A Professional Speaker
A Professional Speaker
A professional speaker walks into a bar — and from this deliberately absurd entry point, the entire Unending Manuscript begins.
This two-page diptych is the opening poem and visual cornerstone of the manuscript: a dark, satirical bar-joke that quietly expands into something far harder to dismiss. The handwritten text is raw and self-interrupting — crossed-out corrections, emphatic underlinings, arrows, and marginal asides ("And none of this crap either about compassion") give it the unfiltered energy of a mind in mid-revelation, half-joke, half-prophecy, half-manifesto. Three halves, because the math was never going to add up here.
The narrative follows a hyper-disciplined professional speaker — ascetic, breatharian, body-building, denying himself water and food alike — who descends from high mountain caves into a seedy gambling bar during humanity's dark night of the soul. He neither drinks, eats, gambles, nor indulges in any vice. The bouncer immediately senses an equal, or perhaps a superior. Scents of coffee and meat cooking register as auspicious omens of hidden wealth. Beneath the surface simmers the speaker's profound disgust for the underclass — the drinkers, the smokers, the cess-pit of ordinary humanity he deigns to enter only briefly.
The story spirals outward: a historical setting amid Karl Marx and Charles Dickens, secret involvement in 9/11 (revealed almost as an aside), a fleeting tolerance of this cess-pit long enough to found the Bank of England and plant the seed for what would become the Midnight Banquet Foundation. The bar-joke has swallowed epochs.
What makes this piece the manuscript's true beginning is the moment of fusion it represents: the dense freeform ink doodles no longer merely surround the text — they wrap, entwine, and cradle the handwritten words, making the organic linework an inseparable living border. The border is almost predatory. The words feel digested, protected, or birthed by this unending visual organism. Look closer and the doodle terrain reveals itself: subtle faces, creatures, abstract landscapes, biomorphic shapes and eye-like forms that emerge only on repeated viewings. Some sections are dense with cross-hatching that opens into shadowy depth; others loosen into fluid waves or arrowed gestures that push the eye across the page. The linework breathes. It does not decorate.
The manuscript does not stop at ink and paper. Body Building Breatharians — an AI-generated song inspired directly by this poem — extends the speaker's world into sound: listen to it here. It is one thread in a larger vision where the manuscript's imagery, text, and music co-evolve — each medium feeding back into the others, none of them finished.
This is the piece that sets the manuscript's tone and logic: how personal discipline, revulsion, long-term planning, and hidden machination might quietly shape epochs — smuggled inside what appears, at first glance, to be a joke.
This high-quality fine art reproduction captures every nuance of the original pen work — varying line weights, the subtle smudges of long sessions, the intimate scale of handwritten script amid explosive doodle borders. Available in various sizes, it is the ideal entry point into the Unending Manuscript: hang it where it can quietly unsettle visitors, and let them find their own way in.