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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Surreal Sketches
compiled and edited (ha ha ha ha)
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Spontaneous Gibberish, Feb. 21, 2004
A mixture of pillows and cauliflowers, the painting seemed to leap off the wall and land with a thud or splash on my nose. I imagined how it would be; its gooey mush would coagulate and conform into a commonly viewed shape: that of the Pillsbury Doughboy. It would begin singing Christmas carols while skyscrapers were flying out of its antennas atop its hat and obstructing the light beams of headlights of nearby passing cars. The world whirled in a rapidly expanding kaleidoscope of colour; you could almost smell the invigorating scent of moth feelers and the remains of crushed ladybugs as the chaotic scene accelerated into blissful cacophony. The sirens that I heard were fragments of monstrous erasers from the past, fusing together into a giant blob of hideous rubber blankets who were wiping pencil shaving cream off their feathers and whining a mournful melody.
I laughed at the sight of colourful mahogany desks joining together in the dance of the centuries. They seemed to expand beyond my normal field of vision and converge, proportionless, in the distance. The thin wailing of erasers was sporadically punctuated by windshield highlighters forgiving the city for its pollution and mess. The cleaning crew’s pickup van started vibrating at its resonant frequency, creating a wave of vibrations that set the whole town on edge. The fingernails of the gel pens washed the chalkboards of their unintelligent pupils of the unseeing but alert eyes, creating a screeching tune in harmonic minor, so symbolic that the semi-tones spun colours of red, yellow, and blue scarves. The pounding of my heart contrasted sharply with the sound of shuffling feet that produced static electricity, making the antennas of the pseudo-Pillsbury Doughboy moth stand on end. The harmonic minor tune reached the inner recesses of my mind where memory and emotion are intertwined in a typical symbolic gesture of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I began dancing to the beat of the rubber balloon drums while the colourful scarves circled my ankles and I tried to recall who it was that would most benefit from the seemingly incongruous selection of words, and I looked inside my heart. I could find no one who would even care about the funny, noisy and beautiful vision of gyrating cauliflower stalks pressed against the oxygen pressure hose from the land of musical and intellectual incomprehensibility.
Paintbrush: The Colour-wheel of Incomprehensibility à la Van Gogh, 2004 or ‘05
The monochromatic penguins started slipping off the treadmill of multicoloured ice. The seals were slowly slipping into a sleep full of harmless dreams of ribbons. Fragments of sky were seen as yellow dots peeking out from the black covering of night. The night sky whirled around and a sphere on the top seemed to get bigger and bigger, rapidly absorbing the light from the golden sparks and drawing them within its own brightness.
The sphere was yellow with a white centre. The yellow seemed to get brighter and brighter, and the white inside appeared as a moon. The centre was blazing so brilliantly that it was impossible to look at it directly without straining the eyes. Even though the brightness was rapidly increasing, the picture seemed to get deeper and nearly close in on itself.
I screamed with pain and covered my eyes, but it was an inside scream, not an audible one. Audible. Visible. Sensory. Suddenly it was dark, grey-red.
I opened my eyes. I was in bed, and it was morning. It was still early. I pulled aside the curtains from the window but the sun, the real sun, was not visible. However, I could see its light shining through the window and playing predictable shadow-games with trees and houses, only enlightening half of them. Yes, very enlightening indeed.
The Language Barrier, May 2005
The woman was driving along unconcernedly to her virtual suburban Montreal mansion, driving along a rather small and twisty road, when suddenly the van in front of her stopped for no apparent reason and she crashed into it. Crash. Finding she was still alive, she decided to be very angry. She stormed out of her car, slamming the door, and confronted the driver of the van.
“What in the multiverse do you think you’re doing?” she bellowed.
“I am selling insurance,” the man replied with a distinct French accent.
“And so you crash into me? Does that make any sense?!”
“The insurance,” the man said, pointing at the back of the van, “is coming out. My transport is not quite big to hold all of it.” The woman looked at the van. There was certainly some pink stuffing of some sort seeping out the windows. She was very confused.
“What kind of insurance do you sell? Why does it have to be kept in a van, for Infinity’s sake?”
“It’s house insurance,” replied the man, looking equally confused. “Fiberglass. It keeps out the cold air in house.”
“Oh... you mean insulation,” the woman realized in a sudden flash of insight.
“Insul...quoi? It does insure against freeze, does it not?”
“Peut-être,” the woman replied with a smile.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Star Wars: A Space Odyssey, July 2005
(This following excerpt is naturally a metaphor for the human condition.)
Put Golem in a gulag in Cyberia where he cannot rise out of Jewish myths and plop himself into Norwegian ones and demand the ring of power for his new fiancée Rose who lives on a little tiny planet all alone. Happy Anniversary, Gollum old chap. The metamorphosis is now complete.
“Press the red button.”
The girl refuses, her eyes darting nervously around and her whole body trembling with fear. “I do not want to cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people,” she cries, with the trace of an accent.
The man snorts derisively. I mean, how else could you snort, anyway? He advances towards her, knife in hand. “Your people mean nothing to me. I mean, they are worthless. They are beyond hope.” His cruel, narrowed eyes are mirrored in her own. “But,” he adds as an afterthought, his knife inches away from her neck, “you know I love you.”
The girl reaches mentally into the dark recesses of nanospace to retrieve a remembered and memorable American phrase. “Yeah, right,” she says.
The furious man drops the knife and grabs her by the throat to strangle her, because frankly he’s scared of blood. At that moment, the rugged yet handsome blond-haired blue-eyed hero kicks the control room door open and smashes the antagonist’s head with his fist. The enemy crumples, stunned, on the floor. When he opens his eyes, he casts his first focused glance irritatedly at the hero, who has completely misunderstood the whole situation despite his heroic-ness.
“You so much as touch her again, and I’ll…I’ll kill you! She doesn’t want you! She never has! Although I must make allowances for your mental condition…” He is, after all, a sensitive open-minded liberal who is accustomed to being objective and is unable to drop the habit even now.
“That’s all right. I’ll leave your Christina alone,” he says with a diabolical smile, his hand reaching for the aforementioned red button.
“Her name is Judy!” says the hero a bit peevishly, not noticing what his enemy is doing.
Judy realizes the danger at the last second and kicks the still-crouching man in his temple with her high-heeled shoe, accidentally killing him. The hero opens the garbage hatch and whistles as he tosses the body in. Then the couple embrace tenderly.
However, the originality stops there. “Will you fall in love with me?” he whispers in Judy’s ear after kissing her passionately.
The girl laughs bitterly. “Like fun I will.”
Holden Caulfield draws back, startled. “I expected you to at least swear!”
“I’ll have you know I never swear. At least not in public.” The girl regards him with dancing witchery in her eyes. Then she turns into a shoe with lovely, long-lidded purple eyes. She likes ending sentences with the word eyes.
“What have I done to deserve this?” Holden implores the heavens. “I swear I’m not on an acid trip!” The shoe looks skeptical. A beaker of hydrochloric acid randomly flying through space by means of a horrid psycho-mechanical anomaly likewise spontaneously transforms into an Imperial Star Cruiser, and shoots the (new model, as passing ships remark cynically) Delta Spacemobile 9000. Holden and his new footwear companion are instantly blown to bits.
Thus Frodo completes his mission of rearranging the Rubik’s Cube as a filter of mental images entirely by chance when a spare piece of scrap metal from the explosion maneuvers the last coloured square into place. “Voilà!” Frodo cries, à la Montreal. (His voice has a slight nasal twang unaltered by years of Jedi training.)
“Open the pod bay doors, Hal!” he cries jubilantly. “I’m going home!” He enters the fourth dimension of an equilateral rectangle at exactly midnight on January 1st, 2001, amidst a blaze of white light. The polychromatic aura of his inner life is reflected in his eye, which slowly becomes clouded by a dull film creeping over it. (Stanley Kubrick resented this little jab—dull film indeed!—and died two years earlier as revenge.)
September 10, 2011 – Historical Meltdowns
The first interviewee identified as meltosexual. Anything that melted, he said, had an innate appeal for him. He had just presented a research paper entitled “The Eroticism of Snow” at a conference in Tokyo the previous week. I asked him, “Does this attraction include metaphorical melting? I mean, if someone has an emotional meltdown, is that still sexy?”
He looked at me for a second. His eyebrows curled up and then down. “Well, yes, if it happens in the snow.”
She kept her eyes fixed on the penny on the cobblestone sidewalk in front of her. She was eleven, ten, nine, steps away from it. To pick it up unobtrusively required walking in a straight line towards it, and walking in a straight line towards it required her to walk diagonally in relation to the cobblestones. A thought came to her: it was bad luck to walk diagonally on cobblestones; she would die. Nevertheless reached the penny and bent down to pick it up, breathless. It was too brown to reflect the sun. She turned it over several times in her fingers. As she got up from her crouching position, a man wearing a yellow hat knocked into her. Muttering apologies, he nevertheless swung his briefcase into her head. The password-protected silver buckle, flashing in the sun, hit her temple hard enough to cause pain, though not hard enough to cause a concussion.
But she never tried to pick up a penny again.
Everyone knows Mozart’s Turkish March was composed in order to be played as fast as humanly possible. Every day at the conservatory, upper-year students held Turkish March-playing competitions on the old creaky piano in the cafeteria. When one student was rejected from Julliard, she took another degree and eventually got a job as a prison security guard. Ten years later, a local church donated a piano to the prison where she worked.
She installed it just outside the cells and tortured the inmates by playing Turkish March very, very, very, very slowly.
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