Anatomies: an Apocryphal History
The discontinuous fan-spokes of a freshly coined dream: fistfuls of fruit-flies—the last embers of an impenetrable dialect of lower Missouri Comanche; gift of an ancient sort, yet so specific as to fold up into its own narrative without acknowledging contrasts between the thing as parable and the telling of it, like fictionalized battles in the air over missile-silos of interminable cloud-mast—the differential precipitates of wind; the coda, like the peak of a surfboard cutting through paradoxical wakes of icy tarmac, preceded by an otherness so radical as to seemingly justify its projection onto another’s well-earned daily allotment of malaria. We, the accumulated Parthenon’s of Paleozoic viruses, sown into anachronism.
Everything eventually overcomes itself as fact, through the banal fakery of trompoleil, the hidden urethrics of 3rd floor post-Reichian fantasies; 1,000 years and all you ended up with was a recipe for German potato salad and a Hummel dairy-cow figurine. The essence of kitsch is in never being properly grounded in the Iowan black-dirt of proportionality; those tiny big eyed waifs whose feet hardly touch the floor at the bottom of one of Margaret Keane’s canvases, bur spiral like tears of nostalgia into leafy lawns of a mild Fall without legislation; itself just a longer circumventing of the magnetic boundaries that attach themselves like a corona of miniscule cleaner-fish to the fraying shark-skin of the original word: roots clumped in dry-rot.
Hundreds of drosophila buzzing around spools of banana rinds inside kitchen garbage bags—the outer hull of a rusted transformation borne of distasteful but purposeful activity, bloated like a neuron shaped mandrake.
Kitsch is one fruit fly, cartooned a thousand-fold; photographed and framed next to the downstairs guest bathroom mirror, into tremendous opticals and fluttering wings—a sentimental shrinking of nature and precisely why half-truth makes a likeable companion. It’s dragonesque derangement of its own insectized anatomy now too small to be seen; its otherness occluded and reduced to the apostrophe’ of a musical trilling from invisible propellers, like the far away plane-engines of a romantic Lindbergian crossing over the 1920’s Atlantic—a world that one can never inhabit directly.
Fantasy is partially built from the inability to imagine something within the domain of its actual proportions, necessitating a redefinition of context that creates the need for an accompanying legend, or the Humpty Dumpty circumference of synecdoche, to reduce a story to measurable shape; re-growing the yellow-corn-fed fat of myth at the expense of innumerable particularities, like the erasure of lithospheric narrative through subduction into fresh mantles of undifferentiated lava.
I should balk at being asked to consider such a price for the preservation of an already unreliable memory, without which history would be a thin soup indeed, bony and insubstantial, like the hooves, spines and skulls of an emaciated herd of self-repeating bovine discontinuities. Faded maps landscaped with an endless chronology of unreadable names. History can never be painted entirely of fact, just as experience cannot dis-embed itself from subterfuges of core ideas cross-pollinated by insights hardened into dogma.
The sturdiest boats are grouted with the impunity of myths, whose cargoes of refractory hatchlings only survive their inevitable wreckages, reconstituted as coprolites in sunken worlds strewn like conjugations from barely forgotten languages: the endless midden pile architectures scattered across indecipherable beaches of amnesia. Politics, the last artifact of expired selves mineralized into armatures pregnant with stale air.
J Zackary Rothstein 12/27/2017
Innumerable Stumble 