Sean Kilpatrick
The mechanization of noise, industrial revolution to tiny computers clucking handheld racket, acts as full aggressor for the conglobation of art now. Speed and factory progress what’s modern: the fragment, being caught off guard. Russolo classifying screeches, Ball inventing speed metal, Duchamp violating the staircase’s history with skins, Marinetti’s guillotine autos stomaching his will, cars a holocaust of beeps, World War I erupted symptomatically of the industrial bangs navigating uncharted trauma along landscapes, in heads. Destruction as advancement: “The closest experience to trench warfare before winter 1914 in civilian society was to be found in the wreckage of a railway accident” (Leese 15). “Engineer’s malady,” product of screeching mortars or random bombs from the air, the repeat-firing weapon, shell-shock initiated a society rushing clumsily ahead. The old concept of valiant warfare tested on ears forced deaf, chemically influenced bodies, bullets in clouds instead of aimed. People dismantled by their making. People as leftovers knew less about meaning. “These symptoms constitute an idiom of suffering and sickness: a physical style for expressing inner pain, which was bound in time and culture” (Leese 2). Schopenhauer – barely withstanding clopping carriages and whip cracks, arguing at his kindest for the dignity of suicide, noise a fury poisoned outward from cultures forming, reasons to be places, soldiers of getting it done, what’s worth being around after every hollow purpose – might explode in the metal tundra, hear motors bubbling and fall down. The brain allows fresh failures. Electrodes pitter patter constantly below the screech, a tease inside cramped spaces where silences threaten people to mock talk more, the tweet, the caller in your pocket, soothing buzz overlaying cacophonies outside, fun. The hunger of everything metal – metal feels like something that can only be shined with blood. God was a chime kicked by poets and the mystery shrank with Darwin. Churches offered a falser hush to buck loutish and daily terror, were again proven uselessly fancy with the coming of the atom. The atomic bomb shrank the world to the size of art. People built themselves a hole with pride, became so obsessed with newfound meaninglessness the overpopulation of their own birth dissimilated, abstracted into irony: nothing to do, knowing life as a mere button press, but giggle at accomplishment. Faith a process of learning not to know, stupid existences transcend. Feed yourself to noise, be carried somewhere ugly. The internet makes knowledge here and as pointless as breathing. Stein’s loop tangles backward, seething below her language, stepping away to let noise reflect. Not a societal challenge, but silence cut and spangled. Tzara pulls words out of hat and names the modern technique of editing. Joyce bends that process to something hoity, radio phrases from the big museum in his brain. Psychology shocks art by purporting how brains exist. That dreams can be unpacked. The non sequitur instills art, collage and automatic writing, whatever happens, pen to page, let Freud sort it. Neurasthenia is a pathological disease affecting the mind and the central nervous system. The social stigma of shell shock turned poets dicey. Who with any sensitivity alive could not feel the affect great or small without need of seeing war. Artists still wear the armband of mass disgust in all societies: “blue armband…which inescapably describes who he is (an inmate)…and drew the attention of the local community” (Leese 117). The only way toward peace from mass culture and noise forms as a revolt of its characteristics. Due rights of disgust with any system rude enough to have artists who won’t be put to death, are forced to wander neglected, shouting hellos when silence is scary. Djuna Barnes says: “To think is to be sick.” Thought already divides as tumor and process, static and edit, the shindig of apocalypse in our ears. Barnes knew how to make her lovers bark, some pleasantries do shout. At worst, the spectacle of our collapse will tickle, at best the earth just quits. Has society concocted any taboos not endured by journalists and voting? To record the scream of a century burning itself out. “And neurosis mirrored a society dominated by discipline and hierarchy and social taboos and that it was a pathological expression of a sense of guilt” (Ouředník 65). The ability to sit still has become a type of gold. To project without listening as the relaxation of lesser morals in society, the sudden clipping off of internal blather without consequence, silence amalgamates the wise from all ambition. “If the microphone is only used to make oneself heard, then one has mistaken the microphone for a mallet,” (UltraRed 2). In the anarchic assemblage of varied song, sound as mosaic descriptor reinvents autobiography. Primitivist meshing unfolds inside. The barest inkling of structure turns felt. The trundling outerwear a unique blare of patterns accorded to rhythm. Speech is history turned jagged, slow to evolve beat by beat. Rousseau was whiter than his agency of guesswork concerning “savages”, etc, wore a bowtie to discuss arts he could not reach, wrote himself outdated. The drumbeat of war was a prophecy for driving to buy groceries. New noise exists away from human boundaries. The mix tape carnival, grotesque catalogue of twirl and joke, manufactured growls sweating darkly, with papier-mâché abandon in the dream speak we falter, children since explanations fail, love a mere billboard of groins. The listener knows subjugation. Reality and all weak innovations toward verisimilitude subvert the unknown. The commonality of limited composure embodies walking. Wretched as the cityscape angularly taut around us, moved like someone broken into unwilled postures. Spidery lengths cantankerously knife property recognized. Only through static can we reattach our sockets and maintain. Pulp the stolen aesthetics scrutinized by control, nightmare prayers. Mike Patton played the new bible with his throat. The viral video shaded whimsical for a contagious relic, found as a psychic time bomb brought here from some alien ecosystem. Inherent with the fast slaughter needed. A fantasia of ear aches settles the sidewalk. We suffer a gigantic diet of traffic, turned cubist in our sin. Temperature can be dogma if we stay superior and dizzy. Something grouped within communication will keep us angry. Pauses hint between undulations. Gears freeze mid-stroke and consider their turning. The only music left, the sound of being kicked.
Marinetti and the Cowardice of Living
Marinetti ate his food cold and reinvented dumb explosions in his head. He wanted to survive as a poet and this made him disgusting. He wrote a play with robots before the term robot was invented. His robots hurt each other having sex. He was in a car accident from which he emerged better. He lowered art to punch and speed, claimed war as hygiene, ironically wanted to survive this way supported by fascists. It did not work, but his ideas survive like thought bubbles over an urn.
Marinetti invited hecklers. He wanted to read his proclamations against antiquity to crowds that hurt him. In this way, along with Jarry, he was the first contemporary poet. By aligning himself with war, hatred, rampant squelch, his work embodied the twentieth century. The lute song being stomped. Italy felt like a mausoleum of pride, gushing ears full of hair. It became necessary to burn art that wasn’t change, reflected by the din of cars, slapped from mechanized hullabaloo. Marinetti needed to hurt the page, wanted young poets to be so angry they would scalp him as he aged. Marinetti worshipped the suicide bullet mid path. He grinned for the great mass of humanity to go yapping down sharp tunnels. Art is the break away from wisdom, the anti-sitting. Had Marinetti surpassed his politics he would have been the greatest artist alive. Had he died sooner, his work would have been a vision of the coming grind and earned the full realization of its shape, like Mayakovsky.
Mayakovsky went into a corner and ate bullets, fed through his chest a few times. He played roulette with his balls. Proper futurists shoot their body; leave the head to spin aftermaths. Mayakovsky wrote anthems culled from a nature he never lived. Marinetti was jealous of Mayakovsky’s banishment. He went after Mayakovsky’s tombstone with a hammer, lived a pious fifteen more years, joining the army as an old man, charging senile toward some enemy. Only a heart attack could stop him.
Mayakovsky became the bullhorn of his death, propaganda player. Marinetti cried that no one killed him. The task of doing it himself felt like a task and too right. He felt neglected by the growing quiet, the lack of violence in his life. He craved ruckus, the awkward insights once you’ve lost. Marinetti was the underdog of his own creed. He dueled intending to lose and always won. He chased dogs for the purpose of getting caught. He felt like a coward for being unfortunately alive. No one remembers Marinetti beyond his statements. He is frowning in a very silent hell. We feel guilty and pelt his grave with sonic harm. We smash the dirt where he’s buried, not enough. Marinetti eventually pandered to Jesus and got married. We burn his works for that, not because he wants us to.
Russolo conducted gradations of pitch to wake ambulatory harmonies breathing inside adrenaline, straddling gibberish, to dominate nature. Marinetti wrote Russolo love letters about shell shock, thought himself free of its effects with an insane ideal, spelled out explosions. The first artistic reaction of the twentieth century was to place one's smile against a bullet, to get stupid in your own heat. To shingle our idiocy by the light of what kills us, to eradicate self in the name of creation. Culture adjusted by noises fed big, a stoma through art. We, hostages of clang, speak the language of rampage. A revolt detached from irony leaves us silly without guns, well-dressed and bleaker still, ransomed by media, cut and swallowed cell phone to shallow reasons behind crime, excuse for baser needs to hurt. We were making noise since sex began; a less intimidating grime and shuck, whimper disguised as procreation. To stopper that modern urge leans toward grandiose wrongs. The spreading of our kind is a potential not even our kind abides any longer and never did without knowing. We scowl loudly into our nylon bibs, facing gizmo speed. Edification demands grunts cast in the surplus light of our comas; no message equals no cumshot, no catharsis in the shuddering plurality of now, instead all is banging known at once, million-fold gusher. Good art pulls every muscle. Wrangled kaleidoscopic from origins of prance to mate, pocketed noise begs for an artwork loud behind hearing. The mobile crisis, the panicked canvas, a song of fingernails, fire as a toy, no economies, no hope please, tourists with mange, words as strangulation. The silence stated between echoes of edits is all we have.
Crackhead Manifesto
Read Xeroxed behind meaning, willed away and present, full of calamity and not, crumpled by process, construed from fear of death, shot here slant of evolutions the brain shat. Issue writing from bangs of seizure, free of measure, holy beyond ritual, goofy sciences happening, constricted cell to vessel to amnesia and returning by fire with nothing wanted. Memories, circular and wrong, repeat small impacts, poof and wretch. Adoration of our waste refilling. We talk our nursing homes away, everything a weak stall to the nursing home. A veil of blood memorizes sight. Crack sees no division within noise. Whatever stabs through best: a chance to die sooner is to write. Attach nothing to being alive, addict of sounds we can’t stop making. We write with our fists. Giddy linguistic pap smears wrack free. We resent our births. We remove our lives with such sad ferocity that art becomes our lives. The enemy is sober and informative. Doom is in our hair.
We shuck our bodies to falter verse. No ideas line to line. Only moments falling thereupon, only backstroke and knives, we are the crack huff religion. All skin blocks our blood from the air.
Those considered attractive cling fastest to identity. Stop everything groomed. No petting of opinions because mirrors exist.
The invention of crack cocaine asks for new writers. We find toilet paper in the richest homes on the owners’ tongues. Murder must be primary to going outside. Writers struggle to go outside.
Crack is headfirst American, louder, fatter, grotesque, a bubble from the ass of culture, a screeching heart attack buoyantly awesome, a needle lost in the urethra of progress, not a quiet poem.
We dance without dancing. We salute the stupidity of what sizzles. We jam ourselves into society’s fissure and giggle about socks.
No one contributes to, saves for, participates in, any society at large beyond their own selfish will to survive, beyond their own laughable ambitions to proliferate.
A lower atheism tears god mechanized. Nothing there to deny. Apolitical is too political.
Not near enough suicides clog the street in place of traffic. All paltry substances fund pigs by law. We snort the paint of our gibber. We mean the crack is in our saying. We mean maturity stoppers urge. We are addicted to the scat of our hands.
The idea, joint along with hope, that any poem must achieve maturity, is a yes to morality and common sense, a yay for life, a gaudy approval for the status quo, a “good job” to how things are, so yawn-worthy that the only response is to go far past the conservative cliché this opinion details and get downright silly in the paced slaughter of the sooth-sayer of old and well-meant white boy piss – slit the bowtie first.
So many pissy snouts in money. So little bullets all the same. Fuck veracity. The only genre is infection.
We mistake our tinnitus for the page. We hollow out our grime to submit.
People use the threat of cowardice to enforce a greater cowardice.
We learn our ABCs by sucking the chalk board.
Reagan invented crack deep within his racist bowels, pummeling his vagina with a log, shellacking his penis with Russia, his bullet wounds sporting wigs of diamond. He lives the century backward from all saying, is all about turning the skyline his. The cult of Reagan explodes litter from every hole, super-sized and baying the dust of queens, a doo-wop monarchy ripe with frowns, a dollhouse built of cocaine. Our desks are full of the blisters our halos said. Reagan carried out abortions with his stride, updated the bible with quarantines about himself. Reagan fucked his jewelry and had it killed. Reagan is behind the chatty nature of every drug. The yeast beneath his wrinkles is the twenty-first century’s calendar.
We are the speech of sutures. We have missiles in our hug.
Our flag is made of scars. We worship our own corpses instead of singing songs.
Our poems are lice in the eyes of prosperity and culture.
Our poems won’t survive: the rat trap stuck on a wet jacket of skin. Trailed through the kitchen, in a V of blood, the rat twitching, muscular system exposed, three feet away, dead but free, pointless effort, but amazing, a genius magic trick we bow to, the artist on the tile.
We coddle our waste by ranking it. There is no hierarchy in a coffin.
Pussyfooters of snark, academic wine aficionados tied callow by their stringy balls, the Reich of snoozy nitpicks, to the pissy art of edifice, ideals baked gimpy by courts, courts and their parasitic pews, the pious and ordained, to the clock for being slow – may you all be granted lives long beyond living.
Save for the flail and its evening, our shedding gasoline in expensive rooms, the vulnerable and their beautiful hate, the hate that grins, for the bullet and its path, for Columbine and Christmas, for crack and all its fucked helicopters that let one see, for the rat glowing outside its skin, the lush bounce our heads piffle, for the audience of cuticles, we grow vast inside our blood.
Now the graft whittles loose by the noise of its being snorted, borrows everything we love and performs arson in the gradation of its own jury’s severed wet.
The smoke rising from us is our property.
