KEEP PLANNING time / space / about
#036
Eric T. Racher
The Post-industrial Rustbelt Psychological Battery
KEEP PLANNING time / space / about
#036
Eric T. Racher
The Post-industrial Rustbelt Psychological Battery
#036
Eric T. Racher
The Post-industrial Rustbelt Psychological Battery
| Statements | Evaluation |
| 1. I am convinced of the necessity of providing an exhaustive account of the concept of space in the belief system of the American people. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 2. I often sit by my lonesome, engrossed in the wandering melodies of ants. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 3. I have read the Latin works of Petrarch. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 4. Each burdened gaze tapers down into torpor, sap-obsessed and mapped onto drownings, suicides, barely glimpsed faraday cages of the soul engaged in glossy vanishings—more malfunction than malfeasance, perhaps, albeit measured in grave pronouncements of principle, in the ardent charters of precipice, in the ontological excesses of solitude, a solitude unsolicitous and impure, viscous and unencumbered, upstaged perhaps by drossy banishings, although never not so unhaunted as when the shadows of hexameters slide up against the tympanum, knock deep upon the cochlea and scrape their way into raptures of synapse; however, it cannot be said that voice distills itself into anything other than voice, be it unvoiced beneath the vault of the cranium, within the wandering gyri of that silent ball knotted into its wide fulcra of fluorescence, or be it out strutting in the public thing, that vast bodiless body of life-bringing, death-bringing stretches of practice and scandal, infected with the brute heft of ourselves and the harshness and the blood and the beauty therein, for voice turns upon the shade and shrivel of that most circumspect, that most haruspexical of skirtings, the word. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 5. The world is indeed too much with us. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 6. I have dedicated my life to solving the Hodge conjecture. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 7. Roman death masks, known as imagines, were made of wax or terra-cotta, and were placed in a person’s home and crowned with laurels; they were carried in the funeral processions of one’s descendants. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 8. Brackish life runs down and out, founders among letters stricken with blacklung; licking at our sutures, we stagger, astounded, through this carrionworld. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 9. The sky is gray. It has been raining all day. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 10. If I had the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world, it would truly gladden my heart to spend a sunny afternoon wandering among the ruins of the Homestead Steel Works. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 11. The interior of the tower is lined with mirrors. Each mirror reflects every other. The exterior of the tower is lined with doors. Every door is opened by a word. Behind every door awaits a blank. Every word is a door which opens into the interior of the tower. Inside, the tower is mirrored by a well. The well is situated directly beneath the tower and is the only source of water for those who inhabit the tower. The tower is located in the wilderness. In the wilderness there is no road. Where there is a road, the wilderness no longer exists. Where the wilderness no longer exists, the tower no longer exists. The tower must exist. The tower exists. Therefore, the wilderness exists. Likewise, no road exists. The well inside the tower reflects the blank outside. The well inside the tower also reflects the tower itself. The well reflects the mirrors which line the inside of the tower. The mirrors which line the inside of the tower reflect the well inside the tower. Each word opens one of the tower’s doors. They say the well has no bottom. The well has no bottom. When the first tower fell, we were blessed with confusion. When the tower was rebuilt, we were still confused. We decided to dig a well. A voice cried in the wilderness. The first word uttered by the voice crying in the wilderness opened one door on the tower. The second word did likewise, as the third and so on. The confusion did not wax; yet neither did it wane. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 12. I am not to be considered a knave because I hate my friends, as I have claimed, but because I do not, yet thought that I would seem more interesting if I claimed to—the truth is that I neither hate nor love them, but for some inexplicable reason, which we by convention call friendship, I tolerate them in a way that I do not most people, and they likewise. I wanted to make myself despicable to you. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 13. I believe with perfect faith that the Reverend Ernest Winston Angley was framed. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 14. I inherited this blocked-off, stocky frame and thick fingers from my Eastern European peasant ancestors. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 15. I find myself obligated to take both issue with and umbrage at these accusations of originality, as I have taken great pains to ensure the derivative nature of the text on various levels. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 16. We are shown a white background upon which is set a series of black markings of various forms. The black markings are arranged in rows, and an analysis of their order and patterns of repetition and placements seems to evince a definite departure from equiprobability, which would, perhaps, indicate that these markings likely constitute an ordered system of signs, a system for the encoding of information of some sort. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 17. Peter, Peter, peat in a bog. ___An old Beefeater sat on a log. ___Two fellows came and turned him out, ___But all the same, he drinks his stout. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 18. The fact that any particular activity or experience would make me happy forces me to suspect the inclination. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 19. Who will say your presence is not felt? | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 20. It was, to start again—again, what a word [here should insert a bit about the word again: Nietzsche, Vico, etc.]—a day like any other. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 21. It is a terrible fate to be memorialized in statuary after death; locals ignore you, tourists stare at you and birds shit on you all day. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 22. [TITLE] brings closet drama out of the closet and into the parlor, and a what a coming-out it is! Not since Samson Agonistes has the biblical dramatic poem packed such a punch—and Judy! [NAME OF AUTHOR] has taken an age-old story and brought it to life for the 21st century. I laughed, I cried, I defecated in my trousers. If there be greater praise than that, I know it not. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 23. For many years I was under the impression that I was a West Virginian, but then one day I discovered that I am actually a Sufi. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 24. All writers are criminals, at least potentially so. Christopher Marlowe was a murderer, counterfeiter, and an atheist. Ben Jonson killed an actor in a duel. Samuel Pepys was a pirate. Aphra Behn served time in debtor’s prison. Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have participated in the Edinburgh Snowball Riots of 1838. Byron was a rapist and O. Henry, an embezzler. Nabokov was a prodigious murderer of butterflies, and Gertrude Stein was a collaborator. Chaucer, it is claimed, though he was not prosecuted, engaged in the illegal employment of a servant, in violation of the Statute of Labourers. William Burroughs killed his wife and Anne Perry killed her friend’s mother. Both Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser participated in the Siege of Smerwick massacre. Andre Breton was a communist. Charles Reznikoff was once fined for jaywalking. Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Ah! dear reader! the list goes on and on—yet in all these cases, we must remember to separate the art and the artist, that we can enjoy the aesthetic splendors of Lolita in spite of the author’s insecticidal rage, that Naked Lunch does not lose any mote of its pursuit of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True on account of its author’s crimes. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 25. As far as I am aware, this feeling has no name, although its history has been traced in chronicles and in poetry, in the infinite gradations of emotion found in music and of color arrayed on the canvasses of the great masters; it is indeed true that which has been said of water: of the visceral, primordial attraction that seems to call to us in our dreams and in those moments of our waking life in which, not unlike somnambulists, we find ourselves lost in the labyrinths of immediate experience and devoid of those goal-directed thoughts that occupy so much of what we like to think of as our life. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 26. “You’re incrediburgable!” says Jeff. [Burger Chef laughs heartily.] | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 27. I think I’ll try to get out of Akron this summer. I suppose I’ll have to stay in the US for obvious financial reasons; as much as I’d like to go to Europe, it doesn’t look like reality would allow that. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 28. It is curious how intense physical pain brings one back to the exigencies of the flesh. For the untrained mind it is a great distraction from thought; however, it can also be the occasion of discipline of the self. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 29. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 30. Old pulp fiction, noir, rockabilly, jazz both smooth and free, fast and mysterious women, old dented trombones, hot-rod cars, pompadours, small-time criminal acts of rebellion, filterless cigarettes, gin-and-tonic, a comb in the back pocket, oversize skull-and-crossbones over confederate flag belt-buckles, metal whiskey flasks, initialed silver cigarette cases. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 31. I’ve hit rock top and things are looking down. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 32. In the back pocket of his jeans he always carried a small, green notepad with white spiral binding at the top edge, in which he jotted down his every gripe and grievance, phone numbers of people he met, ideas for songs, and various things he needed to remember. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 33. White House Chicken Dinners was much better before the DeVore family bought the place. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 34. No one would ever claim that a still life with apples was better than a still life with oranges simply because one happens to prefer the taste of apples to oranges. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 35. The smell reminds me of hot rubber and the factory. The white powder on the coiled rubber before it is fed into the extrusion machines. Standing there in the dark of the factory, I brushed the white powder onto my jeans. Fed the machines. Yard-square boxes filled with long pieces of rubber like a python. Always watchful. Make sure the rubber feeds correctly. If too slow, the length of weatherstripping thins out and catches fire inside the oven. Before that the plastic factory. 10-hour days, four on, three off. Overtime. Plastic hangers. Sat in the low chair, bend over to pick. Up again and over to pack into cardboard boxes. Pick and pack. Pick and pack. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 36. My inability to do that which I feel I ought to angers me; I should set myself to work, instead of wasting so much time and energy. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 37. The car needs washed. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 38. The roots of the mulberry tree swell and push against the retaining wall, causing it to lean out over the sand-graveled alley that runs alongside the house. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 39. Cold air passes over the surface of the waters of the lake, whose slightly warmer body rubs off on the coldness of the air, warming it, as is its wont, and this warm air, together with the water vapor that has been enjoined to join it in its peregrinations, rises up up up, passing through the colder air above, until said vapor, submitting itself to the lower temperatures at the altitude unto which it has risen, and in that submission forsaking its gaseous state in favor of the beauteous fractality of the frozen snowflake, which forms, massing together in their multitudes, settle down down down upon the leeward shores, and in those leewardings blanket the land downwind in the drifts and silences of softly falling snow. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 40. No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called My-Delight-Is-in-Her, and your land Beulah; for the Lord will take delight in you, and your land will be married. And in those days you shall eat battered walleye and fried sauerkraut balls, and drink NORKA Ginger Ale and Root Beer. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 41. Get in the swing of things! | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 42. I have ridden in a pontoon boat on the waters of Turkeyfoot lake. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 43. It was a dead-end street. Either you turned right, up the unpaved alley beside the first house, or you had to turn around and go back the way you came. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 44. He feels pulled by music: the Cramps, the Misfits, the Ramones, Howlin’ Wolf, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Feathers, Hank Williams, Hasil Adkins. At the same time he sees it as inferior to more ‘serious’ artwork. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 45. Out-of-state checks will take one week to clear. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 46. Yehoshua ben Perachyah says: Nothing is more ‘oneself’ than to feed on others – but one must digest them afterwards: a lion is made of assimilated sheep. Nittai of Arbel says: The one thing of value in the world is the Active Soul: think of being so elusive, so mercurial, as to be first swallowed whole, then coughed up, and yet still remain a mystery. Yehudah ben Tabbai received the tradition from Yehoshua ben Perachyah and Nittai of Arbel. Yehudah ben Tabbai says: The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 47. A stem—sentimental, centripetal, centrifugal—centers us, yet one senses something off, a feeling-in, or in-feeling, and yet… the implication of a counter-movement, a feeling-out of sorts. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 48. I let myself rest here where the blacktop cracks on its crumbling way down to the canal. I look at brick and water, alternately, and the soft, indistinct texture of fading that my eyes find in their searching clashes against the world’s dry sharpness. The act of my disheveled lust consists in lying there at the distinct line where light caresses shadow, arising in all arising, sinking in all sinking. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 49. Look what the cat dragged in! | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |
| 50. The darkness was sharp and detailed. Stones mirrored the stars and every flower said, ‘Quit the day! Take up the ashes of your lyre and sing a merry note!” To my right, a row of houses, transparent faces in each transparent window, and to the left a ridge rising to meet the sun’s rising. Light is only a darkness more easily loved by the eye. | ___1___2___3___4___5___ |