with respect ...

with respect to madness language is always somewhere else

literature – from poetry to philosophy to its consummate present example, the novel – has become the story : exploration through narrative, typically human narrative. it has relegated madness - literature’s precarious soul - to the inaccessible, the autistic, mentally ill, deranged, the solipsistic, the virus …   but these – regardless of whatever names they might appear to be attached to – have always been literature’s true home. and the definitionmongers, the rationalists, the prize and list people, the storyists in their infinite discomforts do what the spiritually insecure have always done – use force of whatever quality to displace their insecurities far from the sterile spaces they inhabit, even as the privileged displace garbage and pollution as far as possible from them geographically : onto the poor, unheard, inhuman

story was mad insofar as it was born from the placed derangement (a derangement that because of its place had real range, range of touchable knowable unknowable divine land) of the tribe, but as story’s become separated from this tribal ecstasy it becomes formulaic, conventional, conformist, expected … and so not literature

so those called to remain committed to literature in these darks ages of the word – when madness is still manifest in the garrets and cellars of music and film for reasons primarily technological – the exploration of madness and the exploration of literature become effectively the same. so psychology – not the academic laboratory variety that dominates in lit and official corridors but the kind that oozes like pus from the psyche itself – and word become bound, psychology and psychologies of word and words literature’s practice. the mental illness of the word, its dysfunctions and taboos, schizophrenias and pharmaceuticals, shunned babblings, urological rants ... these are literature's narrative. the writer takes each word to the couch even as each word takes the writer. not to any effect. effect is academic psychology’s domain. literature in effect is the record of word and writer taking each other there … to noplace (the utopia that is no utopia … not just noplace but no noplace – and the no’s as affixes may be stacked like turtles on the back of a collapsed universe, universes of places of diaspora, exile, apophatic mappedness) of the empty question

how then does literature dissolve its identity through technology in the way (but in its own way and ways) that music has done. (we discount film for film’s born of technology whereas music, ancient and fleshy, comprehensively tedious and weary by 1912, had to break through [we set aside all those for now seductive pathways of film as nature filtered through preexistent but previously underused dimensions, music as first technology, literature as cosmic babel, ... all pathways dreamt, all arguments made.].) music has accomplished its recreation, its identities and doubts, drones and genre asylums through the synthesizer – the ability to patch everything onto everything, anything onto anything, all nothings on nothings … through enabling sonic life as music. when i walk down a helhi street and hear honkings, harassments, dogs barking, sun screeching ... it's as if to me i’m sitting in my sunroom listening to an lp. you can say – but literature is this. not in its common talk and trade but on its edges. even a name like dfw does this. and he was mad. he suicided after all and that’s a good sign. sure, but sterne was edgy, mad too and didn’t suicide. (madness now’s more mad. or rather madness now has farther to travel to reach literature even as literature has farther to travel to reach madness. they need more patches, infinities, more nothings ... they need to forget society, themselves. and this takes so much ... effort ...)

literature craves to be unrecognizable, lusts after anonymity (art's altar and eucharist) in these polluted seas of name refuse. literature should be so much ourselves we don’t see ourselves. the uncanniness is too present. we shall seem to be wholly absent and in this hole we are here. dfw and his family are recognizable, his fragmented stories the shapes and blabs of our currency

atonal literature, astory literature, areason literature, aliterature literature, literature defying currency, written by the cthulhu ... for the cthulhu aren't the hideous other but the hideous us. organic life! love and hate! human passions, conditions, standards! one only needs to travel well into the soul that hoards toilet paper in our increasingly visible species narcissistic times to see this usotherness. this travel and need is literature. not as fact but horror

i don’t hear you

i don’t see you

i hardly understand

i can’t read

the word through its endless interrogations reanimates. rejoins, reintroduces thing and name, renatures language. each word is spirit in infinite language forests. not one spirit but countless. and as spirits amorphously drift, each word (most alchemically, most mystically) drifts into all others. each word’s in each word and for the writer, as the writer’s just another word, in it. not as god or christ is in the christian. this is hierarchical, separate. but as gods in gods, mycelium in trees, air in fire, water in dream. so as academic psychology attempts to effect identity (and effecting transgressive identity still follows the conventional path of identity effecting) for social relation (even if this relation is protest, rebellion, shock), the psychology of literature (hardly any different than the literature of psychology) enters the identity of word to travel to identity’s dissolution. while this journey is paramount, literature appears as the writer as journalist depicts as closely as possible the effects of the movings into words’ identity’s dissolution on its inveterate physicality, the wholesale range and limits of its sensations. as journalist. (though we must acknowledge it should be obvious that our journalist is as different from the common one – no matter how noble, influential, sacrificial, perspicacious – as our psychologists and scholars are different than those pedigreed among fluorescent peers and gowns and lecterns)

with respect to language language is always somewhere else

with respect to madness …

with respect to respect …

with respect to somewhere else …

with disrespect to …
without disrespect ...

without language …

without without