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.