Insouciant, Inebriate, A Real Shambles

Perdidos,

Foragers,

Strip teasers, go-go dancers, gone-all-the-wayers

Gate gate para sum gate

Unread geniuses

Hobos and no-bulls

Underachievers who make an art of not standing still

Makers of panegyrics, epitheliums, eggshell walkers

Ravers, rowers, practical jokers

(Can you say wet so that you feel wet)

Lexicographical hoods,

Naysayers and loud brayers

Sleeping in the briar patch of love

Tall talkers, ramblers

Who never finish what they start...

(Signs & Traces Of Who They Were)

The Diligents of course regard the Ravers as outright Charlatans, big talkers who put on plays and make every day an adventure but who fail to show up for work or, if they do, make excuses about why they weren’t there the day before and how they need the day after tomorrow off to celebrate Charlie Rekrap’s birthday. But what strikes the Diligents worst of all is the big smile the Ravers put on when they have to clean out their desk because they’ve been fired.

It can get really rough for the Diligents right about then, seeing as how they so badly want to be the Raver’s friend and there they are, the Raver being led out by the Executive Vice President in charge of Malfeasance Management (once upon a time a musician, now she knows all about knives), who wants them to turn in their I.D. card and the Raver is refusing to give it up and laughing loudly, getting everyone on the trading floor’s attention. That sort of showoffiness really gets to the Diligents.

-- It’s a lack of manners, it really is.

-- He’s being taken to the wall right now.

--So what? How is a loud voice going to solve anything?

Ravers are sometimes found dead in their bathtub. Contrary to what the Diligents suspect, they had no intention of committing suicide. They simply like to go under the water to listen to their heartbeat and the blood in their veins, and they forget to come up. Actions like that make Diligents think Ravers are really cowards, but that isn’t the case, the Ravers just tend to get lost on various tangents. If they knew this, it would infuriate the Diligents even more.

Also because they believe that all bodies of water are one and the same, so it saves them a trip to the beach.

Even though Ravers don’t have stomachs per se, they can sometimes eat for days at a time, consuming everything in the house or hotel where they are staying. When they begin to carve their initials into the leg of the chair where they are sitting, watch out they’ll be on the floor gnawing on it in a jiffy.

Once a Raver was staying with a very diligent Mother, who had cooked a full pot of chicken stew for her two skinny kids. While the mother was out doing errands, the Raver first took a small cup of the stew, and then began to get serious. In half an hour, the pot was empty. It felt to him as if a forty-year hunger had overcome him and he simply could not resist. The diligent mother came home and saw that the stew was gone and the Raver asleep on the couch. She looked everywhere for the stew because she simply could not believe that that the Raver had eaten it, he was such a bag of bones. The Raver pretended to be asleep for as long as he could, and then slipped out the door.

The Raver always looked back on that stew with a special tenderness born of its clandestine consumption, with a feeling one might reserve for an especially happy love affair or a lucky day at the race track.

Regarding their sacred books: the tracings, a few scattered pages, are the only books they possess, and they are slowly fading away. These they venerate as rare images of Ancestor Ravers. It is all they know of them. The Ravers tell many stories about their parents but they are too lazy to write them down, and in any case everyone suspects they are just making it all up, so why bother? They can always tell another story about their great-grandfather tomorrow.

The Ravers believe that time is not a straight line but a loop, a Moebius that curves back on itself: endless voyages are possible and one can never really be in the same place twice. They feel that it must be possible to be on two sides of the equation at the same time, and they dedicate their deepest efforts to finding a way to make a hole in time. There have to be pockets somewhere where time is either non-existent or all time exists simultaneously. This may also explain Raver sloth.

The Ravers have a creation myth about a cruel master and an island but no one is really sure if they should take it seriously. They say that many Ravers tried to swim off the island and were eaten by sharks or marooned on even lonelier places. Some say it’s all just a tall tale, a fable, nothing to take seriously. In any case, or so the story goes, after some length of time the old Ravers gave up trying to swim away and withdrew to the interior of the island, where they lived in caves and got acclimated to a simple life of foraging for berries and living without gods. Nevertheless their hopeful disposition, and the tendency to believe that the Beyond Labyrinth exists somewhere, lead some of them to disappear down the mouth of the cave. Those Ravers (if they were indeed Ravers and not something else) never returned. They are known by the name Montesinos and Ponce de Leon, which are noble sounding names, although the young Ravers laugh at the respect the older Ravers reserve for them. The older Ravers regard them as the true ancestors, while the young say: Ha! Maybe we’ll disappear and go somewhere else too!

It is thought that perhaps it was the Montesinos and Ponces who found a passageway through the earth from one side to another. In any case, no one has ever been back to the Old Island.

They count their money by throwing it down on the table or the floor. They sing impromptu. Ravers are naturals for public events, promenades, parades and festivals except that you can’t count on them to show up any earlier than the last minute. While everyone else has been planning their costumes and their floats for months, holding rehearsals and making sure everyone knows the dances, the Ravers get together the night before and start building a strange monster without really knowing what the monster is or what it will look like; they party all night and believe themselves transformed into sleepy sirens and terrible sea creatures by ten a.m. or noon. They are proud to lose in every category as long as they get the chance to dance shamelessly in the street, and as they draw close to the ocean, the salty air enters their nostrils, they forget the sea monster immediately, and go do what they do best, which is lie down on the beach and argue among themselves. Ravers never agree on anything.

Ravers can be indifferent towards things not because they are spiritually inclined but because they contend that every form is a constantly evolving mutation, capable of appearing or disappearing based on laws that no one fully comprehends. Over a long period of time and starting when they were very young, they have watched things vanish, only to reappear in very different guises: parents, cannibals, witchdoctors, nurses, to name a few. Only the body in motion can be the true body, the one that is standing still and has its photo taken is a fake. So they tend to hide out from photographers, recording contracts, journalists and debt collectors. (All that is water under the bridge, and as everyone knows, you can never cross the same bridge twice.) Ravers seem frivolous and confused to the naked eye.

A saxophone may do for a sledgehammer as well as a torch. Buildings look very different from different perspectives. It can be said that entire structures can be made to disappear under certain weather conditions: this they regard as the city of the future. As shadows are two dimensional representations of three dimensional objects, they are inclined to believe that three dimensional objects are shadows of a fourth dimension. The question is how to get there. (See disquisition on time, above.)

More than 90% of the body is made up of fluids. Young Ravers tend to be serious, intent upon solving the riddles of time and space and the fourth dimension while the old are given to frivolity. Ravers believe that as they grow older their bodies will become either more like water or more like wood, and thus they spend an inordinate amount of time in steam baths and thermal heat, in order to remain as fluid as possible.

After a certain age (when wood is getting the upper hand), the old walk voluntarily into the mouth of the nearest volcano.

What do Ravers feel about G-d or gods? The feel that there are gods present in the world, they feel this especially strongly when they are inspired and things begin to vibrate all around them. But they are not so ignorant as to feel that a god is trapped inside a bottle, a book, a musical instrument, a shell or a stone. In fact one of the reasons that the general population regards Ravers as idiots is because they continually look for the gods inside their own heads, and desperately try to invent some way to free the god from its confinement.

Needless to say, a Raver’s personal relationships at any particular moment tend to be a right royal mess. But so what?

One night a group of young Ravers met a distinguished Professor of Statistical Genetics in a sushi bar. They got to talking and the Professor was most happy to encounter some actual specimens that correlated to his line of work. In an inspired mood, after discussing Ornette Coleman, numerology and pantheism, he told this group of Ravers all about their genetic pre-dispositions and artistic tendencies.

After about an hour of listening to the professor skylark around about them (their very them-selves), they grew tired of him and began saying outrageous and really insulting things to him, all of which seemed to inspire him even further, until finally they couldn't take it any longer, and dragging him out of the sushi bar, attempted to stretch him lengthwise, using him as a rope bridge over the moat at Galapagos; when that didn’t work, they hung him from the ceiling at the Rubalad, and when they heard him mutter, "Interesting Phenomenon!", they got fed up and left him hanging from the underside of one of the new girders on the Williamsburg Bridge, twisted into their favorite shape, a Moebius Strip. They figured that was the last they would hear from him.

The next thing they knew, word was going around that the Professor had written an article for Time Outré, titled "Ravers and the Genetic Propensity for Fits of Outrageous Violence", denouncing them as mere barnacles on the hull of society, chaotic misfits and atonal aborigines, which made them very happy and definitely enhanced their reputation, at least among themselves.

The Ravers prefer to keep their diary or next symphony on scrolls of manuscript paper and then wrap themselves up in the text before they go out on the street. Each person is a book and by wearing what they have written, the public may read who they are, which results in some very compelling scenes in subways and elevators. (It may also explain why there are so few preserved Raver manuscripts.). But if truth be told, Ravers are overwhelmed by shyness and prefer to hide behind things, which is why they can frequently be seen carrying umbrellas on sunny days.

Sometimes a Diligent gets greedy, anxious about life, and that’s when he really leans hard on his Raver friends. (The Oblivions of course are trained to be greedy as a virtue.) One of their favorite tricks is to go to a party where they know there’ll be plenty of Ravers and listen quietly all evening as the Ravers expound on transvestites, Martha and Illinois Jacquet, jumping boxcars and suicide. Sometimes the Ravers tell strange stories that never get printed, which would be too wild and improbable even for the Post. The Diligent goes home and patiently writes down everything he heard and then hands it to an Oblivion, who is an important person with Important Connections in the magazine world, who manages to take a bit of everything he has heard and cobble it together into a screenplay, which he sells to Hollywood.

Then he pulls up stakes — (But how can you pull up stakes when you had none to begin with? It is a verbal figuration, nothing else) and with his blond girl friend, who really believes in his Talent, heads out West to become a hack at a studio. (A transvestite on Third Avenue back in the old days had more integrity.)

It is for this reason that Ravers get visibly nervous before entering movie theatres.

A young Raver was down and out. His girlfriend was out of town, he wasn’t getting laid regular, and what’s worse, a certain Other Raver had offered him a thousand dollars if he would shut up for ten minutes and write a symphony, which would mean that the Raver would have to quit pacing and sit still, and all that went against the grain.

In any case, this was about the time that word was beginning to spread (once again) about Ravers and certain entrepreneurs were trying to latch on to the phenomenon. The disconsolate Raver was walking down the street when he saw a very average family approaching from the other direction, all of them wearing bright red tee-shirts. When he got closer to them, the Raver could see that the lettering on the kid’s tee-shirt said, "100% Pure Junior Raver," while the mother’s tee-shirt was emblazoned with Raver Mama and the man’s Big Raver Daddy.

The Raver didn’t know what to do. At first he just pulled up right in front of the family and stared at them as if they were animals in the zoo. Then he reached into his pants and pulled out the exacto knife he was carrying in his back pocket for not exactly obvious reasons, and with a few unbalanced and unstoppable strokes shredded the tee-shirts and tore them off the persons in question. He danced feverishly on the remnants and with a few swings of his foot pushed them into the gutter, where they floated away. And while the family stood in front of him shocked and slightly bloody, he lay down on the sidewalk and began to sing.

As it happens, just at that moment a photographer for the paper of record happened to be nearby and he began to take photos. They were really strange photos, what with the semi-naked family, the blood running down their chests and the Raver lying on the sidewalk in front of them laugh-singing. Needless to say the editors at the Great Metropolitan Daily had the graphics people put the shirts back on the victims before they ran the picture on the front page. The photo ran under the headline, Further Degradation of Raver Life. *