going west, I look down from my Delta flight to California below, the territory
of the imaginary in which clouds ring out utopias of the golden earth, rivers of milk,
rivers of excess that flow to “Baby” by Justin Bieber, ringleader of the virgins
encased in remote adulthood, he wears chastity like a veil to re-enforce tween
sex appeal, which of course would be violated were you to touch him, oh oh oh,
I cannot die, I cannot be killed, I can only fly across the waters of the oceans
below, landscapes of undying splendor and adoring peoples who shuffle en masse
to see me, everywhere, at once, hemorrhaging category of the straight male,
starstruck by the excess of disruptive totalities, bodies in a gym or smiling on a jet,
out of which, oof, their structuring comes in a wave, or as Paul Virilio writes
in The Information Bomb, “the smaller the world becomes as a result of the
relativistic effect of telecommunications,” meaning Justin Bieber’s Instagram
feed, “the more violently situations become concertinaed, with the risk of economic
and social crash that would merely be the extension of the visual crash of this
‘market of the visible,’ in which the virtual bubble of the ‘interconnected’ financial
markets is never any other than the invisible consequence of the visible bubble
of a politics which has become panoptical and cybernetic,” i.e., in the bringing
of it all together, disarray of the field of particulars that bucks at the subjective field
in which a holographic Bieber moves, ensconced in his private jet, or more to the point,
the murder plot unravels but ends to reverse expectation and defer death across
the event horizon, into evening, where the oldest man with a Justin Bieber tattoo
meets co-conspirator to finalize his plan to castrate and murder the pop star,
in a bunker where we meet to arrange powers of attorney, flowers climbing up
the walls, my fingers close around the rail as I deplane at SFO, which is not
difficult though with an eye on the long view it will eventually become impossible,
if not submerged in water, going about for days, then in my advanced age,
in and out of feeling and deciding that, truly, the most beautiful place name
in the United States is Embarcadero, Spanish for wharf or place of departure,
I remember renting a van and driving around San Francisco at night, powerful
force of country music registering within its coordinates the activity of memory,
the split second at which I enjoyed seeing the word Divisadaro on a sign,
wondering also what exactly Justin Bieber will remember of his travels, his name
which I almost wrote here as Justine, like the character in the famous porno
fantasy of the Marquis de Sade, prisoner of unsplit will, masculinity reinscribed
as the supple dictator’s body around which non-male-assigned bodies cavort
until twisted into the chainlink fence that surrounds him, the Marquis, writing
on toilet paper, Justine Bieber writing on his iPhone, a hundred wonders
that ought to be forgotten but not the alleged nude photos that prevail online
and his balls at the tip of a knife, such a different implosion of particulars that
makes up a night in San Francisco vs. a night at the Kids Choice Awards,
on stage, splashed by slime as is the custom of Nickelodeon, and to think,
even green goo, the texture of semen, became a corporate signifier,
Justine, Justine, I want to call out, as I watch him drenched—in what?—DNA
encoded in its sacred material, churning inside, spunk among “the spared,”
the purple sky above me untouched by the fog of the Bay, so atypical I suppose,
but everything is not misfortune and with enough drive the speed to escape
vantage point of the unholy world is enough to propel you beyond, into the
nonspace of air travel, globalized bodies of pop stardom, Therese beset
by misfortune, brought to the mud to make it holy again, the Madame
de Lorsogne cleared of any crime and Therese struck, not by lightning but by
the moralistic literary device of a culture about to be wiped off the map,
but I’m not criticizing de Sade I’m only suggesting this might be his critique,
and I head up north to the Redwoods, where by the end of the twentieth century,
95% of the forest was sawed down no matter to create a forest of the dead,
a ghost wood, the encompassing home of the lost brought together by
the crisp air of another day, my feet firmly on the springy earth, I walk
with a friend to a tree where people like to photograph themselves, likely
the most photographed tree in the park, into which I carve Justine, name
of our roseate exegesis and a totem, worthy of violation of custom to be written
into one of the members of the 5% as permanent fixture, the lonely forest,
the place I wish I knew best, where I cannot pass through with the speed
necessary to forget it was ever such a roaming territory, endless once
a world of giants in which the living prevailed alone among the branches
