There was once upon a time a young clod from the farm who called his fellow trippers to order during a mind-boggling party in the city.

“You city slickers have gone too far.”

It was indeed a great party and a parturient one at that, as we can see from its rebellious offspring: Surrealists without a portfolio. Beatniks without a beat. Hippies without Peace Now. Condoms. Fragments of a shattered cosmos.

We sold out, begetting a isolated progeny of defiant protesters who have only the vestiges of our causes; who seek the spirit of our disobedience in the dead letters of our dissent; who fumble with obscure relics unearthed from primitive contexts; and who unwittingly search the campus catacombs for an Ism to comprise all isms while denying, as a matter of habit, that any such Ism exists except in the personal prejudice of a bigoted mind; leaving us to wonder: Is there any way out of this cluttered labyrinth of cynical cycles?

A final exit exists. It is the only escape from which there is no proven escape. That trap door is everywhere anytime, leaving us with countless ways out if we wish to choose, and if we would not choose our own way, we shall have no choice in the end anyway.

 It is high time to stop once again and smell the flowers on the wayside, to smell who we are, time even to cultivate the garden using bigotry as our compost, or, at least, to read a pastoral hymn to Arcadia.

The descendants of our juvenile delinquency reject us, and in this traditional rejection there is some respect and sympathy on all sides. We all sense that there is something gravely wrong with the modern mode, especially in its tendency to grind us to statistical dust under the unicycle, powered by the great god Change and steered to Nowhere by the corporate clown. We feel the mute screams from the vacant skulls collapsing under the massive weight of the Gigantic Wheel as it ponderously resolves all conflicts pursuant to the dogma of the global postulate that makes of our race a massive turgid pustule ready for the lancing. We dread a premature and ignoble final solution for all but the Remnant most of all – even the most arrant apocalyptic prophets do not want to witness the Apocalypse of the Terrorist Almighty. A foreboding auspice of dishonorable disaster is the sight of a great flock flying in one direction and squawking, in unison, “It is inevitable, it is inevitable, it is inevitable…”

The rebellious hearts of our youth offer us yet another ism, postmodernism, to counter the crushing revolution of the Big Wheel, an anti-modern clogging of the war machine logic with its own spare parts. Yet we suspect the proffered credentials of the soi disant nouveau ism. They do exhibit a charming predilection for pluralism, a penchant for aboriginal forms of behavior, and an admirably irrational, romantic attitude very appealing to those of us who have an indigent aversion to the perverse rationalization of existenz into digital tokenism. Yet we know from personal experience what fools lovers are and how destructive the designs for golden restorations can be. After all and in any event, what is really so new about love? Mature love is true. Lust is immature notwithstanding the merits it sows at random. Even in our prurient regard of the abstracted form of that most popular, populating lust, we have our intellectual reservations. We suspect that the discourse about discourse of the current ism comes at the expense of productive intercourse, that it is talk about talk or, in short: just talk. We desire to pragmatically appreciate fertile texts; for instance, the Kama Sutra.

Nevertheless, the current ism is no mere sterile nothing; rather, it is a voluptuous nothing. It is an unregistered trembling of the ground. We feel nothing, for we lost our senses in the last great debauch and have been on the wagon all too long. A native scout appears in our midst and presses her ear to the fundament; she hears a roman cadence, echoes of the imperial confederation marching forward and stomping out the revolutionary fires. She peers into the ashes of our campfire and reports on the future:

“After terrible squads of raggedy misfits have by explosive and enervating action and reaction wreaked their havoc, a great spirit-sucking vampire shall embrace the carnage, and from its putrid dismemberments shall  emerge an awful androgynous monster, having a multitude of limbs. The convoluted convulsing limbs shall wear invisible armbands. They shall seem to move under their own powers and to have independent voices as they enstrangulate one other. The writhing appendages shall finally be devoured by their ravenous binary progenitor.”

The crowd does not understand the native scout’s hysterical report;  a physician steps forward with an interpretation, rendering his professional configuration of the prefiguration: The malease of this ism, he says, is a sort of premenstrual syndrome antecedent to the new generation’s first period, a prepubescent malaise preceding the forthcoming blood-cleansing preparation for the conception of the hybrid supersedure: the Hydra.

A period of silence ensues after this prognostication, broken by a statement from someone in the crowd: “It is all according to Hoyle. It is inevitable.”

“You are too far out,” said the farm boy. “I’m going back to the farm.”

XYX

Honolulu, September 1998