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Beside Myself

Dion Farquhar

The rivets never come, reason’s double-edged, which is what dialectic is, after all, nothing being what it seems or is supposed to be, r.i.p., and once beyond the mescaline-inspired insights of three decades ago, the appeal of going native paled, never giving a fuck about fashion or ivory, consorting with liminal abjects, wimps and eunuchs, buying one and getting the second, of lesser or equal value, for free, not holding a candle to Wall Street’s century of fraud, robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale, the worst sin, sings Dante, knowing he will fry if he returns to Florence, its glass threaded with gold, his issues yours, fame hardwired to flagellation, what middle class means, and the mean is mean, is essential ambivalence, or as Adorno, I just read what’s lying around, says, only getting it half-right, the shame of still having air to breath, in hell, garbage heap crossed with Olympus, assembly-lining the disposable as kamikazes, and for the rest of us, guilt hard-wired in, a retrospective simulacrum keening, middle always-already coupled to a bottom below, redeemed—or damned—by building ontology in to identity, the hubris of a Plato, a discipline floundering at its founding, mutual recognition, politics of egalitarianism—am I reinventing the wheel here—aristos above, intrigued by talking-dog virtuosic lackeys busy embellishing a static madrigal model, working, if we’re lucky, oh, thank you, for air, for essence, for ideology, every week, for the online writing lab at a degree mill, every panopticonized keystroke monitored, menê, menê, tequêl, uparsin, Rembrandt’s record of the holy writing hand, warns the excrescent, crown-on-turbaned king, count-count-weigh-disperse, the handwriting on the wall, Daniel’s shock doctrine, retold as prophecy, like retrospective caveats or communism, the simple restrained calculations of empire, a continuity of sorts, Master’s tools dismantling the Master’s house, between the selling and the surveillance now falls the surfing, while ninety percent of the online West’s stirring up a moment’s recognition, writing on their friends’ Facebook Walls, ever prey to cracks, inattention, autodidacting against parental stupidity, the scurvied twistedness of noir passing them by, teleporting out of the wasteland of Ellery Queen, Reader’s Digest, and nightly TV-watching, a tiny, black-and-white with six channels perched on the parental dresser, wondering what they’d have now, what size TV, if they were us, and she was her, now at the end of the aughts, radical will is not enough, I say of middle class what Charles Olson said of the dead when I was reaching the age of reason in the mid-Fifties, hail and beware them, a hand clutching the side of a dumpster, class sucks, puritanical language sucks, resistance is not futile, it could have been worse, Adorno, and I, well know, the horror, the horror, fitting last words, let lamentation ring, what’s left but a seasoned Lear, or Thrasymachus, knowing it’s not the worst if being said, I’m proof of that, that the sunlight can be made to lie too, grist for the essentialist mill, to be continued, or as Yeats says, crying in Plato’s teeth, That being dead, we rise.