Episode 2: "The Puppeteer's Puppeteer"

The Cornucopia: Notes & Errata

Ep. 2: “The Puppeteer’s Puppeteer”

 SCRIPTUM

Intro:

            Welcome to the Cornucopia. I am Billy Kirby. This is a call to the Ajna, to the pineal gland, to the third eye, to the heart of the brain: to the heart of the heart of the brain. You feel good and bad at the same time, somewhere along a spectrum, some vague always-shifting gradient. Whole pools of mitochondria swimming in their plasmic cells. Hello. And welcome.

Meat Hammer:

            The clutch squeaks as gear-change initiates. Pedals floored, pulse accelerated, we cut through the night’s yellow-lined road with bright headlights, at a dizzying speed, so fast the broken line seems solid. This is my trying to put into words the opening sequence of the David Lynch film “Lost Highway.” I have a soft spot in my heart for Lynch’s works: the way he creates, his ability to eschew rules and pre-assigned structures, etc. I feel as if this opening sequence of a car’s headlights cutting through the night, speeding down the highway, will always stay with me in some way. It is no mere cruise, at least not in a traditional sense. It is an assault. There is in fact a kind of subtle violence to this opening. It is a high-speed assault on darkness, perhaps on the calm of darkness, perhaps—and I’m probably over-unpacking here, but what the hell—on the unknown, the safety of slowness, the comfort of the safety inherent in a limited speed, etc., etc. It makes my heart clutch itself. High speed, credit-sequence names rushing toward the screen in yellow, blaring saxophonic jazz…. It’s so unique and perfectly vague enough and yet blatant and vivid enough that a part of you just about dies inside, watching it. It reminds me of that sensation you get going suddenly down the incline of a rollercoaster that’s just slowed to its apex: that wind rushing against your face and internal falling beyond the falling itself so real and potent it’s as if your brain is momentarily blinded.

Episodic Germ:

            “Trees are the original prophets.”

Meat Shredder:

            My can of cool Pepsi is perspiring, here, on the porch. When I open it, the tab snaps and for a brief moment some of the can’s dewy perspiration flies outward from the lid and lands like a mist god-knows-where, somewhere, and I bring it up to my seer lips and sip and taste carbonated sugar-water so nice and only partially saccharin I cannot help but feel good on a personal level at least a little bit.

The taste is inviting through a whole other sphere of me I can’t even put into words adequately, and so won’t, here. I used to be a Coca-Cola -type-man. I used to praise the stuff. Nowadays, with the 20-cent difference in price of a single 12 Fl. Oz. aluminum can, and what with some vague perception of sugar-to-water disparities, I’m inclined to choose Pepsi over Coke. I think maybe it has something to do with an unconscious shift, though a more naïve part of me wants to believe it’s somehow a sign of a new chapter in my life. Whether or not any of this is true doesn’t really matter much, but I think it’s interesting to at least give the ideas a nod of sorts, to acknowledge their probable depth and possible branches. All things seem to distend way out the more you look at them, in this sense.

I light a Camel Crush (RICH) cigarette with a small Bic lighter depicting minimalist constellations. I inhale and swallow post-inhale and taste in the smoke the sweet aftertaste of Pepsi from the cold can. Sometimes I pinch the filter until its menthol capsule snaps, and then I inhale the menthol and am overpowered taste-wise by its lung-purging chill. Most of the time I wait until after the cigarette is halfway ashen, getting the better of both worlds of whatever it is this so-called “cancer stick” has to offer. Most of the time I enjoy both. This is a journal of my mind’s own shameless dribbling. I like to write in the header of all my shit the phrase “VESCERE BRACIS MEIS,” which is Latin for “eat my shorts.” I consider it a sort of tagline. It’s almost really more a signature than a tagline. It’s almost more a kind of a calling-card. It’s almost something, is what it is. I like how irreverent it is despite the repute of the language from which it derives.

            So this book I’m working on. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s talk about the supplementary material I’m reading: Anything I can get my hands on, for the most part. What’s so inspiring about being a writer is that just about anything your eyes’ brain’s mind’s own inner eye encounters becomes a part of you in some way. It harkens back to this little theory I have about the notion of the words we use and their sentience above our own, about how maybe our own vocabulary controls us more than we control it, in a sense, on perhaps like another level. I’m not entirely sure. Some of my theories are like this: inchoate: not fully formed: half-baked, perhaps, is what a lot of people might describe them as. Since these theoretical people concerning my theory don’t have the same images as me for the words I use, I don’t consider it too important to dwell on. There’s supposed to be a “however” somewhere in that sentence. I was too lazy or too befuddled or too sidetracked to actually put it in anywhere. That’s how the sentence will stay. I’m reading this language-arts book with a really good title: John Dufresne’s Is Life Like This?, A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months. He has a lot of really neat ideas in here, some of which include a single image or notion or action that connects to a character or place—thing, you know—which effectively serves as a jumping-off point for what might occur in the story. It’s sort of a jumping-off-point-type idea, if you will. It could be a gesture a character makes toward their pocket while closing a door behind them: What’s in the pocket? Why are they acknowledging it? Who are they gesturing to? Etc. It goes on from there. And that’s just a single example. It could be an amalgamation of these things: a duck in a pond by which two lovers sit at a picnic table during a thunder storm. Type thing. You hopefully get what I’m trying to describe. I don’t often do the best job at actually putting into words whatever it is I actually mean.

            Well, good ol’ daisies!, folks. I’ve just here kind of invented my own personal exclamation: “Good ol’ daisies!” I want to just dissolve sometimes. The idea of writing this episode has become such a point of exasperation that I can hardly even get my proverbial foot in the threshold of the proverbial door before I’m all but totally winded, mentally. So what do you say to that? I say “Good ol’ daisies!” It’s because of this exasperation I’ll begin what I call [FADE IN: RAINSOUND] an audio-soak. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Meditative, even. What you do is you just let the audible rain beneath the significance of the images of the words of my voice fall over you. Really let it soak. Let the droplets of condensing cloudbellies fall at their uniquely-theirs velocity, in tone, such that (here) you let the trees be the forest they are, so to speak, to let the droplets’ audible drips melt together, to hear and feel on some inside-level the audio-soak’s effects… [FADE OUT (POST-DELAY): RAINSOUND]

Meat Processor:

My mother bought me a red notebook. There was no precedence; I hadn’t asked her to. She just bought it for me, probably—insightful and receptive as she is—having intuited my figurative drought w/r/t creative work. But so anyway: the notebook is manufactured by a company named EXCEED. It features an elastic band for holding it closed, a red ribbon for page-marking, and a folder in its back cover. I’ve decided to use the notebook for my novel, that its utility will serve my purposes well, in all honest hope. Though I won’t be reading from my novel here, I don’t mind reading you the opening page of the red EXCEED notebook, which serves more than anything as a kind of a primer for the content within the notebook itself. It goes as follows:

            The opening page on which…

-          the torture begins: senses’ Self’s own inner narrator begins to plot away all the details of details of the Event of Wording, of the immaculate Always just far enough out of reach to reserve “possibility” for a mythological state, status, the mode of an abstract transcendental term.

-          the self-torture (torture) begins: an overly self-aware writer assesses his own ability or in- to write fiction consistent enough to substantiate a novel, to dredge from Utter Murk some semblance of a compelling story that is as “fun” to write as it is to read or parse or meta-read, w/h/y.

-          the real torture continues: This “thing” which is the thing he’s wrought over what feels like a great time (some six-od yrs., now…) comes sort of at him all “full-focus” and blatant like a crow’s cawing rictus featured head-on, close-up, as if to vie for existence among possible other unformative inartistic pastimes that often occupy him for all too long.

-          the reception of the pain of the torture becomes a reality: the variable abstractions of settings, people and things therein, etc., assemble like pieces on a chessboard only to be reassembled and ultimately moved by some like cosmic poker.

-          the sound of the echo of the audible emissions of the rictus of the abstract birdform thing (analogy) of the thing that is this thing he’s wrought, coming at him, begins to empower itself via feedback loop…: the fiction like the character-rich Oliver Twist begs for more—more content—with all the urgency and genuine hunger of a starving child… to begin to plant especially formative seeds of doubt in the figurative headspace of the creator (its creator) concerning why he doesn’t give this thing that he’s wrought enough time and/or attention as well as a number of seeds of doubt concerning the purpose of life which (in retracing the steps apace all along their trail of red-painted footprints ) brings him back to some idea of a substantive answer, being “art” (the answer), being the only real means by which he sees an opening to bridge the gaps and restore his own lonely soul.

-          “torture” is alluded to as a metaphor for the act of writing: genius interlocuters engage in conversations which go static for brief moments, devise contexts optimal for their arguments’ legs (respective) to stand on (as-it-were), rebut rebuttals to their own in so Socratic and fair a format it can at times be difficult to tell they’re actually arguing and not engaging in a kind of lingual dance of sorts, all unheard by this writer, who’s (even exterior to the text) merely only able to view the locutions as hypothetical, substantiating the “genius” adjective for which the conversationalists’ ethos is modified.

And so, for much of what follows, there will be the (nearly) tacit recognition that—for all intents and purposes—none of this raw unedited shit will really be seen by anyone other than me. This engendering some solace in the “act of” without which the “act of” would be nearly unbearable, just about impossible….

So that’s it: a bullet-list of sorts as an introduction to what is effectively my own great secret text. Hopefully it’s not overly nauseating to be talking about this sort of thing. Hopefully I don’t care. There’s so much to really experience and yet so little time to actually do so, it’s a Fear of mine. It sometimes feels like I just don’t have the energy or brain cells to soak it all in. I wish for absurd things like frozen time, the opportunity to see things from every angle at once. I wish I didn’t wish these types of impossible things. I wish I knew how to end this episode. A sudden thought makes itself apparent. I have this journal I keep for plot points and ideas and such. It’s a small green thing, with numbered pages. The following is a note-to-self from this journal.

To some degree, I’m compelled to both scrap and ignite the failed type-written manuscript, that it might somehow miraculously rise from its own ashes as a reformed/refined version of itself. The characters within have become strangers it seems to feel like I never knew to begin with. The places and events feel stilted [I may have meant “staged,” there.] in a most vacuous way, held up by wires too interconnected and knotted-up for the puppeteer to detangle. For me it’s to a level of such dissociation that I don’t even feel like the puppeteer, but rather like the puppeteer’s puppeteer, trying to somehow control the lack of control. It all feels very amateur, botched in a lurid way like chicken-scratch that is trying to say too much. At this point it seems like I should either endure it and change a lot or simply throw it all into a trunk somewhere until it “turns blue” and dies altogether. Regardless I cannot fully understand why I’m so in love with this failed manuscript or how it’s transmogrified into such a convoluted sleetheart. “Sleetheart” being a neologistic term crafted for the purpose of describing a type of love-relationship that is either one-sided or totally corrosive to the soul or both.

So here we are, listeners: totally out of gas, stranded on the edge of a cool desert. I am like you a mortal thing, made of blood and flesh, but not here. Here I am a voice gone to the Aether. I am slot machines wound to burst at JACKPOT. I am fully empty, devoid of both flesh and blood, white as bone as a noise: white-noise, let loose and dying. A poor-man’s halo floats too high above the head. Goodbye and rest well. May all your dreams be Lynchian and calm.