John Biscello

As I sit here at my desk waiting for the world to end (again)—the collective hunch and shrug of mass many keeping future tense at peak volume—I think I will write. That seems as good and fine of a thing to do as anything else. Both a way of passing time and playing with time. Apocalypse is always in vogue. Its cosmetic disposition and audience-tested screenings of potential endings may change, but it never goes away, a sitcom immune to cancellation. In this respect, everyone has the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads (which means it’s either a biblically enormous sword, or many swords covering many heads), and I am well-aware that as I sit here at my desk, the Sword of Damocles is suspended above me, yet instead of looking up at the sword every third second, I look inward endlessly, channeling the sword-threat and malingering peril into writing that may never directly include sword—as word, as object, as word-object dell’arte—but it is there, in the writing, or behind the writing, in the shadows of words that function as decoys and disguises, it is there, the sword’s dark assassin of a voice….

The world is ending again today, so many worlds have come and gone, so many reruns aired in narcotic syndication, doomsday protracted into a punchline and formula arc under hot lamps. Whether today is the day, or tomorrow is the day, or the day after tomorrow is the day … I will try to sit down at my desk and write. Like the band on the Titanic who kept on playing as the ship sank. Sure, that was only a sentimentally effective dramatic device in a movie, but that band playing burned into my retinas and heart as an enduring symbol of creative solidarity. The mausoleum sinking of a ship did not stop the music. Now you can say America is the Titanic, or the world is the Titanic. We are sinking. Glacial waters will be our grave and calling. I want to keep playing as this happens. Playing in this sense being writing. This may well be the definition of what I call apocalyptic bop. A hard driving and incessant music, a desperate music born from anxiety-climes and tinder of apocalypse, music squeezed out of endangerment, out of recognition that you are part of an endangered species. Apocalyptic bop has been my writing jam for a while now. Several of my novels owe their conception to this incubus and hothouse angel. Whether Amazon-branded flying robots with laser rays deliver death to our doors (in two days or less), or an FDA-approved virus stages a holocaust, or a rising flood to rival Noah’s accelerates the amphibian stage in human evolution, I say play, keep playing, play on and on. Even if you think you are alone, there are others out there playing—they are syncing, tuning, harmonizing—on waves of creative levels that are on the side of life as a morphic festival of a force, an abstract riot. Make Mardi Gras out of mortuary. Hearts may break in real-time, but what you play, your brave weary blues, resounds within the timeless.