DIRECTIONS TO KOHOUTENBERG
Transmitted by telephone-message to Truman Capote

The physical world, all the objects of the physical world are composed of photons in bondage to the weak forces. We careen towards the mountains trapped inside Frank’s car, drive through a world in perpetual crystalline bondage until the sky splits, the hard-boiled yellow-grey yolk splits, and we are inundated, autour de moi, la deluge, and the furious impact releases the photons from their slavery to the world of appearance, their slavery to the real. In their haste to escape they flee in all directions, into the copper-clad sky, into the muddy river, into the eyes of their former masters.

And some careening billions of the newly-freed idiot pistons, photons, pixels, freedom means no more slavery to names, I can’t even use, shouldn’t even be able to use the word light without shame, the word word without shame, some suicidally-free billions of rains, eyes, pixels and nails are shattering themselves against our windshield as we drive, annihilating the world and pitching us headlong into a hellish eternity trapped inside a small Italian car breathing the sour smoke of stale Gauloises vertes issuing like sewer gas from the squalid mouth of P.

Details seem inconsequential, a fantastic language of notes fluctuating and staggering, their journey disappearing into ephemera. Something about travelling in darkness or with eyes closed, a utilitarian agenda untrammelled by imagination, the altered present decoded and read back in plain English, as a way out.

We’re here for no other purpose than to realize and manifest our own escape from the not-present. Everyone has a spirit that can be released, a body that can be trained in some manner. We work on ourselves and our appointed tasks and then apply the results to everything we encounter outside ourselves. Everything we run into along the way. Everyone has a road to follow. And we’re following this one, god help us.

We are driving towards the Kohoutenberg at an unpredictable season of the year, a season that fluctuates between labouring and staggering. Our mutual intention confronts our concensual yet individual possibilities in a kind of exchange of entoptic phenomena portrayed as axiological descrepancies. Outside the car windows, spectacular phosphenes describe images of iconic character and formal complexity. Temporarily bereft of alcohol, I am trapped in the search for the origins of the nonfigurative aspects of iconic progression suggested by the implied narrative and mesmerized by the exterior’s abstract geometries of appearance. And by my infinite capacity for anxiety. A sophisticated genre that we call narcissism.

The indescribably fetid transgenic biomorph who sometimes answers to “Pétanque” and who occupies the majority of the back seat (I am suffered into the minority) would probably agree with me. As disagreeable as his physical presence can be, he tends to exhibit an uncritical sort of good humor and usually agrees with everything I say aloud. Though admittedly that isn’t much.

Arnaud is in many ways Pétanque’s obverse; physically quite handsome (in a way which appeals to women more than to men), he has a very disagreeable way of disagreeing with nearly everything. Frank seems in these present circumstances merely driven to drive.

Our shared consciousness charts the turbulent progress of our isolated longeurs.