I’ve just moved and am going through notebooks and many other things, sorting out my life in this new house, and I have rediscovered a blue notebook with the cover done up in a collage. Part of the text on the collage cover reads:

positive curvature, 1825
space is not
analytically logical
mathe
Space Reimagined
emerge     illogica

“Bullshit anti-rhymes,” as Henry Mullwiler would label them. Here’s more, from the interior of the notebook:

Neutralizing Autumn
12/9/06

Rain in the forest.
Drained resources.
Sonorous caves, hidden deep
in Michigan, in humans.
Resorting to chronology,
folded gold hatches
under following stars.
Alchemists kill defenses.
We’ll breathe liberty at last.

Automatic Catapults
12/9/06

Mahogany
Ash. Skies crash
Sheets near razors
Blazing breathing
Sheets delighting
Exuberance
Overflow. Hit output.

End cares.
Mandatory casts.
Diners split skies
In end resorts.
High sheen
Efforts protract
Elegant sunlight
Settling on moons
Far removed.

Health crisis.
Desk drawers
Empty of form.
Morphed death
Leans into heart.
Heard again
First time
Telegrammatic.
Autofixation.

Deliver movement.
Ash rehashes
Components. Splice
Sluices. Sewage.
Hanged in barbed wire,
Blessed in excess.
Thank you Jesus.

No Acceptions
12/9/06

Mesmerized stillness.
Open season on ammunition.
Autumn atrophies
Stuck in stalls.
Automatic habits
Halt. Howl. Lower. Glow.
Leering chilled ice warlocks
Watch roads. Carved totems
Decorate tomorrow’s roads.
Karl Rove withers away.
Too much hoarding.
Halt! Stopping points
Hold force.
Ask Ahimsa.
Question and answer
Hallway cosmologies.
Dare approach.
Communists mate.
Socialists hatch.
Gold harms.
Our paper notes burn war.
War defuncts and defaults
Our stubborn dead.
No deal. Leaders been stealing.
Hell now.
Hell has human rulers.

Telemetric Inflection
12/11/06 & 12/13/06

Leafless aluminum spires
painted on card backs
held in hands, pinned
in boxes of heavy metal.
Extinction blooms.

Vehicles boom across city streets,
leave trails among houses,
disassemble precepts. Hold.
Scaffolding lines climb to thousand story floors,
prick the night’s stars, pull
pills from the medicine cabinet.

My solitude boxes us out from each other.
Hadn’t expected to have another
of these episodes. DVDs collect
on the shelves, swear straight lines
to episodes. Humorous, perhaps.

It’s like that
in super market lines,
in rituals broken
that I don’t even know.
To talk about money now
is to talk about being powerless.

They own all the shows
in their outside world.
Inside December, I wonder
what this rich collision
needs to speak.

Burn and pull
The moon places her cards,
believes hearts carry wilderness.

Moons above the forest.
Deeper ripenings take place
inside frenetics. Mildewed webs
sharpen in dawn light,
purchase us movement and time.

Down here, cuts hasten our senses.
Deliver music, misuse inches, storms.
Together we will collect the dawn.

Misheard, shaped to fragmentary music,
our temperatures decry cages.
Unhand those borders. Mildred thirsts
for the sharper etchings,
for mastery of form.

Fluid ridges, built with metamorphosed
cantos, begin to speckle horizons
with unending hands.

We place ourselves in position again.
Nailings and stairways
compose navigation. Magellan’s waterways
spill outside margins. The planet bursts,
returns, burns and pulls.

"The Boy Himself" by Frederic Goupil

He was happier then, in a way, taking the anti-depressants the psychiatrist had prescribed, though he took them begrudgingly, irritated at having to mask his true genius, his true discontent with and, yes, sometimes even hatred of, the world.  But the world was so big, and world was such an all-encompassing word, and after a while of taking those small yellow pills, he began to wonder, some days, if he had ever really known the world, or if he, or anyone, ever really could.  Of course not!  It came as an epiphany, slamming the ideas from his hyper mind to fall, cooling, to the pavement.

He sipped coffee on a bench, watching foot traffic go by.  He was watching girls, sometimes, but more than that, he was watching all kinds of people go through their days, through their own idiosyncratic routines.  He didn’t understand how they coped with it all: day after day, doing the same or similar things.  For him, such a routine would be classified under drudgery, and if he couldn’t get up and get out at any point in time that his ADHD mind prescribed to him as the time to get up and change the subject, well, life just wasn’t simply being lived to its fullest.  He drank the coffee down.

After a while, less than a year was all it took, his notebooks grew unwieldy.  He had designated a specific room in the plastic trailer assemblage that was his family’s home for his philosophical musings, filing them away with no particular system.  He hadn’t really developed a philosophy, after all; that was too much of a category, too much a word coined by the man to keep children from free associating and engaging with the world that surrounded them, the world that imbued them with vitality, and food, and food for thought.  In his more inspired passions, he denounced the philosophers at the dinner table, in an attempt to shock his father, but the fits of verbal rage rolled off his dad’s back and under the table, where the dog pawed and licked at them, as if they were tasty treats, which Henry supposed that they could be.  Perhaps he would market them.  The thought was deliciously absurd, and he thought that it might work.

So during the month of April in 1992, Henry made and distributed hand-drawn stickers, the first ones free, to his acquaintances.  He imagined himself as a pusher of aesthetics, of ideals long lost in the ridiculous, rushing tide of material progress, and he was sure that someone among all his acquaintances would bite, would be intrigued, and would have five dollars or more to spend on custom-made stickers.  Because he could do it, he told himself, he could even make a living this way.  This could be it!  He could be the art director and staff of his very own graphic design playhouse—not business, mind you, it was too horrid of a word.  This was how such things were started, he told himself: small, with a loyal base of acquaintances.  He would not let himself label them as customers or even consumers, but they would always stay acquaintances; he didn’t dare entertain any of them as friends, because to do that would ultimately be distracting and humbling in a way that would crush his aspirations towards greatness.  After all, Henry told himself on a deeply subconscious level that he couldn’t even be aware of, it was so hard-wired into him as a product of western corporate 20^th century culture, greatness was what made life worth living.  It was the secret goal, the ultimate apex of existence, to become that lone, solitary genius of an individual, sailing a flag that no one had ever seen before, planting that rocket of his own particular creativity and originality and development on the moon, and then from there, reaching out beyond the moon.

The moon was passé.  Today’s entrepreneur aimed beyond the stars in their entirety, for the multiverse.  The universe was not enough, and Henry supposed that he had quantum physics to thank for that.  And thank quantum physics he did, at least once, in something resembling a prayer in a library, with mounds of books piled around him, his chewed-cap pen working overtime in his battery of notebooks, scrawling down the avant-garde formulae of shifting multiversal truth in laymen’s terms that only he could understand.  He even got three or four poems out of it; really, it could have been three, or it could have been four; two of the poems were so close together in content and Ashburian imagery that they really could have fused themselves into part one and part two of the same poem, if they would agree to share a title.  Henry worked with them for several hours on different days, but never could come to a conclusion, and so it stood that he had crafted four of his idiosyncratic poems about quantum physics, except that they weren’t about that at all.  He had obscured the subject, coded it in layers of post-absurdist imagery so as to completely baffle the reader.  He counted it among his greatest achievements of the first half of 1992, and daydreamed about the day when it would be sent to the printing press of some literary poetic magazine publisher.

That day, not surprisingly, never came, but he did receive, on the third of May, 1992, a request from a fellow sophomore named Don Robbins, for a series of stickers depicting a pink elephant, sitting on a tall stool, pounding away at a typewriter, with the simple caption, “Genius” emblazoned in a thought balloon over the elephant’s head.  It was a great concept, thought Henry, and he got started on hand-drawing the twenty requested stickers right away.  Up front, he told Don that the cost would be forty dollars for the set, two dollars a sticker.  Don didn’t try to talk him down at all.  He agreed it was reasonable, and Henry’s first playhouse relationship was formed.

The stickers were a success and spawned buttons.  On receiving his forty dollars, Henry also received one of his products smacked onto his locker, a permanent fixture for the rest of the year, courtesy of Don. Don’s bardic clown troupe, Genius, benefited from the exposure that the stickers brought them.  They were passed out at lunch time to select individuals as promotional material for Genius’s up-and-coming performance at The Backburner, a café downtown.  The buttons were sold at the performance, with the proceeds split between Henry and Genius, and the playhouse relationship was solidified.

But when I abandoned this blog to focus on other projects, like my work over at Nevermet Press, I left a large majority of what I’ve written about Henry Mullwiler unposted. I had also started on some “weird fiction”. There were several people who commented on this blog that they enjoyed that stuff, so I am going to post more pieces of both Mullwiler and weird fiction here in 2011. I can only hope that those people who enjoyed the early bits of Mullwiler and the weird fiction will happen by again to catch up on the next installments, and that new readers as well will stumble into the dense prose of Henry’s life and the loopy stuff.

It was a beautiful summer day in the south.  The sky was wide open, salted with occasional clouds, looking for all the world like a heavenly sea strewn with cotton balls.  He made a note of it.  Henry sat down at a picnic table and chewed the cud of his thoughts.  Nearby, a river made laughing noises, sending goosepimples over the grass, making the Earth blush.  He exercised his mind in times like these by writing poetry that made little sense.  The poems were just automatic streams of linked thoughts, associated words.  This, according to Henry, was how the world was created: it was not premeditated, not ordered together like unto a carpenter god, but it bubbled up from nowhere, or more precisely, from under the fingernails, from under the running brook, from the madness of clouds it fell, and it grew, and then it grew again after it had died once for the season, and it kept building, not according to plan, but simply for the sake of building.  He was on to something, he told himself.

He wrote his name on the cover of the notebook, in all caps: HENRY MULLWILER, and on the inside front cover, he wrote his name again, and his address, and his phone number, and his e-mail address, and then he wrote: “If found, please return this notebook to:” right over his name and address and everything else, and concluded the whole advertisement with “because its contents are important to me.  Thanks a bunch,” and under that, he signed his name, Henry, except it was more like a capital H and some inarticulate, unpracticed squiggles.  He had seen how some important people signed their names that way, and thought he would try it today, but it didn’t really work out for him, and the signature ended up looking like barf, or so he told himself.

Here he was, in his 16^th year, sweet 16, spending his long summer morning down by the river, and really, did it get any sweeter than that?  The day was warm and hot, both, and the water was pouring by, replenished by so many afternoon thunderstorms that had come before.  By mid-day, those cotton ball clouds would have amassed into something more foreboding, armies of thunderstorms waiting to happen.  Henry frowned at the predictability of it all.  That was the problem, he thought, with summer days.  As awesome as they were, they held onto their archetypal patterns too well, and rarely strayed from the mold.  He found himself feeling disappointed in them, and surly, and dissatisfied.  Henry chewed on the end of his pen, then sighed the beleaguered sigh of a poet who had already seen too much in his 16 years on the cruel Earth, and he put everything of his away with a flourish, shoving the pen and the notebook into his backpack, which he dramatically donned, strapping it over both shoulders as if it were his own particular, earned burden, which it was, and he took off madly towards the river, leaving the civility and tameness of the picnic table behind him.  He shot off into the wild, intent on finding an antidote to the staid and encrusted patterns that surrounded him on all sides, smothering his intellect and wisdom and curiosity with their damned fool routines.

Given a car and keys and license, Henry drove from county to county, but by this point in his life the thrill of trespassing in other people’s domains had dulled.  What had started as an accidental thrill had disintegrated into nothing but going through the motions.

At school, he slammed his books into his locker.  The classes weren’t doing it for him, and like it had been that night in 1988 when he stood in front of the mirror, teenage Henry was frustrated and alone.  The aloneness flashed around him when he least expected it, or more like all the time, even in the crowded school—especially there.  Something had gone wrong in his wiring, he began to suspect.

It began to occur to Henry that perhaps, unlike the other students, he was a robot.  He clung to this theory secretly for the better part of a year, even checking himself for data loops, batteries, logic circuits, or strange wires poking out of cuts, microchips hidden under toenails.  Of course, he found none of it, but none of that kept Henry from believing.  He remembered that earlier, when he had been, what, seven years old, he had repeated his name so many times internally—Henry Alan Mullwiler, Henry Alan Mullwiler, over and over like that so many times—that he had seriously begun to doubt not only the reality of the name, but the reality of reality.  He began to have panic attacks.

It was hard to say when the panic attacks truly started, or whether they could even be separated from other, perhaps later, neuroses that developed.  But then he didn’t like to think of all of these problematic aspects as neuroses, but think about them he did, and when he did, he invariably labeled them.  And this was the problem with running his internal monologue: it was that it invariably led to crisis.

The crisis came to a head one day.  It’s not like he hadn’t been expecting it.  He was driving along, listening to the tape deck, dimly aware that his life was one drawn-out catastrophe dotted with others, and wondering where along the map of its ultimate unwinding towards demise he actually was.  And that is when the crisis actually came to a head.

Henry was trying to come to a point, he was trying to reach a destination somewhere on the other side of the state, but kept getting turned around.  He could no longer hold conversations with anyone but himself, and had recorded long, introspective monologues that he would listen to on long trips like this, something like books-on-tape, but custom made for his own tastes and concerns.  And he was trying to get to the point with these tapes, but they kept cutting off or rewinding, or something else always happened to keep him from reaching the end, and then on long drives like this one he would end up having to either improvise the ending or turn the tape over and start another one of his pre-recorded programs, hoping that this next one would turn out better.

And so where was he going with all of this, he wondered, at age 18 when he had grown to his final height.  He was beginning to grow facial hair, which was his first real physical clue that there was a world of shit out there actually waiting for him, a world of shaving and work.

Truth be told, the boy was lazy, and he was beginning to realize that it would just be in his own best interest if he went ahead and got that out there, squared with himself, even steven.  “Henry,” he said one day when he was 18 years old, looking himself in the mirror, “You’re not a robot, you’re lazy.”  And suddenly he felt vulnerable without any excuse.

But was it laziness, really? he would later ask himself, in a moment of compassion.  Because after all, wasn’t he human just like the rest of the gang, and was it his fault after all if everyone else was caught up in the cultural neurosis of looking busy all the time to earn money?  And there was the crux of it, though; he just couldn’t fake it anymore.  Like he ever had been able to.  And then he was back to his first conclusion of the situation: the world was actually hell, a place of punishment for wayward souls, or if not punishment, then just some kind of lost cause, like a bad thought let go and untended.

Just to prove he wasn’t lazy, to himself, Henry threw the mirror across the room, where it shattered.  To his credit, he thought about punching it, and even saw it break in his mind’s eye as his fist smashed it and became bloody, but then one of two things became apparent to him as he opted out of that and threw the reflective surface across the room:  “Either I’m a coward,” he thought, “or I respect myself too much to break my own reflection with my fist.”  But then the mirror was broken, on the other side of the room.  At least then it reflected the rest of the room with its broken fragments, and not the lonely island of a self that Henry was beginning to respect.

These were the questions that Henry Mullwiler entertained himself with in the odd hours of the night.  To say that they were his entertainment would not be completely correct, but there it is.  They were the thoughts leading to his eventual liberation, but first, came the depression.  It had afflicted him from time immemorial, as the Indians say, but if that is too much hyperbole and exaggeration for you, then how about this: having read all of the absurdist works of the early 20^th century by his 12^th birthday in 1988, Henry felt haunted by what had come before.  His white ancestors were merely that: white, pasty, like nothing that had a soul, and he could feel that like something ripped away from his skin, like a band-aid or a scab, because he indeed had a soul.  He could see it in his own eyes, in the mirror.

On his 12th birthday he was giving himself a speech.  He stood in front of the mirror in a necktie, rhapsodizing about his own personal nihilism, which fit him well but did not serve him.  As was his wish, he was spending the evening alone, having earlier taken the offered cake and ice cream from his parents and a group of friends and acquaintances.  As it stood now, though, he felt utterly isolated from his brethren, his class, and his race, and was trying to explain his predicament to himself.

The mirror held his image, but he did not find the holding flattering.  Actually, he wished the image would go away.  After aborting his speech in mid-sentence, Henry sat down at his typewriter in the middle of the room—it was on the floor—and began to bang out a manuscript of some importance, or so he told himself.  Unable to expectorate the sentiments that had lodged deep inside his lungs, wedging their horrid little bitternesses into his heart on his bad days, he instead sat down to the keys.

Oh, the keys.  He didn’t come to them often, and had just now set the typewriter in the middle of the room.  He was revising his thoughts, deciding that he would write metafiction, a fantasy of sorts.  Lining his bookshelves were all sorts of graphic novels, a couple of bibles, several leather-bound copies of old classics that used to be his father’s.  He was trying to get around the problem now, was what he was doing.  He typed faster.

The long and the short of it came out in one page, which he examined with some satisfaction.  Was this how it was done, then? he asked himself.  He folded the paper up for safe keeping, and placed it on the desk.

On the desk was a vial of blue ink, which he examined for perfection or imperfection.  These were the two dual poles which he was convinced must exist, much as the children of a lesser time thought about good and evil, law and chaos.  For Henry, there were aesthetics, rather than morals.  Did it move him?  Was it worthy of framing, of repeated viewings?  These were the questions, and he scanned the world for their answers.

On another day, Henry would have had enough of the moldering, modular castle in which he lived, and gone out for a walk.  The castle was made of hundreds of trailers and other modular buildings, invented for convenience and portability.  This was the legacy of his suburban family.  The savings were invested in more and more trailers, which were stacked on each other in puzzling architectures until the whole thing resembled a hive more than a castle.  It was an immense, plastic-looking encampment of trailers built into each other and around each other, self-contained in its own hodge-podge existence.

Henry was out hunting for nonsense.  He had had enough of the old extremities: yes this, no that.  He wanted to observe his river, which flowed without dichotomies, without logic that hinged on this or that.  After all, like any man of the world, Henry was trying to communicate something with his letters, and if he didn’t have a higher power to study, then it was all for naught, and so he sought out the river.

The river was a ribbon of nebulous blue, now rushing, there cut by brackets of rock.  Further on, it ducked under a bridge, was diverted into a ragged steel tunnel.  Henry could easily climb down the bank and trudge through the tunnel, clinging to the high ground of the walls.  He was absolutely concentrating when he did this, and he liked the sense of not-thinking that it gave him, there in the darkness, the water trickling on below him.  He imagined that one slip would mean being permanently swept up into confusion and delirium.  To lose his hold on the wall would be to lose his tenuous hold on things altogether, and so it happened one day when climbing through the tunnel that he became distracted.  A paper boat passed by, apropos of nothing, and Henry took his eye off of the corrugated steel that he was working himself along with his great and uncanny skill, and he fell.  Into the river he went, and after that the world for Henry was never quite the same.

Something about getting wet, about letting go—even accidentally as it had happened—caused Henry to laugh.  Suddenly, a small switch within his brain clicked over, and he had had enough.  Of course, it couldn’t stay this way, but in that moment, the 12 year-old boy suffered a series of insights that flashed away across his inner eyelids, and as the swiftly-moving water washed him beyond the culvert and into the neighboring county, he realized that, without meaning to, he had shifted his perception.  Something had changed.  Henry, after that, became a born-again county-hopper.

The Nest

The ogre hole had been clean. The nest of pestilence was not. A shockwave slowly crawled out from the nest; like a time-lapse film image of decay, it spread.

The Things that the Nest Spawned

They were not critters. They were not vines, although they crept along the ground like vines. They were not spiders. They were not snakes. They were not skeletons or zombies. They were not flesh-eating tigers. They were not diseases, although that’s getting close.

The things that the nest spawned crept over the ground like shape-shifting shadows, but that’s not quite right either. They were never there when you looked directly at them. They were elusive and slick. And they laughed. Their laughter was like a phlegmatic cough of an infected infant. The laughter was like despair.

They made depressions wherever they crawled, and the land gave way below them. Dizzying pits opened up where grass and flowers and trees and mammals and birds had grown.

Sid stared this down, but it did not go away.

Sid and the Nest

“Fuck.”

Sid had been staring at the nest for a while. Two years. During that time, he had eaten nothing but whole acorns and drank nothing but morning dew. He was not in good health.

The pestilence had surrounded him, but had not touched him. He remained sitting on an island under the oak.

The oak had displayed remarkable resistance to the spreading pestilence, but even it was beginning to get sick.

Sid sat on the little island of oak, floating amid a bleak sea. The sea coughed and sputtered. This was its laughter.

The oak creaked. One last acorn fell from its branches. It landed on the edge of the little island.

Sid picked up the acorn and considered it.

The Acorn

Inside the acorn were worlds. Sid knew this intellectually, abstractly, as a matter of science and art. But he did not see it. He stared hard at the acorn, trying to see it. He peered directly down at it, willing himself to see the atoms of it, trying to see the thousands upon thousands of beginnings and endings inside of the hard seed.

He sat looking at it for some time.

Nothing happened. He blinked. His eyes were dry. They burned.

The acorn was completely normal. There was nothing to it. It was just an acorn. It did not contain worlds.

“Fuck.”

Collapse

Sid had never considered himself a special kind of believer, but he had been quite adept at performing magic. Because of his ability to bend the inner properties of things to his will, he had assumed that there must be some order and some divinity to the world.

The pit of creeping doom which was threatening to eat him changed his beliefs.

Sid became an atheist.

At that moment, the tree island began to fall into the pit. Or maybe the pit reached up around it, like the walls of a sore throat. The island, and Sid, and the oak tree, and the acorn which was absolutely normal, rushed down the thick, dark walls of negative space that had grown from Sid’s wand.

The Acorn, Not the Wand

Sid found himself surrounded by the contagions he had unleashed. They had eaten the world around him.

He had destroyed the wand he used to unleash the contagion, but this had not alleviated the problem.

He had tried to stare the problem down, and that hadn’t worked either.

He had pondered the seed of a tree, attempting to penetrate deeply into the truth of it, but the acorn had kept its secrets. It simply lay there, in the palm of his hand, as the island on which he sat rotted and succumbed to the spreading void.

Soon he lay in a delirium of oily apathy, being slowly consumed by a tubercular and polluted environment. He was awash in filth and slow endings.

The acorn murmured and opened one eye. It slowly elongated. It wriggled under his skin.

That felt nice.

What remained of the tree tumbled into the gross sea that surged outward in all directions.

Reviving, Sid saw this. Under his skin, the acorn released tendrils of oak. Reviving, Sid climbed onto the tree.

Noticing the stars still shining above, he began to paddle, navigating towards the light. There on the far edge of the horizon, a small tangle of trees was calling to him. But they were far away.

-Derrick Jensen, “High on Progress”, Orion Magazine

The fact that all men are created equal is not debatable, it is “self-evident.” To formulate the question in your mind, you have to be open to the possibility that an entire race of humans might just be intellectually inferior to an entire other race of humans. We have a word for people who think it is even possible for one race to be inferior to another.

Elie Mystal, “At Harvard, Intellectualism is the New Hood to Hide Behind”, at True/Slant

Not being racist is not some default starting position. You don’t simply get to say you’re not a racist; not being racist — or a sexist or a homophobe — is a constant, arduous process of unlearning, of being uncomfortable, of eating crow and being humbled and re-evaluating. It’s probably hard to start that process if you’ve been told that every thought you have is golden and should be given voice, and that people who are offended by what you say are hypersensitive simpletons.

-PostBourgie

While the right bellows regarding undocumented workers supposedly stealing jobs, the contributions that they make to the U.S. are soundly ignored. Undocumented workers participate in the economy and in fact, the garment industry and the agricultural industry are particularly dependent on their labour. They bring with them a beautiful language and a rich culture, that can only enrich American society— and yet, this is easily ignored because it allows obfuscation by rich White men regarding their fear of loss of privilege.

-Womanist Musings, “Shoot the Illegal Immigrants”