Fiction by Steven Seidenberg

from Anon

All the same I thought myself a less likely pauper than corpse, and approaching both with neither speed nor trepidation, found the callow pleasure of this aporetic mien to be a calmative of sorts, without which I’m quite sure that I could never have endured yet another dull abstraction of essentia from the world. It is my way to stand what once was mine, to live perforce another life, when loosed from all the self-effacing credos of a fool I can at last—if not again—endue the fetid humor of this spiritus unbound, a glancing wound that ever bleeds from nowhere towards the real…

When so within each aggregate recitative of origins I reave the sanguine mirror of some aggregate ens entium, when every faint distortion seems a respite from the swooning obligations of a tortured light, then no other can declaim a greater purpose than this shrift, lacking in composure the enchantment of utterance or caress, instead to croon the gospel of extinction with a forced, anomic smile—to flow again as water spilled, and gathered to the sea…

When I warble it to pigeons preening on the trail, and think myself the fairest of all murderous successions long since driven from the drink; when I supplicate to play the vaudeville Guignol on that pretense of a stage and dig a shelter for a grave in quiet, painfully delectable anticipation, pleading in recumbency for the cleansing inundation only such an incidental deluge can effect; when the terra set beneath me seems no more reliable a perch than any pitiable iceberg drifting low upon the waves, and each new leap towards solid ground appears as but another stunt I can’t hope to complete, then I account it high time to set out upon that most inscrutable of atmospheric lineaments, shimmering and distilled, making for the nearest port with as much haste as possible. If they but knew it, almost all would seek the same unalterable limits, off to sail the seamless verge upon which every tangent, every pivot…

Is it so surprising, really, that one whose flesh is hacked in twain by such a biding paragon of superfluent longings—whose desiccated seity has been avulsed asunder by the invariably disclosing defile of this omnitudo realitatis—should want to cast a glance upon the land which she has always sworn to leave behind without a seeming trace? Has she overstepped all limits by her need to cleave the plumbless whorl of poesy to her forswearing heels, that she might comprehend at least her least and ownmost stranding of such mat and leaden pearls for sodden souvenirs of searches ended in a prepossessing vagrancy…

She, she, she…If any third now feigns a deft presentiment of footfalls still quite distant from this pallid churn of portents into prosody, or the credulous dissemblance of some middle term insists its functionary compass points assume a stygian transparency—an equivocation of absences—as means to reach the beachfront from which every furtive mariner sets forth, then what, or rather, who am I to unconceal the regress thus mistaken for a torrent, to bar the gest before I’ve found the means to its discernment, as a game of tag where the only home is a tree stump on the far side of the mountain…

Why not let that leaky tub float cautiously away from its phlegmatic harborage, image after after-image cruising vainly timewards in the name of some shrewd prowl; still the rumpled wavelets will rise up to taunt the plunderer of flotsam with the promise of a depth that she can’t measure or deny, that she can’t….Her amusements, as it were, may appear warrantless in turn, but no facile reproof can lay its claim to an attention more compelling or inclusive; she is as though a dancer who can’t finish off a single pirouette without a blunder, so bent on its refinement that she springs into the vertigo that guarantees its failure once again…

It is the same with me when my world is laid bare by the hunger to fall headlong from the crow’s nest in despair, to throw myself into the maw that guarantees the scant demesne of indisputability. The sundering of depth from its trenchant façade, the shearing of the veil that rends this integral abyss…no evidence will abrogate the next arising outside without another surging forth to take its form and place, and so I have resigned myself to skipping-over once again, knowing that to sink would but enact another deficit, another cost…

It’s possible that it appears a recondite distinction, but that is of no consequence; every twin may represent a singular existence, but the designation intimates a generative quiddity exceeding mere position, mere resemblance. And so I take to sea in hopes of following the topographic contours of the land of truth—an enchanting name!—from which all such fleet prostrations must already have embarked. Each world is an island, accomplishing its shadowy remainder by accepting on the balance the discretion—the necessity, for necessity is never indiscreet—of a monstrous decay into its other. The flesh is sad, alas, and I have nothing but words…

I will not say that by my feckless toil I have offered up a model of such acquiescent landings, nor even a heuristic plot by which some more adventurous seafarer might think to hoist his serried flag above the surging azure of this littoral excursus; I would not wear the cap and sash of victory even if I could, for the unwavering vulgarity of every torpid analogue, the regressive stupefaction of each attempt to replicate the very clay by which one tries to replicate…

But perhaps it is enough, which is to say, perhaps it’s not; perhaps it never has been, never could be, and by this odd admission always has been in its way. I’m sure that the consideration must seem premature, for having somehow drifted into this digressive dotage of an anecdotal form, but that is quite beside the point—as though all sides, unfolding inward, find their term in vanishing away…

from plain sight

Shining rancor, the void of the sky. From this moment forward—relinquished, delivered. What scales every peak but still clings to the ground. From this moment forward…

To live with the vanity and idleness of a scavenger, stirring the cold ashes of encampments long departed for that scrap of withered gristle that survives the dying flame. Such is my delictum, if I have no room for other sins, such the bane I drivel from this icebox like an early spring, the arctic torpor breaking with a subtlety made abject by the truculent inertia of each chilblained orb, each shivered dream…

To live—to ruin everything. There is comfort in appearance, but in appearing, only torment. Suddenly, it’s over. It begins by being over…

The desire for change—the quest for originality—is empowered by stagnation, by the fear of being fixed within a posture of decline. That other straw men burn before the altar of the idem is not cause enough to join them, to wallow in the comfort of some transcendental plan. For me, there is no promise in the specter of the witness, in being forced to smut the lens that trains upon the page, so much as by a history surrendered to discernment, the bearing of some harborage between…

Unpledged and indifferent tabernacle, to whom…to what disport…A tale, it was, not of triumph or advancement, but of pitiless degeneracy, of an imminent debauch. It is best to hope for silence, for a turning out…

Degeneracy—never an imprecation. In the absence of molder—in the root that sets its limit—there is progress, there is aspect; in the rending of the cerement, the promise of plain sight…

One remains a slave to one’s own singular dispersion of first causes for as long as one is mindful of desire, a slave to hope as long as one believes that there is something else, that someday something more than what has happened…than what’s happened into happening right now will cleave the darkness with the taint of new arrivals and so save the coming day…

That you are such a one—that there is either you or one or one more you— needs neither proof of expectation nor the testament of signs. I have already spoken, so this paramour of indices reminds the eager quidnunc—his next semblable—to mind, an opening to other applications of the affable mathesis any more or less ingenuous precursor would agree is hardly fit to the digression—hardly given to contrivance—and that without the subsequent rebuke of manumissions that the voicing of the practicum can’t help but guarantee. The same contrived preamble—that the plural is apostrophe—is reared as both remittance and persevering remand, the surest ad absurdum one can use to keep the promissory idiom of languor from abandoning its cohort to an endless brink, a final…

If one could disunite the world reflected in this mirror of hypostases from credence—could warrant every image the surmounting of its bourne—then perhaps some future sacrifice would serve to cleanse the spoil of its rancor, its insistence; would lead me from the cipher of a seity assembled to a wholeness beyond difference—an exile which is no less in the fold…

Necessity without release, a vestige of what never was, the ooze of manumitted forms joins shadows to their sundered depths, as glints upon the verge. Insanable sleep, a tedious poise…

One shouldn’t bother saying one needs nothing, or one shouldn’t need to say it, whether one bothers or no. That I have paid such heed because the order is an affect of its needful contravention is apparent, though that is not precisely my position or concern. What is, I’ll tell you now, is not established or forthcoming, for the precedent of something less imagined than proleptic, the genial surrender of diminishing horizons, as a vanishing in aggregate that nears despite the pride of its dispersal, its persistence…

Take my hand, this world forgives. Yours may be quite ruthless and I can’t say the correction will transcend the subtle pleasures of this sluggish liberality, to unconceal the other paths—the other tongues—by which your mouth discerns its ever neoteric savor, but that seems quite enough to bind you over for a little while, beyond the nearing lookout of this missive affectation, when something else will happen, something still more like a promise—like, but as the image of an absent friend. I can’t say that I’d blame you if you took your leave directly, without second glance—or first—to match your own in its discretion; that you’d be less inclined to sanction such droll marginalia if I cursed the ground you scour on your chafing knees, but that is neither here nor there to one whose vim has managed to begin its final volte-face, the craven weal of one whose back has turned…

Nothing’s neither here nor there; the path towards dissolution is made stable by deferment, by ciphering the transit as a standing in its own right, thus an aim fulfilled. One imagines the predicament of those who failed to see the deluge coming—no time to draw a last breath…

A clearing—a departure—and so the case is closed. The vacancy is tempting— every interval is culled. This, then, is the crux, although the gist’s another matter. This is what it comes to—what it will, when it comes due. The chief thing is to be seen…

To manifest—to measure out—the suffering velleities that overflow each alveolar chamber of the nous. No flight from isolation is a search for common calumny, either proffered as a warning or a fungible abuse. All tidings, no matter how glad, are made abject by transmission. What we long for is a freedom that’s continuous with quietus; what we search for is an infinite…a limitless abyss…

Steven Seidenberg is the author of Itch (RAW ArT Press, 2014), Null Set (Spooky Actions Books, 2014) and Songs of Surrender (Gummi-Geliebter Verlag, 2013). He co-edits the poetry journal pallaksch.pallaksch., and is curator of poetry events and publications for The Lab, a non-profit arts and performance organization based in San Francisco. His work as a visual artist has appeared in solo and group shows, most recently in San Francisco, Reno and Berlin.