Forthcoming March 13, 2018 from Black Sun Lit
His pleasure in the featureless coincidence of his own illimitable excursus having landed on the vision and the welter of illimitable excursus has not thereby resulted in reward for his small efforts towards resurgence, vindicating—as if it were his purpose—the pleasure he takes in thinking of that telos as an end in itself. His mania to stop from any further bow to stasis in the simpering deferment of his simpering resolve to make a move towards recommencement has nothing to do with an absence of a full appreciation of the moment…of the pleasure of the moment, but is another demonstration of compliance with what’s happening in consequence of the drollery that’s happening right now…
ϕ
It’s not that he construes himself opposed to such behavior…such expression of a pleasure, when the urge hits him head on, but now, just at this moment, his inversion of the attitude most usually resulting from one’s standing on the boulevard—his subtle derogation of all proper ease, all right repose—makes any further deference to that preternatural seizure seem a longing for the terminus the first sputter evoked, face flush with the rancid muck that covers his cadaver, no less than the adjacent mount…
ϕ
It can come as no surprise—it can read as no great insight—that when one can predict extended suffering in consequence of briefest joy one is likely to endeavor the avoidance of the pain over the experience of the pleasure; there are kindred choices made more difficult to predict by some comparative intensity—some difference in demonstrable extent—but this seems unimportant to the case as it presents itself…as he conceives it presently, if nothing more impressive, or more palpably corrupt…
ϕ
It should come as no surprise that he chooses…that he’s chosen to remit his growing jouissance before his head hits mucilage of saturated loam, but that he’s able to do so—that it’s still within his power to halt this second iteration of his whelming joy at merely thinking his condition, to stop himself from any next convulsion by surrendering his vigor to a balance thereby anchored and secured—is more than any common skill or facultative longing, and so seems not an expertise he’d likely have achieved. He’s satisfied, he thinks, he’s even pleased with this ability to keep his carriage stable in defiance of the heartaches he’s subjected himself to…he’s subjected to, that is, without a need to cede the details to a purpose that’s intrinsic—that’s prospectively intrinsic—or assumed…
ϕ
He feels himself accomplished, flushed with surreptitious pride, while having no cause to deny such paltry enterprise a place within the purview of all others of his kind—of any other intellect he’s understood as equal, if not by act then by design. That there are many willing to forgo this satisfaction is a fact he’s well aware of—of which, that is, he counts himself conspicuously aware; he knows that some who are inclined to leverage such collateral are nonetheless so wildly impulsive in pursuit of greater joy that it’s beyond their scant capacity to resist its vain attraction—for any reason any way at all…
ϕ
One might feel so enraptured by some disport of the faculties that stopping it…that no effect is great enough to justify one’s stopping it, no matter what its perquisites of misery or pain. Indeed, he thinks it plausible to think the obverse true—with respect to the experience of pain, to the assize of any momentary joy against the hardship brought upon by its remittance, its intractable deferral to…
ϕ
He speculates that if his balance falters for a moment he will find himself so far from any easement of his purpose that the progress he’s made so far will be wasted, will be lost. In this sense, he believes, the pain that’s creeping up behind him—the pain of losing all sense of his status in relation to his vacant range, his voided troth—is not so much a stimulus to any eager organ as it is an expectation of a labor without stop. He would be displeased, he would find it painful…
ϕ
He finds it painful to conceive of all he’d likely have to go through to return only to this point—to this point once again—should he casually relinquish what small gains he’s managed so far, those gains he’s thought to stipulate as legacy, as his demesne. He imagines the frustration of his having to rise up—to lift himself up—as though it were an insult, an offense against the effort he’s embodied by this strain. His frustration at the endless repetition of the exploit of attaining such a meager state is considerably greater than the same plight first approached from the perspective of first notice, of one’s inaugural submission to the pattern—to the system—as a newfound dream…
ϕ
That this peculiar episode is nonetheless not novel—that the fact that it’s peculiar doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened in some erstwhile span—has not escaped him, nor would he expect his furtive auditors to fail to see this very state implied in his arrival at such swift resolve. His indefinite response, that is, to this discrete occasion is not at all peculiar to one who’s come upon it even once before. Take, for example, his focus on a consequence accessible to anyone provisioned with such balance—who has taken on a stance of any stable sort at all—and notice that assumed by this reaction is a knowledge of the ends towards which that consequence propels him…would propel him should he fail to circumnavigate the mire by his present stall…
ϕ
There was a time before this, before this new concern, when falling down seemed no more than a nuisance, a state demanding only that one stand back up again. Easier said than done, he thinks in knowing resignation, knowing as he does so that this has never been his means…within his means to do or think, to think or…
ϕ
There are those, he’s almost certain—a rhetorical expedient he’s almost certain substitutes for proof—for whom the act of rising up…of lifting oneself lengthwise from the heave of lea or pavement requires neither skill nor measurable passage to acquit. It’s not that he’s seen many—that there’s any single instance of such feat he has in mind—but to his amazement he believes it makes no difference; he’s apparently still able to adopt this understanding of the state of his compatriots absent any further evidence, and for some uncertain logic this thought…this complaint, as he regards it, doesn’t bother him at all…
ϕ
Every earthbound organon will recognize what falling down a precipice surmounted by the strife and strain of froward crawl amounts to, a tragedy of lost time and relentless disappointment that no able bodied gull need soon abjure. One imagines the frustrations one has had to suffer through, and so would need to brook again to manage a return; the impediment of the first step, the toxic ooze of long ago excoriated sockets, the plod of spasms far too often thwarted to be gains; that there’s no guarantee that one will dodge the same aggrievements the next time one sets sight upon the summit, and…
ϕ
And how has he surmised his plight a parallel scenario? How can he believe himself contrived to meet such forecast when he has…when he possesses all his pieces, all his members, fit to form? Well, funny you should ask, he thinks, addressing his own person; funny that this present scene should bring him back to intervals made real by implication but that he can’t remember in extenso, as a designated mode. He is flooded with so many like ideas and speculations—so many intromittent thoughts and tocsins against fate—that it’s no surprise to him most will adduce as titillations, are arrived at by osmosis; that the way he comes to comprehend the new when he confronts it is by filing away the sensitivity of viscera thus ingressed, not by sighting the extrinsic goad that triggers such response…
ϕ
He knows that he recalls only so much of his experience, and in answer to that tragic loss—that epiphany the same—the sense of shrill foreboding…the shrill sense of foreboding serves him as a method—as an autonomic skillset—by which to keep his waking mind uncluttered, and so clean. It often doesn’t work, he thinks, it doesn’t work that often; it works for what it must, but no sight further…
ϕ
Which is to say that if he’d found it requisite to recollect what’s happened in some…in any sort of detail—transfigured into litany whenever he’d attempted to push forward in avoidance of the next decline—then it would never happen in enough time to allow for a reaction, a kinesis; to quicken at the moment that the danger makes its presence felt, no matter what the skill of his mimetic feats in turn. The feeling gives him impetus—accelerates him forward, as a force opposed—even as his wont is to give voice to its description, an epilogue he knows he can’t project before he’s settled—before he’s found a way to some next finding of a way to move along…
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Steven Seidenberg is the author of Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Null Set (Spooky Actions Books, 2015), Itch (Raw Art Press, 2014), and numerous chapbooks of verse and aphorism. His collection of photographs, Pipevalve: Berlin, was released by Lodima Press in 2017. He has had solo shows of his visual work in various galleries in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He is co-editor of the literary journal pallaksch.pallaksch. (Instance Press) and curates the False Starts reading series at The Lab in San Francisco.