What scares you about the machines? Whatever it is, you’ll get over it. It’s more or less a human being thing.
You walk day to day, paycheck to paycheck, smothering the city in a passionate misgiving. Some produce more elaborate conclusions, some do more, more diligently. You entail the final speculation.
Anyway, it’s not really about all that, about that theory, is it? Isn’t it how you create, not why? Whatever. Anyway.
The way you live around your art! That’s like when we would stay up, all night, upside down.
Before a crush of personality, a crush of city, body odor, some fluidity to subject, or something like that.
You take your time now. You have to get up much earlier now, you have to leave much earlier, you have to go to work, you have to get to work. You have your meetings and your quotas and your commute and your meetings, did I say that already, you have to have your having.
This is not the work you thought it was. The all night binges, making marks, not this, not this ellipsis, not this drainage, this sewer of attentions.
We stay up all night upside down. Through two jobs, squeeze in marks for making, stay upside down all night. Whatever works. It’s work. It, this, this other, this is also work. Another work.
You know you might not pass beyond this work, might not get over this work, might remain under it. This so-called might last twenty years, machinic, until creativity becomes a hobby in a false retirement, awash in an inevitable vegetation, a dementia.
What scares you is that you might not get over whatever this is. What scares you is that your salvation, your reconciliation, your truth, is a machine, and not a snake, in the tall grass. Rust frightens you, not poison.
So sing technical overtures to rationality, all thought, all feeling, overwhelm your punk impulses. You may yet pass beyond another’s sight. But not beyond a wiretap, but not beyond a cipher, not beyond a wayward touch. The still breath between bass drums in stolen abyss on watchless nights crowds sleepless enmity from safety, from its secret corners, to the yellow angles of an open desert. This crowded loneliness pulses through the song.
The way you live around your art! Or then perhaps the way that you admire, grow jealous, say secrets to yourself, say that you would be better, if only if only if only. But judgement recognizes failure when it sees it. Judgement recognizes bare mediocrity, recognizes the depression of the competent.
Your status and your comfort overtakes your quiet talent. Flattery, appreciation, these drown origin with tightness, with control.
You are born stupid, you die unknown, you may live unprolific, but you give purpose to remnants. We despair, but your stupid persistence!
With existential dread and abject terror and with mundane horror, your stupid persistence, something new, your something beautiful, persists.
We damn it all and stay up one more night – one more. Then back to the machine.
lewis levenberg is a human person who also likes some machines and some animals and so on.
