I woke wadded in night, my nose bleeding piteously but without purpose. The sheets were strewn with stains as if I’d brought down fall and I listened for my overgrown children downstairs, passed out across sofas. Streetlights glazed the windows. I brushed the sensor on my computer, it must have had a name as part of an anatomy, but my intimacy with it was pre-verbal. A screen dawned. I wanted to receive, respond, reactivate. There were no emails I hadn’t already seen. I didn’t want to initiate or generate. I wanted to say we had less, while my husband implied we had more—we were both trying to reduce our target. A car passed, calming while it lasted. My husband’s father was living as a hermit, growing his thorny curls to his knees at the end of the world in Nova Scotia. He claimed he was off the grid, that he ate “but roots”—we made finger ears—“and rabbits.” His beard smelled like canned peas, said my husband. I wanted to say the pain was greater than it was, while my husband said nothing, or he said the pain was nothing. It was a difference in how we protected ourselves. I wanted people to feel sorry for me, but I wouldn’t give the details.
"The poet is of no party." BaudelaireOur manifesto is an act of substantiation.
We reject all forms of futilitarianism, in whatever disguise.
We believe that comedy is the song of the village and tragedy the song of the goat.
We believe what is written in the books, but now we want to see for ourselves.
The single idea, beating on the same doors in vain.
The analogue and the invention.
The death cell.
The first permission.
Though we watch the stage for things to happen, though our minds wander.
By ourselves in the green field, playing our diversion.
Though the story begins with the loss of a home.
Out of the machine, we shift restlessly in our seats.