Excerpts from
Asparagus Maximus’
Accumulatarium/Accumulatorium
Accumulatarium: The
gradual assembly of written works for the purpose of exhibition. The display is
legislatively hectic and the conceptual offspring bare-boned.
Sunday pins my tongue to the roof
of my mouth.
A stifled yawn crackles in my
earpits.
That’s what airplanes will do to
you.
When I think of all the planes puncturing all the cloud
cover as they rise into higher currents of air. When I think of perforation,
dream catchers, tearing a paper towel from its roll, loose-knit sweaters and
scarves, sieves, and the fine perforation and steady concentration needed to
separate one pile of mixed spices into several piles of individual spice. You
will also need superior eyesight and a reliable pair of tweezers.
As the planes ascend, descend,
and make sieves out of cloud cover, as the spices sift through the sieve :
fennel hail
pouring marjoram
tumeric showers
flurry of curry
Salts. Sea salts. The way to separate fleur de sel from Hawaiian
sea salt is to take the red, earth toned grains from the virgin white grains.
The way to separate Peruvian pink salt from Kala Nomak salt is to take the
blush toned grains from the off-peach grains. Alder smoked salt is brown and
Ultimately, I ate blueberries for
breakfast this morning. This is not unusual. I eat blue foods on a regular
basis :
blue gumballs
blue lollipops
blue popsicles
blue slushies/slurpies/icies
blue soda
blue pop rocks
blue cake frosting
But the color of blueberries is disturbingly impure.
Their skin is covered in a whitish film, which reminds me of poison. There are
few pure colors on earth, although strawberry comes close. There is no
blueberry as blue and delectable as a waxed blue car or the handle of my frying
pan. This leads me to believe that nature is naturally impure and humans are
eager to poke unnatural holes along the color spectrum, keeping this shade from
that shade. None of this has anything to do with human racial phobia, which has
nothing to do with color. Colors have always known how to approach one another
- since the spectrum shone at dawn above the rounded horizon of reason - and
despite the best of our efforts, colors continue to come together naturally,
impurely, smudging, begrudgingly. Racial phobia is, in fact, hypochondria.
Before the world was made round, the dead imparted wisdom
to the loved ones they had left and brought disease upon their living enemies.
But our specters were woven into the color spectrum, their dream vehicles
becoming blank white pages. Sir Isaac Newton banned specters and invoked the
spectrum, a new apparition in which to trust.
Among black chickens, running water, salt, and
hallucinogenic drugs, we used crystals to call on the dead and the deadly
powers. Man is now spectroscopic. We use crystals to call on the color
spectrum, bending it from the blank white page. As simply as that, those from
distant lands weren’t the dead anymore, but the differently colored, bearing
sickness, which was invisible to the human eye. The strongest threat to
medicine was foreignness. This is the germ of racism, which is pandemic.
Foreignness in our midst is enough to spur the unfounded
belief that sickness is within us.
According to Lonzi del Vesta, the body is divided into 31
portions, minus the arms. The head is whole, although it contains five integral
deceptions. The neck consists of nine piled slabs, which, with age, constrict
independently of one another. At the end of life, the voice is feeble and the
skin hangs loose. Allowing one’s bile to rise and eat away at the slabs will
cause them to collapse like sand and clog the lungs. The chest = four elements,
which arise from the gut, which is ether. The legs = three from the hips to
just above the knees, the knees, and three below. Finally, the feet, which are
dispensable and unnecessary for genuine passersby.
When Man stands and spreads his arms and legs, the five
integral deceptions appear upright. These are: the space between the head and
the right arm, the space between the right arm and the right leg, the space
between the right leg and the left leg, the space between the left leg and the
left arm, and the space between the left arm and the head.
The five integral deceptions are illustrated by the body,
while contained in the head. Further from the center of the head, wider the
deception.
When God laid out Adam's spinal cord from skull to
tailbone, neither of the two ends was slandered yet. Neither sacrosanct nor
profane. Deny belief in God. Deny belief in Man. Beneath all this belief is
unforgiven nudity. The guilt of it diffuses throughout the human population,
lessening any one Man’s shame, so that to have sex, to say, "Touch my
nudity!" is a mob impulse. Mob mentality! Mentality is a mob impulse. "Touch my naked consciousness and
make disappear the guilt of my unconscious!"
There is only the delicate preparation of white bone, red
meat, and human skin. The body is not a thought, but a sentimental initiative.
It encloses an internal combustion which heats the breath that is exhaled after
having traipsed a trillion bodily paths and reformed itself into one breath in
order to pronounce these words:
We sleep like empty spoons, always with a concave space.
Night is a maw like the mouth of the mysticeti, or baleen whale. The vibratory rate of the human
population sucked into its feeding filter and stuck between the chords produces
an infrasonic song, which is mainly associated with courtship and mating.
Among baleen whales, there are gulpers and skimmers.
Gulpers stop swimming to spread their lips and skimmers keep swimming while
they feed. Gulper whales include the Blue Whale, Pygmy Blue Whale, Fin Whale,
Bryde’s Whale, Minke Whale, and Humpback Whale. Right Whales, Pygmy Right
Whales, and Bowhead Whales are skimmers. Sei Whales do both. Although baleen
whales are strictly carnivorous, it seems inaccurate to describe them as predatory. They are the idlest of
hunters, confident in the simplest of dietary routines, preferring extravagant
migration to stealthy predation.
The word mysticeti
comes from the Greek word mystax, which means moustache. Night is a mysticeti
maw with a musical moustache. Collectively caught in the bristle, Man plucks at
it fretfully. He hopes to find the same note that the great Indian mystic
Shiambata Korpistu found and played on his guitar. The mystic strummed in the
street a single-noted song that was steady (but not hypnotic) and repetitive
(but not monotonous).
A dubious spectator interjected, “That’s a nice note, but
why don’t you try a few more, like other musicians?” Shiambata replied, “Other
musicians play those notes because they haven’t found the right sound.”
This morning I posed the question, “How will I eat two
eggs – one scrambled with milk, pepper, paprika, lemon pepper, and Mongolian
fire oil and the other cooked sunny-side-up – with two pieces of bacon and one
piece of buttered toast?” I broke apart the first piece of bacon, sprinkled the
pieces onto the buttered side of the toast, arranged the scrambled eggs on top
of the bacon and laid the sunny-side-up egg sunny-side-down over the top so
that the yolk would not slide down the white, over the edge of the toast and
onto the plate, but would rather permeate the scrambled sub-layer once the sun
had been pierced according to its own design. I ate the open-faced egg sandwich
with a steak knife and fork and the second piece of bacon at intervals with my
fingers.
The bacon was lined up in the pan and curved at the tips
like cabaret dancers. As they cooked, the cabaret dancers looked beaten and
bruised, and as they bubbled, like women aging lumply.
The world fidgets like bacon in a profusion of grease.
Accumulatorium: The incessant assembly of written works
under the assumption that they will be burned. The heat is iconoclastic and the
conceptual offspring a Gemini.