Yet More of 'The Broken Bowl

Document R


When Leonardo mapped the body he sketched out what he found within the flesh of the dead; when Vedic philosophers did the same they formed topologies of sensation.

Only one course was objective, observing the body as an object, and the other was as subject.

In the second case the body is not defined by how it can be detected by the senses, and their extensions, i.e. arrangements of lenses, but by what its senses can gather or manufacture.

These observers spent time not slicing apart what was left after life had exited, but attending to the only bodies they had subjectively available: their own, and at times the bodies of their lovers.

Eventually they found through mimicry they could approach knowledge of the sensations of others, and then create through confabulation those which could only be imagined in sequences of events called stories, images of the ideal face each subject wished to possess.

It was then that the wish was formed as an idea and a voice would carry one’s wish into the air to extend the sensual range of that body as prayer, and as song.

As the wishes grew in complexity they needed greater tabulation or to be arranged in sequences and variations of sounds and their associations with the living.

And so their corpses find their way to the page in what is written, as is here, a wish that can no longer know itself but only sing and search attempting to mend the division its logic wept into the confusion of so many wishes.




Document X


Say you have some number, some value X. It may win you a prize. It is very unlikely that it will, but that question will go unanswered while the ambiguity of the circuit remains open.

X marks the spotty and no longer virgin winter tundra, cranked oil fields of metonymy, reason’s arcs and locks, all the impatient wedges added to one’s portrait to avoid elective surgery. X and its many possible options, positions on the chart, career choices, when destiny lacks inevitability and the remaining contingent factors are all more or less, more or less. If your scoop of topological measurement could lift you out of the disarray, plop you back where you thought you’d belonged, you might find it an uneasy fit until the work of fitting is done and you’d be right back where you had been. It could well be that this act of fitting is destiny, or anything that might pass for it, when it is in actuality a wriggling into shape, much as we do when we are asleep, or working our way toward sleep, finding the comfort, or the appropriate discomfort to dream what we need to dream, something I will often wake up in the middle of the night amidst, unable to find the key back in. For someone in this state there is often an unfolding of the various discomforts haunting on the periphery of waking life, the ever insurgent resentments, financial woes, vague terrorisms unexplained in the body’s behavior. It is your choice, go on from there—though it may not feel as though it is, the irreconcilable flows that he or she may run up against and which may just as well disappear meaninglessly for no particular reason after months of battle. It is then that we forget what we had wanted to forget all along, as if forgetting was a salve we could rely on, without calling on the x-ray, or the death ray, years of reprogramming or analysis, or whatever device might blossom on the forefront of the imagination, promising to soothe and make right, and then settle the nerves that may well be responsible for the whole absurd theater from the outset.

Of course the people of one’s life weigh in significantly as well, these smooth prison officials from the workplace, for instance, with their stim-response managerial shuffle cultivated from potty training days and trumpeted into your home within as abusive hooks and jambs, walls of sound constructing a noisy fire that in the end is exceptionally unmotivating, but without which no corporate structure could possibly exist, since the very walls are made up of this fire, the heat and violence money needs to be made into more money like a rage flame accumulating in the alembic from very many sources, and because our world is driven by such agonizing, there is forgiveness all around, and as the smoke turns the rotor it dissipates and only its shadows play on screen, where we get our laughs, choking down another with dinner, at the same pitch as the central key on the keyboard. Not C, perhaps B flat, for the thing was not built symmetrically and most pieces can be played in any key, at least the basic melody, though an instrument like piano may be more difficult to transpose than say a guitar, where moving up and down the fret board easily does it. There’s no worry about which white and black levers belong to the current frame. Years you can play an instrument and still not know how to play others, while some people can slip from one to another as easily as I might change my tie. She might be a young Asian woman, or a grandmother from Brussels, a bearded octogenarian with a fiddle and a hammer dulcimer. Anyone of them may have a relative recording an album in his mother’s basement, playing every instrument, or sampling a few, some strings perhaps, to give the slow song the added depth a death metal band might need to sound so classic seventies. If he succeeds he makes one want to go out and hate disco all over again. Until Madonna appears, and then Prince. And it makes you wish you had continued striving toward one of your own aspirations, pick one from the bar chart, that variable of variables, like the changing weather in one’s sack of flesh, one of those multitude of flavors, none of which could actually serve to transpose what it was you were feeling until it began to wonder itself to death.

What you have fealty toward one day or the next day and how it gets categorized in your bumper to bumper catalog of wants and wishes on page 17 of your organizer. But that number slips by and spreads out, becoming indistinguishable from the environment once you try to be happier with the way things have turned out so far. Like mud on the trim of your dress, the one you wore to the movies so no one could see anyway. And which one was it? Something about men on flying carpets trying to rescue children of the countryside whose parents had just been blown to bits at a wedding reception. But you love to get bombed by sipping the remaining dregs out of the glasses of the others at the party. That eventually put you in the hospital with a deadly infection, and you lost several fingertips to gangrene. Even after that you could still juggle and put back together shards of delicate pottery for exhibits at the Met and The Museum of Natural History, and you could still paint your ass off and drink deeply with the rest of the losers on 11th Street: Excene Mudraki, Angelina Farina, Dirty Lick Boy, Potty Child, Solar Baby, Jack to Die For. When you were all spindled two or three years to or fro of thirty there still seemed to be some remaining, heartwarming, youthful stupidity left in all, which you’re glad you’re through with, but miss quite gravely. And the election results didn’t help. And that’s why you decided to let the dice make decisions for you. You’d work for days filling in each of six sides with another possibility. Somehow you always got the same results. The formula stays the same and then so does the arc, that thrumming of one’s own rhythm section that well-wishers cheer you on to dance to, though only through a clean break might one end up with something different, though scientifically this remains an impossibility. One has to suspect science these days; the man in the moon never once saw that coming.