Flowers

Dear Flowers,

It's been a long time; my how we've grown. I am currently watching you slowly die on my kitchen table. It began two days ago when your water clouded over and formed a film. First the longer delicate petals began to drop off and some of you shook loose your stamens onto the blue checkered table cloth in one last act of procreative desperation.

This morning I woke to find more of you bending sullenly over the lip of the vase. And deep inside the water I could see swimming about this promise of death, coded into your DNA. Cutting off your stems only hastened this. All of this has gotten me thinking about my own DNA and what is has in store for me. Which is not to say I am looking for excuses to commit bad behavior. The other night I was watching Ghost in the Shell 2 Innocence, the dialogue of which was mostly made up of quotes from Heidegger or Baudrillard or Barthes and who knows which of the three said this or whether the lines were remixed after a memory-download, but the quote is:

Beautiful

The essence of life lies in the continuance of genes

What about social culture and expanded memory system

And I began to think about gene expression. If genes express themselves in shapes and colors, pre-programmed time-bombs that explode into diseases later in life, degenerative congestive failures, impulses to fuck and impregnate, why not add to the list the mechanical processes that allowed the boy to jump off the Washington Ave. Bridge while thinking up weapons of mass destruction. Or even me, sitting at my desk, impulsively writing down 'poetic' lines that adhere to no known poetic rhythm and are merely a remix of linguistic practices. If genes allow us to collect and interpret the world, why can't genes provide a system and an engine for interpreting and remixing our inherited, linguistic world?

Then, there is this imperfection. I'll have to blame my genes for that. Which gets you into fuzzy territory ethically. But apart from that, I am trusting what my genes are telling me these days. I'll allow an interface with 'culture' to arrange everything at a later date. But when the mood strikes and the pen moves in the hand of its own accord, you have to listen to what your genes are telling you.

If that is the case, then they haven't spoken for a while. I have been mesmerized by the summer, which has constantly subtracted itself from the meager volume I had at the beginning of May. I seem to have nothing left now. People have split up, moved away, fallen into disrepair, no longer call or write. It is all in their genes, I want to say. Part of me thinks it is the end-times. This makes sense to me if I extrapolate from my original theory about genes. If genes code the color of our skin, the shape of our bodies, our quickness or slowness to anger, our ability to have children and raise them, and if these genes then create the germinations of poetry or push us to suicide, then genes have also aided in building our cities and our wars/failures. They step back and see that it is good. We bask in their glory; serve at their pleasure.

If that is the case, then we can draw a connection between the gene-induced wandering of friends, my own summer depression and lack of gumption and the gene-coerced break-ups I've witnessed recently, AND the sense I have been having that the City of Minneapolis itself is suffering from a kind of degenerative alzheimers. Can you feel it? The organic ganglion that threads through the brownstones and skyscrapers and keeps the overpasses soaring is silently breaking down, bits of the city breaking off and floating away, the natural order of animals breaking down (did you hear about the swarms of marauding wasps devouring pressboard condos along the river?) Here then is a sign of things to come...

Jason's madness

At six am he snores himself awake, conceiving of the world again that is such a bore.

The room sounds like a door has just been closed quietly.

The Secret has gone; his shoes on the street. A distant chopper, cutting through the heliopause.

Jason is left with his Italiante face. Antinoosian. He's left behind a series of hairline fractures.
Faultlines that threaten to blame with their yawns.

Vivaldian equals Minneapolis. Jason rubs his eyes and cannot believe it. The trunks of every single elm lining his street are ringed in red. Red spraypaint, put on by the night crew like lipstick on the high-water mark of life.

It is the end of August and when you step on the grass it sounds like tiny bird bones breaking.

The adjacent street, the red rings are the same. Hoops for his horror to jump through. He has a mansex hangover and he rubs his eyes. The red rings.

Crews will be coming through, whole fleets of them, to anatomize these cells. Jason attempts to spread his patagium. On the South Minneapolis streets that are so lovely and tony the trees go on spraying their stickly ejaculate onto the windshields of cars. As far as he can travel on his little deer legs Jason sees nothing but red rings.

We're going to find out why they call it Dog Days. The city has been dreaming of cursing at its old people and it has been dreaming of a post-modern revival. New architectures. One lake is shut down for E. Coli. In another, algae blooms. Eurasian milfoil clogs the city's throats. Canoes stranded on the lakes look like suppositories. The sun currogates the lakes that can still breathe. They blink up at Jason, who is riding high and slow in the heat in a helicopter, inspecting the damage. From here the red rings merge into long bands that X-out whole sections of the city, ceded to entropy.

Jason thinks he is having tiny strokes. Audio files. Photographs. Spilled from his head.

The helicopter veered west and took him to new heights. Commercial jets on final approach now appeared as discarded musical instruments below them. And then, obscured by clouds. The helicopter was approaching its recommended operational heights. The air grew thin and Jason gasped. More little strokes in his eyes; the color of red algae blooms in a lake. The propellers worked hard to pull enough air around them to keep alight.

Jason thought of dissidents in Argentina, flown out over the Atlantic and pushed out the open doors of planes. Is this the way the world fires you?

Not at all. The cargo netting beat its ribbons against the steel of the helicopter. A voice came through on the headphones. Where is water? Wisconsin festered like a boil. The foliage curled its leaves to conserve water. The sunset was a stunning ochre pomegranate from distant wildfires that had been burning for years. It was in front of them as they swung on in back to Minneapolis, leaving Wisconsin to its feverish dervishes...

Posted by jason at September 2, 2006 11:12 AM