[A brief primer: “Clog” is a portion of a longer work made up of sections of a novella written about a man who enters the woods with a saw that cannot be bested, it is the perfect saw. He becomes obsessed, and as any good sawman removes his limbs. These novella sections were then translated into multiple languages by various computed means and reassembled into what we have here, notably Klingon, Romanian, and Mandarin Chinese; all then slowly translated back by other means, often word by word so as to disrupt anything like intent, and enact something closer to pure encrypted narrative.]

SAWMAN’S JOURNAL (yours):

Evening boy you ought to create something haunted and unoriginal for the

My assistant can’t help you

My feelings about what follows are unstimulating

I have precious metals

I SAW

Saw yes no I want to spit in blood’s protection. This is something. This is what I’m thinking. I’m tired. I’m ready to work again. I’m ready to work again. There’s this frenetic corner to all my thoughts now. Even now. Even just now having just begun having just become whatever. IT seems to move differently every second. There’s this gigantic red ‘O’ that glows atop the machine and I’m not quite sure what it means but I’m quite, quite sure that I’m terrified of when it ceases to glow. Interesting note from creator. Not sure what to make of any of it. Definitely care not about passing on saw gigantic saw to future generations. Imagining self on birthday morn of young young buck handing off saw as glorious gift ‘take it with you into the future’ and being laughed out of the living room. No. That isn’t what it’s for. People don’t make this sort of thing to hand down. THEY encourage your potential death, this is maybe what I’ve realized. I realize it too much. There’s any number of possible conclusions one might come to but the undeniable factor is the beginning rev and corresponding gliiiiide that feels like someone taking the sharpest knife cooled down below freezing through the front of your forehead on through to the back of your scalp until your head just sort of coolly splits open and all you are is a welcome mat for Stein’s posterity, or something.

Projected teeming burnt up dogs        Began today with momentary torment before taking saw to each of a pair of ballet shoes found in dumpster behind pizzeria. THIS sort of thing is not what saw’s for and yet it’s undeniably pleasant to use machines for endeavors they were not intended for. Something godly in that, perhaps, something of the discovering of new galaxies in that, perhaps. One doesn’t know or want to know.

Suicide and control for cowards suicide and control for cowards suicide and control for cowards suicide and control for cowards suicide and control for cowards suicide and control for cowards suicide and control for cowards suicide

There is a matrix on the ground which guides one footstep to the next and though we cannot see it we always know it is there for we are adhering to its principles without so much as a thought or dispute. There are lines of light which guide the human animal towards an infinity in space and though we’ve been told (guided) to believe that something is nothing and that outer anything is chaos we are in fact completely trusting when we let ourselves become swallowed up by the night so black that we cannot see ourselves or hear our hearts think. And there is peace not in food nor in sex nor in hurt but in the mere fact that there is no peace and there has never been a word so degrading as peace as long as we’ve lived and we watch ourselves shower in here we watch ourselves become clean and there is small beauty in this immediately before the struggle which completely tears us asunder and we are children in the fray or in fields where nothing bright ever happens but we are sweet-toothed and do not reject the potentiality of lust or happiness or freedom because we can feel it as the wind courses over our flesh. And in that silence there comes a tidal wave of friction which precedes everything important and turns it into ideology and pain ideology and pain and as we watch this happen we can only equate it with the bright bright bright blue screens of ephemera hovering just beyond the horizon on a screen so black that nothing could possibly live there but the blue blue blue center that hurts to stare directly into and yet we cannot help ourselves. We cannot help ourselves. We cannot help ourselves. And even as the children learn to govern learn to farm learn to smell to eat to think to write to read to paint there is something ungodly about this description that causes each of them to panic panic erodes away their rational thoughts and they become vigilantes each more angry at the last than the next and as this happens one crow hovers just above the village and the children lost in hay fields look up to understand the blackness on the wings the blackness on the wings and with this a kiss falls down to each and there is slow penetrating lust that creates a sort of magic within the sphere and each child slowly follows the matrix the labyrinth toward the center when eventually they reach the orchid which pulls slowly apart to reveal another planet deep inside there and they each step in one by one by one by one by one and there is majesty though ignorance in footsteps following this way and trusting that with entirety the children are not hurt. Unhurt by the footsteps the children are thence able to gather the surroundings only to realize that the bright blue blue blue screen had suddenly been transformed into fields upon fields of glowing neon hay that shifts and moves with the wind with such purpose that although it’s tempting to look away after so much organization and direction the children simply cannot and tearing off their clothes the children are suddenly grown with bodies and cocks and breasts and there is nothing rotten or hurtful or scary about their flesh as it lies between the rows upon rows of glowing neon hay and as it tickles them they roll into one another until suddenly they have all combined into that massive specter of humanity the cube and as the cube they graze comfortably within one another until the light slowly shifts from blue blue blue to a deep and calming red and one by one the children understand that it is time to sleep and one by one their arms are relaxed behind their heads and their minds are able to comprehend nothing but that distant point the polar point of guidance settles every mind and pulls eyelids heavily down onto cheeks and breath breath breath is all. Like I am trapped inside the saw like it is endless. Man I wish I could see that way. What a way a silent little piddling way. The movement is so profound. I can’t believe it and I don’t want to. I can’t and don’t want.

and simply start crying and tearing my clothes off and hurling myself relentlessly into the ground that I’d often wake up at night dreaming about it; needing it, feeling as if there was nothing else in my life worth pursuing except for this one manic episode wherein I was the cyclone and the world around me was the cloud/the sphere/the god that I couldn’t make sense of. I needed something vast, some immense pressure against my forehead to understand that this was in effect important and that everything else up until now had been a piddling training course for my deterioration.

I see the beyond and it is nothing more than childhood or blood running from limbs or the sorts of [this job’s a fucking nightmare] things that humans can’t often see due to pure lack of interest. I change my mind and walk away though always regretting this will cause me to do almost all the stupid things I’ve done hence. I’ve enjoyed the stupid things and I welcome them the way one might welcome a porous knife, blood circle, failed saw, toad occasionally stepping into your path and yet even this is tainted for the memory of once trying on a friend’s sandal only to stomp a croaking frog into wet oblivion. I do this and my friend looks at me differently from then on and I am ashamed though not enough to stop my gloating and run the other way.

[dead space where husk of idiot sits]

Grant Maierhofer is the author of Marcel (The Heavy Contortionists) and the forthcoming novel Postures.