today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.

madnesses ii

certainly the currency of money can entitle its holder to safely play with society’s constructed lines between sanity and madness.  as we see, various sectors of fiscal wealth reveal on lit and comfortable stages the eternal intermarriage of sanity and madness, providing tents of release for the many who carry the burden of maintaining separations and the appearance of madness as an external thing.

language’s role as the currency exchange of sanity is indisputable.  what remains disputable is the table of contents for the exchange’s manual.

whether madness is inclined toward fragmentation or unity is a question the self-designated sane tend to avoid in any extended musing, being themselves inclined to both.

the relations of madness with possibility and dream are a hardly nascent science.  all we can say in our bare infancy is that god, at least as creator, was mad and that the subtle and fashioned schizophrenias of sanity depend on the madness of god, the incoherence of dream, and the possibility of impossibility for the entirety of their comforts and breath.  little will advance here until the essences of religion (the psychology of the inhuman) and science (the geometries and mathematics of the senses) sufficiently converge in yet articulate dialogues.

the recent rise on history’s plane of wellness, of mental health, of the psychotherapeutic professions, conglomerates, vast merchandising and retail franchises – and so of madness as a core industry – indicates nothing like progress in any sense, other than as a further accumulation of cultural artifacts, and rather may point to an increasing insecurity and insularity of the species that requires such industries for its vast protections.

if time is money, it is also madness.  the three are united in a manner not dissimilar to the muses.

as what is routinely called civilization continues to migrate farther from its dark origins into habitats of eternal and artificial light, it may be that sanity takes on, culturally, a function analogous to the alphabet, technologically.  whether earlier warnings about the correlative increasing prostheticization of the human soul, in relation to the alphabet, are relevant to sanity is a question perhaps worthy of further practical and theoretical explorations.

madness is a language family, within it as many languages as sanity.  who would trace these trees and relations, these syntaxes?  who would translate among the many speaking things?  who would know the wind’s dark mind?

do not say – oh, that barely babbling thing with booze for blood, that savage indifferent to its killings, that lump locked in the lacunae of itself are mad, while this executive vice-president of cards, this towering name of music, this lovely altruistic nun are not.  or say it.  but do not say it lightly.

so little along the pathways of evolutionary diversity has humanity crawled on its hapless and blooded knees.  even colour and genitalia, the names or not of one’s gods, are hardly plural in any bulk and spread, or have simply transferred old tyrannies to new.  we have not even reached infancy in these organics.  but geometries of mind, heart, soul, language, thought, form – our approach here is of the non-existent.  of the non-existent, or mad.  and the two are not wholly distinguishable.

for those babbling in the gutters manifest the coated nonsense of the sane; the sane wear them as an ocean its waves.  and the tongues of the eloquent are covered with blisters of denial and usurpation, and woe to those who hear their words and do not see their tongues.

for would not the one capable of hearing the speakings of the sane and the mad equally, applying neither privilege nor objective, be also the one hardly capable of speaking?  so language, sanity’s exchange, does not trade when madness’ stocks have equal value.

based on what i’ve heard the articulate and inarticulate, the loquacious and taciturn, say, i am far from convinced of what is articulate, its source, of any truth in words.

rather than pretending to be mad, i pretend to be sane?  what does this make me?  and if the former is malingering, the latter is …

     for isn’t there always a pretense, and a purchase of that pretense, and often a forgetting of the pretense and its purchase, for the sake of utility and ease?

dirty old man

i’m a dirty old man and when i was young I was a dirty young man and if i grow to be ancient i’ll be a dirty ancient man and when i was a boy i was a dirty boy and when i was middleaged there i was squashed between innocence and incapacity, on the throne of dirty, and when i was an infant i was an especially dirty infant and when i was a fucking teenager i was a fucking dirty teenager and i’ll always be dirty because i love being dirty and i’ll be dirty even if i live forever and dirty’s more fun than being clean and if mommy or daddy told you otherwise they can go to hell and this is what dirty is:

1.  it’s wanting to rub your sex on elephants and streetcar poles and wasted poles

2. it's thinking about everyone you meet without

their clothes on and piled higher than everest

doing the kama sutra forward and reverse and everything covered in gas and zeus with his matchstick ready and lit

3.  it’s wanting big black pricks—fuck the clichés—ramming me in tropical plant greenhouse washrooms, my ass spread like a book over the dripping sink and whoever coming in and watching and joining like some de sade cuckoo clock, some sex du soleil, some carousel of rising falling whirling oysters! roosters! lights! music! and it’s knowing dirty has nothing to do with political correctness or anything but being dirty and feeling great about that, as if the world’s a big hairy testicle or a woody allen boob

4. it's seeing juicy screaming pussies wide

as mirrors on velvet couches like those

brothels in your brain, hands coming out of them, fingers soaked and beckoning, and clits like talking pomegranates, blabbing slutty, seedy, crimson, the way you like it, the blood, the blood

5. it's getting through dentist hell by having her say,

did you know it’s international nude

dental day today? then her stripping, feeling her

soft saggy catholic bubs against my cheek as she’s drilling in my mouth and after i’ve done the final rinse she says time for you to drill me now and she clambers up doggy-style half-geriatric on the drilling chair and i’m hard as god, life’s just endless porn clips unless you’re mormon then it’s endless mormon porn clips

(what else do you do with that throbbing thing between your legs? cut it off? sew it up? get some deity to delegitimize it? bury it in meetings and skating lessons and mortgages and muffins? what else with those manic memories? say oh me oh my oh silly youth! or i used to be bad but i don’t need to be bad no more or the highest functions of our species are hardly simian but those of virtue and honesty and discipline, which are their own rewards and devoting your life to proving this despite the seven billion pieces of evidence to the contrary but it’s so much fun to say fuck and even more fun to do it and if towers should fall and all the fish die and bugs overrun us, who cares, really? everything dies and it surely isn’t an accident eros and thanatos have always been friends with benefits, doing it in their mythic bouncy castle—always an open bday party at the hard shag café on planet moof)

6.  it’s spending my time in elevators

undressing people because it’s a helluva lot more interesting than whatever tragedy is being broadcast on the monitor

7.  it’s looking at that boxer’s swinging balls in the doggie park and thinking maybe they might taste good

(that’s not all i am:  i bake flognardes and babysit my grandchildren and read mallarme and take long walks and scrub my bathtub using allnatural cleaners and don’t own a car and compost a lot and am mostly nice to my neighbors and ponder the nature of god in something of a spinozean way and drink only the finest global beers and am told—but who isn’t these democratic days?—that i’m a great lover and volunteer in my community and feel no desire to abuse my cats and behave more or less like the citizen i’m supposed to be and don’t censor any of my thoughts so)

8.  if you’re walking down the street and your

stockings stop at just the right spot and i’m in a particular mood i’ll pull you into my mind and throw you facefirst on a desk on the 72^nd floor and yank your panties down and your skirt up and do what any certified ape thinks about at least 81 times a day

9.  if you and your mother or brother or sister or

cousin or boss or grandmother or whatever are

sitting there across from me (but only if everyone’s legal of course because i’m canadian) … we’re all bonobos, little copulation deities, fulfilling the only thing that’s ever fulfilled (nature, stupid) … what are couches for anyway? (and here we are, all this flesh, black time holes, collapsed, sucking darkness like it’s a milkshake) … what the hell, it’s all in the family, names are constructs, we’re all related

10. all this, this hindu heaven, love here on

earth, pure bodhisattvas of glorious

nothingness, and you’re a perfect 10 even

if you’re 100 (in the baptismal tank, in

the name of the mother and the

daughter and the holey host, laid

down and dying dying dead, you’re

resurrected! thank aphrodite and the virgin

mary and that whore, magdalene, made ever

new!)

(and we’re night and fire and ice and words are a lie, we’re all hair and goobers and drive to the grave in our b-52s like the idea of a certain kind of god dreamed by another kind of god in a messy nest of chirping gods)

… and you wouldn’t think this if you met me but who cares the mask is all as willy taught us and that’s what being dirty is and i’ve always been dirty and i love being

dirty and my god’s dirty too and so are

you.