Experimental Writings by Robert Fuller

Four Preludes

The Four Preludes were originally written as Preludes to the four main sections of an as yet unfinished larger literary work by the name of Quarry. They are experiments in both prose poetry and a “nonsense” style of writing where free association takes over in a kind of stream-of-consciousness babble.

The beauty for me in this kind of nonsense, free-association writing is that it’s often a way to discover connections between seemingly disparate ideas or realities.

The reason I decided to include these as a set was in part because there are quite a few consciously-designed structural relationships between them.

One of the most striking examples of such structural relationships in this set is that Prelude I and Prelude IV are in a very real way inversionally-related. It’s all in good fun, but the upside-down nature of Prelude IV results in quite a few turns of phrase that seem to be in some minor sense revelatory. (Of what exactly, I don’t know...)

This type of writing is at least to some degree related to Stephen Daedalus’s quip in Joyce’s Ulysses: “Errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

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Prelude I

A haunting, sultry, forlorn, otherworldly cello melody echoes, reverberating through the cut rock chambers, spectral in its affect. Instrumentally she sings it, speaking through wood and gut, surrendered, vulnerable, releasing everything, with all her heart, given over. Always anticipating, always remembering what had come before. History’s nightmare. Not imagining that anyone would listen, that anyone was eavesdropping; that anyone had ever listened or ever would listen.

This was her own private catharsis, in this open cathedral of cut stone. She wept. The morning light glinted, firelike, off roughcut specks of mineral; a cool breeze soothed; she wept her sinewy soak of song, she wept it sunlit. Senza vibrato. Unveiled. Above the hills, above all.

He listened, observed, raptly, from within tree-shadows above. And imagined or believed that he himself wasn’t watched. Transfixed by her cello-sounds, he was oblivious to the watcher across the way, on the other side. By her footsteps of pure snow.

But she had some kind of vague premonition about the other one, the one who had been observing, surveilling him, the one who listened so raptly to her (even though she was not in the least aware of his own presence) in the tree-shadows above; there was a general feeling of unease that caused her bow hand to waver, with ripples of secret feeling that gradually took over both her hands and her entire being. For the time being, she wasn’t frightened. In fact, she began adding spontaneous ornaments to the fabric of her dirge. Her new tropes of song soared in the mists above, soaking the excavation, her private amphitheatre, in ever-deepening lament, as if breaking open its mystery and its story, by dissolving it and retelling it. Triangulating it, carving up its bedrock.

The one across the way who watched over, and spied upon, both the observer and the observed (he who was above and she who was below), was not in the least moved by all the sounds she caused to resonate in her own rounded crystal theatre, and through which she confided, unknowingly, to all (unseen by her) who might listen, all that she had experienced. His own ulterior motives were hidden even to him, he, the one who had been observing from across the way, even though, in his own view of things, he had no possibility of seeing that he was being manipulated by forces that he was completely unaware of.

She paused. There was still a faint, living resonance of bowed strings in the air. She turned to admire the square and diamond shapes that had been carved into the hillsides over the vast centuries by hired hands unsung. When the wind picked up suddenly from the far-off plains, she could even imagine the forced breaths of their, the workers’, labors, as they gouged the walls of rock and mineral, harvesting all the most perfect shapes. The clues of their sacrifice, from ancient and more recent times, were still palpable within all the realms, solid, gaseous, and liquid. The mists quickly intensified into drizzle and downpour, and then just as suddenly ceased.

The man across the way sharpened his arrow, tuned his bow, and pulled back on it with a quiver, with her in his sights.

The other man, the one within tree-shadows, didn’t see it coming. He was still so taken by what he had heard and experienced, which had been done and sung by her heart and hand, that it was inconceivable to him that anything ill could happen to her here in this location, at this time. Anyone who had been given the gift that she so freely gave through her beautiful waves of sound, could not possibly ever want anyone to disturb it.

The man across the way, the one with arrow, being slightly myopic, missed his mark.

The projectile, in its arrow form, glanced off her left shoulder, then hit the A string of her instrument, causing a metallic pluck to sound throughout the stone chamber. And so it was that arrow-man, realizing that he’d failed in his mission, then fled from the scene, having left behind his bows, arrows, and quivers alike.

She continued her plaintive song in due course, in roughcut diamond and acanthus trills, all the while silently sobbing, sobbing. He, the one above, shadowed by trees, the one who hadn’t fled, continued to listen, with all his heart.

She sang all out.

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Prelude II: Babble

Even you manage yourself. In 3D. You cannot. Bubbles. Did anyone else? Dusted reflections, on the surface. Explain it. Gurgling. Can there be? Convergences. How that would be. Filmed empires. An explanation would even understand. Hidden close-ups. Explained? Illusions in plain sight. What if? Endless robins. Be able to. Intone sunlight. Possibility would. Signify a referent. No.

Coherence is the mystery of rational logic. How it got there.

Divergence from the middle of the paper spiraling inward. Merging at infinity.

Central planning futile, all going to dust, pending unpreventable or unforeseen consequences. Five billion years, give or take.

Some say few words, some many.

Snails haven't been around lately. Slow season.

Kind of lonely here now. Quite quiet. Quarks. Quail-free.

Munch a bunch of lunch or brunch. Crunch.

Experiments were conducted even when they were esteemed to have been financed by. No one had the forthrightness to. So that was why.

Dissentocracy is the new democracy. Original founders. Future steaks of America revolt!

Nothing left but to.

You might not know what you think you. But no one else knows anything much of. How many snake oil salesmen can you fit in a.

Sparrows and others perched under green leaf cover, in tree shadow. Down below, he is cutting rocks of mind into music of inherited word-tokens, singing them into ever-morphing patterns, mining and harvesting thoughts and chirps into the dust of unrhymed prose verse.

Swoop! A winged arrow, kestrel-like, glances, sees him down below, glances off branches, wings away again, spooked. Missed!

In earlier days, twice, on two different occasions, he had witnessed a great horned owl swoop, not more than ten feet above the tree-sheltered trail. This was in the brook-babble area, the brook that plunged through not so ancient hieroglyphic vandal treatises perched on the not so ancient descending walls that served to channel the flow.

He had earlier harvested light and sound higher up the trail, providing a flowing document of creek life, in intimate detail, convergences of moving water mixed with an ever-changing kaleidoscope of mirrored light forms, imprints and slivers of sky and trees, sometimes graced by water striders, upon the moving water.

The resonances between the words, connecting the perceptions one to the next and to all others, give wing and song, soaring one to the next and to every chord of syrinx-effort.

Crap! We have gone. You are missing your language. Your wonder. Swallow your wings. No longer. Long to find the words paradoxically. Not that you. Observe a way. That eyeports you to it. Open it down. Left, gone. Then listen yourself, this is to unclip. It is. All, all out, and, and how. It is. We are will. But we have. What then? Up it. The gullet. Now we have to. Attune. Where. That. Is. From. You are here.

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Prelude III: The Inexplicable Symphony

How can you explain what cannot be explained? Even if you did manage an explanation, there would be no possibility that anyone else, even yourself, would be able to understand it.

Human beings are ensnared in a barbed web of words, pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, touches, fleeting slices of experience, mind-forms, fears, hopes, dreams. They are trying to peck their way, as chicks of a sort, through a shell that has no exit. The spider in that egg that has ensnared them so fully is the black widow of language, of sound tokens so venomous that they can’t be spoken. That same machine, of cosmos, the black hen that would birth them, would spin all their fables, and has already woven their strands and filaments of mind into a puzzle that can’t ever be solved, is also the one that has made the shell impenetrable. Even though it seems as though anything is possible, upon closest examination it is tacitly obvious that absolutely everything is impossible. All trajectories end. And they end before you know it. Even before then.

Everything else in the interim is a timeless clock, which can’t be wound. Located within a kind of space which can’t be found.

Any speck of time within the timeless clock, or hourglass, that you so furtively and precariously hold, and attempt to shield, within the confines of the latticework, the windings and meanderings, of your impenetrable shell, your chick of egg, the web filament of your own peculiar life and mind, is ultimately denied you, has already passed away, before you even notice it.

Have you grasped that there is nothing that you can hold onto, in the desert sands of this, your hourglass of life, so casually trickling to a vanish.

Each instant, each grain of moment that seeps through you leaves its imprint, which may or may not register within what you refer to as your memory. The nature of these imprints is that, as with anything else occurring within this conditional space-time realm, they tend to alter, and fade, and decay, like fallen leaves, over the days, months, decades, such that eventually they completely decompose into the topsoil of what you imagine to be your subconscious or unconscious self, your most, even utmost, fertile hallucination.

Everything is a simultaneous snapshot of remembering and forgetting.

What you call your thoughts are pre-woven arachnoid artifacts of tongue, sticky with archaic meanings, spinning, that span centuries, and which tend to be useful only for catching or ensnaring your various airborne insects of dubious mind-effort. Truly none of them are original, or genetic, but only briefly borrowed from other times and places, most of those being rather distant from your sparse hourglass of lifetime.

None of these utterances mean what you say they mean.

At some unspecified time, at some particular undisclosed location, there was, and still is, a shattered glass of your web of signifiers, such that all such memes were, and still are, effectively fractalized. Pulverized, beyond recognition. Nothing means what it used to. Nothing ever meant what it did.

There are now too many flavors of how to say what has to be, somehow, said. Nobody even knows what has to be, or was ever, said. Meanwhile, no one knew what it was that the others were even saying. Their tongues were different. So foreign that no translation of any such mind-effort was possible. There was no way to say what it was that they were trying to say, in whatever way such an attempt was, or would ever be, made.

Thus, an impasse came about, effectively.

That was before a family of quail, mom, dad, and four youngsters, took over some aspect of the space-time component of the backyard. They moved in initially, to my delight, as if they owned the place. And they probably did.

Their preferred refuge, whenever I moved too quickly through their territory, was directly underneath the wild blackberry chaos of thorned vines, creepers, and assorted vegetation that was undertaking to take over as much of the backyard as I, in my laziness, would allow it to do.

Strutting or scurrying about, dark feather-tuft at their crowns bobbing and wobbling about, deigning occasionally to syrinx out their soft pure fluted feather tufts of tone, they must marvel, if it even concerns them at all, at the deep violet-red human experiment that has gone so awry, so profoundly umbral in these shadow times. If it were their concern (and probably it is not), in their carefree delight (which I can only hope to unveil and embrace, as my now and forever state), how would that cloud their song?

The sweetest, most succulent wild blackberries are attached to the sharpest thorns.

I sit in my word basket and pretend to pick some.

The strutting, bobbling spheres of feathers continue their feeding frenzy, with purl and coo, croon and peep, and I silently wonder how long it will take before they capture me entirely.

Warm sun bakes plump berry cobbler right on the vine, beckoning me to empty my word basket, and simply taste.

The unwritten words, the ones I have dumped out, forlorn, roll out on the ground, where very quickly they are eaten by the warbling wobbles of bird.

Eventually my ears open fully to hear and understand. But I can only manage to paraphrase the underlying communication.

Death, they say, and killing, is endemic to all of conditional existence. What is the life of one being is sought as food by another. One being’s conscious enjoyment is suddenly devoured and ended in the culinary delight and sustenance of some other.

We are free of that, and simply strut about, they sing. You in your knot of fear, the darkness between your knit brows fully worded with your presumptive purl of cleverness, are deeply veiled in the moan of your selftorment, having tasted the shadow venom of your own homespun word pastries.

If it concerns us, why is that?

We, shell-born, have hatched. You, in your endless mind labyrinth, have not. You persist in your unearthly subterranean wanderings, perpetually bewildered, yet with a self-congratulatory pomp.

You extract and rearrange elements in your lab of experiment, which is just a schoolboy’s chemistry kit full to bursting. You take only, and take more, and more, until terra tires of you, and finally spits you out.

You are the neediest of all earth-dwellers. You need and need and need, more and more, and yet at every turn you deny your dependency on kith and kin, earth, sun, and moon. Hardly any of you could survive for long in the wild without the enormous support structures you have devised, deviously, over the centuries. Essentially, almost all of you, with very few exceptions, depend on the efforts of many others like you in order to survive, yet some of your monarchs of commerce act as if they themselves did all the work. And they freely take for themselves, everything, what is not rightfully theirs.

We, all of us other non-human creatures, live every day with the tacit knowledge of how to fend for ourselves. We do so, unlike you, without casting the terrible shadow of, what for you, are your arrogance and destructive tendencies, which will inevitably and unfortunately end up descending upon most of the other life forms here in this world.

You have no humility; your wings are clipped.

We, for our part, in our language of pure tones, have no way to say “exploit,” or “hate.” By us, this is not seen as a lack. There is nothing of value missing in our culture because we have no such concepts.

When, in some particular culture, there is no referent for a thing, idea, or concept, when there is nothing within that realm that corresponds to the would-be referent, then there is no real way to signify that referent linguistically. We do not exploit; we have no way to hate. We have no means of intoning those messages; for us they do not exist.

The lives you live are exceedingly complicated, overly filled with unnecessary dross. It is possible to live rich lives, as we do, and yet simply. We luxuriously preen our feathers, cluck and bobble about, live freely off the excess of our rooted friends, peck the manna that has been dropped for us. Occasionally we brave the thorns for the sweet, plump seeds of our wild berry, right off the vine. We teach our young what is proper and delicious to eat. When the time has come, we scamper and flit away toward our next escapade. Sometimes you don’t notice.

Our language, tied as it is to our own peculiar breed of experience, has tokens that have no equivalent in your tired, prosaic larynx. You might figure out some of the percepts and concepts that we dwell by if your pharynx weren’t so bloated with your own swell of self, of delusional sugar-coated memes. You’d have to be attentive to understand.

Open up, swallow it all down the long gullet, crap it all out, and then listen, observe, and attune yourself to what and how we are. You will then find the words that are missing from your language. Paradoxically this is a way to unclip your wings.

Now that we have left your eyeports, you wonder where it is we have gone to. But it is not we that have gone; it is you. You are no longer here.

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Prelude IV

Dwelling within some unfashionable nobody’s gutter, massively censored silence came from the general environs of his manhood.

From the edge or periphery of her sometime or never nothingness, muted and deafened in spite of his intermittent spasms, there was a location that hadn’t yet vanished. Further away, animals and insects, sun-scarred in plain sight, yet still below the undergrowth, managed to find a dual queen. Laughing, laughing, aloud, never, not at all. With single sustained timbres, and asymmetric or polished, overproduced memes, immediately if not sooner, his ditty faded out, he faded out, his empire vanished to dust, popped bubbles...

A dissimilar status quo, or a single blunt object, pizzicato. Her right forefoot, lacking anonymity, initially ran toward her own demise. With her outdoor recreation successful, she failed to understand this machine surrounding her, which wasn’t, in any case, anything very exclusive. From its silence, away from the glass ceiling, everyone else’s blunt weapon failed to generate any shattered glass melodies. Before that, caressing an omega trumpet not of any stable coherence, outside of anyone’s dimwitted torpor, shapeless clouds hovered near his right hip.

Nothingness, exaggeratedly taking the long view, succeeds in enveloping her. A woman sits nearby, but not the one lacking in mental acuity.

Everyone else, always not liking the idea of mollifying, might just, far from his horrid silent particles, assume a penalty so despotically exacted by him, or by no one at all, elsewhere, then, or at some other time. Nothing good could emanate from him, which to her was understandable. Everything else that his foot or mind narrated or failed to do, she hadn’t ignored, or perceived; it hadn’t been. She wasn’t much given to ask why. The same woman, exposed out in the open air, heard everything.

Without him, out of her range of hearing, the woman nearby dulled her blunt instrument, causing it to go out of tune, or it pulled her back without anything even registering.

A downpour slowly tapered off, away from flash flood or drizzle, or prior to that, over a good span of time, might have caused major damage. Gaseous or solid or liquid, apart from any particular location, a few mysteries, not including the exploits of the few, yet heading in the direction of modern times and also times past, might still have registered as illusions of mind. Before a calmness tapered off slowly toward a nearby rock, he had no idea about any voluntary asphyxiation of his own, a slacker’s, leisure time activities, after he had already finished putting the toothpaste back in the tube, which fell on the floor, destroying only a few of the least blemished specks. Standing in place, he loathed a circular or elliptical blob which showed up mysteriously one day recently despite faceless executives beating their own chests. Never had there been the overwhelming, dead, thunderous thud of bass drums deep underground. He kept going.

Her openly shared dreams weren’t uncloseted, except that in her own case, she, a nobody observed up close, since, despite her generic lack of sophistication, she was perfectly capable of being oblivious to anything she was capable of controlling, without regard to subtle intuitions minimally driven by her. A nobody nearby, the surveillance cameras missing every detail, or openly viewing the underbelly of neither an audience member nor a carnival act (she underneath or he aboveboard), happened to be completely captivated by not even a single particle of silence he allowed to die outside of his communally owned diamond-shaped anechoic chamber, or, skirting the issue, that he managed to conceal from, publicly, only himself (visible to everyone else), not drowning out a speck of his personal experience.

And he failed to perceive every precise flashback, which had nothing to do with a doppelganger, some stunt double who was anything but a voyeur, openly gawking at her, a multitude, none of whom tuned her out somewhat inattentively (because he was exceptionally ignorant of everyone else’s absence) away from a sunlit gutter. Somewhere else, never existing, the precise nausea not having anything to do with happiness, something else was caused by the steadiness of his leg arrow preventing it from holding fast, lacking torrents, openly callous, which immediately released neither of his feet, nor his fractured nothingness. Many years ago, he was perplexed. Contrary to popular opinion, he stopped taking away overly-rehearsed misshapen pearls from a negation that compounded his youthful song. His age-old reiterations, not exactly percussive, crash-landed out of range of a low cloudburst, desiccating an edifice, his public closet, notwithstanding the more and more casual praise, not quite the same as unifying a generic truism or anyone else’s myth, having nothing to do with congealing everything else or forgetting everything. Encircling whatever remained, reuniting a generic attic.

Away from his handholds, which lacked desert camouflage. Dismounted from a self-similar interior chamber, she soaked in anyone they were surveilling right in front of her. Disenchanted by his screaming. Or knew for a fact, and yet denied this: she, along with everyone else, was completely hidden from view. She was blissfully ignorant, completely failed to notice, inattentively, far away, outside of the sunlit depths.

Under nothing at all, below the trenches. Hidden. Espressivo. A twilight shadow obscured itself, mistily, absorbed into an immaculate immensity completely without fauna; there was no burning inferno; he split his sides, his incapacitated desert, which was not made of silence; he rejoiced in everything else umbrally. He laughed. Never had that been his shared, public withholding, outside of a certain space lacking any intact accommodations.

Minimally, no one rejected, rarely did defy, and never had ignored, anyone at all, in order to stipulate just this particular person, who had to neglect the other one. Everyone else wasn’t deaf to it. Radiant dreams of the future. Never unprepared, never forgetting illusions yet to materialize. Fighting on, secure, holding nothing, having lost his mind completely, holding back. Staring vacantly, silently, avoiding carcass or barbed wire, nothing taps him, free of any apparatus. Barely audible, avoiding a swelling liquid torrent, completely normal except for everyone else’s apathy: not even one familiar, invigorating, happy-go-lucky drum roll survives. Silence.

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NOTE: This was originally posted in the “Flash Fiction” section

We were walking through the woods. It was like any other ordinary day. Yet there was a rush of energy underfoot. This was actually not entirely unexpected. We were becoming somewhat more sensitive.

The energy underfoot was quite subtle. We were unable to make it out. Yet foot after foot we walked over it. Gradually we became more aware of it. Of what this mysterious presence was.

We were talking about many things. None of them were about the mystery. Yet we walked foot after foot for hours. What we walked over was the earth. And underfoot was what we sought.

Then it began to rain lightly. And the ground gradually became somewhat wet. Yet we still did not notice its secrets. We stopped at a convenient picnic table. There was a babbling brook nearby.

We were enjoying wine and cheese. And that gradually became our entire experience. Yet we could have enjoyed so much more. One of us filmed the rushing waters. The other pushed dead leaves around.

Then the rain let up slightly. And gradually the sun shone through us. Yet we were still oblivious in its rays. There was a rainbow that appeared above. Its colors began to infuse everything.

We were noticing more things underfoot. All of it was somehow more alive. Yet why was it not obvious all along. The drizzle and the mist came back. It began to soak us through.

The sprouts and mushrooms showed themselves. Tiny sprigs of life poking through earth. Yet we were still talking about random things. The seeds and spores still poked through. We gradually became soaked with silence.

We were running out of words. There was still much obvious growth underfoot. Yet our growing silence was not quite enough. There was only walking foot after foot. Then we found another picnic table.

This time we became more attentive. With more food and wine we relaxed. Yet there was still something we hadn’t noticed. The robins had been singing all along. And the brook had been gurgling.

We were determined to be aware. And so we sat in deep meditation. Yet we still could not perceive the truth. The truth right there beneath our feet. There was something magical always happening.

Then it began to shine through. The dark life underfoot was always growing. Yet it was hidden from our conscious minds. There was a root principle at play. And the seed was the key.

We were talking about decaying matter. About how that fed seeds and growth. Yet we still could not figure it out. So many things that were happening underfoot. And all of it completely hidden.

The complexity was impossible to comprehend. The inborn urge for seeds to germinate. Yet all of this growth was somehow arbitrary. Why some seeds turned into certain shapes. And others turned into other beings.

We were walking along as ourselves. Not really noticing how arbitrary we were. Yet the seeds that became us became us. And then to be was our duty. To be as we arbitrarily were.

Then a light rain came back. Our walk was soaked with wet energy. Yet how could any of this be possible. We came across yet another picnic table. Cheese and wine fueled the mystery.

We were...

February 19, 2024 [01:44-03:04]

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Seeds, by Robert Fuller