Tricycle Chase by talanm

Jack of Clubs

My dear _______,

You don’t want to hear ‘this’, but I will tell you none-the-less. It’s only right, though you will have to keep this secret. Jack is lost. He already knows how you will hurt him, so just let him disappear. Now, I’ve said it.

Jack is jack-nothing to you. There’s no future. You like him as nothing, more, nothing more. Jack blames you, the one who takes his call. He now sees that you are the problem – He is just, he is just a symptom. You make too much of him. You make something ‘other’ of him. It is unreasonable. It’s jack. Just jack. This cannot continue. Let it fade to black. Leave the theater. Forget the secret utterance that signals “I am lost now” … Knowing, it would be easier to remember the madness, les sottise de valet… Pardon my jack-French -- I apologize.

(jack)I …
become tiresome.
(jack)I …
remain mysterious.
(jack)I …
Already lost.
(jack)I …
saying nothing.
(jack)I.
Jack
Just stops.

Like you, Jack must take a stand. You will call him selfish because of it, but he just doesn’t care anymore. Carefree.

Three facts:
1. Jack will not.
2. She will not.
3. We will.

Everything around Jack means nothing. There is no measure so Jack lets loose. He becomes hopeless; secreting what is felt in the blood and bones to see if he can trigger something beyond himself. My sorry Jack of Hearts bleeds. The hopeless hopes there is a witness. The nameless wishes to remain anonymous. The romantic looks for an interpreter to read the cuneiform, to decipher these cuts; an historian to remember the deluge.

Jack pillages the future from all this cosmic trash … Blinded by the unexplainable…
So, continue.

Find
‘this’

Mustard

Jack sat on pins and needles. Anxious, sometimes... Still, waiting for the familiar to arrive, his own familiar -- a suspect double he imagined would lift him from the malaise of knowing nothing -- the anathema of the jack-ass. The familiar, Jack thought, the jack-ass thought, would arrive in a golden carriage, in a flash of light, with an explosion that could not be ignored. Jack would know it had arrived from within -- he'd feel it ... suddenly alive -- bursting with joy and goodwill... Everyone would be surprised at the change. It would seem that Jack was no longer jack, but larger than himself ... still outside of himself but comfortable with this positioning.

The new Jack would look down on the old Jack with an aristocratic disdain. He'd try again to forget the Disaster. The starless, moonless nights... The Wagner Opera would stop running in his head, replaced by popsongs and jingles.

It will not arrive today. The double is careless this way. Couldn't care less...

"It is good to have goals. To have ambitions..." Jack thought as he waited. "But, it is also good not to want." What Jack really wanted was to not want. But, old habits are hard to break.


Lesson 6: night 3

jack-destiny tells us...
the saga continues...
find amity between the hypnotic and the operose...
assemble the insolent apparatus...
dead-duck proclivities dishonors the hic et nunc...

Bunny, ______ left the carnival to live a better life with the Psychoanalyst. Though she had not quite had enough of herself she had had enough of Jack. The lack of Bunny in Jack's life was not a cause for gloomy thirst or hunger, so much as the impetus for celebration. The white noise, the gray noise was gone for now and Jack hoped it would never return. It will of course, but for now he cherished the silence, the lack of thunderous downbeats and the shrill yet stolid warble of Bunny.

Though Jack had originally thought Bunny, ______ to be his familiar, it seems he had mistaken her for what he knew least of himself. He had had a change of heart. More foreign to Jack than Jack's own foreigness, Bunny was now just a speck ... of dust ... a shooting, fallen star ... something to be forgotten.


Lesson 7: day 4

jack-destiny tells us...
the saga continues...
exceed the chaffing hoi polloi...
ventilate through dialectic benevolence...
arrest and nullify efflorescent jack-abundance...

Without the momentum of the Arsonist or the blessings of Saint Augury -- the saga remains. Jack remains.

Antipodal Species

“Just being weird.” Jack said.
Jack imagined he’d say … as he stood in his room … before his desk, before beginning to write.
When Jill asked what he was doing,
Jack said, “Just being weird.”
… hiding out, standing before the desk … Jack thought this would lead somewhere but jack didn’t know Jack so it lead nowhere. Jill just walked away. The saga remains ... nothing happened.
“So it goes.” Jack said,
as he shook then nodded his head. Didn’t matter anyway, Jack didn’t know jack, jack doesn’t know Jack. He wasn’t brilliant or anything, though mostly he thought himself a genius, the originator of dreams, at least his own. Jack wasn’t brilliant; in fact, he was quite stupid, dim in this and that, at this particular moment, dimly lit, at this moment stupid. Impatient. Yet reticent.
Jack never said,
“Just being weird.”
He didn’t. He didn’t say jack – he didn't get the chance.
Jill remained silent, didn’t even see him standing there, awkwardly waiting for the chance to say,
“Just being weird.”
Jill didn’t care, Jill didn’t care for Jack, really, and only put up with him because she mostly thought he was mostly brilliant, though also mostly stupid. It depended upon the subject. In the matter of certain very specific things Jill thought he knew quite a lot, but in more common matters Jill thought he didn’t know jack.
He didn’t even know Jack.
None of this meant anything to either Jack or her, Jill. They were in some mysterious way using each other. Neither knew quite how the self was using the other but they were both quite certain that the other knew how they were using the other and in time would reveal this mystery. Jack reveals jack to her, Jill … Jill reveals jack to Jack. And so the affair was sustained by avoiding the subject, by remaining in anticipation of a hopeless revelation.
“Just being weird.” is a provocation.
Only. For Jack only. To Jill it doesn’t mean jack. Jill didn’t get it, not even the gesture -- Jack standing awkwardly in the darkened room uttering the words,
“Just being weird.”
… which meant just being Jack, just wanting, just feeling hurt, just feeling what should not be felt, not feeling anything since they had never really touched … Which meant just being the jack-ass that Jill though Jack was, just being what Jack thought Jill thought of him, just being weak. Jack was weak – in the knees mostly, but in the heart as well.

Nothing will be revealed, not even in time, not even over time. Rather, the tale of Jack is one of jack recurrence. The moment of anticipation for hopeless revelation will recur, though the exact phrase -- hopeless revelation -- will most likely not be repeated. Any revelation is an offering, a gift, a climax, a punchline with a rimshot and this tale is about becoming, or remaining at the point of Jack becoming something other than jack, Jack. This becoming will lead to nothing. Nothing will become of it … nothing good, at least. If not puzzling, these tedious affairs are at least a puzzle, to be resolved if not solved. And, even then nothing is offered in either regard. Nothing that will satisfy.

The puzzle, Jack requires a cure rather than a solution.

Apocryphamnesis

With the help of Nostalgia, Jack thought back across open fields of false memory ... the crooked ways and wishful thinking. He tried to keep a level head but as we know, Jack has the capacity to take what was once mostly perfect and destroy it, make it ugly ... now ... to take what seems balanced and knock it out of whack. What Jack had always thought was memory was not, not a remembering but a dismembering.

As he thought back to The City ...now... memory always failed, covered over with a gloss of urban splendor and decay. Lombard crossed Flatbush, Hope Street crossed Colfax ... J had the body of K had the body of L had the face of ... Even his recent memories of K-town, failures really, were covered over by some sort of sentimental goo. Disaster looked better -- enough to cause Jack to pine in its absence. One cannot see clearly when Nostalgia is in the room. Nostalgia is the detour ... the crooked way that leads Jack toward schmaltz.

Jack never looked for Disaster it just came to him ... occurred to him, welled up, beamed out, pulled in. Looking back, Regret was always the easiest sentiment to form because all it took was some pieces from a broken mirror and a handful of mud. Disaster and Regret are sometimes siblings, sometimes enemies, sometimes lovers. Disaster, when not affected by the engrammic erosion of Nostalgia, is indistinguishable from Regret. Disaster has the body of Regret has the body of Disaster has the face of...

Jack forgot. Or tried to.

Lesson in the Uncanny

Jack knows best. Jack knows better. Jack doesn't know jack! What Jack knows, and this is why he knows best, and better, is that Jack doesn't know jack. But, now Jack returns to the phlegmatic pretense of his office -- to what he knows best. Cleans the slate and starts again. This is Jack's hope at least, though he knows Saint Augury won't permit it. He is already jack-ass, too far gone, too far from the sea for everything to be washed away.

This begins in K-town, 9,000 miles from the City, with Jack lonely but not alone. Everything was bothering him, always had been, really... Since an early age Jack knew he was an old man ... born gray, Jack stayed that way. What was inside, though Jack would deny this, had always matched the outside... There were no differences to be negotiated, no mythology to maintain, no saga to be recaptured and transliterated.


First Memory:
Less than a month before Jack was born the Psychoanalyst gave his famous seminars. At the exact moment the Psychoanalyst began to speak, Brother-Poet abandoned verse for visual art.

Jack's birth was long and difficult, causing great pain to his mother and it was initially thought that the newborn Silosopher might have been damaged in the process. He didn't cry for days but continually sighed and cocked his head either left or right as if in contemplation. The Doctors and Nurses were baffled by this behavior, while Jack's parents worried for the health and welfare of their cherished runt. It was obvious to all that Jack was not a normal child and everyone wondered what would become of him, what Jack would become, if becoming was in the cards, the stars.

As Jack grew, childhood proved not to be his cup of tea. Already an old soul, an old man by kindergarten his tastes were well beyond crayons and eating paste. Jack preferred his great-grandfather's wine, his grandmother's inventive use of gestural profanity, and the pretentiousness of his friend's parents and his parent's friends to pretending with his own friends. He never was his own age.

___

Jack had always thought about writing this story. What prevented him from doing so was that he thought the saga ultimately boring. Even Jack was bored by the thought of it, so its retelling had for the most part remained limited to bar-time anecdotes, and drunken shanties better fit for bawdy nursery rhymes than literature.



Second Memory:
Brother-Poet, who now called himself the Artist, came into Jack's life early on. When they met it was immediately obvious that Brother-Poet, the Artist had little to teach Jack. Brother-Poet, the Artist who was Jack's elder, found this rather frustrating, since his employment depended upon his success in educating Jack. They argued endlessly, not over aesthetics or color theory but over what one could offer the other. It was minutes after one of these heated discussions that Brother-Poet, the Artist suffered a debilitating stroke, and hours later died.

Jack was introduced to the Psychoanalyst while at University, but it was not until after college that he was introduced (in)to psychoanalysis. The latter never really worked for Jack, as even here, on the couch he found himself somewhere else and the Psychoanalyst refused to interpret daydreams. Though Jack paid dearly for the sessions, he never quite bought them as curative. He considered the sessions to be research, and from the Psychoanalyst he learned how to draw.

___

That was then. Not even Nostalgia (stepmother of the muses) could overcome the shortcomings of jack-memory. The stacks of children's blocks ... a wood framed shanty ... the ticky-tacky flat.

First Commotion of Saint Augury

It ended as quickly as it had begun ... but the saga continues.

The night before, Jack's world had been populated by and occupied with Disaster so he was not surprised that in the morning he remained jack-ass.

Before coffee he was still trying to convince himself that Disaster was a good thing -- that Disaster signaled real progress... That any reversal was the beginning of momentum... But, as he rummaged through the rubble of the night before, Disaster began to lose its appeal for Jack. There had been a change in the weather -- from hot and humid to cold and clammy. All that was left were gray and jaundiced mementos, shards of glass and scraps of paper ... puce and pea-green puddles. Junk really...

By mid-morning Jack stopped thinking, started thinking about something other than thinking. Which is to say -- Jack woke up from the Arsonist's hex. jack-ass faded and something else of Jack, in Jack emerged. In an instant, Jack, no longer Jack or jack-ass decided to allow this becoming of what he was not. He thought without thinking that he had it in him to make this change -- to crack the code of the otherly, to learn the language of the orderly, to sort sagacity from the sordid. He just might.

Jack started to plot a course.

"collect weapons ... foster logic ... clean your plate ... listen carefully ... suppress desire ... clear your mind ... ignore curiosity ... travel ... don't overthink, methinks ... let go ... oil the squeaky wheel ... keep busy ... romanticize nothing ... avoid labor ... retreat ... follow birds ... feel less ... get out ... fidget ... stop dreaming ... confront everything ... remain hidden ... capture the moment ... muster the strength ... suppress desire ... clear your mind ... ignore curiosity ... covet ... follow passion ... relax ... overthink, methinks ... demonize the enemy ... prevent collapse ... advance ... tribulate ... play ball ... feel more ... enter into treaties ... be brave ... take notes ... lolly gag ... avoid conflict ... swagger ... equip yourself for Disaster ... prevent the idiotic ... be resourceful ... tread lightly ... just think, methinks ... dismiss everything ... repair the broken ... remain idle ... amplify ... cross swords ... balance ... stay put ... carry a big stick ... feel, more or less ... do not despair ... foster audacity ... brown-nose ... reject everything ... be the bigger person ... throw it all away ..."


By late afternoon Jack had lost interest in the rigors of Saint Augury, returned to jack-ass and took a nap.