this is my sadoo

anyone who has even a smeddum of a mind knows that not only õvəl doesnt matter anymore but ârt doesnt either  nothing matters anymore other than behaving sensibly as a species which is of course the one thing we cant do   we can do everything except what matters  which maybe is why were so obsessed with matter  to detract us from what really matters   what really matters is caring for our home which we might call love and all ärt does at its best is just say this in ten thousand different ways and whether it does anything at all other than say this and whether this perhaps not doing anything at all about what matters most is arts schizophrenia which may be better or worse or just different than societys schizophrenia about trying to do something about what matters most of which is either making things worse or trying to make things better as even trying to make things better considering our wholesale ineptness may easily be just making things worse and so artists are like the ancient desert mothers & fathers who just eventually shrugged and went out into the wasteland and sat on pillars and ate sunsets and died although of course once a few yahoos had gone out there a bunch of wannabe yahoos followed and then there was a society of desert yahoos just like theres a society of artist yahoos and nothings really changed except there are almost ten billion of us and fortynine gazillion more things and not room for many more and yet even knowing all this all we crave is more and you know what billy bee lake said about that and since all this craving is exactly the opposite of what really matters what it means though nothing means anything is that were the first instance in nature of pure hate which is why i guess religions like christianity arose so that we could further deceive ourselves that were creatures of love and this deception yet another hate  hate upon hate  and heres my õvīl  i mean my hate  i mean my despair  i mean my nothing matters  i mean my desert yahoo schizophrenia  this is my sadoo

writing ii

writing is prayer. i am self-effaced before the infinite, confronted with the injustice of myself, slowed to the speed of waiting. writing is waiting – for the uncontrollable moments when syzygies come to presence and words appear. but when i talk, i think, act, when i will, desire – all these are waiting.

writing is vision made flesh made air.

in maintaining writing as one’s life, language loses its power, even its primacy as vehicle, and writing itself becomes less the orientation of one’s life than placing oneself in a space in which writing might find one. as this space is always shifting – writing likes to play hide and seek – i become more familiar with lostness, homelessness, separation than with writing, seeking to be found.

one can of course simply sit and write, but then it’s a career, an occupation, a means …

so writing becomes something else, and this something else becomes the nothing that is.

i wanted to write serenely, capriciously, peacefully, comfortably, from the broad plateau of middle class pleasures and scholarly privilege. but instead i was manufactured to write in struggle, discomfort, offense, disregard. every environment needs its labourers.

a certain kind of writing simulates a nomadic life on earth – wandering from place to place scavenging for words. how could i write a novel, anything resembling what is typically called a book, with such a lifestyle? my forms reflect vagaries, uncertainties, impoverishments. i write in fragments, with few things complete, in vulgarities and ugliness – this is the milieu in which i scavenge.

i know i am now writing because to place myself in spaces of writing is to place myself in spaces of obliterated pain.

when we achieve our goals they become beyond us. i strove for 20 years to become solitary, desolate, hapless … now – these states having become me – i see, like all non-trivial goals, they’re unachievable. like community, love, justice, they occur, but in moments, and i had them as much 20 years ago as i do now; the only difference is that now i know i have them in the manner of not-having, and that they aren’t goals.

bodies are not living and text dead, text is not the corpse of a living body any more than a body is the corpse of a text. my text is my body and my body a breath of unknown words.

if i should live in vision and poetry rather than analysis and politics, have i removed myself from the world more than a president or scholar? no. or rather i have removed myself differently and engage differently. in writing i breathe my body’s far-near.

it’s not that i write or am written. the movement from the active to passive necessitates its return and circularity. if there were a mode that expressed agency and non-agency, volition and waiting, activity and passivity and the absence and subversion of both, it might be that mode that is writing in the i. yet not just in. here too a circularity.

i am innocent in writing. all guilt i leave behind in the world. my body becomes pure, like air before consciousness, and text eats me, in desire and love. eating and purity are briefly one.

no longer do i believe that writing is a technology. writing is a god that has lost its way.

in writing i amputate myself in love and grow new limbs, i generously behead myself and – there! – new brains.

this violence to myself is not something i do alone but is an active collaboration with the world. i call it violence but this is a necessary mask, for what it is hides behind every name.