Today was one of those days. It occupied my thoughts for every minute. It came as a surprise. When you find yourself consumed, it starts to reveal an aggrandized, veritable self. Read the rest of this entry ?
Archive for November, 2007
Villiers-le-Bel Manifesto For Youth Revolutionaries
November 29, 2007To all my fellow Surrealists, by freely admitted title or not: labels are ineffectual and useless when staring down the barrel of a rifle. So then, to re-start with all pretensions and assumptions aside: every ear (even the stone-deaf) in Villiers-le-Bel , comrades, artists, humans, REVOLUTIONARIES… Read the rest of this entry ?
21. superficial supermen, artificial souls worn thin
November 29, 2007If I were to blow my own horn it would sound like an air-raid siren warning me of my impending doom. However I shouldn’t be so foolish as to thrust my assumptions upon such a methodically faked life. I would not be so brash as to disregard your explanations, so by the same token I hope you take it upon yourselves to make no assumptions on my behalf. The title of this collection is indeed a noun and not a verb. The clear lines of language will show us this truth from now until the end of all things. Read the rest of this entry ?
20. another log in the fire
November 29, 2007
Please excuse this overwhelming urge to paint personal worlds of ego and compulsion. Sick and obsessive, sticky and forever. Strung up like christmas lights around the necks of every innocent little girl. Shadows that are deeper than the real thing, and darkening all the time. Read the rest of this entry ?
19. jaundiced and chilled
November 28, 2007
It’s cold in here and my stomach burns from hunger. I have a sick feeling, I think drawn from emotion, that permits me to take a weak form of poetic license. I pretend I’m working only so I can pretend you interrupt me. Ridiculous. I lie to you, I lie to myself… what’s the difference, I feel the same either way. Read the rest of this entry ?
a SURREALIST questionnaire
November 27, 2007a SURREALIST questionnaire
Name: Jonathan Douglas Duran
Party Affiliation: Independent as a hog on ice! (Voltairian Surrealist) “I’d never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.”
Links to you online: voltairiansurrealist@gmail.com
1. Who are you? Not you, for sure…
2. At what age were you born? Some men are born posthumously.
3. Describe what the future sounds like, bleeding out of a speaker. Dissonance. Cars, televisions and sound waves of pure cancer – oozing as open sores. Gunshots and drumbeats… indistinguishable from one another.
4. Which month has all the days crossed off on a calendar you will never see? No one reads the papers around here, pal.
5. The virgin mary’s favorite television show is: Hookers at the point. Real Sex (all of them, the whore!)
6. If Jesus Christ (assuming the worm existed) came back today the first thing he would do would be: Vomit the compassion right out of his heart.
7. Two of the conditions surrounding the inception of god were: Giddy superstitions given ridiculously ersatz validity by scared and angry old men afraid to acknowledge their animal ancestry that dangled between their puritanical thighs.
8. The blood of others will be: Red with embarrassment.
9. The most violent shape is: North America
10. The most beautiful sound is: Wounds healing
11. To choose the right verb you must: Let it choose you.
12. What sort of hope do you place in love? The hope to momentarily displace some senseless pain.
13. How do you picture the passage from the idea of love to the reality of loving? Much as the idea of defecation to the actual reality of the smell of feces.
14. Would you, willingly or unwillingly, sacrifice your freedom for love? Have you ever done so? Yes. No. No. no. No. Yes. Well, maybe, sometimes though I…
15. Do you believe in the victory of love’s glory over the sordidness of life, or in the victory of the sordidness over love’s glory? SORDIDNESS. I envy that word.
16. Addition or subtraction? Addition can be subtraction and vice versa when utilized correctly.
17. The opposite of art is: Slavery.
18. Surrealism is: Complete freedom of the mind.
19. Rebellion is: Necessary and unavoidable. It is right under your skin, behind your eyes and throbbing through your fingertips.
20. Freedom is: Surrealism. (see above)
21. Your personal manifesto in one sentence: All power to the imagination.
22. Where can people find you? In the last place they’ll look for me.
23. The precise formula for dignity is: Two parts intelligence and four parts bleeding fists.
24. (association) Woman: nigger, menstruation face/glow.
25. Pages yellow, skin ____fever___________
26. Your hymn to the night, please: Ever present, enclosing, enveloping, unending grace and spite. Both sides of the worthless coin spread across the sky, represents the night. (but there is always a way you can light up the sky)
27. The great victim is: The human verb
28. The great evil is: Anything which diminishes, deigns to devalue or attempts to trivialize any individual’s imagination.
29. Please create your own question and provide an “answer” here:
List your top three reasons for wanting to fuck JESUS CHRIST:
1. Those wash-board-abs, mmmmm…mmmm, good!
2. Wine.
Anytime.
3. Wash-board abs!!!!!!
beaten
November 26, 2007
I definitely have some pent-up aggression issues! Read the rest of this entry ?
18. i choose
November 26, 2007
Do you believe in an aesthetic sense? That everything is placed and perceived by us out of a perfect and beautiful necessity? Read the rest of this entry ?
17. here I am
November 26, 2007
I had a dream that you dreamt I died. Same images all the time; burning flesh – falling sky – silhouettes of empty high rise. Nicotine stains swing triple time, everyone is everything all the time.
LOVE (Version 2.0 – open source)
November 21, 2007Dark times my friend, confusion reigns at home and abroad (a sad truth no matter where you live). Everything is a bit old and rotten, even perfect innocence one day oozes out a thick black oil of vitriol straight from its very heart. Then you have to put it down like a rabid dog. Shotgun to the brains and then the silence of release. A slow, painful trickle of complete loss. You have to be able to look this death in the eye without flinching, you have to stand tall and vibrant against this increasingly dull and soggy world. We are comrades. We must write about love. We must lead by example. proselytize our agitprop of apropos absolutes. The love of everything all at once, screaming, bleeding, fucking, passionate love of love. Life is worth love. We must stalk this elusive lion and pull the thorn from its distorted paw which has been piercing it for far too long. Substance and purity have been leaking out around the wound, causing a dilution. Love is the true liberation, without it there is no Surrealism. Without Surrealism there is no one to fight on the front lines for love. Take bullets and punches, have our guts removed by bayonets soaked in paint sold to us for far too high a price. The days are meaner and more vicious to the human verb by the minute, the skies more poisoned, our food more vulgar and plastic. We continue to slink away, afraid of recognizing our increasing dehumanization, our increasingly devalued minds, emotions and desires. We’ve been manipulated like poor, dirty puppets, all gnat infested potato sacks and old, rusted buttons. We must soak these trappings in our genocide-supporting petroleum and set the match of love to ourselves in order to purify our lost selves. Only when we truly let go of the meaningless fodder; the world they’ve invented, interpreted to us and addicted us to, will we start to use our eyes for the first time (all three of them). A flower, a woman, a man, a child, a mind, an anything, EVERYTHING even the worst of ourselves can be enriched, supported, created, fulfilled and convinced by, and with, love. Please throw away all trite, grandiose pre-conceived notions about the futility of “love” and its complete lack of conviction and/or power. Love is not a limp, static word which sits, impatiently upon the lips of teenagers who stand precariously on the brink of their awkward hormones. It is real, it is a power of unbelievable force and it is not fragile or banal. When known, it is more destructive than the atom bomb. It is the force of a million explosions, sitting ready, buzzing and coursing through every cell in your body. It is the bomb shelter of the soul and the ultimate weapon of freedom simultaneously. It is that moment, while reading a book, when you have a moment of understanding, of great learning – and suddenly a whole other part of your brain lights up and functions in a new way that you never imagined it would. It is a drug of potent addictive qualities. You taste it and it only increasing your hunger, driving you to the point of insatiable dependence upon those brilliant, bright colored flashes of peace and understanding. A silence after a hum…
(Think about this, and contribute your own paragraph in this space)
So we must stand up and shout, yes. Not only shout, but we must believe our convictions. We can only harness the limitless potential if we truly carry the faith and remain honest in our brilliant insanity. A hundred different choirs singing a thousand different songs. Dissonant, perhaps, yet deeply, richly textured with beauty, with creation, with art. Love. We have no choice but to understand, to bend and be loyal servants to the tip of our swords.
You have my support and I appreciate yours, please send people my way if you desire, I will never turn them away, I have an open door and bread under my roof which they can chew and get stuck to the roofs of their mouths.
15. not all of paradise is lost
November 21, 2007A hard, heavy pit in my stomach. Filled with cancer, with fears, with thoughts. Filled with that familiar lie of compromise. Sitting as heavy and inert as a boulder. Our bodies, meat, bone, fluid, muscle, etc. Ostensibly playing out this act of living. They lead us around, passing our gasses and filling them back up again. The science, the truth behind our bodies, how biology refuses to let loose of our hands. Leading us into our inevitable death.
To live is to feel, to die is to make good on that promise. Read the rest of this entry ?
14. that won’t help
November 20, 2007Let’s pretend, just for a moment, it was a hot and balmy summer day. Right in the middle of one of those weeks when you’ve tried everything to break the hold of the persistently brutal heat. We had been swimming, seen a movie (air-conditioned), sat in the shade with the ice in front of the fan, everything… and still the clamp the heat had on us. Stifling, weighing on our porcelain shoulders like another layer of skin, thick as steel and matted down like sticky fur. We took off all of our clothes, no escape. We sat naked, wet and slimy like large newborns wallowing in their afterbirth. I got up, opened the refrigerator and stood at the foot of the door. Pathetic; barely cold enough to keep the milk from turning.
Let’s pretend together what happened next, that heat, the inescapable discomfort.
Vomitous death of temperature.
Vomitous death of memory.
13. the ambiguous shape and arrangements of the words on this page.
November 20, 2007
The family of wolves,
The family of snakes.
A large yacht, christened the “Oyster Yellow”. A brownish sky filled with viole(n)t voices from a foggy past.
Undecipherable, yet precise.
Parallel to the idea of death,
soft and wide as shadows.
Take back your book of lies, take back your poisoned skies (I never asked you for anything). A hasty formation of knowledge in rhythm with that liquor that pumps through your veins. I still have my father’s heart. A great blinding son, a question of responsibility that seems impossible to distinguish from an overhead silence broken like a child’s favorite toy. A collective fight, a will to power. The accepted construction of deplorable aspirations. A fever drenched in sweat and urine. Forever just a bolt of lightning with no preceding thunder. A sky split open, large and gray, by a burst of electricity, the splinters of science.
The ambiguous words crawl on for hours, in complete disregard of their simplicity. They hold my hand and my mind in contempt.
Meanwhile the ambiguous crab sprawls across my floor, belly laughing like a secret superimposed over an infant.
p.s., I wrote about you today.
12. the loss of dreams
November 19, 2007In my sleep I wrote a small novel, chapter by chapter with a great ferocity. The words and story were very specific, very complex, yet the work flowed effortless from my pen. Read the rest of this entry ?
11. viva la muerte
November 16, 2007Don’t expect anything from anyone, ever. Don’t believe in altruism, only lust, only want, only self-preservation. The human animal: the human disease. Flights of enormous fancy that fall from your mouth like teeth, spill off your tongue like wine. Simplicity simplified. A contradiction shopping at a thrift store. Becoming a hand me down, a used piece of kitsch. Perhaps the Surrealist object. Nothing ever really defines itself in large, bold, and broad brushstrokes which illuminate the night. A colorless form, a ghost of glass and diamonds. An obscure repentance of sin. Vice controls/vice consumes. Bury all your art in the garden, plow and till, ignore and fool. But DO NOT slip into self deception, into compromise. It strips all the words right off your spine. The poetry on the page: a joke in spite of control, in favor of contempt. Read the rest of this entry ?
10. The human verb
November 15, 2007Woken up too early and continuing my dreaming.
A vicious feasting – carrion impulses, a straining and collapsing, a frightening point, a sharpening of views, so strained and so forceful, a straight-laced disciple.
But nothing’s of significance, nothing is necessary, pictures are fallacies, moments of treachery, drawing on our smiles, the faking of everything, time will come when time’s undone, hide ourselves, shit of our souls, decomposing bags of bone.
And you’re so welcome, and so faithful, so perfect, and so fucking everything. Empty bottles strike out broken prose while painting on a certain majesty, notes taken underground, I play the guillotine. Poetry pulled from banality.
9. if there is something
November 15, 2007
If there is something inside you, you should be able to find a way to extract it, to remove and distort it. Separate it from its base and use it for devices previously not thought of and not designed for it. I’m speaking of course not only on the meditative qualities of personal Id, or of self-effecting intellect solely for intellect’s sake. The most formulaic and pre-determined notions can and somehow must evolve into a creature/movement of great predatory power and function. Predatory not in an exactly physically destructive sense, the material world is far too ridiculous in its excesses for something as prurient and level as (at this point) un-bridled brain synapses: our basic biology. Read the rest of this entry ?
8. woman
November 13, 2007I want to run from you. I’m so tempted to use you. To subvert you. To crawl inside your head and shake the dust from the shelves. I feel a weakness in myself when we make eye-contact. I feel unsure, confused. I’ve no idea where I’m going but I want to string you along as I decipher the signs. I want to please the flesh. Confuse and obfuscate the senses. The drugs don’t work anymore. I need to throw everything off the track and pretend to focus. I love to teach as I fuck. Read the rest of this entry ?
Where are my goddamned questionnaires?
November 12, 2007You know who you are!
Please put your monkey backs into it, I’m getting bored.
7. poetic relapse
November 12, 2007
To become yourself again. What can nurture this natural disaster? Do you need to tear every old, yellowed and brittle frame down to see the pictures in a new way, with new eyes? What of consequence,
what of method? Read the rest of this entry ?
6. the return of ghosts
November 9, 2007
The deficiency, I want to be CLEAR with someone, have a true connection, but it is so difficult to condition yourself to be totally honest. There’s always the pretense: pride, shame, jealousy, love, hate… etc. Read the rest of this entry ?
5. reshuffle\
November 8, 2007So I had to stand in line. Waiting for a check of all things. True, I took part. I was forced to. I’ve liberally bent over for the “dollar” on so many occasions throughout my life that I no longer count them as significant. I use the dirty god muscle of money only because, in this world, this façade they’ve built up, I could not survive without it. Everything is owned and rationed out for far too steep a price. It would be near impossible to live in this country without taking part in the dance. So we apply ourselves, languidly; up and upon our gods. Sodomized in our minds.
AUTHENTIC, REAL, IMPORTANT. Read the rest of this entry ?
3. all power to the imagination.
November 7, 2007The seductive disease of these beautiful trees, it seems sometimes like paper, brittle and thin. Vulnerable to the point of disintegration, barely real enough to hold itself together for my benefit. Read the rest of this entry ?
2. vicious as coitus
November 6, 2007I could finally hold my breath inside words… Spatial consequence, physical and obscenely tangible. The honey from a deadly nest. “Obliviously on he sails” – that’s what we call a quote. An idea, feeling or suggestion that we borrow from someone else to help validate something we personally think, feel, or suggest. Just one of the crutches we use; other people’s words, removed from the context of the whole. Supporting ourselves with our distortions. We faint and demand that the world faint with us. Read the rest of this entry ?
I AM THE FIRE THAT FLARES UP AGAIN
November 5, 2007i am the fire that flares up again
selected writings by
jonathan duran
open me up and I’m re(a)d…
November 2, 2007Over the next week I will be putting the entirety (chapter by chapter) of my first book, I am the Fire That Flares Up Again, on this blog. So if you’d like to read it, please…
However, that being said, I will still be selling it here:
http://www.cafepress.com/consume.36415260
just in case anyone would like to own a physical, and extremely attractive, copy of it.
So, prepare yourselves; there will be a few pieces that you’ve seen before, some I’ve even posted on this blog already, but no worries, there is still plenty of it that will be new to all but a handful of readers.
