I celebrate Earth—my home, my mother, my grave—and as long as men are Man they must, if they would preserve the integrated being, do the same—and preserve with it the body—this rank casual hungry smelly sweaty lusting transitory body, my oozy pulpy liquid-bag-swollen body, bones, blood, hair, glands, my bejeweled sex; I love and celebrate it all.

Never to let men forget that they are animals as much as gods—that is one thing I shall say.

Ed Abbey, Confessions Of Barbarian

Of Wild Gentleman it is worth speaking at somewhat greater length.

The first impression the appearance of this man made was one of barbarous, ponderous, but irresistible strength. He was clumsily built—”rough-hewn,” as we say—but he exuded rude health, and, strangely enough, his bearlike figure was not without a certain peculiar kind of grace, which was perhaps the result of his absolute, calm confidence in his own strength.

He conducted himself not so much modestly—there was nothing modest about him—as quietly.

There was much that was mysterious about this man; it was as if tremendous forces were sullenly hidden within him, as though he knew that, once aroused, once let loose, they must destroy themselves and everything they touched.

And I am sadly mistaken if some such explosion had not already happened in that man’s life and that, taught by experience and having just escaped destruction, he was now holding himself inexorably under iron control.

What struck me particularly about him was the mixture of a sort of innate natural ferocity with a similarly innate nobility—a mixture such as I have never come across in any other person.

Ivan Turgenev, Singers

Man is literally split in two—he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever.

Ernest Becker, Denial Of Death

The problem of Man’s existence is unique in the whole of nature: he has fallen out of nature, as it were, and is still in it; he is partly divine, partly animal.

Erich Fromm, Sane Society

More like: Party divine, farty animal!

Can I get an Amen!?

Prof P Willy

Memory is a map of sorts, but hand drawn, incomplete, and full of errors. It can let you know a place exists, but you cannot trust it to get you there.

To get you there, you need a computer. A computer is precise. A computer does not think your mother is more important than the chair, or the space that’s not your mother is more important than the space that is, or the glass of water on the table, or the sun pouring through the window, or the velvet drapes, or your mother’s love for her father, or the front stoop, or the cracks in the front stoop.

This is why Man must fight it.

Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

Uggh . . . we go in circles around this business of realism.

What does realism even mean anyway?

Are we talking about lifelike appearances?

Or emotional reality?

Or psychological reality?

Whose reality?

John Kascht, Collaborating On Mysteries

When you’re lost, pretty much everything is surprising.

So get lost.

Bill Watterson, Collaborating On Mysteries

Our folksociological system, like our visual system, errs on the side of providing us with only the essential landmarks and main avenues around us, while ignoring lots of detail.

Thus, the dynamically shifting gradations and clines of cultural variation are often rendered as a snapshot in sharp relief.

Joseph Henrich, Secret Of Our Success

We don’t know what we want.

But we know what we don’t want once we see it.

Collaboration more collision than compromise.

Over and over we hurl ourselves at each other.

Detailed realism smashes into stripped-down primitivism.

This dumb method creates tons of debris.

And flashes of lightning that cannot happen any other way.

The experience of being lost—that is our common ground.

John Kascht, Collaborating On Mysteries

You set off looking for surprises and you get them every day, so be careful what you ask for.

The project demands developing a pretty high tolerance for confusion and uncertainty.

So shelf your ego and trust yourself to invent something new.

Something that you don’t quite understand or control.

The process is mysterious in itself, which seems perfectly fitting.

And I don’t think it can happen any other way.

Bill Watterson, Collaborating On Mysteries

Amos: We kind of share a soul, and we are linked artistically, emotionally—

Rebecca-Diane: —completely, we are one.

Janet: You’re co-dependent.

Amos: Well no, I would say that we’re dependent on each other.

The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel.

And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.

And a dark wind blows.

The government is corrupt—and we’re on so many drugs with the radio on and the curtains drawn.

We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine—and the machine is bleeding to death.

The sun has fallen down, and the billboards are all leering, and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles.

It went like this:

The buildings tumbled in on themselves.

Mothers, clutching babies, picked through the rubble—and pulled out their hair.

The skyline was beautiful on fire—all twisted metal stretching upwards, everything washed in a thin orange haze.

I said, “Kiss me, you’re beautiful—these are truly the last days.”

You grabbed my hand, and we fell into it—like a daydream, or a fever.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dead Flag Blues

Down iron countenance of Wild Gentleman
From beneath beetling brows
Slowly rolled a heavy tear

Ivan Turgenev, Singers

Man in me will hide sometimes
To keep from being seen
But that’s just because he doesn’t want
To turn into some machine

Bob Dylan, Man In Me

Emily: If I read something and it makes my whole body so cold that no fire can warm me, then I know that is poetry.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

These are the only ways I know it.

Is there any other way?

Mann: A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Embrace the beautiful struggle.

We enter the action midstream—entering into a muddy-ass race, if you’re into the whole Latin thing, though it all sounds a bit Greek to me—our initial cast of compadres deeply absorbed in crisscrossing chatter as Experience Machine rumbles down the road—antennas accessing airwaves actively, anxiously, achingly, acquisitively, appealingly, a-paul-ingly; thin tendrils and tiny tentacles lifting and twisting like skinny fists towards the heavens—thrusting tenderly, tentatively, trepidatiously, tenaciously—tuning to tantalizingly tasty, thunderously tympanic timbres…

Ed: Transistor static—I detest that noise.

Music is natural, static cultural.

Spitzy: Man’s original sin was turning away from animal music.

Gaia: Music is an umbilical cord back to Nature.

Ludwig: From the heart, may it go to the heart.

Vogue: Free your mind and the rest will follow.

P Willy: Flee your mind and the best will follow.

Chaka: One must be willing to release one’s mind and soul from one’s body to achieve ecstasy through music.

P Funk: Exit your mind, down your spine, and out your behind.

Bung: Pfffffft fraap brap brap…

Cavernously cathedraling cranial chambers conceal, corral, cradle, cocoon, cultivate, curate, cogitate chance connections, coincidental collisions, creative conflagrations—chaotic crosscurrents coursing, churning, careening cross cellular channels, cribbing crafty conceptual constructions, crafting complex cerebral cobwebs—correspondences converging, commingling, crackling—crisscrossing cortical cathodes conjuring calamitous cognitive cacophony—I mean, we’re talkin caw-caw-phoney baloney my stoney mack-hero-knee below-knee crow-knees…

Rage: Fuck you—I won’t do what you tell me!

Dude: No, come on, man—nothing is fucked here.

Punkin: Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage!

P Willy: Despite all my rave, I am still just a bat in a cave!

Beetle: Why don’t we do it in the road?

Peppa: Suck my kiss!

Walkin: I got a fever—and the only prescription is more cowbell!

Tuning knobs turn yet again on the cognitive radio, chaotically crystallizing into clearer chords as contemplative conversation creeps coyly, cleverly, cum-hitheringly—cautiously, cordially, chords-you’ll-eee, cords-you’ll-see…

Nas: You need some soul searching, the time is now.

Jay: Allow you to reintroduce yourself.

Fab: Get back on your bullshit.

Back to back on your bullshit.

Matter fact, that was bullshit.

Go back to back to back on your bullshit.

Cool J: But don’t call it a comeback.

G Love: Just be the change you wish to see in the world.

Rocky: Flex on em, every bone and muscle.

D Rock: All killer no filler.

P Willy: Off kilter no filter.

Shorezy: Hell yeah fuck yeah.

Dray: Just express yourself.

Kay: And love yourself, as I love myself.

Charlie: Just do something true and something helpful.

P Willy: Easy to say, hard to do.

Snoopy: Find your self, find your art, find your heart.

P Willy: And never forget, we all fart.

Bung: Pfffffft fraap brap brap…

Turd: Yeah, that’s right, Turd Ferguson—it’s a funny name!

Forrest: I got to pee.

Coach: You sure got a way with words.

Ed: Indeed—celebrate it all!

Tay: You boys are gross.

If I was a man, I’d be—

Yay: Tay, imma let you finish but—

Tay: Ahem…

As I was saying—if I was a man, I’d be the man.

So just be the man you are, man.

Jay: No matter where you go, you are what you are player.

You can try to change, but that’s just the top layer.

Lahdee: Just don’t stand in the way of my actualization as a man, man.

And don’t let them stand in the way of yours either.

Jay: I’m not a businessman—I’m a business, man.

Let me handle my business, damn.

P Willy: I’m not an organ of Man—I’m an org and a man, man.

Let me handle my organ, Amen.

Drop mic. Freeze frame. Fade to black.