. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . from THE EXCESSES THE CAPRICES . . . . by Philip Foss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EVOLUTION OF DELIGHT Sexuality and death are simply the culminating points of the holiday . . . G. Bataille This is night. There is a category of intent related to sleep; the affinities being subsumed under descent. Sepia is a decline into antiquation: the faces appear to organize a genetics since dissipated. Perhaps war or a genetics associated with mines. The way silver is in veins. Blue glass discarded near collapsed mines: when one peers through, one is beneath water. And beneath sky. Blue is related to black. As the redundancy of closing one's eyes in darkness. A cellar. Inevitably there is a pile of coal. Or a winery and the comfortable absence of light so as not to disrupt mutation. And associated drunkenness, like a boat slowly sinking into a still lake at night. Or drowning in an aquifer and being simultaneously buried. The vagina as sleep, or alcohol. To sleep in a house of ice with open eyes and believe the glimpsed stars are beneath water. 2 There is a corpse drifting with currents below the ice. Its lips are red with burgundy. The sun is eclipsed. There are dancers on the ice singing into tortoise shells. Their rhythmic steps do not alter the currents. The corpse is drifting in a house of ice. The sun looks like a silver ring on its finger, or its eye. They are not singing about the sun but are stretching the season like blown glass. The corpse can hear them singing, but imagines their words as its thoughts. It is snowing and the dancers try to inhale the flakes in order to drown. The flakes melt on their open eyes and affect tears. The tears in the corpse's eyes are salt and taste like sweat on the dancers' backs. Their naked torsos are shiny as if they had just broken up through the ice. They see the corpse through the ice and believe it to be the season refracted, like glass, into elongation. 3 She believes she is inside her. Then will she be her: a platinum eggshell; or is she then only participating in parasitism: a platinum diffusion. She observes her hands distorting beneath water; the veins are silver; she could fashion earrings. She can see the reflection of her lips; they are red with oxygen, but she is not breathing. She sees the other's memory in sepia; it is not her memory also, though she is inside her, as in a tortoise shell. She cannot see, except memory, so what occurs cannot be other than as fed through the other's memory, lapsed, like allowing one end of the spectrum, broken through a prism, into one's mouth. 4 He wonders if his head could be reinserted, as one would stuff the bloody body of a tortoise back into its shell. À THE ELEGANT PREDATIONS The nausea of lilacs: a preverbal vertigo or incandescent gesture such that voice disintegrates into a cosmology of animals and instruments. Is she then frightening? Is she then a horse or violin? Perhaps near enough to smell her breath her irises will expand horizontally. Or perhaps there is a red snake tattooed between her buttocks curling up her spine. Then the interiors of her pores will have the fragrance of lilacs. Teeth do not shine in the absence of light. Thus it is pointless to sift through loam at night, even if your wrists are fatigued from conducting the flight of birds. And she might have a small bird in her mouth, in place of a tongue. Or a child's tooth as a fingernail, the strength of which would be in implied threat. The intent is to create a church of sound, a baroque vehicle for image, and these a sonata of bastard symbols: a crown of smoky quartz, a silver stirrup, or a whale's pelvis; a foundation of pure projection, not unlike a voice creating three notes at once. Thus succumbing to an animism disguised by artifacts of desire, like red. This could be the endless recitation of texts to prevent erosion of civilization, as if sounds were not merely mnemonic devices for thought, but brief projectiles refracting off what is imagined to be divisive to continuity: finding a marble inside a hen's egg, or combing a tarantula from one's hair. Such are exaltations of device: a clock work which turns in the head as an amateur impersonation of physics. Extensions of the body clutter the scenery: looms and revolvers waiting for fingers to prompt articulations of which the fingers alone are incapable. A lie would be appropriate now: an adamant proclamation about the temperature of crystals when invited to heal a dislocated personality: that assumed when one is discovered sucking nectar from flowers. Or to quarrel with physicians about the color of your eyes and, lacking a mirror, or not believing in mirrors, you are always correct and allowed to change your claim at will. Thus to subvert the finality of naming, disallowing anything to gell or reach maturity, like iridescent fish eating their offspring a second after birth: it is that instant when the mimes leap on stage and fail with one collective gesture. The pictorial histories carved in stone are all fabrications, not designed as temporal refutations, or false scent-trails, but glorifications of failed memories, or comets. Perhaps they are sufficient to die for, as good as wheat fields hosting hallucinogens, or a breastful of photographs of individuals assumed to have lived, their tongues uniformly drooping like limp fish. What is desired is the recollection of odors, perhaps a theater of odors which compels a mental seasickness from the movement of its waves; as the gull flies upside down, confident the sea will not turn to rain. Or the tongue up the neck where acidity refutes the romance of the nose. And the red peels off the lips and the hair is thrown on the floor, like a taxidermist's experiment. The trees change color so rapidly you lose all sense of direction and believe that by sitting still the flocks of cranes plodding toward you will not discover the roses you are hiding inside your shirt: you wish to create a language that is pure red, and you wish to speak it on a day of pure snow. You can visualize what you wish to speak: the red and orange sunset, the finger-wide band of erect pubic hair visible through her pink gown, and darkness reeking of lilac. But you are afraid because you understand that each tone corresponds to a hue. Thus even in darkness you could create a cacophony, like the decomposition of fireworks or the dissection of desire. À THE PAINTED WINDOWS Through the empty arch comes an air of the mind that blows insistently over the heads of the dead . . . Federico Garcia Lorca As if a conspiracy to refute reflection or condoning of-polished interiority: the-landscape inside a vase; a house glazed blue: the erection of-an-eye, that of a dragonfly; or-a-darning-needle postured between fingers as echoic of-a-cigarette. And, like goggles, hands-are-cupped over the eyes, palms-tattooed with goldfish, to-imitate silk. And-the-child in the crib, singing-chords like a player piano, is a ventriloquist's dummy. The wall said, "redemption", causally introducing the-saxophone as an equation against-the-implied coy: the wall has-no-window other than as mouth for-voice, as such is painted with-the-landscape projected beyond it. Yet,-those-walking do not walk: a-portrait of death; like singing of love to a skull; the-desire to animate would-participate in animism: perceiving-thighs as repositories of-bones-capable of fabrication into-flutes: sex. The windows are-black: soot, darkness, blindness,-sleep, paint: fire, the-division of light, lost-gnosis, the coma, white. The panes of glass burning-in-the-fire give off an-inversion of light in-which-the-skin of the hands can-be-removed, like gloves. Such-behavior is predicated on-analysing the dreams of-the-oversoul; in the same way one-can-float down a river on the inflated skin of a pig. Windows of the soul, thus-painted in prostitution, perform-a-theater of introspection, wherein-lust is a handmirror gloved-in-a-wig: a dionysian waltz executed-bereft of audience; the-wine-bottle a magnifying glass which,-when-looked through, straightens the-world from its convexity. The-*duende* of the genitals jumps-up-and-down with malice. Suicide is then a-critique-of-time, as a mime's face is-a-critique of immortality: how-disease and winter form-a-satyr, their conversation braille written with frost on-a-window. Thus in touch perhaps tenderness, is dissolution and-the-view is rectified, not-telescoping into limpidity or ocular profundity but, like myopia, the pane is cracked by the invention of-the-forehead: a crypt in-which-to-seat a bullet: idol. À THE MAGIC OF CONTAGION The site of consciousness is the unpainted decoy. A raven dies in flight: three colors: red, black, blue. He can move the ivory and ebony chess pieces by concentrating on his fingers through the decoy's eyes. His fingers feel botanical. His eyes are painted blue; the ink smells of old garments. He can open his eyes in the glass reflection. They are glass; a membrane binds them to an aquatic diffusion. He can hear the music of his heart deteriorating. It is contrived, of wood. It is beneath the boards beneath his feet. Thieves. He wishes to model it. He is in a window. It is winter. His tongue tastes of brass. He wishes to speak. His words are in his palm: bone dice inscribed with Roman numerals. He remembers there is a door in his chest; he imagines a theater performs, thus the sound of his heart is not deterioration, but soliloquy. Opera. He is singing. It is night. His voice is breaking windows. It has legs and kicks with satisfying violence. The fragments he renames windchimes and feels them as his fingernails when they click together. He is in a tree. It is summer. His mouth is full of revolver cartridges. He assumes these are his teeth, inscribed with aliases. When he swallows them he is afraid he is slowly becoming old. He is in a tree. It is winter. The decoy is a raven. It wishes to speak but its glass eyes have inverted him so that he is hanging by his feet. He is peering through many panes of glass. He is able to throw his voice into their interstices; and each voice is from an age in his past. He calls to them, and they answer, with nicknames. He is peering through many panes of glass. Each is coated with a layer of frost. In their interstices are images of himself from his past. With the chess pieces and the dice he can rearrange the images and thus avoid condemnation. The site of his consciousness is a pane of glass. Since it is a liquid he assumes he can flow. But its rate of movement is so minuscule he ceases to think. He is playing the violin. The site of consciousness is his hands. His hands believe it is a woman; the skin vibrating beneath his fingers. The violin sounds. He is playing chess. He can move the pieces without using his hands. He does not know the rules. He is playing against no one. He understands that the board is his back; the dark squares tattooed. He is tattooing his eyelids in the mirror. His eyes are shut. The tattoos are of his eyes. The eyes of the decoy. The eyes in the mirror are not his eyes. They are blue and membranous. Thus he can observe himself, a silhouette, with empathy. He has cut out the silhouettes of his profile as it has transformed since childhood. These are his chess pieces. They are in a war over his back, yet are all monochromatic. He can project his voice into each, but his sense of temporal linearity is oblique causing the voice to be inappropriate, the baby cursing in sanskrit. He wishes to destroy all the caricatures of himself, to incinerate the puppets and dolls, to have his numerous voices dissipate into star music. He wishes to dissipate into star music; to become an unnamed musical composition, one which the body of a violin, a woman, could play without the contagion of his consciousness. À THE EXCESSES THE CAPRICES was published by Light and Dust Books. Copyright (C) 1991 by Philip Foss.