Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Oafishness"
Cresting onto the wave of the present, the specter subsists
of who we are, who we have been. We travel endless eternities
to get back to the square one— this is who we were, and more
importantly, this is how we were seen. Mary, who painted me
as Michelangelo’s David, saw me as him— naked, raw flesh,
handy in bed, but rough around the edges, impulsive, and eager,
in an oafish way, to sleep with as many women as I could. All
these eternities later, looking at Philadelphia in the Aughts, I am
unable to say that the raw, naked meat part of me was not
motivated by the crass impulse to prove my viability in the world
by racking up conquests, as though all the bed-hopping were
a sport, and I a detested vulgarian by taking a game she played too
out to the Nth of complete excess. If, nonetheless, the whole
thing is to laugh, it is because I never, then or now, found Jesus,
his eagerness to mortify his senses and thus enhance his spirituality,
that interesting. The clumsy oaf who would stumble into the next
room and fornicate with Jenny, herself an oaf of crafting wickedly
and mischievously undetectable appearances, likes to think that
these games are all towards the good, and that the expansiveness
of raw meat, taken out to the Nth, is simultaneously an expansion
of consciousness. If Jenny and I left the door open, out of naïve
trust or just oafish dumbness as usual, there remains that space in
human reality that stands on the precipice and just jumps— like
The Fool in the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, who has Holiness
against Jesus in headlong momentum towards the crazy wisdom of
real, tactile experience, we wanted to see what could happen next.
What happened, from 2026, is that the world is onto our games
and our conflicts. They care. Oafishness is an interesting religion, too.
© Adam Fieled 2026
of who we are, who we have been. We travel endless eternities
to get back to the square one— this is who we were, and more
importantly, this is how we were seen. Mary, who painted me
as Michelangelo’s David, saw me as him— naked, raw flesh,
handy in bed, but rough around the edges, impulsive, and eager,
in an oafish way, to sleep with as many women as I could. All
these eternities later, looking at Philadelphia in the Aughts, I am
unable to say that the raw, naked meat part of me was not
motivated by the crass impulse to prove my viability in the world
by racking up conquests, as though all the bed-hopping were
a sport, and I a detested vulgarian by taking a game she played too
out to the Nth of complete excess. If, nonetheless, the whole
thing is to laugh, it is because I never, then or now, found Jesus,
his eagerness to mortify his senses and thus enhance his spirituality,
that interesting. The clumsy oaf who would stumble into the next
room and fornicate with Jenny, herself an oaf of crafting wickedly
and mischievously undetectable appearances, likes to think that
these games are all towards the good, and that the expansiveness
of raw meat, taken out to the Nth, is simultaneously an expansion
of consciousness. If Jenny and I left the door open, out of naïve
trust or just oafish dumbness as usual, there remains that space in
human reality that stands on the precipice and just jumps— like
The Fool in the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, who has Holiness
against Jesus in headlong momentum towards the crazy wisdom of
real, tactile experience, we wanted to see what could happen next.
What happened, from 2026, is that the world is onto our games
and our conflicts. They care. Oafishness is an interesting religion, too.
© Adam Fieled 2026
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