The murk and sludge of 2008 engendered a wide variety of responses. When I could get high in 2008, it was on the wings of a writing bender which wound up seeing me into the Teens. In the triumvirate of e-chap/e-book publications in ’08 and ’09, Revolver distinguishes itself by a vested sense of sobriety. Revolver is not me burying myself in alcohol, nor is it me wallowing in the urban menace atmosphere of filth and scum. Revolver is where I respond to the sleaze and scum by fighting back. Wide awake, the protagonist here takes in the world around him, and sees what unholy, bitterly corrupted lights he can shoot out. Beneath the sobriety and the fury, Revolver also reads as a last will and testament of and for my relationship with Mary Evelyn Harju. I’m watching her moves, and watching mine, and trying to discern why the impasse between us must be, or seem, permanent. Blood on the Tracks time. There’s always a rift where the physical and spiritual play a violent, spiteful game of tug-of-war. The criticisms and recriminations which inform Love You To, lead to molten melt-down of She Said She Said and then the complete and totalized entropy of For No One. As the final salvo of the e-chap, Tomorrow Never Knows consummates a willful imposition of the physical on the spiritual and vice versa, into a sense of life being conceived in a dissolution of individual consciousness. This is where the lovers cease to exist, and commune in something like a Universal consciousness or Mind. Where sex means something. Where Mary and I are concerned, the final fuck (half-metaphorically meant) is the most profound. The revolver carried by the protagonist annihilates itself, as it self-exhausts, and the ecstasy does not exclude sobriety, faithfulness, or discipline. What actually happened between Ms. H and I in the second half of ’07 is tangled. Some of our raw material got transmuted, some rendered with (again) an adequate faithfulness. Released as a Scantily Clad Press e-chap in ’08, Revolver’s solution for recessional entropy is a commitment to cultivating presence, reality, individuality. These are seen to be worth fighting for. Entity, unthinking consciousness, is not to be trusted, as a weakening agent. All shot through with a patina of raw, divorced pain. One way home.
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