returning to returning

The sun, we say, returns to the sky (though it is always in the sky).  The moon, we say, is full tonight (though it is always full).  Can we not say in the same way that we are always there, still and pyretic, in the void, always full – and that we speak of returning and newness as a result of the confusion of bodies, ideas, events, passions, orbiting around us?

       Returning is a word we use for the perception of motion.

One could say, as some sages, that we all return to the desert.  But isn’t this to privilege the desert?  And isn’t it to set aside our immobility, the desert’s crawl and reach? – the desert moves farther, faster than we do; we only excel at the appearance of movement … the desert returns to us.

What feels like the farthest distance from our origin may be the moment when we have returned.

The tourist returns, but has to move to return – the tourist forever visits Returning, is a resident alien in the no-place, Returning; the natural citizen of Returning does not have to move to return, for returning is its home.

       The tourist in fact has to move to re-image rememberings of returnings, to simulate the no-place of returning through an onslaught of physicality and images.  The function of technology, it could be said, is to aid the increasingly vast industry of tourists to Returning.

       Transportation technologies – to move to returnings

       Image and sound technologies – to (re)capture the movement

       Communication technologies – to narrate the movement and the capturing

In these conglomerations, society loudly assures itself that the simulation of home is home, that tourism is citizenry, and that moving is returning.

Isn’t returning less flying home after visiting another continent, more—after having thought about visiting another continent—staying home?

To return before one has to return –

       Is this less of a returning?

I have returned, said the businesswoman to her partner as she entered the condo they shared.

       I see that, her partner said.

I have been on a long journey and discovered myself and lost myself and become nothing and become everything and here i am, back.

       But you just went to the store to get eggs, her partner said.

The two are not mutually exclusive, the businesswoman replied.

       And the two went their separate ways soon after, for they had not journeyed together, nor had the returning been shared.

To return perhaps is to build a bridge of nothing between the void of i and the void of world and walk to the midpoint of the bridge and not move.

       But would we not rather say that the walking to the midpoint is the turning and the not-movings the returnings?

I returned your book, a friend says.

       But, surely, having gone on a journey, the book is new.

If you have been on a journey and have come home early and a friend calls and says, Oh, have you returned?

       And you respond, I’m unsure.

       Your response will be seen as a little joke, a nod to memory and movement and dislocation.

But, truly, it is the only serious response.

We say, We are returning from a trip on the journey back.

       But we do not say on the way there that we are turning toward a trip.

We think of return as a returning to home or ground … but – if there is no home or ground – no return.

If we had to choose a space to return to, or a time, which would we choose?

       A space, for only it could be in the future.

We may think that returning is a mapped act and the act of reaching the point of returning unmapped, but this is only a feeling at the point of returning.  Once we embark on returning we realize there is no map and never has been.  There was a point we sought, the point at which we turned back or felt we turned back, but our returning is less a seeking than a negating of seeking, a negating of returning, a negating of maps.  We might say disturn instead of return, except for return’s necessary euphemistic function.

I picture a return journey as a line with an arrow pointing inward on each end, or a circle, with my point of departure and return at, say, 0°.  Perhaps a serpentine line, a labyrinth.  But the shape of my picture may be less important than the composition or texture of its shape.  If the shape is made of iron, the journey will firmly be a circle or a serpent; if a string, throw it in the air – a new shape (the journey renewed, reshapen, returned).  If strings, many shapes; if water, the journey reforms itself continuously.  If gas, the journey is everywhere, diffused, like a volcanic eruption affecting the weather in another hemisphere generations later.

       Returning is a shape that has no shape.

We say we return to death from death through life (or, in certain spiritual orientations, to life from life through death) but can the i—of which they are comprised, like structures and quarks—once returned to itself, be said to return to death or life?  i returns to i through i.  life and death are just roadside concession stands.

You are lost.

       But you are lost to your lostness.

Who has returned?

Why don’t you return to your homeland? asked her friend.

       Because i am a different i than when i left, and what was home will no longer be home, and the land is always shifting.  There is no return.

Your home is now here?

       I live here, and i say for convenience, This is my home, but if there is no returning there is only exile; exile is my home.

What does it mean to have no-home as home?

       It is the same as having no-place as place and no-time as time and no-god as god and no-love as love.

How can this be?  Only love is love and god is god and time is time.

       This is not what the heresiarchs have said; the heresiarchs in art and thinking and spirit and number and shape all agree.

The heresiarchs make no sense.

       Then no-sense is sense, for my feeling of exile is more real than my feeling of sense or home or place or time or god or love.

This doesn’t sound like living, but dying.

       But this utopia—this no-place—has been humanity’s dream ever since it began the project of the city; if we have been focusing on dystopias recently, hasn’t it been because we sentimentalized no-place, even as we sentimentalize almost everything?  But our dream is a fate and a passion, and all fates and passions involve dying in order to live.  Exile is the human home and, regardless of the names we give it, we seek it with our lives.

I have what i call memories of what i think are returnings.  But to return to these memories – am i now not caught in a travelogue of impossible directions?

What does the football fan seek in the return to his couch and beer, in the return of the season?  Is he not like Odysseus returning to Penelope after unspeakable absences?  Does he not seek, again, tears, again, shock and rage, again, death, again, great joy, again, the end and return of a story?

The increasing misalignment between the returning of the seasons, the returning of the moon, and the returnings with which we obsess is perhaps a notable factor in the increase in our ennuis and neuroses, our depressions and fragmentations.

       Yet to return to the returning of the seasons, the returning of the moon, would break us, dependent as we now are on our obsessions.

              Isn’t this unspoken knowledge also a factor in our ecstatic enervation?

We say we return to the earth—ashes to ashes—but why not to the clouds—rain to rain—or to the iPhone—text to text—or the toilet—dump to dump—or the i—eye to eye:  the gaze at the black center of returning?

Life is not love, we can’t help observing, despite their homophonic properties.  Yet can’t we transform all of life to love through a certain trick, a trick that, when performed, seems more legitimate than the observing we first can’t help?  Doesn’t this trick, once performed, require many of the same manoeuvres as returning? Is returning, then, the manual for the worthy simulation of love?

The body returns to the mind

       the mind to the body

The mind returns to the heart

       the heart to the mind

The heart returns to the spirit

       the spirit to the heart

We are complex prefabricated packages of returning.

Returning home with joy, returning home with foreboding

       the same returning?

Returning home with grief, returning home with ambivalence

       the same returning?

Returning to an alien ashram with grief, returning to your ancestral home with grief

       the same returning?

Returning to life, returning to death

       the same returning?

suicide is the most extreme form of returning to life

A grain of sand returns to the beach from the water, returns to a glass studio from the beach, returns to a vase in Manhattan from the studio, returns to a landfill site from being a vase, returns to a gull’s belly from the site, returns to the water from the gull, returns to the beach from the water.

       Which is the true returning?

              And if i move from child to student to priest to husband to father to banker to lover to academic to poet to bum to student to priest to child?

       So am i not the ways i walk, the ways i am led upon?  Don’t i hang names on myself and with each hanging weigh myself down in my walking, my true returning?

When Chuang Tzu says after he dreamt he was a butterfly that he’s unsure whether he is now a butterfly dreaming he is a human or he was a human dreaming he was a butterfly … is there not contained in this doubt the very vision and unspeakable truth of returning?

       For what seems to us solid sublimates to gas on slender accident, and what gas to solid.

              Did not Heraclitus say this also when he wrote that gods in dying live our lives and we in dying live the gods’?

       So the tunnel from womb to earth and that from earth to grave are equally returnings.  If we call one light, the other darkness, is this more a function of our darkness, less the vision of returning?

To the human on the shore, the wave keeps returning to the beach.

       But to the ocean it is always a new wave.

To the mother giving birth it is always a new baby.

       To the reincarnationist, the soul keeps returning to the world.

So every return is also wholly novel and every novelty is also wholly a return.

We could speak of the relations of money and returning.  But we shall not.

When i am at life’s statistical midpoint, i could say that i am beginning to return.  Although could i not equally say i am ending returning – for couldn’t life’s midpoint be the consummation of the impossibility of returning?

When you remarry it is not as if you are married again.

       It is a different thing, requiring a new word.

We add a ‘re’ from laziness.

       So with return.

Returning may be less to silence than to the silence in every word.

The city, being the alphabet in three dimensions, returns us to an image of god’s original speaking—one that created a species to destroy the Creator and destroy the silence that comprised god’s heart.

Our attempt to return to places in our minds has more solidity than our attempt to return to them in physicality.  For our minds are closer to the heart of perception, having more purity and hallucinatory power.  The cluttered facticity of objects in physicality diminishes the efficacy of our attempts to return there.  So returning is a spiritual discipline and it is no accident that humanity’s great religions have it—though with different spins—at the center of their cosmologies.

       water returns to the earth from the sky

       water returns to the sky from the earth

       woman returns to man

       man returns to woman

       the adult returns to the child

       the child to the adult

       the sun returns to its deep bowl of night

       night returns to overturning its bowl, releasing the sun

I travel india for a year and return to my home.  I walk through a combination of valley paths and urbanscapes to a café and return to my home after five hours’ absence.  Yet the latter can be more of an adventure, a longer journey, than the former.  Fewer prosthetics are required of the i.  We have hardly begun to explore the relationships between time, space, expenditure (fiscal, ecological, physical, emotional) and returning.

       Until we see every act as equally returning (and thus accept a diversity of way), are we not the most wasteful and inefficient of species, doomed to chains we do not call chains because we have the capacity to make them long.

Returning Exam

In order to be shown the exit from the realm of shades after death and enter eternal dissolution, one must pass an exam on returning.  Here might be some of the exam’s questions.  A sample question, with possible answer, is provided to aid in completing.

Sample question, with possible answer

Which two consonantless words are homonyms, synonyms and antonyms, and might be the mantra of returning?

       eye and i

1.  rotate regress advance relay

       Which is the better synonym of return?

2.  If we saw all words beginning with re as related, how would our lives be changed?

       real       rebozo       reckless       redolent       reefer       referee       regolith       rehab       reificatory       rejectamenta       rekindle       reliquary       Rembrandt       renascence       reodorant       reprobate       requiem       reredos       Reservoir       return       retiary       Reuters       revenant       rewind       rex       reyong       rezepte

3.  Which is more of a journey—returning ourselves or watching others return?

4.  Based on the below patterns, fill in the blank at the end of the question.

   return – reword – renew – reshape – renumber – renew – recreate – repent - redevelop

   return – urn – nut – rut – run – net – ten

   turn – tern - - torn

   re-surrect (insurrect/ion)

   upturn – overturn – downturn

   disturn deturn unturn misturn in/out

   turntable – turnkey

   Turin

   re-mind, re-body, re-spirit

If to decreate is not the same as destroy (and dedestroy not the same as create), then dereturn is not the same as ______________________________________.

5.  none of us are what we seem

              and

       all of us are only what we seem

                Is returning a turning into this and?

6.  Return – ret urn – wet urn – the living :

              the dead – dry urn

       Explore.

7.  Are deconstructions and decreations returnings, in their apparent removal of unnecessary debris, or do they accumulate debris through adding to the material one has to negotiate in order to return?

8.  We return our minds to accelerate our bodies on the commodity exchange of spirit.  Are the industries of law, knowledge, religion, technology, health, justice, ecology, and business the tentacled and transactional ghosts we reify to aid us in our desperate barterings?  To what extent, and how?

9.  Why do we go away?  We go away to come back.

       Isn’t all desire a desire to return, all action an attempt?

What we return to is what was hiding inside what we came from.

       The Eiffel tower is a return to the postcard

       Bloch’s novel is a return to the film

       The parent is the return to the lover

       Han Yu is a return to Kafka

       The ocean is a return to the bathtub

       The pinnation of the leaf is a return to the microchip

Following the model of christ, god in dying has become—through its ultimate absence—more potent than when it was alive, strutting through cathedral naves, solid walls in the cloisters of mind.  So are not we, as god’s forebears, learning from god’s play of potency?  As christ used blood and crosses, as god used education and enlightenment, are we not using technology and communication for our ambitious ends?  Are not christ, god and we walking parallel paths of potent return?

To return is to find returning in not returning.

One cannot say one returns to the one for the one in returning has negated the one it seeks – the one seeking, the one sought, the returning itself – are there not always at least three and, by extension, a myriad, in the one?

We now rest on unities as tenuous as thawing ice.  Is this a return to our original solitude, the height of human civilization a frozen pond, on either side a sea?

There is never a point of no return

       the point of no-return is the point of returning

Re-turn :

       but we are always turning and so always returning.

What do we return to? is perhaps less the question than the questions we ask about our questions as we return.

The merchant returns suddenly, as some zen students achieve enlightenment, on his deathbed; the sage devotes her life to returning.  Some advocate the gradual path, some the sudden.  Nevertheless, all return.

It is easy to say we return to nature or death or god or ourselves or silence or love (through technology or life or humanity/the city or love or words or greed) but what if rather than returning to nature we return to technology (or words or greed)?

We speak of return or returning as singular … but …

       only returns and returnings.

Perhaps the most we do is return to returning – we see, as the arcs of the spheres become visible, there was no original turn.  Of course, we could also say all we do is turn and that we never return.

How i love the efficient destruction of the city, this attempt to return to god’s original destruction, not through word but the destruction of word, to the decreation between and beyond our words.

Perhaps we can say we’ve returned when we perceive entering sleep or night no differently than entering waking or day.

We don’t return to anything, any body, any idea; we return to returning.

It is equally easy to argue that we surround ourselves with ourselves (and surround the extensions of ourselves with our extensions) to avoid returning and to consummate it.  Is this equal ease a returning?

The prefix re- assumes an original.  Do we add another re- for each returning?

       But if there is no original—or the original is irrevocably lost, like the name of god—and there is neither a place to return to nor ever a repeating of place (or i), then we are irrevocably lost between the original turn and the desire to return to what never existed.  This irrevocability, this lostness, are perhaps our home, what we return to, our only returning, although because of its no-place (its utopia) we deny it, and construct homes from false places, covering the no-place of our home, as the city covers the earth and the earth the void.

What is the opposite of return?

       Isn’t it return?

Isn’t the knowledge we attribute to returning the human’s ignorance and hubris, seeing return primarily through the arc of an isolated self, culminating in personal death – this delusional elevation of an infinitesimal part of the whole (a human, a species); isn’t our fear the not-knowing of our root inability to attribute—of not being able to see any point of origin or destination, of not being able to see the portion of the shape we inhabit, let alone the shape?

       So isn’t returning a sub-fallacy of teleology (or teleology a sub-fallacy of returning)?

We always return, we never return, we sometimes return, we partially return, we fully return, we never return.

The concept of turning seems easy—

       I say, Turn your body to your left.

       You do it.

       I see it.

       You have turned.

But if i say, Return your body to your left—

       You (re)turn your body to your left.

       I (re)see it.

But have you returned?

If one pictures a journey as a line,

       all returnings are measurable and finite.

If one pictures a journey as a circle,

       all returnings are immeasurable and infinite.

We can have recreate, bound to recreation, but can we have redestroy?  Does return sit between recreate and redestroy, indecisive?

We visit nature but we no longer can know it.  We know the city.  We can only return to nature by recreating it (its void, its desolation, its silence, its unknowing, its unmappedness, its rhythmic infinitude) in ourselves.  (Isn’t technology the visible sign of this most virtual misplacement?)  So this return to nature (in recreation and signage) may be emblematic of all our returnings, misplaced (re-homed) in the void of ourselves.

We turn to what we know we think,

       return to what we think we have known.

In both cases our knowledge, our thinking, is murky –

       both a gloaming … but which one leads to dawn, which to dusk?

I return to a home of my childhood after decades’ absence.  Is it not like visiting a movie set of a dream?  So all returnings are oneiric, any sensuous manifestations props and facades.  So our returnings are films – we may be the audience, but the director surely is unknown.

       Returning in history : film (a returning to literature, a returning to itself); the human in the city (a returning to a pre-alphabetic age).

Return is not retreat, for retreating arises from desperation or strategy whereas returning arises from an interstice of khôra and qualia.

We think of return as moving toward something that existed in the past, but why fix returning so solidly in time?  Time may only be a one-way street to those who rigidly follow history’s laws.

The house, the woman, the job we wish to return to – are they not as elusive as the smell, the experience, the state we wish to return to?  Both are spontaneous configurations of perception.

Your circumscriptions and so your judgements are solid

       return to the breath on the water

Your love is like an ax

       return to the breath on the water

Your words are like a traffic jam

       return to the brook bubbling around the rocks

Your desires are like apocalypses

       return to the mist of the morning

Your way is littered with definitions

       return to the path of hot coals and rain

Your virtue is like medieval armour

       get naked, throw on a sarong and tanktop

Your assets are like an airplane

       hijack it; turn it into a bird sanctuary

Your relations are like tapestries of dustbunnies

       There is a paneled portal behind, hiding a secret passageway to silence.  Return.

It’s close to midnight.  I crave potato chips.  I return to the store i was at a few hours earlier to obtain them.  But first, before my returning, the potato chips returned to me.

       Before i return, i am always returned to.  I am a transit hub of returnings.

We are homo homo returnus.  Whether talented or middling, whether local or global, whether an EU president or a collections agency officer, we each have our few favourite spots to return to:  intellectual, emotional, physical.  We live in our returnings to these spots and are defined less by the spots and the returnings and more by the ways we return—what we create on these ways:  the totality of these creations we might call the i.  We die (why do we die?) … we die … to assist in creating new ways of returnings for other returners, even as others have done so for us.  Our dyings are our greatest collaborations, our greatest creations, our greatest gifts.  That we do not view our dyings as such—that we even view them as our chief tragedies—is a sign of our skewered geometry:  we overfaith the apparent solidity of our cities’ verticality.  But the ways of returnings are many and go down or sideways as often as up, are gaseous as often as solid, doubt as often as know, and flounder as often as stride.

We are wind and stone.  Yet we fear wind, we fear stone.  Isn’t the fart the lightness of our fear of wind, the turd of our fear of stone – the laughter of Balaam’s ass?

       Sublimation (chemical, psychic, aesthetic) as vital living.

              Yet the paths to walk between solidity and gaseousness longer, more circuitous, more obstacled, more unmapped (despite our tsunamis of maps) – and this distance now the mythic journey, riddled with suicides and breakdowns and genocides and addictions and fragmentations and ennuis and despairs.

       Returning has always been at the center of myth.  But with myth now itself having gone on a mythic journey and returned to itself—its self of returning—and so is at home nowhere and everywhere, the distance between wind and stone is not a lifetime or a catastrophe—though it is a lifetime and a catastrophe—but only the distance from i to i.

It isn’t what we came from or return to that present us with the greatest challenges.  It is our returnings.

I return a smile.  I return a lawnmower.  I return a favour.

       Same returning?

Do we return by turning back or going beyond?  Isn’t this the unspeakable question of the universe, of creation and also of physics, of the spirit – the doubt and seed of the human?  Yet isn’t our doubt and seed also their possible indistinguishability?

As i walk, as one foot returns to the earth the other returns to the air, then the one that returned to the air returns to the earth and the one that returned to the earth returns to the air.  Are not all other returnings complications of these returnings?