Psychic Amputation

Le désastre ruine tout, tout en laissant tout en état. ¹
Disaster ruins everything, while leaving everything intact.

Patriotism, and When the Evening Tomb Burns

About the rose that had fallen from the lava, Ken’ichi felt there was nothing to say. The edges of its petals had been vaporized by the magma, the moisture it should have carried long since evaporated, leaving only a dry, curled body. This body reminded Ken’ichi of many people, but he felt it would not be his own. The magma crawled forward slowly, consuming the remains of the rose without a sound. The rose lay still, made deeper crimson by the searing glow; in Ken’ichi’s eyes, it seemed to be floating gracefully into deep space. Steam gradually clouded his glasses. He stood up from the chair, slid shut the narrow door, and the rose no longer concerned him. Did the rose have anything to do with the gold inside his brain? Did the rose have anything to do with Ken’ichi’s nearly decayed, unrecollectable past? Did the rose have anything to do with the hoarse red splotches pulsing on the wall? Ken’ichi felt as though he were drifting in water. He rushed out the door. Sunlight instantly annihilated the acrid dampness on his body, and a woody scent settled in cardboard rose up, so ordinary, so harmless. This smell must be closer to that radiant sun. Sunlight undulated. The waves were an illusion. Ken’ichi raised a hand gripping a fountain pen and drove it, cold and swift, into his own thigh. Warm blood surged from the undulating black hole, met the sunlight, consuming land, air, the recollection of the past. Where the blood spread, there was no sentimentality. Ah! That robot lifting delivery packages with five mechanical arms! Ken’ichi saw the blood and thought of this. He must have gone mad, only able to think of unrelated things: robots, Western ideology, forests, Egyptian mythology. Oh no, the narrow holy and sublime, a moment of absence drowned behind the curtain-wall of blood, their fates too trivial to mention. So please, don’t look at me the way you look at them? Please don’t confuse blood with the tears that flow to the horizon. Blood and tears are ultimately two different things: one condemns, the other absolves; one is scarlet and spreading, the other congealing and restrained. No, it wasn’t me who pushed Ken’ichi down in the end, not me! The red on Ken’ichi’s head was the mark of all that sun exposure; wasn’t Ken’ichi living the way he wanted! Living magnificently! Living in frenzy! Like a painting! Like a dream sweating into the cold brew before a nap. A spike-like sound echoing ceaselessly in my head, striking the right side of the back of my skull… don’t… don’t… pour the wine out… don’t…

Losing illusion is a disease. While the bones are burning.

Monument to a Theory of Cruel Silence

Even through his glasses and the car window, Ken’ichi should not have been able to see the sun’s outline gnawed blurry by the sky, the sun’s own color collapsed into a white more white than the empty sky. The weather here was truly unpredictable: snow and sunshine might be separated by only two hours, and the shift from a boring morning into a gray hell required only a single bloodless fall. So many people sang the praises of being seventeen. For Ken’ichi, seventeen had been peeled away like a pull-tab into library archives. It was a library carpeted with piano scores, insect wings, classical haiku, and alternative pop. But set that aside for now, because Ken’ichi saw an iron record player, ten times its normal size, falling from the sky. Falling, falling. It pierced through this gray hell like a strand of spider silk splitting the air, crashing into the earth, spitting out a ground full of record shards. The shards were black and white. Whether they were Chūgakusei, Zankō, Ranjo Trilogy, Mezzanine, Yūki, Kūchū Buranko, or La pas du chat noir, he couldn’t tell. In a flash, Ken’ichi had the sensation of a bullet passing through his skull, but that was only for an instant. Soon Ken’ichi forgot everything he had just seen and stepped through a familiar, stain-covered iron door. He immediately saw himself in the mirror: straight hair and straight clothes, nothing beyond a first impression. In the yellowed mirror he could not make out his own face. Was this his identity? Ken’ichi stopped examining. He didn’t want anyone arriving at the elevator to see him standing with his back to it. He turned around, shook his shoulders to settle his clothes. The elevator door opened. A middle-aged man wearing glasses and a buzz cut walked in. He straightened his tie and pressed a floor button with natural ease. His shirt was clearly more old-fashioned, more worn than Ken’ichi’s. Yet Ken’ichi sensed, beneath the creases of this man’s clothes, a crisp, lemon-colored scent. It was a scent that belonged to him alone. This man must have carried it from the moment he was born. Ken’ichi watched him walk out of the elevator. Same floor as his. He had to wait for the man to go first. Ken’ichi felt he would encounter this person again someday.

Big Bang, the Opening of a Melodic Umbrella

Ken’ichi wanted to know what primordial suffering looked like. For this, he lay down in someone else’s grave and poured cold water over his own head. The cold water splashed down into the earth, striking the stifled, silent planks and bedrock. Ken’ichi suddenly felt everything was so distant. In this grave that should have belonged to someone else, he let his mind wander toward the edge of an era. There was nothing left to be done here. No one would blame the person in the grave, not even the grave’s owner. After lying still for he didn’t know how long, Ken’ichi’s limbs grew numb, and the rigidity of his posture made him uncomfortable. Still, his heart was flying toward the night sky. Sometimes, looking down from above is also a form of release.

Just go home like this, Ken’ichi said. Just go home like this. But wouldn’t Ken’ichi miss anything? What was there to miss about this cold, damp place of death? Everything here had been sealed away until no bones remained. Was he going to lie to himself that none of it had ever left? The weather was bad. The weather was bad! What did Ken’ichi want to blame about this cool, shameful sky? Would overcast weather enter a grave? Ken’ichi suddenly had this strange thought. The ever-changing weather would surely continue to exist in the world for as long as the earth. But what if one day the earth no longer had overcast skies, only blizzards, thunderstorms, or an endless, sleepless stretch of clear sky, or what if there was no longer an earth at all… but that day still sounded so far away. If overcast skies were also gone, would anyone mourn them? Perhaps this is the only destination of the sacred. Perhaps birth will keep being deferred into antiquity. Perhaps, or perhaps, suffering holds a chorus at the site of speech’s failure and the performance of anchoring.

An Ordinary Slaughter of the Wind

A strip of silver flesh barring the road. Rats gnawing in swarms. I seize the snake’s black eye and order it to retreat. Today rain clouds fell as wood, dead branches scattered everywhere. Today I must carry a water-stained long-handled blade to kill the wind. Today I must sever the shimmering, gossamer sky that may or may not belong to this drawn-out spring.

César Aira’s César Aira

Imagine a prose-like life: from indoor plants and furnishings to the fully sealed door of a bank vault, a loosely structured, accident-prone, lustrous mode of living; a mode propelled at constant speed yet already operating on nonlinear logic; moving through ever-denser light, icons, digital traces, and feeling-fragments collapsing between symbols, walking and sitting down, conversing and falling silent, a Latin American novel spread open, resting on rain-soaked stone stairs, swiping and retrieving cards, stealing and generating, flung out by the earth’s centrifugal force, violently oscillating through life to a bebop rhythm. Will this kind of life lay bare its legitimacy in full? It will not roll down through inertia alone; the machine’s ignition switch must be found. To become prose, one must assume the posture of a piercing wound, using limpid pupils to focus on the gaps between continuous paragraphs.

A Meteorological Symptom, Hero or a Pool of Pus

Clouds, still fish-spines, protruding
from the skin of the sky like hives, striped
gills spread out, plunging into the rhythm of wires,
panting urgently, opening and closing like a net,
broadcasting tangled scars,
a pool of colossal heroism. A plane passes
below, piercing the boundary line
between looking up and looking down.

Ruins drifting
on the earth. That colossal monster!
Retching without end, erratic in its ways,
bleeding mutely. Look up and there is emptiness.
That is the ancient and the recent.

That is the bustling yet deserted. Jasmine once bloomed here.

Gray, exterior pus radiating resentment,
casting the iron graveyard
back into barren earth.