Mature Themes Read Online Free PDF Page A

some time down the line, when certain landscapes erode beyond recognition, the most convincing evidence of their former existence will probably be Google Maps. I’m not a futurist except in this regard. Later, with a multitude of mapping technologies that will eventually render it obsolete, the original map will itself become a kernel of the real, distorting our perception of everything that we experience when we experience the so-called natural. Together we will watch the present unfold from afar. Glaciers, snowy mountains, fields: we will understand them only in terms of our seeing them represented online, consigned to the archive because their original, transitional form will have entered a delay between phenomenon and absence. I mean to say that these things are going away. Of course the bison we watch in northern Montana should graze free of our having to see them to know they had ever been there at all, but that isn’t the case.

    language is landscape
    every word dissipates into its mountains
    valleys and oceans
    Laurie Anderson once said
    virtual reality
    will never be convincing
    until it has some dirt in it. This is also true for writing
    base unit preference: the vowel over consonant
    consonants are buildings; vowels their foundation
    vowels and consonants are organized
    into words organized into commands
    language is weather, too. The water came up to 20th street
    and 10th avenue in Chelsea
    at the height of Hurricane Sandy’s
    storm surge
    I played a drinking game until the power went out:
    one shot of whiskey for every time
    the CNN newscaster said “surge.” Thirteen-foot surge
    drink
    higher than expected storm surge
    drink
    the East Village was evacuated in boats
    Long Island, Staten Island were partially destroyed
    in the surge
    drink. What does not change /
    drink

    You are fugitive. I am reverie!
    No mistake is made without permission first. At sea, I have been this, with you, thrown into the pile of things moving across us in rhizomatic bliss. Do you remember the early passage in Joe Brainard’s I Remember where he describes throwing his glasses off the Staten Island Ferry? To reinforce blindness with behavior, I return to this moment so often because I have thrown my glasses into the harbor, too. Melancholy, even in its most cloudlike state, is never invisible to others; it is only ever abstracted to its absolute and most potent normalcy until it becomes the environment you exhaust yourself in. Like taking a train upstate midsummer to be by yourself and finding that the entire train is full of people doing the same thing. Pollution is extradition of the everyday, detritus scattered across the mechanisms that create daily life in the first place. Joe Brainard washed ashore of this landscape, among the floating nuances of newly depleted resources like love, kindness, memory. How many modes of production can we fit into this sentence? Disaster is tremendous and overwhelmingly narrow in its concern. Can you name it? And does its name stick?

    I once saw the city of the dead in Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss , an ethnographic film about the Hindu burial practices in Benares, India. The city of the dead is not only filled with the dead, it is filled with the living who arrange the ceremonies of the dead, laying them to rest in the Ganges strewn with flowers. I saw this film a long time ago and can no longer remember what the forest of bliss refers to. Perhaps it was ethnography, the central point of the film being its silence—lack of commentary—and therefore the redemption of the anthropologist in Western liberalism. Perhaps bliss is the post-ontological lack after death, things like personalities hovering over the void. I watched bodies get dumped into the river as professional mourners gathered to say goodbye. Today the forest of bliss is on fire. And though I am not dead, someday I will be the flowering death that burns down the temple paying homage to it. Light of