Joshua Cohen - Witz

Thank You For Visiting

Our Tour’s over, finished, sof, thank you kindly, we all really enjoyed our time together, the little we had to spend, here on earth, in the world; maybe we’ll do this again, get together one of these days, a reunion, to reminisce, remember already, it won’t be soon enough: my heaven or yours, name the cloud, we’ll be there…

For now, though, it’s time to settle up, and to fortify, too, one’s position, armed with nothing amid the turrets of a castle of cloud — time to validate a status on the books: to grave an encampment deep within the lines of the ledger, wisping smoke to burn at the bind. Affiliation’s moved in, demanding its dues, and the Solutioneers, professionals that they are, expect prompt payment. Their remit, pounds of flesh impounded. Less a revival of an olden play, less to rule a ruleless game, more to revivify for the sake of spiel, they extract their knives from a cast of smoking, boiling vats, sharps culled from dripping wicks — to cut deep at the primordial rib, then turning to flick at the quick of wrist, exacting their dribbling tribute: incising a gash of mouth at the gut, excising the imprisoned flesh, the imprisoning flesh; a ribcage: a cage of ribs, caging the ribs. Once gutted from mass to individual, with appetites, wants and needs, with indulgences, with schedules and itineraries of their own, they’re regrouped, again coagulated, permitted to circulate as currency of newer veins: assembled in nerves, bundled in sinews, heartmusclebound, freed from the tight pack of trains, regurgitated from the boxcar tract, the intestinal track, then rearranged in limb. Allowed just a moment of air, an eye’s breath of outer light, they’re then reassigned to inner dim, a roiling gurgle, to these bowels of barrack, these quarters halflived. Drained of starve. Shivering, bluelipped, blacklipped, without lips or voice. Made fit to slip into bodied bunks, between meager slabs of spine, columns brained, rows shorn of ornamenting thought…they’re numbered as if all are mere vertebræ in a mythically infinite serpent, stingily coiled yet envenomed with combustible poison: it sheds its skin as it slithers its multitude, forever stretching out to the outermost end of its endless span, to make its greatgorged swallow — the enormous prey, itself, fixed to the tooth of its fang. Helixworming. Petrieyed. Lensed in reversible time…

Understand, what we’re confronting here is a reversal, Peripeteia: call it the evil of banality, the protocol by which we enkitsch the lives of the no longer living, rendering the rendered unto Caesars unceasing, offering their memory up to the dicts of any armchair dictator, to the pronouncements of any weekend historian, decrees from the sofa, the judgments of the further den. Here’s what we’ve only now understood. You’re either historically alive, or you’re historically dead. There’s no argument there. And that the purpose of life is only to revolt against dying, and that we do this, all of us do, through our rallies and speeches, some delivered to millions, others kept locked in our heads, marches and parades through what was Berlin or our bedrooms, through wars both global and intimate, fought forever and on infinite fronts. Please, it’s all about relations (discourse with an image, intercourse with the imaged and yadda), all a matter of access, of narrative angle, story arc. Institutional support. A career track. O the tenure of breath. Pay attention. Important. How we live amidst the publicity of privation. Witness the unique willingness of our people to package the product of experience both collective and individual, only to market it — that experience of living through history, that experience of being forced to live against history (as simulacra not impelled by duress but by choice, it’s been said, not compelled by oppression, torture or threat, but amazingly by elective affinity) — it becoming a matter of preference to engage such sensation, to become occupied by such strange infotainment, as virtualized in seemingly every medium to be just enough real that you’ll come out of the commerce alive, and perhaps even willing to be upsold on an ever newer revelation, an even more intimate experience: that of your own life no longer yours, lived only between the deaths of your preference. Identify and die, deny thrice and survive, up to you. Debread the morning. Crumbling noon. Mooncrust saved for soup of nightsky. Birdfingered. Candletoed. They’ve drunk the dogs, they’ve eaten the hooves…sleepless — they’ve forgotten how to dream, in what language. This is what they remember, from what they never knew, from what they never experienced and never will, and we all say — Never Again! Camps are reconstructed. Reopened. This Camp Has Been Reconstructed Thanks To The Generous Support Of The Lauder — Muggston, Corp. Reopened, but less to host the victims than to provide for their subsequent visitors: admission’s always flowing blood and coin when your guests don’t die on you; it’s only once the last body’s burnt that the real money begins coming in — green growing from ash…in the end, it’s better to set up a spectacle, a landmark attraction, and all for the sake of peddling its image to fade, all for the purpose of licensing its horror, of merchandising its terror unto the umpteenth generation, trustfunded, that of the greatest inheritance, than to actually believe in the truth of an unchanging cause, a ceaseless crusade, the given and graven.

Understand, because there will always be change, please, there will always be cease, that’s important, and that the only ones who ever survive then survive their survival are those — schmucks, mamzers, up to no good — who are always, perpetually, reinterpreting themselves, reinventing themselves, remaking themselves along with the antipodal identities (theirs always, too) of victim and victor. Protean. Praying the mutable. If you don’t like my morals I’ll get new ones. If you don’t like those, I’ll just have what you’re having. If you’re not willing to share then I’ll take. Of course, future propositions aside, prophecies, predictions, plans however inspired tabled upon the deeprooted, belled as innumerably rung surfaces of cedartree stumps, postponed to bygones, exiled to the dark of the clock — of course, they’re put to death, here and now, we’ll spare you the details; that’ll all be prorated into the newest Tour leaving shortly: whatever screaming shouting praying promises and negotiations, whatever resistance there was, it’s merely a gesture, a measure of the mercy required; neither party would’ve wanted it any other way; quiet acceptance would’ve satisfied neither, docile fate (even if interpreted as token, as such gestural nonsense) would’ve gratified none. Though most are killed, the vast majority being accorded the privilege of massmurder, are put out of massmisery, many others, we’re sad to report, die just prior to the opportunity for such rarefied martyrdom: dying too early of fear, too soon how they just drop in their socks; though it’s less fear, some think, than it is inchoate anticipation, uncontrollable, they say, undue excitement at the possibility of being so chosen…some soil themselves, others feal, fall into a giggle, hyperventilating on their happiness at this prospect, this privilege, this right — at being condemned to suffer such an eternal condition, what should we call it, maybe by every name we’ve ever been called; a prospect so elementally sad, and a privilege so maddening, a fate so existentially gorgeous, and yet so bewildering, so gorgeously crazymaking, too…O to be ingathered into that most glorious State that is the eternalized promise of suffering, which is bordered by seas of jealousy, its shores zealously guarded by the most vocal, if gentle, of wolves. And yet again, for those still alive: history’s known, always has been, on record, and in every format your nostalgia might fetishize; once again, nothing’s ever denied an initial existence, never is or was, never will be. Surely, it’s terrible — it’s terrifying even to think, to test as Abraham once was tested, and once tested himself, if only metaphorically, or lamely angelically, your darkest convictions, your most vile capacities if ever reborn to an opposite side, remade into an oppressor, reinterpreted as victor, lord of the manner, king of the dunghill if only for now; a horror for one, then a horror for all, a horror once then a horror still and always forever. Never never again. Surely, once it’s known such tragedy can be forever forgotten — unless, that is, any of us might wish to avert its return.