My mother a keel-less catboat on the great lake
My father a wooden row boat in a remote tarn
My brother a house boat in a private dockyard
My self a deep submergence vessel in an anchialine cave
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A subtle issue
She wipes the black ink off her fingers and throws the crumpled up paper tissue into the toilet where it slowly unfolds to look like a subtly splendorous angel spreading it’s wings.
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Empty months
had a massage the other day
she laughed at how stiff my back was
small talk – yes, I’m a writer
she said she wished she was more creative
I didn’t say I wish I was less
creativity can be such a curse
so many ideas, wishes and wants
no energy, no time, no mental bandwidth
this connection – lost
swimming in white noise
the journal has empty months
my mind as an avalanche
massive chaos, hard to salvage
it all piles up and up and up
a few updates to my previous release
the last things to finish the next
one final pass of that video restoration
some proofreading for new editions
collecting and editing new writings
the piles keep piling and piling
everything takes forever and ever
stumbling without direction
can not taste the mead
too full of turbulent water
if I could drain the bog
it would be easier to traverse
maybe rest without sinking
love to sleep – can not sleep
so tired of not being finished
with the wall of stress and anxiety
…
not trying to write poetry
just trying to write
anything at all
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Animal tricks
I teach animals tricks. I teach frogs to leave with a sudden jump whenever they’re going somewhere. I teach flies to navigate by crumpled up maps. I teach humans to…
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Saintists & blank halls
Two saintists – I’m Stein and New Tron – are gluing a boat of gravy in sight of blank halls.
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Found back
A worn and torn paperback. Unintelligible scribbles in the margins. Graphite fingerprints all over. Eraser remains in excess all over page 11. One of the blank pages in the back has a drawing of a door from a famous building. But there is no such door. As far as I know.
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Sudden darkness
The universe is a fucking dark place, I thought late last night when the street lights outside my house for some reason went out.
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Inbreeding ideas
The old gods and goddesses were complex and ambiguous. Seldom associated with Sun or Moon, more often weather – unpredictable. Caring for us or playing with us? Inanna the goddess of love and war; female, yet male. All diverse and similar, but not same. Powerful and inexplicable.
Then they coagulated and merged. Simplified. Monotone. Easy to describe to prospective converts. One trait heroes. Suitable for children. The domestication of all different kinds of wolves into a single breed of dog. A golden retriever. Happy and harmless.
Now we’re stuck with the inbred idea of an idiot god.
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Rearranging again
It’s changing. The walls moving again. Not the slow surface, petrified and decaying, don’t touch it! But heading inside. Different somehow. The spinning anxiety has subsided. For now? Only the spinning remains left (ambiguous end).
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Chekov’s curse
Chekhov’s curse – You can’t mention anything in writing without giving it too much significance.
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Scratching the dream
I don’t dream about things I would do if I won a lot of money. I dream about what I wouldn’t have to do.
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Rustler of trees
Labels and titles are rather unimportant. “Artist” implies a special and untetherable link to the artifact. Should a maker of cars be called carist? The artifact is the thing – we only bring it out of the structure. Summoner, shaman or magician. Condenserist? Cavic light-blocker? Rustler of trees serving fruits of emotions. In the end I am no one and the artifacts I made are something else.
Meaning, message, rules of storytelling – tools to be used or discarded at will. One story built by logic, narrative structure and character development, an electrical grid with source, relays, switches controlling a single engine. Another is a mood, a feeling, a river shifting from rapids to falls to meandering and ground water tunnels.
The questioning of everything is built into the urge of expression. Instead of competing with the masters I have found my own niche. Not trying, comparing, wishing, but just going where I have to go. Admiring, learning, repurposing, but never playing the same game, changing the rules to fit me, challenging myself as I wish, pushing-relaxing with the tide of my energy.
Humming to myself, the vibrations in my chest is comfort and joy, a pleasant feeling, as the flow kicks in and I leave logic for intuition. I’m doing this for me, for the experience, for the vibrations I make, for the thrill, for the climax, for the satisfying end, be it artifact or a surge of electrochemical lightning caused by putting words in a novel and exiting order.
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The Internoise
Choices too granular. Illusion of will. Trapped in hyperfreedom. Triage of prayers, conveyers and the ephemeral hellmachine. The gravity of reality distortions. What gains attention gains value. Event currents. Too many zeros multiplying the messages. The manicfacturing of junk thoughts in pursuit of revenue instead of renewal. Pararotting vomitted words to fill in the added gaps. Transsentenced entirely by non-breaking spaces. Carriage makers of reverberating noise. Carpenters as content producers. No nutrition in sawdust. Kids taste everything and numbed adults learn to eat anything. Pointless rumination without stomaching it. Widespread digital coprophagy. The dark ages, the enlightenment, the dazzlingment – so fucking much of everything at once. Lost in formation. Forgetting stars. Every number becomes either null or infinite. Zebra patterns all over reality. The path goes to sephira eleven. Trapped in fiction. We need an anti-thought to this affliction.
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Cronenberg retrospective
An acquaintance saw the movie Taxi Driver for the first time a few years ago. Afterwards she said to me: “Sure, it was good, but not as special as people said it would be.” She didn’t consider (or know) that there were no other films quite like it when it was made in 1976.
She would probably react to David Cronenberg’s early films the same way. He was doing stuff late 1970:s and 1980:s in a way that no one else had done before. Then the styles and themes he explored seeped into mainstream where they have been refined with better budgets.
But now that I’m doing a retrospective, re-watching them all in cronenogical order, I find that I still love the rawness of those films. Slick production and modern effects can never replace the earnest excitement of exploring these dark, liminal spaces of the human body/psyche.
The progression in the early films, starting with Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), ramping up with The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981) to (at least in my eyes) culminate in Videodrome (1983), is a beautiful journey. Though they are (mostly) horror films I get really happy when I watch them.
His continued production is also great, Dead Ringers (1988), Existenz (1999) and Spider (2002) to mention a few, and I’m very excited to see his new Crimes of the Future (2022). But, though I’m no nostalgic, the new ones lack one certain aspect of the old ones: the vintage production design.
Because the Canadian late 1970:s is my absolute favorite aesthetics in film ever.
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Nightrealme
For each time we spin to face the billion-year-explosion things become more and more unreal. It’s as if the radiant pride of the gravity well can’t help pointing to the flaws of its obviously half-measured creation.
With every turn the dense composition is revealed as hollow, an insubstantial tangle of shadow play and make-belief, forcing us to participate in a fiction without script, directed by an elusive feeling of the inevitable.
Caught by surprise, imprisoned by the floodlight, we hastily patch together an undercover dayself from scraps we find around us to avoid detection, to fool the guards, too fool each other. To avoid confronting that we are the flaws.
The brief hours of respite, when we look away from that self-centered scorching face scrutinizing our personas to pass condescending judgement, is the only time I feel I actually exist. My nightself is my real self.
I only truly exist at night.
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Tricky business
It’s tricky business trying to guess how people will perceive what we – as writers, artists and plain human beings – try to convey in our attempts at communication.
Tricky because every little part of information (sentence-word-letter-punctuation) in our message have connotations that are inextricably linked to the unique point of view, shaped by mood, language and culture, that any one of eight billion potential readers happens to have at the particular time they interpret the message.
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Image of a novel
Title, cover art and typography are the shutter, aperture and ISO of a book. Tune them all appropriately together to get a good image of your novel.
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One living organism
So far we only know of one existing living organism: The Earth Biosphere. Humans and other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and archaea – we’re all inextricable parts of this single creature. It won’t be saved by more divisions between its many parts. It will only be saved by more connections.
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The Delusion Solution
As a writer I thought that I was rather alone diving headfirst into the ever-shifting currents of culture to chart the depths of imagination and explore the visionary landscape of the human psyche.
But now it seems like most of humankind has been dragged off by an escalating series of malgorithmic realityslides and thrust deep into the dark torrents of a psychic deluge – far beyond the actualities of physical reality.
So I have realized that instead of being a writer I will become an avalanche dog. I’ll try to dig tunnels and drag anyone I can find back to reality before they suffocate under the imaginary weight/state of the world.
And maybe offer some brandy to those I have saved.
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Tradition schmadition
Tradition is a hammer to deal with the nonconforming nails of the population. It wreaks havoc on people like me – we are screwed.