some thoughts on rangeela.

damn, i was hoping rangeela would fall at a time when i was present on campus, because i wanted to write to chimes talking about what a farse rangeela is, how it shares many qualities with the efforts at the earlier parts of last century to parade africans around in cages on show in major cities like new york. they did do that, right? i´ve heard tell.

in any case, it belittles Other cultures and the otherness of other cultures to a spectacle, instantaneously de-complexifying them and classifying them all together because of their otherness, which doesn´t make any since does it?, as a nice show for the white man to watch. a nice parade for me to watch of everything i´m not. they should have some sort of display of dutch culture, west michigan dutch culture though, or better yet the culture of my friends who get piss face drunk and chain smoke and stroke their dicks and sit around. you guys still do all that shit, right?

i´d like to be in rangeela myself, painted black with big red lips. could you see it? i´d do a little minstrel dance for the president byker himself, yes massuh!

com et va? :: anar tirant

i would never put my money down on the Electric Light Orchestra if i were you.

this morning i saw a fellow student buying FOUR smirnoff ice at 10:00 am, and of course i thought of nick reynolds.

a paradox? a misunderstanding.

when a notion/concept/idea/understanding is first introduced into our minds, it´s semantic space is like that of an inflated balloon, that goes getting shaved down more and more processionally where the nature of said concept is revealed to us, exactified.

what seems paradoxical to me is the fact that the more this semantic space is narrowed, the more it becomes part of our subjective reality, the more proper the idea is to us, to our own minds, BUT, at the same time, this shaving down also puts us in touch with objectivity, in a way, a connection with the shared concepts of our socio-cultural reality, a sort of shared definition, if you will for me, a nearness...for example, all us angloamericans probably share more similarity in our concept of what it means to be poor than say, joe mbuutuu from botswana. but on the individual level thinking that our conceptions can often reach an equality is ridiculous, maybe. that and language is the bastard. language isn´t innocent...it´s a representation, it´s a lie.

this seems paradoxical. or it doesn´t make any sense.

i need to buy some flip flops.

you, why do you always feel the need to situate yourself in space and time?

"i exist, i exist", yeah, keep telling yourself that. asshole.

nothingness behind your masks.

i met the latin kevin d.HA. he dresses and acts like kevin but i'm not sure if he's quite so neurotic. what? and of course he's from spain. he talks with a fucking lisp.

and i'm going to the beach again this weekend, with him. and someone else and someone else. hopefully i won't end up shedding skin for three weeks like last time.

peter, you seem to be going through a rough time. maybe you're confused. i just want you to know that_____can help. _____is always there for you, _____ always has been, and if you pray to_____, _____will listen to your prayer, and at least think about it for a couple of seconds. or a second. peter, _____loves you.

isn't it a bit paradoxical to live in grand rapids for a whole winter and NOT try to take your own life? i've always thought so.

quilt of bullshit.

verily, i say unto you: cast thou glance upon all my friends, for their clothes are dirty but their hands are clean

and i am proud of them.


°

right now my mind feels like a gallon of neapolitan ice cream melting together in the sun

and does any one besides me remember when we were living in that hellhole off of wealthy,

then when will refvem walked into the living room with the tub of thoroughly knife-gouged margarine, jokingly commenting that it was a metaphor for his soul, with infinity in his eyes?

will refvem, lead us in prayer to apollo, and thereafter.


°

some times i´m afraid again. paranoid with that dick-grabbing, sleep-inducing fear that my parents were always right all along, or maybe that i´m spitting in the face of a sacred code.


°

look at how they shake those sirens, ambulances after midnight.

too many times i confuse mediocre canvas of my room´s rectangular window pane with obscure dreams, shrouded in nothingness.


°

horns, wings, the colours red & white.

holy fucking shit.

the prospect of spiritual warfare going on all around us?

i should wear thicker socks.

girls, girls, girls.

yesterday there was a huge protest and thousands of people took to the streets to march and to show their solidarity against the president.

alex says that things here are ran like a farm, but i think there´s something lost in the translation.

it´s been raining every day here, which makes it cold in the morning and more and more often i´m finding that it takes the motivation of smoking a cigarette to get me out of bed in the morning.

yesterday la Consuelo changed my bed sheets, now the color scheme clashes wildly and, who knows? that act could be solely responsible for the death of thousands of people in a couple of hours, or centuries.

last night i dreamt in french, and i was talking to my literature professor in french, because in my waking life i know he can pronounce a couple of words with a decent accent.

in my dream his french was fluent, though, and i noticed my accent was getting worse. i woke up wanting to go to europe, and wondering why i had a quite strange or more than amiable relationship with an anonymous fat girl in my dream.

i saw a good argentine movie last night called "historias minimas" which means "minimal histories" or "minimal stories", or something entirely different. i went home and read "the argentine writer and tradition" by borges, and i think i got something out of it, but i´m still not quite sure as to what "gauchesque" means.

my blog is a fucking waste of time and space. or at least i need to die and be born once to ever write in this blog again. i´m starting to hate it.

why is every singular thing so fucking fleeting and ghost-like? it´s meaning seems to already be floating away with the wind as soon as it is.

an author has said that due to the fact that we´re mortal beings we walk around like phantoms, never sure of the moment in which we´ll cease to exist, always in a hurry, anxious.

i leave you with a quote from my mother, which is probably a lot more interesting than anything i´ve written in this post thus far (i´m not sure why, but i found it humorous):

Hey back from Las Vegas. I felt sorry for all the people there using their bodies to make money.alot of mexicans are at each street corner handing out leafets (sic) for girls,girls,girls.

... but i'll play the game.

josiah,

as for god’s unconditional and everlasting love, maybe you could talk about that to the street children in this city who sniff glue all day so they don’t have to realize their hunger pains; they could may use a pie-in-the-sky heroine more than i, friend.

“and he looked up, and saw the rich men casting their gifts into the treasury. and he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites. and he said, of a truth i say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: for all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of god: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.” (luke 21:1-4)

and how much more beautiful the offering of the widow who barely had anything to give than that of the rich men, how beautiful the love of the being who loves despite it’s difficulty than he who loves in abundance with facility, how much more tangible and real;

besides, accepting and relishing in the love of christ seems the physical equivalent of enjoying sex with a sincere prostitute.

(if you’d let yourself fall in love, tangible, organic, non-static love, maybe you’d know what it means.)

as for the wisdom of man v. the wisdom of god, tu quoque? you’ve spent the last four years in an institution that stands, within the scope of modernity, as a symbol of man’s attempt toward and respect for wisdom and knowledge, specifically self-knowledge, i.e. man’s effort toward knowledge of the humanitarian sort.

in any case, the word of god had to pass through a human filter, ergo man’s wisdom, in order to enter history. christ himself was a wise man, but fully man as well as divine, transforming his wisdom into a piece of that of the corpus of the history of the wisdom of man.

i reiterate that I feel that christianity is but a chapter in the history of man’s relation to the divine, a beautiful myth, of whose authors fortunately didn’t distinguish between truth and fiction nearly as rigidly as we do, but how can it be approached with any morsel of the religious objectivity that it demands?

my opinion holds that people believe something because they want to, perhaps because it fits well their social or cultural reality, but not necessarily because it’s “true”.

i don’t mean to sound asshole or mean, on the contrary i love you. you’ve opined on behalf of what i’ve written, now i return the favor. and it fits to note that i do believe in the divine, but i don’t think by any means that she’s beyond reproach.

sincerely,

zachary david campbell





p.s. (yet how much more does the superfluous character of judas suffer, how much does he himself sacrifice for enabling christ’s sacrifice?; much more than three days: now eternally, now infinitely in hell.)

history´s secrets.

how can we possibly know if an act is right or wrong?

guanabana juice in the mornings.

for it is written:

"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." (ecclesiastes 1:7-9)

and that which disheartens me is the premise that there are perhaps only a handful of singularities, a collection of only certain entities and that the substance of everything is made up of their variation, the infinite possibilities of the combinations of their nuances. there are perhaps only two or seven people in my life, in the world, each complemented by infinitesimal (sic?) personal nuances.

and to emphasize my point, the preceding paragraph is practically borgesian plagiarism.

*

outside, my respiratory system fills with smog and the mountains kiss the clouds. after dark, the quechua indians dig through garbage. at times, i´ve been able to mumble primitive syntax in their language and make myself understood, a fact which has made to smile, but more than anything they´ve wanted that i buy something.

at once, i thought they were here first, but later found that they, too, had been conquerors. and neither is there comfort in the fact that the conquest does not continue infinitely throughout time´s spiral. or does it?

have you ever thought, mr. gregory, of the horrid possibility that perhaps there was never a beginning. what horrible emptiness. what grotesque cyclicalness.

and that there are combinations of words eternally lost because eldon spangle isn´t writing at this minute, they are gone forever.

*

we are damned rational beings. here i´ve been told that putting a burnt match back in the box brings good luck. i only wish i were so superstitious.

in 1587 in what is now modern day perú, the quechua indian guaman poma de ayala wrote of los conquistadores

"Y que de día y de noche hablauan cada uno con sus papeles, quilca."

or roughly,

"And night and day each one of them would speak with his papers, quilca."

de Ayala was giving an account from the perspective of a strictly oral culture the phenomenon of reading that he was witnessing.

he narrates the process that these men, whom he describes elsewhere as having "faces covered with wool", undertook-some sort of magical communication, a talking, with this "quilca", which in quechua means "pictorial representation", or drawing.

de Ayala had no idea what the fuck was going on, so he mythically filled in the gaps.

and what i wouldn´t give to possess that magic, magic that reason murdered, magic which in aquel tiempo filled in the gaps, caverns that modernity has defined in only negative terms, and the mere presence of the word "ignorance" in my vocabulary is testament of that fact.

this seems an odd place to leave off, but friend, i have nothing else to say. i go to smoke a cigarette.

i really should be correcting a translation of an economic article in the new york times on how fucked the economy is here.

just wait...

chévere

in a matter of hours i'm headed to the beach. we're all on holiday here.

i'm going to drink beer and turn red so y'all can let your dicks freeze to the pavement.

and drink beer as well.

because it's friday there, as well.


there's nothing else to say...except that i want a cameo in one of will's porn scripts.

c/o the bane of financial institutions, part II

the final correspondence b/w "my video shoppe" and i:

(see the post entitled "c/o the bane of financial institutions" for further reference)

jigimama@sbcglobal.net
to me
Zach, I received your check today. Your account is in good standing. I will also contact CBCS to insure your name is removed from collections. Best wishes on travelling abroad.
CT Noll


zach campbell
thank you ct noll,it´s very refreshing indeed to be out of the united states, even more refreshing to be here.

thank you for taking care of my account.

zach




i still think they´re fucking cunts, in a way. jigimama??