- bicycles
- the blurring between humans and animals, humans and technology, humans and gods, humans and everything
- how politicians and businesspeople are manufacturing mental illness
- art. how art still isn’t being heard after 3,000 years
- how the reification of systemic exigencies mitigate difference, intention, competence at the executive level, ensuring any value of debate becomes moot through being transformed into scifi entertainment
- the roles of education and productivity in quietly enforcing patterns of deep destruction
- language. how those who don't speak money's language are being killed faster than the rainforests
28.9.16
some things that were missed
24.9.16
writing ix
writing is neither magic nor a discipline. it
is a prayer without any gods.
who writes for any audience? one writes for
the rules that break the rules.
if writing is mostly waiting, why don’t
writing workshops keep infinite waiting lists without any placement, fulfillment?
then i might believe writing can be taught.
the bicycle trumps language in freedom. but language
trumps the bicycle in mobility.
i inevitably say that i wonder if i wish i
had never been introduced to writing. but i was. and now even the moon is ugly.
and the unflushed toilet rises over the horizon of beauty like an amulet in a
time of crisis.
writing rides a great bird of a 40 kilometer wingspan
to the south pole in june. it skitters onto the back of a fish so vast one can
see neither its head nor tail and travels to the victorious rainforests. yet
one who writes neither rides nor is ridden, but sits in a shack of orbiting molecules
glimpsing the flying of the bird and the swimming of the fish through bloated
fogs.
i am a skeleton and writing is my flesh. so
when the beautiful come to me and strip i say, i am a skeleton – let us put on words and then maybe we can sleep
together. but the others often think they already are fleshed. and so we
stare at each other across a valley of bones.
writing contains horrors in its jurisdiction.
but this is saying nothing. every republic contains these. writing’s
distinction is that its horrors are the simulations of the horrors of all other
republics – including those that simulate other horrors. and this without end.
i’ve spent over 45,000 hours in aimless
writing as an adult, caged by vision. at what point is the
apprenticeship complete? i ask my non-existent master. at what point can i open up my own shop and sell my goods? and my
non-existent master says, some who write
are apprenticed in domains that exchange – if they exchange at all – unknown
currencies, who are masters only at apprenticeship. because they have no master
and thus don’t know how to be one, because they have too many masters and thus
are overwhelmed by mastery, or because they are slow and the human span is
insufficient to graduate from apprenticeship? i ask. but there is only a
white page and silence and a trace of questions.
writing is a mode of existence. is it such a mode that one can be one of writing without writing? and this by entering a writing of writing in the way one can enter a poetry of poetry, a thinking of thinking, a behind behind behind – these innate attributes of mysticism? is this achieved by migrating the restraint of writing from exotericism to esotericism, from the whiteness of the page to the whiteness of the pageless void, a becoming that alchemically alters writing to be not itself, purifying word into silence?
writing is a mode of existence. is it such a mode that one can be one of writing without writing? and this by entering a writing of writing in the way one can enter a poetry of poetry, a thinking of thinking, a behind behind behind – these innate attributes of mysticism? is this achieved by migrating the restraint of writing from exotericism to esotericism, from the whiteness of the page to the whiteness of the pageless void, a becoming that alchemically alters writing to be not itself, purifying word into silence?
23.9.16
writing viii
writing is a translation from one necessity
to another. initially this translation feels like a freedom, but time translates
the feeling of freedom to another necessity. so … from necessity through
necessity to necessity. let no one then speak of writing as a pleasure, unless
it is a dark one. yet writing laughs in darkness, in the way that death laughs.
writing is the deepest of comedies. melville suitably placed these comedies in
the ocean’s depths.
writing makes manifest the dna of the city
and sets this against the cosmology of the observable universe, not in
opposition but in radical and unspeakable union.
writing, in taking issue with time, is
equally a covert energy at odds with money. not because time is money, as the
commonplace goes, but because writing subverts everything … time and money
simply being two of the dominant present commonplaces and so so easily
subverted. (to say that time is money is only to reveal a wholesale
incomprehension of time, money, and the copulative. time is as equally a
cabbage or a totem.)
i would like to see rainbows not of colour,
of spectra of light, but of text, of multihued words, appearing not in the sky
as an arc but in the canopy of mind as supernumerary hyperspheres of dream.
writing stains white light with sins of
blackness.
the towers of the city are trees. i cut them
down with the axe of my mind and thinly slice them into blank surfaces for
words that use my body for their transit.
i do not say these are my words, this is
my work. at most i say these words
may have, like dragonflies, settled once on my flesh. we are not each
other’s. i have briefly been fascinated by their light and indifferent touch.
they have briefly used me for purposes i hardly understand.
the seeming infinity of language is to action
as the seeming infinity of the universe is to the earth.
oh words. what should i do with you in the
dump of my soul? you do not belong there. it should be silence and flies.
when i write, it is not as if something draws
me toward it. rather, nothing draws me. and in this empty picture or unused
well i write and the words that form are water on water, some elemental union
of void and deworded word.
i look at the city’s cells stacked like
tarantula containers. words, fed weekly, taking years to grow, then crawling
mature and fragile into a world of long and innumerable blades.
writing avoids the world’s causticities and
hard illusions by ingesting them and shitting them out on soiled pages which
humans sniff and, smelling themselves, celebrate. any true writer drily laughs
behind its salaciously ascetic face.
i write the way i walk. aimlessly. with my
eyes as legs. the city as the page and my flesh a pen. non-linearly.
distracted. whole. diffused. holographic. hopeless but not despairing. open.
omnipotent. free. deneeded. one.
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19.9.16
writing vii
language wants to escape itself, even as we
want to escape ourselves. language’s means is silence, ours technology. but
silence and technology are bound similarly to language and the human.
even as i cannot consider the human an expert
commentator on itself – but only one voice among many, hardly privileged
because it tends to be perceived to be located on some inside and the inside
perceived to possess in some sense superior perception – so i cannot consider
myself an expert commentator on myself. yet we – and i – cannot help comment.
the gap between this cannot consider
and cannot help is a charter of
writing. yet most writing comes from the cannot
help.
when we say the external world doesn’t exist
– or that it exists solely or primarily as a function of imagination – we point
to maps of spaces of writing. for writing re-enters voids not to create worlds
about which it is debated whether they are illusory or real but to create
spaces that might point to maps, so making any discussion of existence and
non-existence, their locus or non-locus, moot.
we don’t have to create another world, through
politics or technology. that other world is here, already, in language – all we
have to do is enter it, although the policies and procedures for immigration are never explicit and always morphing.
do i write in privacy and loneliness? i enter
privacy and loneliness – or at least the porches of the cottages of their names.
then writing happens. writing is the odd breath of souls loosened in the
unsegmented world.
writing! a dialogue with mirrors’ mute flat
infinity.
to trek through writing’s dense empty
forests, the only respites deserts and carnivals, is to become so used to
nomadic minimalism and survivalist ingenuities that i confuse life and those
techniques required to navigate writing’s environment.
writing is violence, but a violence so
processed by violence violence destroys itself and only writing remains.
nothing here, he says,
after having purchased an excursion package to writing. but writing is a
selective mute.
writing? an empty boat on a river, unmoored,
drifting, unseen, in which time may have ridden once, its traces smelly, like a
deep navel never cleaned?
writing subverts itself. so that in the end –
though there is no end – it gives up itself. what is left? a useless
acquiescent subversion? questions of the methodologies of giving up? atonal
memories? convalescence? palliation? a wellness that refuses its name? these
are questions of death, of the root of the religious quest, where neither
spirit’s presence nor absence can claim ascendancy and its mutability presents
itself in objectifications, its mockery in reifications, its incommunicability
in subjectifications. am i not seduced by writing as its voids are passable
simulations of death and so hold the eternally lost key to life?
8.9.16
writing vi
with few exceptions, i have preferred
writing that has emerged from places of exile, horror, estrangement, despair,
anger, darkness, confusion, transgression – these shadows of culture, these
dumpsters of health. so to write the first step i knew was to travel to these
spaces and make them my home. writing would then happen, a product of this
environment, as much as wellness is a product of capitalistic society.
writing is a cold love, but it is a love. and
its coldness can feel like a welcome from the unreliable heat of what is
normally called love. never familiar, it’s familiar. never intimate or
reassuring, a dark companion.
these many languages of writing. journalism,
scholarship, business, politics, technology, philosophy, mysticism, criticism,
affection, lust, play, speculation, whimsy, … isn’t each a celestial object,
artificial satellite, bound by gravity, electromagnetism.
i don’t want to write until i write well – i
want to write until i can’t distinguish well and sick. the whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful yet this is
only the ugly, the whole world recognizes the good as the good yet this is only
the bad.
thought is primarily oneiric not rational; its
rationality is valid but secondary, posterior in time and being to dream.
writing translates the dream of thought to language; communication articulates
thought’s reason.
writing is death. the only death remaining us
in this age of virtualized death. writing is death because it replaces the body
with itself and kills the operations of the human in the body. it teaches
nothing, aims for nothing, loves nothing, advocates nothing. its selfishness
and selflessness are vast – the former in that it doesn’t care for others, the
latter in that it doesn’t care for itself. writing is not itself. it is the
dead other that has taken over as host of the human. so zombies and immanence
assume popular and intellectual consciousness. but writing is the mother of
zombies, the father of immanence. it eats through the world at the speed of
words. first and last technology, it surrounds the fat societal middle from
within and without and consumes it until all that’s left of society is air. so
there is air disguised as society and writing disguised as nothing and here we
are in the consummation of love. this consummation doesn’t care for the causes
of liberation – whether gendered, sexed, raced, classed, specied – for in it
these causes have been completed in an age so primitive its memory is only
available in dream.
only the dead write and only the dead read.
books are the means of communication between the dead and the dead.
no longer is there writing on the wall. the
wall isn’t there, broken by dreams of unity. writing is written on the air …
yet the question remains the same: who would there be to interpret the words,
and what power shall die tonight to be replaced by another face in the parade?
writing isn’t about names, but about the
indistinguishability of names and the unnamed.
literature has taken the burden of assuming
the vestiges of nature – a realism heaped on humanity’s urban shoulders. the
exorcistic spasms of surrealism and dada have been forgotten and nature’s
contingencies have flooded the aesthetic realm of words.
to write about the body offends the body,
which is what such writing, intentionally or unintentionally, aims for – to
reproduce the offense it has suffered. writing writes from the destroyed body,
aiming to reproduce beings inviolate.
7.9.16
writing v
if i choose to develop, nurture, contrive
sorrow – and not just sorrow, but any emotion or state that interests me, that
fulfills an orientation (and which emotion or state would not at various
points?) – i am not some neowerther, a schopenhauerean pessimist, a christian, for
i neither mourn nor leap, and laughter is as much part of the palette as any
other colour of the heart. if i at times might seem to favour sorrow over
laughter, or some sensation over another, might it be for no other reason than
as a sociopsychic autocorrection. the world in its amusements, volitions, and
absurdities can be wearisome and i at least must wonder, viscerally, if its
diet is imbalanced. we are all tiny experiments in an infinite laboratory.
who would not, in this age of relentless will
and forced happiness, desire to use sorrow and anonymity as materials, as
simulations and play, as contentments and travels.
i have been to india 19 or 21 times, each visit
a mockery of the previous ones. so i have stopped going and remain in the
provincial land of my birth. for mockery led me to the end of my heart and
there i found an absence i perhaps had been seeking. while i had been writing
for decades, only then could i write.
by the time one realizes that one is on a path
and what that path has been named and the dialogues about that path from those
who have walked it and those who haven’t and those who have been found broken
by its sides or those who take a tourist interest in it and travel over it in
helicopters and that that path is – like all other paths – engaging in a
dialogue with all these in their various manners and knowledges – and has any
experience worth noting … one is not only nearly dead but in a very real sense
has died and so the human dialogue of paths is a conversation among the dead.
in this way writing is little different than any other road.
a confusion (but there are many) of writing in
an age when writing has lost its meaning through an excess of meaning, through
an excess of proliferation, through abuses of familiarity (these common
violations) is that it is easy and common for those of all paths to write about
their paths and thus consider themselves writers. and so, inevitably, they must
be considered. but when these writers are encountered and they clearly have
walked a path or more but have hardly set a foot on the path of writing – its
terrain, struggles, deaths, false ecstasies, predators, roadside inns, flora,
and so on (there is no need necessarily to demonstrate any ability to
articulate these experiences conceptually, analytically, but they need to be
demonstrated somehow, certainly minimally in the writing itself, however subtly)
– what then, other than confusion?
writing is an art of having things fall apart
in realms of the unscene.
it is easy to write. all you have to do is
decide not to run. not to run, and to disbelieve in time.
when you become disillusioned with
disillusionment what remains is illusion but through the lens of
disillusionment, and this renewed illusion is a ground of writing.
one becomes what one writes; if one does not
write (other than in the ubiquitous purposive or transactional sense in which
everyone writes, to accomplish something outside of writing) one becomes what
others write.
3.9.16
writing iv
i do not
write, i say.
i live, i void, maybe i create, i
say and am said. these glyphs you see are
not writing, they are no signs – signs are lost; these are dead shards shed
from the unknowing of my pupils – empty, yet use does not drain them; dark,
imageless images.
see the rabbit cross the monkeysection against
the violent lights. the coops shall miss their bunnies, the scars shall not
rain. who may abide the day of its hopping, and who shall stand on a
shibboleth? for we are like an orphic liar. i say uh 3 2 1 0 -1 …
give me
darlings some rough petunias
give me
sweets a bakêd ass
i shall
nibble on thine titties
thou
shalt dine on lentil gas
we were
then and now were once we
who can
tell the paths of ways
when
you’re in my ebenezer
on that rubber
leopold chaise
here’s
the end – it’s spanked and heaving
like a
sunset on a dump
let’s go
forth and juice an altar
with the
ancient rump’n’hump
but. in
and through and by and outsie
aren’t
what they were supposed to used to be
bakeries
are now just laundries
you and
i are they and we
so :
that is it and it is this
what is
come is just to go
where’s
the outhouse when i need it
got a
load i gotta blow
writing is this a moon in desolations of a
solstice sparring with a sun across a court of bottomless sky writing is this i
in shitheaps of i snorting happiness from flammable bhutan writing is this an
arrow in a rabbit and that rabbit yet undead and its suffering ours and those
sorrow-stricken shall win writing is this nothing and sums of nothing and doktor
nothing and mayo nothing and nothing of nothing to nothing denothinged donne
and undone, dung
in the old debates about the moon and the sun –
these now branded and reproducible – it was sometimes agreed that the moon by
itself was more beautiful but the sun with its starting and closing effects
could surpass the moon. the movement of writing away from these debates into
the techniques of branding and reproduction is an evolution and, like all
evolutions, beyond, except in detached sectors of moments of time, judgment.
writing about writing traces the movements. writing about writing about writing
traces the traces.
despite appearances, writing like time is not
linear – or at least linearity is a dimension of writing, only gross cultural
bias advocating its supremacy or exclusivity. writing is circular, enfolded,
interstitial, linear, turned and returned, urned, stationary, punctiliar, holographic,
hollow, abyssal, gyral, tessellated, meandering, waved, foaming, cracked,
fractal. i long for a species desirous and capable of living in time – and so
language – its attributes equal and plodded and explorable.
in an end that is not an end, one cannot help
specializing. and if i have been specialized in the art of not-writing through
an excess of generalizing and if this art is necessarily obscure …
writing, if i am going to write in writing –
which is to write in i and i in writing – and not in money or its extensive
families, is a disaster.
to speak of writing in this age when everyone
writes might be as it was speaking of god in that age when everyone believed. a
disaster then, a disaster now. who would dare it? no one. yet there are those
who, despite any obvious desires or gifts, are placed in that daring – which to
them is no daring but a necessary sorrow. these are the no ones of writing and
once of god, strange duende in atimed sorrow.
2.9.16
writing iii
letting go, if it actually is letting go, is
letting go of nothing – that is, to truly let go, there are no objects to one’s
letting go. one simply lets go. such is the path of writing.
immense vats of writing exist. and now large
tracts of writing about writing. writing in voids is to write about
writing about writing, paralleling writing about god (goding about god) in the middle ages, that ostensible birth (rebirth) of mysticism …
writing has seen itself and – vain,
treacherous, and promiscuous beauty – cannot help but explore and proclaim its
wonders. to write about writing about writing, then – could it not mean adding
not simply another mirror, in which writing begins to blur into what it is not,
and – then – endless mirrors, from which writing dies, but shattering these,
down to the very first, through which writing lives but, again, without knowing
itself?
i do not analyze when i write. i don't
proclaim, persuade, entice, deride, construct, praise, deconstruct, inform. i
write. that is all. writing to be writing is as free from object or plan as breathing. when i am dead i no longer breathe. when i am dead i
no longer write. the two are the same statement. writing is simply breath made
visible; in writing language appears in the cold air-voids of
consciousness, brief memory-vapours – beyond consolation – of our having been
in the realms of sensuous wandering.
writing begins with death. only the dead
write. what do the living know that they could share any wisdom with us? the
living are fuel for the chthonic industries of art, the living are
writing’s pens.
gods are in words as they once were in trees
and rivers. i do not know much about words; but i think that river is a strong
brown word.
all writing is trying to do – at least any
writing aside from that necessary to transact, gather, propagate – is nurture
and develop a language of the unconscious.
prosaically
we can say the spaces of these nurturings and developings are spaces of
madness. but this is the sort of madness that is of the free discipline of
sufis, poets, mystics – creators in voided wedges of civilization.
what writer cannot help but to keep running
hard if it is not to be overtaken by the hungry languages of fact?
once we are writing about writing about writing
we are not only no longer writing about writing – we are not even writing.
to write i forget, forget that i can remember. this
is not to negate that i have memories but rather to affirm that i am memory and
to write is to give myself so fully over to my being memory that there is
direct sublimation between that being and this writing. in this process – a
movement between gas and plasma: the solidity of memories of expectation, convention
forgotten; the liquidity of memories of hopes and despairs set aside – i write,
and history, time, i, ambition, death have become words on the democratic stage
of words, a script forming as i am abdicated to giving.
once everyone is a writer – a consequence of
literacy’s ostensible success and corollary re-oralization of culture –
literature has to find new paths of sensation, untried ways of ecstasy and pain,
to prepare voids for words. to give oneself over to writing now means refusing
identification as a writer, this substantive – dried, shrivelled – hiding in the
catacombs of soul, yet in love with language, melancholic with the fleshy
knowledge of unrequitedness, stumbling in metallic undergrounds seeking
ancestors of the names of dead fires in ashed genealogies.
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