autothanatography as practice ii

autothanatography i have learned has many associated practices.  one of these, naturally, is autobiography, but autobiography transformed by death.  no longer is the account of one’s life dominated by time or even space.  language, form, loss, dream, degradation – all these and infinite other structures offer themselves as complements, substitutes, and subversions of time, identity, reputation, unity, facticity, social convention, of biography constructed according to life’s tyrannies and humanity’s relentless hierarchies … and so as much thanatography – as thanatography, being constituted in an animate form given to death, is also biography.

another associated practice is autohagiography.  in writing my life-death, i write my sainthood, the unmitigated holiness of my life.  saint genet wrote in his autobiothanatohagiography, sainthood is the loftiest human attitude.  the saint arrives at its goal if it sheds them; its expression is original, its sole basis renunciation – i therefore associate it with freedom.  as the loftiest sainthood was once martyrdom and now is its secularized child, suicide (martyrdom being impossible in capitalism, one of its many craftinesses, for it specializes in laundering and virtualizing its blood), i bring suicide into my life as a practice:  i plan my death and enact it in visions and words, my funeral becomes the stage on which i breathe.  more centrally, i build death into my relation to self and world through value and volition:  i pluralize and expand value to extents that empty any value of potency, that radically distribute value such that the human becomes what it is in distributed space:  a speck, a geranium petal, a bicycle.  i direct volition toward itself in carnivals of complexity.  such building effectively leaves me dead in society, a martyr of myself – judged, judge, journalist, spectator, scholar, protestor, crown and defense, indifferent other – the powers united, primal, pragmatically ineffectual, usefully useless, seething in voids of words.

autothanatography is the intentional and continuous denaming of myself to provide new perspectives, forms, obstacles, passages, a subverting of barriers and incarcerations through a weaving of the yes-no into new flesh.  technology, cyborgs, are for the unimaginative, the bifurcated, the scholarly.  i create a new body with the natural energies of myself.  who needs industrial complexes and pharmaceutical conspiracies and entitled academic circuses in fashions of synthetic knowledge?

and you, you so committed to life, to wellness, power, will, community, society, progress, health – i say to you i’ve lived your lives, your health, your communities.  i’ve lived the sickness and death and hatred that govern them.

living death and turning this living into writing minimizes – through death – the imprint of the i, except in that most energy-efficient resource, words, and so is ecological, contextual, non-speciest, and aligned with a reality that confers no distinction on any specific singularity or group.

autothanatography de-evolves the autothanatographer gradually through the process of removing the prosthetics we have been enculturated to associate with life without necessarily removing life.  a de-evolution travelling sufficiently back through to encounter tomorrow in nascent glory.

it returns the human to a pre-civilized state while merging the most noble aspects of that pre-civilization (a daily intimacy with existence’s core) with the most noble aspects of civilization (language), bypassing the production of waste of the between.

so daily i choose death and in this choosing find energy and life.  this is hardly some christian masochism any more than it is a nietzschean ubermenschanitis.  it bypasses the high and low by uniting both in itself.

autothanatography is protest:  against the brutality of names, against the hard hierarchies of the human, against the savage ennui of nature.  it distinguishes the human by its most distinctive capacity, combining its uncommon consciousness of death with its rare capacity to not fear death and its rarer capacity to translate this consciousness and not-fearing into language, that uncompromising compromising concatenation of human and inhuman infinity.

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sadoo diaper and art obio, sadoos who met on a banana peel in thiruvetipuram during the overthrow of the cumhurbaşkanlığı külliyesi, are increasingly collaborating on an exercise in exercises of encountering death and birth through ripped myth, reimagining self-world in diverse ways, blurring the distinctions that the hierarchies of society and its linear obsessions with time say are the gifts we are given to work with.

what is the difference between autobiography and autothanatography then? asks sadoo diaper?

if we have done our work properly, replies art obio, this question hardly has a clear answer – both being liminal portals of possibility, even as autohagiography may very well be.

are you saying, continues sadoo diaper, that birth and death – and maybe even holiness should it exist – each being a marginal event at the center of things, participate equally in something more nameless, less articulate?

while not discounting any validity that might be resident in your words i would not say precisely this, replies art obio, but perhaps rather say … {and yet this conversation, like this blog, continues interminably and future fragments are saved for elsewhere and elsetime, for we will get no sleep if we never silence the sadoos who, despite their theories, like to talk …} …