The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata
Ep. 1: “PILOT”
SCRIPTUM
Intro:
Welcome to The Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. You have found my voice by some subjectively random string of events which have led you here, to this moment, listening. If you’d like to up the volume, tune in, think along, then (by all means) feel free. My hope in doing all this is to gather and unpack the various Notes and Errata that fill the details of my daily life. Most of what I’ve discovered to be “mundane” is here perverted into the soulful, the interesting, the alien. I think that maybe if you just try to view the things the parts of you able to sense can sense through this sortuv lens of perverse mundanity, there is hope in living. This hope is what substantiates my authorial actions within The Cornucopia: to tread the tired roads, bring oil to a thirsty engine, and once and for all analogize myself as the scarab of all data. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Yrstrly
Episode-Specific Intro (ESI):
The barren streetlights breed yellow angels, fogging up to crystal iterations of their own least detailed selves through the rose-tinted glasses of a young visually challenged person or persons, inhabiting the apartments through the windows of which the angels’ distal shining makes a jam of halation.
Meat Hammer:
So then the already prevalent idea of what is to come has come and dissolved like a Tums in a glass of Schweppes such that the upward-dying capsule can be seen clearly through water’s amplification one Whole Clear Thing. So but here we are, all of us, listening to my voice come through computed distortion, through the nether of a long reach that is itself a timeless augmented operation. Blah blah blah. You didn’t come to listen to a pseudo-poem. You came for information and entertainment. You came to read with your ears. So then let us allow the reading to begin, to be begun, to make way for the words’ images’ cerebral digestion. I cordially invite you to sit, relax—recline, even: set your feet at a spatial point above your head, even.—to allow your self’s imagined soul to float out of your periphery, out of your body, to some adjacenting place just far enough to be considered safe, to not agonize over the state of the schedule, of the state of the posterity of the original schedule, to glaze eyes and engage in the sort of idle gesticulations you make when you’re actually genuinely thinking, really reading with your ears. I invite you to watch with your brain. The episode has begun. We are officially nearing The Terminus.
Meat Shredder:
We will begin at a point between lost and very (or totally) lost. We will sojourn into the mouth of a hungry cave and watch through the illumination of glow worms as it digests us minute by minute. We will try and keep the dilation simple, not give into the temptation of the Darkness Fix. There will of course be the temptation. We will finally grab the proverbial bull by the horns and wrestle it into submission.
[Quick Mathematical Tabulation: Bull = Problem = Restitution for idle time. (A = B = C….)]
There is for the author a cheeky note to the sentence in which nothing is said. This, ostensibly, a huge leap-and-bound difference between the sentence in which nothing is Really said. The horror of the necessary syntax for substantiation of the latter being one of difficult description. You hardly cannot describe the idea of working through the delicacies of a sentence only to discover that nothing valuable enough to justify communication is really actually definitively being communicated… at all. So then what’s the purpose of the former, in which simply nothing is said? I’ll show you: “….” This is just a politety. I really do wish I could more accurately describe what I mean. That thing for the horror (for the writer) of the blank page. Maybe the real horror is the full page that might as well be blank. Maybe the real real horror is the idea that communication period is futile. This solipsistic reflex in which the only solution is to recoil deeply inward: the problem to begin with. The idea that, no matter how effortfully we communicate or attempt to communicate, no matter how accurately we word our prose or syntactic sprees, there is no real way of making OUR image for the words of the sentence the same as the CORRESPONDENT’s image for the words of the sentence. You hope and pray to Nothing that perhaps they know what you mean; you H-and-P that they get whatever it is you’re laying down. So then it goes in stages, this futile attempt at communicating, toward a terminus that is the conversation’s eminent death, foreshadowed. That it is always somehow foreshadowed because it was always going to happen, and either way people read too much into everything anyway. So let’s here lay it down. Let us wipe clean the slate: Tabula Rasa. You cannot escape it. It does not blink. One massive scroll forever in its inky crypt.
Meat Processor:
I’m writing this novel. Here, in the podcast, I won’t be discussing its plot or characters or structure, etc. I am, however, open to discussing my difficulties with the actual process of trying to create something that has just about willed itself into the morphism of a monster. When I was in high school, I became obsessed with an author. I fell in love with his prose, both fictional and non-, and immediately researched and bought almost his entire bibliography. With each word of each book I fell deeper and deeper in love with this writer whom I’d never known and never would know on a personal basis; he’d killed himself in 2008, four-or-so years before I’d discovered him. His works allowed me to reimagine what language was capable of, how I could possibly use it as a means by which not only to communicate a thought, but an emotion or tone or abstracted idea as well: to bear my soul on the page: to fuse the two somehow into a creation all its own incarnate. That was about seven years ago. I remember vividly the moment I was in business class in the eleventh grade—a class I would spend all my time writing in, typing out thoughts on the pre-installed canvas of a Microsoft Word Text Document. I remember when I came up with the premiere setting of the book. I remember typing out a conversation between characters at a meeting in this setting and how each character’s principle qualities became visible to me on a level deeply connected to my mind’s heart. Surely I had tapped into something. Now here I am, with around two-hundred-and-fifty pages and hundreds of characters and tens of settings and sub-settings I have very little knowledge of how to arrange or mold in order to elucidate. I am lost on the sinking ship of a novel I can’t abandon, whose stories and people and experimental forms I cannot abandon for the life of me. I am plumbing the depths (so to speak) of void and abysmal waters. With the aide of some excellent language-arts books, the free time I have away from work, and the blueprints of these clastic type-written pages I’ve kept in a brown sheathe all this time, I am assaying toward a palpable Thing, something I can really as-it-were sink my teeth into—something I can know is formed.
Part of the innate difficulty in writing it is the knowledge that my ability as a writer—my rhetoric, lexicon, w/h/y—has depreciated a good amount, as has my knowledge of much of the plot’s strands. Where the latter is strictly OK because I’m willing to see where the unknown parts take me, the former is a shot to the heart. I look on at these unedited pages I wrote on my Olympia SM9 and wonder how the hell I was able to make the words flow that way. This is a huge part of the despair involved in creating and re-creating art, especially textual art. This part of my life I’m in, exploring, is for me about mastering the craft I have decided to dedicate myself to. Part of that mastery’s initial sacrifice is the realization that the mind is a kind of a muscle. If you don’t regularly “work it out,” it will weaken. I, amid my multiple hiatuses from the artform, have come to confront this newfound weakness. To shirk of the albatross of sloth. To make new things. That is, in part, why I’m doing this podcast. Not only is it a reimagining of the notes I’ve taken, it’s also a storage for the germs of ideas those notes contain. It’s a means rather than an end. I hope you’re willing to listen on, because I have a lot on my mind, and my mind never sleeps.