thee istsfor manity reader

The Glass Eater’s Advice

Agh. Agh!

Don’t talk to me about bloody urine, son! There were days when I’d drink ground glass shakes and piss blood clots all day.

I’d pee bloody streams incarnate!

So go away with your complaints of I’ve got discolored urine, dad. I used to piss shards, lad.

Shards!

“How do we begin to make sense of our own complicity, however reluctant, in this nightmare? I know that I’m complicit; my hands drip crude. Hell is murky.”

— Nathaniel Rich / Losing Earth

31 Pieces of the Auto-Sedition Quilt (excerpt)

These were the first words Garcilazo spoke when Maria finished drilling the hole in his head: 

This is plundergraphia. This is Flarf. This is Newlipo. This borders on Google-sculpting. Remove me from myself and then take yourself out of my body. You’ve been inhabiting my body far too long. I need an exorcism… You… you are a trapeze artist with a fear of heights and sick with vertiginous desires, and I require nothing of you — but I want you at my disposal. I will dispose of you when I tire, but I’ve tried too often to depose you without first taking your deposition as it relates to your position in this disquisition; and yet I never inquire as to your disposition on my position…

Maria repositioned herself on the recumbent couch  — really more of a settee — cradling the bloody hand drill in a wad of Bounty.  And Garcilazo continued:

… reconnoitering of your superstitions and lack of interstitial indecision.  I’ll decide and you’ll suppose that I’ll undertake a reconnaissance of the imposition of superstition of the implications involved with trepanation.  Then I’ll help you trepan yourself, after which you will trepan me again.

“That’s a no.  Not today.  Not ever.,” Maria said.

***

“Trepanation is the process of removing a disc of bone from the skull.  While generally regarded today as a barbaric operation exemplifying the benighted state of medical practice in medieval Europe, to its few adherents trepanation has actually solved one of the basic dichotomies of human existence: the split between mind and body.  While evidence of trepanation can be dated back to 3000 B.C., its advocacy as a direct psychological shortcut to serenity is a little-discussed tangent of the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s.

The first contemporary European to drill a hole in his head for the purpose of becoming “permanently high” is Dr. Bart Hughes of the Netherlands.  After three years of research into what he has termed “brainbloodvolume” and its effects on the mind.  Dr. Hughes administered his own self-trepanation on January 6, 1965… 

A stubborn literal-mindedness has yielded a novel if largely overlooked theory: that the third eye of ancient mystical lore is an actual hole in the human cranium.”

— Stuart Swezey,  Amok Journal,  1995.

***

The following Saturday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a few days before Garcilazo was hospitalized, this:

“I’ve never seen anything as atrocious as this.  How is this art?”  He seemed to be pleading with Maria to leave.

“Well, why isn’t it art?” she said, “the artist has created this as a work of art.  Why do you think it’s not art?”

He turned to Maria and looked at her somberly.  “Do you consider this — a great white shark in a clear tank of formaldehyde a work of art?  And who is this Damien Hirst fuck, anyway?”  He shifted his jacket onto his right forearm holding it as if he were an expectant waiter.  His judgment would be swift and permanent.  Predicated on her opinion, their relationship would either whither or move on, that’s what she intuited by his demeanor.  She found his earnestness disconcerting.  There was something petty and pernicious about the twist on his face.  

According to his affect she was the biddable one.  He, somehow, would make some pronouncement here and she’d either be out with the trash or still his sister.  Nausea seeped in.

***

By the end of the week Garcilazo was malingering. He had a well known tendency to simulate symptoms when month end work was due. He’d be out of the office most of the day injecting himself with q — actually taken in this light, he was malingering in honest fashion but he was bringing it on himself. The symptoms did end up being real but he was causing his own sickness, and only at the end of each month. Did he do this to himself away from the office? No one ever found out. But over time he turned an off color, as if his skin was striated with loam and it started to slough off at the edges of his shirt cuffs. And in the full course of time, one day when Mr. Semplice went in to see him, all he found was a mound of skin on Garcilazo’s seat. Had he turned into this? Or was this his parting gift? No one at the office ever knew.

“What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often?”

— Robert Creely / “The Rain”