the poet and money

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

aka … th_e disciplin_e and practic_e ^of madn_ess

^or … a mystic’s q_uarr_el with th_e w^orld

(in elusive instalments)

jabes, applied

What is the book i wish to recreate, a book of origins without origin, a lost book, the siamese twin of the god i wish to recreate?

The attributes of this book, this god, are likewise lost; this is why i approach my task tentatively, on paths of murkiness, setting myself aside as one sets oneself aside when leaving a mirror.

The internet aids me in my groping, in my task, as the printing press aided others in their quest of the book.  They wished to make copies, to pass the task of the hand to the machine, to promulgate the Word.  I wish to return to the space before the hand, to when copying was an idea and remained an idea.  This wish i feel has something to do with the book i seek to recreate … or rather (or equally) the book that seeks to recreate me.

            My book is a record of my seeking for the book.  It takes place in the gloaming so i place it in the technology of the gloaming, its wholly ambivalent invention.  Whether dusk or dawn (of the book? humanity? me? machines?) i don’t know.

                        My book has no limits because my quest has none.  I must only seek the book without the book, in death but without affirming death, in life but without affirming life, without even affirming the book or the quest.

                                    The book is my body i cannot see yet cannot escape.

The internet, in its natural infancy, has been seen as an extension of (has been used to extend) the powers of the printing press—more copies; more rapidly disseminated; more swirl, dissent, reform—even as the computer was initially seen and used as a glorified adding machine.  But this is to ignore (through fear? ignorance? novelty? surprise, as by ambush?) the internet’s natural powers, as our attempted simulation of the mind of god, as the adimensional book (neither tower nor library) of babel:  nameless (because it assumes all names), attributeless (because it assumes all attributes), powerless (because it assumes all powers), limitless (because it assumes all limits), without knowing (for knowing has walked past the end of itself), spaceless (for it is everywhere), without extension (for extension is a function of time and the internet is the mystics’ technology in its bypassing of time).

            Humanity was not defeated at the stunted tower at the beginning, nor was it silenced by the library’s confined infinitude.  Babel, to fulfill itself, is to circumvent not only verticality but horizontality; it is to translate the random emptiness and plenitude of blind borges from the virtuality of a story to the story of virtuality, to explode it from the confines of eight pages to the infinitely reproducing electrons of empty freedom.

                        The internet is Babel, the consummation of communication; through it we have defeated god and in defeat have founded the visible asomatous quest for the book.