it says here / read this / it says there / is a definite / sign / look / for the unambiguous / we’re fired up / on noise / we’re deciphered / auto-mobile / we have knowledge / where the word / says so / it says it there / no error — Diarmuid G. McKernan, Voice of Noise, from Bleeding Lines ‘77
Those who identified with Nasrul saw him as an adventurer willing to transgress accepted modes of the rationale of communication. He showed them that the ground of his being was a banquet laid out before them at which all present were consumed by the privilege of free choice, not granted automatically, nevertheless available to the sentient creatures should they so choose.
In their story, N was an anti-hero conqueror of other planets, an astonishingly gifted yet terribly flawed individual. He had appetites he would satisfy but not be controlled by. He would put them to use to advance his ambitions ruthlessly. He was not a man to make a snap judgement.
The gongs sounded and at that moment there was an event beyond description. It seemed N had been stopped in his tracks. The request for location was transmitted and he repeated it obediently. His body and mind were found in perception.
In perceiving, the reader’s whole character would be enriched a thousandfold. However, N would play a trick on one’s memory. When one thought one could summon him, he became elusive — outside even the trained eye. If everything was subject to knowledge and communication, there would be such a repetition as pertained to literary knowledge of N, so much so that it would sufficiently demonstrate its power was a phantom.
He was definitely not Flemish, looked quite Mediterranean but was possibly from Bangladesh. The reader came to acquire knowledge of N through his movements within their own life and on this page, even in spite their incorrect reading of the situation.
Belladonna had all these words emblazoned across her back. She arrived at the encampment in a cardboard sports car.
A creature hung about the yard, dejected. Whether rodent or canine, it was difficult to say. No-one would touch it for fear of contamination. It took a piss around the back of one of the idols and sauntered across the floor of the execution chamber.
The water outside the encampment rippled with sparrow song. Light filtered in through gaps in the canopy. A bright, sonic glare — noise — dust. Scrolls fell to the floor. Heat simmered in the distance. A horse and cart passed by. A small boy threw a stone over a lake and ran off with the twilight, his bones on fire with petrol dollars. He got sucked into the soil.
The world around N was incomprehensible. Shattered after recent supernatural events which upon reflection were inevitable, he had accepted it was impossible to gauge who or what was controlling the identity whose case he had been assigned to.
Suddenly, everything went dark. There was a low hum. Monochromatic lines flew across the encampment. There it was again: the divide between the real world and the unknown, yet the two were the wrong way round. Whatever seemed to be evidence of the unknown was evidence of the real, or so it seemed. The divide between the objective universe of values and the place where there is neither an objective or subjective thing subject to any value, was false. No such divide existed.
There was a sound as if a brick had fallen on to soft ground.
The team of researchers N had hired for the project had mis-read the signs. They had failed to appreciate the significance of the events which had actually occurred as opposed to those they had constructed in their bid to try to prove consciousness.
The strength in N’s abdomen pushed his lips to say, “A word is no good. A sign is just an indication of another sign. Propaganda.”
It was the same with the TV. At the molecular level, TV was all cartoons. Consciousness was not generated by the brain any more than by the TV or any other device, but the research team thought consciousness was all parallel universes or a hologram, or the collective unconscious or neurological brain activities, etc.
Consciousness was the equivalent of advertising and propaganda.
Monochromatic lines had been drawn across the screen, but what for? There was no need to have to apply any specific rationale.
The air was in-existent. All connection severed. There was no Earth upon which to translate the feeling or the experience of being alive. The universe had destroyed itself but its saving grace could never be propaganda.
Luckily, N tied his shoelace. He did not want to draw attention to himself as he pondered: the miracle was the unborn, truth was unknowable. That which was taken as the social-factual was only a partial view. To enter the unborn, that inhuman place where the laws of physics and social unreality do not apply, N had to be prepared and constantly on the lookout for the seemingly insignificant.
The hyperreal dimension gave forth its wonders as mostly everyone became overwhelmed by informational noise pollution. A few renegades and mavericks had the keys, but they hid elsewhere.
Belladonna knew there was no such thing as faulty, and as she relieved herself of duty, she was a random who won the lottery, although Montague thought less of the situation. He said, “I told you so. The solution is going blank.”
All that was left to do was psychologise. An endless cycle of confessions as to motive and purpose made into a life long commitment where insights were gained daily as a reward from the trade in subjective observations.
It all seemed like so much delusion, as if a relationship between objects and subjects was a confirmation of the belief that an entity had psychological integrity. Trade had given birth to lives lead in search of other lives, and hope in the belief that existence exists. Lives had been broken open like pineapples, like skylights, no longer just public property or a sense of belonging to transnational corporations, just transparent propaganda for the sake of it.
Motorcycle exhaust trailed through the traffic outside. B’s two eyes, like signs of culture and craving, flaunted their danger money and a sequinned, puffed out chest emitted moans of the full measure of beckoning and delivery.
It was summer. Withdrawn in the scarlet banquet hall and in the bathroom, B talked about her love of the schizoid personality. She talked about the dinner and how homo economicus had fallen, how when she was a child she dissected frogs and rats, determined to know how hearts pumped, how brains were made to think. She was never into personal computing. It left her cold, but given enough of a character arc you soon saw she was able to interrogate the dead.
“The less I write the more I know.”
The gallop of forked hooves sounded like the bark of a clubland starfish melody. In a vessel of octopus ink in the chapel, a purposeless look was in a mirror of porridge of muddy gestures. Ploughing through the fake signatures, the gaps between chaos and treasure were mapped out through all the abysses, exquisitely.
The encampment stood bold in the glare of the heavens, risen up like a toadstool. New signs broke up the smooth lines of the landscape. Grey-brown dirt and oil — ash wafted up in the peripheral vision. Coloured glass shattered.
Leaving the petrol station, a pirouette between carving blade and rabbit hutch with tortoise shell squinted in the mould of the dunes, not unlike a distortion of how things could have been IRL.
Whoever had become the creature had succumbed, soothed by silken abstruseness. The creature ate a cigarette out of a plant pot next to a stone lion whose mouth was fixed in a silent, perpetual roar. The canopy flapped in the breeze. The water rippled lightly, bearing a dead scarab. The creature stretched out its neck as if about to take the plunge.
Such pristine modernity: so post-factual, like a guest of descending notions. Slipping like tyres in the rain, came the statue of intercession in pursuit of the fleece, in pursuit of omens and light of heart. He / She was enslaved by a role, held by the frenzy of an accordion’s whine.
Troubled hands played behind the elevator door. Through the domination of space Terra Firma shook off thunder and lightning.
All about the costume of the body of citizens went the trembling, wraith-like fingertips, like android detonators of its malcontents.
“Linger awhile,” B said, “Make me weep again. Don’t hold back from asking who.”
She picked a bird dropping, an omen of luck, off her mohair cardigan. She had frosted over in an execution pose on the pedestal. N’s tail swished back and forth over his branded buttocks. The pianola played Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande”.
They shared the same dream.
In the hall of superstition a froth-making finger unfolded the lamb of Earth to make it speak into and out of the sensual world.
N’s novel had been ghost-written. After eating and sitting he went about his business as described here. It was written for him as a favour to give him flavour. After a frightening whirr then a stupid kind of silence, his eyes were torn from their sockets.
But as the panic epidemic spread, it became easier to rise above the directives of social and ideological expectations.
“By panic shall we progress, by panic shall we multiply,” said a controversial politician.
Towards the formulation of later plans, N began to work according to his mentations at definite hours, writing letters of inquiry and detailed reports. Speaking about equanimity, N said, “The most terrifying and astonishing thing in the universe.”
N heard the unearthly flute of a snake-charmer.
The siren escaped in a wheelbarrow. Seasons blurred the view, took rule over what penalties sleep dispensed. The raven skull of the dining car explosion repeated peril in all the abysses simultaneously.
There was no future in the festive hour of the hunting organ, or in the pith of the new novel, only a plain living room where the inner meaning of backgammon was uncovered, played out under an auspicious family tree. Survival and its blueprints were pasted up like some kind of anti-manifesto in perpetuity.
This was no marketplace love or bliss, only the artery of the ancestral river. There was no future in remembrance, no memory that was not delusional.
“The Revolt” and “Deserts of Love” resounded.
All information was bullshit. Who cared what any of these characters did? They could easily have been focusing on more useful stuff.
We could not say exactly what happened next. The characters had already been shown to be fictional. Their actions and the various descriptions of their habits and habitations had been found to represent their repetition, available now.
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