The Temperance of Heretics

Steve Barbaro

The light of the righteous rejoiceth: but the lamp of the wicked shall be put out.

—Proverbs 13:9

The smokecrazed horizonface.

Life beyond the life of each last belief-inebriated beach?

The smokecrazed horizonfaced one lone windowpane.

Ah but we all know not long ago we all hinged everything, I can’t abstain from elaborating while oglingcolleague shelving colleague shelving colleague, we all know we channeled even evasive expectancies into the canals of fealty that were our stench-caked surf-forswearing blasphemings—

Oh but this putrid shelf-suffused Preliminarium’s profusion of colleagues … … all heedful … … but each last face twofaced … … and nary a one not as fake as fake can be … … my retinas scan each to each to each such that I can’t self-cease from seething: yes our inner eyes can’t but all see to an unfluctuant T … … that there is no fate or pedagogy beyond the fateful pedagogy of putting the scuzzy scumdrunk waves in their scuzzily scumdrunk place.

Then the cold dammit … … the cold?

I mean ahem no no excuse me sorry sorry we must sprawl, I find myself wheezing when on the window’s yonder side it’s clear that one singularly snarly colleague is monitoring. Yes yes we must bask, I can’t but hiss when what seemed smoke self-reveals to be just the air that said same colleague breathes. Indeed indeed, we must sprawl and bask and bathe in the … … ahem … … MALADY of what we once taught when we feigned to put the tides in their place … … the malady the malady, truly … … what a miserably malevolent meticulously miscreant malady … … I mean to think that we could have ever thought that we might swear off—with any modicum of finality—the breakers and crests and depths which persist to encase the majority of the earth’s face!

Yet the cold oh the cold … … out there in the cold is whereour singularly snarly colleague seems not the source but a symptom of his own vapory starings … …

But there’s naught to do now, I spew while watching each last constituent of my audience crane their necks to the tune of the door’s creak, there’s naught to do now but confront such inanities with the full force of our own reformed goodfaith … … before of course rejigging that very awareness of our former malady into the be-all-end-all foamfrothed surf’s redeeming.

Ohhhhh wowww, said same singularly snarly colleague’s in fact soon sneering after entering and looming angling looming. Wow wowww wowwweee— Approaching the lectern from which I was just now presiding. Sure is a lot of smooth talking! Pressing grinding my own gaze into the lectern’s upper upward slanting. Silky silky smooth talking … … Drawing out a blade and cutting slicing bridging my own blood from chin to brow to cheek. Good ‘ol nouns and verbs in floopy little floppy strings—

Like a leash … … that whoosh. Yes it’s like a cursèd leash yet not un-plush—that whoosh that rush that salty frothy sludgeflecked mush … … I mean the waves IE the surf the tides and their lulls their shush which each youth after beachcrossing youth can’t but ape in the wake of the filthfizzy waves’ crush after crush … … Even the demon kids … … those punks … … even or especially those lost soul dopes on their demonheld isles—yes yes those crudcrazed young bucks halt. Stare. Gush. Plus the sway—the spray … … I mean the way the stray gray spray turns long-since-gray days gray-beyond-gray … …

Your mere frolickings are a kind of percolating, the loudspeakers once upon a time announced every other minute. Ah … … and how those loudspeakers perched so loftily above the sands would yap yap yip: and if the one true defamation is being birthed the one true defamation’s being birthed by your burgeoning tongues, eyes … … ears—

The here-there-here of the kids’ minds … … their lungs … … their needfully malleable grins … … A child must be the world’s what-if in the same way the world itself can’t but be the non-world’s what-if. But the wafts the frizz. The on-off-on-off-on-on-on-on-on stinksuffused winds … … The demons are just so many turncoat former mire-despisers who now believe they can cleanse the wastefoul foam and swells in which only self-punishing fits of fish have been permitted to persist but some months back … … Yes it was only a matter of weeks upon weeks in the past when many of these same fullgrown colleagues and dinky tykes alike were as wont as I to profane the earth-spanningly icky self-abandoning par excellence medium of abandonment.

You are cultivating a kind of inner beachniche, the currently gashed and shoretrashed loudspeakers themselves only thirty or so days ago still infringed infringed. And said same niche shall itself self-segment until these self-segmenting segments more fatefully sift everything disgusting entering your mouths … … hands … … grips … …

Plus: barely two or so weeks prior to today, see … … on one such niche of beach where such loudspeaker’d pronouncements likewise no longer pooled down … … yes one such niche of beach is precisely where I found myself after having braved two checkpoint-shirking days of hiding-fleeing-hiding within that same broader island … … and also after having of course been delivered to that island in the first place from yet another demontaken island via the fortuitous appearance and thence transport of the type of nondemon vessel I can only refer to as a saviorship—

Believe it: two fits of sunrise and sunset had just then passed before I’d finally reached what I’d believed a safe distance from any and all of the ever-increasing number of demon-held Preliminaria … … and what did mine eyes then spy on that hopefully benign beach-niche but a set of steep stadiumseating between twin seastacks whose own upperrock flanks nosed spare sooty air something minerally feral.

Sleep, then—sleep! (The trashtipped tidedrifts swooshswished … …) I did need dreams I did need … … rest? (Oh … … how the trashtipped swooshswish swathed the sandstaked aluminum limbs … …) Because just as soon as I’d seen the stadiumseating I was broaching the seating’s gate in slackjawed awe of the gate’s steely ajar state before closing then locking then doublechecking the locking then climbing scrambling climbing eight ten twelve levels at the top of which I sprawled out still wheezing huffing panting—

Yep, then yep—up and running in time came the very thing I feared … … up and running only to forthwith cease movement. Ten voices, maybe twelve. Twentyish ears; two-hundred-some frightfully functional fingers. And fast sitting up after fast waking I was sure as heck fast hoping what-seemed-to-be-colleagues were true colleagues IE not demons in light of not only their non-youth-ness but also from the pure crude sneerwrenched pitch of each of their visages—

For a few hopeful moments after I again swiftly laid back flat, I was indeed not sure these strays weren’t still unkeen to my own presence … … but I’ll be damned if I could not tell from the consistency of the subsequent silence that these strays were fast … … stalling. The strays were in fact … … conferring? Four of the maybe-colleagues climbed the superficial level of the stadiumseating and spanned the glossy planks to damn near break down the gate … … but whilst these now-self-revealed demons grasped the futility of their aims what did I do but just up and up and doze and wait before I found myself procuring the pelletgun I’d been gifted for pedagogical purposes and propagating my penultimate pellets at skulls which were thence bustling and scrapping. The velocity with which so many waveprofaning colleagues have over the months up and become waveworshipping demons, the sham of it … … The shameless sham expeditious golden-age eviscerating flakiness, oh … … But as soon as these demons retouched the sands to scamper adrift there appeared … … a pack of kids? The kids couldn’t not do what the kids could do—each tyke was long since taught to detest! And these tried and true despiser-kiddies showed themselves to be very much tried and true despisers of the drossdosed waves what with the way the juveniles in the front stuck the elders with sticks whilst the rearflank shot the elders with something much more lethal than pellets.

Those young bucks though … … one of ‘em … … I mean I glimpsed a kid … … the dislodgedness … … yes I saw a specific chap and the chap I was seeing and seeing seemed in time to be … … the very act of seeing? Because that was really him … … him, really?! One of my students … … sunny, boy oh boy … … I mean Sonny … … slippery so slippery … … yep … … the kiddie’s a kind of self-escaping entity … … I mean a tyke whose twang really rather resoundingly lacks the oomph of true enmity yet I could tell … … oh … … I couldn’t help but see it was Sonny down there what with the way he’s ever as if invariably crowned with a cheek-cinched nothing-if-not-meek gaze … … while also somehow always being very shoulder-pointedly tilting angling tilting to the point of almost (ahem) oh boy (let’s say) (OK) creaking—

But that gaze that gaze that same gaze—was it not the very nothing-if-not-meek gaze Sonny wore ‘midst one of our desecration-is-indeed-mandatory one-on-one colloquies? And just before Sonny started screeching and shrieking? Weeping … … Wailing … … wowwee … … The snorting … … Snotting … … Face-occludings … … Plus right when I was going to dismiss the still squealing and sobbing kiddie the kiddie started squeakily self-squabblingly beseeching me. What exactly though was the gist of Sonny’s beseechings? Well … … Sonny was simply confessing that his quote-unquote crabfisher daddy was a quote-unquote proud lifelong saltwater crabfisher daddy who subjected the salty deeps to as much refuse as anybody in our society … … yet even today daddy couldn’t bring himself to quote-unquote repudiate the newly quote-unquote shitsmuttily crabless coves and waves … … and when I woke yet again there on the stadiumseating I woke again to a bodystrewn beachniche which a doubledecker cruiser was seemingly scanning at several removes from the shore whilst something of a Sonny-versus-lone-demon standoff persisted IE phlegm IE roars wrists screams teeth roars grins teeth screams grins … … oh … … poor kid … … I reclosed my eyes … … poor damned rightfully righteous kiddie … … yes I reopened my eyes … … the one true defamation … … I rereclosed then rereopened my eyes and reprocured my pelletgun and shot my last pellets then reverted my spine and in time reawakened to feel I was not sure I was ever sleeping whilst the selfsame doubledecker cruiser approaching the shore was approaching the shore yet more to moor in some murky way. The one true defamation now being birthed is being birthed by your burgeoning gaze … … your rage … … The vessel was gray … … maybe green. The passengers were propagating and angling and the passengers were yelling that spume its hues that brew its haze then the passengers were spreading and multiplying then pervading the ship flank’s second then first staircase from one of which a ropeladder was hurled and onto which I hopped and clung after unlocking the steely gate and bolting and sprinting while Sonny’s tide-whoosh-spangled last-gasp screams seemed somehow … … fake. So fake … … yes fake … … like fate.

Yet I know there must be space to breathe … … there must be plenty of space to breathe in the very act of divulging breath’s impossibility—

The golden age: unceasing debasing of the long since unceasingly debased waves. The golden age, oh—the most hard-earned archipelagic plans gone woefully astray.

Yes there must be ample space to breathe … … there must just be pockets and patches and plots of the purely airy … … especially vis-à-vis the endlessly fluttery inconceivably depth’d earth-hoggingly all-too-trashed thing—

But to crawl and cling the ropeladder on a saviorship’s flank … … I mean to cling and climb then glimpse limb after all-too-free limb ambling the main deck after they too escaped some or other demon-held beach … … yes to fight and flee and climb and cling only to soon take in tongue after tongue of real true nondemon colleague after colleague—the relief! And the ship’s pleasantries blurring into yet more pleasantries … … with such blurring itself becoming tideward profanities. There were winefull winecrates like the grapefull grapeplates. Tanks full of snakes and freights of dulcet pastes. Rows of cakes so lanky that the icings’ swirly bobbings rhymed with the swirly bobbings of the ship’s wake. The pedagogical plenitudes of the chitchatting, ah—how they feed and breed the very self-out-selfing of such scenes. If ever the golden age was reprised with fullbodied blasphemous faith—the dancing the gyrating whilst all onboard were singing the life of the vessel is a life outliving living. One must grace such a ship as if one shan’t ever leave. And the life outliving living blends bodies like each wave of the abominably blue body. Indeed indeed one just proverbially tastes the kisses and kisses the tastes. The grips the cackling; shifty shifty smirkings. Champagne in range of ill-niched beddings’ rollicking … … whilst yonder tongue after tongue slunk into yonder face. There was space to doze but also depths for sleep. Because to be inhabiting a vessel itself flowing upon the be-all-end-all abominably noxious thing … … I mean to tauntingly make a medium of the one true filthily self-obliviously self-alienated means … … oh … … it’s the type of sensation that takes one back … … back to a time before the demons crowded damn near each beach … … I mean long predating the present when we’re daily herded and clasped and forced to clean teach clean teach clean … … goes back indeed to when only blasphemy was compulsory … … way way back … … to when there was blasphemy and when there was testing … … the very golden age … … yes when there was testing and when there was blasphemy and when the blasphemy’s testing aimed to gauge which of the fidgety blaspheming kiddies was fated to put the rampant sewagestrewn thing on which our partyship flowed in its proper destiny-pinned place—

Breathe, yes … … breathe … … in the face of the breadthy-beyond-breadthy now-estranged-from-its-own-stink be-all end-all … … ahem … … thing … …

In said same filth now though … … in the muck … … in the filthfucked tidetucked chilly chilly muck where the all-sousing scuzz swathes our protective covering like smoke on a lung … … feelings and their fluidity … … The Dean’s swimming like any of us but The Dean’s also expounding: coercion and its companions … … yes yes we’re all full-body-suited and bobbing floating treading … … motion and its antitheses … … stink fogs the brain but it’s clear … … it’s all too clear The Dean’s doing the talking … … a voice so bold a voice so … … raspy? I too once hated this entity … … one of the things keeping me going … … the impurity of the waves … … such a face such a gaze … … and yet the impurity of eternity … … no ill turns of phrase … … emoting is a kind of stalling … … and she was there that very evening … … subsuming the thing … … what a fool’s game … … yes she was there during the aforementioned winecrated cakeplated golden-age-reenacting evening cursing the very thing upon which our ship was flowing … … the hinge of sentimentality … … but she is now dipping she is now … … teeming? Hating itself is a kind of praising … … commanding dozens of us like a phantom … … I too despised the azure opacities … … that voice’s fleshy sonority … … I too dreamed of instantaneous evaporation—

But back a ways … … yes let’s go back again some days IE let’s go back to the blurry hours immediately following the saviorship’s fleshy tonguey party and early early … … so early … … the creaking, crashing. The loomings—smacking … … Yes yes our partyship of a sudden rollickingly becoming its own unfixity pre-sunrise next morning what with our colleague-captains having left the ship jettyside for reasons then-escaping my bubbly rememberings and thus the divings the strandings. The screaming: splashing. The duvets foam- and fish-corpse-caked abetting grapesplayed creams and pastes spread across the sunless filthiness’s watery-beyond-watery haze not to mention the almost finicky middark bashing of banisters and railings among other destroyable functionalities … … Yet inside of the twin headlight-brained bulldozer carriages rolling this and that jetty-spanning scene-authoringly way I spied only … … twin glasspanes … … merely sort of besotted with eight wide eyes of kiddies? Then fresh shiptrashings … … then more of my colleagues escapingly entering the be-all-end-all filthy thing … … then the vroomingly vast stock yellow jettyspanning lumpsum bulldozer bodies twirling swirling atop a flat slab of timber paneling before the redoubled shipbangings and thrashings then yet more shiptrashings then the menacingly halfassed would-be full-on shipliftings but then: the consummation of the ship’s evacuating birthing strike after strike of now damn near excruciatingly overdeliberate shipward hammering … … with our oasis-vessel’s deck of fancies finally split in twain … … and the rupture’s authors never not gigglingly taunting the already all-but-afterthought of several and sundry silly despisers speckling the swells like so much bait.

Plus right there … … in the muck … … in the flux … … in the selfsame toasty but muckstuffed and now sunrise-lamped flux in which we were then still stuck … … I mean struck … … yes yes all of us stricken yet stuck with no protective clothing and thus garnering lesion after sizzing lesion while trying to swallow nary a droplet and all of us also waiting to swim shoreward as soon as the loitering bulldozers buzzed off and or beat it and or just plain got fucked … … the plunging … … such tumblings … … ugh … … such floatings such bobbings and not only of us but of lamps and commodes and of cups cups cups … … with the dumpers screaming OUR FREEDOM … … OUR FREEDOM … … WE SHOULD NOT AND WILL NOT PAY TO DUMP … … the clocks; armoires … … vanities … … WE SHAN’T TAKE ON BILLS TO RID OUR SELVES OF JUNK … … dozens of us down up up down up whilst watching … … yet more up down down up up?! Yup … … not to mention: the heavings … … the teemings … … sinking … … suffusing … … yes yes the stinking self-suffusing sinkings and the sixty-ish-yards-away figures aboard the yacht self-revealing as if anew with each last hurled furniturepiece crossing the plane of their railing … … the hutches … … pedestals … … self-shelf-oozing credenzas … … and The Dean … … oh her watchings … … her teethings … … I mean the way The Dean was teething such seething … … such fizzing … … settees; ottomans … … lifting heaving … … fuck … … heaving lifting … … fuck fuck fuck … … what shamelessness … … deckchairs … … sectionals … … so shameless but also … … pinball machines … … mattresses … … so shameless but also … … not-un-glamorous—

And when the trawlers arrived the trawlers scooped us up then left us off where tests were no longer spurting up all over the land … … as if from the sand. Though spray was still re- and re-blotching this next beach’s air until the air really did seem … … the be-all-end-all sieve?

Yes from one island to the next these very non-golden-age days you’ll likely well find … … ahem … … un-partitioned arrangements. But back in the archipelago’s golden age nary a foul foam speckle was not regimentally defined within one some spatial specialization. The golden age: each shorepaneling bestowing self-ness unto other shorepanelings. The golden age: every shoresubsection brethrening its fellow subsections. The very niched fluidity of such spheres might well have been the one thing that turned a child—your own child, even—into the one true Analogue Of Annihilation. Everything in its proper place! Or rather: every space (as The Documentation proclaims) in its own specialization.

See … … in those halcyon days damn near each last sandgrain was kiddie-jigged to make hay for the grandly grody entity’s one true name. The grandly grody entity’s one true name would after all reign (again per The Documentation) as the mark of the specimen fit to be the one true future Analogue Of Annihilation. What was a Preliminarium after all if not a schoolhouse artisanally fashioned to cultivate slander?
The Analogue of Annihilation was a kind of savior prophesied if not promised by The Documentation; and The Documentation itself was penned by the same Council of Elders handpicked from our ranks to serve at the pleasure of the owner of these islands. The Documentation was in fact plopped in our hands only a matter of weeks after we originally boarded the very vessels chartered for our self-willed exile. To err on excess clarity’s frontier: our breakaway society had one purpose and said purpose was to cultivate one specific kid who’d talk just the right shit in the form of a name that hit the transcendently pitchperfect note of sacrilege. But who exactly possessed these islands?

Well … … the specimen in question was merely a most magnanimous magnate of data who standardized the pipeline structure bridging biomedical data and retail physician visits. A series of sprawlwide boxy offices fast became inconceivable riches; and said same riches were let’s just say sufficiently sufficient to let’s just say extremely unthinkingly purchase just about all of the archipelagic land after just about all of their residents fled the (let’s just say … … ) never-not-subjugating stench. Repopulation was as such something for which the magnate was pleased and even indeed quite desperate. We came as we left! Yes yes we came as we left and when we came we came by way of the very trashedtides whose filth we necessarily did already hate as if hate was our migration’s very engine—by and large we are people of the littoral, born and bred … … We forfeited our phones and laptops and any and all such digital iterations simply so as to fully devote ourselves to execration. And if at first we encamped and or made use of former houses and flats we in time did hip the magnate by way of our Council of Elders to the necessity of not only novel dwellings but also novel temples of education. Thus were birthed the educationally-conducive edifices known as The Premilinaria … … our bond with the magnate being in the process further cinched … …

Yet The Chamber of Elders? Listen … … Among other adjudications this rarified go-between entity was never not ready to adjudicate the would-be be-all-end-all epithets which we Preliminarium Proctors had ourselves kicked up the chain after prolonged conferring. Months after months did admittedly pass in which we Proctors relayed smear after smear none of which seemingly met the Chamber’s arcane standards. Such was a strange state of stuntedness … … Especially considering the fact that when the one true Analogue of Annihilation was crowned the one true Analogue would have spearheaded (per The Documentation, yes) the formation of a midlevel parliamentary-type structure by which we Proctors on the ground could streamline the business of programmatic abhorrence. Whispers and hints of an inevitable march back upon the mainland even tickled the ears … … Admixed though such tickling admittedly was with whispers of the magnate’s methodical overintimacy with swathes of the kids … … What was the difference between destiny and fate again?! Destiny can be willed … … but fate’s unfailingly an imposition … … And while nary a community in history has ever been more systematically set on enforcing self-differentiation … … we all still believed we’d be graced by the sponsorship of powers greater even than those of the magnate … …

Ah, the dreams of glorious reconquest! The golden age: an age of perfectly consummated desecration. Yes the golden age: once the sea was properly desecrated we’d be prime to march back upon the mainland. But for months and months the stuntedness persisted whilst would-be kiddiebards were delivered by the droves unto these beachniches like so many plugs for the one true name’s enduring absence.

Just imagine: stray slews of kids did indeed not long ago oft-march upon this or that fit of sand to cluster something like that of a photograph-ready pack … … yes a photograph-ready schoolclass pack … … yet with regard to which one really very curious specimen—your own child, perhaps—loomed at an aquatic-abhorring fringe. The tyke’s tongue was cooly unspooling an epithet; said epithet was perhaps estrangement’s apogee-consummation. This would-be self-out-selfing was merely … … The Analogue of Annihilation’s manifestation?! Yet when my detained fellow former denouncers and I first reached our current island destination after being tossed from our formerly partyfull saviorship … … let’s just say aloofness was an uproariously impractical prerogative.

The partypacked saviorship’s lunarly lit promiscuities—those were one thing. But the interiors of the trawlers which quote-unquote saved us as well as those of the dockside checkpoints to which we were in turn trawler-delivered were all alike zoolike in their adjacencies. A tumbling gaze coming to rest fullspeed on a crowd-fixed knee; a scarletly-oozing shouldercap jutting to gag the groaning gape of an aghast colleague. Such entrapments, pooling. Failed fleeings after failed fleeings, federating. Oh the counterrevolution … … that pestilential … … that excremental … … yes yes that eminently un-incremental effusively un-providential golden-age-killing pro-marine happening—

There must just be some sustaining sense to be gleaned from these severely several and sundry perverse sullyings—

The Dean yes The Dean—‘tis again the same speaker again swimming the endless moon-swished muck and its oh-so-chilly tides somehow oh-so-sonorously. The Dean ah The Dean—there’s a kind of evasive loftiness to her presence … … something beguilingly escaping even its own centrality.

Such vicissitudes can’t but be apiece with everything redeeming—

Ah, see … … long before the counterrevolution’s onset, rarities upon rarities were pervading The Dean’s being … … and each kid thereto exposed fell prey to the rangy nearness of one whose knowing collapses space’s fixity. Those hazel eyes … … folksy twang … … ever-so-slightly chubby cheeks … …

Implausible, the Dean would in fact way back then often be heard half-whispering, improbable, inconceivable … …

In light of such recondite detestations I was even then not oft-keen to whether The Dean did despise what’s eminently worth despising. And I must say: said same unsurety haunted my being with something of the scale of the be-all scuzzy thing.

Could it merely be, The Dean persists to now sigh when our other lone current captor-colleague swimmingly strays unto land and away, that it is love and not hate which is the one true means of subsuming that which eternally eludes subsuming?

Yet even when such feelings of deficient impiousness did preponderate back in the old golden tidecursing age … … welp … … The Dean’s mere presence itself up and filled the void something so suffusing as to be obscene. Those sternly unjiggly thoughts … … that coolly remote flesh … … so organically glossy … … Unspeakable, The Dean would necessarily repeat, indescribable, unutterable … … Barely deigning to grant the waves a peek whilst emphasizing the supra-communicative vileness of the thing—yep … … The Dean was fit to be granted authority even prior to any display or seeking … …

And authority remains no mere passingly pertinent conceit. Myself and all of our colleagues are after all all alike daily demonforced to self-corral to self-inundate in our former object of disdain first thing. The depraved oneness with the tawdry tides being the golden age’s very expiry, oh … … The stinging; steamings. The dribblings, boiling. Fits of filth so brusquely fizzy as to fuel the unprotected flesh’s florid flayings something spaceshuttly … … Oh … … goodness … … goodness me … … the very rigidity of our current routine—awake; self-douse whilst depolluting the be-all-end-all thing once casually called the sea; repeat; repeat—at times helps nurture the hallucination that the Analogue of Annihilation’s self-revealing is still only a matter of days away. There is admittedly a kind of makeshift coverall fullbody antitoxic fit of finery much finer indeed than the makeshift fits of antitoxic finery we non-demons formerly employed and which really does lessen the wounding. Yet even the demons themselves dare not protest the tautology that the counterrevolutionary coverall-covered Dean remains The Dean as The Dean was ever and anon Dean-beyond-Dean … …

But the onuses of pedagogy, said same being is now musing, always do clarify reality and its exigencies don’t they? And maybe by outsourcing our will to that which damn near cosmically reeks we can unreek the reeking and in that process set our souls riproaringly free—

What on earth does outsourcing have to do though with the be-all-end-all face-invading thing?! I wield many fancies not shareable communally; I increasingly possess increasingly grim thoughts regarding my increasingly all-too-intimate colleagues. I am and shall remain—in a word, or quite a floridly few—resoundingly distinct from the filth that has long since outfilthed the medium of its own filthing. But I can no longer neglect to state that I find my colleagues’ hate-to-love fluidity so flaky as to be awe-inspiring.

Dean, I am now finding myself intruding ‘midst the would-be be cleansed horizon-vergingly repugnant thing, excuse me Dean—may I ask you something?

Scanning the abetting beach I can confirm we are as far from militant demon-eyes as we could safely be.

There is something ever so post-post-commencingly eating away at me—

The fashion in which we Proctors were tasked to handle not only pedagogy but also disciplining … … the children sent our way being the very children most in need of mastery. Was this not the epoch of the filthfucked waves? Nothing was pure … … nary a thing escaped staining … … even or especially young human beings … … so what exactly was so extraordinary about slapping a scuzz-sympathizing ruffian in the face or kicking a Preliminarium-unrespecting snot in the ribcage?

In the case a kid got mightily out of hand however … … I mean if the unmanageability manifested overridingly physically … … let’s just say that The Dean possessed her own coterie of auxiliaries. Said same brawny Proctor-clique unfailingly inflicted The Dean’s own punishing by proxy. Yet sometimes matters evade resolving on the pure plane of physicality, don’t they?

Indeed indeed daily concerns do from time to time transcend the fleshy source-vicissitudes of mere corporeality … … There was therefore a territory, see … … An interior, I mean … … A room … … An expanse—a means … … Yes yes there was a not-un-silkily-draped Preliminarium niche for which The Dean and only The Dean possessed the apt key … … and when the sun deigned to coat that particular island the sun duly deigned to intrude and grace said same wellwindowed chamber’s every last corner and niche something like the be-all-end-all foulness-free fit of savioristic post-filth flesh plopped middross to restore utter and absolute dregs-free purity unto the all-subsuming waterheaps—

Sit very still, The Dean was said to invariably commence to communicate therein, and think of a locale where you find quiet and peace … … the type of place where you can forget everything and retain the fullness of your own autonomy … … This could be a playground or campground … … even a crowded space like a gym or citystreet … … take yourself there right now … … allow yourself to release yourself to the privilege of such a setting … … is the spot in question anywhere near as obnoxious as the fizzing sullied thing which islands this place? And does not solace pervade that other non-here place precisely because of the place’s utter remoteness from the be-all-end-all scuzzy thing?

And when these problem kids emerged from her Preliminarium … … you better believe the former-reprobates duly vilified the breakers’ debris decrees.

But do you really reckon, I find myself now querying the Dean as if in spite of my own prudency, this thing in which we are bobbing is really worth saving—

And the why-huh-why of the look which The Dean shoots me … … I mean that squint … … that stare that glare, pressing … … piling … … is that look not itself a kind of hardly-un-disgusting self-out-sourcing?

But Tombtree dammit, Tombtree—the same Proctor whose Preliminarium was in my own Preliminarium’s adjacency. Tombtree, surely … … Mr. I’ll-Never-Let-On-My-Firstname-Maybe-Precisely-Because-My-Surname’s-Infamously-Tombtree—someone with whom even the eeriest of daily errancies could once upon a time be chat-pared down to quips of cutting velocity.

Tombtree was in fact the same aspersion-ardent colleague whose Substantiations inspired me to the disposition of a kind of alacritous lackey. Said same Substantiations compelled each island-kiddie to take midnight stage. These consummately ceremonial fits of pique saw Proctors and kiddie-cohort alike populate the audience so as to yell and scream; and where The Dean’s administrations soothed the wayward into a comfy distance from everything worth despising … … the orchestrations of Tombtree coerced hate-spates yanking even the most rococo abominators’ breath away.

Buzz off, scram. You know? Hit the road. Split—

The blaspheming would indeed first foster notes more escapist than extinctionary.

Shove off, the kiddos would duly pivot. Take a hike—clear out. Break out; alight; beat it. Cut off. Be gone. Understand?! Clear out. Bug … … um … … off. Bug the fuck off!

Thence commenced the spitting, yep—the execrating … … Angling and jolting … … nay—scaling … … and crawling and climbing and mounting … … nay—clambering … … the revilings … … The writhing and seethings’ self-generatings were in fact such that said same seething writhings kept self-generating even after leaving words in the writhing-seething’s gargantuanly spitty wakes. And even when such outbursts seemed to self-effectuate via their very straying … … I mean to the point where only groans and bile remained … … welp … … at such a time you’d spy each last fellow would-be Analogue of Annihilation fuming in a way that still retained the requisite focus necessary to accompany rather than dim the scene’s primary antipathy … …

See … … it was Tombtree’s contention that these supralinguistic tactics would perhaps paradoxically be the very thing that would tune to the kids’ language to profanation’s perfect out-goldening the very golden-age key. The method was in this sense the very modeling of the master’s mastery. That swirly … … that shitty … … Tombtree’s own rage was itself so embodied as to burst forth ‘midst one of our post-Proctoring Preliminarium-adjacent meetings: that swirly that shitty that squirrelly shiftily selfsuckingly slimily stuck-on-stupidly cosmically scumcumming—

Tombtree’s brand of impiety in truth rang with such scandalous sacrality that the ultimate profanatory key oft-seemed to evade its very brain-tongued source capacities. And I myself was but a kind of usher … … shepherding the tykes forth from their dormitories before making sure they were ripe for their impromptu insulting.

At a boil, I say, at a boil! That’s where we’ve got to keep these chaps’ hate … …

For some time when his post-proctoring leisures preceded mine own—yep … … There Tombtree’d invariably be … … looming graybeardedly yet spryly in the sandy courtyard connecting our Preliminaria … … huffing … … and beaming and screaming too … … teeming—

The more their loathing isn’t all-but-constantly piqued the more the trashy tides might come to seem something worth saving … …

It took some golden age weeks of convincing just to get me onboard in an admin way. Because, well … … per Tombtree’s original plan … … I mean per the longlongstanding peak-golden-age vision of said same colleague … … certain substances were administered by none other than Tombtree … … yes certain substances of whose precise composition I myself was willfully not privy. Suffice to say though that even after I’d filed the kiddies one-by-one up to the stage abetted by stadiumseating itself propped within the shallows of the dregsdrunken faux-be-all-end-all thing … … Tombtree would proctor detours unto his nearby Preliminarium just to get the kiddies going.

This here’s what we call, Tombtree would proclaim not-un-wryly ‘midst such circumnavigating, The Deviation of Utmost Self-Adorning—

And boy oh boy did the young folks get going! The fury, spitting. The twirling … … seizing. Onlookers aplenty couldn’t themselves but self-release by proxy until a kind of communal possession of hate transpired … … the likes of which even my most ill-will-coveting eyes had nary seized … …

The catch? Welp … … some and indeed many of these postmidnights would see the rage percolate such that the gals and boys headed unprotectedly apace for the trashy be-all-end-all should-be vanquished thing. And the velocity! Even for a tried and true despiser like me the scenes were nerve-wracking … … The torque of the taints; the sprinting. The self-birthing sequel-to-the-slurs that was the very attacking adolescent body. ‘Twas as if the thinking breathing corpus was longsince the smears’ mere proxy. Plus the thrust of the sacrilege bred concomitant twists of the waist which themselves birthed full-on spins which helped propel the cursing corpuses unto the woefully hopefully wizeningly whitecapped thingie … … and all the while … … yes yes all the while Tombtree’d be never not scrambling and springing and screaming boy oh boy oh boy as he galloped toward the gals and boys as if toward machines whose capacities were well in excess of necessity. And though ‘midst many a postmidnight Tombtree was able to grab the errant would-be Analogues of Annihilation and escort them to the beach … … the abruptness of the matter oft-precluded Tombtree himself from donning the requisite coverall antitoxic finery.

Tombtree, I would thence find myself yelling, Tombtree Tombtree!

By the time my own skin was soon fizzing it was clear that our hate—not merely obligatory but essential and indeed existentially necessary—was the very source by which our collegial corporeality might well expedite its own degeneracy—

Goodness you’ve again saved me, Tombtree would as if on cue thence start spewing … … Goodness goodness me … … When we re-reached the beach there’d invariably be a novel lesion or three cropping up mid-Tombtree not to mention upon the canonical complexions of the Tombtree-saved kiddies … … but all of that sure didn’t stop Tombtree from spewing and huffing and slurring my friend great great trusty colleague you’ve saved me … … oh you’ve saved me from the gnarly the self-kneading disgustingly heaping horrorhoarding lowlily puritysinkingly—

Yes yes … … even Tombtree’s grace could not surcease his rage. And yet now … … right smack dab in the middle of this chilly-beyond-chilly pit of endless inexhaustible scummily self-usurpingly self-swallowing … … I mean when I approach this selfsame colleague mid-tides after long serving as the chauffeur-cum-savior of the ritual of his utmost devising … … suffice to say that I am met by an indifference fast verging past the frontiers of obstinacy—

Don’t bother even asking me if I really truly believe the sea is redeemable, I do indeed hear Tombtree address me. Pondering such a query requires a degree of self-distancing which exceeds current capacities.

Saverina though … … Saverina—the one who first raised a stink regarding the sheer volume of little squirts spewing pro-marine heresies. Saverina yes Saverina—the colleague who corralled an emergency gathering on her nearby island upon uncovering a conspiracy of midteens.

See … … several and sundry murky late-late-late-late-golden-age mornings saw Saverina stumble upon remnants of assembly in the same Preliminarium over which she was presiding. Floorstrewn maps; weapon-alcove jostlings. Lazily-erased chalkboard scribblings. Clearly the kiddie-conveners convening were convening when such kiddie-conveners were supposed to be sleeping? But when Saverina herself staged her own latenight sessions of sleuthing … … it was nary an esoteric feat to see and hear what there was to hear and see.

This process currently unfolding betrays the leisure–lazy almost vacationlike processing speed of the vocation-process that is pedagogy … …

Such midteens wished to overtake a slew of proximate Preliminaria and thereby concoct a slew of stations to convert kids and Proctors alike to pro-marine aims.And how many quote-unquote true believers would have been as brisk as Saverina in prepping our colleagues for what was already very much happening?

If we do not snuff out whatever niches are straying … … I mean if we are not fistfully adamant in ceasing the protrash matriculation’s sway—

Saverina was not only correct—her correctness’s speed exceeded even the promptness of her own warnings. And though it was after and not before Saverina accosted the Council of Elders regarding these events—a matter of hours indeed—that each last adjacent-island-Preliminarium was overrun by a cohesive set of cache-raiding kiddies … … does it still not go without saying that our own island’s subsequent aid-forays were so mortally taxing as to render our own islandedness ripe for the circumscribing?

Mind you: my own not-un-rigorous Proctor duties precluded me from action on the front … … to put it really truly simply I was truly really eminently busy! Though even the very evaporation of the be-all-end-all ghastly thing couldn’t have spared me from island captivity. But Saverina all the while, Saverina—more than once her spewedforth beliefs have spewedforth so righteously extemporaneously as to force their utterer to incur the bruisingest of counterrevolutionary bruisings.

The obsolescence of blasphemy, Saverina has exclaimed several times if in a strangely increasingly decreasing way, hehehehehe … … More like the obsolescence of what’s so polluted as to warrant each musterable huff of rancidity-transcending hate—

The dreams of a transcendent sacrilege—did not these dreams commence with the chief clarities of which anyone might conceive? The clarity of the unfixity of everything. The clarity of indistinguishability’s own self-out-indistinguishing. Not only the proverbial leash-yank of everything sensory; not solely society scattering into a slew of selfchasing shades of erstwhile surety. The glamorization of the state formerly known as obscurity. The social world longsince lost its sanctity! Or more precisely: social life lost its primacy and the fate of the nose ears eyes remains downright disgusting. My colleagues and I—we are not anti-naturalists … … We are not anti-naturalists no, no way … … In fact when I myself was wan and wee … … I mean I too was once a kiddie and when I was indeed a kiddie my mommy and daddy often took me to the boardwalk and to the amusement park thereby abetting. I remember the rollercoasters’ mechanical purity and the electrical lucidity of the lengthily abrupt lowceilinged room lit largely via the visages of arcade games … … and I recall too the tender tonguespecter of deepfried pastysaucedipped froglegs. Ah yes … … yet even there … … even there where sternly shiny rollercoaster successions of paddleboats coasted dozens of feet high upon curving rails only to plop—systematically yet at fullspeed—into a pit of water bubbling eminently transparently … … welp … … one could spy such a scene from a distance of no more than 10 feet and oooh and aaah in phenomenological solidarity with strangers in one’s proximity and not only not be assailed by the realm of the olfactory—one could do so and not feel a single dripdrop peck the face. After seeing such a thing one could and often did self-proctor an about-face to a beach less than a block away. And the right true scent of brine! Oh … … one could swim and curl self-forgettingly and one might even have nonlethally indulged gulp after gulp of the selfsame subsuming waves. We were never anti-naturalists no no—quite the contrary. We hate because we loved and what we loved went astray in the way of a kind mirror of our own being. A mirror of everything never worth forgetting like … … my own kiddies … … my spouse … … My family—

But when I do now duly approach Saverina … … oh yes as I am currently mid-dross and chillily crossing what’s nauseatingly crossable to query whether my colleague does in fact now believe the irredeemable thing worthy of redeemability … … I am finding myself grabbed by another colleague whilst Saverina swimmingly looks on not-un-approvingly before I can initiate my questionings … … and then seized by another then another colleague … … and I am pressed and yanked unto the bowels of the blehbarreling never-resting thing … … my memories the only stay against the wont to open my mouth to the torrents of walloping whooping fizzy detritus streams … …

In any one Preliminarium any given Proctor must needs know that every last order of business can’t but ever and anon feed The Preliminaria. And if a would-be Analogue of Annihilation does not fathom this—or so the not-so-time-well-weathered quip had it—said same would-be Analogue of Annihilation is all but fated to be preliminary even to the preliminariest Preliminarium.

But now … … my oh my … … such fits of wit seem like so many jabs to a longsince bloodblurred corpus. I recall the boy Sonny’s very last surfswashed wheezes; recall too Sonny’s tears regarding his father’s vocation’s obsolescence. Strange as it sounds such thoughts are solace in my current session—my current session in which I’m again teaching as if teaching itself is the best mockery of teaching.

Yes yes my colleagues are all alike marched and plopped in front of me just as I am plopped in front of them when it is their turn for proctoring. And beyond the colleagues who are in attendance—and the colleagues naturally keeping a vigilant eye on those colleagues—this Preliminarium also subsumes sundry kiddos themselves waxing not-un-proctoristically:

any day now we were said to be prime to hear

the one true new name… any day now oh any old sys-

thematically didactical day after day after day… here here

here … here here… yep…

month after month the tides & waves let rip & rip as we rip

roaringly waited for a name but the only name ever

spewed & spewed got spewed & spewed forth from

lips so sibyllinely slip

slidingly foul-beyond-foul that such lips all-too-speech-

fully obviated mere timehoned thingamajigs like … hmmmm …

dunno … … ears!

A most foully erratic fit of enjambment, alas … … This is what transpires in this same Preliminarium in which I was last time face-sliced mid-pedagogy; this is the curriculum over which I’m to be administering. And it seems indeed as if my own speech has been phased out and all that’s left is the kiddie-proxied bluster of the be-all-end-all putridity—

the Council of Elders, oh—

days months weeks months

years?! hmmm… OK… yes

yes oh but see OK OK listen:

they were just wastingly no

no no we mean waitingly div-

inating for the one true

smear to appear & spark

the disintegrating coherence—

The demon-kids inside of the Preliminarium sing such filth in unison. These demon-kids in fact chuckle and yuck it up and laugh laugh laugh! And as soon as I feel the ever-verging urge to interject … … what do I spy but yet another former colleague turned snarly demon looming on the yonder side of the window and grinning at these surpassingly pseudo-versifications—

yet when the Council of quote

unquote Elders were met

met with us, well… the soul

no no we mean the sole ad-

judicating was that of our em-

intently non-elderly

selves conferring RE: how

such quote unquote elders

could be—sans no

more than merely cursory up-

keep—kept

bound gagged bound

gagged gagged—

Goodness yes … … I was wondering if the Elders were incapacitated … … I’ve been pondering what might soon comprise my own corporeal finale. When I study my colleagues though … … Saverina and Tombtreee and the very Dean … … I mean when I glimpse those former haters of everything worth hating what do I glimpse but mere resignedness … … mostly settling … … even indeed … … smiling?

Yet I can’t be designated as Proctor and sit here and do … … nothing?! Nothing nothing yes yes yes: nothing. Fate was only ever a footnote-fit of tide-fumes crowning a bookcase bobbing filth-colleaguingly. Fate was never anything more than the loved ones we left in our wake for the sake of our hatred’s purity. But the knife with which my colleague from brow to cheek sliced me. That knife on that shelf yes yes—my sole spirit and savior. That same knife lazily allowed to loom for days upon the shelving—my lone masterful liege. Let these traitorous smut-dedicants never again hear my own orifices’ apologetics or praise no no—let these turncoats heed my writhing whilst I use said knife to cut cut cut the par excellence instrument of my own being. The tongue, shred. The tongue—spread … … The very obsolescence of vocalizing … … The pain of the gash is bad indeed yet said same pain’s nothing compared to the constant persistent irk of the visage-infesting filth so let these flimsy cowards see the tongue I am now liberating from its all-too-circumscribed régime. Let these flaky dolts eye what they wish not to eye lest they forget what they forgive and thus let off scot-free. Yes yes let these reprobate apostates catch—with their own slop-supplicant mouths, even—the sanguinary fragment I am now tossing if only so I myself can spy this measly relic of speech dangle midair like just another scumspeck flung as if redeemably by the waves—