The word “impending” deadends. The word “doom” looms. Immemorial memorial. A crow lands on a mannequin’s headstone. An albatross assumes a new name – Emo Gnostic – to document “the long pilgrimage to nowhere.” He (the human) reads ritually by nightlight in limitless space and tries to write the most monolithic nocturne for the nothingness. Then wakes up crying in some European Existentialist’s twentieth century apartment to every one of his sentences undone. Totally. Same, bro. This is, what it is, to exist, to exit, into the busy city, part tread-milling flâneur, part trench-coated wraith, your mind racing, but filled with asbestos and fogged with wreaths of melancholy lint. The “I” has a perpetually mournful hangdog visage. We’re first-person players born to take a sickle to the psyche and a scythe to the language. Like a writhing rotary. As the one hand “neithers,” the other hand “nors.” The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen (Black Square Editions, 2022).
