years are clouds, we are rain

… consisting of a perambulatory, seven (7) randomites, and a knotty but true slough of thoughts pertaining to god, text, lies, and canada …

preambulatory

… these are my own particular opinions, feelings, and visions, and i deliver them as only what i myself feel and believe and see, and not for what is to be felt, seen or believed by others.

Adapted from Montaigne’s Essays (1580)

Epigraph in Daphne Oram’s An Individual Note (1972)

After 20 years of writing i am just beginning to learn how to write … after 40 years of thinking i am just beginning to learn how to think … after 50 years of living i am just beginning to learn how to live … as to loving, even God, after living tens of millennia and dying many times, still has not learned how to love ….

Adapted from a few-score mystics, artists and lovers, littered across centuries and continents

randomites

Coincidentally on Family Day i encounter the line—No matter how solidly you build your house, it will always rest on sand.

Like most, the professionals of the non-profit industry are money-changers, simply having less to change than those of the profit industry and more to change than those they claim to help.  Having less to change, they use different brokerage techniques on the exchanges of virtue.

To be without a pen is like being without breath or love.

Jabès—

God keeps his freedom in choice, whereas man loses it the instant he chooses.

You disturb death with your constant actions.

Faces, even belonging to those i love, are like flowers to me.  Words are like faces i love.

So many names still with roots across my untended timescape, few flowering.

Kathleen Munn, Toronto artist, withdraws from art at 52 because of society’s indifference, Toronto’s provincialism, the empty silence between her aesthetic vision and the surrounding sets of conformity.  But why not see indifference as a fuel, an impetus to keep creating, as far more of a reason to create than interest … interest tends to generate interest (in the way that sex rather than silencing lust breeds and screams it), but indifference creates creation.  Isn’t this why God couldn’t help but bring the world into a visible becoming, indifference being a prime attribute of the void?

            A variation of saying the world was created on a Sunday.

nine i-am’s of i—

1.      i am a text

2.      i am a void, which is to say a question

3.      i am an indefinite article

4.      i am a breaking of the book that breaks me

5.      i am cabbage soup

6.      i am a wink in the night, a drowsy eye of a world

7.      i am preposition pronoun and gerund that wants to be wholly verb but can’t decide which tense

8.      i am the memory of film after art evolves to fewer than one dimension

9.      i am not i am in timeless quarrel with myself that is perhaps to say the world concerning whether and where there should be punctuation

god, lying, blogger & canada

(with a little ditty on the evolution of suffering, as a bonus feature, at the end)

God brought the world into existence by lying, for to speak the truth It would have had to remain silent and the world remain in utter darkness and humanity wholly dirt.

We continually bring each other into existence through our mutual confusions.

We speak each other in our pain.

Confusion and suffering are the shady republics where God and we wander without meeting, sensing each other as night and day in the gloaming.

The powerful, the wealthy, the self-assured, are restrained from wandering in these republics, not through any superiority or inferiority, neither through laws, but through their proclaimed ability to distinguish truth and falsehood.

How do i write about the lying of God, who does not comfort me at midnight or noon, who continues to exist in the shades of text, though my expectations of It have fallen, even as they have of humanity?

Yet I have one expectation of myself:  that i continue searching for living words in the rising condominiums of text, where words flounder in babel cells, in our resurrected vertical project of a unified language.
     Dialogue. Communication.

And so i yet have one fallen expectation of God—that It does not impede the words waiting for me, that It does not block them in Its chariot of unintelligibility.

What is called poetry is a promethean process of ripping words from the body of God, of seizing living organs and holding them up to the sun.  We have always been vultures, hungry to eat God, to gorge on the divine erotic flesh.

What is called human communication is Word no longer becoming flesh, dwelling among us, but Text, dwelling on and in us; the once living organs of Word ripped from God’s body, genetically copied, freeze-dried, in an M&M Meat Shop.

I speak to the electronic void in the way i once might have spoken to God.  Typing is a form of prayer, the keyboard a flattened cathedral.

God hides in the Internet the way It once did in stars.

I stuff prayers in Blogger the way pious parishioners still light candles—believing in their efficacy although no evidence steps forward to justify the light.

I cry to the whiteblack screen like some eternal widow before a shrine of her dead and only love.  I hang phrases like shrouds of the nameless dead.  Sentences are digitombs, paragraphs cryonic mausoleums.  I build electronic ecclesiologies, wastelands of heaven.

But i know … i know where God is.  The Russians were right—It’s not out there, in the lidless freezer of space.  It’s in the serifs of Cambria, the fleeting glyphs of Calibri, dark flashes on the arctic noon of my screen, their common indifference seducing me to the winter night of words.

My fingertips are Ericson, Polo, He, da Gama, Cortés, Bering, Cook, Livingstone, Amundsen, Tereshkova, seeking an x-ray of an outline of the flesh of God, aided by a library of melted maps and ashen manuals.  We cross the flat snowscapes, ripe with wind.  Our steps are words.  They lead nowhere … yet we must walk.

Canada, the land that is not a land (for there is no memory of land and this land is the first of a new age in which land is only an idea), the land that is not a land for it is text, the First Nation of Text, believes in God the way you believe in Ocado or Amazon.

To see God, who hides behind God, who hides in God, who hides, come to google.ca and search for It online, with broken and toxic fingers and a heart with no memory of land.

The word on the paper page—more solid, less erasable—than the electronic word.  Yet also, simultaneously, more gaseous (more pyretic, burnable), more rooted in fog.  The tactile, penned word plays differently with the elements, with our souls, than the electronic typed word, which is generic by nature.  “i”s in Word are identical, regardless of the “i” that typed it—supremely erasable, yet more solid because of the weight of its commonality, its backedupness, backupability, its sameness (we are all i’s [… yet am i that “i”? is this “i” that “i”?]).

The i of Word when printed on the page becomes the i of the mob, the penned i on paper the disappearing i of God.

Art is only possible through a simulation of suffering, by migrating, pushing suffering from its physical roots into emotional flowers, through a mirror.  True suffering can only engender silence.  But humanity in its quest to continually distance itself from nature, from silence, from pain, (to immerse itself in the now true falsity that has become our flesh), works frantically, systematically toward further migration—a global collective freneticism it justifies through the usual methods:  solidifying the virtue of its activities, ostracizing those whose activities are not directed toward its migratory project—in which suffering is prostheticized in technology. 

Because of our need to experience suffering in some fashion (to fashion suffering according to our ambitions)—we will still identify with pain, even if pain primarily resides in screens and toys.  (Where we’ll want to migrate suffering after technology, who can say?)  Perhaps by the time pain is primarily a toy, the gap between nature and our selves, between the suffering of flesh and the virtualized suffering of humanity, will have grown so large, with us tottering on the almost dimensionless world we’ve created for ourselves, that we will be unable to resist falling into it.  Or, alternatively, if we are sufficiently clever—if that is the word—we will also be sufficiently dimensionless such that the only gap we can fall into will be ourselves.  In other words, we will have become the gap or at least an aspect of the gap.  There will be nature and void and we, long before text began crawling its way over our flesh and overtaking it, becoming it, will have made our choice.  We will have crawled from nature, through God who once hovered on the void, through the mathematics that was fearful of the empty set, through the rank effulgent simulations of emotionality and psychology, even past the machines we have begotten and are begetting to assume our burdens, a long bloody tearful capricious detour around the nothingness once pointed to by Buddha and Lao Tse, to a constructed silence that mirrors suffering’s silence, to an elaborate void that mirror’s nature’s void, to a textual joy that mirrors the vibrating desire of creation, to a world without dimension and without pain.