text city
We will have dragged
the heaven of The Apocalypse onto
earth, as the prophets foretold some two millennia ago, but the streets will be
paved not with gold but text.
Texting i
find disabling, like social media. A
shorthand, factual, tedious, transactional, of the mind, heart; a Pfizer
pharmaceutical to cloud and numb the spirit.
Like so much of what is taken for intimacy. Of course, like advertizing, every now and
then there’s a soundbite that dazzles, a moment that seduces, a convenience
that relieves, an artifact that rises, sparkling, above the rubble. Even email i’ve found tedious, disembodied, unnatural,
recently. I begin to long to write
letters, perhaps in hieroglyphics, elaborate customized postcards that jam the
postal processing machines, with fragments flying, glimpsed; OOF in Orange B inspiring a fulltime
operator, from Xi'an, to quit, return to China, and invent 11 new forms of ontology.
The
legion that Jesus casts out of the madman into the pigs in the Gospels indicates
the feminine, the plural, in man, that he denies, that the Judeo-Christian
complex denies. The origins of
psychology recognize this, the necessary emerging validity of the feminine, the
amorphous ground of muliebrity, but deal with it in classic male form: by examining, analyzing, laboratory style,
female plurality—male struggles of it in a male-dominated world—and having affairs
with certain women who particularly embody that plurality. But how does one embody this plurality
oneself, in a male body, in the city (which is a kind of conglomerated phallus),
without the classic primary dependencies on multiple female bodies (which is
using plurality as a prosthetic, avoiding finding the way between inner and
outer plurality, the abdication of the [inner] knowledge of plurality)? How far into oneself can one take plurality,
accept it as the primary legitimacy, without destroying oneself? Is this the new death? (Despite the superficial paganism, our
culture remains deeply Christian.) Is it
simply redefining the possibility of what maleness means, in the midst of a radical
sparseness of living examples?
Aesthetically, of course, Woolf brilliantly articulates the plurality
and amorphousness of identity in The
Waves.
Do men even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense, or are
they simply extensions of some unspeakable primordial darkness, a category
uncategorized in time’s categorical categories?
The challenge
of maintaining the rhythms of nature in the body—and consequently, the mind—while
living in an antithetical environment—the city.
The yoga-sex-workout regime seems inadequate, trite; a certified organic sticker on rotting
pesticide-ridden meat, haute fashion covering postulated skin and AIDS-infected
flesh; a frequent flyer, 5000+-square-foot homeowner, two+-car
householder putting out his recycling bin, feeling good about his greenity. Central seems the vision of seeing what is
not seen: not god, as in the past, but
nature. (Not the unreal as an object of faith,
but the real!) Yet god —the gods—has (have)
been seen as easily as the trees, in an age and culture when the two were inseparable. Seeing, then, the rivers of China in the 401,
puca sapos in iPads. A de-identification
with one’s own species (a re-narrativing from
the-uniqueness-of-humanity-as-being-more-unique-than-any-other [and,
consequently, my-uniqueness-being-more-unique-than-any-other] to a uniqueness
as one-among-a-vast-plurality-of-uniquenesses), within an environment which—through
the monolithic immensity of its structures—incessantly demands identification
and supremacy. To see earth and all it
contains holographically in our actions and thoughts …
Is this not what is meant by the doors of perception?
One can
see the (admittedly frequently puerile) increase of pet-love also (as with,
although differently, our frequently puerile spiritual practices [yoga, eco-])
as indicating a gateway to the diminishment of assumed human supremacy. (The puerility enters through factors such as
the undue waste/attention on pets [packaging, preferring ‘cuteness’—i.e. we
love {care for} our cats but not our worms and bees …].)
The train
to and from Montreal: whom would i
rather have around me: the phone-text-techno-babbling
self-importance of the business grandmother on the way or the techno-talk of
the children’s machines on the return?
Earplugs in both cases.
I watch the dark void of nature through the window,
punctuated by the lights of occasional stark settlements, punctuated by the
reflected lights of the videos, games and communication devices surrounding me,
both punctuations real-unreal.
I check
email in Montreal, then on the train back to Toronto. Yet as i approach home and think about checking
email again, the feeling is there (though the reason is not) that i will be
collecting mail for three days—ever since i left Toronto. The electronic in-tray still rooted
emotionally in the physical mailbox, yet surely exacerbated by the present’s
ethos of speed.
art&god
The insidious
pervasive attempt of psychotherapy, culture, to reduce the body-psyche complex
to one, to continue the monist regressions of Christianity. The healthy plurality of the body-psyche complex
routinely squeezed into the appearance of a singular social identity, this squeezing euphemistically named health by the monist regulators of
culture and spirit.
An
ex-girlfriend calls me Protestant for
certain emotional configurations she experienced; an acquaintance insinuates a
connection between my marrying young and my present moral orientations. How trite, reductionistic: connections not technically untrue or
imaginatively vapid but which become untrue, vapid, by means of their radical
insufficiency, their decontextualization, their decoupling and hierarchizing of
subject and object. The problem with these
facile psychologizations (which present themselves as insight!) of life and art
(just look at biography-of-artist as explanation and replacement of the artist’s
art [and in the mediocre the life is preferable to the art]) is the inarticulated
and presumably unacknowledged assumed etiology, a fact-value relation, behind …
(typically event --> applauded or derided value, often linked to common and
unquestioned notions of success, beauty, truth …).
The
environment of writing shifts for me, causing confusion, despair, exasperation,
fragmentation, loss. I can’t find or
recreate my historic faith in art any longer.
This doesn’t seem to me primarily a matter of my obvious insignificance
in the human world of words and names (crises of faith are hardly absent from
those in that world) or having exhausted the themes intrinsic to the relation-of-i-with-the-world (these seem
infinite [dependent primarily on sufficient attention and care] for their
configurations are constantly changing, spawning a perpetually shifting reflected
image-collage of words), but rather the atmosphere in which writing takes place
has been modified and my orientation, my practice, lags behind. I have hit certain apparent emotional and
linguistic walls; i extend words across the walls like vines, hoping to
infiltrate and crumble them.
Yet: instead of breathing in airs of faith and
ecstasy, my spiritual lungs are learning to adapt to breathing in doubt and
stillness. (I thus am in a state of
exhaustion and death in relation to my past atmosphere but a state of birth, a
fumbling novice, in relation to these emerging unknown elements. The confusion created by this: working still in what seems to be the same
medium (words) but in a different atmosphere on perhaps a different planet … all
this genetically altering the medium.
So how to
write? The way i have been: waiting, despair, impatience, exasperation,
calm, focus, inspiration, doubt, anger, faith, caprice, vapidity,
toilet-cleaning … describing the world through this i-eye, describing my mind
through this eye-i, attempting to eliminate judgement of the world, my mind,
other than as it implicitly must be in the contours of language which reflect
the particular colourings and contractions of the iris of this eye, the irides
of these i’s (which, without the apostrophe, is is: a recreation of yhwh in its, in their, tobetobeness) …
My exploration of god, use of god, the attempt to describe the irides,
to look at that which looks (the origin and end of the mirror, the labyrinth as
the path between those origins and ends [borges always, always borges) …
It
has taken me 20 years to return to using the word god, to resurrect the name,
to claim it in my own image while making my image an image of god, image on
image, the gateway of the manifold
secrets …
If i
write for Time at all (and how i
despise those who assume Time is the
only or primary audience), it certainly isn’t for what is typically meant by
the present face of that audience …
All
systems of thought are systems of restricted desire, of the way a mind (a group
of minds) want themselves (the world) to be or imagine it to already be. But the world, the mind, Mind, defy articulated desire by encircling all desires and their
denial.
This is what Jabes beautifully,
horribly, cleverly, labyrinthinely, midrashingly does in The Book of Questions: i am
left with nothing through his articulation, his seeming affirmation of all, his
simultaneous dispute, his equal seeming negation of all …
He stretches his endlessly
shifting passionate and contradictory feelings so far into words the mind shatters
into itself … words constantly being sucked back into their voids, peering over
their edges like scared and pretty children.
Student
story #1. I read an academic article on
teaching ESL using the principles of “imaginative education.” Wholly banal, conceptually risible, spiritually
infantile: what sort of competent teacher
would not simply know, embody, actualize the advocated principles? Yet, such is the bulky output of academia, a
kind of factory spirituality, a mapping for robots of what any human—anyone reflectively
embedded in experience—would know and (automatically, unthinkingly, daoistically)
practice in the classroom.
Student story #2. For
a business ethics course we discuss a case study on Pfizer, talk about how the
company could rebrand itself more ethically—part of this public relations
campaign could be providing cheaper AIDS medication to Zambia, for example, in
exchange for renaming Zambia Pfizer. Many multinationals are now more fiscally and
politically powerful than many nations; why not effectively actualize this in
our geopolitics?
These discussions take place in the context of my increasing
non-misanthropic indifference toward humanity as a species (vis-a-vis not only
other species but other categories of natural things). I view this change as an equalization program
and as i slowly immerse myself in it, as it feels increasingly comfortable,
right, for me, my legacy misanthropy mostly fades (which only works if i
carefully limit the quality and quantity of my human interaction). Even if i now respect worms and bees more
than most humans, my schizoid response to humans lessens, as my initial
confusion over the tension between my feelings of disrespect for the species to
which i belong and most of its members (a disrespect extending to myself in my
historic values and practices) and my inevitably greater fondness of some specific
humans over any specific worms and bees evolves toward the emotional complexes
becoming integrated into a larger vision of my-body-in-relation-to-earth,
as i allow my values and practices to be modified by what-i-see-in-what-is-not-seen.
Don’t i
enter words in doubt and leave them in faith … and in between there is neither
doubt nor faith but only words, among which are doubt and faith?
And if all my writing were reduced to writing about not being
able to write, would this be an expansion?
Everything
increasingly seems like a spiritual prosthetic, other than food, touch, walking,
and the void in words: only flesh and
language remain real, everything else a house of cards.
And yet, still, wispy friendship, fondness, affection, in
splips and shplots—a thread through flesh and language even as they are threads
through …
coming soon (though coming and soon are as slippery as doubt and faith):
the poet and money
oem’s (origins, ends, middles: creation stories for those oriented toward renarrating)
closing daodejing meditations: lxxii –
lxxxi (let’s wrap this up, baby; it’s
been a long ride)
daoism & anarchy; anarchy & a neo
aesthetics
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