death i

i am of the sects of hamartia and planē, these gods of the order of death.  i establish shrines for them in the houses of my words.  for to devote one’s life to wandering, to the mastery of masks and the supremacy of void, is to err in the institutions of life that enforce life as supreme, distinguishable, standard and plaque, as artifact and station, but in the open air of the dying sea, for those born of movement and theatre and night, it is to breathe.

in the world each hierarchy – even though a hierarchy of an i – is incessantly being questioned by all other hierarchies, a process of death pettily delayed in small measures of time by each hierarchy bolstering itself – this bolstering the hierarchies agree in calling life, an agreement more essential than the competitive bolstering.

a dreamer once said a coward dies a thousand deaths before its death but the valiant taste of death but once.  but i say a coward only dies once and the valiant die a thousand times.  for the valiant are not afraid of death and so die as a matter of routine, because they like it.  it seems to me most strange that humans, seeing that death, a necessary change, comes when it comes, don’t integrate such necessity into their daily lives, dying thousands of deaths and so creating what we now call death as just another one.

the key, they said, is to become so intimate with death that one can use death’s techniques against it.

but then isn’t life also subverted by means of that same intimacy?

a double subversion, they said, an experiment in the laboratory of the soul.

a key, though, without a door.

the only worthy key.

becoming posthumous – …

birth and death, being our passages, present themselves singly as the aporia of life.

death is everywhere but everywhere life is devoted to placing death in small boxes to suit its small purposes.  yet death is large and hardly confined to cemeteries and movies, coffins and dictionaries.  it rides trams through crowded urbanscapes, presides at policy task forces, seduces you in bars, lectures you in ecobiology.   death is not some once and final act, a silencing, but endless flowing. 

i write for the people of the void and so use the methods of the void and the language hardly a language of those people.

living as i have in decades of eros – which only became explicitly named such as we moved away, an inexorable migration into thanatos:  that distance, sensing initially … now i will have lived in both spheres fully, beginning as seems appropriate in eros and closing in thanatos – followed by a shaded dawning that this life of death contains no less energy than that life of life and so, as all the poets have known and written:  eros is as in thanatos as thanatos in eros:  we live dying as we dying live.

minnie downed to baton rouge, waffling about love

    little ditties ‘bout god (or somethin

g) [maybe] {uh} : — : — : — :

isn’t god the image of ourselves that we shatter upon, becoming not whole or healed but uncountable pieces of glass under an electric sun?

            we gather ourselves into transient unities through wisps of language, ineffable reflections of our fragmentation.

god is a word i use to describe the chasm in words, the chasm between desire and desire.

death stabs us.  This stabbing while we continue living i call god.

it isn’t so much god we miss in a secular age but the shadows truth once cast, protecting us from perpetual light.

if misery is a butterfly, is god a caterpillar?

            wouldn’t god, though, be a sanctuary for those with wings in a flat and gravity-bound world?

i once thought that god, grounded as it seemed to be in darkness, would spell the sacred word at the end of time.  But i saw in a dream that time, unlike humanity, is eternal and we are the sacred word which cannot spell itself.

little, said god one day under the bonsai tree it favoured, is born from tears and blood, even as little is born from their absence.

            and the bonsai tree withered upon god’s speaking these words and god was silent.

if god must pitch its tent in a poet for poetry to exist and god is dead, do we not write from a residence of death and a throne of dust?

            but hasn’t language always been dust’s tongue and poetry its bloody pen?

the golden irides of god are dimly visible in the smog of our souls, through the gutted monsters of our wounds.

            as we spot them (staring at what? surely not us! staring at staring itself?), a certain death is inevitable (who does not seek this death in the act of gutting? in slaying the hungry heads of those wounds?):  we cannot help but become the blurred reflection of those thousand eyes.
                        the endless deaths in life:  with each one added, life and death begin to resemble each other, like a dog and its human.  (but which is which?)  (with each addition of death, divisions are subtracted …)
                                    heresiarch ramarooroo said, from death’s perspective, all of life is a failure.  And i said, yes.  But isn’t it equally true that from death’s perspective, all of life is a success? (and doesn’t, ^now, ^{the golden flappy now}, ^{tolle’s cheap toll}, chuang tzu’s butterfly poke its pesky head over language’s cliffs, laughing like a banshee munching avocados on a teetertotter on a raft in the Pacific?)
                                                (and from life’s perspective [from those perspectives] what is life? might it be language precariously stuffed into human form? and when humanity ends there still may be life but …)

might god be the amorphousness in the eye of each word, making the hebrew scribes right:  the holy name cannot be written?  It would be english’s crassness—our requirement to express subtlety in syntactic convolutions, the directness we claim in our grammar, the mask of honesty we demand in our art and our love—to plunk the shapeless shape in a clunky one-syllable word, with a hint of its essence in the vowel at its hollow center.

              
isn’t my melancholy that art, like god or time, has no end, no goal, no definition, no f ^ac ^e … only a fluidity polluted (flowered?) with past ends?

one must speak of god (if one must speak of god) in ways that barely resemble ways that resemble.  (and who would be so mad to speak of god unless one must?)

although there are other claimants, we prefer the gods who crouch at the edges of thoroughfares, drooling a bit perhaps, though not infrequently from caprice, day-old french fries in a paper bag, sartorial holes worn comfortably, quarreling with death as if the quarrel were a lover, dreaming of a night of love to down the horny world, seeing themselves not as saviors or losers or members of the virtuous merchant class or artists (those usurpers!), not particularly seeing themselves, humming off-tune tunes, not having had a martini in seven weeks or bermuda … these gods of smells and dirty fingernails, those claimants no more true than others, yet more true through our preferring.

i use god in the way you use waffle or project or agent or fuck me—not in any final sense or sense existing outside of what presently is inside, but in the sense of picnics and candy floss and rhino poop.  God is simply the empty set of words that impossibly claims to hold the infinity of other empty sets.

the endless compelling compulsive exhausting irrevocable exuberant leaping need for the tongue to move in the mouth, celebrating sound, feeling itself wiggle, wiggling, wiggled, in that cavity buttressed by carnivorous teeth and salacious lips, madly, softly, sweetly, bleeding, reaching through the void for the clanging stars … this need … isn’t it god?
 
which is greater—language or god? heresiarch wollenmatova asked one woolly bedtime as gramma tucked her in to hums of bygone nights.  Language, gramma spontaneously answered.  No, god, she corrected herself.  No no, that’s incorrect, it’s surely language.  No, forgive me, it’s god.  Language—i remember, i got the answer wrong, it was #98—is it, i know now.  But … i can’t forget that moment in the backseat of the chevy … without a doubt, god is right.  And so it went until heresiarch wollenmatova fell asleep and gramma died from the exhaustion of indecision, sucked into the gyres of memory.
            and love? you (& paul & aldous) ask, from a perch of posited perennialism.  Love, said heresiarch munchawuffle, i have heard it said that love is but one of the trillion children spawned by language and god, wee hindu-ish divinities wobbling it out in the living dictionary of life.
                        love! said will burr-brrrrrr and his wiffles.  Love is a meme stuck on the forehead of my self-proclaimed integration and enlightenment, a plank in the eye of my transpersonal taxonomies.
                                    love, said the kamut flakes, is an emo orgy on a bed of blooming almond milk, the jets we fly to paradise.
                                                love, said sappho and sade, that salad of limbs and eyes …
                                                            love, said aristophabooble, that cloven sphere …
                                                                   love, said Love, as it may have always had, which makes it maybe just like us,—…:  dunno what i am.

god is every word in every past, present and future language.  Not just every word, but every object and concept that that word points to, every textual and oral discourse (thought and feeling) about that word, the object(s) and concept(s) it points to.  Not just these, but the end-to-end experiences of that word.  For example, god includes the word ‘potato,’ the object potato (in all its varieties and states), all words and concepts (ontological, scientific, theological etc.), thoughts and feelings about potatoes, and the actual lived experience of modifying, growing, marketing, selling, preparing, cooking, using, wasting potatoes in all possible circumstances, with all possible methods, in all possible states.  Until the human has entered into each word in all languages this way, entered until each word has collapsed under its own weight and become the night below all words, it does not know god.  This radical limit to knowing we might call the humility we resist in order to sidestep reality’s confinement, the humility we must resist in order to speak at all.

 
if god was absence before it died, does it not become after its death not amortized absence but the absence of absence, which is not presence (which would immediately destroy us) but something more problematic—the lack of lack, the silence of silence?
            god becomes the copy of itself—itself by definition itself copying (god bless you please, mr. benjamin)
                        in dying, god expands its infinity, takes on more of eternity.  God always gains through death.  We always lose.  But in god’s dyings (which are endless), we become more distant from our center, requiring more substances (things, noises, images, movements, orgasms, money) to bridge ourselves, attempting to compensate for god’s expanding infinities through prosthetic innovation, to which society must increasingly devote itself; this activity inevitably becoming the sacred (the task of compensating for the absence of absence:  the perpetual sacred).  [the three sacreds:  the above task of compensation, the task of detouring around the above task, the task of bridging compensating and detouring]
                                    it is humanity’s inefficient energy to transform the divine losses we are granted into processes we are compelled to call gains.
                                                isn’t this compulsion the cooperative task between heaven and earth, that old alliance (to refer to heraclitus) between delight and mud?
                                                            (daodejing xlii:  thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to …)

the body is the way that gets in the way

the body is the way and the body gets in the way

the body is the way that gets in the way of the body, in the body of the way

the body is the way of the body of the way

            heresiarch ramarooroo

 

god i take to be the inexplicable incommunicable infinite resource i draw from to attempt to describe the quantumly human (what feels at times like a siege of twinkies).

 
grey is the god of the city, who slips on its vomit in the back of taxis, who leaps before trains from a pedestal of pills, who rides elevators, prime past prime, until light itself snaps and the god forgets its names.
            grey is the god of the city, who has forgotten the energy of unconsummated desire, the fomenting pit of silence, who races up the steps of the future without faltering or looking back at the pillar of love.
                        grey is the god of the city, grey and pricked and sated and beautiful and doomed.
 
it has long been known that god is a failed alchemist and we its confused apprentices.

the urban streets are god’s neurons, its intersections its synapses.  We inhabit the divine cranium to explore our resilience in new environments, to explore new explorings, to trace circumferences on night’s unblinking canvas (the arctic, everest, the congo were nothing next to this critically acclaimed [and popular!!!] choreography of the unseen and seen!).  The visions of the Apocalypse are fulfilled, and we stumble along heaven’s alleys and boulevards (where the sun is no longer necessary! finally!), not (of course) according to anyone’s expectations, as is the nature of visions, wily to the squiggles in their vast and microscopic core.
            this mind incarnate we inhabit:

• our collective flesh turned inside out and hammered into shapes of certain dreams?
• the essence of a substance of a shadow ^{(dream’s definition?)} shoved through time’s leathery funnel, splatting architectures on the shaved and antiseptic earth?
• our lusty tongues, strung out on themselves, drooling patterns we barely understand, the woven spit of history?
• the imago of a race neither won nor lost and maybe hardly run?

 
doesn’t god wait for me in darkness, less like a lover, somewhat like a corpse, more like a word dropped into a bottomless desert well?
 
what drives us to god?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy and small-mindedness and the arrogance that pretends it’s not, the cruelty and aggressiveness at the heart of the good, the greed that disguises itself as cooperation and the cooperation that disguises itself as greed, …  what drives us away?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy …
            and of these other things:  tenderness, understanding, friendship, care, forgiveness … do they not drive us to the human … or, rather, do they not drive?
                        those who would call the driving evil or ignorant or otiose or tired but gladly accept its effects (planes, trains, automobiles, yoga, to name just a few) … what do we call them? might we call them unjust?
 
texting is a bridge from god to nothingness, from the nothingness of god to the nothingness of god … god, simply, was insufficient as a bridge (at least it learns on its śūnyatā designer couch!); we need aids:  two thousand years ago it gave us Christ the Word, now it gives us texting—the ultimate instant communion, oh bouncy host!
 
one doesn’t oppose society and god (other than in that particular way, the scrubless plain on which things legitimately confront one another in the joy and desolations of themselves), one doesn’t unite them either (other than in that other particular way, on the supersonic planes of the air show of ourselves).  But one can perhaps, in some geometric spinozean vertiginous calm, listen faintly to a dialogue between them, not without meaning not dissimilar to the feeling of glimpsing a silent mob under a night clear rural sky. 

haiku on the trans-siberian at three a.m.

dazed, god speeds down the

miles of its deadlines, which it

would confuse with visions but

for the treasure in

its impermanent lantern

like virginia, with her waves and rocks, i refuse to watch art kneel before psychology, vision before analysis, enthusiasm before pragmatism, spirit before money.  This refusal i could call god.
           (you call my divisions false, my refusal puerile, my methods dubious?  Do i not also?  [But what shall we call the calling?]  I appeal, in part, in the broken pitch, from the whispers of stone, to the uncarved block of the dao, lay my oily fingers on its surfaces, cling to muddled images of murkiness and turning back and vacancy and the ancestors of beginnings—the project of the unnaming of names, beyond death’s caress, life’s claws.)

April 24 - St. Hairy Clitoris, Primal Philosopher

Eleutheria was born into the world shortly after the alphabet was invented and men began to use words to build the foundation of what is now called civilization.  Back then, it was just called sweat.  Without a plan particularly, they placed brick on brick, and often a brick was a few generations or a life. Words became the currency on sophistication’s exchange and for the first time in history’s murmur, men were required to trade in words to survive.  Some did not, and fell back into the well of woods, where they wandered with beasts and negotiated life each hour in the disorder of unmitigated flesh.

Orphaned at 6, Eleutheria learned to fend for herself. Equally at home with the meadow’s butterflies and the city’s scrimmage, her favourite activity was observing the world. She’d sit for days at a time watching the churn of nature and men as if they were all part of her but not she one of them.  Then she became a woman and she was beautiful and all the men in the town wanted her. So she fled to the forest and hid, but the men found her and gave her to the mayor to decide what to do with her, and he made her his wife.  She was given the best food, a generous clothing allowance and three servants; in exchange, she was required to bear children and attend official functions and always be polite and show off her beauty.  So she grew bitter toward the world and swore dark prophecies against it.  On one of these nights she placed a hot iron on her face to disfigure it so that men would be repelled by her, and she ran into the woods and rutted with a bear and gave birth to St. Hairy Clitoris in 535 BCE.  She took the boy with her as she sat and watched the birds in the meadow and the men in the market. And no one talked to her and they avoided her eyes.

When St. Hairy Clitoris was 6, Eleutheria died. He went into the city and watched the affairs of men and listened to their words.  When he was a man, he began speaking, but the men in the marketplace resented him and told him his job was to watch.  St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, my job is to watch.  And then it’s to say what I’ve seen. And he kept speaking. And the men told him he was too useless for the city - which was a place of action and not for one who simply sat around and criticized.

St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, I am useless, and if you would listen to my uselessness, your lives would be more useful.  And the men of the city bound St. Hairy Clitoris to the ground and shat on him until he suffocated.

From the gap between his mother’s beauty and disfigurement,

From the gap between her fashion and his conception,

From the gap between the butterflies and the market,

From the gap between his silence and his speaking,

From the gap between his solitude and his desire,

From the gap between his uselessness and the merchants,

He wrote a book and its words are one and the one is fire.

The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on the first day a flower grew from his makeshift tomb.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.