Bryan Edenfield

Against Psychology

1

Today is the night of the stallion. We speak long deep into pools of academic archipelagos and short long beyond the dry lanterns knocked over by idiots saviours and swans. We embrace our veins together and snap jaws in a locust of merry screams to crisp at the blood moon of a failing heart. We are here lunar and frightened to discuss the big time ramifications of the schizophrenologist made whole by a nightmare. In the damp den of the ego the archetype of the clown laughs at secrets. This binary triolet as function of the sanctuary realigns into the nocturne canon and camps in the dusk of cellars. The id as comic trilobite ancient and buried in language calmly devours the bonethief tree. What is the empire without the emperor? Mind his knowledge of tunnels. He moves arms scratches knees. He chews the food of the helpless that live in the city of scamper where he too scampers and crushes and thinks all thoughts one two three all of them. He cracked the citizens in the neighborhood of knuckles. He scented the citizens of the holy mouth. But I am a pigman lost in grace and my kisses are showers of stained moss. The fog clears from the jungle and we are still.

2

In hope in study in dreams dissected the nonetheless apples rejoice in the flavors of a brain hemorrhage. Ideally we knock down the walls between you and subject insofar as we must help diligent the seminar of bad bad biology sofarin here we go. A holistic approach may or not include such things as enumerated in manifestations past of intellectual hubris or the meaningful relationship between horse and vial of cyanide but suggests something on par with the dislocation of citizens both embroiled in a narcissistic project of rejuvenation and a wonder projection that smiles underneath the bed sheets of self-actualization. This particular brand of psychosis has bubbled up in managerial doctrine both continental and analytic but once the neighbors throw their couch out by the garbage bins there’s no stopping the animals from enjoying the privileges of white hegemony. Release the co-dependents and occupy the space between sporadic readjustment and complacent zealotry so says the doctrine. Release the negative delusion of failure from the lexicon of everyday suffering for it need not be understood in such a dualistic fashion says the camel says the lama. Or may we be in denial after all these years and decades tying and untying the conceptual shoelaces of finitude. Here we empower the dysfunctional family allowing it to function within disembowelment beside the ebony discs of fungal psychic growths. Here we continue the project of denial that follows empowerment and pretend with eager ears and mouths that a moth can place kitchen equipment in the appropriate container if we just have a good attitude about it and stop being so hard on the little guy. Here we edify the personality disorders that cause high functioning automobiles to psychotic break at the first stop sign of mindfulness. To mind the full nest of synergistic halo goals is to massage with beatific wonderment the top-down ideology of help me mommy I’m going to die. To continue our self-actualization and our other-actualization we must embark on a trip towards the inner coil of consciousness and only a mindful practice of knuckle cracking and lip smacking will cure what ails ya. Believe it or not some of us have day jobs so when you chew on that pencil for forty three minutes straight I hope that’s not your sole source of fiber for my soul is a big slab of red meat but this menu doesn’t serve such enlightened malignancies. In order to further develop your personhood so that it may resemble an assemblage of blood moons and concord grapes we must locate the esteem whether it be of the self or of the other and place it on the highest shelf so that the cats can’t get at it. Remember some of them jump high and they dislike water. Our next objective is to fall into the trap of full awareness and consciousness so that we may respect the dignity of others and the rules and regulations of a standard trip down memory lane however post-traumatic it may be and no matter the triggers that may or may not set off a series of chain reactions that can only be described as undesirable. The standard desk reference may consider it abnormal to chew on the teeth of an abdomen but we should make accommodations for all the songs of existence in the panoply of prismatic polarization. Just kidding. Truly abnormal and shocking in its banality is the neurological anxiety associated with various water-based sports such as water polo and synchronized swimming. Our attitudes as they are poorly designed by a flimflam of worthless acidic monologues and the quirks and foibles of the old man and the ole ball n chain may someday come into contrast with our ugly predilection for distributing gas masks to the hellions of scamper city a place that is no good for you and I sweet gentlemen of the jury. We arrived here through learned behavior and isn’t a leaf a leaf a leaf. My biofeedback bias only confirms what the crotch itch predicted: namely that we are all constrained by a deficit of knowledge historians like to call the heuristic genetics of hypothetical maturation and the mnemonic meta-analysis of the panic disorder parallel to the phantom limb. As mentioned before the nervous system composed of binary luminescent objects is imprinted into the memory of phonotypical moods disordered yet again based on the climate of scientific hostility and the hostage negotiations going on across the street. In a debriefing conducted in the early 1990s by yours truly and a team of young up and coming go getters we came to the conclusion that materialization as it is a compact vestige of the material reality outlined in deterministic theory can affect the rate of aversion and the judgement a child feels on holiday when primogenitors fail to meet certain basic gender requirements. Take me to the chocolate factory right now please I am a very hungry and anxious boy. Not everyone agrees with this hypothesis so let me parse it out: say a middle-aged heathen approaching the equinox of usefulness in a utilitarian societal framework boards a train traveling at approximately seventy two miles per hour on a Sunday with little wind or political resistance. Now say we reorganize the parameters of this gestalt in order to optimize the flight or fight response in such a middle-aged specimen. Will he combine his dendrites into a useful whole as predicted by the Mycenaean model or will he tumble down the wormhole of groupthink and simply chalk up the adages while wasting luggage space? Now say a woman of similar height but convex temperament wills a toxic messianic complex on the various hierarchies represented on the chug chug choo choo. In the aforementioned hierarchy of needs is she concerned mainly with her health as it relates to hereditary markers connoting cervical cancer and thyroid problems or is she going to skip town and steal the man’s aquarium so to speak? Earlier models suggested the former if and only if her hormones become out of whack physiologically speaking with her kinesthetic notion of personhood and dragonladyhood but the latter if and sometimes not only if his scandalous lack of object permanence exists as an operant residue of his rationally compulsive reflexes and familial norms. That said a third option presents itself on such cases as when a stick of dynamite 4 centimeters in diameter inexplicably shows up at the doorstep of one of the more presentable members of our elite circles like say the mayor for example. The notion of a representative sample becomes problematic and is more importantly problematized by the sticky resonance of parallax taboos. Giddy with the destruction of the mayor’s front door and hounded by the disappearance of the prized thoroughbred shortly after a tragic train derailment our theoretical binary humanistic model falters and shifts towards a paradigm of unconscious validity squirming and positive inference obfuscating. Dear me can we wait this long to go to Iceland? But to end digression the tolerance of a trait-to-toddler hybrid theory becomes weak and wistful in the dark cold shadow of optical self-awareness. Thus we come full circle to a trigonometric globalization of fragile patriarchal personhood all the while the recognition of the prisoner’s gambit saturates every decision made after noon whether or not the subject lazy as he or she may be ate breakfast. We come back then to the outlined debriefing and its humid consequences. I have divested myself of at least a dozen of our biologically bedwetting codependent narcissisms yet a schism persists despite respite from prismatic responders and semiotic pedagogy. Every day we yearn for a grapefruit that will satisfy our flesh lust but the goddamn rotten meats are still throbbing underneath my pillow. There is no adjustment to such climates and no animistic self-annihilation for the golden halo of a mindful buttercup. I can taste the wet succulent seeds. I have untied my lineage and now understand the parallel trajectory of the whip and the nozzle. Come with me little ions of the future for we will dream big and get all our ducks in a row gaw darnit. Shut the book of psychosis on the fingers of mindfulness and tell the neighbors that the couch stinks and it doesn’t belong on the city sidewalk. My ideal ideology is one of animal magnetism and floral folly. When privilege comes knocking on the door pick up the phone with your snip snap incisors and call the glass doctor he’ll fix your panes. Eliminate the negative unnecessary. Fondle the pretty pretenders. Visualize greatness. It looks like something else something over there something over something some so. In hope the full mind dreams of a good no-biology where knock knock who’s there no one no one who no one.

3

I can see your data is showing a correlation between severity of depression and rainfall during the summer months in sparsely populated regions near the equator. The energy offset by positive thinking creates an astral potentiality and thus if we can jump-start the avatar of infinite human potential we can downgrade the monotony of a harmonic convergence to that of partially hydrogenated pleasure waves. The principle is simple: if taken holistically the didactic lucidity of ephemeral dream logic can and might not create a paradoxically relevant and untouchable genesis of meandering trust. Secondly while animalistic in nature the holographic projection of self enables the melancholic to heal the wounds of psychotechnologies as the poltergeist of normative behavior always and sometimes wanders through the metaphysical network of transitional and kabbalistic traditions. This out-of-body-experience can and will not act as a medium for the spirits harboring resentful grudges against the web-slinging sparrows that stuck them in this nuthouse in the first place. This mob logic thus necessitates a mantra of graphological insignificance and ectoplasmic Christian foreplay. A Jesuit a Rabbi and a Turtle walk into a bar and the bartender a nice fellow who grew up along the Liffey asks them what they would like to drink. A telltale sign of hedge betting and adherence to gnostic goblinism is the left eye tick that when decoded spells out the name of God and the ingredients to his award winning invisible hand creams. Knowing this the bartender in all his infinite wisdom did not listen to the three cosmic bodies but instead sought attunement with the Gaia force in Buddha’s perpetual isolation chamber. Once inside he discovered an ancient invocation that went something like this: Once hidden the karma of iconoclasts now comes to the clearing in full circle of the levitation medium: A circus of thought withheld from common ancestry cannot destroy but very well may try the numerological uncertainty of self-realization. The tender human now with knowledge of the syncretic truth about cats and dogs returned to his work domicile and began taking orders from every harry dick that tom-tommed through the door. But with his chi properly aligned and with Mercury retrograding into the gutter this chap concocted the elixir of life and spelled out his plans for world domination: As a spiritualist and an avid footballer I believe and it has come to my attention that certain individuals heretofore referred to as holy and transcendent are not but a dripping phantom of unidentified vedic fraud as revealed to me through telepathy surgery and trumpets: What warlock is this that comes into my houses and moves my furniture about willy nilly and then has the gall to ask for the tree of life and the fountain of immortality? What false prophet and seance slave saunters under those brilliant golden arches and proclaims the true faith the good deals the righteous path the 99 cent value? What idiot spirit claimed retrocognition when all knowledge is knowledge of a yogic future? I do not have answers to these questions but here is your cocktail. And with that the Turtle said goodbye the Rabbi said good evening and the Jesuit sat down to enjoy his mule and spoils. What can we learn from this esoteric parable? All glum is the surface of the tetragram all frightened are the subjects of yin tang hierarchy. Gobble-based globalization has reduced the Taoist to a snake oil peddler and a sensitive trance channeler without a remote control or service knob. Can’t we all just go to the park together and play frisbee? Can’t we believe in the solar logos that gives meaning to all suffering and sentient suckers? Can’t we purchase goods free of guilt and without overflowing or drowning the real with goodwill? The third eye blinks out of sync as we have learned but this theosophy of right-brain hierarchy cannot but succumb to the vicissitudes of a gentle ear and a calamitous bigotry. The last psychic birth is the emergent scoliosis of pantheism. Pagans from all seats of death converge on the holy temple to bask in its nirvana hole and prostrate in its cosmic itch. Alas the paradigm shift is only for the useless and meanwhile the rest of us wittle piggies go all the way home. They can om all they want but we still got bills to pay mouths to pay spouses to fuck billboards to ogle trashcans to design mailboxes to study. My inner self has always warned me of the calm warm guru with promises of fish tanks and iced meats. Such things aren’t real. And in hopes of appealing to a broader audience the fallen man dwells not on the deja vu dowser who discovers water and discovers it again but the crystals of pendulum energy that immense good cheer and christmas tendrils around the necks and spines of kirlian aura. Down dog down this is not a good time for fetch. Once initiated into the cult of tarot jesus the papas and mamas begin to see the ultimate plan. But who will be our spirit guide us commoners of commerce? Who will knight us and read our fortune? The zodiac offers but superficial assistance and so we must turn to the last remaining wise woman born from the earth and covered in worms. That’s fine. But I feel sick and paranormal so is there an ointment for that? Is there a group chant or a night class? My network is limited my net worth is benign and the council has spoken. Against unity the teachers diverge and disappear into the milky ether whence they came. My witch sells diapers at a department store next to santa. She drives a used ford escort. She is not what she seems. Thus we come to the only possible conclusion: sing the song of psychoanalysis mouth the prayer of the moth. Sing the solar palm postage sing the skin from the bone. Sing the flying object identified cataloged dissected and refined. Lip the tonsils of autonomy regret the foraging of knives. I am the king of discs the queen of farts. I am the jester of calamity the knave of cutlery the healer of boxes. I am the queen of disrepair the surgeon of light. I am the be all things one and forever all things come to those who wait or something like that whatever and ever after. Please forgive my diction. Please forgive my dereliction. Please pass me the salt throw it over my shoulder dress my wounds cure the feet of hogs the eyes of warblers the tongues of the sloths. Say goodbye to my family for me. I will be back someday.

4

But that is neither here nor there nor where nor fear. What offline system are we speaking of exactly? We shake our fists at missed opportunities here we are lost again in a deeper divide there doven down with the dumdum pigeons of our better light. Meanwhile a cavernous inconvenience looms in the iconic crosshairs of freedom soldiered away in an indecisive manila envelope. And why not? My soft mouth feels for the appropriate questions and let me be honest with you the scissors and rope holding together this feeble construct of a fleshmachine is how do you say not so magnificent. The nation is in brambles but that is only an idiom. We can only observe the staff of wild night realign its prepubescent values with the bandwidth generation and the witch doctor from across the street wink wink. I have a long pipe of organ donors just glitching to save the lives of empty vessels and vat brains hemorrhaged on porridge and poor hygiene such that they dream the demon monotony. A genie of computational coffers rubs off a pinched didactic scream into the upper revolutions of a badly made bed and poorly arranged composition of dusk but such little goats don’t kid around with contract negotiations. As such and for to with the disruption continues. I am a leader I think but I do not lead from the front lest all become lost as I forage through the frontier I lead from behind nipping at the heels of innovation like a rapid calamity of rocky rivers nipping and tucking with surgical yelps from my dog maw at the creme-de-la dogma of gosh-darned analytics be damned. Fumigate the call center gentlemen for your color is bleeding into the esophagus of justice. In space of all things we record and reorder the needle in order to understand the brotherhood of practices invented by gollum plebiscite and committee breathalyzer avoidance obviously. Needless to say the needles are here to stay and for lack of a better word they are hyperautomated and without virus. I have a stick shoved high into my pituitary gland gumming up the synaptics of my medulla and stoning my oblong alligator brain. Pick away at the ice vessel of monogamy you gorgeous gash so we can go spoil this infant plan if you know what I mean I think you know what I mean. Every grain is a lip of consciousness we thus piggycircle back to the middle oink oink my knee is still bleeding from that bicycle accident from the early oughts and we needn’t worry about the Mayan Calendar anymore okay. The meteor is soaked in marina falala lala lala lala. Don’t you own her wounds? Don’t you concern over persons often? Are you not deserved of underfunded comedy? Is this not the sharp point of sales wherein the ground caves in due to ceremony and cuttoe business acid men? What what what what degressive circle backs foresight into restatement to indigist the idolatrous and the futile please please please please stop. Repeat the cut. Resteam before the cut. Serve cold if hallowed. Break the mold and serve chilled before lozenge. Serve up or on ice. Swerve gone until pulverized. This knobby weather is going to drive me nuts.

5

Knowledge as the king dictates is fundamentally patriarchal and capitalist in nurture. Preternaturally awake in the Byzantine sense I incline towards gravel yards and totem makers. Let me tell you the true factual story of the fake city of Benevolence my good friends and lions: circumcised by a lineage of factory workers and neuroskeptic transmitters promulgated through decree by the matriarchs of soil and sky the little buggers of violence stamped out any hope of muddy salvation or suffrage in order to erect a dysfunctional city of dread on the edge of despair. Dead now gone the daughters of chemical dependency and mothers of the chimerical papacy our foresisters shredded the outdated documents of democracy and landed on an alternative to plymouth rock: We shall be warriors of the icicle bedlam we monsters of pre-industry. Most know this story to be false but some disregard truthhood in favor or something a little spicier and thusly I give you the redacted model of our disenfranchisement such as it is not: The male spider colony interacts with its web through a series of semi-controlled seminal statements aimed with triangularity at the woven mouths of shibboleth sailors and a kindly specimen of woman meant to hide the bodies and feed the babies. This subpar genus speaks when spoken to and are not spoken to so the games they play are inconsequential. But in nocturnal rebellion the freeze bleeds forth from socialist womb and Luddite vulva. I value my dischord as much as the next guy but hey dude don’t be such a fickle dick. This porch sags under the weight of a thousand liberated and lacerating lizard appendages lest we remind ourselves that the government is controlled by a conspiracy of deep deep down cold-skinned cretins. Our bodies are minds controlled by a fascistic limbic system of propaganda dust-ups and media controlled consumptive objects the only real route towards antibiological efficacy is through the tunnel of orgiastic hollar and down the road of hedonistic edge play. Here we are again in the exurbs of justice in the cul-de-sac of rewired purgatory. The city as phallic imperialism spreads its wings through the torn pages of esoteric goblinism and claws its ways from the canyon of elven magic to the citadel of balrog pain and lymph node isolationism. The mad mob of women like to tell us many manly men that we are all immigrants of the soul transgressing along a finite path towards a neuroillogical network based more on the tangled ideology of the cephalopod than the hierarchical divinity of the redwood but even trees sing songs so they say so they say. Back to the antimatter afoot the mouth the ugly automobile of progress has been driven as promised over the fresh snowflakes that wither our bulging testicles. I am a spiralling assemblage of marbled maybes constantly resorted by a didactic society hellbent on turning me into a muzzle for those whose jewels shine too brightly to be stifled. All jokes aside I have resigned from mankind neither truly man nor kind. Our teachers show us our toes and pretend they take us to the bank but the banks cut off our toes and feed them to the enemy. This is what sis told me and her propaganda is real even if it isn’t on the television 24 hours a day so and so days a scum. I listen to sister. I hear her wounds. What was I saying? Oh yes the sinister urge to procreate is only a coincidence and I say this because I am atypically handed. Benevolence is a state of hoarse beauty and sparsely populated vibrant boulevards. The magnanimous miscreants that cut away at our inborn liberties and ingrown failures may appear from a mythic distance to be muses or sirens screaming us towards a bitch oblivion. But in silence we hear something different shut up stop talking for a second I’m almost finished. Hey you guys ever think that maybe your echo chamber is suffocating you? Infinity comes later. This is a cold city of liberated eyeballs watching watching watching my every confused movement. My body is a genderless body of please miss don’t take away my heavy breath and right to stare my body is a city the laws are cuts this is suicide. Don’t worry little girl calamity is coming I can never walk down the street alone at night calamity is coming. The bus is a coven of patriots ready to pounce. My spine is the broken highway system thus I hunch over to protect my children but hey wait I have no children I’m a swinging bachelor and this is my wristwatch. The convention center is full of stomach acid and the subway is gout on the rampage and god believes in your obedience your left rib your tiny brain. Legislature supports thousands of years of tradition and I can’t make my painted rocks without those slush funds trickling down to my little lamb of a continent. Dear madam and madman we all know that marketing is the tool of the devil but an information campaign on the dangers of feminine hygenetics might dispel some of this herpetic growth should I be talking to someone else? Into the kitchen says the pale skinned emperor so I get into the kitchen with my cookbook of atheism and burn down the cathedral and the bank. Hyped up on caffeine the regulator carefully disassembled we join tentacles to build the city of Heaven in a hole on a hill in Hell. I am astronaut industrialist look at me go zoom zoom. Digression ended thesis realigned: the phallus of mind comes laden with infection and the body contorts to survive in a confused state of Hegelian paradox. I’m okay with this sometimes I’ll say some stupid shit hey girl am I right? Found in the suburbs a burning pile of apologies and a cookie-cutter neighborhood of accusations she looks to the countryside and finds only windmills of fangs slashing spit at a better world. She looks to the the turmoil zone of vagrancy and collects idols of poverty to polish and set on an illuminated vitrine. We are museum entries curated by the careful hands of first and foremost mother and public servant. She recoils into anarchy her lips trembling a morse of phantom babel. I turn with her wherever she turns a silent partner is cutting up myself. It’s not a metaphor says the emperor but his disposition is a singularity of ad hoc hegemonics and the nationalist phrenology of lazy antiquity. It is a metaphor says Susan or someone so I cut myself up to be more like you I cut myself up to join you and you cut too I see. We are all scum cunts forgive my self righteous ranting and I will forgive yours. The wild mare loosens her soothing mane of snakes and allows we frail riders to clumsy navigate through the crop circles of disenlightenment. Patterns resemble the tattooed insignias of indigenous folk psychology thus embodying a prenatal urge to follow the synaptic convergence of insectal hybridity through the muscular contours of an agricultural and post-industrial wasteland. Colony collapse fumes in the runes to the west and deglaciation grumbles in the aura of the boring south. Our skin is melting and our blood is wrinkling the winter into a pollen dusted spring fever absent of pupils pulpits and pistils but engorged dangerously and delicately with pistols plumage and plumbing. Posters advertise our private pipes. Sister sits across the street away from the serious man and his choral attachment of birds. I join her and stay silent for a half century as she tells me her story. The end.

Bryan Edenfield was born in Arizona but has lived in Seattle since 2007.  He was the founder and director of the small press and literary arts organization, Babel/Salvage.  He hosted and curated the Glossophonic Showcase and the Ogopogo Performance Series. His writing has most recently been published in Mantra Review, Underwood Press, Meekling Review, TL;DR, and Plinth.  He was a recipient of the Jack Straw Writers Fellowship for 2018 and is currently the host and producer of the Hollow Earth Radio program, Glossophonics.