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irrealis

by janis lago

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1.
limen 17:29
2.
composite of a thousand earths 13:34
lyrics
Ocean, wish and wash up an eternity, don't care where it's been Even on the inside of the vessel, it won't evoke a sin Caring for the surface and the Portuguese man'o'war I want truths that come up all the way from the bottom floor Give me pitch-black Styx water, a drought of philosophy Tell me everything you know about this mythic physiognomy For another definition, give up all your inventions Purple and the surface, Muricidae will not serve you well The Tyrians are on their way to the heaven inside of Hell Christofascist motifs form a motive for uselessness Freeing selves from ruins with these deep-reaching services I could never distinguish you, I could never surely say The border straining out each piece of night from the day Cheesecloth, sieve, and a method of a method's production Class being the categorization of a world and its attributes Nothing will stop a world's construction, not even apocalypse Ruins of tall buildings, inquire where they would have fallen Scaling the Temples of God, I can hear faint echoes of Sallust Tacitus aside, I wonder what it was like to feel faint optimism My feelings extreme, a partial mirror image of a broken reality What could a dream be in relation to the rest of me? Cutting off interpretation, I find exitium mentium With nothing having been stopped by a stray bullet sentiment I run so quickly towards the beginning of an additional section Working in segments, I discover realities so sexless Nothing stopping me from astonishing myself within this nexus Discover that the lands in my mind have infinite leases Beyond event horizons, makes me wish I could meet them Granted sight of shadows, disbelieving in honest limits Sixteen bits or floating point and still I encounter clipping Nothing could've kept me from the feelings that I felled All the walls and the trees I ran my hands down and felt Felt providing necessitated constraints on a maniac gamut Thus, you're so far from alone, says my honorable caput Improbability is never a reason for putting down mirrors Be whatever you want, just keep it on our seas and Earth When the sky's our limitation, we can send out provocations Many lackadaisically impressed with a complex creation Endlessly consume ourselves, all on some god's invitation We do not through-compose, for we know what we are deep down Someday there'll be a way to need someone else nontoxically Necessitate their being without impaling atop blades When this day comes, a thousand earths must contain me While I engage in my nonsystemic, difficult process compositing This to that, interconnective folksonomic mythologies Reconstruct the shards of our too-dark ontologies All will come together in a quaking flower of bloom I swear to God that I will see the whole of my world soon
3.
from legible glyph to molten bronze 18:04
lyrics
Back to the beginning, when we drank from the mouths of women When we wrote a poem without any sense of versification You call it clumsy now but so much it could evoke back then Oral formulae inside a clandestine archeological document Something unintended for the public's consumption Evidence that there was no such thing as any Assumption Purportedly written by someone close to the lost but History doesn't ever just speak, it has to sing It cantillates secular stories of shifting text Always differing in nature from one girl to the next When messages mean nothing more than what they suggest at first Where is the joy in handing down and figuring out these bursts? Us women in peat, we died in a lovers' embrace We never really cared much about saving any face Ours are reconstructed and are soon enough longed for By many like us who wish they could go back to the past Not even to make change, but merely to see To take a photograph of the complete tablet before its degrading Thus leave yourself still, don't shake so violently For you do not experience this distance so silently No tradition to return to, nothing not a hypothesis We will fire our arrows, our guns, at targets in preparation For a someday where the entirety of history happens at once And we will drink from one another's mouths, entering the end Legible glyph, come and get me I want you to see me as I am Anyone else in the room be damned Make me fracture, molten bronze Punishment by death for the act of autobiographical self-documentation in Rome This I promise you I will not suffer too much, even if times become terrifying I will find a way to encode my existence in the flows of streams and currents The oceans will remember me in a way that a human could never once comprehend They'll understand in unknown ways, letting me look down from the afterlife And say to myself, "I love the shifting systems that bear my existence still" I would parade around in circles, as if realizing continuously a new beauty You will notice hints of me for a thousand years to come; I'm still breathing
4.
realis (When the sea rises) 15:56
lyrics
To want everything and need nothing Processing reality by Sumerian parallels Each sentence runs too lengthily I wish that time would really truly tell The age of unreason brings me in further I'm dragged into a hand-drawn sphere Imperfect by nature on its micro levels Come here and refuse to emboss my bevels Realis. Signifier of fact. Body describer. Authenticity. Prosperity. Gospel of four hundred names. Intrinsically. Trinity of money, hope, and grief. You know when to see. Enter these arms. Realis. Strong belief. I have faith. Redemption within a few days. Shaking, beating, fleeting. That's the entire world happening simultaneously. Collapse. Watch me. Feel me. Come into contact with me. Run. Go. Directly into me. Without another word. Constantly. One hour passes and I still feel whatever I'm feeling. Dealing. A shadow looms over my face. Nixtamalization. Extract every nutrient from me. I will leave a quotation. "Reduce me to nothingness." Something I'll someday miss. Underwater. Skin peels off. In the Himalayas. Extremophile. Haunted. Archaic specimen. Fossil record of a self. Done. Punctual and trying her best. Dionysian. Heroic sacrifice. I'm doing this because I wish I had done it far earlier.
5.
a desiderative (What I shall be) 13:20
6.
bunny rabbit fur 34:40
lyrics
Where goes Form when Function leaves it behind? In hope I say, "It breathes, I don't think it dies" My skeletal form, however, withers, wonders whither Will it go when everything devourable is unavailable Not enough of me, I am dispersed as a vapor though Rarefy me for the sake of eating all that I know Eat my dreams, serve them as an imperial banquet Those dreams already have designs to infect me Myxomatosis is a horrible business to suffer with But pest control is essential, that I can't argue with The sun's reach I am underneath, compiled belief Vegetarian scripture, I don't even fucking miss her I want to feel less gone. I want to feel more here. Overcome by wanderlust out of darkened senses of fear Wish things upon me otherwise too hard to imagine The color in my mind's eye's going all out of fashion I am a pest and nothing and everything to at least Somebody who wants to preserve a taxidermy of this A body with a metabolic deathwish which targets itself Divinities of Form and Function, save me from destiny It collapses in on itself. It carries itself back From the grave. I am ill. I am fading. Still I hunger. Basic and essential, furthermore perfectly accessible How must I even end this series of pseudocouplets? THIS IS MY FAITH, NOTHING SHORT OF DISGRACE THIS IS MY BODY, ALREADY SHORT OF WORKING TAKE THE MEAT OFF MY BONES, FEED ON MY FACE THIS IS ALREADY TOO FAR FROM YOUR PLACE ORDER REDUCTION, DENY MY MARTYR'S ASSUMPTION GIVE ME SOMETHING, SOMETHING FAR TOO SAFE INFINITIVE OBJECTIVE, GOT A BAG FULL OF NOTHING WHY'D I DO THIS, WERE I TO HAVE BEEN SANE? "To come too close to us is to alienate your fear And nullify the ruined looks or break up all those years I'll drop the iambs, I have a serious offer for you Punish yourself less; rather, let me do it for you" Take me up for another hour of disempowered grievings like these Just kidding, this'll only be about fifty minutes when it's complete Symptoms: facial swelling, high body temperature, unpredictably dying No, I do not suffer, I'm deluded, but I want something superior "Come closer to me, I just want to hear the sound of her guts Being rearranged." But I'm skeptical of all you choose to enunciate You take too much joy, you take too much pride, in extending so far Into the sky, but not even horizontally. Leave me alone here to think. By the syntax of a bright translucent mind, through the force of bodies in motion Via saccharine constructions and ventures beyond half-eternal graves it shifts Build a world, says the true angel. Construct meaning, spoke reality's insides. So, make increasingly clear, I shall, the grotesqueness of this emaciated predicament While my shadow fails to cast against the looming glimmer of a shimmering castle Shivering against windowsills, will the intestinal rope guide me to the citadel? Deprivation and lack define this lacking life, I must accept, I must accept, dammit Am I not to escape, I see a dark alternative, the turn to horrid Eucharistic mysticism Anchoress, anchored idle, here for a while but not long enough to fatten back up Subcutaneous injection and Focalin, this ahistorical trek through another world Destroys fate, discipline does, but I feel my fate is too real for a simple surgery Collapse of the arteries, blood's multidirectionality demonstrated, exsanguinate It will fail, plastic will, a plastic will is the only one which construes destiny Yet I deceive myself, my faith misplaced, piety streams all down my empty face I become full once more, with the tints having overshadowed the absence of my shade Keep me in a cave and feed me, to be shown to the world anew unequivocally I agree Your high-fantasy world is flanked by gateways of ketamine Lost in pseudoiridescent false opal, trapped in aquamarine Arts and crafts movement, cannot cope with this uselessness Transformation, lifesaver, transfiguration, I'll do it later We need a new Earth for monsters like me, a daunting plea No horizon can contain your ever-expansive fuckoff vision I need a body you can't see, a body that extends all ways Always wanting something else beyond what already lurked Whatever was left over I cannot see when I attempt to look The ground shook, the same devices govern me over and over Anti-Oedipus as a cover, I don't need another one like that I don't wanna be whoever I used to be, just save me from that This body can implode and expand outwards with boiling muscles All crimson in the ruins of a corpse and a dissociated mind That moves between bodies, haunting undetected by psychiatrics Visceral echolocation of an uneven place in the shattered skull Where the bats invade your chest and you are made ready to end Yourself, and the flesh torn from your throat is stuffed back Into the hollow cavity. I don't bother with this thing anymore So make it instantaneous. I don't want to do this shit anymore Harmful, the narrow slits of razorblade carved into arm's bark Pruned back to a place whence it cannot regrow to be known I have forgotten that line of scars in their dark procession So make my body something better than a mind's possession Congested, can't even feel my mouth against the phlegm All this shit just makes me wish I never knew him Why is he here, why the impossibility of to redact him? I don't want to know anymore, does he want my reaction? I say yes, I say I should, I say I can't deny and I would Just bring a halt to the suffering had I thought it through Bunny rabbit fur coating this corpus, may I be born anew Transmutation, trans mundos, re-encounter me next time Close up the Pacific, no more peace in this divided heart I'm so incoherent, can't tell you in disgust what I want So what I do is simply tell him what I want, the man A man daring dictate these processes philosophically I just want to make my exit from his clutches while I Have a chance, for I'd rather not dance, rather not die The sweat on my skin governs too many clauses of horror Each droplet subsumed into growing hairs, morphing face In this city, you will always be told you are in a different city From the one in which you stand. Its name must be deduced. Is it? Do we have any chances to reestablish ourselves in spaces so Decisively lacking identification? My body, it's changing again... Purple hearts on the face, fur whiter than sunbleached vision Ears sprouting from my head to by and large replace my prior Means of hearing. Does this mean my prior languages are gone? No, the mouth is a compromise in speech's favor. I am her. I, Vivian, will be the bearer of nextness, enumerating changes Imperial, divine, changing courses with each passing second Loss for the sake of loss, grief for the sake of grief, say... Will my body be torn apart just the same way it was before? City of Myself, I approach you, not ready for the forthcoming The following, already too much, is a difficult recollection For nothing stops me from divulging too much detail except I Lago, Lago, where could be Lago, amidst every other Lago Here I am, having been told seeing late-childhood photos In my early adolescence portraying me alongside a spitting Image of some fuckups who would near-ruin this entire life Rife with strife and rifling the borderline not-fineness of it Shit, if I could see him again, collective him, many hims I would punch him, this masculine machine, all at fucking once And I'd do it in the face, hard in the face, but I find myself Like this! I find myself surrounded by myself with no return! Woe upon all these people who do not understand this form! They do not recognize the me of those photographs nor any 'Us'es who might've had a life to live from thereon out Which was so huge and exciting by comparison to microtheatrical Shenanigans! Yet nowadays this life is so immense that I cannot Complain a bit, but they wander, these images of me, us, them And I have no escape, they ogle at and they profane the rabbit Losers, all of you, losers who will blow up in a matter of Minutes, seconds, milliseconds, when I evacuate myself alone And there will only be dust left in the place of these pasts But little children running round with bowlcuts are not pests I wish all these selves were nurtured rather than tortured. I don't know how to end this, but I lack an option to undo I can only wish that I could come all the way back to you.
7.
dimension 10:24
lyrics
"THE FIRST DAY" I want words in macrostructures, I want language in every which way Combinatorics of Control-Z, impossibility of Control-Y, no silence Tacitness is madness, keep me where I am in the meantime, I wish Text adds one more dimension to the stories I have to tell in sound Is this a proper poem unless it is recited? No, it is also to be read It is both synthesized in multiple dimensions at once always and forever Pitch contour, formant, consonant, amplitude, frequency, register, tone Timbre, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics Circlings back into the ever-changing nature of God, trying to ascertain Rain, snow, heat, spring, autumn, lives encountering lives no longer Worlds, construction, everything, my Emacs window, the quality of Meaning something. And finally, with a sigh, I just say "text." That's all I need and all I ever have, a neglected segment of a soul I do not dream a world, I live a world in the present of each day So that nothing can stop my expressionist ravings, no matter how strange I would say I don't care but my care is so deep I cannot ignore it I write poems in stanzas of eight, twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four lines This time I will be doing exactly the same thing, very purposefully But with characteristics of prose necessarily borrowed in the process The process of conveying this narrative, these blue streams of light Which in my paradigm rhymed to form spaces initially but not consistently Consistent rhythm is the only thing now, and the later-applied melody My hope is that my audience hears my clear voice sung into the text As loudly as the rapid clicking of my keyboard as I penned it "THE NEXT DAY" Determining my modes of being, having been not para- but parallelized Repeat into me all that an illeist lists as having little possibility Another morning, an open book, the probable reconstructions bracketed Wet clay tablet only luckily preserved by a theorized pyroclastic flow I wish, I wish, for clumsy lyrics in a circle of self-consumingness Nosism in the classics, we just want you to see whatever may come next Lexed and vexed alike, in self-interpretative cracks at who I've been Non-objective, my impression, a stream of water murmuring these words Cowries strung together, each one a simultaneous verse of exchange We - not in nosist sense - will soon enough know each other's names I scream my own, weed out my cursing, Nanshe hymn, reading back on it Consciousness is not a stream but an ecological system to understand Legalese befits not poetry, precise language was never my forte too Even when I tried exact precision in description, it still haunted me Benefit yourself in new ways, come forward and come back all alike The former antediluvian psyche goes to bleed back through my face

about

NYS#163

irrealis is a state of mind, a mode of thinking in which no one can exactly discern the sensations they experience because each sensation touches another feeling at its edges across a massive, irregular lattice in patchwork, and at the edge of each lattice we speak to one another, inviting ourselves into our perceptions of others' minds. the only-part-knowable nature of this structure may strike us as insufficient, and many (once regrettably including myself) may abandon the hazy journey amidst excesses of fog believing they are but useless expressionists with no working perception of themselves who will exist in the same place forever, but this is but weather that clears up when given time and space. irrealis is useful expressionism, the supposed unobjectivity crisis made glorious, irreplicability and surreality come together to form, with steady hands and with complete, even consistency, a unique nonsense logic. from there, the useful expressionist makes art a part of her life in whichever way she sees fit, construing political, queer, emotional, and cultural meanings in an ever-evolving body of work which reflects countless spaces, real- and head-; for me, the most useful medium happens to be computerized, hence 'digital expressionism.' this is my state of mind.

it's difficult not to delve into the personal when writing about something of this scope and caliber, so, to keep things simple, i won't avoid it, at least not the crucial parts which function as meaningful context. something with a great degree of importance to me, about which i have written elsewhere, is the impermanence of information and sensation. i simultaneously evade impermanence and embrace it, both of which happen for better or worse. the impermanence of sensation is what allows me to feel something noneternally, for an emotion to be fleeting and recorded only in the moment for the moment's sake. i had hitherto not written much about my more complex sensations that always seem to blossom into worlds of hurt within minutes, and this meant chaos had free reign in my mind much of the time. this wasn't pleasant. to the end of exploring impermanence of sensation and venting less to my friends and generally improving myself, i ended up starting a journal at the tail end of the recording process for this album. whatever haunts me at a given moment is to be written down in free verse with relatively even line lengths in a text document i keep on my computer, with a timestamp above the poem and the context (added after the poem is fully written) in brackets. this way, i can look back on what i've felt and say i've felt it before, it's not going to kill me this time either. in that way, i finally figured out why journaling is actually useful.

irrealis is not itself a journal, although it often comes close, but know that everything i do is inherently diaristic; all art is political even if it claims not to be. if you feel artistically inclined in any way, it should become part of your daily life in at least some aspect; you'll be happier that way. go out into the world and prosper.

credits

released February 2, 2024

recorded 20240113-20240125

written and produced by janis lago
recorded/arranged by janis lago
tenor trombone by janis lago
cover art by janis lago
vocals by janis lago
piano by janis lago
lyrics by janis lago

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about

Next Year's Snow image

Next Year's Snow

Svalbard Seed Vault field recordings label. Dabbling in large-scale interactive hydrophone installations and sixth wave post- Pigfuck on the side.

Art collective est. March 1st 2017

Founded by:
Octa Möbius Sheffner
Valyri Sheffner Harris
Spencer Booth

Previous:
&TIME
earlyprey
(etc.)

Current:
7FORM

Hatemail and/or demos:
snow@ecarlate.company ... more

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