At an April 2014 gathering at No Land’s place, Zack read an excerpt from “Parallax,” accompanying himself on guitar. The reading segues into his song “Arctor.” He reads very fast, so follow along with the text below if you want to catch the words. Gabriel Gall is the second guitarist.
August 26th, 2013
what starts as apology turns into defense. power is creation of parallax view1 (by ability or habit), precious stone that looks different from whatever angle and wants you to position yourself everywhere (God) and/or nowhere (saint) in order to reflect (on?) its horror without participating. Emma Goldman: Lenin’s a laughter that compelled one to laugh with him. The paralysis this parallax gap could engender—becoming reconciled to laughing at an absurd trick played on oneself.
only with another laughter can you blow up the machine. you can try to stop it by going on strike (too obvious) or unravel its lies with your tongue but those who speak often wind up getting their tongues tied or cut off or severed from hearts
Erdogan’s parallax turns Lenin’s ruby inside out, pious clown takes sacred trickster seriously. The double (+) entendres are simultaneously so offensive self-deprecating self-aggrandizing that you wonder if he could possibly have intended them: “I am the best Allevi.” Did he really just say that? What did he mean? Tolerance? Diminution? Tayyip, are you trying to trick us? We rushed to build a bridge no one needed and took down an ancient forest, and whoops, it’s in the wrong place, no big deal!
Tayyip is the image of Kurt Cobain on store-window T-shirts on Istiklal, the idol THEY wanted us to worship—aloof, angsty—authoritarian-victim supreme.2
If you wake up one day and find yourself turned into vermin crawling on an advertisement for Erdogan in the Taksim funicular (his world revolves around you, you never get to see ours), the thing is to get rid of yourself3—not as victim, as laughing time bomb that shatters the pane4 at the same time it recouples tongue and heart, without the risk inherent in speaking (not wrong just unwise, and maybe wrong as well). Otherwise you get brushed off caught in the gears become exoskeleton smashed into the cable fluctuate eternally-inertly between/under piety and sin, two worlds you never get to see for yourself, gain a view on power from everywhere and nowhere but never explode it. ‘so this is eternity, this is the time experience of sun and moon’—blessed are the free of mind for they alone shall turn from universe and world toward earth5 toward each other in an ever-imperfect circle of infinite gift, so rare it almost seems cruel not like a withheld commodity is cruel like seeing prisons everywhere is cruel like a note between notes is cruel like something that is not on the scale of commodities at all is cruel to the you that would buy or sell it, sacrificial you the sheikh says to bismillah (chickpea to cook? leap objective interval like electron? or bridge carefully the gut interval between nomads on the same plane? necessary cruelty conducted by space or by sheikh?)
Rumi’s religion the alchemy of turning one view (above/below, everywhere/nowhere, peak of mountain/slaves’ shantytown at its base) into the other and back again, a stultifying circle with unworldly greed/transcendent grace as its enclosure and gift as its foreclosure—a common, a garden, a friendship, a love, a riot, shared space policed, zone no longer defended, turned into empty fetish—presence turned into absence and absence turned into the Presence and also meaning’s presence (as Friend reterritorializes friend) as religion as institution rather than as constellation illuminating narrowing way forward, that is: not up, not down, not back, not around, with aggressive drivers continually threatening your walking equipment. After revolutions dervishes bow with the austerity of Klee’s image6 but none of the ashamed playfulness of awkwardly whirling round one another (vertically, dizzyingly, defying gravity), trying to figure out who’s higher until bodily boundaries blur and both/neither is. Generous circle inverted, reflected endlessly. Barricades abandoned. Defense turned into apology.