NON-FICTION : A Narrative Concerning Megalopolis / Sam Heaps
The road takes you back to need. The need for the body to eat and have money and sleep, to be ethically pure, to be held. Mostly these things are, if not fully, at least partially, denied.
To avoid the road which leads to need you take the road to the movies.
You eat the oatmeal and a bit of the food dribbles on your lower lip and you scrape it off like you are your own toddler. You detour at the museum and in the elevator you cannot look at the pregnant woman, the pain a swollen knife, even though she would like to talk to you about the Matisse. You detour and take 20,000 words, make them 99. One of the words is taint, one is cum, one is farts, three are Jesus. Your fear you are not wanted in spaces demands you force yourself onto spaces. You linger in the bar. To no good end, for you. For the populations you inflict yourself upon. A violence. The review of the debut says “you” is for complicity. I demand you feel ashamed of yourself too.
Watching the film I wonder how there can be so much pleasure in a form, and so much hatred of a substance. Marlon Brando and Shia Lebuf. Sometimes while watching I will see FKA Twigs naked next to the bed. I will think of butter. There is depicted violent misogyny and benevolent sexism both. But, I like so much the costumes, the conversations, the method of the camera. The absurdity. The ambition and the confidence.
Coppola dedicates the film to his wife, who a coked up Tarantino is talking about to Fiona Apple in the famous video where she rolls her eyes.
And also there is the confederate flag and the swastika commingling. There is the whif of Ayn Rand and Dagny Taggart in her chains. The lower classes depicted as a filthy mob on the screen. The eyes of suffering American children who are not on fire who are not dead, still Justice collapses (literally) around the protagonists, whose monied love alone can right her.
The poet asks if our generation is defined by its relationship to 9/11 and I say yes, then no. I am thinking I personally am defined by fear — by the aforementioned unmet need — and that was there long before 2001, but perhaps exacerbated, propulsed, by my society.
I think while watching the film that if I do love the form and not the substance / the message / the meat — if I say I love the vehicle only, then truly there must be something wrong with the things I love. As, these two things are interconnected. Are reliant upon one another.
I am afraid there is something wrong with the form of The Thing. This whole Thing, but also the smaller things that make up the superstructure within which you are always both visible, and separate. The lover who searches for you in the night, kneels before you in supplication. He surrenders his autonomy to your wants and moods. Will you feel delight in his penetration? He kneels. The actress in the sheer black dress, so you can finally see her ass, is a nudity surprising and delightful — you have never seen her naked ass before — then slowly appalling as the sacrifice of her exposure becomes increasingly intolerable in light of the container. The form must have surrendered to some fundamental and deep evil that cannot be rooted out. Incremental alteration insufficient. You are angry at everyone you meet.
Evil is not the right word.
Anger is not the right word.
I do not love language and its limitations. And, do I even need to point out that love is never the right word? Everyone is aware that none of us really know what it means to any other. But we persist?
I read Wittgenstein who uses mostly words to make his point. I cannot create a mind blank of nouns. Even when I try to fill it with only colors I have never seen so I do not know their prescribed form of reference, I end up naming them. I name myself to myself, I am Sam, even though I should be something boundless.
Feelings of inferiority are a way to keep you toothless, and separate, and docile. They are just feelings. What value are any of these feelings. But I am afraid of the form and using the form wrong I am afraid of repetition and redundancy I am afraid of crawling back into the circle, spiraling down, stuck in the bottom. That the only way out is narrative. Narrative being a lie.
I fall asleep reading but a man says my name in my sleep and I wake. He says, Sam, which is my name, and I wake. But I do not know the voice. It is not the voice of the man in the next room, it is not a past lover, it is not my grandfather or father or any man I can remember. But it is a clear voice in a high register and I tell myself it is not Jesus Christ. I do not believe in anything. But, I still am afraid. I tell myself do not seek out the speaker. I crack the window even though I should be content with what I have.
