challenge: how honest should we be with each other?
‘You’re Jewish?’ Yes. ‘Look, I don’t mean any disrespect, but believe me when I say some of my dearest friends are Jewish.’ It’s ok, I get that a lot. ‘What?’ Sounding like a Jewish father from Brooklyn. ‘Have you been to D.C.?’ You mean the Holocaust museum. ‘Yeah, did you love it?’ No. I’m not sure that’s something you can love. ‘Well that’s not what I meant’ Of course not. ‘But how moving, I took my oldest daughter and she cried by the end of it.’
This presents a certain challenge in regard to memorials. What is to be their intended effect? I don’t think that tears are the end all and be all of a memorial. If A desire to lubricate our eyes exists, then history is full of wasted tears thanks to repetition.
I really didn’t like it. ‘Why?’ It’s like the Disneyland of Holocaust memorials. ‘That’s terrible.’ I know, but go to Yad Vashem. ‘Why? Well I mean why do you like it more.’ It’s not a question of like, it’s a question of breath. I’ve never felt, even when drowning in the ocean, that this was the first breath in my life, until I walked through Yad Vashem, and had to learn to breathe again.
Paul Klee gave Benjamin a painting called Angelus Novus
Benjamin went on to write about this angel: ‘A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’
Benjamin went on to say ‘To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’ Maybe marketing is about creating a moment of danger between need and desire. The hapless instant when what you have isn’t enough and that which is desired is all there really is. The materialism of historic desire can be then understood as that which makes man most emptiness when destruction is the only satisfactory response bridging the gap between desire and need.
When J-‘s father was alive he would call me his white son. I had then as I do now my own father. I took comfort in knowing that I was a white son to a black father. In Last of the Mohicans Chingachook says ‘where are they taking my white son?’ when Hawkeye is being lead away. Where is my black father today? I’ve never had the desire to be black or even a white son to a black man. However, there was a certain comfort in knowing that the chasm between black and white could be bridged by fathers and son. I’ll extrapolate this to include mothers and daughters. Finally let’s just say people. This too is in my imperfect past.
I’ve slaughtered 1244 words now, twice that which came before. Writing is a bloody preoccupation.
When I was 19 and working in a law office I began to do drugs with a Jewish lawyer from Canada that had a penchant for speed which he called super lawyer juice. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t even enjoyable. He wasn’t all that sane. One day while driving to get a burrito he started the car and the radio came on. ‘You know you’re getting older by how much talk radio you listen too.’ I was glad to be young.
The dictionary defines Commute as ‘to give in exchange for another.’ Solitude for the road. Time for money. Imagination for servitude. During commutes I started listening to talk shows. This was how I exchanged the road for people. I didn’t know it then and I deny it now but it’s not always my preferred state of being – alone. This he probably didn’t know. Just as well he might’ve tried harder to keep in touch when I was done with such a dangerous pace of life.
‘The dead only know one thing, it’s better to be alive.’ Of the lines from Full Metal Jacket (unofficially the official film of the marine core) this one sticks out to me. There’s a lime pit full of corpses executed. Eddie Adams snapped this photograph
During the Vietname war. He won the Pulitzer for this image and it became a firebrand during the 60’s. He never hung this it in his office. As a matter of fact he wanted to forget it. Kerouac said I spent half my life writing On The Road and the other half living it down. No one took anything he wrote quite as seriously as On The Road because it didn’t have the same spiritually charged experience for them. It’s dangerous to come out swinging.
Of that which is forgotten about images, the prisoner being executed had just blown up a building filled with the executioners family. This is a desire for biblical justice. Hamurabi would be proud.
My grandmother had a twin. Besides the memory of a twin that she was too young to remember and only exists through the stories her parents told her while they were alive she has a scar that serves as an umbilical cord. Hades would be proud. A man claiming to be a doctor came to immunize the two of them. He injected something in their backs, close to the spine. My grandmother survived her twin died. My grandfather hunted this man down and shot him in the middle of the village square. This went unnoticed by authorities. Hamurabi is proud. I’m here because of chance.
Desire works itself into everything. Everything can be placed in two buckets: needs and desires. When needs are commodified into variant grades then they become desires. We desire a better toaster, more stylish than the one we have. We desire a faster car when there’s no reason for having such because there are restrictions on the speed at which we can travel. The need to move from point A to point B is a natural phenomenon. We require the freedom, however limited and imperfect to extend beyond the confines of our locality. We’ve given ourselves the ability to do this imperfectly. The degree to which this imperfection is refined and marketed is the extent of human desire’s ability to sustain a marketplace comprised of false needs. The history of such needs crafted through carefully selected words. Market tests must be conducted in order to establish linguist predispositions of the human desire. That which we fundamentally need can be turned into an expensive commodity by exemplifying the cost savings of our desire, should we act on it today, we’ll get a second one free, in four easy payments of 99 99 99 99 99 9 9 9.
9 is the last digit of a base 10 counting system. In the beginning was the 0. 1 is the first occurrence of anything or materiality in the necessary tools we use to create multiplicity in the world. What can be multiplied can ultimately be sold and counting is perpetuated.
Genesis begins with the act of creation. John begins with the logos. These are both places of departure. A desire for reinvention. Euphemisms – to restate how something began and then like Adam we create our world through language. Through language desires are understood as historical materialism. Back in the bar this all seems inconsequential when slurring becomes an involuntary act. This too seems inconsequential because Billy Joel is on the juke box and we’re all staggering through own libidos singing only the good die young.
2022.
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