with respect ...

with respect to madness language is always somewhere else

literature – from poetry to philosophy to its consummate present example, the novel – has become the story : exploration through narrative, typically human narrative. it has relegated madness - literature’s precarious soul - to the inaccessible, the autistic, mentally ill, deranged, the solipsistic, the virus …   but these – regardless of whatever names they might appear to be attached to – have always been literature’s true home. and the definitionmongers, the rationalists, the prize and list people, the storyists in their infinite discomforts do what the spiritually insecure have always done – use force of whatever quality to displace their insecurities far from the sterile spaces they inhabit, even as the privileged displace garbage and pollution as far as possible from them geographically : onto the poor, unheard, inhuman

story was mad insofar as it was born from the placed derangement (a derangement that because of its place had real range, range of touchable knowable unknowable divine land) of the tribe, but as story’s become separated from this tribal ecstasy it becomes formulaic, conventional, conformist, expected … and so not literature

so those called to remain committed to literature in these darks ages of the word – when madness is still manifest in the garrets and cellars of music and film for reasons primarily technological – the exploration of madness and the exploration of literature become effectively the same. so psychology – not the academic laboratory variety that dominates in lit and official corridors but the kind that oozes like pus from the psyche itself – and word become bound, psychology and psychologies of word and words literature’s practice. the mental illness of the word, its dysfunctions and taboos, schizophrenias and pharmaceuticals, shunned babblings, urological rants ... these are literature's narrative. the writer takes each word to the couch even as each word takes the writer. not to any effect. effect is academic psychology’s domain. literature in effect is the record of word and writer taking each other there … to noplace (the utopia that is no utopia … not just noplace but no noplace – and the no’s as affixes may be stacked like turtles on the back of a collapsed universe, universes of places of diaspora, exile, apophatic mappedness) of the empty question

how then does literature dissolve its identity through technology in the way (but in its own way and ways) that music has done. (we discount film for film’s born of technology whereas music, ancient and fleshy, comprehensively tedious and weary by 1912, had to break through [we set aside all those for now seductive pathways of film as nature filtered through preexistent but previously underused dimensions, music as first technology, literature as cosmic babel, ... all pathways dreamt, all arguments made.].) music has accomplished its recreation, its identities and doubts, drones and genre asylums through the synthesizer – the ability to patch everything onto everything, anything onto anything, all nothings on nothings … through enabling sonic life as music. when i walk down a helhi street and hear honkings, harassments, dogs barking, sun screeching ... it's as if to me i’m sitting in my sunroom listening to an lp. you can say – but literature is this. not in its common talk and trade but on its edges. even a name like dfw does this. and he was mad. he suicided after all and that’s a good sign. sure, but sterne was edgy, mad too and didn’t suicide. (madness now’s more mad. or rather madness now has farther to travel to reach literature even as literature has farther to travel to reach madness. they need more patches, infinities, more nothings ... they need to forget society, themselves. and this takes so much ... effort ...)

literature craves to be unrecognizable, lusts after anonymity (art's altar and eucharist) in these polluted seas of name refuse. literature should be so much ourselves we don’t see ourselves. the uncanniness is too present. we shall seem to be wholly absent and in this hole we are here. dfw and his family are recognizable, his fragmented stories the shapes and blabs of our currency

atonal literature, astory literature, areason literature, aliterature literature, literature defying currency, written by the cthulhu ... for the cthulhu aren't the hideous other but the hideous us. organic life! love and hate! human passions, conditions, standards! one only needs to travel well into the soul that hoards toilet paper in our increasingly visible species narcissistic times to see this usotherness. this travel and need is literature. not as fact but horror

i don’t hear you

i don’t see you

i hardly understand

i can’t read

the word through its endless interrogations reanimates. rejoins, reintroduces thing and name, renatures language. each word is spirit in infinite language forests. not one spirit but countless. and as spirits amorphously drift, each word (most alchemically, most mystically) drifts into all others. each word’s in each word and for the writer, as the writer’s just another word, in it. not as god or christ is in the christian. this is hierarchical, separate. but as gods in gods, mycelium in trees, air in fire, water in dream. so as academic psychology attempts to effect identity (and effecting transgressive identity still follows the conventional path of identity effecting) for social relation (even if this relation is protest, rebellion, shock), the psychology of literature (hardly any different than the literature of psychology) enters the identity of word to travel to identity’s dissolution. while this journey is paramount, literature appears as the writer as journalist depicts as closely as possible the effects of the movings into words’ identity’s dissolution on its inveterate physicality, the wholesale range and limits of its sensations. as journalist. (though we must acknowledge it should be obvious that our journalist is as different from the common one – no matter how noble, influential, sacrificial, perspicacious – as our psychologists and scholars are different than those pedigreed among fluorescent peers and gowns and lecterns)

with respect to language language is always somewhere else

with respect to madness …

with respect to respect …

with respect to somewhere else …

with disrespect to …
without disrespect ...

without language …

without without    

fog & fog talk in fog about fog

there is nothing for you here but madness

but there is nothing for me there but madness

so where will you go

here there  there here

you go to madness

i am always here

madness is always with us

what is madness

madness is herethere

madness is the going that has gone

hello nothing

hello madness

hello hello

here but you is for there

amen

for some say that order is the way

and others chaos

and neither right

and both right

yet who could walk both and neither?

and the path of trying is the path of madness

and the path of seeing but not trying is also the path

and the path of neither trying nor seeing is madness

and the madness that is not madness is also the path

there is no path outside the path for all is path

and this is madness

there is sky and land and sea and fire

but they are dead in our hearts

we have kept them alive technically

they are dead in our hearts

the gap between coitus and dream

this is madness

the wheel that re-turns

this is madness

the dove and the oil

this is madness

the word that has forgotten how to fly

this is madness

the the that keeps theing

this too is madness

here we are

in the this and the here and the the

we shall win a prize

from the society of the nonexistent

and it shall be called onk

the prize of onk shall be ours

we shall place it high on the shelves of our soul

and dust it like rare italian marble

we shall call ourselves those of onk

and those who disdain us shall call us onkists

and there shall be a war

between the onkists and the yoophians

between the onkists and the uffuls

between the uffuls and the yoophians

between all and all

and this is madness

let us go to sleep

for we have exhausted the possibilities

but rather we have not exhausted the possibilities but they have exhausted us

for the night has gone and day is here and it is time to sleep

for we no longer know how to distinguish day and night

and this is madness

and this is the dusting

and this is madness

and here we are  the last poets

the last poets are always the last

and this is madness

we seek fog like others seek light or money or love

nothing for us here but fog

and fog is the wheel

and the wheel is the sea

the sea the hello

the hello the prize

the prize the sleep

let us sleep

and this is madness

and this is sleep

this is sleep

dao de jing iv

the way is empty yet when used there is something that does not make it full

deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures

blunt the sharpness

untangle the knots

soften the glare

follow along old wheel tracks

darkly visible, it only seems as if it were there

i don’t know whose child it is –

it images the foreparent of god

dear fours,

long before simulation replaced reality and images the word, before surfaces usurped the deep and the seen became the only rule of truth, idontknow of dao loitered in existence’s confused corridors

long before natality and genealogy were questioned by the revolutionary doors of modernity, before causation was sublimated and identity defined, mud and murkiness presented themselves in shadows and indistinctions at an unmarked crossroads of history and nothing

god here is not some omniscient omnipresent omnipotent conscious or unconscious good or indifferent or malicious creator that bred a world and left, forgot, neglected it, merged with it … even some totality of opposites ... but just a bump and a ride on a carousel of vague forms, an orphan of emptiness

pointedness. entanglement. brightness. novelty. a quaternity of desirable attributes which dao in its almost comic nonchalance suggests we don’t particularly esteem or nurture. hardly advocating idiocy, dullness, conservatism or tradition, simpleness … hardly articulating a fourstep plan to wellness, success, happiness, enlightenment, knowledge … hardly inducting you into any arcane esoteric arts … lacking teleological thrust, highlighting a constructing through notconstructing, leading through following (not any idea, person, thing, text, feeling), an ising through seeming, a way through notway

it only seems

it only seems as if

it only seems as if it were

there

i reach into infinite hereness of soul and what do i sense but an appearing to, an if that moves around itself in shimmering vacuity

i don’t know how to embrace such elusiveness. i don’t know if it is full or nearly full or empty or running out. i don’t know if it is a thing or what it is or is not. i don’t know how it is related. i don’t know its accomplishments. i don’t know if it is worthy or real or an it or a joke or imbecility, a reflection of an archaic absolute or a bending of a line, an allaying, an untangling, a softening …

copula cupola

here is a day

a day is a poem

a poem is a dream

a dream is a day

here are you

you are notyou

notyou is an i

an i is a question

here is death

death is a doubt

a doubt is a bird

a bird is a vision

there is a song

resembling a doubt

hiding in me

and i in a day