We Are Born Into A Pre-Invented Existence

We are Born Into a Pre-invented Existence

IT'S THAT LATE MORNING LIGHT that bathes everything in the landscape giving it an apparition of warmth. I’m sitting at a second story table of a restaurant, behind the plate-glass windows of some crummy piece of architecture feeling dark. Maybe it’s what we call sadness, maybe it’s darker than that and all I can think about is the end of my life. In the far distance at the edge of the runways is a thin wedge of horizon made up of dead brush, maybe trees—it is formless other than that enormous oil refinery thing and a couple low-set buildings made up of blond concrete and shadows. What does it all mean? What’s going on in this head of mine? What’s going on in this body, in these hands that want to wander that guys legs over there? I just had a fight with my boyfriend in the middle of the airport twenty minutes before boarding a plane to Mexico. I console myself with the sight of the construction crew down below in the fenced off area of the runway. I count eight or nine of them and I feel like shit. I guess years ago I could start thinking of the interiors of those construction trailers with the drafting tables and cheap oak furniture and calendars and ringing phones and one of the crew members taking me inside and locking the door and a ratty couch over to the side and him removing his sweater and thermal undershirt all in one move so I could reach over and put his sweat on my palms but that is a drift of thought that takes a lot of effort right now and I don’t care about making that effort. What does it mean, what for and why ? and the red tail fins of some of the planes parked nearby have white crosses painted on their sides and I think of ambulances—ooh love is wounding me and I’m afraid death is making me lose touch with the faces of those I love; I’m losing touch with the current of timelessness that drove me through all my life til now. I maybe won’t grow old with a fattening belly and some old dog toothless and tongue hanging low in the house. I won’t grow old and maybe I want to. Maybe nothing can save me despite all my dreams as a kid and all my dreams as a young man having fallen to their knees inside my head.

I wished for years and years that I could separate into ten different people; ten versions of myself in order to give each person I loved a part of myself forever, and also have some left over to drift across landscapes and maybe even go into death or areas which were dangerous, and have enough of me to survive the deaths of one or two or three of me. This is what I thought was appropriate for all of my desires and I never figured out how to manage it all and now I’m in danger of losing the only one of me that is around. I’m in danger of losing my life and tell me exactly what gesture can convey or stop this possibility, what gesture of hands or mind can shut it down in its invisible tracks—nothing, and that saddens me.

A friend of mine recently killed himself and I can’t let go of him; he has followed the first flight to Miami and now it is going towards dusk and I’m sitting in a replica of the earlier waiting room waiting for the plane to be announced. My boyfriend Tom is wandering the billion shops of the airport and I am smoking a cigarette and thinking about Death. A man on the balcony takes a kodak picture of the sunset and uses a flash attachment— what does he hope to illuminate? If I could I’d descend the stairs and run with my eyes closed all across those runways to the far horizon and break through the screen of dusk as if it were a large screen of paper held vertical, and enter a whole other century or life. If I could I’d jump into the warm ocean and swim until I disappeared like a cartoon dot on the horizon.

Once, years ago in a warehouse along the hudson river I wrote on an abandoned wall about a man who flew a single-prop airplane out over the ocean until it ran out of gas and I envied that man so much it hurt. That was years and years ago so does that mean up until now I have been living on borrowed time? Should I count backwards like the Mayans so that I never get older? Will the moon in the sky listen to my whispers as I count away?

Text from the mixed-media work WE ARE BORN INTO A PRE-INVENTED EXISTENCE, 1990

I FEEL A VAGUE NAUSEA Stroking and tapping the lining of my stomach. The hand holding the burning cigarette travels sideways like a strong cloud drifting the open desert; how far can I reach? I’m in a car traveling the folds of the southwest region of the country and the road is steadying out and becoming flat and giving off an energy like a vortex leading to the horizon line. I hate arriving at that destination. Transition is always a relief; destination means death to me. If I could figure a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom. After hours and hours of driving in solitude I moved into a section of countryside that is controlled by the marine corps air station. Civilization and its approach is beginning to make me feel jittery. I feel something concrete slipping off the ledge back there behind my eyes. I was, up until this moment, a member of the industrialized tribe; the illusory tribe that catapults this nation, this society, into something thick and hallucinogenic. My hand with the cigarette is slowly making its way back across the hip of the horizon; its slow motion drift creates dark spot below it like a cloud shadow on the landscape that travels at the same speed. The hand with the cigarette is drifting for hours and hours back to my waiting lips. What is it in these wrists that grab the steering wheel; what blood flows through these arms and hands; what color and sensibility in that blood? What textures and images are coded and locked into those genes, those cells, those bones that drag the world towards my eyes? What do these eyes have to do with surveillance cameras; what do the veins running through my wrists have in common with electric wiring? I’m the robotic kid with caucasion kid programming trying to short-circuit the sensory disks. I’m the robotic kid looking through digital eyes past the windshield into the pre-invented world.

I’m the robotic kid lost for a fraction of evolutionary time in the outskirts of tribal boundaries; I’ve slipped through the keyhole of an enormous psychic erector set of a child civilization. I’m the robotic kid lost from the blind eye of government and wandering edges of a computerized landscape; all civilization is turning like one huge gear in my forehead. I’m seeing my hands and feet grow thousands of miles long and millions of years old and I’m experiencing the exertion it takes to move these programmed limbs. I’m the robotic kid, the human motor-works, and surveying the scene before me I wonder: what can these feet level, what can these feet pound and flatten, what can these hands raise? Äfr

Text from the mixed-media work I FEEL A VAGUE NAUSEA, 1990