Found 3 - An Exercise For You! Yes, You! Complete The Worksheet, Comment Your Answers

What I Learned About Youth From Logan Square, or Found 2

Darwin Be Patient (New Song)

Darwin be patient, you done all you can
Wrinkles still invade the faces of men
Women dispute to measure their worth
The royal navy argues the land of your birth

We're out trading handguns for petrified rocks
Charterhouse bellows for relics from the cross
We write mission statements with blood & birchbark
Barter umbrellas for a seat on the Ark

The tall grass the splinters the rocks and the rain
Are driven by something, we don't speak its name
Its currents fire circuits hid under our skin
Lead us back to the place from where we begin

But the corporal prison swings shut its gates
Our mess comes in a pan rusted by our mistakes
So if you think the world crooked, bereft and askew
Don't abandon those dreams of a holy rescue

So Darwin, be patient, you done all you can
There ain't a schemata for the faces of man
We bend and we buckle, we long and we scheme
We find our release amidst all of our dreams

6

The tall grass the splinters the rocks & the manes
Are driven by something We don’t know its name
It circuits & fractures & hums under our skin
Leads us back to the place from where we begin

My sister a chorus behind her sings over the thumb piano
She touches my shoulder smiling takes my hand leads me
I can’t see a thing to her cabin where a pot boils over a fire
& women are skinning carrots & potatoes
in soft dresses crosslegged on the soft wood floor
they hum the same tune as she

She talks to me & all I hear is comfort & I never say a word
& she brings me bread & milk & meat & leads me outside
to gather a chicken & struggles it to the chopping block

when it falls I pluck the feathers but they’re too soft

When I get my sight back she’s gone
The cabin & the women are gone
& my hands are bloody
over a dead rabbit

5

Tally:
16 hairpins
45 rubberbands
1 loose tooth
3 fingernails, torn off, hidden in coat pocket
1 busted lens, which makes:
2 suns, noonhigh
16 trees
4 squirrels
infinite grasses
18 dead branches, fallen
2 sets bird bones, incomplete
random torn feathers
2 dead campfire sites
which makes, in reality,
a repetitious thought that divides everything in half

Preparation:
Consult collective consciousness to see how people sharpened stones or sticks without any tools. How to make arrowheads. How to whittle with stone.

Note to self:
Next life, carry a knife. Or I could, in this one, find that fellow I set out looking for. He carries one.

Instructions:
1. Who cares about eating. Not you.
2. You care about sound. Believe this.
3. Bend 5 hairpins in half, back & forth, back & forth, until they break. You’ll then have 10 keys for your thumb piano.
4. Put the rest back in your pocket. There’ll be more uses later.
5. Find a straight branch, wrist’s width.
6. You don’t need a sound box. You don’t need a sound box. You don’t need a sound box.
7. Who cares about eating.
8. Line up the hairpins on the branch, hold them in place with some rubber bands.
9. Play your thumb piano. Listen closely, because you have no sound box.
10. Sing.
11. Who cares about eating.

S.O.S.

I need help. I have sunk into nihilism & I can't find my way out.

Anything you can offer is appreciated.

whowewilltobe@gmail.com

Two Ideas To Combat Nihilism

1. Nothingness = Unrealized Potential (thanks, Heidegger)
2. Remember that you allow this absurd state (thanks, Sarah Kane)

4

Move now you've done nothing so wander go roam & because it is easy to walk away from something when its angry as long as it doesn't yell at your back I got up made mobile my creaky joints & walked towards the west. I could still feel Sun's frustrated pulse on my shoulders stabbing through winter air but I didn't turn back & Sun didn't shout although the pulse quickened.

& with movement no thoughts & with movement no thoughts & with movement no thoughts I kept thinking to myself in rhythm with my steps but obviously it wasn't true. The ground crunched the dry grass snapped & the only sound was the wind & the whisking of dormant plants. Why Antarctica was attractive. & with movement no thoughts & with movement no thoughts & with movement no thoughts

But the truth was I didn't have anything to think about & I didn't know what to do with myself in the middle of this prairie & I didn't feel much of anything but concern that to feel useful I must make myself perform some kind of action other than walking. In the city I could have found pieces of parts of things to mess around with but here I'd forgotten what these pieces & parts did. Because they were living I felt wrong taking them apart for my own amusement & curiosity. See, Creature, ethics still exist.

What to call things was slipping from my head. Thicket. Forest. Where did one start & the other begin. Can a row of trees be called forest. What is prairie. Is this wasteland or nature. I moved toward the trees because I was hoping for some fallen branches or a stone to give my fingers & my human brain something to mess with. Because no movement is the same as no thoughts.

3

& the answer was Dream & as I understood it dream was no longer receiving impressions but continuing on an abandoned walk so I said Okay.

& I shoot true north straight past the tree branches which catch in my hair & break off into a mane of twigs. Rising quicker & quicker until the world becomes black swirl & the river black snake curling about itself & the land moves & laps no geometrical plots no cornfields sectional & angular no electric haze of lights no elevator shafts just something pure & unnamed

I dissolve into black air & am kidnapped by a diving wind which pulls me back down into a tangle of thick high branches into molecules into skin surrounding bone & far under this maze shreds of conversation drift up hallucinatory & relevant

hallow akin hands finders mineral driftwood forget selves

& the answer was Yes & as I understood it

I awoke

to Sun peeking over the prairie angry with me but shy to say so just hovering & glowering red cheeked

2

Sun pleaded wringing its hands and all but I said No my eyes stay shut this morning cause we’re playing a game here’s the rules I’m giving you 90 seconds to hide so you best be somewhere clever when I rise and not behind that Tower of Babel cloud neither cause I’ll know exactly where to find you and you’d have ruined our fun. When it skipped off behind somethingorother I blindhanded my way along the gravel to where you were but all my fingers found was a handful of busted rock schemed in a braille that I could not read.

Sun was anxious for me to finish counting its heart chameleoned to an Ethiopian drum taut and low that osmosised from space through horizon and settlered the cave in my chest. Go get gone I thought Go get gone cause I wanted to find you instead

So I pretended to fall back asleep while counting. I fake twitched (just in case sun was peeking) my arm jutting out & what should have been gravel was suddenly grass & the ground sunk a few inches like when you lay on your back looking up on a trampoline & someone startles you by jumping up & your world shifts the sky buckles. So here I was suddenly on some prairie with my fingers braided through tall grass & sun hiding on the other side of the world thinking Why isn’t she done counting yet?

My camp had all disappeared unless they turned into those trees waving between me & Orion & I found no reason to rise because my mind wouldn’t shut off One of us who would have made a better animal told me that if we lived in the forest there’d be no second thoughts there’d be no ethical systems there’d be no trace of humanity left but I can’t believe this even if we’d been raised there all along a mind is a mind & that’s the nature of the beast so here I am so here I am and what now what now what now?

1

Those in my camp no longer knew what to do. We daydreamers became cloudy eyed when the sun came up, lost in the morning fog. I Don’t Know became our new mantra, when we could find the words to speak. Most often we just exchanged awkward glances, shifted our gaze to the cracked concrete, twisted the rubber bands we had collected on our wrists. Those of us who would have made better animals than humans left camp to bare their teeth in grins at others, climb up the dismantled skyscrapers, and fuck on the beach. Those of us who had been the visionaries became neurotic, tracking the minutest of details with exacting precision. They had no idea what they would do with this information. We were quickly unravelling, and we no longer knew what to do.

Of course, we couldn’t ask each other, for each was as lost as the next. We couldn’t ask anybody else, either, for they wouldn’t answer our confused language. We had forgotten how to communicate on the most basic level. Even those of us who would have made better animals. Their expressions were written with obsolete emotion, untranslatable, caged. But at least their hearts still thumped. At least when they lay down near us at night we could feel some kind of communion through make believe. But after awhile we began to resent them because we could not transfer their energy to ourselves. We were cracking up.

We Don't Know We Don't Know We Don't Know, we whispered.

Then at dawn, the fog spoke: Do This Will Do This Will Do This Will Do This Will Do.

Sartre On Adventure, or Nauseous Epiphanies

from Nausea, translated by Lloyd Alexander

"Have you had any adventures, Monsieur?"

"A few," I answer mechanically, throwing myself back to avoid his tainted breath. Yes. I said that mechanically, without thinking. In fact, I am generally proud of having had so many adventures. But today, I had barely pronounced the words than I was seized with contrition; it seems as though I am lying, that I have never had the slightest adventure in my life, or rather, that I don't even know what the word means an more. At the same time, I am weighed down by the same discouragement I had in Hanoi - four years ago when Mercier pressed me to join him and I stared at a Khmer statuette without answering. And the IDEA is there, this great white mass which so disgusted me then: I hadn't seen it for four years.

[. . .]

I have never had adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures. It isn't a question of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something to which I clung more than all the rest-without completely realizing it. It wasn't love. Heaven forbid, not glory, not money. It was. . .I had imagined that at certain times my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little precision. There is nothing brilliant about my life now: but from time to time, for example, when they play music in the cafes, I look back and tell myself: in old days, in London, Meknes, Tokyo, I have known great moments, I have had adventures. Now I am deprived of this. I have suddenly learned, without any apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly.

The beginnings would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings are like a fanfare of tumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings: "I was out for a walk, it was ana evening in May." You walk, the moon has just risen, you feel lazy, vacant, a little empty. And then suddenly you think: "Something has happened." No matter what: a slight rustling in the shadow, a thin silhouette crossing the street. But this paltry event is not like the others: suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist and you tell yourself, "Something is beginning."

Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead. I am drawn, irrevocably, towards this death which is perhaps mine as well. Each instant appears only as part of a sequence. I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable - and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. This last moment I am spending - in Berlin, in London - in the arms of a woman casually met two days ago - moment I love passionately, woman I may adore - all is going to end, I know it. Soon I shall leave for another country. I shall never rediscover this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.

All of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine. I turn; behind me, this beautiful melodious form sinks entirely into the past. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning. Following this gold spot with my eyes I think I would accept - even if I had to risk death, lose a fortune, a friend - to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from end to end. But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged.

Yes, it's what I wanted - what I still want. I am so happy when a Negress sings: what summits would I not reach if my own life made the subject of that melody.*

The idea is still there, unnameable. It waits, peacefully. Now it seems to say:

"Yes? Is that what you wanted? Well, that's exactly what you've never had (remember you fooled yourself with words, you called the glitter of travel, the love of women, quarrels, and trinkets adventure) and this is what you'll never have - and no one other than youself."

But Why? WHY?

*Some of These Days is "that melody."

Best Song Sung To Me Today

"Older," by They Might Be Giants

Mental Image Caused By Conversation With My Brother

I see myself from the back crouched down in front of an open box big enough that I could crawl in and curl up comfortably. We (the box has a persona) are superimposed images upon a black screen. I am holding a physical representation of the phrase "Put All Your Thoughts Into This Box" that is grey, straight, as big as my arm. I do as the phrase says, and put these no-longer-abstract words into the box.

Must Finish. Must Finish. Must Finish.

I saw the first fire of the year before he painted my walls red. It was the only one that had already been attended. Just past the curve of the Embarras River, Brandon spoke for the second time on our drive back north. The brush must have caught fire, he said, look at the smoke rising. Usually no one has to point out these things, but I was replaying my high school civics teacher: Remember to say Embarras, or you’ll be embarrassed. The river was pronounced em-bur-ah or slurred em-bra. A fireman was watering a pile of smoking wood. A neighbor was stalled outside his pickup. Isn’t that the abandoned house we stopped at a few weeks ago? Brandon asked.

* * *

When we met, Brandon called his photography expressionist. I asked if he was helping to break the black hand. He laughed, his hand bumping a full pint. He didn’t catch my reference. Beer gutted onto the table. Kandinsky, a German expressionist painter, warned against the black hand – the blindness that slows evolution, the focus on the shell and not the kernel. Brandon said, I mean I capture the outside world when it best reflects my insides. You’re overflowing, I said.

His portfolio was littered with remnants of collapse. Rusted iron bed frames, ashes, piles of broken glass huddled under rotten windowsills. There’s no Phoenix there, I thought. He’ll have to begin again. When I went home early that morning, the pipes had leaked through my ceiling and onto my bed again.

Don't Mince Words

-Wonder what the world would be like without all these pictures of faces plastered everywhere.
-Nicer, you'd have to pay attention to the ones passing by you on the street. I'd like it if there were no words plastered everywhere.
-Aphasia.
-And more underground houses.
-Bunkers. Don't mince words.
-Bunkers, then.
-I'd take a tent over a bunker.