Riffs – Page 9 – Via Negativa

February 4, 2012March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

How to wake up

This entry is part 1 of 39 in the series Manual

Download the MP3

This is the first page of the missing manual, designed to be understood only by those who have no need of it.

Waking up isn’t for everyone.

Dreaming is an anodyne to our nearly inescapable grief.

But if you must awaken, make your bed inside a kettle drum and pray for rain.

When it starts to thunder, climb onto the roof and cling to the lightning rod.

Waking up isn’t for those who are already dead.

You have to start from a position of strength: go fetal.

Every zipper yearns for closure, but it can’t be rushed.

The mountain isn’t going anywhere—stop trying so hard!

Early birds are known only from the fossil record, having met their end in the jaws of nocturnal beasts.

Leave a window open for cat burglars and cats, either of whom might teach you how to travel light.

Waking up isn’t for sleepers.

Eternity can be bribed, though, if you’re subtle about it.

December 14, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Low afternoon sunlight bathes the end of a log — a tree brought low by the ice storm of ’05 and cut to clear the trail. Walking with others, I have time only for one quick snap in passing. What attracts my eye? The red, the green, the pattern of white lichen. Later, looking at it on the screen, I realize that in its slow smolder of decay it has gathered all the colors of the Christmas season (though our only white so far has shrunk to a small patch of snow on the north side of the spruce grove). And looking at the lichen, I think: teeth. Big back molars, packed tight in an impossibly capacious jaw.

I have too much to chew on this month. Beyond a certain point, the chewed becomes the chewer, setting the gut to permanent churn. At the merest slight we light up like Christmas, but for the wrong reasons. Combustion comes in many forms, and some give off more heat than light. Starved of oxygen, for example, is possible to smolder in such a way that one turns almost entirely to charcoal — no ash for de-icing or the caustic lye, nothing but the fabled anti-gift, a stocking stuffer from Krampus.

July 20, 2011December 30, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Superb frozen drink machine (unsolicited email)

Hello, my friend, glad to hear that you are interested in frozen drink machine. I am semi-aquatic, our company specialize in various habitat for 4 billion year, with the customers from diverse phyla, and hopes to find a way to cooperate with you. We have various kinds of iceberg, pack ice, glacier, snowcone, and other beverage and river dispenser with high quality and competitive price which will be suitable for your market and customer. You may visit our biosphere to get more information, free samples can be teleported on request, call me, let’s talk more. Do not wait as supplies are increasingly few. I anticipate your generous reply.

February 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta

The truth about trees

Some trees are agoraphobic — it’s true. With every branch and twig they strain to block out the sky, and they never leave the forest. Winter is painful for them, but they escape as best they can by drawing down their sap and hiding underground. On warm days in late winter and early spring, when their sap starts to flow again, they are groggy as sleepwalkers that have just fallen down the stairs.

Waking up isn’t always a pleasant thing, especially if you are approaching middle age and your joints creak, your skin is suddenly no longer elastic, and any weird lump or lesion could be the beginning of something dire.

Better to stay asleep and dream of sprouting a thousand parasols or hiding like a bird beneath its feathers. Better just to stand by the stream and listen to the water, which has mastered the art of running from the sky.

December 31, 2010 by Dave Bonta

High-rent times (2010 quote-o-rama)

Hide your kids, hide your wife & hide your husband, ’cause they rapin’ everybody out here. The rent is too damn high. They got together & swore a pact with the devil. This is a big fuckin’ deal! To the passenger who just called me a motherfucker: fuck you. The rent is too damn high. You touch my junk & I’m going to have you arrested. The gentleman is correct in sitting down. I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies — the rent is too damn high. I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you. Just avoid holding it that way. You know, I’d like my life back — the rent is too damn high. Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line & not cross it. I was a big supporter of waterboarding. It’s a double rainbow all the way! America today begins to turn back to God. Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate. In the Ground Zero Mosque of the soul, dude, you have no Quran, because the rent is too damn high.

October 20, 2010 by Dave Bonta

The Truth About Potemkin

Everything I thought I knew about Potemkin, godfather of the public relations industry, turns out to be false. His villages were real, however new and fancied up — nothing like the “village squares” in 21st-century America, which spring up near highway exits and have no residents at all. The peasants posing with their herds weren’t rushed in for the empress’s visit, but had been there for at least four years. And he himself was no empty suit. He wouldn’t have had any motivation to deceive the empress; they were confidantes and former lovers who knew each other’s secrets. When he wanted to impress her, he arranged to set off 20,000 rockets, or spelled out her name on a mountainside with pots of burning oil. His ideas were often grandiose, and his greatest colonization scheme ran out of funds and had to be abandoned when it was less than half complete. Toward the end of his life, he announced plans to conquer Turkey, Poland, and Egypt. He contracted a fever, ate a whole goose, and died on the open steppe.

August 10, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Confession of the Professional Left

Having made a career of desertion, we are adept at wailing, failing, falling, walking it off. We juggle buckets & flamethrowers, weed-whackers & metronomes, equal to whatever sinister task. Every third Thursday we serve guilt & sour soup. Mornings leave a gritty residue in our communal sink — think of a hog wallow. If the earth were any closer, we would have to put millipedes on the payroll & rechristen all the cemeteries as recycling centers, because what you call leftovers, we call encore presentations. We believe our enemies to be human, no more evil than we, & we believe in regular upheaval. Like sands in a goddamn hourglass are the lives of our days.

(In response to the recent outburst from President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs.)

May 24, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Irises

I have yellow irises, I have purple irises, and starting about four years ago, I even have mixed-race yellow-and-purple irises that appeared all on their own. These last are very cool, despite the fact that they are kind of ugly: yellow and purple really don’t mix. Actually, I came perilously close to painting my living room purple two years ago, and it was only the thought of the contrast it would make with the yellow of my writing room that dissuaded me.

I’ve never regretted painting this room yellow: it’s a cheerful color that seems particularly fitting in a 19th-century cottage, for some reason. There are certain bars I visit in my dreams with yellow décor, and they are also always appealing empty — no noisy drunks, not even a bartender. You just pour a yellow drink into a glass and savor the warmth in your throat, like liquid sunshine. Maybe this is what an iris is like to a bumblebee: a self-serve bar with bright translucent walls. And when irises close, I love the way they fold up tight as six-fingered fists. It’s as if the garden is mounting an insurrection against the sun.

May 22, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Sandman

I am a renter on a large estate. Every night the landlord comes around to take his cut. If I shut the door, he raps on the window. If I pull the shades, he turns my power off. It’s not my labor he’s after but my consciousness. I only need it for a few hours, he says, but already I’ve given up a third of my life. Think of it as ballast, he says, the dark sand trickling through his fingers. Imagine being unable to imagine. Imagine weeping because you couldn’t spare the time to blink.

May 17, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Opposite of erasure

In response to Siona.

I want to steal some place for recovery, some chaotic site not for self-indulgent accumulation, but filling in and anchoring and letting happen and growing wild, or for negating identity, and laughter.

If I were an engineer I would be an engineer of excess only, of crowded markets and teeming pools; if I were a real estate agent I would sell land only to preserve it, to allow it to achieve maximal complexity on its own; if I were a critic I would praise movies that were not just action-packed but nonsensical; if I were the wind I would howl. My body feels too empty already, and yet no one seems to be avoiding the by-products of less familiarity, less attention, and less.

I seek instead what I already have. I could clumsily recover, or be recovered — what a pain in the ass that would be. Anything can be done, anything, and this is wonderful and repellent and oh, thank Lucifer, a fiction.

Category: Riffs