Space: what you damn well have to see

[After Scylla and Charybdis]

After Fez, the loudhouse music cave, where we sprawled over pillows in fits of tequila, picked burning inscense sticks from a decrorative trellis to poke through bended promo cards so the smoke would curl before us, serpentcharmed. After our bodies let themselves be sound. For a time at once biorhythm and bassdrum bump bump bump bump oh ho hum alone in the space above moving feet, painfully aware of the floor and my uncomfortable mechanics. A little sauce for oil here, get the knees uncreaked, the mind unwinded so it stops wondering what the fuck to do with its hands. Dancing sweating skeletons. Penguin paired now all hips and hands on hips and thirsty demon eyes, wandering crotches. Looks that cry helpless, helpless. It's time to get a beer.

-As we, or mother Dana weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.

O Penelope. So like you we ravel and unravel and sputter from moment to moment like molecules, clutch and release, flicker and flit-- making our selves.

Back on the pillows the conversation turns from back home to sex. Stories for laughs, oral porno-- forgive the pun. Hip thrust, eyeroll embellishments. Punchlines. Ohhh!s I try my best to jeer along relieved at least my quackcough laugh is lost in synthesizer. Not quite myself? I don't know. Have I my quiet times? Ahhmm. Questions come my way, knew they would. Community! Find words enough, delicate ones perhaps, spacious and light but with a hopeful vagueness like what I'm saying is implied. You know? Yes lovely really. Just the right thing it is, mmm. Hard to put, this is this this

He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible... Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts giants, old men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law, but always meeting ourselves.

Intermission now to deconstruct. How strange to be a person. To father the self, at once creator, designed and ghost. In the forever-state of reevalutation and repiecing in different patterns from different palettes. "Fuck the institution. Fuck allusion." Performers in a gallery. Pictures at an exhibition. Despite our best intentions theatrical, audience applause. Begging. But now: are we ever really honest? Do we ever really believe?

"Cloudy, misplaced Mike Stringer came to Jesus Green slightly pissed and wondering mercilessly, adapting and undoing in a fevercircle..." no.

So after Fez. Right. After Fez.
-I'm not really ready for bed, Mike. You?
I realize that I'm not. Buzzing but unwilling to lie and let my head brim too heavy to empty. It happens when sleep won't come but the will isn't there to fight the brainbats when they gather and cull, snarling thoughts.
-No, not at all.
So we walk. Cambridge is all alleyway by night, shadows pissdrunk middleclassers. It's Saturday, lads, fuck all 'til it begins again. We talk to strangers. We step over bodies propped against a glowing McDonalds, a Mecca for the living, vomitstain of the pissed and hungry, frenchfrymackers, friends.

We find our course plotted for Jesus Green, the familiar haunt, a different monster by night when the weirdos walk. And walking, pause at the entrance gate. In the relative distance, galaxy inverted! lights dancing like planets haphazard round a black sun. Great electrons of fire, spinning noiselessly in the night.
-Dude.
-Yeah. We should go over there.

We stop and watch until we're noticed. The dreadlocked gypsygirl extends a hand and introduces herself as Emily, a gesture to allow us their company. We meet the rest. They are from the Cambridge Community Circus, and practice their firetwirling here by night. We are from Massachussetts and New Jersey, and are far less interesting.
-Sorry we've just finished the wine then! one barks, all grins. And we laugh, because it's right here. Take a sit down, then.
The gypsygirl takes up her chains, wraps them around her wrists and lights the lamps that end them before starting the slow and musical ravespin rings. This is moment. This!
-A spliff, then, gents?
One takes a baccypouch from his bag, produces two papers to L, and picks a ziploc pinch. Another gets a set of glowing jugglyballs from somewhere and launches them between his fingers so they bounce until they fall.
-Juggling goes out the window when ya pissed, yeah?

Out come a guitar and drum. Andy plays. Don't let me doown. Don't let me down! I'm in love and I think we might all be. The gypsygirl howls and warbles. I take up the strings and one of the jugglyfellows raps. Andy taps precussion and we're all so alive and smiling and turned on and hi hi high hello.

So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now by reflection from that which then I shall be.

It's the funniest part. In the present we are, as my Ulysses professor would say, most acutely aware of the slippage of time. And in that present perhaps only are we even capable of that organic honesty. So now to write, to make permenant, give form-- do I betray these moments? Do I cage them, inflexible?

This is it: the inescapability of rendering a moment past through the lens of the present.

So sorry, ameteurish. But believe me.

Jest on. Know thyself.