The Will to Matter.

A World
Gone Weird
on Me.

Missive Seventy-One

By Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
DATELINE:
May 27, 2002, at 1315 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA

Will? Who has the Will to matter?

You try, you make efforts, things are done — and then you end up lying around. You fall off the end of the Earth.

You move away from wretched indolence by moving towards an idea. You shall count for something, matter to someone. You begin the mission of mercy — and then you run into the wall. You sputter and stall.

What rules the act? Where ends the mission? Whose mercy shall you inspire?

Two hundred million individual failures of Will converge in a psychic firestorm to empower the one iron Will of absolute surety. Seized by immaculate opportunity, the one emerges; with manna power and supreme strength of Will, the one rises to command the many.

The opportunity to command stems from a people's shared humiliation, from the two hundred million failures of decadent ambition, from weakened resolve to retain fragments of freedom. The opportunity matures when Event annuls the contract for maintenance of the status quo

Save Us. Kill Them.

Would you believe that the Will to matter compels an inexorable quest for a fascist solution? That the vox populi shouts with uncommon unison: Save us. Now. Kill them if you must.

Is it truly a quest? Is there a better way to express the movement of a people, wounded and bewildered? Shall I define fascism for you?

"You weren't talking about fascism," Oksob de Opposite said in a casual way. He leaned forward on his easy chair in the Opposite Loft. "You weren't leading them to decadence. What happened to Will? Watch your transitions, or lose them."

Lose them? I lost them all many thousands of seasons ago when the rowan tree fell, not from the rot of natural decline, but from the swift axe of the conqueror. The bards could no more remember the meanings of their songs.

"Lost what? The throngs, or the transitions?"

The Midnight of Self-Justification.

My eyes burn in the midnight's confusion. I discard adjectives like scraps of blued pine on the sawdusty floor. I justify self to no one because no one listens. Would you listen to mawkish self-justification? I wouldn't.

Ravens whisper beside the circumspective luminaries, who are created solely to haunt and harangue. See them, their knobby claws and moist black eyes? They mock me from temporary perches in the dark heights of Oskob's Opposite Loft. Dame Conscience whispers instructions into their ears. Between the long walls, thieves creep in search of dark zones, hoping to discover the secret of invisibility. I cannot afford to insure the goods ag'in them.

The rattled ravens mutter old saws about impending deaths of confidants and sharers, the very lifeblood of union residing within an innermost ring, the privately constructed vortex of contact and the circle.

A thought hangs in the air, snared by a noose, but the tether is long and the eyesight is weakening and I canna, I canna catch the dangling thought a danglin' before me. It was somewhere between the ravens and the thieves when the knot slipped, when the thought slipped away forever. Once ago I might have stopped, retraced my steps, and sought to rediscover what was lost. Now I refuse to look back I hurry ahead impatient and forgetful.

Topless Decadence, Predators.

On a public screen, the women's breasts appear like ripe melons of the honeydew on a banquet table. In the flicker and sparkle of the delicious decadence, how can breasts look so firm and shapely? It must be another illusion.

One ripened houri, topless and manic, glides into the great room, moves next to another naked woman, rubs her breasts against the other's breasts to glorify flesh and satiate the watchers. Currencies between men change hands and addresses. The naked women lean, sway, thrust to the beat and the timbre of codified rock 'n roll.

Beside the balustrade in another room of the famous man's mansion, I spy a long-legged siren with thick curls of hair rolling like foamy waves o'er her glistening backside. She bends over, touches the Italian marble, hikes her curvy buttocks toward the crystal and gilded tin, shakes her tail and the bush beneath it. Predators advance like snow leopards in search of hot blood.

Parts once private are presented through audacious and stylized mannerisms for instant inspection by the goat, the witch, and the voyeur.

You may be titillated, but I am unapproachable. I can go to another place in an instant. In the other place I see bearded men with sticks and temporal power. They flail a mob, beat back the hungry heads of households and the orphaned children. Oblong bags of beans and flour and rice are visible in plain eyesight, stacked on the dirt just beyond the grasp of the seekers. A chef slices fresh salmon, fingers sprigs of parsley. His prattle is nervy, arrogant. The censors slap a pixilated veil o'er erect nipples and bushy vaginas, but I know they're there, the nipples and the bush, the rice and beans, the ready flesh of intoxicated strivers in the famous man's gilded mansion.

Forlorn Seashore of the Manifesto.

I lost the adjective, the finer point. Certitude dissolved into cynicism. Presto — it came upon me so quickly I couldn't believe it. The creeds and pledges of integrity from the great institutions were emptied of credence so fast that my faith flailed and flapped like a beached perch on some forlorn seashore of the last resort.

In place of the creed arose the manifesto, arose in the quiet time after the landing of the ravens, the entry of skulking thieves — after the heralds had come to announce the nearness of death and the loss of physical vitality.

I'll just hunker down and send him a burst of bandwidth. Why should I worry that nurses recorded his heartbeat at thirty-seven per minute? He knows how to pace himself.

A policeman's whipping stick stings the hands of the hungry simple folk, bites into the shoulders of the fathers who press forward to claim a share. I spy a dominatrix in leather with her whip and a willing ass, and then I hear a bard arise from his crypt and sing a dirge of life, and life only, a dirge of Spirit vanquished, and hope diminished, and love well nigh impossible. Vale of tears, wretched vale of tears! Behind it,as if behind a veil, flesh embraces flesh; the primal urge for release and capture of the ejaculate is too obviously ascendant. Flesh and the Will to power wrestle with spirit, truth, and beauty for dominance in a world gone weird on me.

WATCH FOR MISSIVE SEVENTY-TWO
sometime. Maybe.
Once I wrote according to an internal deadline.
It worked well enough.
Now I glide in presumptuous luxury,
awaiting communion with a Muse.
She has a name and I know it.

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| ©2002 by David Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles |
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