The History of Haze

Note: The following story is a remix inspired by a writing exercise from Mark Amerika: “Go to Gutenberg.org and find a text in a language you do not speak. Line by line, cut and paste that text into an online auto-translation program and use that auto-translation as source material to remix a totally new story. If your source text is pornographic, try and keep some of the original text in your remix so as to defamiliarize the mundane.”(Amerika, 2016) The text I used is Han Xiang Zi Quan Chuan. Author: Anonymous

The History of Haze

The shepherd boy, the forbidden beauty, wakes up happy in the Underworld.

The Underworld, where Chaos first divides the world, where yin and yang cooperate with adults. Where the demon becomes a god, God becomes a deer; and the pines and cypresses wither.

Snoring is not a good cause. There is no contradiction between the good and bad life –Buddhism is asking for a kiss in a dream, the demon complained. There is no mistreatment or obsceneness. The apocalypse is in the history of haze.

The shepherd boy knows even tortoises live forever with good breath.

Cranes fly into the sky with algae gods. It’s not qi, the demon complained.

However, the shepherd boy knows, mountains and rivers remain constant, and water flows constantly.

However, the demon knows, mountains and rivers sometimes collapse and overflow, and when qi is stagnant, they become impassable.

Even tortoises have qi. The shepherd boy flirts.

And if it loses its power, it will be like the fog of the morning dew, wilting, cocoon and death, the demon complains. Desire to live forever, to be satisfied? Touch the mountain, and the snail king. Repair the sky. It is the immortal, the first to be clever and angry, who is impoverished.

The shepherd boy knows all things can be viewed in the dark – the spirit; the big dream of tribulation; stupidity. The shepherd boy flirts. The shepherd boy, the forbidden beauty. The shepherd boy will never grow old.

The demon will never doubt the mountains and quench the flames of the fire.

The demon and the shepherd boy discuss riding on the green phoenix in Danqiu (super), where the wood is tall and verdant but not withered, where the sea of ​​bitterness is quiet, and the waves of the sky in the north; they discuss riding on the phoenix in the Xuanpu (rare), where the grass is everlasting and beautiful, where the fields change into the sea.

They discuss red fruit. They discuss the truth. They discuss the Buddha’s brilliant bones; the mother of gold; the six dragons; the five pictures, the eight stones, the nine essences; the five colors and the eight sounds. They discuss the sun and the moon, the stars, thunder; birds and beasts, insects and fish; the strange story of the gods and ghosts.

The demon flirts. The shepherd boy is magnificent. The fire demon knows the power of the shepherd boy.

The fire demon: (Complains) Rules and regulations are complicated and wrong. Proverbs are crooked, a false communiqué; and truth the secret text, the illusion of the world of the poor. Today’s people, the secret of their spirit. A biography. The title: Chant Of The Public.

The shepherd boy: Vomit the strangeness.

The demon: Pass to the trail, mark the residuals, such as in the table of contents. The new edition, the article strange and magnificent. Out of reincarnation and high astrology, eternal proof of lifelessness.

Remember, seize the golden bridge, the city gate; head from head to head. Seize a cloud and a sentence across the Mountains. Seize the heart of a foolish village woman. Seize the ears of the children. Seize the Qi.

The shepherd boy: Pray for the snow, pray for the fetus. Show the vastness of the magical powers; call the dragon saint with hands. Nurture the circle of change.

Rupert

I watch his rotting corpse on livestream,
I see the worms within devour his brain.
Putrefaction; abreaction.
The stage is set. The rot sets in.

His fetid flesh falls away from
his putrid bones.
Necrotizing fascism.
Dead man talking,
he never stops.
He never dies.

When will he die?
He never dies.
Why won’t he die?
He never does.
He never will. It never ends.
He festers forever
live on air.

He summons his flunkeys,
his lying monkeys.
They fly to him to do his bidding.
Eager to meet him,
anxious to please him,
skimming over the airwaves,
they fill the sky.

C L Barton 2022 all rights reserved

De Chirico on Art and Human Limits

The Soothsayer’s Recompense. Giorgio de Chirico, 1913. Oil painting. Source: Wikipedia/The Independent

“To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.” Giorgio de Chirico.

“Sensitiveness, in life as in painting and all forms of art, is incontestably a quality appertaining to the human being who possesses it. It is much easier to recognise the sensitiveness of a human being in life than the sensitiveness of an artist in his work…. to be truly sensitive in life, a human being must possess many other qualities; for one cannot conceive of a human being endowed with sensitiveness alone… while being in every other respect unintelligent, wicked, envious, miserly and gossipy. The sensitiveness which is attributed to a given human being is inconceivable unless the spirit of this human being be, as a whole, noble, full of goodness and endowed of course with a certain intelligence.
In other words, sensitiveness as a moral quality is never found alone, but forms part of a whole ensemble of superior qualities united in the character and intellect of a man or woman….
In life a human being’s sensitiveness can be tested by facts; but sensitiveness… when applied to a work of art does not exist. And when someone, speaking of a picture, tells me that it shows sensitiveness, I can only reply that I am ready to believe as much, but only on condition that it can be proven.
… in art, it is not the subject but only quality that matters. The value of an artist consists not in what he does, but solely in how he does it.”

G. de Chirico, ‘Sensitiveness’, an essay, Metaphysical Art 2010| N° 9/10, available via fondazionedechirico.org (2019/07/14)

Wisdom dispersed

She would talk while walking
It was hard to hear what she said.
She spoke so softly,
without turning her head,
without slowing her pace
While the city streets roared alongside us
beset by traffic,
suspended in time and space.

Ambulance and police sirens blazed by blaring
As her half-heard words drifted to me on the breeze,
to be blown away.

Such a shame,
She knew so much
all the ancient history of an ancient city,
of this strange city,
an ancient wisdom
that she seemed to want to share.

Yet she strode along at such a pace
and she neither slowed
nor spoke louder.

So her wisdom was lost,
dispersed on the breath
of the misty grey morning,
as we traversed the cobbled alleys,
until we reached the rampant dark heart of the centre,
where she, without a goodbye,
scurried off to her regular haunt,
the little old theology library at Grisfrères.

Copyright © 2021 by C L Barton
All rights reserved.