Боги и Новые создания - [7]

vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb. Cameras inside

the coffin interviewing worms.

It takes large murder to turn rocks in the shade and expose strange worms

beneath. The lives of our discontented madmen are revealed.

Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing for omniscience. To spy on

others from this height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of our lens like

rare aquatic insects.

Yoga powers. To make oneself invisible or small.

To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.

To change the course of nature. To place oneself

anywhere in space or time. To summon the dead.

To exalt senses and perceive inaccessible images,

of events on other worlds, in one's deepest inner

mind, or in the minds of others.

The sniper's rifle is an extension of his eye. He kills with injurious vision.

The assassin (?), in flight, gravitated with unconscious, instinctual insect

ease, moth-like, toward a zone of safety, haven from the swarming streets.

Quickly, he was devoured in the warm, dark, silent maw of the physical

theater.

Modem circles of Hell: Oswald kills President.

Oswald enters taxi. Oswald stops at rooming house.

Oswald leaves taxi. Oswald kills Officer Tippitt.

Oswald sheds jacket. Oswald is captured.

He escaped into a movie house.

In the womb we are blind cave fish.

Everything is vague and dizzy. The skin swells and there is no more distincion

between parts of the body. An encroaching sound of threatening, mocking,

monotonous voices. This is fear and attraction of being swallowed.

Inside the dream, button sleep around your body like a glove. Free now of

space and time. Free to dissolve in the streaming summer.

Sleep is under-ocean dipped into each night.

At morning, awake dripping, gasping, eyes

stinging.

The eye looks vulgar

Inside its ugly shell.

Come out in the open

In all of your Brilliance.

Nothing. The air outside

burns my eyes.

I'll pull them out

and get rid of the burning.

Crisp hot whiteness

City Noon

Occupants of plague zone

are consumed.

(Santa Ana's are winds off deserts.)

Rip up grating and splash in gutters.

The search for water, moisture,

«wetness» of the actor, lover.

«Players» — the child, the actor, and the gambler.

The idea of chance is absent from the world of the

child and primitive. The gambler also feels in

service of an alien power. Chance is a survival

of religion in the modern city, as is theater,

more often cinema, the religion of possession.

What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?

There are no longer «dancers», the possessed.

The cleavage of men into actor and spectators

is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed

with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.

If all the radios and televisions were deprived

of their sources of power, all books and paintings

burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,

all the arts of vicarious existence…

We are content with the «given» in sensation's

quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad

body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes

staring in the dark.

Not one of the prisoners regained sexual balance.

Depressions, impotency, sleeplessness… erotic

dispersion in languages, reading, games, music,

and gymnastics.

The prisoners built their own theater which

testified to an incredible surfeit of leisure.

A young sailor, forced into female roles, soon

became the «town» darling, for by this time they

called themselves a town, and elected a mayor,

police, aldermen.

In old Russia, the Czar, each year, granted-

out of the shrewdness of his own soul or one of

his advisors' — a week's freedom for one convict

in each of his prisons. The choice was left to the

prisoners themselves and it was determined in

several ways. Sometimes by vote, sometimes by lot,

often by force. It was apparent that the chosen

must be a man of magic, virility, experience,

perhaps narrative skill, a man of possibility, in

short, a hero. Impossible situation at the

moment of freedom, impossible selection,

defining our world in its percussions.

A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision. A

gray film melts off the eyes, and runs down the cheeks. Farewell.

Modern life is a journey by car. The Passengers

change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam

from car to car, subject to unceasing

transformation. Inevitable progress is made toward

the beginning (there is no difference in terminals),

as we slice through cities, whose ripped backsides

present a moving picture of windows, signs, streets,

buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed

worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move

ahead or fall utterly behind.

Destroy roofs, walls, see in all the rooms at once.

From the air we trapped gods, with the gods'

omniscient gaze, but without power to be

inside minds and cities as they fly above.

June 30th. On the sun roof. He woke up suddenly.

At that instant a jet from the air base crawled

in silence overhead. On the beach, children try

to leap into its swift shadow.

The bird or insect that stumbles into a room

and cannot find the window. Because they know

no «windows.»

Wasps, poised in the window,

Excellent dancers,

detached, are not inclined