today our topic is language. again.
i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that
and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one
twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of
infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet
been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or
seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.
now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an
extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this
time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts
itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything? that we even have to ask the question is
disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an
instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner
related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers
only words, more fundamentally to words:
in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually
doesn’t. but this could be a difficult
thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates: civilization, culture, war, government) to
developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature
seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked). so language, in offering the possibility of
teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us
nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature
now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least
as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be
taught. but all this seems
simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might
rightly call a lesson. yet we began by
not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction. a lesson aims to teach us something, while a
topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no
aims. perhaps this is the frustration –
we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a
topic. or is it the topic? to speak so
definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the
definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and
prosaic. we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too
many issues. but as soon as we ask
whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point,
the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.
which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as
others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been
discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is
language. so what can we conclude? nothing, certainly. but perhaps something, just to give us a
little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive
issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.
or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and
so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all. but this is hardly satisfying. don’t we want something? yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as
much certainty as nothing. and so here
it is: this something, which has already
been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.
22.12.15
today's topic
30.11.15
saint antónio nogueira
on this most grand saintday,
let us
celebrate the deathday of a great sadoo,
master of masks and vagrant in the
city of identity
how he has taught us
of the knowledge of the voids
and calmly, wittily shown the
root emptiness
of the human,
the ways of dream
heresiarch hababala
durban, natalia
14.11.15
my biography
little has been said these long and
secret years about the days and spaces of sadoo diaper – from whence farflung
turds it arose, its innumerable flushings, the journeys of the scats, how it
came to be numbered – if numbers are aspects of itself – among the sadoos, the
incomprehensible ramblings of this blog itself, sadoo diaper’s relations with
other sadoos and the non-sadoo community, its political positions, sexual
preferences, and seminal influences, scholarly theories of its psychoaesthetics
… all this has been left to the reader’s vivid or more likely mundane imagination.
no more.
fukky risotto, a hermaphrodite of
little renown living happenstantially in the 13th arrondissement,
was not quite out of diapers when one cloudy day in february they felt a
strange urging in the nether parts.
mommy,
they say.
yes
fukky dear, says mommy.
mommy,
i have a strange feeling.
you
have many strange feelings fukky.
this
strange feeling is stranger cuz i’ve never had it before.
each
feeling is new fukky, there’s never a feeling you’ve had before, that’s the
beauty of feelings and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
don’t
get philosophical on me mommy, not at a time like this.
oh
fukky – always so dramatic.
mommy,
it’s my diaper.
this
is the fourth time today!
it’s
not the caffeine, it’s something else.
have
you been into the coconut water again?
it’s
alive mommy.
what’s
alive?
my
turd. it’s walking around in my diaper
and saying things.
fukky, turds don’t talk.
maybe it’s not a turd.
but only turds come out of the asshole. i mean – they’re the only things that come
out that haven’t gone in first.
mommy you lie you lie.
of course i lie.
you said that all outputs are inputs and all inputs outputs, that
the world is a great circle or sphere or hypersphere or something and that
everything’s connected.
that’s true. but that
doesn’t discredit anything else i’ve said.
or rather it may discredit it but only in a way that credits.
… so whatever’s exploring my diaper now must have first gone in me
… omigod i think it’s broken out …
… fucking jesus, i see a little hand print in your little trousers
…
… get it out of me mommy, get it out …
… just pull down your pants and let’s see what happens …
fukky and their mommy were good to me,
especially since they weren’t expecting a third mouth to feed and didn’t really
have much money, being committed primarily to verbal play, speculative caprice,
irrational fun, and composting the world’s evils by ignoring them. fukky called me diaper and mommy called me doodoo
and because i was a melancholic child she often called me sadoodoo. when they enlisted
me in school they gave my name as sadoodoo
diaper, which got shortened to sadoo
diaper, as these things do.
it wasn’t until much later that i realized
there was a large class of sadoos – all of them crammed into india – and they
misspelled their names. being committed
to retaining the proper spelling and origins of myself, i left – after much
weeping and the promise of tweets and postcards – to go on a quest to find
other true sadoos. surely, i reasoned – and
mommy if she taught me anything taught me reason – if i had been born into a
diaper others must have been too.
the secular sadoo is the record of my quest,
in a kind of code, that i know other sadoos with a little bit of work can
decipher. as to the fake sadoos and all
those heaps of masses that aren’t even the fake ones, as fukky always says, who gives a fukky about them?
2.11.15
darkness iv
long have i stood at the doors of darkness,
waiting for light to give me permission to enter, or even to push me
through. then one day i found myself –
though i hadn’t moved – in darkness. and
i knew then that darkness roams, seeking, and if one wishes darkness all one
has to do is wait.
darkness levels, equalizes,
democratizes. and so it is little wonder
of the rarity of equality, the paucity of democracy, when darkness is equated
with death.
darkness is doubt, and should doubt feel like
death in this epoch of knowledge, isn’t this related in part to the ferocity
and confidence of truth in its new linguistic clothes?
who hasn’t uttered upon noticing the
preponderance of white on a page of text and yet it is the blackness that we
read?
love, dissettled bird, sentimental sword, is
of darkness and hides in light, and anyone who would love would first travel on
this path of possessing and masking.
we have images of fire at the onset and
demise of consciousness – at least that instilled to its present degree in
humanity – as barriers of light between the darknesses of eternity and the darknesses
of seeing, films of beginnings and endings hardly screened in the pitch of the
universe’s vast and empty theatre.
i am a curious son of darkness, it
has been said. and – a curious son of light? no. a
curious child is always of the seed of darkness.
i am necessarily indifferent to the
sufferings of the world, unless they be prosthetics of my flesh. should i confront this necessity with the
only force capable of encountering it – hardly light – the prosthetics fall
away and i become darkness, and my death is as indifferent as the world’s.
how beautiful is the nudity of darkness. light clothes everything.
so darkness
is the edenic dream, and light the fall into society’s bottomless analytic well.
darkness, rather than copulating with light,
maintains a wardrobe of light’s fashions.
darkness copulates with nothing and light only with itself.
if darkness was once denial of flesh and is
now flesh’s fulfillment, what is light’s trajectory?
everything interesting happens at night; day
exists only as a place to tell night’s stories.
what is sex other than night seeking night
through day, and failing.
there is always a darkness below (in, above,
around) the opposition between light and darkness that is the same as light;
the path to it though is a path of darkness.
when the nightmares of day are accomplished
and i am permitted to return to my natural habitat of horizontality and
darkness, i breathe with the breath of eternity, my true life of dreams
commences, and the substances of hallucination are intravenously fed into the
conglomerates of my flesh-soul. time
then is the joke it was meant to be, the ponderous politics of the human some
rapidly dispelling flatulence, and money an annoying fly i just smacked on my
face.
a human who inhabits darkness detaches itself
from modes of production and there, away, becomes perpetually open to being
created – form of formlessness and nothing manifesting but the open.
darkness is a human oriented with more or
less equal measure to the languages that seem to emerge from within it and
those that seem to confront it from without.
darkness could be said to be the confusion that results from a
persistent uncertainty about the source
of the myriad languages. does this
darkness change, in some psychic alchemical sense perhaps, to light as one
becomes comfortable with the confusion?
but if i become comfortable, am i listening, or has comfort become a
dominant voice? i remain in the doubt of
myself – a doubt some might say is a dominance – and this is darkness.
darkness is the voices of form, its drought
and flood.
i am in love with darkness. the passages and shapes of light – its
assertions – are to me dark’s rough categories, beckonings toward night.
darkness is the space that can be entered
after use does not lose its use but rather takes its place in the domains of
uselessness.
in darkness i work with whatever materials
are at hand – weakness, wealth, poverty, power, betrayal, fragmentation,
loyalty, unity – and darkness teaches me to be equally adept with all materials
and tools, for the universe in its reaches knows no hierarchies – or rather,
knows all hierarchies and knows that within this knowledge each subverts the
other and is true to itself. through the
vastness of these truths, weakness and strength are equally powerful,
impecuniousness and riches equally abundant.
darkness is democracy.
darkness iii
in the absence of visible darkness yet with its
desire persistent, remnant, and present, with darkness having migrated from
exteriority to interiority, our relations with it shift on psycho-mythic
registers, and we seek for the unseen darkness in the human as we once sought
the unseen light of god. so the human
disappears, while our seeking, while remaining infinite, turns toward our
absent selves.
in the age of knowledge, with the human
more tangibly and relatively omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient than god
once was, darkness becomes the ungraspable, apocalypse the dream,
disintegration the hope.
only flesh in its darkest knowledge can
rise to look light in the eye.
to love darkness is to avoid in its
entirety the statement – let there be
light (and consequently let there be
…, which is always and simply a variation) – and rather remain hovering on
voids, exhorting nothing. this is no
statement of fate, any more than let
there be light or money or love or knowledge be statements of fate, but of
the indivisibility of fate and freedom and chance. this indivisibility is darkness.
to exist on the margins – but rather,
no: to exist in places those with money
and hierarchical social power name as outside the light, their light – and not
attempt to move (or rather to move only among these places so named by such) is
to subject one’s selves (oneselves) to visions that, in language, are given by
and to darkness, but outside of language (or rather in languages other than
language), and this outside given to
a deeper darkness: that of not knowing
whether the visions are comprised of light or darkness.
to see, it is said, requires
light. and yet can we not say that the
blind-from-birth see, yet through language.
words are dark eyes. language has
the capacity to bypass light and see.
this is its energy – energy that subverts the power of the beasts of the
world and the screams and resentments they plod on.
and so when we say in the beginning was the word, we know the word existed before
light, and the word was void, and vision was only the capacity to remain in
relation to word. so technology permits
new paths of remaining in relation, new patterns of darkness, new visions of
creating.
i take the lights of society and weave
them – though weaving be now an art of industry – with the scattered skeins of
my flesh’s black thread. how do i know
this weaving when its schools are destroyed and its masters dead? i take my lessons in the night, i read the
texts of void. madness becomes my lover
and emptiness my friend.
mysticism, as its more visible sibling,
society, takes on darkness as root metaphor rather than light – for darkness is
the present greater energy.
i am oriented to those without names in
the world – not as any advocate to give them names or to protest their
namelessness or even to judge the named in their greed for names and all that
clambering entails or to become through advocacy or other means among the named
– but as a naturalized citizen of the tribe of the anamed. i recognize my kinspeople; we are those who
find it difficult to breathe in the air of names; we are those whose rough and disturbing
comfort is wandering in the darkness between creation and destruction, affirmation
and protest, between the ruling and the ruled.
we are the nomads of darkness.
should we – through chance or fortune or talent or love – come too close
to the republic of names, we cannot help but sabotage any process of citizenry
that might be thrust upon us … neither through denial nor hate but an eyed and
replete acceptance … and return to our people, the people of night and the
impossible eternity of words, those who stumble, without object, objects, through
the alleys in those dark regions that connect city and soul.
31.10.15
darkness ii
to pass over in a plane a city at night – is
this not a vision less of the indication of civilized constructs of a species
and more of the stirred dreams in the human looking down? and when the plane moves from its island of
light to oceans of darkness, what then the dreams?
we may be better thinking less of darkness as
anything visual and more as sound. not
silence, for only the space between darkness and light would be silent, but atonal
moods at the margins of noise.
we know that darkness – like eternity,
justice, love, light, goodness – doesn’t exist in any raw or pure form. thus
what we call darkness is always an admixture with light and so its ratios – the
amount of light in it – are always shifting.
darkness is variegated and impurified light.
darkness is less darkness and more our giving
ourselves over to it. darkness is the
gift of ourselves, a yielding without object.
night is simply day made visible, for isn't crepuscularity the onset of the unknown?
enlightenment if it is anything is endarkenment.
isn’t darkness life that has not been turned
into an event and so the overwhelming bulk of life?
aren’t there literatures of light and
literatures of darkness? in the former, tristram shandy, shakespeare’s comedies,
orlando, aristophanes, groups and
atolls of others; in the latter almost everything. between but on darkness’ side a range from hamlet to the master and margarita. this
may make it seem as if light laughs, darkness weeps or is mute. and this is not untrue. but rather, to be literature, both laugh and
weep and are mute. it is more that the
former enter existence through social ritual, the latter through the grave. both are insufficient comedies, different
genres of wit.
that the mystics experience light when
through their circles of ordeals, that the dying see tunnels of light, that the
supposed achievement of the guru and the goal of the spiritually seeking is
enlightenment … all this points only to darkness containing within it its
opposite, a concentration of everything, at its center, a sphere with almost no
diameter, and this almost-not-thereness only increasing its potency and
apparency in the overwhelming black.
what is the distance between you and i, i and
i, between memory and forgetting, the unseen and the seen? aren’t these distances darkness?
this wiring that connects light to life and
goodness and truth, darkness to death and evil and falsity – only a particular
standard in the linguistic-energy configurations of the universe. what would rewire us to new standards of
possibilities and impossibilities? where
might be the vision to become wireless in ourselves, all connecting to all and
from all, the playful and free democracies of consciousness?
necessity perhaps is related to darkness as
freedom is, in some collective-oneiric genealogy. and light? is light the manufactured apparati that
permit screenings of the familial relationships? the dubious, searing, and unmitigated beams
of civilization and culture turned on our irrevocable and lost origins?
if i must speak your language to understand
it, is darkness all the speakings i have not spoken, that have not summoned me
to enter them? if so, don’t i live and
speak in darkness and my little languages, these candle flickerings, which so
often seem to the i as stars larger than the universe, primarily indicators of
what i do not know?
so ignorance and darkness and doubt may be
the only and vague harbingers of truth, and what we call knowledge an edifice
of falsities. the human in its bulk
places its bets on the latter, but the odds of time are set in obscure places,
and hardly read.
in the light of knowledge, darkness is no
longer possible. i simulate it in the
laboratories of the absent. i package it
in capsules of varied legalities, shoot it in the wretched alleys of god. i visit the prostitute of art. i am laid down in the soils of the damned. these are my rites and sex, my semiotics of
love.
30.10.15
darkness
darkness and homelessness are siblings in
time’s dysfunctional family. in a
present odd reunion – a poorly attended affair that’s rented my flesh for its
drugged party – i find solace in darkness, i sleep in the cardboard box of my blood;
familial lineages glide before me in runny colours and difficult flatulences.
the realms of visible politics – identity,
sex, gender, ethnicity – are the shibuya of the human psyche … but the realms
of invisible politics – sanity, eloquence, blood, beauty, virtue – are the
pissed slums of neglected urbanscapes.
the latter are my home; daily i uncoil my diseased prick and whiz on the
future. melancholic jötunn suck me
off with their gums and we collapse into night’s putrescent kingdoms.
i wake up daily in a bed of death
i say to the shadow called day –
i will crawl into you
i will make you my companion
we will play together as if we were friends.
but i long for the prayers of dreams
i lust though for the shadow of sleep
death is my lover, the grave my mentor
day – night’s useful mask, void’s awkward
other
evening waits like a warm and dirty bath
how beautiful when darkness draws us into her
that dread of this ever-present waking
darkness is not an absence of light, but is polar
to and interacting with light; light is the simplest most undivided, homogenous being we know … confronting it
is darkness: infinitely plural, divisive
… and so infinitely creative. colours – shadow and the children of shade – are light itself. colour is born of and feeds on darkness.
darkness evolves environmentally: as humans migrate into contexts of perpetual
light, so darkness – our deepest need – is constructed and accessed in novel
and fabricated ways by these emerging creatures of light. the materials, maps, hazards, portals,
labyrinths, signage, risk management practices and false exits of these fresh
routes – the comparison of these to those of the worn ones – all this giving
new life to darkness … or rather to humans in their cravings for infinite
relations.
at light’s highest point on its ladder, the
darkness of things presents itself to me as the simmering surfaces of
light. but at the apex of darkness on
itself, how do i see light? as the
animation of darkness? a
misspelling? as the remnant that
questions, dark’s tongue? a hope that
subverts even hope?
any authentic notion of divinity – or at
least that of the human unhinged from its overwhelming greeds and incarcerating
self-reflections, and so the human not itself – must include that which is
oriented to seeing in darkness, regardless of whether it can speak. divinity is independent of language, and any
future notion of the writer, of the book, might place vision – not word – at
the center of its dark art.
do i wait for day or do i wait for night? my orientation to this question determines my
comfort with society.
knowledge, while it may be acquainted with
day – most certainly an esteemed and professional colleague at times, on
occasion a spouse – is night’s lover.
if we were to compare the conversations of
night with the conversations of day, with humans being novel to us, would we
not conclude we were dealing with two separate species? so darkness is a language, and who would give
themselves to its mastery? and how can it be taught but in unaccredited and
disavowed classrooms?
are not the translation arts between the
languages of light and the languages of darkness more of darkness, for they are
rooted in obscure soils and hardly seed or flower?
to say we are born of darkness and return to darkness neglects that we never leave – we are simply given briefly eyes to see it.
to say we are born of darkness and return to darkness neglects that we never leave – we are simply given briefly eyes to see it.
3.10.15
knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders iv
cross the bridge of sighs in your robes of
doubt. sing to the punters of ends. expose yourself to time and may it violate
you. ascend to wicker prisons of fire
and burn. burn your histories and your
myths. burn your pathetic tears. burn your love and love. burn your stupid jokes. fire is the answer and is always the
answer. and the question? isn’t everything the question?
knowledge is ledge construction and
maintenance and pricing and profitability and enforcement, the ledgers of
ledges, unknowledge is no ledge or ledgers, and the immaterial orders are the
battle and unity of both.
i walk along my segments of the infinite
corridors of knowledge, limping like ulysses, soap in my pocket like leopold, a
little butterfly dreaming of better butters, the clouds are labia marching to
an unknown war, the concrete sun-dried scrotums, and all’s well, all’s well,
all’s always well.
take my hand or my prick or my hernia or
something and take me down the well of yourself and show me the knowledge that
isn’t there and slice me to death with your perfections. oh my impossible love. i have learned how to walk around inside my
head. it may sound silly to you but it’s
very helpful to me.
i would like to be a white-robed candle on a
hill, chanting pee-wee quotes, burning dumbly.
i would like to be some little retorts.
somewhere in the yucatan mayhaps.
then i would belong to the cult of the human and know the rituals of
knowledge and walk the walls of names. i
would know the wellness of wells. i
would know knowledge like i know myself.
then i would shine with the light of the dead gods and reflect the
mirrors hiding in the folds of clouds.
but i am not what i would like to be.
i am not what i would seem. i am
precisely the sum of the negations of this text.
2.10.15
knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders iii
the sun sets on man. how many times do we need to be told
this? genocide has more meaning. the sun rises on another day and the day
jumps around and barks the way days do and licks my balls in just that special
way, and the sun rises, and it rises it also rises, and hemingway is orlando
and orlando is walt and walt is in your wallet and your wallet’s blood has
spilt and it is empty. this is what i
see on the set of the sun, its pretty bombed hemoglobin stage. oh monks.
oh monks of my lecherous mind.
build me stages of pebbles, construct theaters of suffering. take me by the prick into fields of fading
labia. autumn. today is the first full day of autumn and
winter looms like aphrodite in her drunkenness.
hooters is across from me. condos parade their compassionate faces
before our forsaken redemptive world.
coffee loves me. the hare in my ass
is lively and angry and stuck. it’s
going to be a good day.
you haven’t heard it said that the limits of
knowledge is the onset of spiritual menstruation. you haven’t heard it said that to explore the
limitless with the limited is the most dumbest
thing and the most central human act making the human the most dumbest
thing. you haven’t heard. you haven’t read. you haven’t lived. you haven’t had. you.
you. you you ma. you you ma ma.
nothing solves tummy aches like tum
tums. tum tums and death. and death does it better. death tums.
tum tum de tum tum
rilke taught me something once. taught me something on his ladder of
torture. but i forget.
nothing solves tummy aches like nothing. or a rabid rabbit up your butt.
i think of all the teachers i’ve had. professors, prostitutes, priests, pedants,
philosophers, pedophiles, poets, pipers, piped.
and i have to say. the rabbit
competes.
who is more glorious? alice coltrane, alice in wonderland, alice
the girl next door, or alice the closet inside?
i asked this of the oracle and you know what i think i saw her pointing
to in the pyretic tundra of words? alice.
fucker.
i stand on knowledge’s skinny windowsill,
pretending i’m cleaning glass. the dead
birds raining don’t help much. the
rabbit helps. the rabbit and the oracle. the rabbit and the oracle and the pebble and
pee wee and the memory of the dentist and dead mister disney. everything helps.
woe to you who take the sheets of knowledge
and cut them into itty pieces and gouge out eyes and stuff them in your deep
pockets and call yourself well.
this is knowledge. to sit on the toilet some fucked up morning
and sing the praises of flighty fate. to
lie below a once-loved corpse and love it even more. to walk through the sewers on superbowl
sunday and compose unfunny jokes and laugh.
to talk as if talking were something other than talking but know it
isn’t. to go to galleries and piss on
the heads of oneself. to collect sheep,
placing them one by one in mason jars, labeling each carefully according to
burton and archimedes and allen and john, and show them to your girlfriends or
boyfriends or whatevers or just yourself and you are the sheep. you are the sheep and the rabbit and the
dentist and the dead. when google tolls,
it tolls for thee.
1.10.15
knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders ii
the esoteric and the homodox, the arcane and
familiar, the oneiric and substantial, the purchased and the given, the robed
and the naked, the entitled and the violated, the tribal and the hard wind of
the commons, that which is caressed and that which is set aside, abnegation and
striving, enfeebling and potencies … here, without diminishment, is the knowing
that does not know in the currents of quarks.
that yellow
is a light which has been dampened by darkness, blue is a darkness weakened by
light is no less true today than it was or will be, that every statement is
from the non-existent platform of truth true and so to state is to be of the
state and in state and people of knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial
orders are less of state than mood and mood a form of homelessness … that this,
that this is, is something we might imbue into the imbibings of our formal
education systems if it were not for the comedies they so freely grant. praise be states in their beneficence of
tangential wit. praise be schools in
their oblique walllessness. praise be
enculturations in the smiles they hide.
for knowledge is that ancient game we play on time’s broken board. and we all have the rules. and i read yours the way i read butter. and mine in the manner of cheese.
i tell you the truth. you shall melt like milk in the abattoirs of
the law. and people shall laugh at you
like the violence of rabbits. you shall
climb into the bed of your tears like happiness. and then you shall know. then we shall know. then and when knowledge shall rear its rear
like cloudy eclipses and the moon shall be full and we shall be blind.
oh little pebbles. i eat you out like alice. i grow and shrink like nightmares. i am no phallus or pink and shiny thing, that
jewel in clams in cans. i am neither
satisfaction nor monks. i may be heat
but if i am i am of the kind of popsicles.
the irrevocable fire of the frozen shall be sucked by the eternally
starving. and this is the knowledge you
begin losing after kindergarten.
i suck knowledge like an alabaster cock stuck
in the forehead of maggots. i am blood
and eyes and both are sucking maws.
you are knowledge. i take you on my tongue like a too sweet
cough candy. i choke on you. you are a pebble. you are a desiccated rabbit. you are the perfect lie of the cult. i need you like blood. eyes eat blood and blood eats eyes and so the
world is made perfect again and again.
it is only our knowledge that prevents us seeing this, seeing eyes.
the mirror of eyes is set to the mirror of
eyes and what is exchanged between them?
the gods are decomposing.
democracy is a dead bird. love is
mechanical coffee. music is semen on
your face. and still i love you. still i love.
30.9.15
knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders i
another human says to me after a community
arts festival that ends in white-robed humans, in shadow play and the
translucent heads of mythic creatures, gliding, chanting, like humanoid and
earthbound clouds, among candles, on and at the base of hills, polyglottally,
through a lukewarm late summer evening of threatening rain – looked like a cult to me. i reply, as
pee-wee herman said, one person’s cult is another’s party.
that herman to my knowledge never said this
and if he did in contexts so far from mine that we could say he never or barely
did, if i assume at least temporarily my context as standard. that i can and do say to my knowledge. that i
never replied as such. that the other
human only approximated my above quotation of it. that the image(s) in your mind – if there be
image(s) – birthed from these words likely bear little resemblance to what i
saw, and these words to other words that might have been birthed from the
presumed and ostensibly indisputable actual event, hardly proves but equally
hardly dispels the spinning, expanding, morphing, collapsing limits and
boundlessnesses of what we learn, and how, and what we don’t.
i am interested in the supposedly existing
thoughts of chuang tzu, wittgenstein, kant, hume, foucault, artaud, kristeva, the
boys, the non-boys, the non-girls, the girls, and as is well known in
non-existent circles, the non-humans (which some have argued include the
humans). but no more interested than in
the voices at my co-op’s picnic table, the pebbles in the tiny teeny bitty itty
zen garden before me in this café, the repetitive semi-articulations of that
lover, or the molasses of the morasses of the marsh mists of the appearances of
my mind.
in the paragraph above that begins with another human is all knowledge, all
knowledge’s deconstruction, the materiality and immateriality of all things.
in the paragraph above is just another pebble
in this zen garden stretching before this and that i to the stars, unseen monks raking, unseen monks constellating,
unseen monks whispering, of the infinite love of each pebble, of the sum of all
infinities becoming nothing in that way nothing is become.
in the paragraph above i see a ghost of a
girl tumbling down staircases of burning manure, men of ostensible maturity and
power blanching to fear, for they are seeing saint bernards too large to be
saint bernards. and i want to say – some
of me wants to say – i am the girl. but i cannot.
i cannot for reasons too complex and beautiful and stupid to name. the reasons are too long. reasons are always too long.
in the paragraph above is the paragraph below
and if you don’t see that you’re dumber than a geriatric cat and i strip you of
the name human and turn you into a
pebble and you are thereby sanctified in the garden of silences. these are the paths of knowledge and the
signs of the immaterial orders of freedom.
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16.9.15
mysticism iv
the innocence of mysticism is what rouses scorn. yet is it not in this very innocence that the question of humanity is raised, and the new brought to bear? and is it not before this very innocence that the arrogance of knowledge falters, swoons?
the relation of mysticism and truth totters,
like all relations, at an unspoken fulcrum in night’s ill-visited
playground. and yet, outside of that
playground, away from the oscillations of darkness, we might say in certain
moods that this relation is bound in a manner not dissimilar to the bindings of
the womb.
since mysticism is the discipline that cannot
be taught, the practice that cannot be shown, the learning that is an
unlearning, the play that is never staged, of what use is it? but that is the question it doesn’t care to
ask.
mysticism does not destroy time and space –
for what could destroy them? – but rearranges them according to principles
hardly cognitive. this hardly cognitive is something that is
set before the world’s beginnings, questioned at the center of the world’s
spinnings, and loosed past the world’s endings.
the distance between mysticism and nothing
might, in a mathematics not yet invented, in a geometry still imprisoned in
dream, be precisely the distance between good and evil, between yes and no.
when i speak, this i made more an i by being
less, language is less a function or spawn of meaning, more a film on a window
during rain.
the doubt of whether, when dreaming of being
a butterfly, i am a human dreaming of being a butterfly, or, when appearing as
a human, i’m a butterfly dreaming of being a human, if discredited by science
or common skepticism, does not negate the spaces the doubt is trying to reach –
spaces that may be alongside or even in the spaces that discredit, for these
spaces themselves are spaces of negation and strewn through them holes to
playful empathies, perhaps a necessary condition of constructive evolution.
if all this is only sophistry, language
games, an avoidance of anything that’s truly life, i, who have known the conditions
of those who know such things, would simply hold conditional reflection before
them, this glass of nature, this laboratory of time and the human but some
broken vials in it.
mysticism might be a way of sensing time not
from the present but all presents, history melted butter, the human earth just
another sphere.
mysticism, as a particular brand of
hallucinatory existence, might be considered the formless form of the physics
of hallucination.
mysticism is a means of interrogating nature,
while having forgotten words and will.
we have said before that mysticism is the
ratio 2:0, where 2 is the experience of the sensuous world, 0 the experience of emptiness, and : the experience of the relation between.
how does the continuously emerging
technological global complex affect mysticism?
as an invasive species might affect a fog.
that what is sometimes called nihilism can be viewed as a negative form of mysticism (a negative form of a negative way) opens portals of the relations of time and myth, but barely. the explorer of relations might use contortionist means to squeeze through narrow passages of language, entering what might be called a funhouse of negation, glimpsing flows of politics, psychology, and art as through an instrument made for alternative analyses.
that what is sometimes called nihilism can be viewed as a negative form of mysticism (a negative form of a negative way) opens portals of the relations of time and myth, but barely. the explorer of relations might use contortionist means to squeeze through narrow passages of language, entering what might be called a funhouse of negation, glimpsing flows of politics, psychology, and art as through an instrument made for alternative analyses.
the classic formula of mysticism – this is that – an equation at the root
of art and knowledge, contains within it this
is not that, this is this, that is that, that is not that, and this is not this. without these inclusions, the formula is wholly empty.
if there is curriculum for the mystic, it
might be to travel through these inclusions to the formula and through these
travels know the formula not as formula but flesh.
i read the distant scrimmages of humans, i
scan the daily blood. the advances in
knowledge and speed appear like cats. the
screaming significance of the living is muted by the eyes of the dead. and the human seems to me less a newspaper
than a cloud, more a river than a god.
i am led through the city by threads of energy spun from the grave’s slow looms. the living blow around me like dust, their voices like bones clanking in the wind. i am led, and there is no destination but to be a weaver too, to lead some who speak in analytic tongues, briefly, through the dust. all is energy and dust and a strange weaving.
i am led through the city by threads of energy spun from the grave’s slow looms. the living blow around me like dust, their voices like bones clanking in the wind. i am led, and there is no destination but to be a weaver too, to lead some who speak in analytic tongues, briefly, through the dust. all is energy and dust and a strange weaving.
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