Narrative based on a painting of monks

[This a quick narrative based on a painting by my friend Saint, as well as some of the characters from his comic BABYLON. Check out more of his kick-ass future-urban artwork on phantomelectrik.blogspot.com. / Enjoy.]

 

FREE FORM NARRATIVE BY STB

BASED ON A PAINTING OF MONKS BY SAINT

         Zibbidy-zin. Don’t look at me u fuks. Goddamn! Hate this ragga-electro-jazz shit they pipe in through the streetlights! Zin!

         Will u control your drug rage, dammit? What is it you’re even on? I mean, shit, I didn’t even see u take anything. Is this just your natural state? Don’t u lie to me.

         Don’t u dare zibbidy me for zibbidying this muzik just cuz the shit is all over the zibbidy place and sounds like they put Brazil and Russia in a blender and autoarranged an ironic zibbidy mess. Muzik is no longer a thing. Your mouse is a saxophone!

         [The city exists in the background. It’s a green screen and what’s immediately noticeable is the cheapness of the electronic editing. You can literally see those fuzzy lines around the edges of everyone that lets you know they’re not actually where it seems like they are. Like, are they in the city or not? If there was a camera, it would zoom up from the two people implied to be having a conversation in these opening paragraphs (a black dude and an asian chick, and everyone who passes by them is reminded of that weird forced diversity a la public education math and science textbooks with lots of different hands of different skin colors all working on the same visual aide experiment of turning a lightbulb on with a potato, or just a group of incredibly different-looking people standing in a group, smiling, getting along great despite the obvious tension) and this hypothetical camera would sweep upwards satellite imaging-style, moving machine-clean to a spot half a mile further down the blvd they’re standing on to show an incoming procession of hre krsnas, robed in orange, a gang of shaved heads bobbing beatlessly except for the shit-ass ragga-electro-jazz muzik mentioned earlier leaking from the streetlights in the form of spinning red lace. The hre krsnas are fifty deep, blocking traffic by taking up the width of the blvd. They carry with them visual force. They’re chanting individually, each something different, creating a hectic white noise of eastern-sounding mysteria, but it’s not actual words—they speak gibberish. They reek of spirituality and deep deep deep down hopeless defiance of something that it’s probably totally useless to defy. Red lace slithering from a streetlight, spiking like an EKG line in time with steel drum beats. Return to aforementioned dude and chick. A cadre of conspicuously fossil-burning bikes burpsnapripples past on a street obviously nearby, but not on the blvd of their current location.]

         Let’s let it all flow out into a meaningful ’logue. U know u babble?

         U smell like packaged food.

         I was hungry and that’s beside the point. Where were we even headed?

         Destinations mean journey, story, narrative. Conflict and zibbidy like at. Is this nihilistic drug wandering, yo?

         U know how I just said u babble… ?

         Are we an illustration of futuristic interconnectedness between environment and individual, or is it just off-tha-cuff expression brought about by—

         —shut uuuuuuuuuuuuup. Damn. I really hope you’re on drugs. U sign in 2 the region yet?

         In a moment. I’m trying to decide what form our obligatory pervasive computing should take. Will it be electronic contact lenses controlled by electroencephalography, physically controlled holographic projections achieved by vast networks of phased-array optics, or your standard minute handheld device? And, by the way— ? I mean, just sayin— ? You’re drunk— ? I’m not the only one— ?

         [The asian chick does happen to be wearing electrolenses controlled electroencephalographically and, unbeknownst to her black dude (for it’s obvious they’re lovers, thus the possessive her black dude rather than the indefinite and more neutral a black dude), and additionally unbeknownst to anybody, she is cycling through various vision filters that automatically apply pre-set stylistic changes to her sight, for instance “old-timey,” or “line-drawn,” or “negative exposure,” and finally she lands on the “cartoon” filter, which instantaneously encodes her eye " brain signals to see the city in dramatic graphic novel splendor, her black dude exploding into a muscular, befro’d, and ink-washed character. She gives no outward sign of this change.]

         Okay, she says, I actually do remember where we were going now before all that fucking business at the bar.

         Ooh! Tell me! Tell me!

         And then all this confusing meta argument business and the swearing and the drugs and the music criticism.

         Well zibbidy-zin, girl!

         Robo-sushi joint.

         Huh. So that’s why I’m so hungry. What’s that noise?

         [The eye in the sky reveals that the hre krsnas have made significant progress down the blvd, and maybe it’s just the fact that this far down the buildings are bigger and packed together denser than a buncha them chinee in an ascending elevator to a soulless job, but their robe count seems to be well above fifty now, approaching maybe seventy. It’s hard to tell. The incoming procession, from the distance of the black dude and asian chick, appears as a march of orange tic-tacs. Their eastern gibberish grows in volume. Asian chick can’t tell whether it’s just because she’s seeing in “cartoon,” but the portion of the city behind the krsnas is distorted and seems to maybe be… swirling? Or it could just be the strands of slithering red lace from the ragga-electro-jazz-playing streetlights, EKG spiking in the air to the beat still like the aqueous serpents of pre-pollution devastation. Is there even undeveloped land outside this city? Where are they, geographically? How many days since the last instance of sleep and sobriety? Numbers might not extend that far. For those who’ve never used electrolenses before, it’s quite a fuckin trip to be spin-grade drunk and then have your eye " brain signals recoded so you’re seeing everything in delicate inkstrokes. But no, seriously, what is that distortion? The sound of fossil-burning bikes returns, this time closer.]

         U see that? she asks.

         Black dude can’t even answer cause he was mingling with kites even before the krsnas came into view, nevermind this shit.

         I think robo-sushi might have to be put on hold.

         [Which what a shame—they’re ever so hungry.]

         Ohmygod, black dude shouts, regaining composure, we’re about to be observers!

         [That’s true, they are. It was inevitable that the bikes would eventually come into view, and now here they are, the gang, dozens of helmets sitting like hood ornaments atop chemistry-changing female bodies hugged parasitically by brand name leather riding suits, brands that would purchase their curvatures if at all possible, sex up every last crevice and slope until the very DNA is inseminated and mere utterances of company glottals and vowels might cause erections of the brain, tear-assing around the corner of the blvd to be halted by the force of orange robes and chanting delirium, red lace everywhere. The shit-ass ragga-electro-jazz suddenly doesn’t seem quite as shit-ass as it did previously. The events of the world, unfolding presently, seem to have illuminated its purpose. Before—before it was simply understatement—much the way first-hand accounts of genocide or paintings of battlefields or 5Ks for cancer funding often come across as understatement because some things can’t be encompassed by art, scar tissue, permanently emblazoned shadows, museums, or agonized skulls preserved with lime. Some things are so real they’re not real. They’re so terrible we can’t even fear them properly. They’re so simple we can’t grasp their complexity. The music, piped through the streetlights, has now invited us—plus the black dude and asian chick, who are actually there—to contemplate these things and accentuate our roles as observers. (Indeed, they seem to share consciousness for a brief second when they make eye contact and silently say in eye language, “Wander out for a little robo-sushi and what do u get but a biker/krsna standoff in an unrecognizable neighborhood…”) The krsnas are some weird mixture of Burmese, Cambodian, Japanese, and even a few white dudes who look sincere enough but can’t quite escape that whole displaced university dark beer look, though they’re bobbing their heads and ranting the gibberish just as fervently as their shorter counterparts so it’s hard to question the commitment. The biker/krsna standoff isn’t really a standoff at all because the bikers are clearly afraid. The approaching orange enclave leaves a flowing wake of distortion behind it, buildings bending, people floating spirits, streetlights uprooted and unwieldy, air TV static, one dog with leash dangling and comical expression, all slowly melding with the kind of force so powerful it has no concern for speed. The gibberish sounds like a whole separate feed of percussion that feels like rolling downhill, not physically but tonally, and will not quit. Asian chick takes this all in in “cartoon” mode, plus drunk. Black dude’s high takes a not quite total turn from sheer irreverence into detached and timeless wisdomville. Just their faces alone tempt the easily distracted wordsmith with description. The bikers are swearing and jabbering and still flaunting sexuality even in the wake of what’s becoming a clear phenomenon, a perceptual incantation maybe, or a variety of mass hypnosis, some kind of devilish mindfuck, that behind the krsnas, behind the distortion, the city is DISAPPEARING—disappearing into that distorted swirl like the flushing of debris down a cosmic toilet—goodbye!—and in its place what is left is virgin land underneath blue sky, erratic scrub dotting the hills like the sexy freckles that it turns out have been dotting the long-obscured face of a muslim woman all along, a sight unspeakable, accompanied by electric brain surges, and here they come, approaching, the Orange Procession, bringing with them an end to our green screen city, parking placards ripped up like weeds from a driveway, bookstores and geometrical food shops dismembered, and the chanting from the monks through the eyes of the asian chick, currently seeing in “cartoon” filter, are now close enough to have their own speech bubbles, and what they say is that the only form of peaceful surrender allowed here today will be total erasure, and the last thing our lovers and impromptu observers seem to know is the smell of a gust of wind thick with the smell of grass and fresh manure and human death.]