Blue Bird Squeal

idea: press play on playlist, observe picture


by Daiana Feuer

TRAINED TWOFOLD

This is an exercise in brevity. It is also an exercise in clarity. Clarity perceived is clarity achieved. This exercise's aim is lucidity. The exercise might also be about acerbity. This last is largely a matter of tone. It is also a matter of attitude. Acerbity cannot yet be adduced from the results of the exercise. The exercise has begun. The exercise is in progress. This is not a preamble. It is part of the exercise. But it is like a preamble. It has no emotional center. It has no heart. It only has eyes looking over outcroppings of verbiage. It only has a gaze directed at a guessed distance.

Now this exercise is beginning to be an exercise in redundancy. This exercise is not an exercise in resemblance.

The introduction continues. This exercise is a formal one. The writer is to follow only one edict. It is an edict. It is not a suggestion. It is a rule. The writer is to write only subject-predicate sentences. No dependant clauses are allowed. No digressions are permissible. A full stop must separate each thought. Commas are to be shunned. This naturally limits the use of adjectives and adverbs. Qualifications are ornaments. The ornament may contain a crucial idea. Therefore the ornament deserves to become a subject. The ornament merits a sentence all its own. This is an exercise in egalitarianism. Each sentence is to be an entired statement. Both the passive and active voice may be entertained. Writers may write declarative sentences. Questions are encouraged. (They will also perforce be scarce.) Exclamations are less encouraged. Inserts are forbidden. Double-backing is prohibited. Some lines will wriggle off. Some logic will be truncated. Some good will only trill. Some will only quaver. Many circles will remain unclosed. These are not subsidiary rules. These are suggestions. They are also anticipated difficulties. So the suggestions are preemptive rebuttals. That is whatever.

Paragraphs may be of any length. Paragraph breaks fall wholly at the exerciser's discretion.

This is not a simple exercise. Record how you think if you are coerced to think differently. Then you find that that is really how you think. Confronted by your own discontinuity. Writing with no
continuity is not writing.

Now the writer hits the thick of it. The writer grows more and more deaf with each repetition. Or the writer can hear only the buzz of internal strain. The regulated pump of adrenalin dulls the ear. The writer yanks himself into habit. The writer pulls a noun. The writer cleanly jerks a verb. The writer hoists a direct object. Actions are not for their own sake. Actions fulfill. Each sentence is nonetheless a flex. Preening smirks behind each completed sentence. Transition becomes meaningless.

There is no argument. Thus there is no forward momentum. Thus there is only the prescribed form. Variation is soon exhausted. Anaphora is embedded. Or anaphora makes itself surreptitious in the restriction. This was not foreseen. Give up transition. Give up linkages. The momentum chases itself. It can never catch up with itself. Each point revisits the previous point. Each point also predicts its succeeding point. Each sentence is perfectly divided. Each sentence opposes itself. Each sentence denies the sentences bracketing it. Each adds to each's power. Each sentence is a bulb in a blinking neon marquee. The writer groans. The writer climbs. The writer does not open the exercise's cloak. Only ache or sating will signal the exercise's end. But Beckett died of starvation. (Do not go so fast.) Anything seems easy until you attempt it.

No. The athletic analogy is mistaken. Freedom in sequence? Form triumphs only with formalism's death. This exercise builds nothing. This exercise quickens no reflex. This exercise wastes. This exercise withers. What is inexhaustible cannot be purged. This is not exercise. It is meditation. It is privation. The rule is a chant. The chant rises and falls. The chant admits an infinity of sounds. Diction is refraction. Falling to pieces is beautiful. The curtain crumbles like a chalk cliff during an earthquake. The nature of the chant lies in its pattern. The chant is therefore similar to a wall. The individual stones of the wall are interchangeable. Only crucial is the means by which the wall's bricks cohere. The writer is not behind the wall. The writer is within the wall. The reader may want to penetrate the wall. The reader may believe that they are to breach the wall. The reader may believe the writer asks this of them. The reader may desire to get to the other side of the wall. That reader does not understand. Demolish the wall? Destroy the writer. Functionality is always banal. Banality is always the writer's best camouflage.

The writer awakes within the wall. The writer is surprised by darkness. The writer tastes plaster dust. The writer smells stone. The writer's scalp is slick with sweat. The writer can breathe. Each breath in confinement is more hot than the last. The writer had believed he could pass through the wall. The writer has misjudged his own contemplation. The writer has indeed grown thin. The writer is not that thin. Nor is the writer porous. The writer's atoms only mingle so much. The writer takes up his pen. The writer begins to scratch at the wall. One specific stroke suffices for a while. The writer's aim is to escape. To escape the writer cannot die in the effort. The writer can hardly afford to be injured in the attempt. Fatigue is the enemy. The writer must try many different strokes. Otherwise the writer will remain trapped. Otherwise the writer will be smashed to pieces. The wrecking ball canters back. The wrecking ball retains force. The wrecking ball is swinging. The readers are taking a running start. The pen is blunt. The fingernails crack apart. They swallow too much dirt. Scabs peel. The voice is muffled. There is no room here for another writer.

The exercise does not kill endurance. The exercise is the end of strength.

by Joe Milazzo

If Only Every Day Was Everyday

Eat Well!

By Ghost Squids

Hydrelectric

by Danielle Adair

There's Something About Exercise That Never Looks Like What It Is.

It's not bullshit, is it?

There's something about these pics that really satisfy/indulge my most depressive understanding/whims about exercise as this alienating, forced activity where a person sublimates their desires for instant gratification in lieu of some fantasy of the body as this external, social jigsaw piece. I don't know.

I think there's something to this idea of infrastructural progress on the geographic body that resonates with my understanding of excercise on a anthropo-bodily level.

Maybe aftermath of exercise? Exercise as a kind of war on the body, whatever doesn't kill you? A war on any physical body, the earth? Social bodies?

Sites and aftermath where exercise, a kind of below-threshold assault on bodies, takes place.


Maybe a couple more? I have one of Matias's bathroom that hopefully he won't think is creepy. That one follows a different line of thought, but is more overtly exercisey.


Living exercise! A kind of suburb feel in the silverlake hills. I love the eerie, stage-like light in the suburbs. where excercise has come to mean what it does to me. excersize as a means to diet, where diet has more to do with witholding satisfaction than "a diet", which would be satisfying-bodily-needs.


I'm a little loopy at 4am. I've forgotten how to spell excercise.


last one I swearToGod.

to contrast the more suburban-looking sliverlake houses.

I'm glad you're not just disgusted with my late-night rambling.


from Eric Lindley

Exorcise

All of a sudden, I’m thrown into a flashback. I’m inside myself five years ago and my chest is still being pulled in and out by the tremendous force of these things.



I.

The blood has been seeping into the fluids that it shouldn’t be a part of. My spit, sweat, urine , and semen possessed by the overpowering stench of blood and their own corresponding odors. Thick and red, it has become some new substance, lubricating everything while at the same time slowing it down.

My lungs have become a difficult organ to control. They use more muscle strength to power than I believe I can supply but the others think that I should pray. They think the demons will be expounded in time.

“Just spit them out,” the old woman told me before. “Let those demons come to the surface. They have no power outside.”

It didn’t bother her that I had been spitting up blood for months or that I could barely breathe at times.

“The demons find the weak ones. They like to make their homes in people like you.”

I didn’t think of myself as weak before this but now my lungs are sore.

I didn’t think about telling her about my semen. I felt ashamed enough while she lectured me on the sins of the body.

“How dare you allow sin into your body?” She accused me, as my mother sat in the chair beside her.

“He lives in sin everyday but he doesn’t want to listen to me,” my mother adds to the discussion.

I can’t spit them all out anymore. The muscles in my lungs no longer obey my commands. They stifle me interrupting phrases both mental and vocal. Words no longer retain their own importance as the thoughts disappear without intent. The focus of controlling the muscles themselves takes precedence over all.

II.

Fully infected my body must now be. I wanted to start a family soon but beginnings are the furthest thing from my mind. I think about my death more and more. I begin to wonder if the blood will seep out of my eyes and ears. I release all thoughts for a moment of bliss and for a second I consider the bright side of death. I soap up and forget all the blood inside. I forget all the blood coming out. The streams of bloody semen spiral down the shower drain.

III.

The strange sensation that the body doesn’t function, that I can’t control the systems I desperately need at times. A machine with lubricant running itself under its own control, this machine is ridding itself of me. My limbs will soon not be my own. Will they function without me?



IV.

My chest still aches, the breaths become shallower and shallower. I still find the strength to clench the muscles in my abdomen, forcing the demons out through the lungs, esophagus, and mouth. The strength to live slowly exhausts itself.

Flashbacks fade. Laying, propped up against a wall for most of the night. I feel a fist around my chest. Is it around my lung? Or is it my heart? The pressure comes and goes releasing blood into every other organ. I wonder which didn’t expect to receive blood.


by Rene Ledezma
photo by Daiana Feuer