From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.  -H.P. Lovecraft 

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.  -Edgar Allan Poe

• If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.  -Friedrich Nietzsche

• Am I walking away from something I should be running away from?
•  -Shirley Jackson / The Haunting of Hill House
• 
  

• I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
•  -Oscar Wilde / The Picture of Dorian Gray

These are two details from —

When Sword Swallowing Does not impress.

Together with the unrealized  inventions of man Vol. II

With notes on the impatience of man though out written history.

i show these to remind me of them after they have been covered, 

as they will absolutely be. Mostly.

It’s the type of visual subtext I love.

Title w/ subtitles always get my attention.

Telescoped writing, is the next best interesting thing.

i have been asked, so the answer is;

The first volume was never finished.

Dream; i am riding on a train that is in a perpetual right turn. i realize it’s on a wheel, of sorts, caught in going circles. i end up on my doorstep at a suburban sprawl house. Reaching for the door handle my male springs out of the door, pacing, totting in place + impatiently questioning.

“Do you want to go running?”

“No, I want to go eat.”

i worked in overtime + overdrive during my out times. i have had white-outs, but i never lost a decade. These white-outs have afforded me the knowing that if i have worked through layers + layers of emotional mud, i didn’t know about it. Sometimes + thankfully, the upheavals expected lay dormant through denial + have gone undetected.

It’s curious how things were, how they are, how they could be. People in our lives that aren’t there anymore. The way time travels. Simple twists of fate. Some times they happen in an afternoon, 
YOU CAN SEE THEM HAPPENING. 

Another time it takes years to pull your attention full circle.

At some point you’ve lived long enough to recognize the cycles in life. What folds back upon itself. What wheels around again, + again. It’s interesting to see the circles we chose to close, which are left open, what ones filled up + frozen solid w/ memories.

  Yet, we really never know what the next day will drop in front of us.

   i see a full circle, your circle.

  There is  a dismal attempt to put pieces back together again. i know that it is impossible.

   One of those wicked deja vu days.

One of those, you think you know how the day will go days —  then as simply as can be — someone phones up + rings into a time that you thought was past years ago. + thinking that it would never be, cant be, + will never be - could be here now. If you were only brave enough.

i wrote a lot more than i got down on paper. 

You know how things take flight + circle, spiral up  again + again so high up there that they become unimportant or evaporate until the next time around.

LEAP OF FAITH

FALL FROM GRACE

+ when all is said + done...

whom is know which is which?

jahh / image from When Sword Swallowing does not Impress -codex

 

Chloe-ism.

Chloe is running from clock to clock in every room trying to account for the lost minutes.

While ‘Drew is listening to a loop of the intro credits to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, staring into the you tube box figuring out how it was done pre-cg.

For three men the civil war wasn’t hell, it was practice.

Fucking cool.

Oh, i mean, it’s a well done movie, sure.

Remember, when you have lost your patience, stop, + wait a few breaths longer.

Title page for this work-in-progress + what lies herein.

i thought Chloe was trying her hand at Beat poetry...
until she told me this was her spelling list.

Same concept, different scene.

By all accounts i have spent most of my life in a  reverie, of sorts.  Somewhere between vague wake and sleep. i catch myself checking if i’m on the right side of the yellow line or glancing at the clock just in time to do something i’ve promised.

i reckon it is just my disposition. The slipstream is not a bad place to be, better than some. i'm not spacey as i have a trail of work to prove manifestation + a career to track. None the less, it would be nice to have the chance to choose.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  -Marcel Proust

Just got off deadline with the Magic Flute, the only opera you’ll not find me crying-over in the wings. Near the pit door was a free zone of sorts. i recognize it, having first met a free zone while living in the Vulcan Foundry in Oakland. People placed gently or dumped things they no longer wanted. Of course it was all art + production genre goods: stretchers, sample clothing, used canvas … This pile by the back stage door was of a different nature + mostly unidentifiable, accepting, an empty pizza box, Bose speakers w/ a nest of wire, a half full Listerine bottle. Nothing i would pick up + carry home. Just saying.

i know all of you know this, but that operatic scatting has a formal name. Mellisma. Said w/ an Italian accent. It’s what the Queen of the Night does in Act II. i always thought that was a happy little song, but what she is doing is arguing her daughter into murder.

Have i mentioned the use of panic to calm hysteria?

This is theater no one sees. I perform my task, coloring walls with a stream of sweat and consciousness. Or, a river of consciousness. Some days are green. All green. Monochromatic within the subtleness of every corner of that hue. The edges try to creep into blue or spread into  an olivey yellow smear. But I wrangle it, keeping it within the circle of my minds eye. It is a game I play with the chalk color. They have inherent needs to become something that I may not want, and I reserve the choice to let them rule my thumb or keep them under it.

-jahh / Minotaur - there is a shadow of a monster on the front porch  -pg 15

You have to learn the rules of the game.

And then you have to play better than anyone else.

-Albert Einstein

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward;

they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Three made the mod squad.

When i’m on deadline, different thoughts surface, some adjusting into clear memories, others sift away + only an anxious feeling remains. Just shots of memories. Standing at a stoplight on a certain corner as a car speeds by + a passenger yells wtf out the window to you. i’m thinking everyone has this experience of ‘hits’ when the mind is occupied in one area or another. Isn't it Joan Baez that sings about memories tumbling like sweets from a jar?

i had thought to put in different names, but this was so very long ago, kind of. + although this may not make since to you, it’s just how the mind works, yes?

When looking  back on being w/ Kyle the vague feeling of eminent trouble surfaces. Our compatriot Dana joined in our artistic carousing. He wanted to be a writer so i reckon he felt no competition from us. We loved him because he was quirky (who were we to say), he wore gardening gloves in the winter, brought strange + stranger women home to stay over night + lived to be a character from the film Chariots of Fire.

Dana fired off odd one liners, “Jayne, of all your faults, malicey is not one of them.”

We'd rehearsed non-existing screen plays in the subway at rush hour.

Once, we scaled a fifteen foot cyclone fence at dusk to walk across a barricaded rickety scaffold high above careening traffic. Actually, once was enough.

We had spontaneous photo shoots on the roof top. On one occasion Kyle + i dressed Dana as a messiah in a lamé diaper. It was cold. Dana was really cold. i wanted  him to wear double stick tape on his tattered sandals so that he’d pick up and drag leaves, dirt + small sticks. i thought for some reason it would make the image authentic, as though that was important.

jahh / Script for a practicing artist + an unfinished life. Posted just because.