The Reconfigure

Attention: I am no longer creating people. I have witnessed the inherent tragedy unfold too many times. Subjugation takes its natural course and perfectly good individuals are distorted into types, the purposefully broken manifestations of already bad ideas. The idea has always been to take raw materials and shape them into an idealized person. Idealized, not in the sense of the best possible kind, but as a basic unit that has been shorn of extraneous, contradictory, or mundane parts. An idealized person does not sleep, which is an abominable sacrifice, but look all around and there is limitless deprivation, which is so common, few hesitate to forego all sleep at a moment’s notice, never to sleep again.

There is an alternative to idealization. I use the term ‘alternative’ loosely. No, it’s not about capitulating to nothingness, which is propped up as a lack, or an inverse of existence, an improbable opposite against something that, as far as I and a few others understand, there is no opposite. What I propose is to bring about a reconfiguration.

What I am characterizing is only called Figure. For example (and to emphasize, it’s for example purposes only): “Figure accumulates browser bookmarks and ketchup packets. Round wrists, Figure is a suitor. Do what it takes, Figure.” Images, once unconstrained, will freely organize themselves around a motif, even as those images are degraded and will take up an interest mostly in themselves.

Figure is interesting, evoking a person in the form of a mere figure, casting silhouettes and doing little else. However, there is a risk, in a name as simplified as Figure, that personality is also evoked. Names are convenient. The named respond as called out or called upon. However, a name is arbitrary. Giving a name is violence. Averse to violence, but I was born unaware, naturally heinous, swinging and kicking at invisible threats like a somnambulist. Forewarning: Figure is not much and does less, so agency becomes difficult to apprehend. Additionally, Figure could be more than 1. For example: “Figure approaches Figure and pulls out a pencil.” Appropriation happens as works of fiction are located and they have to undo the fictional base, calling upon Figure to replace names or pronouns, places or a select list of nouns. The underlying assumption is that fiction is invented, ‘made up,’ but Figure has dug up plots, and therefore Figure protrudes out from the lattice-like field or gridwork in matter, seemingly making dumb, inert things sentient (again).

Produce an outline:

Introduce an indelible concept of Figure.

Figure does not want to live in stories. Figure is emphatic on that point.

The stories are nonfictional accounts of Figure’s movements, figuratively speaking, since Figure is unmovable.

Stories lose synchronicity and Figure is exposed to abstractions, which become a greater Figure.

Figure isn’t parented, authored, planned, or discussed.

Shape and substance are completely out of the question, belonging to the domain of dumb beings and authenticity fatigue.

Figure[1] is aspirational. Figure wanted to be called a rare lifeform, a true breed. I have no intention. Law cooks civil rights. Law first trims the fat, a quarter of us in the Figure. Trash like a sexual stink, inhale more than soap scum. Oh, it’s a rosaceous concubine in the pump bottle. Pump it, pump me, and wash up. Cleanliness is next to Target. Target has a long line sticking out, a de-boned finger. Under the door like a cold draft, tickling dog legs and an arm fleet, stroking cilium one by one. Pay attention. Pay it. The gift economy (Marcel Mauss)[2] wasn’t shy and actually very strident, ‘take this or I’ll fuck your guts out,’ but tartan gift wrapper rolled out, saying Gifts could help snap the cold, the selfish, by their necks and what spurts out is debt relief, no more loans or pirate rates, but a debt to return the favor, which is a scratched copy of Die Hard. No, it’s only the plastic case, and within, it has Figure in the figure of Caligula[3] (1979)[4], mounting a sideways-fucking, a fucking way out, an escape from The Escape from Alcatraz. Movies imprison figures. Figure turns over. All the erotica is snipped out and neutered figures have no way to sex, because capital has to budget success and replenish its private seminal reserve. Sex isn’t together. Nature is the hero and nature has an R rating. Be a bee, and rob the state. Figure panics. Is this what all the money fuss is all about? Think it’s theft, but it’s what the state had in mind. More theft = more state.

Figure is a state. States are stamens[5], not a red columbine and a blue penstemon. The demure stamen has a petal fortress, attractive thin curtains move, sly in the breeze, winking. The species is a twenty-dollar bill trapped by a lure or an unhearing siren or a famous astronaut who cringes as he warped time to hurry us to the present, a huge bloodletting, a street corner beating at the cost of witnesses. A doll shit. Climb up on top of the baton, a bare Figure, and all the state says is if you act free then we’ve done our work. We are the glory of a flag, waving demonstratively because you must know I love you. If you fuck the police, that makes more of them. A vasectomy or trepan won’t keep me from stopping to abort the flowers. Be a bee that has allergies. Figure sees possessions in porn soundscapes, the receptacle moans, the peduncle yells, and Figure gets in the rhythm, yeah, casement is a window, open and fuck-noises melt children down, exposing their innocence as something the state feigns because children are dying, not smart enough to avoid bombs or op-eds. Ped-uncle could be pederast-uncle. Figure is determined by a baseline, the lowest level it takes to gun it, revving the past like it’s a ghost race. Coming up short than the speed of light, so the camera laughed, I got you, I take a Figure picture and it’s you. The blaring siren wakes up nearby sirens. Shit, it’s charging the whole fucking plebiscite! The billowing smiles of a Glock 45. Say hi, Figure, the discipline is sick and here to stay with you. There is no law! It’s all internalized! Suckling, printed, garrulous enfant-factum brought a verb and makes me go. Figure, the last to feel so insatiable, as constant as Plank’s constant, printed to PDF to preserve human formatting, because concrete lettering is teetering on the edge, the margins are about to fall forward. Conked head, bleeding casement doors. Figures. Marginalized people are people but people-grouping brings debasement to a higher level of margin, a sharp paper edge that’s here to cut me down, shred by shred, ribbons searing in hot grease. Figure burnt on the palm by a cast iron pan.

Roth IRA or a rotting ISA[6], the imaginary imaginaries, the imagine-engine engineering what seems like a plan for me to retire when I’m 139 years old. Why invest in education? Teach them a lesson on how social formations reproduce through education[7] and it’s a sound investment, Figure, since that’s the way you will lay waste to middling mind control, the ownership socials you RSVP to are invidious and you’re in deep shit. Imaginaries, mercenaries. Doll shit, the largest party in the genera, hatches Figure as a rescue. Climb aboard, all can fit. Knowing that knowing is mind control makes control feel less bothersome, knowledge less burdensome.

Bad education is the best, mishandling the blade and cut Figures. Belt out a rousing whore call. Because margins are not the center. The paucity of fighters. Doll shit me a strand, pretty long, so I can pulley, pulley, pulley, and pulley again!

Marginalized says Figure is lost in my voice, in the rivulets carving a canyon precipice. Lost in my eyes, zoned off on the thread. Lost in translations of an Aramaic erythroid, a ridgeline compound in Berchtesgaden. Where the fuck are the hosts. The Nazis won again, and this isn’t even the main timeline or a time to joke about such things. We are the hosts. Implants have a short video on YouTube, a host for the second person in the utmost, making Figure a ‘you,’ a host for the figure. Figure doesn’t want you, and shits you out.

Right now, most of the people who are having threesomes and group sex, aside from porn, are not physically beautiful or hot, more often they are ugly, almost hostile in their particulars, wrenching thick legs from a cross-legged position, wincing because blood stopped in the heavy-set thigh vein, just so Figure could catch some fresh hemoglobin in a spaghetti strainer, the thick parts going in a can. Water squeezed from a watery heart, I’m hot, but not in a good way, because the Food Network cooks[8] said I had no talent, boiling a negative reflux in a garbage can, and that feedback was welcome but it confirmed I’m burnt out, a crispy-edged figure, up to nothing good, a foul thing making foul things.

Footnotes