by Michael Gira
I’m symbiotically connected to the living tissue of my bed, decomposing alive. Infinity is suffocating me. Time is a closing hole. At some point I’ll know everything and at that point I’ll cease to exist, having exhausted possibility (the word “possible” is itself an oxymoronic impossibility, as is the word “impossible”)... All of this excites me sexually, but the energy has no place to go, so it eats me alive, making me fatter.
*
I have a philosophy of life. It came to me in a dream, or during orgasm, or grew like a bluish tumor in the swollen pit of my stomach, kicking and screaming for release, anxious to spit its juice out at the world. I cut it out with a shard of glass and stood it up on the floor beside my bed. As it dripped placenta in a puddle at its feet, its four heads shimmered in the light of the TV, each one telling me a story as I lay reverently dying. I wrote them down, plagiarizing:
1) MY PRESCRIPTION FOR HAPPINESS,
BY THE ROTTING PIG
In order to solve the problem of my mind’s awareness of itself and its persistent refusal to be completely disintegrated, I’ve developed an idea that would allow me to lose any sense of where I begin or end: I’d be suspended naked in a container of warm blood, kept at body temperature. My mouth would be sewn shut, my ears sealed with wax. I’d be completely submerged in the blood and would breathe through tubes running down my (otherwise sealed) nostrils into my lungs. A machine would pump my lungs for me, so no effort would be involved in breathing. My eyelids having been removed, a set of eyepieces would be secured over my eyes and then sewn directly into the surrounding flesh. These eyepieces would transmit images directly into my eyes, straight into my brain without distraction. The images would be triggered or generated by me, but without my awareness of the fact I was doing so. There would be wires and electrodes leading into my brain, which would in turn lead to a computer. The computer would interpret the electrical impulses as images, events, visual scenarios, and eventually histories, civilizations, galaxies, emptiness. My brain would immediately and involuntarily respond to stimulus before the interjection of my will and would instantaneously signal new stimulus and response endlessly. My body would be fed intravenously, and my feces and urine would be allowed to slowly fill the tank in which I’m suspended, displacing the blood. Eventually I’d float as if weightless, submerged in my own waste. Animals would grow in the waste and would ultimately consume me alive. I’d feel no pain, having lost all sense of connection to the perimeters of my body. I’d feel nothing, the locus of my being now dissolved into the interface between the computer and the images I grow, emptied out from a fixed point into an evolving process... In this way, I can conceive of true happiness. At the moment of diffused reality when I become liquid, my body will die, but I won’t notice. As my body rots away, the images will continue their interaction without my interference.
2) HOW I LEARNED TO SPEAK, BY R.P.
I can see inside my skull. I know the exact spot where each thought comes from. I see it being born, an insect crawling out of a damp cave. Ideas, imagination, and memory are parasitic intruders that live on the nourishment of my passive brain. Soon they’ll eat everything.
The interior of my skull is flooded with light. All definition’s disappeared. I’ve left my body. My mind’s exhaling out from my body like the last breath of a corpse. I’m naked in a chair in a dimmed silent lead room. My arms are strapped to the arms of the chair, not to keep me from escaping but to force me to concentrate. My feet are strapped to the legs, my waist to the seat. A strap runs around my chest and pulls me tight to the back of the chair. My flesh squeezes out between the straps like bread dough. I’m fused, inert. I can’t even move my fingers. Each one fits into an individual leather strap, cinched and secured to the chair.
My mind vibrates outwards. The initial panic and adrenaline of my paralysis eventually transforms into a trance. Slowly the room fills with water, at body temperature. As the water rises, my attachment to the portion of my body which is submerged disappears. As the water reaches the level of my chin, it stops. At this point, I have no body. My eyes are opaque. The darkness fills me up. The only specific sensation is my tongue. A silver hook runs through the tip. Several more run through each side and further back as far as the entrance to my throat.
Attached to each hook is a thin line of optical fiber which runs straight out and connects to a series of computerized pulleys and levers at a luminous computer screen terminal in the far upper wall. In moments of extreme perfect concentration, the terminal glows faintly, casting a shimmering blue-green across the black water towards my skull. The pulsing glow is a direct physical response correlating in degrees to the level of concentration I’m able to achieve. As my concentration flags, the computer instructs the pulleys to tighten the line — the hooks tugging gently at the meat of my tongue. This in turn sends pulses of pure white pain through the synapses in my brain, which in turn leads me to a flux — a perpetual motion equation wherein I am intensely self-aware as I simultaneously cease to exist. There’s no time between the two perceptions. They exist in perfect contradiction and balance each other. When I reach this state of mindless mind, the computer screen glows bright blue-white — a distant prism of rainbow colors shifting deep in its center in direct correlation to the rhythm of my breathing, my heartbeat, my nervous system. I relax, and I feel the tension case in the lines and hooks that connect to my tongue. This pause allows memory, anxiety, desire, to invade my mind. Because of this the hooks tighten again, etc...
3) NOTES ON COITUS, BY R.P.
I’m scared to breathe the air because I know it's really liquid. When I breathe in, I drown. My body drifts in it like a slug in black water. It pours down into my lungs and falls over itself, filling me up with claustrophobia. It seeps through the fibers of my lungs, dissolving me. I scratch my face until it’s bloody and formless, trying to rip apart my boundaries. A worse revelation unfolds: My body is liquid, a temporary swarm of molecules (each with its own separate identity) that will eventually disseminate into a wider sea of shifting and blending liquids. I focus my mind on the space between the molecules that comprise my body. I’m swollen, ready to burst. Fear rushes through me from the inside out. I’m infested with otherness. My breathing is less an act of an individual body than an arbitrary slide of molecules from one place to another. Every thought that advances through the greased tunnels of my brain carries with it its own hungry negation. I’m flooded with empathy. When I drink a glass of water, it’s thick and crawling with life. My mouth leads to the interior of my body — a caldron of disease, germs, and perversions of biology. I don’t exist individually. I’m made of millions of living creatures, eating each other, decomposing, eating each other. There’s a gelatinous pool of grey sperm between my legs in the bed. If I leave it there, it will germinate and rise up in an incongruous parody of human and animal shapes, sprouting from the bed in a nightmare cartoon of biological potential. I’ll begin a diligent program of masturbation in order to spread the growing tide of disease that is breeding inside me outward into the liquid world.
*
I’m inhabited by the thoughts of others. If I cut off my finger, I cut away generations of history, stimulus that has passed through me and shaped me. I’m made of lard, energized, but the energy isn’t mine. I’m used as an instrument so electricity can sing to itself.
When I’m dead, my body will lie in chunks on the table, cut up by the surgeon. Energy will continue to breed inside it, but with a knowledge that excludes me. My identity, contained in the inert meat that now lies on the slab, will be food for foreign microbes and agents of decay. The sum of my life’s experience at the time of my death, and the accumulated evidence of my thoughts and awareness, will pass on in the form of another language into the bodies of the feeding world that is consuming me.
In a lonely room where the attendants wear rubber gloves and surgical masks and the air is sharpened with disinfectant, the pile of matter that was me will be pushed into a plastic bag, then
taken out in the woods and mixed into the dirt. As you walk, carrying the bag, the earth is spongy, dense, and resilient beneath your feet. It has the consistency of a corpse. With each step, your feet press down on generations of dead ancestors. Their bodies, their rotted and transmuted flesh, have become the substance of the earth. When you eat, you ingest their essence — the fertility that survived their decomposition. In this way, they live through you, by your consumption of air, food, water. When you breathe, you breathe in a mixture of gases their bodies exuded in the process of decomposition, reassimilating into your body.
The air, being blood, is hard to inhale, but I learn. I relax and let it in. My body floats through it, subsumed by it. I breathe, swallow, and think blood. My imagination stops where blood ends. Blood surrounds me, drowns my sight, so that when I think, before an image forms, it’s consumed by blood. I’m withered, ancient, a child drifting through a thick red universe, pulsing and gorging myself on my own sentient blood. This blood knows me, licks me, keeps me in a perpetual drone of self-negating orgasm that sends waves of pleasure through the furthest pools of pumping red consciousness.
*
I can’t stop my urge to disintegrate. My skin is pulling apart. I can see through the cells, linked together in a web, and differentiate them one from the other. My skin isn’t a protection — it’s open. The wind blows right through it into my insides. It moves through me, takes parts of me with it, puts new parts in their place. I’m drowning in light. Light is a fluid I inhale. My eyes are closed, so my body is lit from the inside out, glowing like a jellyfish in the sea. The cool blue vapor pours through my veins, pumping through my heart, saturating the capillaries in my lungs, filtering into the tissue of my muscles. In the center of my brain is a vortex of light and color. The pit of my stomach is boiling with light. My flesh burns like magnesium. My sperm is thickened light. It contains false memories, the seed of a new race, a civilization, a plague, a flood of poison oil and dead subaquatic blind monsters. The tips of my fingers shoot light out across the universe and write my name on the sky, then suck it back into a black pit of antimatter. A mute surge of selfless lust grows from the root of my cock out into the dense compact emptiness in the center of space. Sucked into this hole, I regress backwards into a single molecule of agony. The drugged stupidity of my self-awareness gestates in a sealed womb like a seed trapped in a lead container buried in dense impenetrable silt at the bottom of the sea. From here, deep in the comfortable blackness, I expand outwards, spitting sperm at the stars.
4) HOMAGE TO MY FORMER SELF, BY R.P.
The spherical featureless body — my fat living flesh — is suspended dead center in the red room by metal cables hooked into it and running out taut in eight directions to the four corners of the ceiling and floor. The shapeless globe of my flesh is five feet in diameter and my heart beats in its center. Directly beneath the suspended flesh a naked infant squirms and cries in a cool vat of black oil. From a thin wire in the center of the ceiling, directly above my circular body, hangs my severed pig-head. My eyes scan the room but are unable to focus. My head senses that the body beneath it is its own absent body, and it wants to reunite. My mouth moves and my tongue signals, aping words, but no sound leaves my mouth, there being no lungs attached to pump air to my lips.
In each corner of the room, a small pile of my intestines is packed neatly against the glossy red walls, attracting a concentrated cloud of black flies. A few flies venture to other areas of the room, landing at random on the suspended sphere of my flesh, my head, and the infant.
The confining surfaces of the room are moist and marbled with an interlacing network of veins, nerves and tendons. Though the shape of the room is geometric and precise, the substance of the walls is organic, raw pink meat. The walls swell in and out in a regular pattern of breathing, and with each expansion, cool oxygen can be felt rushing into the room.
The heart in the center of my round flesh pumps a clear jelly through a complex web of transparent plastic tubes, supplying nutriments and genetic material to my body. Out from my heart, a large, central tube runs upward out of my flesh and feeds my hanging head, entering the bottom of the sliced neck. An extension of the same tube runs downward from my body into the infant, entering down its throat. Through this large tube, the three entities — my head, my body, the infant — pass sensation, thought, and feeling to one another, “communicating”.
Out from each entity run thousands of translucent strands connecting with each other, with the intestines in the corner, with the moist red walls. These fibers quiver and send a sensation of pleasure through the entire circuit when grazed by the wings of a fly, in a feathery light shudder, like wind caressing the downy hairs on the back of the neck. The energy created by this event charges the oil in which the infant lies with electricity, jolting the soft white flesh and causing the child to squeal helplessly in the silence. My severed head hears this and imagines it’s the sound it makes when it moves its lips. Everything being interconnected, there’s no reason for my head to doubt the sounds the infant emits are the syllables of my own thoughts transformed into language.
(1994)
THE YOUNG MAN THAT HID HIS BODY INSIDE A HORSE, OR, MY VULVIC LOS ANGELES
The young man was a strip of struggling flesh carried along by the crowd, surfing the heaving waves in a boiling pilgrimage of genetically enraptured insects. The insect mob emptied suddenly into the mouth of a department store and he was left swaying on the corner in the stabbing sun, attacked by the screaming reflections of passing cars and plate glass windows. He pinched his eyes up at the dry hills. They arched above the city like the gnarled backs of drugged lions, stretching up into a heaven that was itself descending in thick sheets of sulfuric mist. The sunlight filtered through this levitating powder and felt more pernicious for it, as if the sun’s rays were transformed by chemical reaction into malevolent x-rays, nutriment-seeking carcinogens that penetrated the open pores of unprotected skin and would eat any living thing from the inside-out. The Hollywood sign stood in the hills shrouded in noxious vapor and dust like an arrangement of tombstones carved in dry bone, spelling out in subliminal code an advertisement for slow suicide. His forehead was oiled with sweat and flashed light back at the traffic. His shirt was painted onto his torso like a thin secretion of crusting red slime. His mouth was a bird’s nest, releasing fluttering globs of gas redolent of curdled milk, erupting stomach acid, and malt liquor. He licked his lips with a dirty sock. He tried a deep breath then regretted it. The smog made a fist in the center of his chest. He hacked up the fist, a shimmering tumor the size of a golf ball. He puckered his lips into the shape of a cannon and shot it out into the belching flow of mirrors. It clung to the shiny chrome rear bumper of a Mercedes like a light-sucking leech.
The fires glowed orange behind the hills where the suburbs burned uncontested. Roiling golden brown goliaths of smoke lifted up to feed the burgeoning overhang of fumes that swept over the city and trapped the exhaust that billowed from the endless river of cars beneath it, painting the sinking heat with mustard-colored chalk. A cacophonous symphony of conflicting frequencies and rhythms rose from the advancing procession of metal and glass like the evolving soundtrack to a schizophrenic’s trance — snatches of insipid melodies mixed in with shrill declamations of greed and lust, swallowed in a whirling apocalypse of random bass drums and shrieks of desire and feigned violence. The young man stood absorbing the sound and heat like a lobotomized witness at a roadside atrocity. His arms hung boneless at his sides as he attempted to form a thought. At 5 A.M. this morning, in an irreversible shock of panic, when surprised while going through his drug connection’s desk after silently removing the screen to the open window of the Melrose bungalow and creeping inside, he had grabbed the baseball bat that leaned in the corner and smashed the ex-aerospace engineer (who now carried a gun) in the face until his features were a bloody, unrecognizable goo. The dealer lay slumped with his seeping head against the wall as if he were listening for
his life inside it. The young man had stuffed his pockets with thousands of dollars in crisp hundreds and a huge baggie of meth-amphetamine powder, and fled.
*
Across the street beyond the inching wall of traffic was a movie theater painted pink to look like flesh. It grew weightless from the incandescent white sidewalk like a fantastic attraction in a pornographic Disneyland. The rose-colored dome looked organic and alive, like an obscene monument fashioned from papier-mache by an evil child into a gigantic replication of the flushed and abused buttocks of an obese infant. The pink flesh-paint had peeled back in bedsized sheets, revealing the previous color to have been a deep leprous yellow, like a gaudy underlayer of pus working beneath bubbling, tender skin. The dome steamed a rainbow of glittering gold-pink hues that arced up above it, made luminous by the heat as they mixed with the sifting brown smog. The marquee was a sideways monolith tiled with a mouthful of dull plastic teeth, ajar as if smashed by a fist. Spelled out in candy-red building-block letters were the attractions offered inside: “Triple Feature! 24 Hours!... Body To Body... The Autopsy Feast... Lubejobber... Purified Air! Air-Conditioning!” In the lower right hand comer, scrawled on butcher paper in black ant-sized letters and stuck to the sign with duct tape was another message: “Room for Rent — See Teller”.