Oh, Koki and
Demented Panda. Your self-determined mediocrity makes me smile perhaps more
than it should. And I like your names, and I like the way you confront ugly
societal and personal issues by spraying feces all over them and calling it
performance art. You go, Demented Panda. You know how ludicrous you sound but
you also know that my mind works in a similar, non sequitur tenor. But you,
Demented Panda, you know how to meditate the shit out of your self-doubt, even
if its endpoint is nothingness. Your approach to examining the metaphysical
implications of being present in a particular time and space is hilariously
disturbing.
After a lengthy,
slightly unsettling and disjointed ramble about Demented Panda’s “spell,” the
book reads, “The cash registers ca-chinging, the barking and the breaking, the
whimpering, the crying, the screaming… With nothing holding them together,
Demented Panda and Koki sat there in the raw sewage. All that was left was the
feeling of sitting in raw sewage and knowing lostness deep inside” (pg. 38).
The
non-linearity of this passage, as well as the entire book, seems so familiar to
me. The way the characters fumble for something, anything, to grasp – a
meaning, a way to dig deeper into the problems of society and crush them, or even
a way out – elicits an incredibly palpable crisis for modern poets, hipsters, and
other meanderers. It follows the stream of chaos that accompanies ever-changing
technology and capitalist systems and how to utilize it without extending into a
space of corporate greed. This issue is especially prominent for writers and
artists; as machinery develops and re-develops, it becomes increasingly
difficult to transform words and images in inimitable ways. In a 1965 interview
between Nora Ephron, Susan Edmiston and Bob Dylan, Dylan disentangles himself
from the negative connotation of chaos beautifully:
Q: You wrote on the back of one album,
"I accept chaos, but does chaos accept me."
A: Chaos is a friend of mine. It's like I
accept him, but does he accept me.
Q: Do you see the world as chaos?
A: Truth is chaos. Maybe beauty is chaos.
Q: Poets like Eliot and Yeats--
A:I haven't read Yeats.
Q: They saw the world as chaos, accepted it
as chaos and attempted to bring order from it. Are you trying to do that?
A: No. It exists and that's all there is to
it. It's been here longer than I have. What can I do about it? I don't know
what the songs I write are. That's all I do is write songs, right? Write.
Although the
interview took place long before this new age, Dylan’s simplistic response shows
power in embracing the present and all it encompasses, regardless of haunting
truths. In An Army of Lovers, Koki and the Demented Panda reflect the idea perfectly.
I love the way you write about this book, it really speaks to the form and experience of reading it. Especially your line "The way the characters fumble for something, anything, to grasp – a meaning, a way to dig deeper into the problems of society and crush them, or even a way out – elicits an incredibly palpable crisis for modern poets, hipsters, and other meanderers." I think that really gets at the heart of feeling of this book and many of the other authors/poets we have read.
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