PunkRockSpock ("Jeremy Wilson")
Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020
My name is...
Doesn't matter... anything I tell you would be a lie.
Or someone would say it was.
I lost my name somewhere in a dream.
For decades, I've had in my dreams, places I've never been, of impossible seeming scenes with people I never knew, to later find these scenes unfolding in waking life. Without doubt, and only for a moment, it's a shock, in the same way a stiletto of lightning appears and then disappears while the wounds inflicted on the senses linger.
I haven't much assurance as to why or how these parallel tremors occur. I've only come to see it as a sign that time is encyclical. Like the solstices and equinoxes, and each season and tide and tectonic shift that accompany them, time carries on, concurrently, in ellipses.
I write this in dawns prelude. That noose between the night's fascination and the day's possibility. When constellations return to their hiding places and the world wakes from the Sandman's grasp. Transitive. The uncertainty that lay between the truth. Translation. Between the black and white there is really platinum and fuchsia.
You who read this, do not know me. Yet, I wonder if I can convince you that my entire life, all of this, started with a conspiracy? A confederacy that we could ignore the status quo, that life would be a paroxysm of heterodoxy and broken taboo. That we would trace the fringes of life around our bare feet, and where we stood there would be dreams beneath us.
That these razor wire fences, and unfeeling stone walls mark the beginning of the map rather than the end. Leaving the perimeter behind, the intersection of X's marked in the ink scrawled upon these pages.
A choreography written down by the dancer whose steps are one-part passion and another disaster, who carries them self through life in a decadent ballet of verbs rather than adjectives, alone on the floor, caught up in the solitary romance of the moment, unblemished by the weight of guilt.
Do I admire them? Do I follow... learn the steps?
Am I the rebel gambler, who stakes his heart rather than his fortune and would stop at nothing to win the hand? Who bluffs fundamental truths while some bet on confused euphoria and then leave the room penniless and in ashes.
This was a world of patina and rust.
Of vulnerability to what lies beyond our control.
But, then, did we ever want a life without air? Without breath.
Stop.
There is a momentous risk in allowing the ballistics of the past to aimlessly wreak havoc on the fields of our lives. To reenact the intransigent crimes of the historian. Words drop into patterns... as they always do... and camouflage time as a linear space.
Historia. The synthesis of past crimes. The theft of memory. The past written by the conquerors. Only so many tales will be told at once.
And tales, like time, are never straight lines. No matter what the narrator would have us believe... all stories are arced. The text of our past is usurped.
What was once told through unbridled dance and illuminated by the glow of frictions heat. What was once smuggled in code disguised as wildfires.
But memory is a product of currents and tides, like dirt trapped in a glacier and carried across continents and millennia, driven by gravity and tectonic shifts, ruinous to anything in its path, until the past emerges again perfectly preserved in another time and place.
Linear? Or is the past really trapped elsewhere in the present, layered and fluid, just as a fossil turns to fuel beneath sea and shoal.
A conspiracy. A contract.
Risk it all.
Is there any other way?
Should I say farewell to the past? Should I cast away my relationship to it?
But what if there are no final words... no closing of doors.
Just an empty stairwell leading up to the same point fixed in an uncertain future. Because "goodbyes" are meaningless. Undesired.
I recall a friend telling me of her desire for these intense relationships: "I think the purpose of relationships is to find someone whose creativities and sensitivities play off yours in a way that you make each other more flourishing people."
Remembering her words make me think of my past more critically. Because my only relationships are WITH the past. How often have I found myself or witnessed others in clearly destructive relationships, emotionally exhausting and consuming. Taken to its natural apogee, entirely more suffocating and dangerous than mutually enriching.
I wonder what ego and hubris has occurred that allows us to be driven by convenience, habit or madness rather than developing an attachment to truth.
Some nights I go to sleep and dream I am in an arboreal forest overflowing with trees as wise as they are old. Other nights on a desert floor underneath a moon so bright the mountains are edged by silver. I consider the queerness of the distraction that my being present engenders, feeling that my presence is questioned by invisible eyes. And I think of the words we are losing to narrowly define what language is and the control we surrender to such a narrow and deceptive form of expression as memory. And perhaps, buried below this piracy of language, there is still a part of us that can sense the subtle magnetism that at one end draws us towards our worst selves and repels us from the dreams numbed by lives spent in the hum of our memory palaces.
I wonder if we carry these voices... like butterflies carry a map in their DNA to the same grove of trees their grandfathers emerged. Do we hold these dialects and wisdoms and souls which have lived and grown and died and decayed back into dust? Are we all like the Benegeserit Reverend Mother containing the voices of each that came before her?
Are we simply expendable vessels for the parasites and viruses that manipulate us? Maybe the carrion feeders sit back and laugh... constructing cultures and conflicts knowing these contaminants will be our undoing and these empires would be theirs to inherit.
Somewhere in these voices we all carry... in that code that lay asleep within... we know what's valuable. We know what we love. We know we can't keep living on conveniences and distractions.
The question we are always met with is: "Why?". "Why did you make that choice?". "Why are you being like this?" "Why won't you change?" I ask myself the same questions and more: "Why did I decide to spend years living as someone else?" "Why this name, that story?" I never know how to answer.
Being critically incapable of living with unanswered questions... it's why I tried to bury them in oblivion like the Lotus-eaters. They are questions that tens of thousands of uninterrupted hours alone in a cell obsessing over hindsight have failed to answer.
I never sat in silence. None of us do.
All these synapses and nerves, these fears and insecurities, they never stop speaking. These hands capable of caresses and crime, and this world of endless potential and abundance, our lives that dance like candle flames, are they not too valuable to spend alone, allowing senses and opportunities to atrophy, poisoning the stream for others.
So, I bind these words upon stolen moments and send them out into the world like anonymous messages just trying to apologize for these shortcomings, failures and say thank you.
Because our voices are endless. It is our past that is confined. How could we not spend our lives fighting this? How could we accept the boundaries that are given to us, cooperating with the jesters that act as if what we're given is the entirety of what is?
Rabbis teach that at Creation... light came first, then words. In the beginning things were like a luminous mirror. First light, then language. First the "en sof", the unknowable, then the letters and words all unraveled, from which we were supposed to construct a world... somehow.
The world starts as a mirror... forcing us to gaze upon ourselves. Light turns to letters which form words which we use to describe what was and what could be.
But then we make choices in fleeting moments that shatter the mirror and leave our world broken... incomplete... wordless. Each of our voices attached to a past disconnected and yearning until we connect nothing with nothing.
Until we can hear the sound of a vicious circle.
Until we can hear the sound of a head trapped in a paradox.
Until we can hear the sound of a paradox trapped in a head.
Until all we can hear is the voice, we forgot we had.
-finis. 3/20. ©JDK
"Punk Rock Spock" is the nom de guerre of the artist/writer/recovering miscreant: JEREMY KEENAN (Wilson), a somewhat reluctant resident of the NYSDOCCS. He is of indeterminate age, indecipherable origins and very likely hatched out of an egg (genetically engineered by evil geniuses) in Nova Scotia, Canada.
He is a hopeless fanboy and very likely owes you an apology. He can be reached (under yet another pseudonym) as "JEREMY WILSON", DIN #17A2153 creating general chaos at Attica C.F.