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

absinthe makes the fart grow stronger

if this is time give me blood

if this is blood give me water

if this is water give me air

if this is air give me fire

if this is fire give me plasma

if this is plasma give me god

if this is god give me i

if this is i give me love

if this is love give me art

if this is art give me dreams

if these are dreams give me death

if this is death give me absinthe

if this is absinthe give me more

some things that were missed

• bicycles
• the blurring between humans and animals, humans and technology, humans and gods, humans and everything
• how politicians and businesspeople are manufacturing mental illness
• art. how art still isn’t being heard after 3,000 years
• how the reification of systemic exigencies mitigate difference, intention, competence at the executive level, ensuring any value of debate becomes moot through being transformed into scifi entertainment
• the roles of education and productivity in quietly enforcing patterns of deep destruction
• language. how those who don't speak money's language are being killed faster than the rainforests

forgetting i

forgetting is not the opposite of memory, but memory’s vitality and operations.

we say a primary function of technology is to help us remember – but, truly, its far greater function is to help us forget.

a crisis of humanity is its historic overdependence on natality to perform its chief creative – and so intelligent – function:  forgetting.

forgetting is directly proportional to truth in a similar manner to truth being directly proportional to loss and darkness.

forgetting and time are less related through death, as humanity has been inclined, and more through emptiness, of which death is but a simulation.

forgetting is a primary portal of truth – hardly of words, hardly even of knowledge, for truth’s portals are misnamed in the marketplace and one passes by means of the arts of diminishment.

forgetting is not an act of denial – which is a counterbalance and force of memory – but an ascent of affirmation, an ascent of neither balance nor force.

are you running away again? a neighbor asks me as i head out.  i never run away but only towards, i say.  such is a call and response of forgetting.

forgetting, like unlearning, like love or art, is a path forward that seems to lead backwards.

time is a child of forgetting and volition; let go of volition to forget blood’s thorny strictures and pour into one’s empty self.

time changes, but not readily.  so the migration from solar-lunar time to digital-clock time has been bumpy, slow, bloody, with the sun and moon still there, awkwardly, in the artificial sky.  forgetting in a technological age is digital.

analog forgetting is magical but digital forgetting is factual; nevertheless, each is an equal mode of time, with its own possibilities and limits.

collective forgetting embraces and is embraced by – an embrace of living death, eros’ animate skeleton – individual forgetting.  in this embrace, original and reproduction transmogrify into one another, authenticity and simulation, being and seeming, forgetting and returning.

forgetting is an oubliette, a secret dungeon reached only through a trapdoor.  the seen stage is public and sanctioned memory, but the purchased and articulate drama is sustained by the powers of forgetting, that which is often called negligence or irresponsibility by the ostensible powers.

a given society’s configuration of memory and forgetting reveals more about concentrations of energy than any worth that might have become sacred in these configurations.

forgetting is a letting go of grasping, an un-getting, a slipping of named power, a losing from and of mind, a failing of force and story.  forgetting is renewal, protest, a way out.

forgetting is the oblivion we distantly remember, the newness, fear and awe that are a periodic table of alchemical elements of our desire.

i no longer remember – i allow emptiness to remember on my behalf:  more efficient, yes, but also – more precise.

mysticism i

mysticism is a pervasive and routine awareness that each existent thing – whether animal, idea, flora, element, dead, living or yet-to-be, oneself and one’s constituents no different – is a member of the universe, with its own voice and no clear criteria existing to distinguish legitimacy among the voices.

mysticism is less an indifference to the opposites, or any union of them, and more a continuous translation among them, translating, for example, life into death and finding it a sufficient, even worthy, equivalence.

the translation arts of mysticism are less related to what we call the many languages within and possibly emerging from and returning to language, and finding uncommon common spaces among the many apparently divergent words – and more to language within itself:  arts necessarily without available schooling, or at least any schooling of the sort we normally call such.

mysticism has nothing to do with god unless it has the same to do with god as science or art.  mysticism is god behind gods, science behind sciences, art behind arts.  mysticism is always behind.  but not just behind.  it is ahead and in and under and through and over and of.  one could almost say mysticism is the class we presently call prepositions, but they incarnate.  blood-prepositions.  the of of eyes.

mysticism is less the lines or the destruction of the lines between things and more a recreation of lines to nomadically move around things.

that the human is more oriented to not-knowing than knowing tends to be a knowing of mysticism, but a knowing that feels so deeply in flesh that its knowing is always striving and never achieving articulation – and for this always and never it remains a question if it is a knowledge and, if so, what kind.   for its existence, its vocation, being inside and outside language but never of (unless of expresses direction), it falters in language’s vast networks of utility, and for this faltering tries to imagine how not-knowing might speak.

the human’s orientation to migrate what it might call not-knowing into what it calls knowing presents certain challenges to the mystic, for whom these orientations are not wholly unknown but for whom they are secondary.

all the not-seeing to see, all the seeing to not-see.  this might be a motto of the mystics if that peculiar tribe were given to mottos.

the mystic is hung from a non-existent thread spanning a chasm between the non-existent cliffs of vision and vision:  the vision of seeing and the vision of not-seeing.  so the oracular blind are pathways and metaphors to maintain this state of hungness.

it is not as if this state is – as one is always tempted – superior to other states.  we are all the living hung, all given to our states, these states of our givenness.  that the mystic knows the impossibility of superiority is a component of the suffering and joy of its not-knowing.

mysticism in the age of god’s (or gods') death (or deaths) cannot help but alter from itself in the age of god's (or gods') life (or lives).  for mysticism exists in flesh and flesh’s migrating orientations toward the ineffable and undefined.  but these alterations tend to be a matter of a sartorial waistline modification due to a change in poundage (the exploration of whether an increase or decrease or, strangely, both, being a particular discipline within mysticism) and not anything in what we might call spiritual dna.

within that sartorial world, then, the world of tailors, presses, needles, we could pick up its nomenclatures and say mysticism now is of art rather than religion, of debauchery rather than asceticism.  and we would not be wrong.  but, outside, in the corridors of wind, the tapestries of night, art and religion are just different ways to pronounce an unspeakable word, debauchery and asceticism varied moods of eternally silent flesh.

any individuality, identity, attributable to this i hardly interest me other than as abdications to the unknown.

mysticism is frequently heretical as society – whether it names itself or is named religious, secular, democratic, feudal, progressive, conservative – remains itself by maintaining (despite the shiftiness of the things and the placements, a shifting that can generate great excitement and anxiety among the masses) commonplace boundaries between things while mysticism remains itself by orienting itself toward the bound-shifting and boundless.

while there are many practices of boundlessness, mysticism, it could be said, is the only one that avoids madness and death, doing so by incorporating them into its practice.

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.

gott gedanken denken ii

mysticism is the process of attempting to enter the process of that of god which survives the deaths of gods, doing so by avoiding names.   it has no throne:  whether reason, passion, self, will, nothing.

i speak of god as god is the most impossible thing and if i should lose the ability to speak of impossible things i will lose the i and the ability to speak, which are one.

i and god are one in the way cabbage and god are one.  in this way i speak of god.

the negation of reality is humanity’s only positive and distinctive attribute and it achieves this to the extent it enters spaces of zero dimension:  god and art are two common names for this entering.  that the former was dominant in past time and the latter in present and future time registers in reality but not in its negation; in its negation god and art are the same.

certain existentialists and others who thought they were brave derided god as an escape, mysticism as weakness, sacrifice and passivity as shadows of authenticity; promoted the will, projects, societal struggle as the valid human enterprises.  and who could not say this sitting at certain angles?  but stretching the triangles and squares out to be spheres, who could not see escape as escape from convention, weakness as water, shadows as something to be praised.

that god is obviously unreal hardly prevents us from believing more (not more firmly, for that is an adverb of the real, but more spatially) – and yet with another belief – that god is not only the most real thing but the only real thing.  this possibility is hardly possible in the marketplace, the marketplaces of money and ideas, the unfirm that pretends not to be.

not suffering leads us to god, for suffering can equally lead us away, or anywhere; suffering is random in origin and direction – god leads us to god, and if money is said to be a wall between the seeker of god and god it is hardly because money is more a wall than society or art or love or even a wall or non-wall but as it is something and there must be nothing – not even suffering or non-walls – between.

the demons have left me and i am empty

while they inhabited this i they covered my disease

with their words, their carousings

now there is nothing

i am an empty monastery waiting for gods

to leave their lives and inhabit these

hapless infinite cells

i am average – the sum and average of all averages.  i cast rough planks on the mud of life to cross to the outhouses of god.  the planks are made of booze, sex, books, dreams – anything i can find that prevents me from sinking in the mud.  but i know god is the mud and i’ll never reach the outhouses, only finally sinking when no longer can i find.

to say that god is death is not untrue.  yet even if it were true, would we not now need god more than ever in time, death being now what it is – a nothing that is refused?

god cannot enter time but through shadow.  so the lover of god lives in shadow and the light of the city is a constant burden.  that god cannot is no reason to refuse our need.  that god cannot, that the city is a burden, are no reasons to assume our divinity, or anything resembling knowledge, to avoid the city or time.

we hardly ate of the tree of knowledge; this is history’s ruse.  our innocence is maintained.  and only the story we tell ourselves of our eating deceives us in disbelieving our innocence.

visions of god are not negated from asceticism but affirmed – god enters vision through unions of flesh and flesh’s absence.

it has always been the book that has saved me.  but saved me from what? and to what? that these questions are unanswerable in the i and yet i knows it has been saved - is this not dissimilar to god being dead and in its being dead made more alive?

god is not an escape from reality but a confrontation and subversion of it.  for there are those born into the human who test existence and rather than have the capability or desire to conform to it object to its order.  god is a name given to this objection and those who conform live in the creatings of that givenness.  weakness is a name given by the conformers to the non-conformers.  but weakness is everywhere, even as strength; it is rather that they are variously configured - and how are these varieties of configurating seen, but through god?

the rough advance of doves

the sadoo, seeking its muse, ceasing to be amused, in its ongoing quest to explore identity, embodiedly, against the backdrop of the world and in the great fiction of humanity, language, unrepentedly seeing the monopolar as homo sapiens saw neanderthals, seeing the polypolar as the blinking winking stinking eye of life and art (the bipolar perhaps as a misnomer on the prickly bridge of evolution), continues plodding toward itself, in this instance by presenting this formal yet inspirational essay on doves, their physiognomies, their olfactory limitations, serendipitous tendencies, mating and scatological preferences, kinship exigencies, and other matters of interest to the general reader and Mrs. Herbert H. Caraway, daughter of Wilma Pucker of Hardin, a suburb of St. Louis.

 

(Mrs. Caraway advises any further readers to accept the following text as sound, interpreting any meaning that might be begotten _&/^or linger as simply more sound.)

contents

            1.0       language

  03.     thinkinggggggggggggg                

17.4     life, culture, evolutionnnn

  ∞      void (truth, love, doubt)))))))

         11           art, arts, arting, articles, icicles, mandibles, kerplunk...…

           

 

…i

1.0              language

1.0              language

1.0              language

1.0              language

a student is confused by a use of ‘round’ instead of ‘around’ … as in she’ll probably come round if you leave her alone.  We look up ‘round’; there are 69 definitions.  How one could eternally fall into the infinite vortices of words, wells as deep as love.

to remain foraging for the language of one’s flesh in the bigbox of the socially mediated languages of money and names

            … an evolutionarily dubious move, but one that society calls forth, unable to wholly squelch its origins …

                                  and heresiarch sumli lisum luims said through the mouth of heresiarch xrcaa, one can't resent one's era without being swiftly punished by it.

didn’t heresiarch sumli lisum liums also say, hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner...

            (… and this ¾ofacentury ago …)

if god is the white space around the black lines of letters, are we not the keys by which the text is typed?

            are then the black lines our technology and laws, our structures and screams?

                        (as to the nature of the typist, is this not a question now lost in the indecipherable text of the tombstones of time’s graveyard?)

                                    is then the poet an archaeologist in the strata of air?

writing at the end of the word—like neanderthals clawing at existence under the boot of homo sapiens—we attempt to leave behind a record of verbal extinction in forms the future might have the capacity to recognize.

            the difference between word and world — el … the name of god.

                        word is absent god, which spoke itself out of language to place itself, in infinite fragments, in the world.

if, as rényi said with the inspiration of erdős, math is the process of transforming caffeine into formulae, isn’t poetry the process of transferring mud into breath, the spiritualized proclivity of worms?

the two full-word anagrams of funeral:  flâneur and frenula

            the fun to be had with this

                        putting the fun back in funeral:  real fun

isn’t the blank page the remnant of a dawn or dusk portending a twilight without end, its waiting words an invitation to god’s forgotten diaspora?

the blank page is unfiltered unblanched unsecured light.  Careers, money, what is normally called love … are inkblots on the page — craving to fill it, to be analyzed, interpreted, shutting out silence, light, buttresses against the white void … this night of the known, this page of black.

            poetry is the textured compromise, mediated in the poet’s flesh, between purity and the human scream protesting it … (shakespeare’s sonnet 66, bishop’s villanelle one love, nemerov’s because you asked about the line between prose and poetry
 

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow 
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

, soiled, quiet, writhing
on the foreground of the perfect page …) 

19⅕   life and spherolution

19⅕   life and spherolution

19⅕   life and spherolution

19⅕   life and spherolution

the first emancipation is from one’s parents, the second from one’s children, the third from one’s self … each gets more difficult, for each is an accumulation of freedoms and freedom in its fullness simulates the spherical mass of the world …

… trauma, like tenure, is transferable …

it’s said about f2’s recent suicide:  a life cut short.  Not untrue.  But our culture is biased (at significant cost) toward a life cut long.  Hence the incomprehension, disdain, fear, in response to the daoist thought—

• it is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life.
• when going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades in life, three in ten will be comrades in death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death, and these also number three in ten. Why is this so? Because they set too much store by life.

 

[[[[other lines the well-meaning spiritual class are frequently attracted to, with spectacular sentiment—

o  destroy your reputation (rumi)

o   do not go gentle into that good night (d thomas)

o   I took the one less travelled by,

             And that has made all the difference. (frost)
     o   do what you love (bus shelter and taxi ads everywhere)

                                                how long and long the list …]]]]

but as heresiarch sumli lisum liums says,

only fools, fanatics and gods can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire …

and did not heresiarch lev ray contend,

you have neither the patience that weaves long lines nor a feeling for the irregular, nor a sense of the fittest place for a thing … For you intelligence is not one thing among many. You … worship it as if it were an omnipotent beast … a man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decision, or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring Beings …. You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

did he not also say,

… politeness is organized indifference?

sex becomes easier and more difficult—easier through the portal of technology, more difficult because of the increasing distance between flesh and flesh’s prosthetics, a distance which now only technology can bridge.  Technology and flesh reach for each other across an abyss, but technology initiates and consummates the deal.

            isn’t this the melancholy and frenzy at the root of modern coitus?

how can acceptance and passion not be antithetical, other than through the hard-soft unity of the passion of acceptance or the acceptance of passion … these parallel and less-travelled roads?

ambivalence is always and equally present in every situation, event and person : it’s just a matter of its diameter’s extent and the number of surfaces required to contain it …

heresiarch enorjd-u^..en

wilde said that the greatest sin is being boring but i say that the greatest sin is to crucify symbols …

            … yet aren’t the two the same?

… to explore life not as a question but a wound …

… the greeks entered into death backwards

            we, though, are like the dreams of the christians:  we don’t enter into death at all

the something in the body that’s stronger than the body, that doesn’t simply confront death without fear but somehow overcomes the fear and so death …

            the attempt of physics and religion to codify this something … but doesn’t it only retain its strength as it eludes codification (the kierkegaardian dialectic)?

                        remaining committed to the eluding:  isn’t this heraclitus’ taut bow?

you have heard it said that novelty is oblivion, but i say to you that the city is a memory of an ancient infinite loop

overheard in a restaurant—

            i think of all the innocent housewives on oxycon …

it’s easy to discount teleology in a mathematical epoch, said heresiarch ullullul, but doesn’t the city indicate the truth of the human, the shape of its soul, by laying bare (though the laying bare of the city is like the laying bare of a stripper—it wears the eyes of its watchers and so, as mcluhan observed, is never naked) its contradictions—the eye of the truth of a thing?

            (don’t we then see the shape of our collective desire, the barbed wire of our limits, as we explore the urban ecosystem [{our creation and space—the two remaining frontiers]}, rippled watery mirror of our dark dreams?)

aren’t such gross summaries of time, space and power like the newsbites on subway platforms, but on the platform of myth?

07.    that medievalism—^thinking

07.    that medievalism—^thinking

07.    that medievalism—^thinkin

07.    that medievalism—^thinking

that ideas are dressed feelings, that feelings are chemical relations between the surface of a singularity, masking pluralities, and the surfaces of pluralities, masking singularities, that a large idea wardrobe begins to unmask both the unpresentable pluralities and the unpresentable singularities, that most prefer small wardrobes to maintain a minimal unmasking, any intimation of the inexpressible (we might be able to handle glimpses of flesh but not glimpses of spirit) … what else is there to know?

            that art’s task is enlarging the wardrobe, society’s restricting it …

                        feelings are the truest facts, silence their truest interpretation

                                    if we would speak, if we would attempt to draw nearer to the truth of silence in words, we would dress the feeling in an avalanche of words

                                                as we have rejected silence for the time, as the truest voice of feeling, we must talk endlessly.  Hence the rise and dominance of communication.  Hence tv, facebook, twitter, texting, therapy …

                                                            the Word may have gotten weary of flesh, but words themselves, Word’s children, are young and hungry …

… isn’t the truth a decoy more deceptive than falsity?

there is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses ... the truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

heresiarch azupo

one can’t think about language, art, thought—in the way one can’t think about sex—during the act itself, without destroying or at least diminishing it.

            wasn’t this heidegger’s error—in thinking about thinking during thinking, he failed thought?

isn’t this too the problem with academic and workshop’d art?

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

aren’t words the film before the absurd certainty of our flesh and the absurd certainty of darkness, these two lights (eyes) of certainty comprising our sight, the film the spectacles we wear to shade ourselves from the two certain fires?

            would not art then be the film of the film, the technology allowing us to transgress the laws, traverse the spectacle, look on flesh and darkness, and not die?

À      religion, government, the academy are threatened by the future, which is to say their pasts

À      co-ops, non-profits, are threatened by themselves, which is to say a barely filtered humanity

À      only the business-technology conglomerate, aligned as it is with the modern sacred, strides, self-assured, through itself into the world, in pumps, on speed, suited, monumental, levitating, wise …

֟       (as to art, isn’t it threatened by what it always is and has been, its eternal nemesis and mother, the void?)

—art

o   that which brings forth a preexistent wound

o   that which cannot be translated into psychology or biography, politics, scholarship … which cannot be translated

o   not the mirror of nature or the cosine of god or technology’s strange companion

creation is prior to consciousness

            isn’t this the assumption, arrogance, the basis and breath of art, its trump against the pretenses of industry?

it is the price put on art that destroys the integrity of the art object, not the material or the creation itself

heresiarch bed.rod

if sometimes i speak of art as light and sometimes as darkness, isn’t this because it calls from a black noon and a blinding midnight which to me, human, of muted flashing neon, birthing blurs in the gloaming, are identical twins of passion, as extreme cold and extreme heat both push the body into similar states of oblivion?

can’s tago mago still a perfect musical incarnation of an exuberant descent into and ascent from hell, a kind of largely alinguistic shakespeare

            aren’t all carnivorous orgies and divine lunacies contained in aumgn, the album’s otherworldy centerpiece, which magically fuses atavism and futurism?

                        its anticlimactic close, bring me coffee or tea, softly imperative, comforting, like its title, like fortinbras at the end of hamlet—

—ah yes, recognizable melodies, rhythms … society, order, those living and necessary sleeps …

we could taxonomize the arts, not according to the standard divisions (literature, film, dance, architecture, etc.), which are blurred and blurring anyway, but according to the vague spaces from which they emerge, corresponding vaguely to vague functions they fulfill:  the social-ritual arts, the political arts, the craft arts, the absurdist arts, the arts of the void, the subversive arts, the arts of resistance, the mob&savage arts, the academic arts … each with their gods, proclivities, demons, traps, circumscriptions  ...

            doesn’t this taxonomic difference emerge from the same space as differences between substantive and functional perspectives of religion (family, politics—any cultural expression and its visible and institutional manifestations)?

we know, from theory—the reflection of others and ourselves—and practice—our own experience in others’ creation and our own, in creation itself (to the extent we can enter it without combusting), this immersion blending with mysticism (any difference being the particular relation established with combustion)—that art, in its experience as art, establishes an unsettled relationship with ‘normal’ life.  This knowledge co-exists with the knowledge of another ‘art,’ which quantitatively overwhelms, the reproducible (the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction), the socially-generated and generative, the socially affirmative and cohesive, which we acknowledge as legitimate, which we also affirm, but require quotations for, due to the relative ease of its relation with ‘normal’ life, even its comfortable function of support and furtherance of such life.

this doesn’t interest us, other than as a dinner party or casual fuck:  its degree of engagement, even exhilaration, varies (and, yes!, how it can exhilarate—this marker’s insight on banality—not of arendt’s evil but of dissipating normalcy), its occasional necessity—insofar as it re-bares necessity and so at least circuitously reaffirms transience and truth—neither irrelevant, tangential nor trite—not uninstructive.

what interests us is the art (or arts) which emerge from a troubled relationship with ‘normal’ life.  what interests us is that which displaces quotations—i.e. the surreal, the displaced—from ‘art’ to ‘normal.’  This displacement, this replacement, is our curiosity.

(certainly not trouble itself is sought, as the trite, as those who seek trouble, would have it, but a transmigration of quotations, this movement of markers …)

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the judgments directed at us—in their diversity, subtlety, severity, comedy—are always gifts:  not primarily in their truth, which soon collapses into the vaster truth of the void of contradiction, but in their energy.  Most judgments, however, are simply transformed into judgments:  a simian efficiency.  But their energy potential is greater:  they are capable of aesthetic fission.

            isn’t this another way of stating the adage, the pen is mightier than the sword?

we don’t seek love, as we say and feel, but the same unnamable thing art seeks—a kind of geometry of god, the architectures of dreams …

it’s not god that interests me, it’s the artifice of god

not the city but the incarnated idea of the city

not love but the question of love

not art but its circumstances and crib

not i but the void of i

heresiarch asbermo

how many times have i undressed truth in the closets of night and found it to be a heap of clothes on the floor?

… how we all want to stain the stained world …

            but in a world so stained, stain upon stain, oil upon oil, isn’t the absence of a stain the more beautiful—and even in a paradoxical sense the more noticeable—mark?

to not reject, but set aside, narrative, the novel, stories, as the primary aesthetic or epistemological form of telling (outside of science) is to displace oneself in what might be described as a non-form (or, perhaps, more authentically, a form yet without form).  We might also call this poetry, if by poetry we mean not received (defined) forms but the quest to fish unborn shapes from the void—these shapes having their only appearance as the perception of a feeling of a silent seeking, which seems to reflect the displacement of the self, the mirroring of the human and the void

                        so the novel is not rejected—as evil, irrelevant (but, oh!, so relevant!), passé, expected, tired, explored …

                                    didn’t both borges &jabes more or less say—the novel … everyone’s doing it, why would i?

                                                aesthetically, hasn’t the novel become like the sonnet in the nineteenth century … awaiting an aesthetic holocaust?

                                                epistemologically, hasn’t it become like catholicism in valencia in 1502?

what compels me has always been not primarily the stories we construct to explain, recreate, justify and cohere our lives, but the architectures of the stories’ creation.  I could call these architectures poetry—in the way that poetry preceded the novel in the artform called literature—but i would rather (rather, because i aim for a spiritual-linguistic precision) call them geometry … the geometry of creation.  If people wonder why stories don’t dominate my aesthetics and psyche, it is because the shapes of the emergence of the stories are those that joust in my consciousness.  I recognize the necessity (in the sense of the existential given) of narrative, society, money, ‘traditional’ work and family … but it is not the appearance of these necessities that is my task; instead, it is the processes by which they appear, the translation of these processes into the shapes of language.

                        to confess a certain mutual incomprehension between the story-focused and geometry-focused, a quantitative imbalance, is almost unnecessary to state.  But it must be confessed.  This certain mutual incomprehension is itself a shape, perhaps one that holds a key to language.

                                    might there not be a relation between this exploration of shape i attempt to describe and the root tasks and obsessions of modern mathematics and physics?  The very large and the very small interest me—that which circumscribe and ground—and the corpulent middle only to the extent that its flesh at times clarifies the circumscriptions and ground.

the void is not black but light

            the void blinds us so we seek the blackness of the blotted page

                        don’t we desire—flappingly, subversively, resistingly, sometimes torn like spider legs in the hands of certain boys—to keep the page as blank as possible, to give words a place, living space, to land, breathe, choked and mobbed as they are in the claustrophobic communication of the world?

                                    what is this attempt called from the known?

                                                whimsy, delusion, insanity, psychosis, all manner of dysfunction?

                                    and from the cloud of unknowing?

                                                freedom, truth, love, poetry?

                                                            and heresiarch gladioozer said, do not the unknowing and known feed on each other like lovers in a condemned building?

doesn’t night’s maw open to a throated vertigo promising an aesthetic feast foreign to the day? Isn’t this why we leap before we look?

            and heresiarch edanu said, yes, and the first surprise is that the maw’s promise is fulfilled.  The second is that the meat for the feasting includes the one who leaps.

                        but those of the night are given to it as a baby to the breast, though the tits be deliquescent and the milk the stuff of sewers

the void is not more real than its orbiting masks, night not truer than day.

            don’t they take turns exposing each other, as lovers in the discovery and decline of their love?

                        this place where love and art kiss, bound by that contract between void and mask, signed in a bloodless cloister in the monastery of dust

                                    we plunk the yinyang on mugs, tshirts, workshop logos, pc backgrounds, as if the union of night and day were something other than that which has the power to combust worlds

                                                —now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds—

                                                            as if it weren’t the stretched and stretching diameter of our confused and dying souls

the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madperson has only one.

heresiarch nazeeliolo

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i experience little difference between my past extroverted life and this present one:  both have attempted to translate into language the inner necessity—and the feeling of the energy of this translation remains constant, regardless of the environment in which it takes place.

            in the way that no matter where you travel in the world, humans are humans and you are you? asked heresiarch wilminina;

                        yes, i answered, but with this difference: 

having had to become more than i expect to myself, i became it, and in the becoming asked the question of identity (not what or who [or, horror!, why] am i?—those questions of adolescence, but the question of creation), of the form of formlessness, the question of a dream divided against itself.

in the vast worlds of injustice, your act, arising from cruelty’s sectors but without its claws, is so petty as to be invisible.

the simulation of seeming, the seeming of simulation … 

i remember you

indifferent to my caresses

crawled into the tent of your sleep

your breasts like soft moons

as if we hadn’t just clawed

each other to another death

light, open spaces, the absence of linguistic pollution become more essential to me.  But what to do in toronto—half of its life dark, enclosed, mobbed with disruptions to thought, this half beginning?

            vonnegut's harrison bergeron

                        can i begin to experience this lightless-closed-clamoring half as a necessary darkness, an impetus, a spawning ground, for greater light and silence, not those of the sun and desert but of the soul stretched on the weightless horror of itself?

a nice thing about having led an absurd life is that everything begins to make sense—not just absurdity, which has made sense for some time, but even sense.

i wish to speak of the Bain as a lover, known, unknown, fuckedup, worn, juvenile, dense, awkward, edgy, utopian, opaque, multifarious, sticky, corpulent, miasmic, impossible, (can we say it? … ) … beautiful, hated, prehistoric, craving, brittle, shimmering, broken, volcanic, ovine, turgid, … … …

            but how can i, having been a pilgrim to the temple of adjectives and sat under the silence of their liquid teachings?

here i am,

      friend of the spaces between minutes

      of the darkness in the darkness

      not much knowing if the future is the past or failure is success

      wandering from stool to stool as if it meant something

      full of blinks and stinks and the western wind

there i am,

      in the bathtub with my penis on

      confusing it somewhat with the light in the bedroom

      counting to 81 in the manner of another century

      my mind a casino of bears and playlists

      discounting the darkness as if it were a friend

and not much has happened since (heraclitus or mencius or aeschylus or)

except that maybe what was said has been forgotten

i am far more your creation than mine; i am a mosaic of yous … yet in our primitive justices, we coalesce responsibility onto the singular, simply because it’s visible and so easy (in the manner of visible and psychic diversity).  If humanity survives and evolves, won’t it look back at our present laws and attitudes in the same way we look at the aztecs or nazis—scapegoating the other to avoid our fears, the renaming of this scapegoating a primary social project? 

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