(aka Poseidon’s nocturnal nonagon)
the ghosts of reincarnation
We never hit bottom (death, annihilation, call
it what you want) after we’ve been dropped from the clouds by bonobos or
gremlins or angels or planes or laboratories into life’s well but rather our
names gradually (though at different pacings) lose themselves in the increasing
distance and darkness. Our names are
scraped by the well’s debris, by the bumping against the eternal walls, the
other octillion things falling, until they cannot be read, except perhaps by
those few who, by training or inclination, read obscure and ancient
scripts. At most, they may be sensed, as
a mutant draft temporarily flings us, unnamed and acquainted only with falling,
upward into the named; then we briefly become what are called ghosts or
ancestral spirits or that uncanny mood that inexplicably possessed me as i
passed that alley that spring evening, with mulch and blossoms still clinging
to the dusk.
inheriting
William Golding, in The Inheritors, captures the melancholic exuberant inevitable
takeover of Neanderthals by Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Are we not now writing—collectively,
melancholically, exuberantly, during the phenomenon itself—of the inevitable
takeover of ourselves by the next order, already emerging and visible in the
urban hordes ... what shall we call it?
If part of the Homo line ... Homo Webus? Homo Technus? Homo Nihilus? If not part of the Homo line ... Weberthals?
Technothals? Nihilathals? They will not
replace us primarily by violence and deceit, the techniques we used to overcome
the Neanderthals, but with virtuality and pharmaceuticals and a dark patience
not dissimilar to the dark patience of god.
the project of the projection of why
We don’t ultimately criticize anyone else or
thing, although it frequently feels like this; all we do is receive signs that
we’re to walk a particular path, which most are unable to help us with, an
inability deriving from the characteristics of the particular or general path
they are walking and must walk. Our
criticisms are emotional responses to our objections to our solitudes and
fates. We are inclined to blame others
for these circumscriptions of nature, we attempt to drag facticity into our
subjectivities, but in so doing refuse to grow into the circumscriptions of
ourselves.
spiritual blood-letting
Even as there is a blood type that can donate to
all others but only receive from its own, so there are spiritual types. In one or two thousand years, if we progress
spiritually at the same rate we’ve progressed technologically over the past two
thousand years, we may understand these as well as we presently understand the
ABO blood system. But now, spiritually, we
perform the practice of blood-letting and call it psychotherapy. Our tamperings with psyches, minds, souls are
primitive and barbaric; distant generations will look aghast on them, as we do
now on the medical practices of the 17th century. But in the meantime we diminish spirits
everywhere by having professionals draw vitality into their curious bowls, so
that they can turn it into specimens and lay claims over it by virtue of having
mapped it on their brains ... for, surely, in the logic of premodern medicine,
doing something is better than doing nothing.
monsters of maturity
Once one has acclimatized oneself to human rejection,
betrayal, anger, hate, abuse, incompetence, corruption, stupidity, greed,
vanity, arrogance, projection (ideological and emotional), lust, delusion,
hypocrisy, schadenfreude, injustice, possessiveness, smarminess,
sentimentality, smallness, jealousy, envy and resentment; once one has accepted
them as aspects of existence, as presently palpable (and so, in a sense,
necessary, legitimate) as play, reflection, stillness, and smoking ... and
experiences them in the way one experiences the Canadian winter (one may not
always like it, one is at times compelled to mention it, even discuss it, but
one becomes fairly indifferent to its harshness and vicissitudes); once one has
traversed these common, bulky expressions of the human soul—and seen that routine
society, its members and institutions, is primarily devoted to nurturing and
renaming these expressions, in a kind of spiritual laundering process, to make
them socially acceptable—one then can enter a space which facilitates
appreciating the rare instances of nobility, dignity, grace, and intelligence as
they do appear, randomly, irrespective of ideology, class, education, gender, almost
as mutations, fleeting and beautiful, in the occasional individual—whether in a
novel, poem or dream ... or in what we call reality ... who can say?
pupils of truth
I look into my pupils in the mirror and see
rabbit holes: deep shafts carved in
vision to mine the madness of night. I
fall into them. I count the false
lights, falling, like fountains in a desert, windows on the energy of ossified
illusion. My words are tears, electric
tears on the infinite electric page.
Only tears are real. They carve
the shafts that yield the words in falling.
Tears carve and in carving yield the tears of words. Everything is a circle.
the insects will see god!
... : — everything with twenty tentacles, grasping,
asserting, leeching, sucking: society a
galaxy of tentacles, a fashion house of mawing hunger, a vast pile of insects
crawling over each other, with the dead, the poor, the dispossessed, the
exponentially growing artifacts of history and mind and art forming an
increasingly huge and reeking pile on which the rest of us—randomly born into
relative privilege, now for a moment able to breathe and move and see—crawl in
hopes we can better see the stars. And
inch by inch, century by century, light year by light year, blood by blood, we
get a little closer ...
inquisition redux
Modern psychotherapy as a vital resurgence of the
Inquisition, in new, modern and exciting forms.
Immanence may have replaced transcendence, the psyche may have replaced
god and psychology religion, but humans remain much the same, as a reading of
Euripides, Chaucer, Omar Khayyám or Chuang Tzu quickly reveals. Unfortunately, our First World social
apparatuses lack the power to physically maul and decapitate those who deviate
from the emotional orthodoxy ... but the means must align themselves with the
environment, so the presently approved techniques of emotional mauling and
decapitating are studied, developed, applied, published, enforced and analyzed
by the industry’s professionals, with their canon and vocabularies, and
accepted as commonplaces and promulgated by the masses and penitents, who
receive their treatments with a dignity as wholesome and admirable as those 200
– 800 years ago. These structures and processes
include, but are not limited to, rigid unimaginative socially enforceable
definitions (theoretical, behavioral) of emotional and spiritual maturity (no
less narrow, dogmatic and serious than the official belief structures of the Middle
Ages), orthodox emotional configurations devoted to tyrannizing—but nicely,
politely, professionally, legally—their heterodox alternatives and calling
their devotion not righteousness—for
that is passé—but health.
the feather and the rock
Happiness is a feather on the edge of a shoulder
while running an obstacle course through air conditioners, pain is a rock.
Happiness is not a feather, happiness is water.
But pain is a rock.
Flesh is a rock.
Flesh is a rock, movement is water.
Flesh is a rock, love is water.
Flesh is a rock, flesh is water.
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