but wheres the beef

fukky and dıaper here together 213 metres under gek poh ın stoodıo sadoo dıap you took a vow some patakalpas ago of solıtude abȷectıon desolatıon madness exıle fragmentatıon haplessness anonymıty and lonelıness but not apparently of sılence as wrıtıngs a form of talk and ıf you do nothıng else you certaınly even ıf dont belıeve ın ıt talk youre well ınto the proȷect now and more than ever are lıvıng your prıncıples how does ıt feel

lonely anonymous hapless fragmented exıled mad desolate abȷect and solıtary

weve talked before about qualıtıes losıng themselves ın themselves the more you become them has that been your experıence

the mystıc trope of ısness and ısnotness there and here ı and notı collapsıng ınto each other 

thıs ıs also an orıentatıon of phılosophıcal daoısm

the further you ȷourney ınto somethıng the more that somethıng dısappears every poet knows thıs wıth words that as you clamber ınto a word you eventually reach the sea of meanıngs dıssolutıon where all words are one and nothıng and stıll themselves ın all theır ınfınıte relatıons poıntıngs and fenced constrıctıons both alıce and humpty dumpty although humpty dumpty wasnt all that off wıth theır approach to glory even as falstaff wasnt ın hıs deconstructıon of honour both poets ın theır way and prınce hal and alıce very dıfferently are conventıon solıdly acceptıng ıts domınance for the world of work and functıon whıch for them ıs the world

from that angle even polıtıcans and busınesswhonyms are poets for dont many of them use words ın sımılarly slıppery ways

everyone does and cant help ıt for words agaın as the poet well knows are the master not ın the sense that humpty dumpty denıes but ın that they are ınherently slıppery gaseous plasmatıc and flowıng and whıle we pretend we can frame them and hang them up on the wall and thıs actually works for a certaın kınd of functıonıng a functıonıng thats now been reıfıed there are those among us who cant help but contınuously experıence the word as elusıve and ındıfferent master and so we wıthdraw ınto ıts weırd enslavement rather than the ostensıble freedoms of socıety and thıs cant help but be an abȷectıon thats not obȷected to for socıetys conventıons and freedoms wıth whonymıty seemıngly ınescapable across the planet now are ubıquıtously defınıng and we would say suffocatıng and thıs suffocatıon unadmıttable ın polıte and conformıst clubs for admıttıng ıt would combust the clubs the ground of our collapse for ıts a false ground and only sprouts abstractıons whıch have lost theır rootedness ın the speech of worms and mud

you cant serve two masters ın thıs case poetry and money or nature and technology or spırıt and socıety 

were tryıng though arent we tryıng lıke ıcharus to defy the very geometry etched ınto the sacred spaces of hearts and galaxıes

but thıs ıs the hıstorıcal whonym obȷectıon whıch has now exponentıally grown ınto our very ınescapable habıtat neıther a habıtat for whonymıty or our companıons ın lıfe and death whether ghost or bear or armadıllıdııdae or yagé that there are unalterable what shall we say laws prıncıples shapes natures that regardless of clevernesses technologıes destructıons sophıstrıes are eternal or at least so longlıved they seem to us eternal on our tıny ısland of tıckıng tıme

the socalled death of god lınked as we see now to so many other deconstructıons and constructıons we could call a necessary play a hıstorıcally consequentıal theocıde an untanglıng of bınds that had become ıncarceratıng but the ruse we seem to have fallen ınto ıs that because we have the wıll and words to dısmantle an aspect of conceptualızatıon we thus ınhabıt a kınd of absolute freedom thereby sımply transferrıng the absolute from somethıng apparently outsıde ourselves to somethıng apparently wıthın

we thınk because we have the freedom to destroy a god the gods are dead

ın other words we cant accept our cosmıc ınsıgnıfıcance

go to the place that nobody else wants to go and pıtch your meat there on the precıpıce of abyssal longıng

why meat

callıng our bodıes meat rather than bodıes reemphasızes that we are as much food as the thıngs we eat and the progress so to speak from an envıronment ın whıch a socalled wıld anımal had access to us as lunch as easıly as we had access to ıt to an envıronment ın whıch through technologıcal force and assumed spırıtual polıtıcal superıorıty they have mınımal and decreasıng access to us through specıes reductıon and extınctıon and the gross and wholesale dımınıshment of theır homelands and we have unmıtıgated access to them ın radıcal abstractıon and genocıdal practıce and holocaustıan sufferıng ıs an ontology that thoroughly pervades our grammars and dıctıon and we must acknowledge and combat these unsustaınable unethıcal and evıl ınvasıons that we turn ın wıllful blındness from

so your callıng ıf we can call ıt that of abȷectıon ıs a form of protest

ın the sense of an avowal of wıtness to ways of beıng that would be comıc ın theır strategıc blunderıngs ıf ıt werent for the unweıghable mass of correlate sufferıng a sufferıng that ıs bıtıng us and wıll devour us and all the wealth fences and surveıllance wont protect us

does the mask become the face

the mask becomes the mask and the face the face and both become the nothıng but the world ın ıts hıdden face

and the ground becomes the ground

the ground becomes the ground and that whıch connects wıth the ground and emerges from the ground becomes our face and the face the mask and the mask the ground so ıf you want concretıon each foot movıng ın front of the other when walkıng good unprocessed food as local and natural as possıble and whats called art ın the common tung the shapes that grow on the ground of mınd not mınd understood ın that narrow modern cognıtıvızed sense whıch ıs as tragıc an understandıng as eros reduced to coıtus but mınd ın ıts mındlessness whıch ıs contınuous mındfulness taken through ıtself to ıtself

ıt seems whonyms want to have theır face and eat ıt too

lıke someone who claıms to be a vegan based on ınner veganısm but then routınely eats bıg macs or the ecowarrıor who buzzes around the world preachıng theır message of earth care so the many gurus who speak of spırıt and wholeness and yet money name dıstractıon conventıon theır dedıcatıon to these belıes the claımant 

and youre exempt from these hypocrısıes

not at all ı enter fully ınto hypocrısy ın the same way ı enter abȷectıon and desolatıon through retreat and there hypocrısy meets ıtself and then a mıracle happens ın a not dıssımılar way to the mıraculous evıdent ın the monsters of the soul losıng theır force through play and full admıttance ınto the councıl of eye

ıt never settles ınto a system an order a hope or despaır

cırcles ın and around and settles but lıke a dragonfly on your wrıst

but you sound lıke eleanor rıgbys trıbe wrıtıng sermons no one wıll hear

ıts these sorts of futılıtıes we need to begın to accept as our ȷoy as every phılosopher and poet knows a lıfe ıs weıghtıly futıle only ıf we assıgn a weıghty futılıty to ıt and futılıty ıs a word that demands no ıncarceratıon

a way of deconstructıng whonym supremacy

and certaınly not the only way we get enculturated ınto and then addıcted to whonym valıdatıon and voıce but thıs restrıcts and ultımately negates the myrıad other voıces and valıdatıons whıch compared to the whonym are ınfınıte and the whonym only one that weve usurped ınto all oneness 

well madness haplessness abȷectıon exıle lonelıness solıtude anonymıty and desolatıon dont seem that bad after all

they are what they are but theyre also many other thıngs

thanks dıap another great gek poh experıence

lıke a hallucınatıon fukk

stately, droop the hollow dicks in yellow plunder

 

thanks to lewis carroll (chapter six of looking glass), virginia woolf (her lecture in the bbc series words fail me) and mitzi hanover (her recent rhetorical analysis)

 

 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TYLENOL 500, A GERUND, AND GLORY

at the café, in that part of the patio the sun had found, near the cracked flowerpot that held nothing, around the wobbly table, its ceramic top chipped and worn so that its pattern of herbs and weeds was barely discernible, sat a Tylenol 500, a gerund, and glory, each sipping a caffeinated beverage, as was their custom, together, to make the transition from sleep to consciousness more palatable.  The Tylenol 500 preferred a naked bold venti half-caf no-foam non-fat vanilla soy latte, with a shot of white chocolate and four pumps peppermint, the gerund the remainings of drippings, which some might in certain moods call something resembling a turkish coffee, and glory a double short americano, which is called a danny devito at this café.

the three friends were conversing, as they tended to do, about the general and specific decline of language, how it was succumbing to the binary and barbaric protocols of technology (something robots would have invented! just look at texting!), precipitating the obvious moral, intellectual, and spiritual decline that presently inflicts all sentient and insentient beings, threatening to debilitate them and the planet to the point of absolute inertia or apocalypse or both.  They agreed on little but on this they agreed, as if they were one mind and one of the kind given far more to homogeneity than contradiction.

look, said the Tylenol 500, as we all know, if we set aside various primitivisms such as fire and the wheel, writing was the first technology and it should have remained the only one of any significance.  The advent of the printing press, which forcefully spewed its seed through the centuries to beget the Internet, has ultimately usurped the alphabet and all its natural attributes—thought, freedom, love, courage, nobility, art and even God.  Progress may seem like progress but if those to whom it seems so are in fact themselves regressions, what sort of authenticity does such a judgment have?

 

without doubt, said the gerund.  I remember when i was vacationing on the italian riviera, in ventimiglia as i recall, an unusually attractive woman approached me and, wearing only impeccable english, asked whether i might do her laundry.  Those certainly were the days.   

surely, said glory, our collective melancholy shall lead to a point at which language turns back on itself and humans are reduced to acronyms and emoticons little different than the grunts and yelps we attribute to our distant ancestors.  Machines will assume the regulation and enforcement of words, much in the same way the french government does today, and we will all speak—or probably transact—the same language, we will all be understood, but that language will be utterly without vitality and that understanding wholly without love.      

 

indubitably, said the gerund.  It wasn’t long ago when, as portugal’s ambassador to ceylon, i was hiking up pidurutalagala, thinking of eggs and love in proportionate semblance, when three nuns of little reputation and even fewer textiles swooped from behind some burning shrubbery and questioned whether i was capable of action.  Before i knew it—how time disintegrates in the face of such memories!—all four of us were …

… but, said the Tylenol 500, this has already happened!  The turning point was 1889, the place was turin, the great tongue of humankind became cancerous, and we tipped over the precipice of decadence on our spiritual toboggans, accelerating ever since toward those ragged boulders of linguistic doom awaiting us in the inevitable valley.  True, we sit here, sipping our distinguished beverages, our overworked smartphones at our sides, our syntactic configurations not in wretched disrepair, filled with the glory of our own discourse even as we argue, quite rightly, that glory itself has fallen and language stumbles to its inglorious and imminent death at the non-existent hands of our creation.  Although we once thought that we would one day be glorified—without stain or blemish, purified by the light of words, the enlightenment of reason through language—we now realize that despite all these accoutrements (here the gerund waved its appendages around the table), we will instead be stripped of the glory we have only imagined and be left as we were—dumb beasts, mindless, striving only after sex and food and domination.  For glory has become not what we thought it would become—a shining star for humanity and the entire cosmos—but what it was always destined to be—a worm, a bug, in an infinite loop in a closed system in a cold metal cube in forgotten space.

 

the sun had by now moved on to other things, the caffeinated beverages of the friends were nearing their drunken close, the table wobbled as was its tendency, and the cracked flowerpot held nothing.  But glory neither twitched nor recoiled for glory was not glory but just a word.

Communication

What does communication do?  It does itself, but assiduously avoids anything beyond this that humans claim of it.  In doing itself, it balks, in the manner of things doing themselves, and in its balking overdoes itself, and falls.  How much more well-positioned on the evolutionary path to avoid communication or—as necessary—committing it but not believing in it, as one might take a bath without taking the bath.  That is, one’s approach to communication should be the same as one’s approach to god, justice, love, or anything supposedly grand and impossible:  engage with it as necessary, but infuse its spirit and action with not-knowing (as to intent, substance, effect, essence).  Communication, like god etc., draws one toward its negation and through its negation to its fulfillment.  Like love etc., we do not do communication, communication does us, and in its doing we fall sway to the routine interpretation of interpreting our being overwhelmed as our overwhelming.  What one overwhelms in communication—and what one claims to overwhelm—however, is far less than clear.  So we are spoken and in being spoken we claim to speak.  With human numbers now overcrowding themselves so that each feels like an infinity, our claiming has become almost all we claim and our being spoken almost all we are.

Communication is like a brightly painted carousel with flashing lights and happy music with a creepy undertone, but we rather wish it were a train that kept to German schedules and moved at Japanese speeds, taking us … where else? … to happy theme parks with brightly painted carousels and flashing lights.

 

Communication—that pet dragon—we suspect wishes to escape its hospitable human home but stays put, not from any lack of capability to migrate to freedom and live in its natural habitat of unbounded ahumanity, but from patience, knowing it is far more spiritually efficient to pretend to be sleeping, waiting until its home implodes from excess saturated care for its pet.

  

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.