autothanatography as practice i

long ago i realized i do not wish to think the way you think.  death is the only successful method i’ve found that provides a sufficient alternative, a kind of natural translation service into ways and structures of thought i admire.  the only method sufficiently radical, outside, playful, crafty – the one ruse life, regardless of its talents or powers, recoils from.  i crawl into death to destroy my thinking and allow death to think me.   i look at the way you think, live, write – only a few of you impress me.  all trying to follow each other.  each saying i’m in charge.  each building your life on a desperation to be recognized by a circus of the same.  you still operate according to life’s barbaric lawbook – its stultifying and petty rules which through fear and convention officially exclude death and in such ostensible exclusion diminish life.  only death is free.  only death is kind.  after years of apprenticeship – which have meant increasing self-exile from your congratulatory and cannibalistic systems – i maintain my flesh by giving everything else of me to death and so – in this sleight-of-hand that has learned from death and simulates it in that labyrinth of mirrors … that only environment death itself cannot enter other than in the briefest of moments (but this continuously):  animate flesh – survive by eavesdropping on the silences of death’s continuous and sometimes noisy transience.  i have changed citizenship.  i am of the republic of death, this world without visas or rules.  i wander among you.  i watch your antics and hear your proclamations.  you humans too scared to use the one distinctive gift of your species, your only and last gift, the one true fire, instead thinking you can depend on yourselves.  no wonder i avoid you though for the time being share your visible form – a disguise i’ve realized, a trite and amusing wardrobe.

if i am dead in the republic of the living, i can do anything but have no desire to – it is this gap – between infinity and nothing – a gap that is itself infinite, nothing, intimate, strange – that provides the most modest and efficient of energies.  recording my struggle with how to identify, harness, apply, and dispose of this energy becomes my citizenship in death, what i call an autothanatographical practice.

i seek the interstices where life and death sit down together at an unnamed table, where life’s laws and death’s disability are temporarily forgotten, and the two have become so indistinguishable that they hardly have to seek one another or define their separateness.  of course i can’t maintain such states.  i am yanked back into the prisons of life and forced into various humiliations called civilization or responsibility, the floor opens and i slip into oceans of death and have to fend off the cold, the gravity, the untaxomizable beasts, until i voluntarily accept humiliation again.  nevertheless, i seek.  and even now i find that the ocean is in the humiliations, the prison in the grave abyss, a different union of the two, a different temporary forgetting.

buddhism with its sunyata offers no more peace than daoism with its dao, christianity with its christ, judaism with its book and law, hinduism with its moksha, art with its play, business with its productivity, philosophy with its analytics, prophecy with its rage, silence with its eyes. 

i do not seek peace for peace is as illusory as justice, love, community.  they all exist, but as moments, moods, ideas, desires.  i seek death and seek it in all things, and find it – for it is always there.  most of all i seek death in myself, for, here, it is doubly at hand.  death, despite the claims of the living, offers no rest or peace to the living – for death’s oblivion obliterates all feeling.  death may be peaceful, but offers no peace; it may be kind, but offers no kindness.  it may be free, but offers no freedom.

more autothanatographical thoughts

some sunny day,

don't know where, don't know when ...

madnesses iv

if we accept that all contain within them equal measures of sanity and madness, but in varied configurations, then what we call sanity is not sanity but a particular configuration of it with madness.  so we know our names exist far from both sanity and madness, and sanity and madness are simply present, necessary, and symbiotic presentations of the human.  would any future presentations play with these relations and configurations, would the human cease being human, and at what point?  to what extent is the human this particular presentation of sanity, and so any perceived threat to it most dramatic for those with equity in the human’s house?

while we could say madness exists in each of the primary portals to death – love, technology, god, art – and so madness resides more fully along some corridors in time than others, the portal itself makes little difference and its proximity and relation with death far more.

money is not a portal, but the paint and knobs on the doors to all portals, and the function of the sane is to maintain the closure of these doors – maintain the closure against the relentless pressure of the wind of the mad blowing from the infinite corridors of death.

this is hardly to say that the sane are on the side of the living, the mad on the side of death.  we know clearly the sane and the mad are complexly and irrevocably committed to both, but differently.  but in the realm of the sane, on that side of the doors, we say they are on the side of life – its presumed allies.

i watch the sane and the mad walk existence’s rough and transient thoroughfares, mumbling what each must.  i watch them, and it is often unclear whether they are something i should name outside or within.  this lack of clarity, a general indifference to this lack, is, it seems, why those who call themselves the sane are not infrequently inclined to not include me among their numbers.

the analytics of the mad – that sector of the sane that peruses the mad and pronounces and by pronouncing tampers – is a business not to be ignored:  for, like death, it grows.

and by tampering it tampers not just with the mad but with itself (and who knows what else, that in corners, fringes, holes?), these analytics themselves requiring a further analytics.  and so it goes on and on in the vastnesses of ignorance we are not disinclined to name knowledge or health or utility, and even the older names are far from absence:  truth and goodness and love.

so the function of therapy is to purchase sanity, to translate the currency of money to the currency of sanity, even as the confessional-indulgence continuum was, in the middle ages, to translate the currency of money to the currency of salvific grace.

and that one with only half his ears - was it suicided by society (as has been posited) or by sanity?  and that unone who jumped before a train?
     so in the matrices of identity are hungers and voids scrubbed and displayed and set for sale.

sanity’s magic –

            madness appears to cancel itself when its interior qualities roughly correspond to those of its exterior environment.  madness – or at least the appearance of its non-cancellation – thus is a mismatch between the interior and exterior, between a sarcous singularity (a complex within a singularity) and a technocultural complex (a complex within a singularity).  in this mismatch, this non-cancellation, the sarcous singularity is commonly blamed (not unusually to the points of exile, ostracization, death - expulsions to maintain a perceived purity of synchronicity), and only in cul-de-sacs of art and philosophy is this imbalance questioned and the exterior brought to bear, this questioning occasionally commonly celebrated – in the manner of an annual festival in which the people can briefly forget the constraints of time, entering the dissolutions of ecstatic darkness – and ubiquitously ignored in the dominant and pervasive societal rituals.

i do not say the mad are mad, the sane sane; neither do i say the mad are sane, the sane mad.  i let the sane and mad froth on words’ perilous pitch, and definitions are the vapour that rises from the battle.  all i do is trace on language's blank page the shifting shapes i see through endless gloamings.