the ambulance goes wow wow wow
christ somebody get her a thesaurus
LIFE RX 2 DEC 24
the king of pentacles, and an excerpt from Dan Poppick’s Fear of Description:
“I came to a point at which I could only be persuaded that the most ornately phrased facts were true. Blessed with a tuneful voice, I painted, by livid numbers, my parents, my employers, the state. ‘Oh, so it's twin language,’ my therapist said of poetry. Fuming in an overstuffed chair, I rolled up my sleeves. But I was so furious for such nonspecific reasons that I couldn't speak. ‘You seem angry. Can you talk about that?’ It occurred to me, trying to block out the sounds of a baby crying in the waiting room and construction workers chanting reasonable demands outside, that poetry would not save my life, as I had expected, in the end, it would. On the contrary, sitting there I realized that something called ‘poetry,’ loosely sketched from what I imagined that word to mean when I was a teenager, maybe a water tower with a tree growing from its roof on a fascist's private property, might in fact at some point down the road play a hand in killing me. But what, I thought, if I were to put it in prose? I sighed. ‘What's that about?’ my therapist said. An image of a pane of broken glass in the middle of a meadow in Seven Springs flashed through my mind. No, prose wouldn't work either. I answered, not meaning to sound cold, ‘I wouldn't put it that way.’”
the aleatory
Sometimes, nothing wants to be written.
And the nothing that wants to be written is a brittle shell of glass around something else which does want to be written.
When you break the glass, there is a mysterious substance. Pale taffy. A lunchbox thermous. The carboard treasure chest the dentist let you pick from after getting your teeth cleaned. Maybe it would have been better not to have broken the brittle shell of the nothing that wants to be written, because what are you going to do now? What are you going to do with the memory of the flannel sleeping bag with pheasants printed on the lining, and the time you knocked over a bong at a Halloween party, and the rules for Ghost in the Graveyard, a game which you played often, even though it seems you were never taught the rules?
If it is going to be any good, you have to take that substance and put it back inside another nothing. Maybe a new nothing. Maybe one that goes out past the purple edge of your last memory. The nothing is as important as the mysterious substance under its glassy surface.
There is a deep part of me that doesn’t want you to know this.
the assignment
Prepare for your ship to come in.
writing prompt
Start with nothing—no characters, no thoughts, no settings, no ideals or philosophies, no inspirations. No goals, no hope of success, no readers, no forebears. Don’t be so disgusting as to drag along an “inspiration.” Start with nothing, absolutely nothing. And listen to the chune below, and begin to describe what you see.
a chune
“Crepuscolo sul mare” by Piero Umiliani
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Fear of Description by Daniel Poppick
La Legge Dei Gangsters by Piero Umiliani
dear diary, sometimes I hate this newsletter. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing (as in, I hate it and I still do it) or a bad thing (as in, you can tell I hate it sometimes, and it sends you away with a sour taste in your mouth). I feel a decided lack of inspiration. I don’t even feel very strongly about the tarot in the way that most tarot newsletters do. There is so much being said at all times, and I am so essentially a non-sayer of non-things. In my opinion, the essential story of the world is: WOW. And that’s only three letters. Unless you string them together … but then you have an ambulance on your hands. XS