THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT

8/22/2019 THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT

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THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT

by alex cruse

This is a fragmented account of a drive across the United States,ripped from a journal.Slept in a car/motels/deserts/on a Brooklyn roof, and bathed inlakes/gas stations/not at all. Philosophy is what remains only after survivalism is removed. Covered 14 states in about six days total,before bumming around New York for another three.

DAY ONE

Currently heading to San Diego from Oakland; am currently somewhere on Amtrak’s route between the Central Coast and Los Angeles. Wheels slap endlessly against the tracks, like anaddict’s fingers rhythmically prepare skin. I’ve been on trains for hours; through blurred andslatted vision, the dunes appear italic.

. . .

I amble through Union Station’s art deco ducts, ugly and sick with exhaustion, and get asked for change three times within five minutes.

...The recessed ceiling of the station’s fantastic semi-rotunda—its blue coffers arranged in a brutal pattern of emptiness, like a thousand sunken, Aryan eyes—serves as backdrop to a woman whosimulates tears by wetting her face with water from the restroom sink next to mine, as she chokesout a request for a dollar.As all poetry is a lie, I found it oddly poetic—but, similar to my reaction to most poetry, I denied

her .



Ran into G., whom I hadn’t seen in years, as he was walking along the sidewalk outside thestation. I was chewing on a cigarette/feeling bad/sublimating it all by way of Olvera Street’ssubterranean bass blasts when I spotted him:

“HEY!”

“Cruse! What the fuck? What are you doing here?”

“Just…y’know, ‘raging against the cataract of time.’ Picking up a friend’s car in San Diego,driving it to New York starting tomorrow.”

“Whoa. By yourself?”

“Yeah…”

Grin. “You don’t change.”

“...Unfortunately.”

…and we don’t change—none of us, not really. Psyches are static: circumstance, dynamic. Yetmost of us “normalize” as we age, because the industrialized life is denied occasions for adventureand variability. My hatred of that notion is, I guess, why I’m here now, stupidly spontaneous.



DAY TWO

Biplane engines overhead shudder through collective associations with aerial warfare, and dragvinyl apocrypha across the sky…advertising colonizes even this, the last pure domain.

Current scene: implied recrudescence of consumption, after the pockets have grown cold from prolonged inactivity; after so many hues of Neutral have stitched into one another--into the even, planar Zen of the road…This landscape is a filmstrip of the unreal. And, as it is unbuilt, it couldnever house or sustain you; it can only hold your dumb, inert gaze for a transitory moment, before

ejecting you back into an existence both paper-thin and performative.

The desert’s only kin in ambivalence is the manufactured metal box that you now inhabit—whichhas always separated you, from everything (can’t we say that the mass production of automobileswas entirely historically-contingent upon American isolationism…?)

--and through its glass, heat lacquers your face to the sheen of a pewter St. Christopher medallion, and it glows, all neon and heresy. The blood is merely acting out its script…in such barren realms, ideas of god or fate are cremated under an atheist sun.

All this weather and machine legacy, foreign and domestic, is legible punctuation on your genetic paragraph.



DAY THREE

Driving (somewhere outside De Smet, South Dakota) under naked trees of lightning that snakeout from violent clouds, their mass a tessellation of anger and electricity…can’t quite believe I’mnot dead. Sought refuge from the storm in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s former home…yeah. Now I’m

in a wood-paneled diner, surrounded by hateful stares and collapsed mouths, and sucking downcoffee that tastes like a nursing home. (...today’s surrealism does not beg for metaphoricaccuracy.)Haven’t slept for about 36 hours.The road invites hallucinations, and Earth delivers: jagged, pale Mesozoic colossi of the Badlandsstretch for miles, all enrobed in bands of rouge sediment…and yet, like an old IBM punch card,their code’s randomness is illusory—an encrypted, alien, sempiternal intelligence breathes inside.The rocks’ arbitrary appearance confronts the park’s urban precision, making the site seem evenmore bizarre.

DAY FOUR

Across state and county lines, air pulses isotropic with the radio’s energy.Infinite planes of asymmetry produce a weird plaid of theologian frequencies…male and femalevoices alternating in a miasma of psalms, before they lose traction in the air and slip away…comically replaced by a Black Sabbath song, or with a detached, British description of Syriandeaths.. . . . .The military cemetery at the base of the Black Hills forms an acrostic of Name andRank, all meaningless now; it spells out Death’s matrix, the cause and its effect…one small familyof graves, its significance obscure, contains gaps: broken axes await more soldiers’ obedient skin

to be subsumed into—and reinforce—their logic of destruction…“What is it they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise?...”





DAY EIGHT

Have seen many Western European tourists, encased in cheap designer imitations and huddledaround the United States’ most glorified hole in the ground, eyes fixed on their cameras’ pixelatedstares. Spent today walking down the Coney Island pier. Heard a faraway woman’s rendition of the National Anthem, her voice scraping earnestly at an octave too high, like a besotted dogagainst a wooden door, and a dislocated form of nostalgia began to creep in.

Huizinga’s “THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT” ebbed around the outer membrane of

my…consciousness(?) (who knows), nagging imperceptibly as paranoia or a half-rememberednightmare. I stamped each syllable of the phrase onto the pier’s shit-shellacked wooden planks asI walked.

You can grow so silent and interior that you hear all your body’s minute processes before theyeven occur…a prickling schizophrenia, like Fourier’s undiscovered fifth wave, not detectable byeven the most sophisticated instrument.

Sole human interaction occurred today in Brooklyn, when a man slowed in the street, leaned outof his vehicle, and wordlessly flashed a grip of 20-dollar bills at me. He was driving a vanemblazoned with LAB CORP. DNA TESTING SOLUTIONS.

“HEY MAN, YOU WANT MY PLASMA??” I screamed.

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THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT