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Wise King Taken by the Foolish Oneessay no. 8 On Being Betrayed and Abandoned - by your friends, of course, and the real possibility of Deus Ex MachinaDan Plonsey Keywords: undercut by music, musicians, courtiers, irony, hoist, petard.
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"No. Don't want it."
"Ah, po-tah-to!"
"That's not me. That's someone else. A whole bunch of them, in fact. They're the ones responsible for the surges in electricity which we've been experiencing ever since the stock boy took over and turned the tables on the CEO and had himself delivered to the position of `Dictator.'"
I agreed that this was so, and that I had had to be made very inebriated in order to reach the understanding which I was now gainsaid - not clear whether I had sobered in the interregnum, or was just maintaining that messed-up state forever.
I am undercut in this regard by backers who, like sarcastic backup singers, turn off their echo effects as though embarrassed by their tunings... and the electric bass then begins to seem nearly a half-step off, played up the neck, maybe it's warped, and the chordal keyboard instrument is out of tune with self as much as with bass - around a quarter-tone. Too bad. Very bad.
"Undercut. Rats!" I had to think. "This calls for additional ingestion of substances, and I grow funnily drab: retreating from my place in the cosmos in order to better examine it, from off here in the corner. Sitting on the scary floating couch, listening to music through headphones. Listening for the cowbell hits. Under the crooning of crazy, popping, barber-shop emulating pairs of nut-head ill-wishers. This was before they realized that they could get pretty far bundled together, if they could make it look more an issue of mutual support, united against the world.
* * *
"You know it is you. It's a perfect portrait, down to your mis-matched, arbitrary colors." Odd but unthreatening. So - who is this about? The Wise King holed up somewhere, most likely it's Rabbit's House. He was afraid to face the test results. The final results derived from the position of the sun.
You see, there's all sorts of levels between "meaning" and "meaninglessness."
* * *
The stars come out, and everyone goes to sleep, or off to read a magazine in bed. My reaction to this hideous mess is that indeed it's an issue of the dark arts versus the light, and that as always, as miserable as they can make us, we are always capable of re-immersing ourselves in the very materials and substances of life: the sounds and the colors and the textures. Although when very sick, nothing means anything, but perhaps (I hope) that's just for contrast with the life to come...
* * *
Deus Ex Machina!
-- Dan Plonsey, October 2001,
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