Phillippians Don't Lie

We're all about long-term promises. El Sincero and all that. Camping out along the banks of self respect, of decency, still, madness WARMS itself around our campfire.

He says there'll always be a France as long as artists are being born; he said the man's eyes glowed with fire and gleaming. He thought we'd let machines do everything; he was wrong. But it's about the people, the contrived people who would get up in the afternoon if they could. How they don't is a task in itself, a sacrifice to the frenzy of being left behind by it. It's the ticket we paid too much for, a real life ante, our cosmic lunch, our sin.

It was a ticket to the FIRST NIGHT, but it was the standard opening, job-sized or no matter. The feats of the twelve apostles stood end-to-end, I've imagined them singing and me rashly taking some notes. Procuring a bias directly to their words as they're spoken. Some of the fiery prejudice which they feel and which peppers their humble wisdoms with enthusiasm. Sandals tied to my feet for the first time, rare lamb's blood curdling in my stomach, the sound of all our sandals on the sandy floor fills in the gaps between my sages and their words, the continuous sound of something moving though anyone hardly shifts where they sit on the floor. One man dressed as the apostles but not one thanks them for something small and near his own feet, his words inaudible from my sandals but he doesn't mind blocking them off from the room for a few seconds and they, in their missionary compassion, suffer him.

"How long my brothers? I come from a strange place, far away, where we laugh in what I only remember as a series of small coughs near choking. You confuse me with another; look our way … but bring more than your kind generosity. What is lifted is lifted and no longer a weight but an impression of that taken away, and so we are helpless and in constant bondage to the possibility of alleviation.

"He looks down on us, as you say, and we are naked of the trials we portend yet drain ourselves in search of the perfect holy destiny, yes, until in final perfection we are left naked again," he said.

The stranger went on and I listened carefully for familiar words, ideas, something that made sense with things seen but it all seemed only to be signified by its opposite. When people said they were going to stay they left, and food meant money, and love meant sex while it lasted until conflicting ideas at last made peace with each other.

All the while, the baroque sounds of minute livestock in the NEAR distance leaked in from every crack in the wall. But this man, the speaker - who had only stopped and perhaps wasn't finished - he was intelligent even agitative, like he rubbed up against the undersides of people assumed to be eternally soft. And then I realize what he's speaking might not even be the language I'm understanding; it sounds very much like Italian but the room smells like Portugal. Based on this new skewer of information he's either a psychiatrist or psychotic and suddenly I realize I share something properly with a couple of the apostles when he resumes speaking.

"Clinched FISTS only are offered up; less than we could MUSTER - yet something - and our innocence refuses to step aside. Knowledge of evil and experience with it is what I remember and how we are finally allowed to come to him. To combine with other vessels is the only goal, but the only forbidden fruit. How to circumvent it? Ha! A life's work. Not breaking the law but extending it under a faulty new domain. The garden of our desires where the only good is the very evil we have studied for a thousand years but for the first time to make the choice. The moment, this moment, He looks down on me and senses an ally, an opponent of catastrophe.

Without notice, all the SHUFFLING had stopped and everyone was listening. When secrets like this get out, will they even matter any more? Just a question.

Then some women moved about and the room was transformed into some sort of equine trattoria, or perhaps it was mutton. It seemed to matter and be all the same to us because we were suddenly interested in much larger things and time passed slowly along a fluctuating curve, reminiscent of orgasm but less deeply certain. In this realm, surprisingly there were no fine things to look for; the fineness and serenity of ignorance stopped like a wind. Then calm.

BEIRUT (Agence France Presse) November 29 1996 Construction halted on excavation for the new behemoth towers for circumspect investigation to possible archeologically significant presence. An eleventh Persian city-state has been accidentally uncovered in remains, verified heretofore unknown. A new civilization is discovered to have existed at the site of the present downtown, bringing the total to eleven dating to a Phoenetian outpost of the twenty-first century B.C.

At the demise of each society, for a period becoming previous, historically, to the end, lay a devolution into anarchy. Though anarchy - having suffered vacuous mischaracterization - belies more than the absence of government. Pre-existing conditions which may have made the society possible, and necessary to begin with, lay at its naissance. Thus creating the conditions for failure to thrive right along with the successes and provide an important, if dismissible, counterweigh to them, succeeding for a while before succumbing finally.

Progress was slowed for seven weeks as crews of excavation experts and workers cleared the six-block area of the surviving, mostly impedimental, evidence and debris.

One of the men, one of them this time, with a fiery beard and filthy, dirty clothes rose to speak:
"I'm listening brothers, not because but even though nothing's happening. I tell you the matter, the refusal to understand is like the sand on my ankles - what's that old saying? Oh forget it. Let me tell you something.
We drew in closer.
"It was a matter of mispronunciation, or either poor enunciation. But ever since it was inscribed as a directive on the consciousness (what a small, small island!) of man, men have been asserting themselves where there was the greatest need for INSERTION. Thus, many holes went unfilled - a point surely missed by the optimists' ambiguous mug of liquid - and many were even stepped in, at an enormous cost to the intruders, the asserteurs. Ah, but they would make the holes pay, and thus began the INDICTMENT of the VOID! The will of assertion cast onto some prolifically fertile opportunities and subjugated, enslaved as opponents to the will of man. What insolence! Little wonder the confusion which has ensued; more amazement at the innocence which will not die, which still screams for the last deep breath when man finally goes down in exploration without his armaments or the need for them, when he finally gets it right. But here we will stand, uncorrected, because we are uncorrectable. At length the surgeons of time cut the flesh of modernity and expose its diseased organs. Yet the corpse is allowed to rot beneath the lights because the knife - the resolve, my brothers - which could save it is out of reach, held to the throat of the meek who can only cry 'Insert' and hope then also to be misunderstood. Even the fairest among you waggle before the blade's shiny reflection and indeed, the viper is caught off guard only with the mirror.

He reseats himself, partially sated.

I am handed an earthen cup of the finest civilization and I recall another arrival.
"Watson, come in here!"
"Dr. Watson, get in here!"
"Watson, am I paying you to stand around all day?"
"Watson, what's that scent you're wearing?"

After a brief stretch I re-enter and reseat because another speaker has begun. Without an additional audience, he unleashes the proverbs of the sandy peoples of the earth, infused with a special knowledge he is the usher at the frank union ceremony.

"Convulsed into a series of sublimely worded orders, the executions begin. Systematic and efficient, the crimes have been committed to fit the punishment exactly. Which is death. Which can only be death. For how do we orient ourselves without the context of death? It is one of the overlooked but unmistakable tragedies of the wearing of the flesh and walking upright that life dies at the hands of the specter of death. And soon, a few generations perhaps, it cannot be born at all save sporadically, having lost its place at the head of the line and cast someplace back in chromosomal pack where it awaits the rolling of the die. Then there are the more commonplace "walking dead," the "living dead," and many are their number because the urge for life has been effectively subjugated. But behold, brothers, the dead quiver and I will stand to threaten them again with the very incarnation of life. And among the others, there are those who petition the God and not the courts, who cannot be marginalized any further because they are the margins and fear not the shadows, nor the dead. For power is known to lie elsewhere, remember… and a shadow of a home is an abode nonetheless.

Seated by the silence, his restlessness undergoes a minor transformation, which I note but cannot herein effectively describe.
I'm not saying why it wasn't apparent to me before, marking down names and such, dating things, for so long. It was always, like this sentence, going to take a bit of time. It was something pushed far far out away from the beginning. Any reasonable person would have known it to be sufficiently off shore, if you will, so as to cling to no intimations of approaching it in any of the initial years. Does that mean decades? It might. Would you rethink it?
"No; I would start thinking it was getting closer though. And that, not after too long, either." It's human. And it's that far away, even if someone was going to hand it to you tomorrow. I must believe it's a good thing that perfection is a stationary object, or it might definitely have begun to move away from us.