D. Wilson - Primordial - An Abstraction

Grooming my body hair has become too much work.

I let the hair grow out.

The moment I make the decision, the hair bristles. . and stops growing.

Two weeks later my thighs are smooth as ice, white as ivory. I touch them and the feeling is gone.

Weary, I sleep for at least a fortnight.

A monkey attacks the University as I lay unconscious.

It is not a big monkey but it is a powerful monkey and a purposeful monkey and the administrators don’t know what to do. They’re scared. And yet everybody more or less likes monkeys. Even the evil, destructive ones.

Prudence is required.

Faculty and staff don’t have an opinion on the matter. They left the University long ago. Or died.

Nobody here notices when people die.

Meanwhile the monkey wreaks unmitigated havoc. How are we to negotiate its hambone antics?

Right now the monkey is tearing across campus throwing bricks through all of the windows that have not yet been shattered by drunken students, deranged faculty, choleric staff and bored vandals.

“That’s no bonobo,” remarks the President, and takes refuge in a bomb shelter. .

. . inevitable postapocalyptic dreamscape clinched by the flexed biceps of Logic. When reality gets hairy, the best medicine is Hard Science.

Hard Math in particular.

Consider Euclidean geometry, namely the Pythagorean theorem — my theorem of choice:

a 2+ b 2= c 2

But even the monkey can perceive the holes in this pre- Socratic-addled configuration. Euler’s Identity presents a greater challenge:

e iπ+ 1 = 0

See how the monkey swings from the bowed undercarriage of Pure Energy to the collapse of numeric stability and the beginning of rawhide code. .

The question remains as to what is the most popular square root.

This ushers us into the realm of cubic functions.

My typewriter lacks the capacity to format seven-story equations on a mere sheet of paper.

I will need a CAD processor.

Does anybody have a CAD processor I can borrow?

Does anybody know what a CAD processor is?

Anybody? Anybody?

In any case the monkey has confiscated my typewriter and smashed it over the head of a prominent trustee, one who has donated upwards of ten million dollars to the University in the last five years alone. Needless to say the trustee is dismayed and rallies with a crowbar, but the monkey has anticipated a rejoinder and fled to the bell tower, where it attempts to dismantle the primary carillon and hollow out the upper shaft.

Meanwhile, in my dreams, I am flying above a catacomb, and I am committing arson upon the haunted house of my psyche, and I am contemplating an equation related to dark energy, a (non)substance whose ontology flirts with that of the Lacanian Real.

Generally the equation makes sense.

I understand at least three-fourths of it at first glance and I can envision certain integers and combinations of integers flowing down the fiberoptic waveguides of its machinery. Integers stall periodically when they pass through the sphincter of Hubble’s constant, and the final, bottommost plateau is deceptively conspicuous in terms of its moral stance. A bird’s eye view reveals that the equation is a hoax, a kind of anaphoric pop melody that tries to be smarter that the summation of the dumb molecules that comprise its bawling physique.

The monkey excitedly concurs. . and then dies.

It loses its footing and falls twenty stories down the shaft of the bell tower into the cellar.

One wonders if the primate committed suicide or if its demise was a bona fide accident.

Unexpectedly aggrieved (yet admittedly relieved), the administrators go downstairs, gather in a wide circle around the corpse, and wait for somebody to say something nice, sipping spoiled wine from makeshift decanters.

This one’s for the ones who need Help. .

I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down another hallway. I walk down a hallway. I walk down a hallway.

I walk down a hallway.

I walk down a few more hallways. There’s another hallway that I walk down. One more.

One more.

I keep going.

I walk down a hallway.

I come to another hallway and walk down it.

Then another hallway.

Then another one.

Then another one. Then another one. Then another one. Then another one.

Then another hallway.

Another.

Another.

Another.

Another.

Another.

Another.

Another hallway.

I turn a corner and bump into a priest.

He drops all of his scriptures and stares hatefully at me.

“Sorry.”

Now I amble down a hallway.

I’m ambling now. Before I was just walking.

It makes a difference. Ambling and walking are like day and night in some cultures.

I amble down a hallway.

I amble down another hallway.

Then another hallway.

Then another one.

Ambling now.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

I pause. I don’t know why.

I smell the air.

I make a face.

I start ambling down a hallway again.

I’m ambling again.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling down a hallway.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Ambling.

Narrative as Blot. Lived experience as Blot. Primordial soup and End as Blot.

That’s all of it.

Ambling down a hallway. . Repetition is just as good as karma. Once you embrace it, once you ingest it — you’re bound to wallow in it.

It is not difficult to be a cutout, a cutup, or a cutthroat. To be authentically labyrinthine is even easier. Such conditions are in fact effortless, joyous. . until you become aware of them. Then the curtains raise.

The best truths are the simplest idiocies.

Somebody drives by the front gate of the University in a minivan. They’re going fast.

The back doors of the minivan butterfly open and somebody else throws out a body.

The minivan speeds away.

The body rolls across the grass like an unmanned ventriloquist doll.

I happen to be kneeling there. A long time ago my geology professor told me to find some good rocks. “The best rocks,” he insisted, “are near the front gate, hidden in the grass.”

I’ve been looking ever since.

The body has been wrapped in cellophane.

I pace across the grass and flip it over and tear open the cellophane so I can see the head.

It reminds me of the head of my dissertation advisor.

It’s thin and gray and haunted by corpuscles.

So unlike my dissertation.

My dissertation was dense and vibrant and invigorated by Desire. I miss it more than I miss my own youth and the feeling of sand between my toes.

I cover the head.

I don’t bury the body.

And when the mortician shows up, I’m gone.

I’m throwing grenades into a lake.

I don’t know where I got the grenades and I don’t know what lake this is.

It doesn’t look familiar.

The water is gray.

I’m in a boat.

A pontoon boat.

Occasionally sunlight glints off of the shiny metal frame and stabs me in the eye.

I might be stranded.

It doesn’t worry me.

After I pull their clips, I put the grenades to my ear and shake them, softly, like a rattle, to see if I can hear them tic. Then I cast them into the water.

There’s a pause.