We are Simple Worms, Yearning to Melt our Permafrost
Don't put yourself on ice - wake up and get to work
Note: Don’t like to read? Please allow me to read it to you here 🫡
This is a call. A call to arms, to legs, to bodies, to minds, to that soft part behind the knee that never gets any love unless it’s bitten by a mosquito. A call to humans, and persons, and peoples and you theres—all of youse.
All bipeds and skin cylinders, and let’s add in nematodes, for who amongst us has not felt, at one time or another, like a worm?
Wake up!
There is no time—we’re not having it, and you’re not getting it—for your big and selfish sleep. No time to tolerate your frozen and inert body, stuck as it is in the permafrost of an ever-tilting, off-its-axis world.
No time for shutting down to the chaos of the outside and marinating in your pre-programmed stasis with the black oils and flecks of whos-a-whatsis on your conscience. In and on an unknown, long-forgotten, and foreign tundra.
No time!
Waking up—it’s the only solution.
The waking up and the slipping in and the taking off in-the-now time. Put your finger on it. Only that time. The forever in it time, which is yours to idolize, to monetize, to watch your sides, and take your rides. This is the this.
Get to the getting—wake up!
Open your drowsy eyes and feel the surge of life as it investigates your bones and seeps into the bloodstream which, in turn, animates your vision. You are the slowly blinking tube of light, flashing faster to full-on, bright, and strong on the ceiling of this here moment.
You are the new arrival from the stepped away momentarily. The coming back of you.
Your slender form will find its sugar to feast and thrive upon. One year, five years, 46,000 years in the permafrost of putting off. That’s all over now. Time to put on.
Wake up!
Time and history and life go on, tumbling rocks clean sans your presence, your voice, and your glorious struggle. Unless…
Wake to engage. Wake to get shiny. Wake to wriggle your fingers in front of your face and say, clearly, loudly, and with purpose: “With these hands, I thee make,” and go and do and have and want and be. All of it.
Wake it up!
Wake up whatever it is that has frozen itself into that hard lump inside your body. Hard and cold and heavy and still. The dead inside of you. A heart, a belly, a knot just under the skin. The long-lost hope of that whisp of perhaps, put on a shelf and forgotten.
Lay your hand upon the shoulder of your somnambulant mind and jostle, saying softly and firmly as you do: “It’s time, love.”
This time.
Now.
Wake and engage!
If not now, then when? When why? When you? When this? When try?
Not everybody knows more than you and there are plenty who know less. Wake and take the closest door, which may be the wrong door but will lead to more doors, don’t worry. You must wake and slip and fall and get up. You must splash water on your face and look in the mirror, saying: “Let’s go, you. Just let’s. Come on.”
The step, the stride, the leap. Fully alert, fully awake, fully plugged into the beeping machine of the universe. The now. The awakened state.
It’s understandable. The freeze state. There is a world outside and the world is angry. It snarls and growls and knits its brows. The world is set on spinning off the table and onto the floor to smash all the crockery and expensive heirlooms of our heritage. It is pulsing and petulant, throbbing and watching as you shrivel in your inert poise, a mind dumb and dull and with our temperature dials set well below zero.
“I was fine until you got here,” says World. "Don’t put yourself on ice—wake up!”
Even the worm, frozen and static for far too long, wakes and immediately gets down to the business of wriggling. No delay. No time to waste. Fleeting, brief, and well alive. Let the worm be your guide—spiritual, intellectual, and instinctual. Reject your slowed metabolism, shuck the ice and frost and hard purchase of the sin-biosis psychosis, and rise from the bed to cheer your own dream.
I wake, therefore I am!
Frozen in time, but not out of mind. Of mind. In mind. Sound mind. The gap.
All life is winter.
A long and bitter wind blows in, a jacket stuffed with self-hate and loathing. There’s never enough wood and the coals burn down and your boots wear out while the crack under the door lets all threats in.
All life is winter, but not all the time. Oh, yes.
Put a log on your fire, and stoke the coals, in your slippers and your gown. Wipe the sleep of disconnection from your eyes. Wake up and look at the time change and the mood swings and the inevitable culture wars that rage too long and idiotically. Step into the battle of it. Awake.
Swing arms, throw elbows, and be just like the worm, waking from its suspended animation to produce—with furious intensity—newborn work and thought.
In winter’s gaps, there can be spring, summer, and fall. All gaps to fill. All filled with life. With waking.
Who art in heaven, Father? No one arts in heaven, Child.
Dead musicians aren’t jamming there just because you imagine them to be.
“Do your art on Earth!” Mozart yells from behind that cloud, floating off to join Hendrix and Haring1 in the nothing, of nothing, by nothing, for no one.
Time. No time. All time. We gave it this name. We added marks to a line to signify its passing. We invented ways to monitor it as we moved from born to die. A construct, an invention—it flashes by and is gone for one while continuing for another. For now. Relentless.
You cannot sleep through this.
Wake up!
You must melt your own ice. You must hold a hair dryer to your motivation, to your soul, to your heart, and thaw your inertia.
Wake up.
Permafrost is permalost.
We are all worms, on our way to becoming worm food. We live, we die, and somewhere in there, we wriggle.
Are you awake yet?
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
To get the backstory of this post, watch this👇
This week’s amends…
Oldie but a goodie. From Jean-Luc Godard, but also Jarmusch Jarmusch can you do the fandango (sorry. It almost works!)
Via a folder on my laptop
On Rotation: “Bad ‘n’ Ruin” by Faces.
“My vision was blurring the bass was so loud.”
Here’s a great piece from the NYT on Dominican sound systems in vans. This subculture is rad. An audio version read by the author is available, and the vibe is something else. Watching the little video of the guy folding out his speaker on the roof of his Honda Accord… 😵💫
On a muggy August evening on Randalls Island, I stood in a field of Honda Odysseys and CR-Vs, tricked out with towering rows of tweeters and subwoofers. Speakers were affixed to the roofs or lined the trunks of the vehicles like light artillery, painted in canary yellows, blood reds and indigo blues.
Via NYT
Barbie Girl in the style of six classical composers. (This should probably be in the music section, but I don’t want to put Barbie Girl in The Stream playlist.)
Via Kottke
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
Yes, I know Keith Haring wasn’t a musician. But artists are artists.