We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

The Whale with Human Teeth

by The Cradle

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.
    Purchasable with gift card

      name your price

     

1.
Tape Rules 00:41
While I wind magnetic tape I accidentally think and am no longer doing just what I’m doing. Why does unravelling the reel one way here make it turn another way here? Does tape do things specifically? Now, holding the 1/4” strip in my fingers and having thought, I have to consider tape rules and anything rules. I twist the strip and watch the tape-rules working: a part further down the reel has twisted too. this is the tape’s way of doing. But this way is like anything that always happens, like waiting ending in sleep or people being inconstant. The anything rules prove themselves: If I sleep, I will wake up unfinished. If I wake up unfinished, I will soon sleep. The post-instant rules. They are made of death. Tape rules are made of important stones, matrimony and it’s consorts, dream animals, elected officials. They come out of the stomach, out of the hands, asymmetrical and specific, resembling you. They come out right now and right now, the sense of it unidentical to the knowing it, the seeing it comported by the sense of it the understanding not gained but redepicted. While I wind magnetic tape and think a yellow light crawls the room. It is passive-aggressive and runs yolky on the walls and through the plastic walls of the bottle on the table. When I recognize who the light is I instantly forget the worthlessness of questions. Are the walls of the bottle plastic or is the bottle plastic? Does dissolution happen outside? What are the rules for how it glints the liquid? For the rubber band beside on the table who’s form reminds me of the tape I was winding earlier, and also of other things that I won’t say? Think the rubber band has two sides. but it has none.
2.
Someone approaches you on an empty city block looking like need and starts telling you the story. Says his name is Justice. You go to buy Justice food at the corner store and then something in you feels destructive. You don’t understand what you’re doing at all. You look at Justice standing in the paltry yellow light between the racks in the corner store while he waits for you to leave and you think he hates you now for standing there in the doorway watching, watching him waiting for you to just go, so he can do what he came there for. You should get out of there. It should be the full moon which means destruction and you should believe more.
3.
Them Rules 00:41
When I was talking to you earlier today I accidentally slipped ended up behind a wall. The wall was my face and then it did the being there with you for me. Now, for me, saying a face was a wall evokes the dissociative effects of a bad head cold. That’s really not what I’m talking about though. I guess the head cold could be a parallel analogy but it’s too literal. Nothing literal works here. So that’s what happened. I was no longer doing what we’d been thinking of as talking but instead was doing watching. I watched and the thinking-of rules were evident. The game-and-ritual rules were evident. Here, maybe this will do it: try and imagine someone dancing full costume a ceremonial dance full of meaningful gestures. Now imagine their thoughts in that moment, and the same-timeness of those thoughts with what you can see, with their eyes shooting significantly back and forth, with the slow-rising knee, with the limbs in one-minded, immaculate accord with the shifting tempos, and the severance of the two itself likewise simultaneous. Does this work? Maybe not. But I’ve been watching while you passed the ones going away from you on the street when you recognized instantly and accidentally not only the familiar methodological body but the familiar arbitrary mind, like the gooey insides of some strange spotted shell that don’t repulse but rather remind you of the taste of warm milk, of being awake before your parents, and the light at that time that you notice now only in memory, of original deviances the meaning of which you notice only in memory. I know it happens. I saw you. You put your ear to the shell before you could even think about it out of the fear of forgetting anything. You put your ear to the crack in the wall where your confidant has whispered the nights away. This time a worm crawls into it and your powers of perception immediately become inconceivably greater. When I was talking to you earlier today I slipped behind a wall and your hair was brown and cut into a mullet and your eyes were brown and your face had yet again changed shape because perhaps you’d been limiting your nutrition again, and your brown eyes are looking at me like someone trying to make out the lettering on a street-sign that’s too far off. Doesn’t matter your vision’s 20 20. We’re trying not to be literal here. The question is what can I mean to you? but that’s not my question. The question is where are we going together? but now what looked like a street-sign pointing to your yearning exploded is, on closer look, just an advertisement for someone else’s life. When we were talking earlier I noticed you’d really made your hair into a kinda severe mullet just like you said you wanted. It reminded me of something, and right in front of you I went down instantly inside. That morning when I rode up the road with the skinhead boy in his pickup. Windy road by cliffs Water to the left. He had dense blue eyes and the devil’s numbers burned into his left arm. Told me of the death-magnetism of the bridge we were crossing: car and human parts wrecked below us on the cliffs, equal parts jumpers and crashes. As a kid he would come awake at night alone on the bridge, his clothes hung over the branches of the trees behind him on the way down from his house, at the hour of non-distinction between the water and sky a tiny pale body. Certainly the rocks were jagged. Certainly there are the bridge rules and the stories of their origin. Skinhead boy says we can all make up origin stories. Take the mullet- it’s a thing now, but where the fuck did it come from? So I say some guy’s hair was getting in his way at work, but his girl loved that long hair, liked to pull it when they were fucking or whatever so she just grabbed a handful at the front where it hung over his eyes, you know? and just chopped that off but kept the back. Origin story. The first mullet. Origin story: The fantasy of drowning contently: When we were talking earlier today the eyes of your pale body looked for me and asked my rules as if they could be yours too.
4.
I’m behind him and he doesn’t know I’m watching him. This is one of the good positions of life. He stands making a moment of himself at the overlook fence at the Griffith observatory. He gets that Ahab look on him and pans his whiskery visage like a lawn sprinkler and grips with steely knuckles the fence that separates him from the view of L.A. as if the wind and rain were beating and his vessel badly fated and the sun wasn’t shining gaily on the tourists in the vicinity one of whom just said now I don’t have to be funny again for another year! But I didn’t see anyone around him laughing- two of whom are the old ladies that I joined on this bench and one of whom is me. I’m actually lying a little bit now though. I was there for the view too. Can’t say what it’s like, so say “the view of Los Angeles” and fail. “Los Angeles” is to fail. I guess I already knew this rule when I sat down , which is why I chose another’s blindness as my viewing’s subject, and settled on the bench to commence failing through him which is more comforting than going to the fence to look myself and there playing out my inadequacies of sense, as always. On the bench, I fail through him for a while. Then I pan left away from the viewing-man and there’s the fucking Hollywood sign. That means leave, so I walk back down the dusty hill.
5.
Crease Rules 00:41
Why when you put them on this way with this bit pulled this way here does it go on like this here and end up creased beneath your heel here, from then on crinkling a little in your psyche pressed on you by the weight of you in your each step? Then you stop and fix it. You untie, pull this bit back flatten the crumple and see your thinking change accordingly.
6.
Mouse Rules 00:41
Things happen when you force sleep on a lit room. Day going while the awake under the light. The rustling in the walls and from upstairs where we always joke they’re throwing the dog down a bowling lane, when it crashes, skids on claws, they yell at it. Do the claws know the difference? Do the little ones in the walls share my thinking? The day is different later. Someone revs a motorcycle from the other side of a park fence. They’re playing softball and the light is fast. It’s so fast that there is no light. Unyellow unlike the yellow light that catalyzes midday dreams. Do the little ones feel its sag on them when they come rustling out the walls? Is the yellow light for them when they die in the traps we’ve set? That’s probably what it was, really. She probably died slow, caught on the nose flail around, then that ends, and only little twitch and slow choke. The image went out of the little corpse and into me and then I went to sleep. Things I’ll never know about happened- a cockroach that changed size moves across the wall. I touch it with my leg from the couch, fifteen feet away. If it grows, then so do I (I know the dream rules) Then I told someone about it and have been waking up ever since.
7.
Face Rules 00:41
I walk into the Bar Nirvana because those are the joke rules and my legs are tired and my eyes are tired. This part of the story doesn’t matter. I ask the Japanese bartender which is the cheapest beer and she gives me Sapporo, which I guess is the piss beer of Japan. She looks at my ID for a while because I look younger than I am and have, since I failed to grow a beard at sixteen. The man seated next to me tells her ’92 makes me 23. 24 next month I tell him. You must feel real old he says. Not really I tell him. I take out my wallet. There are five faces in there. Four are the same. I take the four same faces out and hand them to her. Abraham gets folded in half and goes back away. This isn’t something I do often. Sometimes with dad, who drinks me under the table. That doesn’t make this important though. Bartender face across the bar is thin now but the way she looks at me so earnest-eyed behind the transactionary smile means she’s been a mother: gained thirty pounds at some point had morning nausea and craved raw pepper corns. I feel young now. I don’t feel real old. She takes the four faces and puts them in the register. In go the greedy little eyes and the white wig hair, the stoic three-quarter turn, the white skin inked in dulled green. Four times in goes the face the one that becomes a mushroom if you fold it just so. We say before we fold: George Washington We fold and say: mushroom. There’s a tv in the bar playing a college basketball game. Oklahoma-Kansas. Three overtimes. Best game of the season they’ll say. I look toward the points of colored light flitting over the flat rectangle on the wall but what I see is the sweat coming hot down the faces of the boys, and I see the faces of the boys. Phone rings in my pocket and I think without realizing I’m thinking “it’s you”
8.
What is it that’s changed upon ingestion of three-quarters of this cake donut I’m eating? Was it just a metabolic thing? The fact that I’ve been eating too lightly and drinking too heavily? Or is it something to do with my being alone? That explanation must preclude the cake donut, the metabolic theory that I woke from the dream this morning to something untouchable in each specific sense, woke to my body specifically and the body’s adjectives shriveled uselessly into themselves, chunks of the world in the world without origin or context. (this last most apt phrase’s being stolen is, of course, totally appropriate) or in terms of memory: the city lay down off the mountain, to our left, a spatter of glint in the dark like wet grass in the too-bright and you’re at the right angle for seeing spectrums in simple happening. Gatlinburg, my grandfather says and points a leather finger down through the dark at the patch of lights off the mountain- the one we’re walking towards, that I’m trying to make you see as a wet field in the slant-hour of the morning because I think that image may have something to do with the untouchability feeling and maybe the naming of those lights and our walking towards them has something to do with eating the cake donut, with bringing the out in and changing the world inside my stomach. Are you not seeing it? Makes sense. I’m forgetting the main distinction I was banking on. Do we at least agree on the Like Rules? maybe the likes aren’t meant to operate on all these axes at once: real night imagined morning, real town in Tennessee imagined glint of leaves of grass. What a fancy philosopher once said about Tigers in India might apply here: (the same friend who said the thing about the chunks showed me this, of course) “There are two kinds of Tiger Rules” Thus: Gatlinburg: the patchy weeds and floral stubble growing on the island in the middle of a big two-way road in Louisiana Thus: Los Angeles: my each untouchable sight this morning before ingestion of three-quarters of this cake donut Thus: A tiger in India: the words a tiger in India This is something that’s always been despite constant misrecollection of the rules that constitute it : the cake donut conditional on you this morning or : conditional now and always and so always as it has been exactly: alchemical. : that is, there are no Tape Rules.
9.
Dream Rules 00:41
Shells cling to each tree all the way down the line because it’s the still cool night. The trickle sound of the late ones pushing their fat slick bodies up from the dirt. The crunch of abundance of them juicy under our morbid feet. The trees in rows, but was this a gardner’s intent or a thing that the trees do themselves? Don’t some do that? Am I making this up? Do the ones among the roots care about the lines? No image down there- their eyes are closed. No sound under the ground. No cairns or etchings or meaningful mosses or howls of sign-wolf- no starting gunshot- no astrology in dirt no shinto in the shell. what are the rules of shells breaking? what are the caring rules? Their sound blasting like silence now so strong and constant that the moon must be yellow and enormous- tonight one thing elicits another. The cool air like water like nighttime your feet like children’s feet your pity like your mom’s pity The humming sawing song moving like grass under inconstant wind seen from far off- green to lighter green to green, your weight like the unflinching sky because adjectives exist only in dreams and gods only between trees that grow in lines.
10.
Whale Rules 00:41
It wasn’t the same day that I took the piece of charcoal from the barrel in front of the glass shop under the Hewes J train stop, but it was close to it, I’m sure. Or maybe I had just found it earlier that day- but either way, I had it in my jacket pocket that day we walked by the glass shop and I took the piece of charcoal. I doubt it’s that important, the sequence but maybe it is. The charcoal, for sure, is long gone, and, looking back, wasn’t much more than a sign pointing toward the object in my jacket pocket and what happened to us that day. It had the raw edges it should have had and the rough shape of a continent, so I said it looked like a whale. It was rusted orange where it had to be and was in my jacket pocket, and we’d talked about whales recently, so I wish you could have seen it. I lost it. Or gave it up rather. It became part of a deal I’ll tell you about later, which went down according to rules we’ll talk about later. I went on without it for a while going in and out of my house without it and in and out of the parts of sidewalk with the sun where it’s better now that it’s cold without it and went to visit my mom at her house without it and then I was no longer without it. It went down into the tar pit where all the dulling things collect: whales, torn ligaments, alone moments with inexplicable feelings, sex events that fertilize the dreams that themselves then crust into the dream fossils all silent, not even the death gurgle of real muck. The next time I saw it it didn’t look like a whale anymore. It hadn’t been thought of like that for a while, and it had human teeth now.

about

This is prose poem in ten parts that I wrote mostly while travelling this past winter.
there's no audio, but bandcamp makes you upload something so i just put this recording of a washing machine i made at some point. check the lyrics for the poems.

go to the merch page of this site to order a copy. I printed out a bunch.

credits

released May 5, 2016

art by Jenny Williams

license

tags

about

The Cradle Brooklyn, New York

music of paco cathcart. brooklyn, NY.

for booking/whatever: pkcathcart@yahoo.com or
646 220 3328

i also engineer for other people/bands. hit me up for that analog natural jank.

contact / help

Contact The Cradle

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like The Cradle, you may also like: