ART IS THE DEVIL THE DEVIL IS AN ANGEL

By Logan Berry

Logan Berry, broken daemon feat. Sara Zalek, 2020, a frozen GIF made on photomosh.com using a photograph of Sara Zalek taken by Joe Goudreault at the Runaway Lab’s Doing Drugs and Dying in Space Ritual in November 2019

Dear Artaud,

To reflect upon the self that reflects upon memories—to cast that self within a memory, to stand not apart but within—with neither microscope nor telescope—to don the skins of the past-self in reminiscences’ ever-moldering present tense—

Since I was my baby—

Memory’s effervescent pageants. The distortion-mechanism, which transfigures trauma to melodrama, tragedy to satyr play—

Since I was a baby—

Let the baby speak!

Let the baby speak directly through the memory, through the self that collapses linearity into loops—

Okay! But first a brief description: This baby, cherubic with dirk-like infant teeth, ‘tis me, basking supine in a bubble bath, my penchant for the tub having coevally ripened with a wandering mind prone to associations that both terrify and mystify me––death and the pink soap bar, for instance, the lacquered leather bride and her Great Dane groom, the kidnappers’ hidden peepholes for viewing me bathe, to name a few. I stew in scary reverie, brewing in the bubble bath, sweating out a broth of scum and imagery.

Let the baby speak!

Let it be known that the baby grips a popsicle stick.

Let it be known that the baby babbles through a mouth of red and blue sugared smear.

Bae: Another treat, Mommy, please! For God’s Little Masterpiece?

Mother: You did devour that first confection like a squid drinks water.

B: Gesticulating w/ the stick, smacking the water’s lip for emphasis:

Please, Mommy, pleeease! Just one more treat?

She retrieves a second fire-cracker popsicle stick.

M: Not another breath from thee.

B: Your emotions make you weak; that’s why this day is mine.

And with the landline she calls the extended fam to report my peculiar flak and gloat:

M: No tot should be capable of plucking such an elaborate roast from their folderol-churning, doughéd skull. Tis unnaturrrral.

Indeed. She should’ve drowned me then, for I had long been empoisoned by Art and entangled in its synthetic webs, strung up (or strung out) and marionetted by its whims.  It rendered me its supplicant and carrier of its contagion.

Didst I comprehend what the boast actually meant? Nay. Like an echo through a cavern, I’d sponged up a sonic compound and spat out a mangled clone. The source? A piece of dialogue delivered by actor-cum-Govern(at)or Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (1997). Didst I intuit what it meant generally? Perhaps. My tongue twisted and comported itself to the contours of a dialogue enmeshed within a specific dramatic situation, toward a begoggled Mr. Freeze whose glittered azure skin peels back into his cheeks, producing a hammy grin as he gleefully filches a diamond, triumphant over Batman, who opted to save his friend Robin rather than secure the gem.

“Your emotions make you weak; that’s why this day is mine.’’

The line, my replication of it, and its reverberations as memories (in memoriam, though ne’er fully dead) coextend from Freeze’s nacreous armor, as an indelible fabric and texture, a fulcrum of Evil’s revelry. The ways it’s read, read aloud, mimicked/worn is always up-for-grabs, for what persists in subtext is nothing less than the full range of potential energies layered within the utterance.

Like an aspic pre-congealed with its chemicals, colors, possible tastes, and possible textures­ broiling together at Fate’s ledge—a tuna bone, for instance, accidentally ensconced within the gelatinous mass’s jiggly core, does not disclose itself until after you bite into it—the potentialities lurk within the syllables, unfettered from causal certitude. Not unlike the un-lettered energy of a word you know you want to use in a letter but haven’t yet encountered, or the impulse to revise a text and the tyranny of alternatives­ (which jam up Art’s outflow then become a different kind of outflow), the slew of preconditions that give rise to the articulation are all omnipresent at once, potentially stultified by the libido’s past contusions or else revved up and sharpened by Desire’s dangerous encounters with taboo, inevitable as the capillaries surge the skull’s sodium soup with panicked frenzy (a sodium jacuzzi!), trance-induced dopamine—even in the supposed inertness of quietude. I’m overcome. Brain aurora—yes.

The past and future subsumed by the present recapitulation—

Thoughts spiraling in helices gush, constrict, and dissolve—

From the dregs: a new vibration, nuclear bright

As capillaries coursing fluorescein

For the performers of unnatural theater know too well how poetry seizes the body and corrupts habituated speech sequences, revealing language’s profound disinterest in its host subjects and their homeostatic physical decorum. Revealing its status as a pathogen or alien.

Let the baby speak!

B: Dog-paddling towards the tub’s edge, without blinking:

Reader, I speak to thee between the lines. Puckered buboes bursting sighs as I speak to thee through a future panic (When was the first time you read this? Seven pandemics ago, or so?), through a plague-haze, through an entrance, an orifice, the show-stopping, eleven o’clock number spitting spikéd viral droplets (thru glissando, thru vibrato) that enter rapt stomata and shoot ecstatic signals to the applause-limbs. Acclimate, dear standing-0. Enter the voided future tense.

Take my faux-British affectations as fealty to thee, for I’m a serf of the Neo-Feudal economy, a donkey—caregiver to the bastard jacks and jennies. I, future-song, speak to thee, indebted to thine decadent complacency.

The Baby, me, covered in moss and lesions (glitch-dirt), sucked-off by twin lampreys at the left temple. Pupil-less in coronal coronet, sprawled nude ‘cross the bathroom’s cool, white ceramic tiled flooring. There’s an ice sculpture of a bearded vulture, a dominatrix doll, and pastel fleece jammies sodden with seaweed. Voiceover is diegetic, thru loudspeakers installed in the forearms:

VO:
The brain cannot persist solipsistically
Beflowered
By Permeability: the self, the soul, the body
In Endo/exo-communion w/ others
(rocks, plants, stars, animals, objects, people, angels)
Luxuriate in shared air
Trading consonants, pathogens
With no patience for consistency

Sunbeams stab through the windows. Eyeballs in the peepholes. A curdling moan or drone. 

VO: My dead uncle walks in on me bathing. I cover myself, shocked. He says, “baths are for girls.’’ He takes a leak, and he leaves. In the insufferable quiet after the door shuts, I wonder, ‘‘Am I a girl?’’

For as long as I can remember, I’ve perceived everything that isn’t a daydream, dream, or vision as absolutely arbitrary and meaningless. Don’t read this with existential gravitas; I know the visions are meaningless, too. I’d rather be swallowed by Art for the rest of my life than to putter around the intolerable, insidious Real ‘til I drop dead of an aneurysm from the tediousness and treachery.

Peeking through a crack in her bedroom door, I watch Grandmama watch Unsolved Mysteries, too scared to sleep in her guest room after the ghost stories she whispered in my ear before bedtime, before we knelt down and said our prayer: “Angel of God, my Guardian Dear…’’ I hover in that doorway in a liminal state, beholden to both unnatural and natural forces. ‘The jugular is so close to the surface, so easily slashed,’’ I think, “How effortless for a daemon to caress my beating heart. To clutch it to pulp.’’

The mouth loosens, releasing the butterflies.

VO:
My primary caregiver is the TV.
I rent movies from the library and from Blockbuster.
I begin as always in the Horror aisle,
gazing at the covers to see how long I last
mesmerized
‘til I’m too scared to continue.
Time goes glazy slow-mo.
Allured and repelled,
repelled & allured
by bombazine,
by corpse winks,
by graveyards populated by sexy ‘‘teens,’
by sinister dolls,
by open wounds,
by werewolves,
by gooey fonts
by lips glued shut by moths,
it was a masochistic ritual.
A seduction.

Zero gravity. The Baby slowly rises.

I gravitate toward Evil. Its aesthetics aim beyond moderation
toward empyrean scales of imagination.

The Angel Lucifer ventriloquizes him. They share the same mouth.

Lucifer + B:
Owe, certes, what I am worthely wroghte with wyrschip, iwys,
For in a glorius gle my gleteryng it glemes,
I am so mightyly made my mirth may noghte mys.
Ay sall I byde in this blys thorowe brightnes of bemes.
Me nedes noghte of noy for to neven.
All welth in my welde have I weledande,
Abowne yhit sall I be beeldand,
On heghte in the hyeste of hewven.  (York Mystery Play, author unknown)

I gravitate toward Evil. Its aesthetics aim beyond moderation
toward empyrean scales of imagination,
but I’m concurrently dragged to Hell!

Gravity jerks upward and downward. The Baby judders at the center of the room, tearing in both directions. Lucifer the Devil ventriloquizes him. They share the same mouth.

Lucifer + B:
My bale es ay betande and brynande:
That gares ane go gowlande and gyrnande.
Owte, ay walaway! I well enew in wo nowe!

Gravity naturalizes for all but the Baby, who continues to shake. Voiceover is diegetic, through loudspeakers installed in the forearms:

VO:
Evil aspires for art more dazzling than God, and it’s punished by Chthonic, nauseating plunges. That is, as I attempt artistic violence against the sensible, the Earth—with its sundry elaborate miseries—pulls me closer towards its excruciating core. This vertiginous existence is the great burden of Evil.

Evil renders language an extravagant costume, and it dons costumes that soliloquize extravagantly.

‘‘gle my gleteryng it glemes!’’ saith the beautiful Angel Lucifer of his—comely physique? Sparkling garments? State-of-being? The ambiguity here constitutes an equivalency between the three.

Evil knows that the soul is in the style.

Evil speaks antically and alliteratively.

‘‘I played this stinkin’ city like a harp from Hell!’’ saith Danny DeVito as the Penguin in Batman Returns (‘92) in a top hat, long tweet jacket, anchor-patterned satin waist coat, ascot double-patterned in polka dot and flowers, striped black trousers, and three-fingered patent leather gloves fit snug on his sharp avian-human hybrid flipper-fingers.

Evil makes interspecies splices.

Evil cuts through bullshit.

‘‘Life’s a bitch, now so am I,’’ saith Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns in skintight, stitching-exposed latex rubber suit, a sleazy outfit that I replicated with black masking tape on a Happy Meal Barbie doll.

The dominatrix doll levitates toward the Baby, and the ice sculpture rattles on the floor.

Evil is useless, visionary excess. The Law attempts to quash it, for it represents an alluring non-productive threat to the orders of business. I can’t watch the Batman movies anymore because they’re boring. Whenever Batman enters, the fun stops. He’s a prop for plot’s propulsion, a stand-in for the Law, less a character than a stencil foretelling the burnt plastic stench of a toxic ore—a humming metallic womb tachygestating his mini surrogate selves, the figurines to be sold around the world at the toy stores nearest you.

The villains and their outfits centrifuge in my subconscious—I am Evil’s toy sore.

‘‘The ephemeral, suddenly, dazzling, like the shrewd play of verses. Steep curve. A river of hermetic prestige diverted from its own digressions. Possible visions to capture the cry of the human. An urging, tenebrous beauty, remotely related to God, like the excrescence of something forgotten.’’ (from Mouth of Hell by María Negroni, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero)

The scene dissolves. I memorize this message.  I strap on my VR lorgnettes.

I scream it into your ear.

Love,

Lo

NOTE:

My future-corpse sends transmissions to Artaud via dubious technological means. I’m trying to turn theater into poetry and vice versa. I want to know what he thinks! I want to wrest him (and you, dear reader) from the burning sepulcher we call the 21st Century. I want to open portals to alternate timelines. I want to drink Utopia’s ichor and to breathe air so clean it burns us alive. I’m no expert. I’m a bum with an Internet connection. I need you. Let’s synchronize heartbeats. Let’s incite organismic group-think. Let’s meet on a stage among dreams and ride each other’s delta waves into oblivion. The future-corpse is the soul dissolved into data. We need to unnaturalize the Real.