Manifesto

Fringe-monkey Manifesto

Fringe-monkeys aspire, whether consciously or not, to the status of Byronic Hero.

We are the onlookers, the poets, the prosists, the satirists who hang at the verge of every group, never fully joining, and observe the human condition. Our tongues stick to the roofs of our mouths, but once loosed run amok with rants and satire. Tools we employ are: sarcasm (because, acknowledged or not, we are angry), satire (we are the looking glass to the masses and show most prominently their warts and hypocrisy), gibberish (”if you can’t dazzle them . . .” but such also intends to provoke thought in the otherwise unconscious), laser stares (how effectively they were employed in our youth by authority figures to show disapproval, but ours are merely a monkey mockery to incite reflection), c’est la vie (more often “what the funk,” but this is a rebellion against the ridiculousness of situation and unthinking action by fools transparent to us but too obtuse to fathom their own idiocy and idiosyncrasy), silence (nothing scares the crud out of people in the modern world as much as silence and the echo of their own thoughts), and blank indifference (this habit of non-attachment, rooted in the Zen, functions both as defensive and offensive circumstantially).

No lunatics
We know too well our own minds

Suicide is forbidden

Though given to occasional depression, sometimes of Herculean proportion, we persevere to find where life leads—or we can take life. Destiny is our slave, Serendipity our benevolent angel. Curiosity, a greater fault and lovelier siren than depression, is more the danger than despair. Boredom is the fault of a depressed imagination and an unbearable burden to the fringe monkey.

Nonconformists to the nth, we value individuality over all but sense and sensibility. Though by reason we know that certain measures are necessary to protect the individual, we reason through and heed those cautions we judiciously agree to, not by writ of law but by virtue of truth and reason. Do not expect us to be beholden to silly quibbling over any law or letter of any law—we are law unto ourselves, each to own. Law is a hierarchy of blame. Blame is the displacement of responsibility onto the shoulders of too often incapable institutions and individuals. We respect the office and the spirit of the law, but find fault too often with the inequity of enforcement prevalent in our society. This is the spirit of anarchy, not for the sake of rebellion but for the sake of reasonable, and reasoned, behavior.

Fun, joy, delight, and laughter are human needs, and as such are the responsibility of each human being. Tolerance is a virtue the fringe monkey seeks to acquire as liberally as education. Education is the seed and fruit of true democracy, the very ambrosia of liberty, and we will drink as deeply and as often as we can enable ourselves to do so.

Art and poetry are the blood and soul of humanity. They are indispensable. This is our only proselytic platform. It is both our right and our responsibility to disseminate art and poetry whether by covert or by overt action. We shall overcome! (ignorance)

It is the unfortunate habit of the fringe-monkey to procrastinate; thus, a manifesto begun in 2001 finds itself incomplete through the first quarter of 2004—hence updated and further amended in 2007. This is basically a function of split attention, as fringe-monkeys tend to find interest in everything—even when bored, the fringe-monkey finds interest in contemplating the idea of boredom itself. We find interest as much in the minutia of the mundane as in the deepest reaches of philosophy and ontological speculation.

Some would justly accuse the fringe-monkey of being irreligious and at times superstitious; this is a function, again, of split attention. It is not for lack of faith that the fringe-monkey fears commitment to any particular doctrine, but more an overabundance of faith in the existence of truth and lie inherent in every doctrine. In general, all systems of faith, doctrine, and mythos contain some measure of truth as well as some measure of inaccuracy, hypocrisy, and/or inconsistency. We fringe-monkeys are wonderfully fond of critiquing such systems, being especially tickled of fancy in finding and dissecting paradox and irony, for these are among our favorite toys.

Due to the nature of fringe-monkey curiosity, we tend to share phases, especially in adolescence (beyond which many of us do not mature, or are known to regress from time to time), that may include any number, often in combination, of the following:

• Zealotry in a particular faith or political stance: this often results in a rebellion based on later disillusionment with said faith or political platform.
• Anarchy: in the truest sense of the word, the fringe-monkey tends to become a law unto himself or herself after realizing that laws are made for the unlawful and that Reason is more consistent than law. Fringe-monkeys are given to adhering to regulations for which they see and agree on the rationale.
• General sloth: the fringe-monkey covets convenience. This may become at some time habitual, but seldom remains the status quo as fringe-monkeys tend to rise to positive action in the face of observed and understood injustice. We all too often rationalize this as efficiency, in many cases adopting a more reasonable and judicious efficiency upon maturation.
• Activism: no greater self-control is manifested in human nature than that of a fringe-monkey reining in reactionary umbrage and curbing himself or herself from taking direct and radical measures to struggle against perceived injustice and societal inequities. Maturation brings a more judicious, and less capricious, course of rebellion or revolution.
• Rebellion: this often goes hand-in-hand with the Activism phase. Fringe-monkeys tend to “tilt at windmills” when juvenile. Radical action often seems the most effective means of recourse to the immature fringe-monkey. This phase often mellows into a more subversive revolutionary phase as the fringe-monkey grows to learn that the system is more efficiently and productively changed from within than destroyed from without, and that to tear down one tyranny too often invites the rise of worse tyrannies or fascisms untenable to convenience and the chosen lifestyle of the fringe-monkey.
• Melancholy: how unfortunate it is that fringe-monkeys tend toward depressions and deep pits of melancholic dissatisfaction with the world. It is agantoginistic, to say the least, to the fringe-monkey need for feeling accomplished and/or productive in the world.

Addendum A

It’s a complicated world, my friend
We all swim the river as though the other bank
lay in easy reach-or at least possible reach
But the only way across is through the bottom
or coins in the eyes to pay Charon

Worries weight the swimmer
to survive them is to grow stronger
yet more tired . . .

Never mind the snipers on the shore
they are merely your friends and family
Enemies have no true weapon but trust
and the wind remains indifferent
as do the current and the fishes

Jonah was Pinocchio in a separate life
different in the context
of the context that made him the same
History never repeats itself
without editing for originality

A tall white rabbit and a pubescent girl
scandal on the six-o’clock news
where nothing is new—especially sensation

Vogue is merely the spoke of the wheel we pass closest to

Mercury in retrograde is simply the cosmic clock
resetting for seconds lost gazing at its own natural beauty
and the audacity of man to believe he matters

God keeps no score
why do we?

Heaven rejoices
needs no reason

Hell is a place for Cub fans to drink beer and bitch
That part about the heat is fantasy-the temperature varies
precisely as it does in the schizophrenic cycle of Midwest weather patterns

All is vanity
I’d cite the passage, but that too is vanity

Woe to the world!
Woe to the sinners!
Woe to murderers and adulterers!
And woe to the train bearing down on you
a hundred miles an hour and relentless
as the damnation you pass on strangers
for driving by a theory they can’t even articulate

Blessed are the dead, for they’re free of this ridiculous life
Blessed are the feebleminded, for they know not the worries of the rich
Blessed are the rich, for theirs are the coolest toys
Blessed are the impoverished, for they shall obtain welfare
Blessed are the divorcés, for they had the good sense to ditch and run
Blessed are the lawyers, for theirs is the recession-proof industry
Blessed are the preachers, for their hypocrisy is obvious
Blessed are the heretics, for they have dispensed with disillusion

Ain’t nothing but a good time goin’ bad

Blues just a color on a scale in minor key

The dead shall rise
when the flood reaches cemetery hill

All your morbid horsecrud has infected my ears
my brain repeats your remonstrance in eerie silences
even dogs can’t hear the notes of your soul screaming

Machines are too noisy
let’s dispense with every silly electric one of them

How can anything be evil in a world with no good?

Polarity is the illusion of separation
and the misapprehension of difference
the monist cries his song alone among the stars
which are him

What is proper—
What is proper?
Proper?
Propriety is the mindcontrol of a dead aristocracy.

Manners is the bullcrud from which grow the roses of society;
expect weeds now and then.

God is a seven-dimensional autistic child in a race of philosophers

Insanity is the clarity of unreason seen through senses altered by consensus conflicting with reason, filtered through emotion, distilled through dogmatic idealism, and recombined in the ecstasy of true faith.

Sanity is even more confusing.

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