excerpt from Metropolis + Isosceles: Two Macrotonal Poems
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Line 01: As a matter of fact, I was just telling Demo as we walked up to your flat, I’ve been just a tad preoccupied of late with a night I actually just remembered today, from years ago actually, completely non-descript, entirely inconsequential at face value, yet it was a night that nonetheless, now thinking it through, is essentially indicative of my true character. It was a night, via pure instinct, I allowed my true colors to show, and of course I was ashamed at first, who isn’t disgusted at first sight of their true colors, but as the years have passed I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s actually nothing a priori wrong with my true colors-actually, if anything, it’s quite the contrary. My true colors, of course I can’t change them, but even if I could I wouldn’t. Because even though my true colors require a prerequisite, a perhaps unappetizing prerequisite, a prerequisite that, yes, that I loathe certain people for no reason. But even though that may in fact be the case, I believe it’s actually proper to loathe certain people for absolutely no reason, with no justification whatsoever, that hating people sans pretext is in fact entirely necessary, and I may even leap further and state outright that these certain people, whom we loathe sans pretext, may actually deserve this intense loathing and unprovoked hatred, but let me begin, please. Because to begin with, it was an era where I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time at social events that I loathed---I loathed both contemplating my future attendance of these events and then my actual attendance of these events. People, ultimately, have no couth---to this day, for example, I often find myself present at social gatherings where a quote-unquote vegetable plate, along with a vegetable dip, is presented as an hors d’oeuvre, and I’m almost always a little let down by the quality of the celery. At that particular stage in my life, in fact, the era I’m speaking of, I’d reconciled myself to the fact that I had intrinsically higher standards than most when it came to celery, cucumbers as well---I analyzed produce with an acuity, frankly, most of my peers would never achieve. Having said that, to this day the majority of hosts in our country have next to no couth when it comes to serving celery or cucumbers. Forced to attend a so-called post wedding brunch just a few months prior to the events I’m about to relay, I was appalled at the quality of cucumbers served---a cucumber, above all else, should be refreshing. A piece of celery, ideally, is similar to sipping a fresh glass of ice water on a zesty summer day. The source of this regrettable degradation in the quality of our celery and cucumbers undoubtedly stems from America’s overreliance on dip.
Line 02: Dip, in our era, has literally and figuratively become the hors d’oeuvre, it’s become culturally acceptable to utterly ignore the quality of the celery and cucumbers, two of the most refreshing yet delicate vegetables known to our species, at social gatherings because it’s assumed consumers’ attention will be focused almost solely on the dip. Yet it’s precisely the dip that negates the nutritional benefits of the celery, as well as the cucumbers. Americans no longer consume vegetables---they consume vegetables with dips and sauces that obliterate all possible nutritional benefits of a vegetable. These dips and sauces annihilate the intrinsically refreshing essences of our vegetables. Guests attending these parties could relieve themselves all over these quote-unquote vegetable plates and not miss a beat nutritionally---they’d probably even fail to notice a difference in taste, with the amount of sour cream currently found in the median American dip. During this era of my life, almost every week I would spend two to five minutes in the produce section arduously selecting only the finest celery stalks and most concrete cucumbers, touching all the cucumbers indiscriminately, with no regard for the customers who inevitably would touch these same cucumbers after I’d finally made my selection---because, to this day, there’s nothing more deflating than a stalk of celery gone flat by mid-week, yet there’s nothing more uplifting than a freshly chopped stalk of celery, and the same can be said for cucumbers. Yet, as so-called Greek-Americans, none of us should be surprised at this state of affairs, with a vegetable dip masking the refreshing essence of the genuine article, so to speak---and this brings me to a much larger point, a more grandiose issue, if you’ll allow me to digress just slightly before I begin my anecdote, the anecdote I’ve admittedly been obsessing over for weeks now, which will inevitably, I believe, become the crux of my argument here. Because there’s endless discussion today with regard to our so-called world, our alleged Western world, but it’s imperative we define our terms with rigor as opposed to carelessness---because it’s too often that we throw terms into the ether willy-nilly. In short, it’s entirely possible we’re confusing extension with interpretation as it relates to our Western world. There’s endless talk of this Western world, but let’s be specific, this Western world is, in fact, little more than an Anglo world, it’s not simply a nondescript Western world, it’s also an actual Anglo world---our civilization, so to speak, is nominally considered Western, nominally considered Graeco-Roman, yet there’s a barbarism at play here, there’s a nefarious vegetable dip burying the genuine article here.
Line 03: In actuality, the Western world is little more than a misnomer for the Anglo world, which is essentially the American world, and the Anglo world, in actuality, is not an extension of Graeco-Roman Antiquity, no, it’s simply an interpretation of that world---and even then that interpretation was a purely subsequent interpretation, an interpretation in response to an interpretation. Because the primary interpretation of Antiquity came from Constantinople and Antioch and Alexandria, in the so-called Byzantine world, and only then did this Anglo world indulge in a subsequent interpretation of the Graeco-Roman Antiquity, based on the Byzantine era’s interpretation but also of course based on their interpretation of the so-called Byzantine world. This should be understood, that the Anglo world, in a very tangible sense, is little more than an elaborate vegetable dip itself, a subsequent interpretation, and it’s perhaps the most pervasive iteration of so-called vegetable dip our planet has yet to see-beneath it we discover the genuine article, the primary interpretation, so to speak. As for us, within this Anglo world we remain more or less glossed over, a sub-optimal fit over here and sub-optimal fit over there, as Diamanda Galas aptly put it: America is fixated on multiculturalism yet remains remiss with regard to Middle Eastern cultures, which include Greek cultures---but how is this possible? Yet we should note, we should finally admit to ourselves that the modern center of the Anglo world, America, for all of its melting pot mythology, has never assimilated, not quite, because instead it’s simply annihilated---in America we love discussing ethnicities, people wear hyphens like name-tags, but all of these ethnicities are at bottom false ethnicities, just as the so-called modern Greek, the Hellenic baboon, is a fictional ethnicity, all of our other ethnicities are essentially fictional ethnicities, they’re ethnicities at best as simulacra, and, subsequently, what’s inevitably true but will remain perpetually untouched upon is that there is no real race or ethnicity within America with the exception of the Anglo. Everyone is Anglo in America, this is obvious. Every person in America, insofar as they’ve adopted American hyphenations, is essentially Anglo---as Catholicism washed over the third world, the third world became essentially Anglo, the Puritanism of North America mixed with the Catholicism of South America and resulted in a milieu where everyone is essentially Anglo. Magic Johnson, at bottom, is essentially Anglo. Endless ethnicities have been properly identified, systematically assimilated into this Anglo-American framework, and subsequently annihilated, and we peruse their coming-of-age narratives, penned in the classic New Yorker style, and we think to ourselves, “Wow, that’s nice, what a nice little coming-of-age story, I never knew Vietnam was so nice in Autumn---” when the reality is these people have been essentially annihilated.
Line 04: The coming-of-age narrative of the Vietnamese immigrant tickles the recesses of our soul, yet it never occurs to us that this Vietnamese person, writing in the classic New Yorker style, has been essentially annihilated. We marvel at the ethnic traits of coming-of-age narratives penned in the classic New Yorker style, yet these ethnicities are entirely fictional, they’ve been essentially annihilated, just as we, the Hellenic baboons, have also been essentially annihilated. The Vietnamese-American who penned your favorite coming-of-age story is, in fact, entirely Anglo. The so-called Orthodox, the last of the so-called Byzantines, remain unassimilated and therefore unannihilated, perhaps only because they’ve clung to their metaphysical distinctions---through varying crusades and occupations, various capitalisms and communisms they’ve clung to their metaphysical distinctions, to the metaphysical framework of the Patriarch of Constantinople. In any case, this Anglo world is no extension of Antiquity, it’s no New Rome, because its interpretations have inevitably been filtered through the so-called Byzantine, through the Second Rome of Constantine, But for the Orthodox, Christ symbolized the true, verified immanence of God, to correspond with the transcendence of God---just as the so-called Socratic Idea was at once transcendent and immanent, just as Love as an Idea was out of reach in-itself (in its transcendence), yet interactive in a relative sense (in its immanence), God was now the same, not transcendent or immanent, but instead transcendent and immanent. God as an Essence was unknowable, unapproachable, and wholly transcendent, yet, through Christ, God was proven to be wholly immanent, in addition to being entirely transcendent, God’s Energies were Energies we could approach and interact with, to become one with God, even momentarily, was deemed a possibility. Christ was brilliantly grafted onto centuries of Greek thought in a system that found its expression from Alexandria to Antioch to Constantinople, yet the subsequent Anglo interpretation, by restricting God and Person to the intellect, the conceptual to the transcendent, essentially ushered in the secular atheism that’s become our monoculture par excellence. This subsequent Anglo interpretation was markedly different---because now to be transcendent and immanent was now deemed decadent and oriental. The so-called Byzantine interpretation envisioned a God who, through His superabundance, was both wholly immanent and entirely transcendent, whereas the Anglo interpretation viewed that interpretation as both wholly decadent and entirely oriental, the Anglo interpretation, just as the Hebrew God banished Adam and Eve from the Kingdom of God, subsequently banished God from the Kingdom of Man, to His eternal transcendence. No, the so-called Greeks never killed their God because they never stopped merging with their God. The Greek world never chose to kill their God, they never murdered their God in cold blood because, in this Greek world, within this silly Byzantine milieu, to kill their God would be akin to committing suicide.
Line 05: Whereas the Anglo world divorced itself from the Energies, became the transcendent world par excellence, and left itself no choice but to kill its God ruthlessly and expeditiously. The transcendent world par excellence almost ipso facto becomes the secular atheist world par excellence. Transcendence divorced from immanence is the primary formula of the secular. The Western world is the Anglo world which is nothing more than a subsequent interpretation rather than a primary interpretation. In America, everyone is Anglo, Vietnamese immigrants write coming of age stories that are nothing if not holistically Anglo, transcendently Anglo. And we sit, portrayed as absurdly Hellenic, as Athenian baboons, yet of course we have perhaps that “Byzantine look,” our musk is perhaps Byzantine, yet the Byzantine, we’re told, was wholly decadent and entirely oriental and no longer exists. The Afro-American Man is the Anglo Man, Larry Bird in addition to Magic Johnson are both essentially Anglo, the Italian-American Man is the Anglo Man, the Greek-American Man, despite playing the role of Athenian Baboon, is also essentially Anglo. The Greeks, ultimately, have sunk themselves, which is why they’re no longer even Greek, we can’t blame anyone more than ourselves, we were placed in an impossible position between East and West, and we acted in an impossible fashion, and now we’re no longer even ourselves. But how did we get onto us anyway, the Greeks---have I gone overboard here at all? Am I exaggerating at all? It’s definitely possible, yet I feel completely appropriate, I actually feel like, if anything, I’m being too reserved, that if anything I’m actually lacking in hyperbole at the moment! I feel like, right now, I’m actually being too kind, that if anything I’m being a tad too reserved. I feel as though there’s vitriol that I still owe, that I own considerable debt, and it’s all vitriol, that there’s no choice but to pay it back to the general populace of this country. It’s possible that I’m filled to the brim with vitriol, it’s possible that I owe all this vitriol to the general populace. It’s almost as if I’m leaving loads of vitriol on the table. The Anglo world lectured us that the authentic Greeks made anal love to teenage boys, and then when Greeks moved past penetrating high school aged men in the rear-end, when they instead subscribed to the metaphysics of the Patriarch of Constantinople, it was only at that point that Greek culture became depraved and decadent. Wholly oriental. This is what I’ve been personally taught by the Anglo so-called scholastics---and that I can tell you is absolutely no exaggeration.
Line 06: Only the Greeks would accept two sets of ancestors of this sort then shrug their shoulders and go get drunk at a saloon. That’s what I did. It’s just audacious, that’s what it is. If nothing else I respect the audacity, because I actually have the highest respect for the audacity of the Anglo world. Our ancestors have spent hundreds of years in obscure mountains, forbidden to read or write, while the entire Anglo world has spread this misinformation about us, this slander, this character assassination, so it’s no wonder pedophiles run rampant in every Western polity---look who comprise the idols of the West! The Athenian with the beautiful boyfriends traversing puberty, as if these were the only Greeks, as if there were no other Greek eras, as if the alphabet became obsolete after Antiquity! But I digress. In any case, before I enter into this whole anecdote I should say this---namely, that I was at a restaurant across the street from my apartment for a small gathering just the other night, my good friend’s cousin was in town, and she and her father invited me to an informal dinner across the road from my apartment, so I decided it would be a little rude for me not to go, considering I lived within spitting distance of this restaurant, within minimal walking distance, and had nothing else to do. I essentially had to go but also had no issue with attending. In addition, I was aware the meal would in all likelihood be paid for, and although I didn’t particularly think highly of the restaurant across the street, I knew there was at least one decent meal, or maybe even two decent meals, that I could order and feel relatively satiated. Personally, I was a big fan of the Spicy Maki Platter, where you received eighteen pieces of tuna, salmon, and yellowtail sushi for just sixteen dollars. It’s a great meal, and because of the economical price-point you don’t feel like a complete asshole ordering it on someone else’s tab. In any case, we arrive, my friend and I, perhaps we’re actually lovers, but I don’t want to go into a great deal of detail about my private life here, we might even live with each other in my apartment, but I’m not going into that now, we’re in love with each other in a way that just feels profound, that’s possible, but in any case we’re there, at the restaurant, when my friend’s cousins from out of town arrive, and almost immediately the conversation turns to the much discussed COVID-Nineteen vaccine, and being wholly sober as well as extremely hungry I decide to have no part of it, I don’t mention anything about nonlinear distributions, the inherent dishonesty of all large governments over the course of human history.
Line 07: I choose to refrain from mentioning Elliot Abrams receiving a fifty dollar fine for trafficking crack cocaine into every black community in America in the Nineteen-Eighties, I choose to refrain from mentioning any of this, as it wasn’t the right time to discuss nonlinearities and Elliot Abrams, this was my conclusion at the time. I wasn’t going to get caught up in the nature of probability distributions and Elliot Abrams’ fifty dollar fine for selling large swathes of crack cocaine at the behest of the first Bush administration at that time. It would have been uncouth, ill-advised, as well as completely inappropriate. But in keeping my mouth shut I felt just a momentary tinge of agitation, in hearing these opinions I inveterately disagreed with, in refraining from uttering the phrases nonlinearity distributions and Elliot Abrams I became slightly agitated, the only antidote to my agitation would be to say the word nonlinearity aloud, which I had no intention of doing. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word nonlinearity, and I had absolutely no intention of uttering the phrase Elliot Abrams at this restaurant, I couldn’t do either without embarrassing myself, and I knew it. The fact of the matter is when an opinion I disagree with is expressed within my general proximity, and I act socially appropriately and refrain from sharing my true feelings on the matter, then I often feel this tinge of agitation, as if I was put on this Earth for the sole purpose of behaving inappropriately and expressing my honest opinions, no matter the cost socially. Instead I found myself glancing intermittently at my friend’s older cousin, just shamelessly speculating on his racial makeup-which I hate. I’ve been on the receiving end of this despicable behavior, and I’m sure you’ve experienced similar, and I despise people who just shamelessly speculate as to my racial makeup, I’m sure you despise them just as much, yet sitting across from this distant cousin of my friend, my lover perhaps, I sat in this silent hypocrisy, I sat there and shamelessly, continuously speculated on his racial makeup to myself, going so far as to take specific facial features into account and speculate on a geographic area of origin. It was grotesque. But that’s unfortunately what I found myself doing in place of sharing my sincere opinions on nonlinear probability distributions and Elliot Abrams distributing crack cocaine to the black communities of the United States in the Nineteen Eighties---but of course no one can mention nonlinear distributions or Elliot Abrams selling crack anymore.
Line 08: Governments have lied to us almost without pause since the invention of the nation-state, in just America alone we’ve seen the large-scale oppression of African-Americans over the course of centuries, the state-sanctioned poisonings of African-American communities with crack cocaine, of lower class Caucasian communities with prescription pills, we have pop stars named Little Xanax, millions of children in this country fantasize about abusing prescription narcotics before they go to sleep at night and the FDA, a regulatory body with ample funding for regulating just this sort of behavior, apparently thinks nothing of it. We have one pop star named Little Xanax and zero pharmaceutical executives who’ve been prosecuted for producing this lurid state of affairs, and that’s just scratching the surface in America, confining our inquiry to a single side of the Atlantic we haven’t even mentioned the Turkish occupation, the genocides of Pol Pot, Hitler and the National Socialists, the Gulag, the famine of Mao, or the preponderance of other occupations, genocides, famines, and general debauchery which have occurred all across the globe more or less incessantly---yet now the United States government informs its citizens without a trace of irony that a fast-tracked vaccine is beyond reproach for any and everyone, with no long-term empirical evidence available, and if we question that then we’re essentially excommunicated from decent society. We’ve become charlatans par excellence if we dare mention the nature of nonlinear probability distributions, if we mention the fact that Elliot Abrams was fined fifty dollars for selling crack, if we utter the phrases nonlinear probability distribution or Elliot Abrams was a crack cocaine dealer we’ve apparently become fascists in this country. So I had no inkling of the racial makeup of this man sitting so innocently across from me, and eventually I just said to myself---you’re disgusting, this is grotesque, take out your smartphone and dick around on that, for the sake of Christ Himself, just please remove your smartphone from your pocket this second. So we order our meals. My friend, who I may or may not be in love with, who orders right before me, orders the Spicy Maki Platter, so we both end up ordering the exact same meal, the Spicy Maki Platter, and I just shot her a look, I looked at her like Are you kidding me? We could have at least discussed this before the waitress asked for the orders, now we’re ordering the same exact meal back to back.