Matthew Conrad

May 15, 1986 - Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski
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a most egregious cliché

today i learned that some very intelligent people
managed to construct an a.i. system
that would be able to finish beethoven's
symphony no. 10 - or, as a matter of fact:
that the computers did it!

i would applause this achievement...
but... i'm hardly going to...
i wouldn't even applaud had "my own"
flesh and blood - an organic exponent achieved this
feat! unless - he were a deaf man -
even then - relativism of some sort...

as i'm writing this i wonder:
what if these intelligent people managed
to construct an a.i. system that would be able
to finish off... Kafka's *the castle*?
should "we" celebrate such an accomplished:
should it ever come to pass?

a much harder undertaking...
and for all its worth, classical music...
rarely does it translate into something you
can whistle it...
rarely... and when you can: you barely can...
beside the interludes...
basically Bach's polyphony destroyed
the simplicity of classical music -
classical music? no wonder modern music
has to borrow the technicality of the event...

- could this be a Kierkegaardian style of meditation
or... dare i say it... Knausgårdian?
i frankly don't mind...
how much of my biography i will include
in this is beside the point -
like? do i think that for all their worth,
their grand narratives,
some people can still come off as slight?
i do not want to immerse myself
in how so many petty things
bind people together when being
stripped to find themselves beneath
celestial bodies and some disposable awe...
yawn at the stars and enjoy some
soap opera... get into the jungle petty
crimes... yawn at the stars...

this surely must have been written
from an underbelly...
by a turtle starving when being flipped
onto its shell... otherwise...

classical music and its complexity...
i tried to figure it out...
but i will rarely come to finding it
necessary to enjoy certain things...
classical music i will rarely enjoy -
especially if i have to think about it...

oh the glorious days when i thought
that thought was a pleasure in-itself...
now? this spaghetti monster with recycled
pieces of self and the christo-freudian
trinity layer-cake of ego, superego, id
of modernity...
i'm always somewhere, nowhere:
playing the cameo role...
i imagine a psychologist talking to me
armed with all these surgical "equipment" items
for my metaphysical surgery...
and i have no knowledge / consciousness
regarding each vector or enzyme or...
how i'm still, basically...
primordial in explaining myself via:
a pronoun, a verb, a noun, a conjunction,
and obviously a definite/indefinite article...

have i missed the point?
verb pronoun verb definite article noun?
tell me: what is psychoanalytical theory
staging, before the stage of grammar?
grammar is the father of all learning -
given that the mother is mathematics...
deviation from formal grammar must be excused
if this is at all to be even, remotely,
resonated in the ars poetica...

beethoven!
i can whistle about two or three extracts
from classical music...
the one, that i know of?
that resonates akin to *la marseillaise*...
and say... the british grenadiers' *fife and drum*...
and... that bit of beethoven's symphony no. 9...
*ode an die freude*...

no, i somehow want to stumble into
this egregious cliché -
try whistling to some chopin...
after all... chopin was in a contest with
liszt over who... would break a finger
while playing his centipede technicality...
what sort of woman would faint
what sort of matthew arnold would
go home and jerk off in the dark
crying when seeing liszt perform live...

if you're taking a shit and then having a shower?
a few lazy moves of the fore! skin doesn't
even elevate the event to any "immediacy"...
as i once had it: sex pistons sex pistons...
it's fair game... but... after a while
and you haven't paid for it and sex is the glue
that weaves itself into your narrative
and there's talking after and...
god... looks like i was lucky...
my 20s? em... i don't know...
i "think" i was preoccupied with my psychosis
of meeting god... to which i'd reply...
you don't want to be looking for him...
nothing was said -
there was an angelic choir and a great
wind that dispersed it... while i was
running around in a church trying to figure
out 'a how' with regards to still being
the owner of an iPod and...
fasting... high of some variant of marijuana
they only serve in London...

plan? what plan? i'd say: don't go looking
for god: unless you're absolutely sure...
you'll only come back with clichés...

is it really music in those heads of theirs?
i mean the composers?
i hardly think they "think" in terms of melody...
it's not like you could write a polyphony
based externally on whistling...
perhaps a main theme...
like in *ode an die freude*...
there's a premise... but then?
pandemonium rapes the head of a ludwig...
and... they just keep adding and adding...
but none of it could be compressed
to a song...

thanks be to bukowski for pointing this
out... ludwig didn't frequent the parlours of god
(words) that often... rarely...
he only wrote one: Fidelio -
and it was only as a joint-venture with...
Arturo Toscanini...
because you can't exactly sing along
to classical music...
and if you don't enjoy classical music...
you suppose: the heart has to "think"
in order for any "thinking" by the brain
to be disengaged from: the sound of rain
falling on a tin roof and a piano crescendo
synonym...

is blurring out "thinking" from the brain
being stimulated by the minor fractions
of seeing and feeling in the grand sigma orgy
of hearing - minor details -
you still need to feel and hear...
closing your eyes: perhaps...
but at least there's that abstract focus of:
"somewhere in the distance" with:
eyes wide open too...

very much akin to my current drinking patterns...
i don't remember the last time i drank
for the pleasure of being drunk...
christmas is here and i have some minor
responsibilities to take care of...
25mg amitriptyline and a biting event
with the naproxen... the whiskey is measured
like a prison tally... if i exceed:
IIII/ IIII/ by more than II...
i have a problem...
anything to curate this insomnia...

only when words are given access...
but i can't see why words would be necessary...
whether it's a stand-off of show-off
Faustian technicality between Chopin
or Liszt... or whether it's the completely
French stand-off between:
the only way to learn to play the piano these
days... is to find an allure of calm,
of stopping time... a delicate fusion
of... arranging a boquet of roses
while wearing sand-paper gloves...
Debussy "contra" Satie...

but this track of Beethoven's?
is it really such a terrible cliché?
top 3 tracks that have left a most definite
imprint in my head -
a cognitive tattoo... thank god for not
wishing for that sort of other branding
akin to a no. 1990869 from that infamous
of places... or... a ditto on my forehead...

- ode an die freude
- la marseillaise
- fife and drum

is this a clinical approach?
i'm almost certain there's no real thinking
in terms of sound when it comes
to composing...
i once had the rare opportunity
to spot a young composer in a cafe in London...
scribbling his...

ut queant laxis
resonare fibris... to be honest, i was jealous
as ever - but not in a way that:
i could be better...
and as i'm pretty god-damn sure...
he wasn't whistling or humming
alongside what he was writting...

braille is where i stashed this jealousy:
UT
⠥⠞
RE
⠗⠑

because trying to figure out the "thinking"
behind musical composition -
on a polyphony scale...
it's hardly a folk song mentality of:
the "easily remembered"...
but... again this can be achieved...
when a complexity unravels itself into
folk "sensibility" -
do i have to car-crash this sentence
into something simpler?

chemistry almost uses this "syllables"
of meaning... He: helium... Li: lithium...

and my what an honest hour!
i can finish a day well spent!
i did this that and the other...
i watched some alpine ski jumping
from engelberg... a polish athelete won:
kamil stoch... i still can't sing
the anthem: mazurek dąbrowski...
so i... felt... 0.001% of a shared cause...
it's a grey foggy distance in the back
of the mind... that can't compete with
someone's patriotism-in-exile
akin to a Czesław Miłosz...
more importantly... Liverpool won
the Fifa World Cup of Clubs playing
against a very tactical Brazilian side...
and you should have seen
the match-up between Flamenco vs. ...
in the copa libertadores...
who was it... besides the point: what a comeback!

needless to say... who are these "people"
who have started to become reckless
in their attempts to sell love?
this delusion of love -
this most abstract person: personna precusor?
for the love of: what's outside...
beside me - what i see and what i can
offer in it being shared...
never this magician's Pharisee act
of: what love is "sleeping" in me...
how my love is but a yawn should it have
to exist... like a tapeworm without
a wall of a small intestine of the host...
what is this love? this "hurting" -
can it ever please escape the orient
and its parasitical feeding via a haiku?

as no claim: "genius"...
that's the problem... the horde had an element
in it... hedwig... some constant that
could never change and remained
in part solipsistic - well...
a paradoxical solipsism...
multiple-personality disorder and...
the placebo effect of solipsism...
but all the other personalities knew of
each other... it's not like each personality
was oblivious to the other...
which undermines the concept of:
there is no conscious effort...
between switching...
which must be a harrowing experience
to pseudo- the whole experience...
narrowing it down to a thespian consciousness
that's only visible to a thespian audience...

how is it in writing? there is no voice involved...
have i reach a polyphony?
evidently there's a common theme running
through this piece...
but... is there a dialectical play in it -
how there's a grand coming "sigma"...
toward the concordant zenith?
if i were to say these words outloud
and have this little monstrosity -
this little demon whisper as the backdrop
in my thought:
i could not achieve a concordant zenith
as such...

i have already faced the unbelievable lie...
that somehow a bilingualism can be treated
as a schizophrenia...
isn't bilingualism, entrenched bilingualism
somehow not... the stated diagnosis?
why can't i solve crosswords
but find sudoku puzzles to be somehow
predictable?
i already have a crossword puzzle in my head!
and it's not based on a network
of the monolingual architecture that
solves crosswords with a thesaurus:
synonyms and antonyms and "insinuations"...

- mind you... did you mention that quote
from that polish neurologist?
'any one who claims you're mad...
are mad themselves'?
after all... isn't it a neurologist's word
over a psychiatrist's?
according to the latter:
my brain is still a chemical spaghetti soup...
my lexicon is a... salad...
might i ask for the meat... then?

- it can drive a man wild... knowing how
blind some people are...
but after a while... you just:
inhale... and release an onomatopoeia
of the most reclusive relief...
a sigh that's not a sigh... AAAAH...
to be able to walk down a street...
and enjoy the weather,
enjoy the passing-conversations...
the passing traffic...
the stench of a major city...
all of this... would be impossible...
if each man was to bump into
a replica of a Galileo (COPERNICUS!)...

what a dull place it would most surely be...
on a whim: entertaining petty grievances...
on the other: the hunger-strike martyrs for
justice... the philanderers, the sycophants
and their post-moralism bribe donors of
exclaimation marks!
or people like me... who chance upon...
an internalised rhetorical seanse vacation
after the day is done...
since... clearly: i do not have enough
time or money for a cork-lined room to
drum out all external noise...
or a listener with a rubber-ear akin to...
that same sort of fellow...

breadcrumbs from the altar...
where that meal is a ceremony of:
fed by the words...
the details inverted...
perhaps once it was charity...
better the charity to lie these days!

until it comes out by itself...
truth? what truth?!
trivia?! regurgitating scientific facts?!
that's it! or making blatant falsifications?!
i'd call it:
if there is a truth - i'll find it tomorrow...
and by truth and tomorrow:
if there's a truth - it's (a) tomorrow...
otherwise i'll face... death...
or perhaps i'll be cheated of it...
should i come across death in my sleep...
i can't imagine the sometimes
referenced obituary:
he died peacefully in his sleep...
that's as about as peaceful as...
when you sometimes wake up from sleep
because you've just had a nightmare...

this life is a nightmare...
let death be my sleep.
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