Knowthing Zine #4
Knowthing Community
Fall 1993
Poindexter Methorphan
by John Doe
Give me a second while I wipe away the tearful bliss from my eyes and attempt to temporarily extinguish their tracing of indefatigable molecules and illustrious woodpanels which shout my name. Forget about what I just said. I just needed some more time to adequately compose my thoughts into some meaningful pattern that the forces of entropy will eventually interrupt anyway.
This is a transmissions from my brain directly to some small keyboard while I sit at another illustrated rave doing the same thing again in a different way, and the increasing complexity never ceases to amaze me or my left foot. The root of all is the pleasure of the other and then the pleasure of the self. Satisfying the immaculate in others and bowing to them in a spirit of Namaste and Shantih.
Hell, if I didn't know any better, I would shout around the room interminable hymns and gross overstatements of the beauty and ugliness surrounding me simply to give others the perception I have that perception. Speaking randomly, I speak orderly. Sitting uninhibited by standards of art, we create new standards by which to determine excellence and arete. We are the whisper before a scream.
Below the structure, below the grid put in place to keep all of us aligned, there is an unaligned holy grid. This grid covers our true actions and thoughts: our character. A teacher told me once that character is what you are when no one else is around, and despite her wrongness about everything else, she was right. Character is our identity. Character is our cogito. The blanket statements that others apply to us no longer stand at that moment. It is simply what we are. And we are. We celebrate our areness, our ourness, by the continuation of the human chain. We are self-replicating machines pushed to orgasm by beauty, and we recreate for recreation. We come because we are caught up in the webs. We come because our bodies implore us to come for each other. We come because we have come, and we are coming.
Pushing past laser lights with our own two hands, we sit in the gateway and are content that eventually we will pass through it into eternity. Our bodies are our means of establishing the necessity of more. It is consumption, not corporate-drive but the need to consume the world, to wrap it up in our bellies until we can't stand it anymore, and we vomit rainbows out. Others eat the rainbows. That is what waste is. It is a symbol of what our body could use and could not use. It is a chase to determine the quickest route to an existence of measure and meaning. It is sense and sound, breathtaking and frail yet robust and continuous.
Segments
by Mikhail Rims
There was an initial spark from the sky that started a brushfire, that electricity which hit the Earth and created heat. Then, it kept burning. We threw in beads and trenchcoats and funneled gasoline out of our ears into a tank so we could keep it burning. If it stopped, the moment would stop too, and none of us wanted that. We sacked the ashes into our throats that rained down, inhaling traces of what were once solid objects. Bits of soil interspersed with our tent or the leaves that Silvia threw in. The more the flames spread, the more we had to fall back to avoid being engulfed ourselves. We were worried that the flames would move past us and we would be ensorceled and encircled by them. But some of us weren't afraid. Silvia was tripping hard, and she begged me and others to throw her in. She kept saying that it was a more powerful force than she was, and it was her celestial duty to be overcome by it in submission to gain greater truth. We had to drag her away three different times.
Rob saw the park ranger's Jeep pulling up before any of the rest of us did, and he yelled to run. Arson is bad enough, but we each had a whole pharmacy in our pockets. Three days later, I got a call from the cops. They said the found a letter addressed to me in the park by where they thought the fire started. I denied everything.
~
Clockhands assure the approach of the next moment with the click of the current. When they melt, they leak inside the glass enclosure, and it is so many times all at once. The short hand bleeds into the compass encompassing 73 degrees of space: the 4, 5, and part of the 6. The long hand splatters droplets like Rorschach test cards.
~
We burst clouds with imaginary eye lasers. People we meet when we're walking down the street just stop and stare. We look at what's there and decide on a reason and method to change it, to radicalize it, to make it the one thing that doesn't provoke unbearable boredom in us. All of the nice things we find, we bring home to put in boxes. The boxes themselves are nice things, and they hold nice things. Our simplicities are complexities, but our lives can be oh-so-quiet. We could just put things in boxes for the rest of our lives if we wanted to, finding the right wood or stones to make them out of. And each one would have a lock, of course, in case people tried to steal our nice things. But then we would have one box without a lock that would hold all of the keys. Some of the keys would have family crests embedded in them. Others would be unassumingly admiring their more ornate cousins while they cherished their simple Amish dresses. And the things those keys would let you see, well, you just wouldn't believe it even if I told you.
~
Hurry everybody hurry. Do your work in a cubicle and you'll get a bigger cubicle and a slightly bigger house and you can eat sandwiches instead of just bread and maybe get a bed one of these days.
Just who says? The worker works for his worker's pay all day. No time for thought or contemplation. By the time you're home, you're too tired to go out in the world, let alone protest the whole damn global environment. The middle manager will make him wear his uniform. The boss wears an even shinier uniform than the middle manager.
Dreams save us. Extricate yourself from the cruelties of the world by ignoring them. Live in a monastery, one of your own choosing. Beg for alms. Arms grow longer, and you don't know what to do with them.
Get up again by some mechanical device that your body instinctually resists obeying. Loud, piercing noises. Noises you wouldn't like if you were already a ghost.