Our Death 26 / "Let's Not Chat About Despair"

There are certain things we take that help us to murder sleep, that appalling privilege. You know what I mean, those silent golden landscapes, those gardens and cancers and hollyhocks. Its sickening. Our shadows live there, would slaughter us if they could. But instead they are trying to speak to us. Like, for instance, there is a sky inside the earth. There is no light but everything there is visible. No-one can visit, and no-one can leave. But those who are held there, they are manufacturing the noises that will shatter all of our dreams. Think inside those noises. Think inside them, become nothing else. The fist in the fascist’s face must always be wide awake.

very vaguely after Georg Trakl's "Der Schlaf"
title from Diamanda Galás

Our Death 25 / "Where Have They Been?"

And so you wake up in the morning and tell yourself that ‘psalm’ means ‘vitriol’. Otherwise known as the popular song, or as the work equation, or the noises you make as you put on clothes, drink coffee and stare through the window at the unbroken, partially objectivist sky. Songs are holes in that sky, in those noises, those you sing and those you don’t know how to sing. Some are monuments. Some are oubliettes. Some will likely be your accomplice, others should simply be shot. All of them are collisions, and your body is always inside every one of them at exactly the same time.

You wake up in the morning and say that to praise is the same as to curse. That the songs come to you in the dead of night and each one is a memory-net, and most of those memories entirely predictable. There are many songs are simply cops, have set up border patrols inside your memories, have confiscated your passport and replaced it with an endless scream that blocks out the words of the songs you have known since before you were born. Songs still unwritten. Songs that you conceal under your breath as you walk down the stairs and cross the street to the station. There is no longer any station. How insignificant, these scraps of symbolic devotion, these mumbling musical statistics. All you can hear is the ringing that remains when the notes fade away. All you can see is the stone in your hand. The lights of the town signalling through the cop-ridden fog.