death vi

have i not zealously sought constructive vitalized non-existence for the attendant wound – a wound without which life is not life, this home and womb of words?

to be declared mentally unhealthy in the present age is analogous to being declared a heretic during the inquisition:  the standards experts move in, enforcing what and how the brain can think.   to calmly claim one’s own standards, rooted in one’s flesh rather than institutional-cultural-economic mass and privilege is a death – like all deaths, permanent, silent, solitary, operating with configurations of weakness and strength unfound in the lives of standards

not unrelated to the death of sanity is the death of class – this path of removing oneself from class and the corollary struggles.  unwilling to assume the pecuniary and productive values of the middle class, unwilling and unable to assume the privilege and sanctimoniousness of the upper, unable to assume the envy and jokes of the lower, it – regardless of how it is viewed by those in class, regardless of the degree to which it lacks the prosthetics (money, possessions, name, reputation, comfort, security) desired and sometimes possessed to some extent by those in class – experiences itself as outside of class:  at least these classes defined by currency.  it seeks in death (where else?) the manual for living in this outside

the madness with which i write and live is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of some label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final phase capitalist society. so when i use the word mad here i'm not referring to a special race of people, but the mad in me addressing the mad in you in the hope that the former mad speaks clearly or loudly enough for the latter to hear.  so too with death

to live in what might be called dreams and to die in what might be called reality in a society given to the latter is to live a life of death and die a death of life.  and if you find my nomenclature strange – if you say, well reality is all there is – … ?  doesn’t what i call the modern secular mystic aesthetic (from pessoa to woolf, from dickinson to genet) carry a culture of dreams from the slaughter of certain people of these and other lands, from old men who dreamed visions and old women who dreamed dreams, who walked with spirits and knew waking life had no superiority, carry this culture in the emptiness of their hearts through a metallic desolation, dogmatic in its faith in things and facts.  no – despite the institutionalized cries of the light and newly voiced, of the heavy established names, that they have justice, truth, power – i rest in crypts of gaseous doubt, the incessant blurring of ideas and species, of all singularities.  the world, existence, is for me and those rough ones of my tribe – spread across death like fog – hardly solid, hardly true … a question among infinite questions, a dream among infinite dreams

why would i be interested in writing in the common tongue, in writing about the tedious topics of money, sex, society – whatever arbitrary concerns and styles the day ejects and the gouged desperados conform to as if they have objective value?  the overwhelmingly vast portion of the universe is radically inhuman and at the center and margins of the human – there too the inhuman, masked and hardly masked.  so i seek languages, forms, syntaxes, dictions, that reflect the energies that dominate and circumscribe the universe and, inescapably, often surreptitiously, the human; the tools i use for such seeking i have found far more readily in death than life, in the apophatic rather than the analytic, silence rather than what we call communication.  i hardly aim for lucidity or that most puerile of objectives – to be understood.  in art – as in love – we must remember to leave any humanity we might have behind

bricks move and sing.  bricks are made of language.  we do not hear them less because they lack mouths, more because our ears are unschooled and the words in a single brick so vast as to rival a dictionary, syntactically arranged unexpectedly for our brains so trained to certain orders.  would we hear bricks with the same ease we hear humans, would our identities not be spontaneously reconfigured, the human voice returned to its place among places, the grammars of things vast and diverse, our brains as empty and fluid as clouds?

to abdicate using others’ illusions for what may be one’s own is to find oneself in force or – more rarely – energy:  each an intimacy with death, the difference being its primordial orientation to diffusion

death v

when i died first i don’t remember …

once one detects monism and begins dismantling it one experiences it everywhere (this splintered monism, this new secular religion:  the yahweh-christ in disguise – multipally:  as cyborg, victim, scholar, social media junkie, justice ngo guru, feminist, techno, eco-spiritualist, healer …), and cannot stop dismantling.  this process is death.  and then a one does not appear and this is not the one but one.

the root of the human is the inhuman and the process of entering this root to become human is what we call death.

to encounter the human by matching nature with nature – this is a death of which we speak.

just as there is no closure in love (regardless of its state and direction), so there is no closure in death.

death is only a simulation of emptiness.

death is the gap between desire and no-desire, these infinite gradations in which we live.

one of death is given to and rather than or, an and that includes many or’s, even as one authentically given to yes is one given to a yes of infinite no’s.

soft death, like art or bread, you do not forgive our clumsy love, our confused aloofness, our fated cruelty, you do not forgive.  you do not forget, for memory is hard and apportioned to life.

my life is established as a chair from which to watch my death unfold.  i do not waste it on side ventures, on frivolous things, on the pursuit of accumulations or to be watched.  i watch.

death, my true name which cannot be named

for, like death, it hides, in my brain

what i call consciousness, game

of chance and light – inane

but pointed, the same

as love’s blood’s stain?

all the same

the pain

…

the historic objects of mysticism – those perceptions that facilitated justification of death:  whatever linguistic-spiritual concatenation of god, holiness or purification, charity might have been involved – having now, along with objects (through their spectacular proliferation) died, place mysticism with no possibilities of human or self improvement, no sainthood of anything recognizable, no allegiances or alliances, no institutional affiliations however strained.  it arrives, empty, at time’s dirty threshold, still housed in horny flesh, still yearning, still hardly of this world, its not-knowing and suffering odd antidotes or absurdities to the edifices of knowledge and wellness, questioning, empty, objectless and aimless, subjectless, godless, dirty, looking, still looking, but with perception shattered, bereft even of bereftness, lacking any justification, perhaps in all this absence with opportunities to become more itself.

methods of exile and death in the technological age for those disinclined to participate in the dominant and present forms of life (liberally pervasive now across all sectors, from business to art to politics to humanitarianism to ecology to spirituality and psychology to education to law and justice to science and technology) include not only withdrawal from progress, monism, societal devouring, but also humanism and anthropocentrism.   the primary tenets of today’s religion, craftily having rebranded itself secular, are as monolithically and inquisitorially voracious, ruthless, intolerant, dogmatic, and enforced as the primary tenets of past religions, and so one who is non-conformist will likely experience death, but according to the forms of this religion, which finds blood distasteful and death impossible and martyrdom repugnant, and so exile and death and martyrdom are simulated, offset, emigrated from physicality to emotionality, from visibility to virtuality, and the one so disinclined (who refuses to climb) likewise uses simulated means to withdraw, to die.

geometrically, simulations of death can be negotiated as moving forward by turning back, mathematically as adding by subtracting, communicationally as speaking by using no words, politically as acting by not-acting, emotionally as loving by not-loving, existentially as living by dying.

death iv

living a life of death can include eremiticism, primary destruction (regardless of the direction of the destruction and degree of laundering), obsessive morbidities, unthinking citizenship, and many other forms of simulation.  these are the traditional and primitive forms and they interest us far less than the living death of the future, which includes moving from life to life within life to such an extent that the moving, never stopping, becomes death, and so one lives more in the moving, death, the between, than any supposed origin or destination – these false atlantises:  too solid dreams.  yet death, being always unknown, escapes us and so living in escape – from solidity of fact, idea, person, work, direction, dream – is to live lives of verdant death.

so cain was exiled to nod, the land of wandering, after the first death, and there built the first city, and all who live in death live in nod.

if one is given to being committed to no path – hardly one who is aimless and given to regret – and given sufficient opportunity to move among paths to discover that this noncommittal commitment is itself a path, this one has emigrated to the death that lives in life and the life that dies in death.  this no-path path distinguishes itself from other paths in that one has lived it and then discovers oneself on it, in death.

one does not die for one is dying all the time; as a corollary, one does not live, as far as life is normally defined, for one is too busy dying.

i write my death as i write my life, my death is written as my life.  autothanatography and autobiography, wholly embedded in one another, as they are written, create my flesh and eyes.

(elsewhere, a colleague in the industry of sadoo has been exploring new forms of autobiography and is soon to direct this energy and innovation toward new forms of autothanatography.  those interested in creatively and diversely writing their deaths – or simply engaged with the idea of this emerging practice – may wish to seek out that sadoo’s experiments in the ether.)

the void is my mother, death my father …

i write my death.  words open to the abyss.  how can i remember the first time death visited me and said i am life and you will write me, i will be your one and faithful lover?  

we make believe, but we also make disbelieve, and the free movement between the two is death.

violence – regardless of the degree to which it’s laundered through diffusion, institutions – frequently named love – and the naming enforced by the launderers, the priests of money and professions – calls forth violence – immediate, direct, dirty, unmediated by communication, education – and the former, the necessary moralists, call their clean violence good and the dirty violence bad, but from the perspective of death each is equal on the indifferent scale of time, and any hierarchy that might be applied collapses under the weight and the pressing of the calling forth.  so a human who might see these mutual violences as equal and wish to bypass them still cannot bypass violence, but must recreate it using the energies of death.  and is this not the function of art, and the love that is less frequently named, and a calling forth that speaks far from language’s endless abyss?

surely one of the great deaths is the embodied knowledge of how incompatible the good of one loved can be with the good of one’s self.

in the age of technology, we reflesh death.  aloof, clean, optional, with options, impossible, remotely omnipresent and omnipresently nowhere, sexy, urban, statistical, whatever, aesthetic, like cancer conquerable, easy, marketable, objectified, soft like soap, it has become unlike any death anyone has known.  so technology specializes in possibility, a kind of bastard poeticism.

the iliad and blood meridian, bookends to western culture, outline myriad ways to die.  but i, in the outline of my life, find myriad ways to die in life.  someone says, … multiple, shifting, self-contradictory identity in contrast to male ideologies.  but i am male and have died many times to know male as multiple and shifting and self-contradictory and i have died from these easy binaries and i die each day from the words you speak, that are spoken, from words …

to live without goals is to live in death and so destroy death as any kind of end.

de nerval died with his hat on.  hat is in death.

how many have been killed from hate.  hate is in death.

the billions burned and are burning and will burn.  heat is in death.

hunger, hunger, hunger

death iii

death subverts life not by being opposed to life but by becoming life’s shameful necessity.

i do not write with words, but death.  words are just the result of such writing, like spray from the water when a body falls into it.

to translate the dislocation of existence, the chaos of light, our center without gravity, the collapse of time into colour, the precision of imprecision, oneiric exactness, a drawing into nothing through light, to provide memorable views of nothing, evanescent, airy and tinted steam, to make atmosphere a style and indistinctness a method, to transfer polydimensional sensuous form to adimensional planes of words … all this requires continuous and continuously inconclusive negotiations with death.

science is the primarily reproducible textures we spread on death to allay our unsettling relations with it.  i remotely admire the reliability of science’s textures, but use old words to detour around the microscopic admiration, thereby unsettling myself into death.

i was never enamoured of life, but of the devouring that made life tumescent.  disillusioned of the devouring, tired of the great expressions that beautifully show the devouring, i begin to comfortably dwell in the ancient spaces of silence and solitude – these deaths within life that hide in the heart of eating.  does life inevitably seep in?  perhaps, but as into a sieve, for if i am a dwelling for death i am one with many holes.

to live in possibility is to live in death – initially ecstatic, as one blurs oneself on borders between actuality and dream – this ecstasy of eros – and then what seems to be a deep melancholy develops (seemingly replacing the ecstasy yet becoming apparent as another form), as one blurs oneself on borders between sensuousness and death – this ecstasy of thanatos.  and so this living is religious – the unchanging religious life, far from institutional ravages, scholarly autopsies, and populist sentimentalities and launderings, rooted in a precognitive swooning before nothing less than the universe itself, a place of union of art and religion, of creation and awe, of desert and verdancy.

death’s face is absence.  in a culture of presence – of having, seeing, touching, of having to have … – death too must be made present.  technology is the factory that inputs the raw material of death’s absence and outputs (through converting, branding, marketing, shipping, retailing) death as presence.  to avoid this commercial output, a human itself enters into absence, a challenging but not impossible journey, for which there are indirect guides and maps in certain books of past travelers (although the risks and pathways now, in technology, being so recent, are poorly attested, and present sojourners, whether successful or not (and who would even use in this context the word success?), i encourage to write travelogues, such as i am doing, regardless of how partial and flawed they might be, in the hope that the combined experiences might aid in the continuing project of updating the guides and maps of absence in ever-shifting landscapes and ever-altering modes of the production of death in life’s grim, drugged, and regulated factories.

to seek the desert in the city of oneself is to forge a shovel from the junk of one’s soul and dig up death and in the digging see visions of a shroud of communication, and so doubt all things.

to seek the desert in the city is to kill.  what does one kill?  illusions of finding lay slain like soldiers in trench warfare, some though flayed still gasping.

to seek the desert is not of those activities that merit grant applications, book or film contracts, sex club clubbing, monastic vowing, vowing, the attention of the doctored class, beliefs.  at most it grants eyes and fills them with sand.

to see death in all things is not teleological, macabre, pessimistic, gross; it is just poetic vision – as natural as rice or lightning, as strange as television.  to see oneself comprised of death is not suicidal, sick, hateful, misguided; it is just aesthetic mirroring – as clear as avocados or oceans, as cloudy as highways.

death ii

processes and techniques of death –

• hardly protest, argument, objection.  rather – using death as a tool of one’s self to continually eradicate what one thinks the self is.

• a chief art of death is anonymity, one that may be critical for the human to craftily use for its collective survival.  for does not a refusal to use names as root – an essence of anonymity – entail abdicating the supremacy of anything human … and this subversion, this unnaturalness which may be a simulated naturalness more central than technology’s simulations, an unparalleled energy (and this rather than a power) that evokes fear initially, for its vastness, its perceived darkness … and this collective entwining, this seemingly dissipating choice of setting alongside the hyena and termite and hydrant and hookah, an experiencing language for what it is and not some pretty tyranny, some gift of dead or living gods?

• i have always learned far more by not being myself than being myself.  first by not knowing myself sufficiently to not know i was not being myself.  subsequently by not knowing what a self was to an extent that i didn’t know what it was to not be or be myself.  in all cases – the learning, the first not knowing, and the subsequent not knowing – death at the center:  as technique, as question, as energy, as self and selves.

• as it takes a great deal of desire to desire to not-desire, so it takes a great deal of life to live in death.

• that we read the textures of life based on the parameters of death may be obvious, but that we read the textures of death – present to us in life as black glyphs on infinite seas of white – and in this other reading are commonly illiterate is hardly seen.

• a new form of death – a redirecting of death’s energies from their present primary outlets of war and love – would be if the majority of human communication were in art rather than functional, animalistic, or even capricious social discourse.

the human world, curved into itself, itself gravitation and objects, cooperation and enmity more ubiquitous than air, the city now the inescapable environment, objectives raised by the slough of groups and science fumbling enchantment’s ancient sphere, mysticism – being endlessly solitary, silent, of many environments equally (interiorally and exteriorally) but of any single one not at all – may be unable to survive in the present and coming urban and mass technology, it may be the only thing with the subversive skills to survive, or it may – as it has been – amble along, carrying quietly the torch of death through life, so that those who inexplicably find themselves cast from their accustomed environment may have help knowing the selfsame thread that winds through all – whether time, environments, technologies, names, cultures – without distinction. 

writing is easy.  what’s difficult is placing and maintaining one’s self in the spaces of death that make writing possible.

as once could happen with god and nature and no longer, so now one can enter consciousness to leave it, can enter thought to leave it, can enter passion to leave it – this leaving before force forces the leaving (what is colloquially known as death and what is technically a manner of death, a transition of a physical singularity into new forms) is an entering into death to life in certain modes.  so, too, perhaps, this can happen with technology and art and time.

death is the distance that enables life, the distance that is here, on the tram, in your wallet, smiling through a closet of masks, the void of words and the rave of solitude, the clickity-clack of time on the punctual and shiny rails of your brain.  death, like life or jesus or the future, is no friend, not friendly, but an environment, an ecology of turning and returning form.  death is neither darkness nor light, peace nor war, but a way that navigates all without mentioning any.  indifferent to creating names, this energy that trumps and fashions life, that assumes disguises like the sky, it flies, vast across the earth, atonal, lacking purpose, acquainted, limpid, hardly counted, nested, the architecture of galaxies and the technology of insects, enough.

death i

i am of the sects of hamartia and planē, these gods of the order of death.  i establish shrines for them in the houses of my words.  for to devote one’s life to wandering, to the mastery of masks and the supremacy of void, is to err in the institutions of life that enforce life as supreme, distinguishable, standard and plaque, as artifact and station, but in the open air of the dying sea, for those born of movement and theatre and night, it is to breathe.

in the world each hierarchy – even though a hierarchy of an i – is incessantly being questioned by all other hierarchies, a process of death pettily delayed in small measures of time by each hierarchy bolstering itself – this bolstering the hierarchies agree in calling life, an agreement more essential than the competitive bolstering.

a dreamer once said a coward dies a thousand deaths before its death but the valiant taste of death but once.  but i say a coward only dies once and the valiant die a thousand times.  for the valiant are not afraid of death and so die as a matter of routine, because they like it.  it seems to me most strange that humans, seeing that death, a necessary change, comes when it comes, don’t integrate such necessity into their daily lives, dying thousands of deaths and so creating what we now call death as just another one.

the key, they said, is to become so intimate with death that one can use death’s techniques against it.

but then isn’t life also subverted by means of that same intimacy?

a double subversion, they said, an experiment in the laboratory of the soul.

a key, though, without a door.

the only worthy key.

becoming posthumous – …

birth and death, being our passages, present themselves singly as the aporia of life.

death is everywhere but everywhere life is devoted to placing death in small boxes to suit its small purposes.  yet death is large and hardly confined to cemeteries and movies, coffins and dictionaries.  it rides trams through crowded urbanscapes, presides at policy task forces, seduces you in bars, lectures you in ecobiology.   death is not some once and final act, a silencing, but endless flowing. 

i write for the people of the void and so use the methods of the void and the language hardly a language of those people.

living as i have in decades of eros – which only became explicitly named such as we moved away, an inexorable migration into thanatos:  that distance, sensing initially … now i will have lived in both spheres fully, beginning as seems appropriate in eros and closing in thanatos – followed by a shaded dawning that this life of death contains no less energy than that life of life and so, as all the poets have known and written:  eros is as in thanatos as thanatos in eros:  we live dying as we dying live.