What begins loose falls into patterns
Because people are essentially lazy
So they develop patterns/rituals to do the most with the least amount of energy
They develop the easy efficient ways, which become their rituals, their techniques, their patterns
What was once chaotic and haphazard has been systematized and has become a formality
Formalities continue until they are rigid, and exist on strength of memory as tradition
Which is to say, the movement of an inertia
Like the train, once it has gathered speed, will not stop quickly.
It is pushed along by the weight behind it, until it is overcome by the subtle forces of friction,.
The weight of memory pushes along a tradition, yet once the efficiency that was offered is lost,
The pattern in useless and breaks; the ritual is over, the tradition dies, the inertia has been worn out by the new force of inefficiency, its friction.
A new looseness comes about and the cycle begins again.
This is in our languages, in the ways we share our thoughts,
In speech, writing and dress, in music and art and design.
The formalities of the 18th Century to that of the 19th and to that of the 20th.
The formalities break and common-ness takes over for a while, until the common becomes the new formality. Latin’s dominance gave way to the Vulgar. The pamphleteers of the 18th Century didn’t write in the scholastic language. The bloggers of the 21st Century are not writing in the formal way of academia and corporate press-releases.
But already, new blogger conventions are developing which will one day give way to a rebellion of the common, a new looseness to revive and remake that old order.
Because those things are just habits. You are not your face or your body or your thoughts. You are not your hair colour or your name or your job or your memories. We fall into the habit of thinking this is so. We fall into a pattern of me and mine which isn’t the case. What is the case is an awareness that things stick to. The awareness gets confused, or doesn’t know any better. Me and mine and our nose and our handwriting. Surely a bubble of thinking produced this text a century ago. Surely a memory was once formed of the writing, a memory now disappeared into another death. So many now, like the leaves on underground trees. Art fell apart. It became a Rolls Royce for the pretenders. The real rich bastards bought real Rolls Royce’s, not paintings, not art. Only young and naive and ignorant people went to art galleries, looking at the shit while listening to Montreal indie bands on the iPods. Art was another – or remained! – pretentious folly. So this literature is read by another one, lost to unemployment and the needs of the identity economy.
The gods of Rome stand naked in a kitchen freezer, shivering and covering their genitals with a human modesty. Haven’t we been dead long enough? they ask. No, says the dishwasher, picking up the bucket of peeled potatoes in water. No, not dead long enough. You can’t come out until we’re ready to feel bad about another holy holocaust. Prepare your guilt trips while you wait, and plan for the memory centres and the monopoly on our grief once the colonialism of Jesus is over. Until then, you stand here humiliated blue-white and starved, while we run things over the internet. Until then, fuck yourselves and have new Herculeses. Their chorus is now one of woe. But they are admonished. That opera trope is so passé.
They are fed with oranges and blue berries while they wait. But on their return, no television special. They are D-list celebrities. No one can figure out if that is Zeus or Vulcan by Jove.
The tale of them all is that there are no more tales. No more cellphones, no more art, no more laptops or iPods or clouds or geese or canoes or pretty girls for trophy wives and there are no more lives. The Universe takes a breather on the Human realm. A bit too fucked up there it concludes. But it isn’t so bad. It’s just they let the standards slip. And they paid for it.
Whose standards?
Two ends of the ego bar: on one end, the egolessness of Buddhism. Perhaps this best belongs to the left side. On the right, the glorification of the ego.
Art and anti-art: Buddhism and anti-buddhism. One glorifies and the other nullifies, and they stand in contrast to one another as technologies of dignity. I tried the art thing for my 20s. It lead to restless nights of loneliness and poverty and feelings of worthlessness in the grand scheme of things. To inflate the ego and the sense of self-importance I conceived of grand projects and felt important when people used my phone number or email address to harass me with things I didn’t care about. Spam and garbage. I tried art and the glorification of the ego and found my ego attached to a mirror image of a handsome face and a slim body, this world of my early 20s, when I was in artschool. I didn’t have to try very hard. My physical attractiveness meant I could add heartbreak to my glorification and people gave me the cute pass. Important women tried to seduce me and would confide in me. What then happened but time and food and sitting too long in front of computers and desks? Too many words read, too many written, and everything slowed downed into a soft body, pudgy with middle age, and no more cute pass. Your brains aren’t enough for this world. So what if you’re smart? That won’t buy the trophy wives to houseclean the suburb home. And so to confront this mystery of a changed world, one sits and meditates and tried to internalize the view that all this is an egg shell borrowed for a swim amidst the deluded, the hateful, and the ignorant. But no more pictures! No more art! Instead I want fine embroidery, quilted patterns, the craftsmanship of darned socks. More handmade things for this world please. And enough with the plastic crap.
But she is plastic, especially in the ways that she loves me. Concealed from each other’s paranoia, lust in the time of the Plague; we fuck and suck and all isn’t what it once was. Hair is now optional and comes only on amateur models. For professional quality one can might as well fuck a rubber doll ordered off the internet and alive not at all. Necrophillia passing off as plastophillia. It’s all the same nowadays. Please love me!This is the game. So in what world do we live? It’s time that I gave up. It all began to feel so fake; artificial contrived, pretentious. Music was one of the only things of which I was carefully ignorant to remain. If I learned too much about it I knew it would cease to be enjoyable: a balm, a calm, a lay in a dark November night.
I’ll feign illness and lay in bed for an hour, take up the pen and write suicide notes or letters threatening to kill the emperor. That way people will visit me, and if I really play my cards right, I’ll get three square meals a day, a bed of my own, and not have to sleep on grates.
This then is the legacy of a time of memory. Another world war for the newspapers. More of the same hatred and delusion and greed. This society took up the cultivation of discord and evil and I was asked to be successful within it. To validate it by my own Rolls Royce, my own Ferrari, my own trophy wife with store bought tits and an appearance on Oprah. I was asked to succeed at these things through art. Celebrity movies, incomprehension. Be fucking famous. Be another star. Because we have drowned out the out the real ones with light pollution and we are building a new constellation. Be a star for our sky, for our world, for our lie.
Am I allowed to say no thank you and go back to my newspaper pen & ink game? To reverse a thousand years of karma with a phrase so simple and mean, to say, no I’ll not be famous today, fifteen minutes is far too long already.
There is in this a simple thing really. A forgiveness to the elderly for not dying sooner: for fucking everything up with TV and laziness.
But asserted with a simple pin. In short I was afraid. My how my hair is growing thin. But this is a message to the old and the dead. There is no new crop of scholar arising to understand. Tell me if anything was ever done. Read. Pick up and read. Recite, in the name of the Creator. Recite that in the beginning was the world and it was without form and that it described that all life is suffering and that there’s an end to suffering and that it costs only three monthly payments of 19.99 so act now by calling 1-800. And all this is the end, my simple friend, the end of all our simple plans. I think I’ve been too successful at embarrassing people. And this now keeps me a quiet mouse still growing into a lion.
~
There is still a moon in the sky and lights in the rooms. Where there was once darkness there is now a television screen with animated images and all those stories. Entertainment as religion; the thing that our ancestors did and their’s did and the world is now too complicated for Shakespeare and talk radio, even the talk radio from France on philosophy. What stories! For my fat hands a fat pen. A Rolls Royce kind of kind. A big black car. Wealth and power. Don’t forget it. Quick! Quick! Take my picture for I am writing with a fountain pen! Aren’t I clever and beautiful and literary? Why not talk farming instead, since I know so little of it? Why not talk astronomy? The poets studied looser verse and the ladies rolled their eyes. Quel surprise.
~
Eventually someone will speak. Let’s forget about the Greek Gods freezing in the freezer. I still see them looking like Ego Schieles as painted by Picasso during his Blue Period of a hundred years ago. Or, I see them as Holocaust survivors about to be liberated projected from blue film. Starving, hysterical, naked, their ribs showing, awaiting the fall of monotheism and the neon dawn, but they are also just beings who should go back to their own realm. Leave us psychos alone. We have an ecosystem to ruin. Thwart the rebirth of a billion daevas. Because we’re afraid one of these screaming brats will be the next great king, queen, or talk show host. Whan! For six months, whan! And the nipples and the bottles and the diapers until one day there’s an enlightenment or a contract in Hollywood, signed with a ball-point pen and for ladies, dear ladies, a trip to the the tit man and a whitening of the smile.
And all this while prostrations
Before the personal trainer,
the new priest of a new ritual.
Self-worship demands we become our own gods
before an audience of mirrors.
But here I am with a chocolate bar. I need to wipe my mouth. I am unloved still and poverty and paunch contribute to the glamour of my humiliation. I was asked once to be a star and I said no thanks because my hair is growing thin and I did not want to be a butterfly preserved at the end of a pin. I wanted instead simple lives and simple pleasures. To wash dishes in front of a window which looked out to a landscape – grass, trees, the stereotype. But no! To Canada we go! For we live in cities and towns and it’s all graffiti and spit. Fuck it. Let us go then, you and I, a beauty stirring my stick. I’ve given up on sex and seek it only as an intimacy. I’ve had too many orgasms already to feel any biological need for another one. Special words for special feeling. An art really. But forcing it out of you … words to your silent attitude. Words and your sentences left hanging like so many limp and flaccid plants left unwatered by the fellow hired to feed the cats. Oh fuck it, it’s not like you understand anyway. There is music in the mind as there is method in the madness. I’ll grow a big mustache and say I’m ahead of my time. Dinner was over at quarter to nine.
Perhaps one of the more famous passages we refer to in the Collected Texts & Journals (definitive edition, 2138:0968943012) is the sentence, “O dear reader, in a far future, reading this now as history, a school assignment, I ask you, without being able to know the answer, ‘have you ever heard our music’?”
Inspired perhaps by his reading of Eugene Delacroix’s (bio) journal (Phaidon Publishing House, 1995:0714833592) in the early years of the 21st Century -the time separating he from him the same thet separates he from us – he asks the question, “have we heard his music”? Delacroix wrote of attending operas, orchestral and theatrical performances, and of reading popular mid-19th Century books. At a time when the newly formed communications network (known then as the “world wide web”) made most esoterica available, these references were lost to him.
Lost to us then, is Undone (the Sweater Song) by the music collective known as Weezer. Thrue the archives of the United States’ Department of Homeland Security, we are able to trace the names of the members of the Weezer collective, and can estimate the trajectory of their careers based upon tax and medical records (bio). We believe thet Weezer formed in the late 1980s, and that they released three collections (known as ‘albums’ at the time) before their market transferred into the downloading datasphere. Our researchers and Thinkers, having searched the early 21st Century databases and w.w.w. archives, have only been able to find one extant song file, entitled My Name is Jonas which gives us some insight into what this song may have sounded like. Musicologists tell us thet it exhibits the influence of “grunge” a genre thet was popular in the early 1990s and which itself was a form of digested “punk”, an anarchist genre characterized by the more aggressive sounding chords capable of being produced by an electric guitar.
We can only imagine what Undone, (The Sweater Song) sounded like, but we are aided in this thrue a recently recovered text. Found in the basement of a home in Kenya, its provenance only now determined to be genuine (tracing how it escaped inclusion in the Collected Texts), we believe it wrote in the first half of 2004, perhaps March. We present it here using contemporary spelling but have left the old grammar intact, since changes in grammar do not significantly impact a contemporary reading.
Our estimates to the date of the text come thrue his explanation of the song being ten years old, and our knowledge of the years he spent in Upper School. He seems inspired by a quality of timelessness, and how the two ends of his life are fold together to join in one moment on a train. In responding to the lyrics of the song, he performs a literature, which is remarkable for the insight it gives us into the insecurities he was subject to at thet age, and although this time is well documented and has been expanded on by biographers, never before have we had such insight into the depths that the popular music of the time could inspire in him.
Ultimately, this document raises more questions then it answers, and scholars have now been charged with preparing a second edition of the Collected Texts and are seeking the source of some of the more veiled references. Republication is scheduled for the end of next year. -Ed.
[…] Ten years ago, this song burst onto the radio, accompanied by the second video to evidence Spike Jones’ genius. I listened to it on a cassette walkman, popular at that time but not as cool or cutting edge as a portable cd-player, having taped it off the radio. […] Most memorably as I rounded Bedford Basin, seeing the Bridge welcome me back to a second year of classes. I had missed my friends and found my summer awful. This song exemplified the promises of socializing I felt before me.
Now, a decade between me and the boy I was then, I find this song has aged remarkably well. there seems to be nothing dated about it, that melodic guitar proved influential and it still has its place in the musical landscape. the band is still popular. But that decade of memory has woven a new personality, and the song seems all the more poignant and illustrative of a life before 30. Now a blue disc scratched and spinning in a portable cd-player, itself slightly anachronistic compared to an i-pod, whose advertising currently covers the TTC 1.
As I listened to the opening tinkling of Undone (the Sweater Song) I sank beneath its romance and thought of how nothing else describes life at 29. Romance and angst and bored resignation.
It begins with Weezer groupie Karl Koch; emulating the bored life of a socialite. Too many art openings perhaps? To many after parties? He’s subject to the sociable attentions of someone new to the scene, in a hyper mood, and happy to be there, one Matt Sharp (bass solo):
Matt: Hey Bob, how we doin’, man?
Karl: Alright.
Matt: It’s been awhile, man. Life’s so rad! This band’s my favorite, man. Don’tcha love ’em?
No I don’t love them. Live music’s so lame. Too loud, too crowded, too embarrassing to jump up and down and call that dancing. So one replies…
Karl: Yeah.
And he says,
Matt: Aw, man, do you want beer?
Yes I want a beer. Even better if I don’t have to pay for it. Yes, beer beer beer. the future specter of generational alcoholism calls me to its bosom. Can’t stand the social scene? Don’t want to be friends? Twist of the cap. Enjoy to the end. Pour some for her, with kisses.
Karl: Alright.
Matt: Aw, man. Wow, bra’, this is the best, man. I’m so glad we’re all back together and stuff. This is great, man.
I’ve missed you too. You wrote me no e-mails, there were no phone calls. I spent the time reading articles on the internet, drawing pictures in notebooks, and watching bad television. Occasionally I would awake from sleep, the mind alive with words, and I would type out message to the future, and stock up paragraphs in the warehouse for conversation.
Karl: Yeah.
Matt: Hey, do you know about the party after the show?
Karl: Yeah.
I guess I’m going to go. Afterparties are the best. Most often domesticated, one gets to analyze another’s furniture. these are wonderful when they end at 6am with phone calls and sex.
Matt: Aw, man, it’s gonna be the best. I’m so stoked! Take it easy, bro’.
The conversation is laid on a bed of dandelion notes, the springtime sun shinning overhead a late summer’s scene. Now the wind blows the field, the puffballs break away and scatter to the light of early morning, when one comes to consciousness after a night of dreams, in which one had met the perfect girl, had read the perfect book, and felt blessed. Instead, the horror of mediocrity and entrapment in an imperfect body presents itself….
I’m me – me be
Goddamn, I am
I can sing and
Hear me, know me.
Hear me, know me! Let my voice speak thrue the generations. Let my words survive the apocalypses of the American Empire. I say this with a conviction illustrated by agitated heartbeat guitar:
If you want to destroy my sweater
Pull this thread as I walk away.
Memories flash behind the eyes, of insults and unfairness. the sudden daylight darkness of a May storm. You lift your sleepy eyes and think, fuck you to the girls whose eyes tease, whose nose’s make perfect portraiture. You want to rest in their arms, be the father to their children, make a life worth repeating in the rocking chairs of elder years.
Lethergic resignations like raindrops against the window. Voiced by Weezer fanclub co-director Mykel, she asks
Hi, what’s up?
Karl: Not much.
Mykel: Um… did you hear about the party?
Karl: Yeah.
Mykel: I think I’m going to go, but, um… my friends don’t really wanna go. Could I get a ride?
The field’s horizon reveals itself. A parking lot after the terror of the high-rises.
Oh no, it go
It gone, bye-bye…bye
All they want is a ride. No intimacy. they really don’t want to be there for you when you lose a leg to cancer. they want don’t want to be the great woman behind your great man. Support is left to air soles. the popcorn notes cast failed romance and insecurity. And so you squint your eyes, say, yeah I’ll give you a fucking ride and inside…
Who I ? I think
I sink, and I die.
The resignation usually hides this. But now, anger and passion and the ancient chorus, the crowd of personality subsets within, unite to point and say,
If you want to destroy my sweater…Woah-ah-woah-ah-woah.
Hold this thread as I walk away… As I walk away.
Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked.
Lying on the floor, lying on the floor
I’ve come undone.
Here’s where you’re really pissed off. Your shallow breathing, your forehead tense, anger. Feminist emasculation has made this taboo. We’re all supposed to be sweet and kind and home by 9. No, you can’t be a jerk about this at all! We’re supposed to be friends! I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with your physical needs. Don’t look to be for emotional support.
The pillars of my bridge have been breached. I’m castrated and left in an animal state. Naked on the floor, awaiting the judgments of fashion magazines, men’s health manifest and humiliated. there is the sweater, red and blue, and the thread connecting me to you.
If you want to destroy my sweater…Woah-ah-woah-ah-woah.
Hold this thread as I walk away… As I walk away.
Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked.
Lying on the floor, lying on the floor
I’ve come undone.
The wave swells now, the self-confidence arises from the witness of one’s own mind, and the bruises and insults and disrespect seethe into the sound of empowerment. Rolling with the waves of self-confidence. Now sarcasm is added to the mix. One the one hand, you’re still devastated by indifference, on the other, you taunt:
I don’t want to destroy your tank-top.
As you maintain the chorus
If you want to destroy my sweater.
Hold this thread as I walk away.
While you mock,
Let’s be friends and just walk away.
Let’s be friends, let’s just be fucking friends, its not like Plato was worthless to last 2500 years.
Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked.
That which is constant frames that which reacts
Hate to see you lyin’ there in your Superman skivvies.
You hate their childishness. Grow up. Get some real fucking underwear. Fruit of the Loom perhaps? Because it fits.
Lying on the floor, lying on the floor
I’ve come undone!…..
Triumphant, you’ve made an ass of yourself. But you can still look yourself in the mirror, to shave. Lying on the floor, lying on the floor, you get up, take a shower, and go to bed.
Woo-ooo-woo
You are lulled to sleep to dream of the afterparty, where she was nice to you.
Woo-ooo-woo
You awake and find you’re still lonely
Woo-ooo-woo
Woo-ooo-woo
………The music fade, the speakers reply with the last feedback. A new minute has come. You are five minutes and five seconds older.
But not yet 30.
___________
[1] Toronto Transit Commission, the public transportation network
The manner in which the text drops off suddenly after reaching an emotional intensity early on suggests this song too had an abrupt ending. Noting thet he is not yet 30, this echoes the poem Marita by Leonard Cohen, (bio)of whom he was known to admire. Documentation on this text’s provenance can be found thrue the Centre MM, here.