Godforsaken honesty

If someone says their dog doesn’t bark, they’re lying. A barkless dog says everything it needs to say. If a dog doesn’t bark then all talking aside we can drink for ourselves the milk chocolate silence, lap up the sweet living truth of one fewer drill in the eardrum. Everything of enduring force and inner form and hearty constitution doesn’t need much of an announcement or explanation: everything questionable and wormy and mendacious comes with overlong discussion, repetitive arguments, flabby backstory, gas powered promotion.  

The mania for language swells like a boil that needs to burst. Far from an instrument of disclosure, speech is a mode of concealment; honesty is a derivative impulse, the cooled down leftovers of a compulsion to generate illusions and mediating screens. If pristine glass talked of its transparency it would fog itself up.  

At any time of day in my apartment, I hear barking from two dogs that don’t bark according to their owners, which suggests I’ve either descended to the level of madness that includes auditory hallucinations, or the owners don’t know what barking is, or (one more or) they know what barking is and know their dogs do it but they think if they tell me their dogs don’t bark I’ll take their words as displays of good intent, signs of what they want me to believe that will then compensate me, ease the inflammation I’ll soon feel when their dogs bark for minutes on end, in either apartment underneath me a resonant and throaty clapping where I can hear the undeveloped prefrontal cortex and the blunt craftsmanship of the windpipes and tongue, the crude readymade design of an arrested animal lacking the organic possibility of speech and reason but also currently the bearer of a sentimental value exceeding that of many people, it being likely that outraged reactions would follow my describing an imaginary scene where I put on my hiking boots and kick in the door to one of my downstairs neighbors apartment’s and then beat the dogs to death with a baseball bat, while a recounting of a scenario where I hit home runs with other people’s heads would be more likely to elicit a tired laugh or mild concern.  

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In the beginning was the word. But for the word to begin, the beginning would have to precede the word, which means the word can’t be at the beginning, unless the word begins by creating a retroactive loop of its own presupposed ground, because if the word isn’t auto-grounding then it’s not at the beginning, and the question is; what’s at the beginning if not the word?  

(What we view as intelligence is dissimulative cerebral equipment that forms when the organization of the nervous system and its relation to an external world have reached a high degree of complexity; strictly speaking there’s no such thing as intelligence or a mind, but rather a coevolution of organism and environment that issues in the production of signs and countersigns, communicative exchanges, appearances and apprehensions, feints, camouflage effects and reflections that feed back into an organism and at a certain threshold of intensity register as self-consciousness, mind, spirit, soul, as introjected copies of the lures and masks and symbols deployed in struggles for power in drifting energy fields. Which is why the attempt to intelligently formulate the truth, the truth of the world, the truth of ourselves, necessarily results in parodic inversions.) 

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I went south with my dad to get a used car, a 2011 red ford focus with seventy thousand miles on it and not even god knowing the full extent of what happened in there, the last owner’s shadow tarring the seats, the dark fumes of an unknown handler hanging in the cab. I picked up on the metaphysical odor of any random X having previously sat and gripped and farted and dug its hand into a bag of combos or the hot damp crotch of its ill-fitting jeans, in that rolling tin can of stale talk and mountain dew burps, windy heart to hearts and twiddling radio disputes, casual death threats, near collisions and actual collisions, angsty trips over rattling suspension, quiet gnawing dread behind the wheel, an opaque mound sitting down speeding into another iron cage, watching the review mirror suck away the remaining free world in its wake.  

My dad and I drove through the lands of my childhood, southern Indiana and its buried stone and wooded slopes and twisting shade-soaked roads, its mobile homes stuck on dusty hills, the smattering of handsome farmhouses and the dumpy dwellings of passed over provincials, the charm of earthy overgrowth and the gloom of human neglect, vast glittering soybean fields and the unflushed toilet water tone of the mudcaked and oil slicked streams, through historic town squares where ghosts carry out unseen commerce, an hour and a half that felt twice as long, to the mostly unheard of town called Dale, to the garage of a man probably named Dale who fixes and sells totaled cars, where we sat in the gathering heat of late morning in an unairconditioned office to go over forms and sign documents and sign a check that would transfer ownership of the car to me, justifying more work to pay for the car, working farther from my home, driving hundreds of miles in one day to have a good reason to work somewhere within a great driving distance.  

And now I’ve opened up the pressing labor of getting rid of my old used car on the curb growing moss on the tires with its torn front bumper looking more like it should be sinking into a bog in a backcountry trailer park than sitting on the streets of an urban well-to-do neighborhood, if I could dissolve it with a drop of acid but there it stays as a hunk of dead metal, an open steel sore on the otherwise fine tableau of elegant four story homes and manicured esplanades. Put out an ad on someone else’s facebook marketplace and attract antique tweakers, evolutionary sideshows and laid off haunted house actors, toothless low ballers and their erratic texts, ready to meet in ten minutes or after the rapture. 

When I could’ve gone for an excuse not to leave my house, not to drive over potholes and construction cones and the bones of roadside crewmembers, through a Greek underworld labyrinth of spiraling detours and unreal lanes and hobo minotaurs, I went after a sufficient reason to enlarge the scope of my ballistic projects, increase my share of financial burdens and functional worries for the sake of some television car commercial Mick Jaggar strutting on top of a skyscraper idea of independence, the shiny dangling car key dream of limitless open highways and fuel burning assertions and automatic escapes that in reality for the most part amount to payment plans and sausage-tight traffic, auto shop robberies and insurance company shakedowns.  

As an intelligent animal I must keep up the appearance of being a hardworking car driving credit building fun loving reliable spontaneous decent helpful man who feels sympathy for weakness and suffering and is insecure and waffling in a relatable way, who wants honest communication from everyone and pretends that dogs aren’t barking, who isn’t bothered by the barking or the clumsy attempts at symbolic mediation from new neighbors and is perfectly well adjusted to the primary purpose of communication, which isn’t to share what he knows but to cover it up.