route 66

In the democratization of literacy, education, written communication—the requirement to text, blog (if one largely wishes to avoid social ostracization) pervasive, assumed—i text, i blog.  I text occasionally, transactionally, to play now and then.  I blog, at times voluminously, but not in any way that the normally literate, the normally educated, would take any interest in.  I blog—whatever they might say—not primarily as an anti-blog—a protest against any perceived dilution of language, any seeming degradation of the more noble (ah, there’s a word) aspirations of literacy, education, the orthodoxies of the mind and heart and psyche.  (I am not convinced language has been diluted, education has been debased; their loci, however, have shifted—and they are found at the edges of their names, in the necessary and glorious profanations of the sacred word and valued teacher.)  I blog, rather—though i test the verb (verbs are designed to bend and stretch)—to reveal a face of blog that may be the face it’s been trying to hide.  The computer was thought to be a calculation device.  (We still don’t know what it is.)  The internet was thought to be a tool of liberation for the masses, a binding of the high and the low, a spiritually geometric transformative tool flipping verticality to horizontality.  The blog—a mechanism to disseminate our sweet opinions, our special feelings?  Perhaps.  But i think it might be instead—

We begin today’s mystic allsorts, a kind of licorice stick at year’s start and belch, with the words of everyone’s favourite heresiarch—Heresiarch Klyssvhok:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

nine lineaments of myth

1.  Myth is not the stories that were that built our psychic habitations, but the psyche we inhabit fashioned with stories that we tell.

2.  Myth is both the sphere in which language dwells as a drifter and an antique in language’s mansion.

3.  Myth breathes, and whether it now breathes with iron or plastic lungs or breathes as cgi or the daydreams of the dead or even cancerously, choked with chronic smoke, is less important than our doubt about its animation.

4.  I would say—or i might—that myth is like the routers of the web that we don’t see and are sustained by obscure technicians, but i would rather say it is the web that permits us to see it as the thin beautiful home we spiders run across to eat, naked in the wind, and strong.

5.  It’s easy to see myth as the twilight that questionably separates night from day, day from night, but more difficult to see myth seeing from its dubious divisions.  Is this shift in seeing what we could call evolution, if we mean by this not anything like an ameliorating of ourselves?  Is our struggle to accept another vista what we call our present simulation, the virtualities we construct and crawl within to draw a bridge between impossible flesh and impossible spirit?

6.  You have heard it said that myth is the collection of stories that our collective unconscious tells or shows; but i say that myth is the living dream that reveals us in the murky shape of words.

7.  If myth were a dancer that desired another occupation, would i be a long-saved-for refrigerator preserving random foods?

8.  Heresiarch Ramololo said to me, myth talks to itself of itself.  And i said, in the way that everything talks to itself of itself or more in the way the wind appears to do so but secretly speaks of us?

9.  The question of whether we die with myth or it dies with us is not simply one of pronouns, as one might initially expect, but more of the nature of the silence that can still be engendered when encountering unexpected light.

desire and myth_________

myth __+++___+

and______________

desire_________________

I would like to explore myth not as a system of stories—or even an apparatus of apparati (narrative simply being the scaffolding around the distribution of buildings we believe ourselves to inhabit)—but as the necessary tensions we feel as a function of existence.

I would like to explore myth from the position of a human who has the consciousness of our animate history without any commensurate experience—in other words, from within the conscious databanks of a demised humanity.

I would like to explore myth as one exiled from the myth he was born into.  This is not simply a fantasy for time travel (or eternity travel, if myth and time are somehow antithetical) or the inevitable wish to step outside what one is customarily within and see that, in time, withins, as was envisioned and perhaps experienced by ancient adventurers, are just withouts in different phases of their revolutions, but i want a personified myth—one intimate, embodied, vastly collective, enthroned on exquisitely architected polymillennia jewels—to send me, for crimes against the chronological state not entirely understood by history, into a desert bereft of prefabricated words, of a tradition of images, and there construct a verbal tower of light that disturbs the dreams of my personification and draws it to the desert in itself.

I would like to explore myth from deep within the fruit of words, their varied pits, looking out, as it were, into juicy darkness, about to be bitten by a hungry consciousness, permitting a dubious air to startle my surfaces.

I would like to explore myth with the grace of one unacquainted with myth but acquainted with god, assuming grace is a faculty of those so constituted.

I would like to explore myth on a carousel populated by the animals who exist only in myth, and have them talking through the music and the excitement of the upanddowns and roundandrounds of their experiences in that shadowy world of lightful flashes.

I would like to explore myth to not reach a destination or even pretend to be aiming for one, nor to produce a map or maps of intricate beauty which somehow show the landscape of our souls, nor to say aloud on the silent bed of death that myth is stronger, regardless of its truth, nor to succumb forever to a woman worthy of her beauty, nor to know, trampled, the desolation of the saints, nor to explain, as a doctor of the mind, in mighty tomes the erasure of the face of man, nor even to see (or feel i see) in darkness a light on the horizon of the infinite distance that refuses to go out, its energy itself the source also of my need to explore.

I would like to explore myth from within the womb and watch time’s phalli appear now and then, like gargoyles in lightning in perfect pitch, and translate, unmediated, this experience into song, which would take incarnate form in a previously non-existent race which fed only on sound.

I would like to explore myth as if it were not myth but the memory of a dream of a book in a mirror that was not greater than love because it was not different from it.

exercises_inthepastperfectcontinuouspassivesubjunctive

If someone says oh she’s well-adjusted and you respond adjusted to what? or (perhaps better) adjusted from what?, what sort of answer do you receive?

In hypermodernity we don’t forage for food like our mythical ancestors; we forage for meaning, frequently with the tools of love, and find, like our ancestors, it a sparse and treacherous quest.

For the first quarter century of my adulthood, everything was easy.  Now everything is not.  The only possibly curious thing is that there’s little difference.

Did not Heresiarch Yrtadol say in his lecture to the mongeese, his ears chattering with indignation, his nostrils flared with hoary visions—The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of _{what will have been done}.

Nietzsche was right of course at the time to not proclaim god in his passionate quest, naming only the death he had to name.  The name had to die on the vatic western lips, even as Christ had to die on a pragmatic western cross.  When we use the name again, tentatively, as if it were the wind that once was, it is not as if it were the name that has been or even is now, but a name hiding in a name; it needs (in the way we speak of god needing, which is only to speak of its name needing, according to the tradition of the greed of words) to hide and always has:  hiding once in the sacred unwritten name, the holy fire; hiding now in the banal written name, the polluted plastic.  God has come down to earth and is heaped in garbage dumps in Delhi; god has come down to earth and contains your pine nuts; god has come down to earth and hides not in the elements of earth, which have lost the sacred power to hold, but the shifting, murky and irreconcilable grammars of language.

a few mumbles from a few heresiarchs

The air must move in as well as out—no sadness, just disaster.

An art that measured itself by its reflection of the immeasurable.

            The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race—of the earth—as a practical objective.

What right do i have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me?

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life, Why are you living? life, if it could answer, would only say, i live so that i may live. That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living.

It is not a question of observation which propels humanity forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is an instance of aggrandized reflection that insinuates the human psyche to the inhuman.

            The core feature of every constructed subjectivity (what we recognize as someone’s ‘personality’) is a defense mechanism designed to resist and avoid the pain of life.

                        However it may be, life is good.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

It is the immediacy and absolute transparency of life which explains the difficulty of grasping it as a thought:  it is much easier to speak of what we see than of this invisible life, which fundamentally avoids being seen from the outside.

What is harder than faith?  What is harder than faith when it must rest on a bed of doubt in a house of ideology decorated with posters of skepticism?

The practice of mutually imaginatively ongoingly collaboratively enlisting the help of other people, animals, tools, ideas and resources as necessary—building, repairing, planning, decorating and destroying footbridges over the inevitable and shifting chasms of miscommunication—is the practice of friendship.

You’re in mourning I see.  Is your wife dead?

            No, she’s very much alive; she just lacks a body.  I mourn her perpetual amorphousness.
I’m sorry.
            I mourn also that i have to assume her burden of a body.
That must be difficult.
            I mourn also that i have to talk to people like you who don’t have a clue what i’m talking about.
Look—i was just trying to …
            I mourn that the stars don’t come to earth each night and play, that the moon isn’t conscious reggiano, that you aren’t a geranium on the tomb of someone once wonderful, that … hmmm … where did he go?

Aesthetic mysticism recreates a prelapsarian state by questioning the commonplace etiologies.

Slim solemn Salome seldom eats slimy salami while sublimely slaloming in Salem’s slums.

What do you call people who are, consciously or otherwise (and isn’t it usually otherwise?), practically prejudiced against mystics?

Mystophobes? Mysticophobes? Misomysts?
                        Misomysticism (the movement against mystics); mismystology (the study of the hatred of mystics).

What i am is the sum of imaginings of what i am, this sum the sum of the endless sums of other sums of imaginings.

I suspect he doesn’t know the code, she said to me after i expressed vague anxieties.

            In thinking about it later, i realized she probably was right, although this did little to alleviate my anxieties, for, i thought to myself (and at this point she was gone), the code provides legitimate access but what’s legitimately being correlated are anxieties and illegitimacy.  And with that i slept yet another uneasy sleep.

The clouds over the city are like the thoughts of puffy jokes never told, cruising over human absurdity, withholding their secret humor for another age.

I cannot object to the absurdity of expecting impossible things of the world, of others, of myself … for sometimes the possible sneaks through the impassable impossible.  And who are we to tell, mere and blind mortals, the conditions under which this might happen?  If the risk of failure is high, our hope also depends on it not being absolute and we sense that our greatest hope, infinitesimal though it might be, perhaps our only hope, is on the possibility of this sneaky passage, of something slipping through the brutality of time.

Someone asks me new year’s day as i’m writing in a notebook:  are you journaling?

            Well, not in the usual sense, i say.  I maintain a book.

A Woolf-inspired syllogism:

            words are useless
            words tell the truth
            the truth is useless
            the truth tells words

This translated into an effective harvard-inspired corporate model—

 

words and truth, being and speaking,		words
		are	tell
truth	is	useless	truth
	tells	words