DEAD MAN TALKING

Background: I’ve dated and copyrighted the following piece as an essay, although this is actually a letter, sent out to everyone I knew, detailing the true experience of my demise. The events described all happened in Italy over the winter of 2015 – 2016 and as far as I then knew comprised a last testament. During this long period I was made conscious by my girlfriend that -out of all the countless people I’ve known throughout the world- a total of three people expressed concern, which explains some of the mood of the latter part.

DEAD MAN TALKING

c 2006 Tristan Winter

December 16 – February 16. Emergency Ward. Neurosurgery Hospital. Neurologia-Termination Ward.

My head is still matted with blood. Hoisting myself for a survey, I see my arms shriveled down to bone, as small as any chicken’s, and I even have the classic concentration camp pelvic cage with two marionette legs hanging askew. I kid you not. I am inexplicably covered with black spots and scabs. I’m punctured through from injections to the stomach I never understand the reasons for. The veins throughout my arms are by now entirely destroyed and blackened, with just one last great beer tap hammered in, an elaborate machine with three different spigots I hope will last one final week. Were there a group photo from this time, I’d be the jolly one clutching the shoelace I used to belt up my pants.

We are desperate for soap. Towels, toilet paper, are mythical. After five days of requesting a replacement for my old head bandage, I tired of picking the filthy rag up from the floor where it continually falls and so finally abandon it. Many of the patients actually arrived with striped pajamas, filling out the war camp associations as they drag themselves through corridors. No two clocks here show the same time. Many have the faces ripped off of them in despair or horror. On the wall of each room, the crosses in Neurosurgery are all fragile silver bodies on wood with that slight Elvis trick at the hip. More animated: Grinning priests scuttle out of corners to cheer us though the holidays. Yesterday we were swept by food poisoning and barely noticed, since it has happened before, and anyway it is a change from watching our slops being dropped on the floor and reset on one’s tray. The Doctors were all dispersed over the holidays (roughly, until the middle of January), with just a few lesser ones thrown into this Bedlam every couple of days or so. When they do show up, gli Dottori slip through the crowds like peacocks, but with smaller minds and, especially here in the Termination Ward, are swollen with the prestige of withholding information. Confronted by a patient, they will burst into infantile rages and sever further communication. Thus, when the minor medics and nurses appear in the corridors, we stampede them for information, supplies, dates, none of which are ever available.

Worst for me: the noise here is truly of the damned, particularly since it is driven by the staff themselves as they slam their wagons into the cells, clanging, barreling, crashing, smashing from dawn ‘til night. No one employed by the hospitals communicates in anything less than a yell. Everyone stops to argue or gossip whenever they wish, wherever they happen to stop, across any distance, so the chaos randomly fills up the building at any moment. I’m lost in the slaw of accents ordering me to do this or that every direction I turn. The absolute lowliest toilers are Balkan, Baltic, South American and -as always- the deep southern Italians, with some unfortunate retarded women enlisted as cleaning beasts. Their attentions include running in and moving my water bottle with their bathroom-duty gloves on, but trying to limit their mute bustlings only confuses them and I believe hurts their feelings. The staff in general –Italians- by nature announce everything with fury and arguments whipped up from nowhere, and medicines are flung around by orderlies on command, not schedules. Twice I have listened to the night staff partying and crashing supply wagons in races as they laughed and vomited strenuously for hours. Only once was a holiday (New Year’s Eve/Capodanno).

And here in the Termination Camp the roar of the patients themselves is one warping hell. All around me the rooms and rows of embered mouths and cavern faces spewing bats, the Sonic Arab women, the eternally dying Elk Man, and all the many wounded tossed into the beds immediately beside me for this night, these 5, this shaky last hour. The last to go was Ugo, a. paralyzed old man who could only holler incoherencies and actually sprayed shit and piss day and night. Since moving me from the Neurosurgery hospital to the Termination Camp for what was falsely promised to be the ultimate couple weeks of I.V. torture (and scans and slices), I am worried the corporeal turnover might defeat me, see me burning through roommates like a stoker feeding a mad death ship. This minute I am watching a full 2 liter bag of urine attached to Roberto and flung down on the floor by the orderlies where it is twitching to burst open, the plug pointed at my bed. This, a separate and distant hospital, is officially the ward for Neurology, but none of these cases resemble such and I can’t imagine where the hospital ever found them. Some of the staff finally admitted to me that this is being used as a dumping ground for the dying who can find no beds in the community homes. Behind me, I’ve discovered a broken door. Someone snapped off the bolt to this random platform that simply steps off to a five-story drop. My secret.

The NOISE! Two months of unrelenting noise is killing me. Flung into the heaps of hospital staff and yowling casualties, this world fills up to the seams with visitors as well. Uncles like cigar stubs, women clamped into dustmop wigs, kids racing through tottering patients, men who know nothing else talking football, women with asses like grand pianos, some poor Africans who don’t understand what’s happening…every inch of space filled with families, friends, neighbors, and sly enemies flooding the rooms as though from some enormous burst dam, all again on top of the televisions, the telephones and electronic hospital racket, every one of them talking, the only conversational rule in Italy stipulating that no one is allowed to remain silent as long as another is also speaking…not one person with a normal volume, every one of them bellowing. The noise! The Italian cure for a brain blowout is to lock the patient into a jackhammering madhouse for two months. For brain blowout is what shot me into this helltrap. The taps in my veins are for pouring sloshing big bags of antibiotics to my brain. They have been running through me for eight weeks now. These are some industrial-strength killers that will often hit me during the day maybe as hard as chemo-therapy. Antibiotics like these destroy one’s veins, but the blood–brain barrier is an almost supernatural protection against most antibodies and bacteria, and only certain antibiotics are able to pass at all…in this case solely via intravenous flooding and monstrous potencies. Since my jaunt to neurosurgery I have a panel in my head like a station wagon door once searched for contraband and then refitted into my skull; they needed to do that to get in to my brain. But the real problem is the time bomb hidden deep in the trunk.

Actually, I’d croaked previously, just in November. I was delirious, with insane fever and a nonstop –really non-stop- cough tearing through me so hard it broke my bones to shards like someone had bombed a mosaic palace at Ravenna. Coughing blood and gallons of fluorescent slime, I was going back and forth from my knees to my desks and somehow wrapping up business, beating the deadline. I fought it with a couple of weeks of antibiotics from an old prescription drawered in the house and against everybody’s demands for me to go to the hospital. It was obvious -perhaps not so admittedly to me- but certainly to those around that this was the end. By the end of the second week, I had salvaged the business I was stuck in, but I was wrecked. The fact is, I was already done for.

It happened again, but this time perfectly: I had finessed things so that I would have the damn holiday period to set every last requirement in place and then the business would start running itself. It took two days to take me down. I’d had several days of a growing headache, full days of work, of which I now only recall some emails that took hours to write -three sentences each- and even as I typed, the letters were replaced with useless ones I was continuously surprised to see there. The second morning I laughingly described my discombobulation of the day before to Daniela and she insisted that this time I hit the hospital. Neither of us noticed, but I had spent the morning arguing with only one shoe on. That I saw only after she’d left, so I located my other shoe and returned to work thinking how much better all was going this day, until the afternoon, when I suddenly felt a shotgun blast to my brain.

As the pain increased, which I couldn’t believe was possible, I was overcome with a shaking paralyses, which is when my youthful study of ventriloquism rescued me as I managed to squeak to lil’ Chico to call an ambulance. He instead phoned his mother and both she and her boss rushed to the house after convincing some paramedics to get there immediately. Naturally, half the town was gathered outside as the ambulance guys rolled me out to the wagon and rattled off to the nearest hospital with my head bouncing along like a basketball.

While some of the doctors deep in the basement were professional enough to start scanning for a stroke, above ground the staff was offering aspirin in response to my roars of pain. The pain continued to soar and my roars grew along with it. The staff, instead of assuaging it tied me up overnight. -This is the hospital housing the Terminal Ward, to which I’ve now been returned for a month. Before returning here, though (against all my will), the docs from this first hospital thankfully rushed me to the neurosurgery department at a distant but larger one, where a brain operation was waiting for me. Their diagnosis was: no stroke, possibly lesions, but likely a brain tumor.

Upon prying my head open, the surgeons saw that I had no brain tumor, but rather an abscess, a rare treat indeed. Very rare. These things are damn near unheard of, and those that do make it to a hospital are dead serious and ‘difficult’ to deal with. The abscess was deep and developed from the inside, not from the surface, as with tuberculosis for example. As I said, deep: in the posterior left temporal lobe, and worse, the left ventricle. If an abscess ruptures into the ventricular system, the mortality rate is around 80%. In short, I had burned a hole in my brain. Due to the problem and the position, the surgeons –afterwards- made clear to Daniela that the permanent effects would likely leave my entire right side and my speech ruined, but the operation was necessary immediately if I were to live. However, (now comes the Italian medical version) as they were getting ready to auger out the abscess, it began to change before their very eyes, as the exposure and the initial touch caused it to respond like one of our most tender aquatic friends and retreat in upon itself.

When I awoke, I was in the neurosurgery ward with a tube draining blood from inside my scalp. Apart from a vague sense of weight where my head might be, I had no sensation. I don’t recall for how many days, but I was unable to move, eat, go to the bathroom, etc., and so gradually discovered myself over a week or so in bed like a squid. Someone else’s squid. The doctors had from the beginning vetoed any idea of physical therapy for me as pointless. I managed to learn all those things alone. I had incessant hiccups for weeks (obviously a neurological effect of brain surgery). But very soon afterwards, the docs who were monitoring scans and debilitations reported that all my functions were inexplicably returning. Their learned explanation was that, like something from a Terminator film, I simply refilled the destroyed area with a new sausage of cerebral tissue…Somehow I’d replaced what had been destroyed. Later, as the regimen of the hospitals wore me down, I lost too much of what I had regained.

The abscess was/is from a streptococcus infection, but no one has been able to discover the source of it. Fortunately, I alone in the household have this, but this simply increases the mystery. The usual acknowledged etiology of brain abscesses ignited from the head include tooth and mouth infections, sinus infections, ear infections and epidural abscesses; Equally serious are infections spread from lungs, heart or even the kidneys. So what exactly is poisoning my blood? Between surgery and having my veins shredded right out of me, I’ve been shoveled into repeated CAT scans, Magnetic Resonance Imagery, X-rays, EKGs, blood tests, over and over. Every possibility has been and is still being dug through for traces of source contamination; the obvious suspect after 40 years of smoking and hard living being the miasma wafting from my chest.

I am a walking dead man. So when I sneeze, you run, boy. Weird traces of the infection, the remaining abscess, can be seen as they filter out of my head directly from my brain. This is seeded, colored death shooting kernels of poison out of me. Each day we search for the source. My history doesn’t show any clear way to attack this; for years I’ve done battle with each known culprit: teeth, sinuses, ears, lungs, heart. From years of living with these recurring agonies, and ad hoc doctor visits in various lands, I know the targeted effects of each serum. Now, within my skull the medicines flood through scouring coral grottos, arcades and petrified galleries. At night I feel the lonely ship, my dutiful, undaunted, icebreaker patiently ploughing the arctic sea. These cracks and explosions have burst through me for years as the pressure built to excruciating levels and then found release like a Vesuvius in my head. But what is the secret source of poisoned blood?

I have no face. I’ve been too busy. The problem is I’ve been too busy to have one for too long; sheer, unabated action having become my form as I crashed through these past years. I figure I still have no face, and still no need of one, but there came a point when I needed to absolutely identify the part of me spewing death to the rest of me, and I had to summon up a firm image of my head, to begin to reference the brain from which this shooting forth. I was mentally searching through Chinese boxes and similar objects without conviction until, just a bit behind me, my hand settled on a small woodcut like a Vallotton in its own wooden frame. Oddly, it was only in that woodcut I firmly saw the problem, rolled into the left side of my brain like a crosscut salami.

For all the previous month in Neurosurgery –even through the long period when I was only there for lack of anywhere else to transfer to, becoming a sort of mascot for the ward- I managed to bring calm to those who lived in my quarters. Because I seemed to live there (in some sense) the longest, I was the one who assured the families as they left each new patient alone for the night. Those awaiting surgery, those returning from the ordeal, I was the guardian and on-call nurse for everyone who passed through those doors, including such patients as Lorenzo il Diavolo, who leapt about spraying catheter blood for three nights. One of the main reasons I was able to keep peace circulating smoothly is that the surgery has disabled my sleep mechanism. That is, since the operation, I do not sleep. I remain awake, alert, unfatigued and entirely at peace with the situation. I had heard of such an effect many years ago, but can’t quite match the case just now. Actually, I’ve found that I can sometimes drift into a light sleep for about one hour at the very end of dawn. At other points during the day, the medicine hits me like a rock and I could pass out for an hour, but that doesn’t work out so well because the coursing racket here jolts one wide awake every few minutes. But in Neurosurgery everyone slept through the nights and I had nothing more to do –or desire- than to watch the night light sailing the hours through my corner window, painting the room with a pure benevolence I would imagine as lacquered cabinets and carved chests, serene shelves of nephrite, porcelain and jade –an exotic pharmacy of some kind- that I began to call my office. Whether nothing or anything transpired during those long, long hours made no difference. Nothing was asked or expected of this room that came alive each night and faded silently each morning, but the contentment and serenity it brought with it was a marvelous gift.

But maybe, as with the rest of my self-reproducing renaissance, the ability to dream will come to live in me again. In fact, the first instance came this morning as I floated up a gag. Mentally, dreaming, I was supposed to be writing a parodic hard-boiled sentence for an imminent kiss (don’t know why) and the words came to me…His desire to enter her doubled as he remembered her cleft palette. Maybe not gold medal goods, that one, but it came automatically like all the gags used to do. Living without dreaming would certify this death, since dreams have always been my reality, not the quotidian, or, more aptly, Quixotic runaround people call life. Now I wait for them to flock home -otherwise, it looks like losing my sleep mechanism will end up being just another trick of fate to keep me working all hours.

Ah, but those nights in my office were hours of pure tranquility. On January 2^nd, Daniela brought the poor kids in to wish me Auguri (happy birthday), which drove me nuts as I looked around the revolting confines of my busted life or imminent death, and I apologetically chased them out and off home. By 10 o’clock that night everyone in the ward had gone to sleep and I sat at the window smoldering over my stupid luck. That day and evening had seen the worst weather of the period, the first sleet, the most gruesome colors, and now the ragged, filthy splats of snow peeling off the sky mocked me as I sat, helpless, hopeless and futureless. Then the world changed. The snowfall became pure white flakes, as big as birds, and as determined and graceful. In minutes, the entire landscape was covered in heavy snow. At the same time, the view became clear, the smut and soot and night replaced by white miles without end, hills, groves rolling off to the mountains beyond sight. As has so often happened on my birthday, I was alone, in the silence of forests or mountains (everyone else generally being gone to some festive gathering), and into the neighborless space the snow comes as it always does that day. The streets, the fields radiating joy, completely deserted except the hares and foxes I knew were there…This was the world outside coming to the world within me once again…The white fogs through which only I can see the divine chain of generators and the waters that cascade out of their tops….The eternal infinite, the endless silence. This was real, mind you. Delighted and glowing with strength, I looked aside for a moment and noticed for the first time that my bed was number 16 -as in 2016, not 15! and I knew then that all would be settled as it should. I stayed through the night at my window, seeing what no one else saw, until it slipped away from the others before dawn and I understood I was being shown –again- the miracle that will follow me through my life…The solitude that has and will always be my miracle alone, the sole source of my power.

I consider the untraceable source of my poisoning and now I recall a huge delight upon having discovered Sapraemia, which I considered a perfect disease when I was 15 or so. I remember the timeframe because I enthusiastically told my cousin about it, as he was the only one who would listen to me regarding such things, and because I was planning to do a book about it (since I could only afford pen and ink, these works were called comic books (if one could then afford to publish them) –not Graphic Novels as they are grandly deemed now- and Sapraemia was to be the second book, after Panicalamities). Supraemia is a disease of total incapacitation and destruction, nearly impossible to attribute, that ultimately arises from the putrefaction of the blood itself. Years later, in Germany, in 1981, I mentioned the marvelous affliction to Podrazik, and he wrote a furious jazz score that I then wrought into a film using a storyboard. I was surprised to see the score published along with my complete film board on the net around 2008, and myself fully credited.

So perhaps I’ve found my fascinating Sapraemia after all –the supreme disease- sparking death as if one could make fireworks from the imagined salami in in my imagined Vallotton, wheeling off the same colors later described in the medical report. Where is this poisoned well -the molten thoracic mire in my chest, or my heart, or my head? The last several years have had me tied to projects where I had to do all the thinking and it literally burned a hole in my brain. Ridiculously, I now must work twice as much to catch up with all the obligations I had before this mighty smiting took me down. A biblical smiting it was; In five minutes I lost my business, our future, and my life. I have no way to meet the rent or any of the usual bills, not to mention whatever two months in hospitals will end up costing. My business destroyed a matter of days after opening. In fact, no matter how much I try to straighten my concentration and coordination, all work was blocked since the hospitals are firewalled and I’ve been cut off from all internet until just recently, with sporadic access.

Mysterious doctors keep dooming me to one more, two more, and always still more weeks. Every scan and blood analysis leads them to conclude the infection is still too dangerous to release me. Here there is nowhere to walk to; After a miscalculated stretch, turning a corner, the cumulative effects of the cure have greatly worsened my standing, the prolonged bed sentence having thoroughly atrophied me; By now both my legs are useless and have only enough muscle to spasm and give me 24-hour cramps, for which, like all else here in Terminal, I am irregularly and only after battles with every distinct orderly given the equivalent of aspirin. I feel nothing –more or less- on my right side, except the little feeling I do have in my foot and hand, as though the extremities were able to anchor the dead trunk. The rest is numb and unresponsive to pinches and punches and I don’t always know or understand where my hand is. I had my laptop brought to me with an idea of saving my business (and fending off thieves –those poor guys get sick, too), but typing is difficult even with my old two finger technique. A mouse confuses my hand beyond hope. Not that I can even hear my own thoughts here (and lockdown/lightsout make night work impossible), and breaking through the firewall for internet access isn’t going so smoothly. Beyond typing this out and forcing a general return to work, I cannot set too much surety on my (right) hand ever again. I’ll find out more eventually. I did have a particular painting, a final large one I wished to do when I settled down once and for all. And aside from the swarming chaos of the hospitals, concentration is sometimes a hassle, hopefully just as a result of massive overmedication. The inundation of medicine has been too much and I am amazed the doctors see no drawbacks. And, yes, it is unceasing pain.

Worrisome is that my sight was knocked out of balance. Won’t be able to measure it better until I return to familiar surroundings, but this is exacerbated by the ward life, staring at different walls from close angles and then having to comprehend what I was looking at from a lowered or elevated pitch, so that a flick of the eyes have walls appear as ceilings with my feet reposing there and the crucifix from the opposite wall appears beyond the ceiling. With the little Elvis twist upside-down.

Now we have a hobbled race to find an answer and eject me from the hospitals. When –if ever- that happens, I will be prescribed massive doses of the same antibiotic- as much as can be taken as pills- for months more. As decided by both hospitals, I’ve been sent five or six times to a third hospital to entertain some Maxillofacial surgeons who shot and lost couple rounds of x-rays. These had been arranged early on in my sojourn by senior doctors hoping to eliminate the cause of the abscess. Eventually, -only in the past two weeks- one surgeon was appointed to saw out some teeth and/or jawbone that displayed infection in x-rays, although he insisted my mouth was not the cause of my downfall, a stance that fine gentleman might be alone in the world opining. I now have gaping holes and still less knowledge of what’s going on. My destiny seems to be in the hands of two head doctors; One is the infectologo back at the Neurosurgery hospital, whom I’ve never met yet who has for over a month thundered an Olympian NO to every other doctor who suggested I was sound enough to switch to antibiotic pills at home (probably many month’s worth). This specter has haunted and taunted me since January with his last-second orders of one more week, two more weeks, maybe another week and a half. The other is here in Terminal: the tall, stumbling, white haired Chief of Neurology who parades the halls averting his face so that no one can look into his eyes. A pompous dotard too stupid to warrant the name, around him like flies nonetheless the name: Mengle. In his mind, no doubt he is more Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa (painting by A.J. Gros). This Mengele has many times stymied my efforts to collect information about my condition, probably to conceal his ignorance (Mr. Winter, let me tell you the difference between an American hospital and an Italian hospital. Here we devote all our resources to those with the most urgent need for attention… But I’ve been trying for six weeks to get information. I need to know what has been done to my brain. I only ask for five minutes… We don’t have five minutes… Everyone including you has spent far more time than that spouting excuses for refusing me information! I want to know the details of my operation so I can understand what to expect or do next… Hmph. Hramm. That is beside the point… -supported by his under-doctor, who now begins screaming: What do you want from us? What kind of person are you?!?). He is really no more malevolent than any bureaucrat; This morning he shuffled in, threw open his arms and announced like my best friend that if the CAT scan next week shows no or little trace of the abscess, I was free to leave. He honestly was upbeat and amiable…until I asked him about the (possibly) final blood test. Since he couldn’t find the orders from the previous doctor, he told me to forget it. First of all, he is the Senior Doctor and can order the test, and second of all, it is madness to release me based on a scan alone if my blood still shows a major infection being fought somewhere.

February’s almost half gone now, and although the origin of the infection has never been identified, the most recent scans showed the abscess as no more that a tiny stain, or scab, and blood exams had convinced most of the junior or regular doctors that it is safe to send me away to shovel in antibiotics at home. Using my mouth. The search for living veins that can support even one round of meds gets more desperate every morning; it’s really reached the end of the line. However, with open talk of releasing me, I dream that, within the week, with this bullet rattling around my head, I’ll ride off homewards like a skeleton against the sunset. After two months, I can’t survive any more of this cure or these ghouls…it is surely time to move on. Now the staff in Terminal have been trying to pressgang the patients into cleaning the bathrooms, probably running bets on who can spackle the most germs into their wounds. Coincidentally, I was again rebuffed today when requesting a bandage to protect my IV spigots, or failing that a piece of tape (which some of us need), with the explanation that none exist and won’t until sometime tomorrow. On the positive side, a number of staff have relaxed their animosity ever since one of them pointed at me and yelled: Centomilla Lire! suddenly remembering the hundred-thousand lira banknotes, and the others crowded in with Si, vero…E lui! Caravaggio! All of which referred to the portrait of the painter on that denomination (my present appearance is unruly). Maybe my value has gone up. Before that, a pair of them had named me D’Artagnan -not so fitting for a man of my age or condition. But for now my life here in this Carnevale (lit. goodbye, meat) is a reeling nightmare of zombies in wheelchairs, demented bowels without minds, people staggering around clutching enormous ice packs to their necks (always gives me a big laugh, don’t know why), and now some woman screeching Zia! Zia! (Auntie! Auntie!) nonstop for the past three days. Some of the girls have begun popping in and joking, telling me that I must always remember them nicely, and I, in turn, begin to feel they deserve some consideration for their dire positions and will probably thank them profusely as I did upon leaving the neurosurgery hospital. But I must walk out of the sludge, away from the stench, the screaming, the incessant barking of orders. I slipped outside today, through wards with automatically locking doors and down two flights to the lobby -apparently the hospital was designed by some clown who does small, unusable Albanian airports- and into the sun. On the lawn presaging the entrance is a dedicatory bronze frieze depicting people lynching each other and stabbing others with bayonets. No kidding. The inscription says it is to commemorate Liberation.

I don’t care about dying. I don’t get anything out of this life, unless it is the little joy I was able to smuggle back into Daniela’s. A wisp of regret will arise where business obligations awaited my fulfillment. But obligations and fond promises to forge a future for the kids here are all in a slimy, heaving heap, and there is teetering before me a horror at having done this to Daniela, so, ironically, I’d regret being sliced away from this -most abhorrent word- Family. Surely most of all I’d miss Nature, but that’s it. In fact, at any given moment of my life, you could sit me down in front of a tree and I’d be delighted for hours. All I ever needed was a tree to look at. There is no more to add to this list at all. I own no house, I want no car. I do not have or even aspire to own a bicycle. As ever, I have my coat and my hat, and I am set for the world. Or I was.

It should be obvious that none of this work was for my benefit. Anyway, by their nature, my creative and even my purely mental exploits always devoured my physical reserves. As long as I worked, just sustaining the level of intensity was a danger, and that, eventually, winds up being quite the concept of death for gents like me. But that work -the applied, like the sociopolitical, the phenomenological or the gumshoe scoop- and the pure -discoveries like regenerative tree barks, birds that dance to sickening limericks, flying, glowing, singing fruits from the jungle of imagination as alive as dream– cannot to be found in the realm of ego. The kind of creation I know and live for comes like a Big Bang, each time another singularity: the rare breaking through the universe when the radio does equal the transmission in importance Madbox gleaming hopping here me greetings from around the world. Membranes, yes blood barriers, membranes, hemispheres, all limits undone as I find the moments when the act of creation becomes quantum transference…The permeability of the brain cells teasing rhymes of the mind/spirit solution -perhaps the real answer to all right here. The multiplicity of my media only served to open more roads to the center: a universal consciousness. Any sane person can see the selfless origins of such work; What they called art I used to bring beauty through the eyes and depth within the being; Anything literary, the same but not needing external visuals, since it provided its own from birth; The entertainments might be said to x-ray the stupid obscenities humanity uses to disguise its even more useless acts; The rest of my works are of a purpose of lucidity, of precision of explanation above all; they certainly hold no revelatory value for me. Most people, including artists, assume artists are slaves to some blind drive –evolutionary emotionalism– they see as a drive for expression. Expression is of zero interest to me. Creation is all. Expression doesn’t even enter the question, not at this level. Not on our level, Mr. Newton. And anyone who could assume so is light years behind basic comprehension.

And now I speak to those who have evidenced a clear satisfaction with my demise.

Everybody knows it must’ve been some humorous Assigning Angel who hooked me at birth and dedicated my entire life’s work to the Blind and the Deaf.

My remuneration: Derision, in advance, with life-long interest.

Derision: the result of a shriveled ethics grown of deformed perception. The Interest is the resentment used to gild their own inutility, often a resentment so perverse that they are furious when I do get paid, and censuring when I am not.

I speak to those tribal arbiters, those who live to justify their chicanery and their gluttony with nursery school moralities, those pinkassed Poindexters who live on models of Cargo Cult instead of creation. I speak to those hollow, fiberglass effigies, some with hair attached to make them seem more alive, pulled out of cellars and set out to promote rancid platitudes, cant and pabulum.

And when this dead man speaks you can drop that fat smile off your face. My real work will mean nothing to you; Blind and Deaf, you naturally have no idea whatsoever what I do. Coloring your ignorance with allusions to genuine bad boys like Caravaggio or Cellini only proves your dependence on mythomania. I don’t run around killing people any more than I waste time promoting my name. What I have done, amongst other laborings, is poison myself finding the materials necessary to give my paintings a life of several hundred years instead of the few decades that modern works last before falling off the canvas. And for the pleasure of doing that, how many times I’ve had to endure the exact same horseplay from clients: Now we have to kill you to raise the price of the painting! While I wait to be paid. The reality is one of painfully wasted years… All the strange places I’ve had my life on pause while the publishers, patrons, studio executives played with my work like cats with mice, taking months and even years announcing Yes/No/I Don’t Understand This while they collect their salaries and vacations, can be viewed -in retrospect- only through this kaleidoscope of broken streets, countries and strangled ideas.

And what did you think I was doing each time the executives of the Blind and Deaf kept me on the streets, waiting? You hopeless fools, I’m not paid dinner to dance with women! I’m the one raising scaffoldings, building those Babels with other brothers from around the world, swinging beams, blocks, cement through bars as we rise above our languages story by story; I’m the one on the docks at dawn; I’m the one who lost time accepting renovations, demolitions, or the endless jobs I that could only be undertaken through the nights; I can’t even remember all the outlawed industrial chemicals and machinery I have hauled away –and the many asbestos removals now cindered warnings in my chest like memento mori; Jobs on islands tarring seaside houses; Other jobs only found in the markets’ sleet at dawn with the other guys as lost as me; The heavy house moving crews who also became my most honest brothers; The jobs moving boulders; The 4:00 am bread baker; Working in freezing German cabinet shops; Learning and running printing presses.

May this tombstone crush your heads. This toxic labor I renounce after 44 years of straight-through work, and I now offer it up to you, along with my pen and my paintbrush; You try it.