For our Branches are buried in mud, and instinctively thirst for rain and sun even while sunk in the muck.

But they’re smothered to choking in that damp and locked from the light in that dirt.

We were born with a sharp garlic taste for lust, madness, and with an inarticulate goat-cry lodged in the throat. But every noble, kicking, fearsome, joyous impulse in us can’t live while our lungs and hands and brains and souls are trapped by the rank Sludge of the Burying World.

Because the Burying World hates anything secret, strange, and wild. It wants us tame, drooling, limp, soft and clawing around in the underground or not at all. It wants us like Wax to better receive the bombardment of impressions from television & advertisements, billboards and the Buy-This Datafeed. The Burying World is the world of sensory overflow. The Burying World is the world of the Close-Up & Zoom-In; it’s the world of graphic representation run amok. The Burying World wants your Eye, wants to bore a hole in it to fuck. And then it will ask for your money.

The Burying World knows what you want, because it has seized your senses and pumped you full of well-marketed desires like formaldehyde. The Burying World coddles your narcissism and makes you think you deserve everything. That you should improve yourself endlessly. That nothing else matters but you [and only the ‘you’ that is able to purchase and desire]. Not other people, not a tree or a creek, not a cow or a lark, not Art or the Spirit. And so the Burying World keeps you slavering after its products and messages — yoked to its Pus-Drip-Feed — through planned obsolescence and psy-ops marketing. The Burying World fastens thick cables around your neck.

The Burying World is the world of convenience and expedited-everything. The world of Minimalism, Economizing and quick, marketable Feng-Shui-Simplicity at the expense of the bounding heartful healthy Sprawl that we are born craving. The Burying World wants to strangle your thoughts and words into easy-to-digest Soundbytes and Energy Bars. The Burying World will chain you. The Burying World will take your Gazelles from their well-gamboled Steppes to trammel to Troughs for fattening up.

The Burying World numbs your sex and makes pallid your grins with isolating devices, gadgets and technologies. The Burying World automates and automates until there is no need for us to intervene in the endless layers of Processes regulating Processes; Machines regulating Machines. Removed from the world, we rot. The Burying World will feed on our compost.

The Burying World hates the past, hates history, and lives in the eternal, marketable Now. The Burying World is afraid of absolutes, whether in Art or in morality or in church or in state, and would rather you accept everything in what seems to be an enlightened & progressive relativism, but which is actually a spoon-fed blubbering Apathy.

The Burying World hates Art, it hates the good clean light of it. The Burying World hates the spirit, hates the good clean light of it. The Burying World likes the dripping dark of its own toxic stink. The soil of the Burying World is Dense and Rich like puddles of Butter — it softens your buried branches and chokes them with overflow of fudge and gelatin and Cream, distracts you from your own suffocation.

The Burying World hates innovation: innovation is uncertain, innovation is not immediately profitable, innovation is an x-factor, is chaos. The Burying World would rather repackage yesterday and rattle it loudly enough in our faces until we think it’s today. And we say, starry-eyed: “It’s today.”

The Burying World is a Team of Men with picks and pans headed for the Hills of Mexico and California, circa 1849, minds sparkling with the promise of Gold. Except that We are the Hills. And the Gold is our credit card account and demographic data & our waxy, Brand-able minds. And we are being mined. And we’ll be mined until we’re shells. We’ll be mined until our tunnels collapse and our timbers are dusty splinters.

For the Burying World is money, which is advertisement, which is Money. A fistful of the Muck that traps our branches, when squeezed, bleeds green. And we twist in it like a Mouse in the guts of a Snake. The Burying World wants to dominate the Flesh of everything with its red, glowing Brands. Of products, of services, of corporations. The Burying World is not satisfied with a TV screen in the public bathroom stall, ads on trashcans, or ads stuck to the aisle-floor of a grocery store. The Burying World wants ads on our toilet paper, in our dreams, affixed to the inside of our eyelids. The Burying World needs us hard-wired into the Money-Matrix. And so the Burying World supplants the Natural Order with a New Order of logos, copyrighted slogans, jingles and brands. So that a brand-name becomes as much of an unquestioned reality as the color red, as a hunk of granite, as a monarch butterfly. And we watch our children delight in the caustic yellow curves of Macdonald’s Arches with more of the joy and wonder of recognition than at a tree-frog, or an apple on a branch, or a bird’s call, or a dog’s face, or the clouds, or the sky.

The Burying World will win. It’ll pull your Branches fully into itself and snap your Trunk in half and you’ll suckle its Slime until you forget the clean Rain; you’ll bask in its Cellar-Neon until you forget the clean Sunlight. And your Body, Mind, Heart and Spirit will be pallid Husks animated from within by the Burying World’s honeyed, moneyed Pus-Drip-Feed.

And us? We’re Nobody. We’re just here to provide the obligatory tremoloing crescendo to our own Fifth-Act wrap-up. But with castanets, kazoos and mouth-harp, not violins or cellos. We have no illusion that any of this’ll do a damn thing to stop a damn thing. But there’s no reason why the technologizing, automation and corporate-branding of our bodies and spirit shouldn’t prevent us from stripping naked, coloring our bodies orange & purple and tearing up the flagstones to read the poems carved on the undersides.

We’re the Buried Branches, and we’re just pulling ourselves out, don’t mind us, we’re just gathering up our Boughs and stirring them with hatred, love, wonder, piss, bile and laughter, with all things wild and secret and strange, with all Designs arcane and always, always preposterous. One by one we release our Wood from the Slime with dark madflower guttural throat-rasping embarrassing Noise. We are stupid and hungry and no one knows our Names.

For a short time we can exhume our Leaves and Buds and fling them back splattering and snapping into the good naked Air. Where our Stoma can lap at the things we’ve been quicksanded away from perceiving: the natural world in itself — free from the infected Cloak of advertisement; the contour and shape and weight of our own minds and that of others; the cochlea-bursting bloodred howl of real & desperate Love; the glad maddening flux and contradiction of our thousand-and-three overlapping Souls; the World behind the world which is the Spirit and the Order; and the great fleshy Ever-Ovulating womb of Art that looms over us all.

And it is Art that we’ve chosen to help us convalesce after seasons of choking in the Burying World. For there is a Creative Principle manifest in us and in the world, first demonstrated by the original act of the birth of the universe, a glowing naked architecture doming up the sum of everything, beautiful as a ribcage when seen from wet pumping organs, arching over and protecting what we are and what we do.

And we recognize in the Art of a painting, a novel, a building, a dance-step, an invention, a political maneuver, a vase, an aria, an arpeggio, a friendship, a tending of roses, a tending of sheep, a conversation, and of the way we fertilize and tend to our own manifold selves — we recognize in all of these things the potential for good, beautiful Art acts which uphold and reaffirm the Creative Principle to itself and which mirror the original divine aesthetic act of creation. Through Art we sanctify and ennoble the world, the choking soiled world, we complete it and clean it, help drain the swamp of it, and in so doing, complete and clean ourselves, we broadcast the world back to itself, we fulfill its own promise. We’re necessary.

We are pissing up your noses and half-apologizing in tears when you cough up tumors, we are smiling when you don’t know which of us to throw rocks at, for we all share the same knobby splintered Spine and it is this: the redemptive and transformative power of Art by which we disinter our fossilized limbs and selves and fling them back up into beauty. Back up into the distant Mythopoeic, back up into the sticky Arcane world of dreams and of an unclogged Corpus Callosum and of a world not dominated by the Beancounting Spectres of Newton, Locke and Bacon; we want Cohesion, the Mind adhering to itself, Metaphor and more Metaphor, the ancient violence of metaphor, the childlike profanity of metaphor, of literally calling one thing another, of mixing up domains of existence, the outrageous copulation of it; we want the Philosophia of the ancient Greeks, which was both Empirical (Scientific) and Speculative (metaphysical), in other words not yet sundered from day-to-day reality as it is today, where it’s just an ivory-towered scratching and feeble coughing amid Wittgensteinian language-games. We don’t want to live and think in pieces, tiny chunks easy-to-isolate and attack, demographically-viable segments and bits. Give us back our Entirety, stitch up the Sub-Genre-ing & compartmentalizing of identity and taste and entertainment and science and love and law. And give us the mousikos, never just the music.

Our hands twitch. Our legs are restless. Our throats are parched. We miss the Orange-Black Night sky that roils and swirls like red tide. We plot things. We are dogs let loose on ourselves. We are flytraps for the Burying World’s little-wingednesses. We are going to die and all we want is to shape our Guts to Blade and cut one long loud streak in the Blackdrape World and let some hot light in, the kind that stings eyes.

posted by Snail at 1:09 am