sadoo: 2013

the sadoo, seeking its muse, ceasing to be amused, in its ongoing quest to explore identity, embodiedly, against the backdrop of the world and in the great fiction of humanity, language, unrepentedly seeing the monopolar as homo sapiens saw neanderthals, seeing the polypolar as the blinking winking stinking eye of life and art (the bipolar perhaps as a misnomer on the prickly bridge of evolution), continues plodding toward itself, in this instance by presenting this formal yet inspirational essay on doves, their physiognomies, their olfactory limitations, serendipitous tendencies, mating and scatological preferences, kinship exigencies, and other matters of interest to the general reader and Mrs. Herbert H. Caraway, daughter of Wilma Pucker of Hardin, a suburb of St. Louis.

(Mrs. Caraway advises any further readers to accept the following text as sound, interpreting any meaning that might be begotten _&/^or linger as simply more sound.)

contents

1.0 language

03. thinkinggggggggggggg

17.4 life, culture, evolutionnnn

∞ void (truth, love, doubt)))))))

11 art, arts, arting, articles, icicles, mandibles, kerplunk...…

…i

1.0 language

a student is confused by a use of ‘round’ instead of ‘around’ … as in she’ll probably come round if you leave her alone. We look up ‘round’; there are 69 definitions. How one could eternally fall into the infinite vortices of words, wells as deep as love.

to remain foraging for the language of one’s flesh in the bigbox of the socially mediated languages of money and names

… an evolutionarily dubious move, but one that society calls forth, unable to wholly squelch its origins …

and heresiarch sumli lisum luims said through the mouth of heresiarch xrcaa, one can't resent one's era without being swiftly punished by it.

didn’t heresiarch sumli lisum liums also say, hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner...

(… and this ¾ofacentury ago …)

if god is the white space around the black lines of letters, are we not the keys by which the text is typed?

are then the black lines our technology and laws, our structures and screams?

(as to the nature of the typist, is this not a question now lost in the indecipherable text of the tombstones of time’s graveyard?)

is then the poet an archaeologist in the strata of air?

writing at the end of the word—like neanderthals clawing at existence under the boot of homo sapiens—we attempt to leave behind a record of verbal extinction in forms the future might have the capacity to recognize.

the difference between word and world — el … the name of god.

word is absent god, which spoke itself out of language to place itself, in infinite fragments, in the world.

if, as rényi said with the inspiration of erdős, math is the process of transforming caffeine into formulae, isn’t poetry the process of transferring mud into breath, the spiritualized proclivity of worms?

the two full-word anagrams of funeral: flâneur and frenula

the fun to be had with this

putting the fun back in funeral: real fun

isn’t the blank page the remnant of a dawn or dusk portending a twilight without end, its waiting words an invitation to god’s forgotten diaspora?

the blank page is unfiltered unblanched unsecured light. Careers, money, what is normally called love … are inkblots on the page — craving to fill it, to be analyzed, interpreted, shutting out silence, light, buttresses against the white void … this night of the known, this page of black.

poetry is the textured compromise, mediated in the poet’s flesh, between purity and the human scream protesting it … (shakespeare’s sonnet 66, bishop’s villanelle one love, nemerov’s because you asked about the line between prose and poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow 
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

, soiled, quiet, writhing
on the foreground of the perfect page …)

19⅕ life and spherolution

the first emancipation is from one’s parents, the second from one’s children, the third from one’s self … each gets more difficult, for each is an accumulation of freedoms and freedom in its fullness simulates the spherical mass of the world …

… trauma, like tenure, is transferable …

it’s said about f2’s recent suicide: a life cut short. Not untrue. But our culture is biased (at significant cost) toward a life cut long. Hence the incomprehension, disdain, fear, in response to the daoist thought—

it is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life.

when going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades in life, three in ten will be comrades in death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death, and these also number three in ten. Why is this so? Because they set too much store by life.

[[[[other lines the well-meaning spiritual class are frequently attracted to, with spectacular sentiment—

o destroy your reputation (rumi)

o do not go gentle into that good night (d thomas)

o I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference. (frost)
o do what you love (bus shelter and taxi ads everywhere)

how long and long the list …]]]]

but as heresiarch sumli lisum liums says,

only fools, fanatics and gods can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire …

and did not heresiarch lev ray contend,

you have neither the patience that weaves long lines nor a feeling for the irregular, nor a sense of the fittest place for a thing … For you intelligence is not one thing among many. You … worship it as if it were an omnipotent beast … a man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decision, or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring Beings …. You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

did he not also say,

… politeness is organized indifference?

sex becomes easier and more difficult—easier through the portal of technology, more difficult because of the increasing distance between flesh and flesh’s prosthetics, a distance which now only technology can bridge. Technology and flesh reach for each other across an abyss, but technology initiates and consummates the deal.

isn’t this the melancholy and frenzy at the root of modern coitus?

how can acceptance and passion not be antithetical, other than through the hard-soft unity of the passion of acceptance or the acceptance of passion … these parallel and less-travelled roads?

ambivalence is always and equally present in every situation, event and person : it’s just a matter of its diameter’s extent and the number of surfaces required to contain it …

heresiarch enorjd-u^..en

wilde said that the greatest sin is being boring but i say that the greatest sin is to crucify symbols …

… yet aren’t the two the same?

… to explore life not as a question but a wound …

… the greeks entered into death backwards

we, though, are like the dreams of the christians: we don’t enter into death at all

the something in the body that’s stronger than the body, that doesn’t simply confront death without fear but somehow overcomes the fear and so death …

the attempt of physics and religion to codify this something … but doesn’t it only retain its strength as it eludes codification (the kierkegaardian dialectic)?

remaining committed to the eluding: isn’t this heraclitus’ taut bow?

you have heard it said that novelty is oblivion, but i say to you that the city is a memory of an ancient infinite loop

overheard in a restaurant—

i think of all the innocent housewives on oxycon …

it’s easy to discount teleology in a mathematical epoch, said heresiarch ullullul, but doesn’t the city indicate the truth of the human, the shape of its soul, by laying bare (though the laying bare of the city is like the laying bare of a stripper—it wears the eyes of its watchers and so, as mcluhan observed, is never naked) its contradictions—the eye of the truth of a thing?

(don’t we then see the shape of our collective desire, the barbed wire of our limits, as we explore the urban ecosystem [{our creation and space—the two remaining frontiers]}, rippled watery mirror of our dark dreams?)

aren’t such gross summaries of time, space and power like the newsbites on subway platforms, but on the platform of myth?

07. that medievalism—^thinking

07. that medievalism—^thinkin

07. that medievalism—^thinking

that ideas are dressed feelings, that feelings are chemical relations between the surface of a singularity, masking pluralities, and the surfaces of pluralities, masking singularities, that a large idea wardrobe begins to unmask both the unpresentable pluralities and the unpresentable singularities, that most prefer small wardrobes to maintain a minimal unmasking, any intimation of the inexpressible (we might be able to handle glimpses of flesh but not glimpses of spirit) … what else is there to know?

that art’s task is enlarging the wardrobe, society’s restricting it …

feelings are the truest facts, silence their truest interpretation

if we would speak, if we would attempt to draw nearer to the truth of silence in words, we would dress the feeling in an avalanche of words

as we have rejected silence for the time, as the truest voice of feeling, we must talk endlessly. Hence the rise and dominance of communication. Hence tv, facebook, twitter, texting, therapy …

the Word may have gotten weary of flesh, but words themselves, Word’s children, are young and hungry …

… isn’t the truth a decoy more deceptive than falsity?

there is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses ... the truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

heresiarch azupo

one can’t think about language, art, thought—in the way one can’t think about sex—during the act itself, without destroying or at least diminishing it.

wasn’t this heidegger’s error—in thinking about thinking during thinking, he failed thought?

isn’t this too the problem with academic and workshop’d art?

1,1,1,1 art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

aren’t words the film before the absurd certainty of our flesh and the absurd certainty of darkness, these two lights (eyes) of certainty comprising our sight, the film the spectacles we wear to shade ourselves from the two certain fires?

would not art then be the film of the film, the technology allowing us to transgress the laws, traverse the spectacle, look on flesh and darkness, and not die?

À religion, government, the academy are threatened by the future, which is to say their pasts

À co-ops, non-profits, are threatened by themselves, which is to say a barely filtered humanity

À only the business-technology conglomerate, aligned as it is with the modern sacred, strides, self-assured, through itself into the world, in pumps, on speed, suited, monumental, levitating, wise …

֟ (as to art, isn’t it threatened by what it always is and has been, its eternal nemesis and mother, the void?)

—art

o that which brings forth a preexistent wound

o that which cannot be translated into psychology or biography, politics, scholarship … which cannot be translated

o not the mirror of nature or the cosine of god or technology’s strange companion

creation is prior to consciousness

isn’t this the assumption, arrogance, the basis and breath of art, its trump against the pretenses of industry?

it is the price put on art that destroys the integrity of the art object, not the material or the creation itself

heresiarch bed.rod

if sometimes i speak of art as light and sometimes as darkness, isn’t this because it calls from a black noon and a blinding midnight which to me, human, of muted flashing neon, birthing blurs in the gloaming, are identical twins of passion, as extreme cold and extreme heat both push the body into similar states of oblivion?

can’s tago mago still a perfect musical incarnation of an exuberant descent into and ascent from hell, a kind of largely alinguistic shakespeare

aren’t all carnivorous orgies and divine lunacies contained in aumgn, the album’s otherworldy centerpiece, which magically fuses atavism and futurism?

its anticlimactic close, bring me coffee or tea, softly imperative, comforting, like its title, like fortinbras at the end of hamlet—

—ah yes, recognizable melodies, rhythms … society, order, those living and necessary sleeps …

we could taxonomize the arts, not according to the standard divisions (literature, film, dance, architecture, etc.), which are blurred and blurring anyway, but according to the vague spaces from which they emerge, corresponding vaguely to vague functions they fulfill: the social-ritual arts, the political arts, the craft arts, the absurdist arts, the arts of the void, the subversive arts, the arts of resistance, the mob&savage arts, the academic arts … each with their gods, proclivities, demons, traps, circumscriptions ...

doesn’t this taxonomic difference emerge from the same space as differences between substantive and functional perspectives of religion (family, politics—any cultural expression and its visible and institutional manifestations)?

we know, from theory—the reflection of others and ourselves—and practice—our own experience in others’ creation and our own, in creation itself (to the extent we can enter it without combusting), this immersion blending with mysticism (any difference being the particular relation established with combustion)—that art, in its experience as art, establishes an unsettled relationship with ‘normal’ life. This knowledge co-exists with the knowledge of another ‘art,’ which quantitatively overwhelms, the reproducible (the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction), the socially-generated and generative, the socially affirmative and cohesive, which we acknowledge as legitimate, which we also affirm, but require quotations for, due to the relative ease of its relation with ‘normal’ life, even its comfortable function of support and furtherance of such life.

this doesn’t interest us, other than as a dinner party or casual fuck: its degree of engagement, even exhilaration, varies (and, yes!, how it can exhilarate—this marker’s insight on banality—not of arendt’s evil but of dissipating normalcy), its occasional necessity—insofar as it re-bares necessity and so at least circuitously reaffirms transience and truth—neither irrelevant, tangential nor trite—not uninstructive.

what interests us is the art (or arts) which emerge from a troubled relationship with ‘normal’ life. what interests us is that which displaces quotations—i.e. the surreal, the displaced—from ‘art’ to ‘normal.’ This displacement, this replacement, is our curiosity.

(certainly not trouble itself is sought, as the trite, as those who seek trouble, would have it, but a transmigration of quotations, this movement of markers …)

∞ 0

the judgments directed at us—in their diversity, subtlety, severity, comedy—are always gifts: not primarily in their truth, which soon collapses into the vaster truth of the void of contradiction, but in their energy. Most judgments, however, are simply transformed into judgments: a simian efficiency. But their energy potential is greater: they are capable of aesthetic fission.

isn’t this another way of stating the adage, the pen is mightier than the sword?

we don’t seek love, as we say and feel, but the same unnamable thing art seeks—a kind of geometry of god, the architectures of dreams …

it’s not god that interests me, it’s the artifice of god

not the city but the incarnated idea of the city

not love but the question of love

not art but its circumstances and crib

not i but the void of i

heresiarch asbermo

how many times have i undressed truth in the closets of night and found it to be a heap of clothes on the floor?

… how we all want to stain the stained world …

but in a world so stained, stain upon stain, oil upon oil, isn’t the absence of a stain the more beautiful—and even in a paradoxical sense the more noticeable—mark?

to not reject, but set aside, narrative, the novel, stories, as the primary aesthetic or epistemological form of telling (outside of science) is to displace oneself in what might be described as a non-form (or, perhaps, more authentically, a form yet without form). We might also call this poetry, if by poetry we mean not received (defined) forms but the quest to fish unborn shapes from the void—these shapes having their only appearance as the perception of a feeling of a silent seeking, which seems to reflect the displacement of the self, the mirroring of the human and the void

so the novel is not rejected—as evil, irrelevant (but, oh!, so relevant!), passé, expected, tired, explored …

didn’t both borges &jabes more or less say—the novel … everyone’s doing it, why would i?

aesthetically, hasn’t the novel become like the sonnet in the nineteenth century … awaiting an aesthetic holocaust?

epistemologically, hasn’t it become like catholicism in valencia in 1502?

what compels me has always been not primarily the stories we construct to explain, recreate, justify and cohere our lives, but the architectures of the stories’ creation. I could call these architectures poetry—in the way that poetry preceded the novel in the artform called literature—but i would rather (rather, because i aim for a spiritual-linguistic precision) call them geometry … the geometry of creation. If people wonder why stories don’t dominate my aesthetics and psyche, it is because the shapes of the emergence of the stories are those that joust in my consciousness. I recognize the necessity (in the sense of the existential given) of narrative, society, money, ‘traditional’ work and family … but it is not the appearance of these necessities that is my task; instead, it is the processes by which they appear, the translation of these processes into the shapes of language.

to confess a certain mutual incomprehension between the story-focused and geometry-focused, a quantitative imbalance, is almost unnecessary to state. But it must be confessed. This certain mutual incomprehension is itself a shape, perhaps one that holds a key to language.

might there not be a relation between this exploration of shape i attempt to describe and the root tasks and obsessions of modern mathematics and physics? The very large and the very small interest me—that which circumscribe and ground—and the corpulent middle only to the extent that its flesh at times clarifies the circumscriptions and ground.

the void is not black but light

the void blinds us so we seek the blackness of the blotted page

don’t we desire—flappingly, subversively, resistingly, sometimes torn like spider legs in the hands of certain boys—to keep the page as blank as possible, to give words a place, living space, to land, breathe, choked and mobbed as they are in the claustrophobic communication of the world?

what is this attempt called from the known?

whimsy, delusion, insanity, psychosis, all manner of dysfunction?

and from the cloud of unknowing?

freedom, truth, love, poetry?

and heresiarch gladioozer said, do not the unknowing and known feed on each other like lovers in a condemned building?

doesn’t night’s maw open to a throated vertigo promising an aesthetic feast foreign to the day? Isn’t this why we leap before we look?

and heresiarch edanu said, yes, and the first surprise is that the maw’s promise is fulfilled. The second is that the meat for the feasting includes the one who leaps.

but those of the night are given to it as a baby to the breast, though the tits be deliquescent and the milk the stuff of sewers

the void is not more real than its orbiting masks, night not truer than day.

don’t they take turns exposing each other, as lovers in the discovery and decline of their love?

this place where love and art kiss, bound by that contract between void and mask, signed in a bloodless cloister in the monastery of dust

we plunk the yinyang on mugs, tshirts, workshop logos, pc backgrounds, as if the union of night and day were something other than that which has the power to combust worlds

—now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds—

as if it weren’t the stretched and stretching diameter of our confused and dying souls

the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madperson has only one.

heresiarch nazeeliolo

…i

i experience little difference between my past extroverted life and this present one: both have attempted to translate into language the inner necessity—and the feeling of the energy of this translation remains constant, regardless of the environment in which it takes place.

in the way that no matter where you travel in the world, humans are humans and you are you? asked heresiarch wilminina;

yes, i answered, but with this difference:

having had to become more than i expect to myself, i became it, and in the becoming asked the question of identity (not what or who [or, horror!, why] am i?—those questions of adolescence, but the question of creation), of the form of formlessness, the question of a dream divided against itself.

in the vast worlds of injustice, your act, arising from cruelty’s sectors but without its claws, is so petty as to be invisible.

the simulation of seeming, the seeming of simulation …

i remember you

indifferent to my caresses

crawled into the tent of your sleep

your breasts like soft moons

as if we hadn’t just clawed

each other to another death

light, open spaces, the absence of linguistic pollution become more essential to me. But what to do in toronto—half of its life dark, enclosed, mobbed with disruptions to thought, this half beginning?

vonnegut's harrison bergeron

can i begin to experience this lightless-closed-clamoring half as a necessary darkness, an impetus, a spawning ground, for greater light and silence, not those of the sun and desert but of the soul stretched on the weightless horror of itself?

a nice thing about having led an absurd life is that everything begins to make sense—not just absurdity, which has made sense for some time, but even sense.

i wish to speak of the Bain as a lover, known, unknown, fuckedup, worn, juvenile, dense, awkward, edgy, utopian, opaque, multifarious, sticky, corpulent, miasmic, impossible, (can we say it? … ) … beautiful, hated, prehistoric, craving, brittle, shimmering, broken, volcanic, ovine, turgid, … … …

but how can i, having been a pilgrim to the temple of adjectives and sat under the silence of their liquid teachings?

here i am,

friend of the spaces between minutes

of the darkness in the darkness

not much knowing if the future is the past or failure is success

wandering from stool to stool as if it meant something

full of blinks and stinks and the western wind

there i am,

in the bathtub with my penis on

confusing it somewhat with the light in the bedroom

counting to 81 in the manner of another century

my mind a casino of bears and playlists

discounting the darkness as if it were a friend

and not much has happened since (heraclitus or mencius or aeschylus or)

except that maybe what was said has been forgotten

i am far more your creation than mine; i am a mosaic of yous … yet in our primitive justices, we coalesce responsibility onto the singular, simply because it’s visible and so easy (in the manner of visible and psychic diversity). If humanity survives and evolves, won’t it look back at our present laws and attitudes in the same way we look at the aztecs or nazis—scapegoating the other to avoid our fears, the renaming of this scapegoating a primary social project?

sadoo

23.10.13

the rough advance of doves

i

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