January 08, 2004

Cohen’s Beautiful Losers set my loins on fire, hard-on struggling to escape the confines of my pants. Last night I finished reading the book again, lost in words, unmeaning, and poetry. The words were pornographic, ecstatic, full of sound…

“Fuck you. What did you hear?”
“Machinery.”
“Machinery?”
“Ordinary eternal machinery.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars.”
“That’s better.”
“That was a distortion of the truth, which, I see, suits you very well. I distorted to truth to make it easy for you. The truth is: ordinary eternal machinery.”

The characters in the book, all failures in their own way, are transformed by their frantic attempts to stitch their mutilated lives together. It’s as though this “pack of failures” awoke “in the middle of a car accident, limbs strewn everywhere,” and started painfully sewing themselves to the broken bodies around them. The cock is the needle that allows them to connect nothing to nothing in a moment of ecstasy.

And transformed, they remain lonely and dying, caught within a system they cannot escape. “Are you disarmed and empty, an instrument of Grace? … Has loneliness led you into ecstasy?”