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. 

death vi

have i not zealously sought constructive vitalized non-existence for the attendant wound – a wound without which life is not life, this home and womb of words?

to be declared mentally unhealthy in the present age is analogous to being declared a heretic during the inquisition:  the standards experts move in, enforcing what and how the brain can think.   to calmly claim one’s own standards, rooted in one’s flesh rather than institutional-cultural-economic mass and privilege is a death – like all deaths, permanent, silent, solitary, operating with configurations of weakness and strength unfound in the lives of standards

not unrelated to the death of sanity is the death of class – this path of removing oneself from class and the corollary struggles.  unwilling to assume the pecuniary and productive values of the middle class, unwilling and unable to assume the privilege and sanctimoniousness of the upper, unable to assume the envy and jokes of the lower, it – regardless of how it is viewed by those in class, regardless of the degree to which it lacks the prosthetics (money, possessions, name, reputation, comfort, security) desired and sometimes possessed to some extent by those in class – experiences itself as outside of class:  at least these classes defined by currency.  it seeks in death (where else?) the manual for living in this outside

the madness with which i write and live is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of some label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final phase capitalist society. so when i use the word mad here i'm not referring to a special race of people, but the mad in me addressing the mad in you in the hope that the former mad speaks clearly or loudly enough for the latter to hear.  so too with death

to live in what might be called dreams and to die in what might be called reality in a society given to the latter is to live a life of death and die a death of life.  and if you find my nomenclature strange – if you say, well reality is all there is – … ?  doesn’t what i call the modern secular mystic aesthetic (from pessoa to woolf, from dickinson to genet) carry a culture of dreams from the slaughter of certain people of these and other lands, from old men who dreamed visions and old women who dreamed dreams, who walked with spirits and knew waking life had no superiority, carry this culture in the emptiness of their hearts through a metallic desolation, dogmatic in its faith in things and facts.  no – despite the institutionalized cries of the light and newly voiced, of the heavy established names, that they have justice, truth, power – i rest in crypts of gaseous doubt, the incessant blurring of ideas and species, of all singularities.  the world, existence, is for me and those rough ones of my tribe – spread across death like fog – hardly solid, hardly true … a question among infinite questions, a dream among infinite dreams

why would i be interested in writing in the common tongue, in writing about the tedious topics of money, sex, society – whatever arbitrary concerns and styles the day ejects and the gouged desperados conform to as if they have objective value?  the overwhelmingly vast portion of the universe is radically inhuman and at the center and margins of the human – there too the inhuman, masked and hardly masked.  so i seek languages, forms, syntaxes, dictions, that reflect the energies that dominate and circumscribe the universe and, inescapably, often surreptitiously, the human; the tools i use for such seeking i have found far more readily in death than life, in the apophatic rather than the analytic, silence rather than what we call communication.  i hardly aim for lucidity or that most puerile of objectives – to be understood.  in art – as in love – we must remember to leave any humanity we might have behind

bricks move and sing.  bricks are made of language.  we do not hear them less because they lack mouths, more because our ears are unschooled and the words in a single brick so vast as to rival a dictionary, syntactically arranged unexpectedly for our brains so trained to certain orders.  would we hear bricks with the same ease we hear humans, would our identities not be spontaneously reconfigured, the human voice returned to its place among places, the grammars of things vast and diverse, our brains as empty and fluid as clouds?

to abdicate using others’ illusions for what may be one’s own is to find oneself in force or – more rarely – energy:  each an intimacy with death, the difference being its primordial orientation to diffusion

March 29 - Saint William of Emanuel and Immanuel

On a day when London dripped with beer and headless angels sang from St. Paul’s cupola, I went to Hell to speak with the Devil about some matters that concerned me.  Before I arrived at his office, I found Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea sitting in a river of fire, though it appeared not to harm them.  They were eating babies’ hearts and wearing skirts of human flesh and I asked them why their fashion and manner were so strange.  Isaiah said that prophets have always been likewise and if it were not so the world would fail, for it depended on the prophet’s diet for its sanity.  Then I asked if prophecy was dying, and as a world of method and machine arose if madness and genius would fall?  Jeremiah answered that prophecy had always been an art of the few and time could withstand its living absence for a few centuries without vital loss, but if it should disappear for long, the world would have no foundation and fall itself to madness and fire.  I turned to Ezekiel, stooped and hairy with humiliations, and asked him if it were true whether prophets were hatched not begotten and as Ezekiel was thinking, Gomer, Diblaim’s daughter, arose from the river seething with nymphomania and began gnawing on Ezekiel’s belly.  But he led her downward and they mated and so it was with each of the prophets.  And I too was invited to join, and I did.  The seed mixed in Gomer’s voracious and plural womb and on November 28 1757 she gave birth to one in whom prophecy and sainthood were mixed, at 28 Broad Street in Golden Square.

This madman suffered the lifelong indignities of the self-proclaimed sane.  More alive than the card-carrying living, he danced his dance on fire to the tune of tombs.  What seemed walls to many were symphonies to him; his head throbbed with song, his flesh with holy lechery.  When he had tea with Queen Charlotte and she proceeded to lift up and pull down to display her Eucharist, St. William imagined climbing onto the royal personage and filling it with the cry of God, then ran home to his wife and ravaged her.  On August 12 1827 Elijah descended in his chariot of fire and took this saint from glory to glory.

St. William recently dined with me; we fed on powdered bone risotto and soup with saffron, ginger, the eyes of medieval kings and friar foreskins.  I asked him of his art and he said he thought in images and could not do otherwise.  I also questioned him about his prophetic role and he answered that all art is prophetic and that the artist is replacing the prophet in madness and genius to sustain the world.  Not wishing to detain him, for I knew he had other dinners to attend, I posed a final question about the nature of angels and whether they existed only in the mind or somehow also in the world of substance.  And St. William left singing through my apartment’s northern wall and I finished my meal alone.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.