april licorice

dreams, virtuality – sleep, void
             the repressed part of a rule which ensures that the rule does not work

i, god

             how can anyone be against me when there is no i to be against?

creation, evolution

             the myth of the black rose that will never be black

living, the city, talking, humans

             coddled cosmopolitanism

poetry allsorts

             perception is only a hallucination that is true

fear & apathy

             if fear is a wave and apathy a particle, aren’t they bound in their travels in the black light of time?

conversations at yet another netherbar

          featuring
                i’m going to get a drink
                                and
                what do you do?

some thoughts at the end of the daodejing

                exuberant namelessness, dissolute virtue –
                                a bridge to the caprice, laughter, and vital deconstructioning of Chuang Tzu

returning to returning

                the i i step in is not the i i stand in

council of i intro bios

                throneless identity:  the body as cacophonous conference room for spirits

minnie downed to baton rouge, waffling about love

    little ditties ‘bout god (or somethin

g) [maybe] {uh} : — : — : — :

isn’t god the image of ourselves that we shatter upon, becoming not whole or healed but uncountable pieces of glass under an electric sun?

            we gather ourselves into transient unities through wisps of language, ineffable reflections of our fragmentation.

god is a word i use to describe the chasm in words, the chasm between desire and desire.

death stabs us.  This stabbing while we continue living i call god.

it isn’t so much god we miss in a secular age but the shadows truth once cast, protecting us from perpetual light.

if misery is a butterfly, is god a caterpillar?

            wouldn’t god, though, be a sanctuary for those with wings in a flat and gravity-bound world?

i once thought that god, grounded as it seemed to be in darkness, would spell the sacred word at the end of time.  But i saw in a dream that time, unlike humanity, is eternal and we are the sacred word which cannot spell itself.

little, said god one day under the bonsai tree it favoured, is born from tears and blood, even as little is born from their absence.

            and the bonsai tree withered upon god’s speaking these words and god was silent.

if god must pitch its tent in a poet for poetry to exist and god is dead, do we not write from a residence of death and a throne of dust?

            but hasn’t language always been dust’s tongue and poetry its bloody pen?

the golden irides of god are dimly visible in the smog of our souls, through the gutted monsters of our wounds.

            as we spot them (staring at what? surely not us! staring at staring itself?), a certain death is inevitable (who does not seek this death in the act of gutting? in slaying the hungry heads of those wounds?):  we cannot help but become the blurred reflection of those thousand eyes.
                        the endless deaths in life:  with each one added, life and death begin to resemble each other, like a dog and its human.  (but which is which?)  (with each addition of death, divisions are subtracted …)
                                    heresiarch ramarooroo said, from death’s perspective, all of life is a failure.  And i said, yes.  But isn’t it equally true that from death’s perspective, all of life is a success? (and doesn’t, ^now, ^{the golden flappy now}, ^{tolle’s cheap toll}, chuang tzu’s butterfly poke its pesky head over language’s cliffs, laughing like a banshee munching avocados on a teetertotter on a raft in the Pacific?)
                                                (and from life’s perspective [from those perspectives] what is life? might it be language precariously stuffed into human form? and when humanity ends there still may be life but …)

might god be the amorphousness in the eye of each word, making the hebrew scribes right:  the holy name cannot be written?  It would be english’s crassness—our requirement to express subtlety in syntactic convolutions, the directness we claim in our grammar, the mask of honesty we demand in our art and our love—to plunk the shapeless shape in a clunky one-syllable word, with a hint of its essence in the vowel at its hollow center.

              
isn’t my melancholy that art, like god or time, has no end, no goal, no definition, no f ^ac ^e … only a fluidity polluted (flowered?) with past ends?

one must speak of god (if one must speak of god) in ways that barely resemble ways that resemble.  (and who would be so mad to speak of god unless one must?)

although there are other claimants, we prefer the gods who crouch at the edges of thoroughfares, drooling a bit perhaps, though not infrequently from caprice, day-old french fries in a paper bag, sartorial holes worn comfortably, quarreling with death as if the quarrel were a lover, dreaming of a night of love to down the horny world, seeing themselves not as saviors or losers or members of the virtuous merchant class or artists (those usurpers!), not particularly seeing themselves, humming off-tune tunes, not having had a martini in seven weeks or bermuda … these gods of smells and dirty fingernails, those claimants no more true than others, yet more true through our preferring.

i use god in the way you use waffle or project or agent or fuck me—not in any final sense or sense existing outside of what presently is inside, but in the sense of picnics and candy floss and rhino poop.  God is simply the empty set of words that impossibly claims to hold the infinity of other empty sets.

the endless compelling compulsive exhausting irrevocable exuberant leaping need for the tongue to move in the mouth, celebrating sound, feeling itself wiggle, wiggling, wiggled, in that cavity buttressed by carnivorous teeth and salacious lips, madly, softly, sweetly, bleeding, reaching through the void for the clanging stars … this need … isn’t it god?
 
which is greater—language or god? heresiarch wollenmatova asked one woolly bedtime as gramma tucked her in to hums of bygone nights.  Language, gramma spontaneously answered.  No, god, she corrected herself.  No no, that’s incorrect, it’s surely language.  No, forgive me, it’s god.  Language—i remember, i got the answer wrong, it was #98—is it, i know now.  But … i can’t forget that moment in the backseat of the chevy … without a doubt, god is right.  And so it went until heresiarch wollenmatova fell asleep and gramma died from the exhaustion of indecision, sucked into the gyres of memory.
            and love? you (& paul & aldous) ask, from a perch of posited perennialism.  Love, said heresiarch munchawuffle, i have heard it said that love is but one of the trillion children spawned by language and god, wee hindu-ish divinities wobbling it out in the living dictionary of life.
                        love! said will burr-brrrrrr and his wiffles.  Love is a meme stuck on the forehead of my self-proclaimed integration and enlightenment, a plank in the eye of my transpersonal taxonomies.
                                    love, said the kamut flakes, is an emo orgy on a bed of blooming almond milk, the jets we fly to paradise.
                                                love, said sappho and sade, that salad of limbs and eyes …
                                                            love, said aristophabooble, that cloven sphere …
                                                                   love, said Love, as it may have always had, which makes it maybe just like us,—…:  dunno what i am.

god is every word in every past, present and future language.  Not just every word, but every object and concept that that word points to, every textual and oral discourse (thought and feeling) about that word, the object(s) and concept(s) it points to.  Not just these, but the end-to-end experiences of that word.  For example, god includes the word ‘potato,’ the object potato (in all its varieties and states), all words and concepts (ontological, scientific, theological etc.), thoughts and feelings about potatoes, and the actual lived experience of modifying, growing, marketing, selling, preparing, cooking, using, wasting potatoes in all possible circumstances, with all possible methods, in all possible states.  Until the human has entered into each word in all languages this way, entered until each word has collapsed under its own weight and become the night below all words, it does not know god.  This radical limit to knowing we might call the humility we resist in order to sidestep reality’s confinement, the humility we must resist in order to speak at all.

 
if god was absence before it died, does it not become after its death not amortized absence but the absence of absence, which is not presence (which would immediately destroy us) but something more problematic—the lack of lack, the silence of silence?
            god becomes the copy of itself—itself by definition itself copying (god bless you please, mr. benjamin)
                        in dying, god expands its infinity, takes on more of eternity.  God always gains through death.  We always lose.  But in god’s dyings (which are endless), we become more distant from our center, requiring more substances (things, noises, images, movements, orgasms, money) to bridge ourselves, attempting to compensate for god’s expanding infinities through prosthetic innovation, to which society must increasingly devote itself; this activity inevitably becoming the sacred (the task of compensating for the absence of absence:  the perpetual sacred).  [the three sacreds:  the above task of compensation, the task of detouring around the above task, the task of bridging compensating and detouring]
                                    it is humanity’s inefficient energy to transform the divine losses we are granted into processes we are compelled to call gains.
                                                isn’t this compulsion the cooperative task between heaven and earth, that old alliance (to refer to heraclitus) between delight and mud?
                                                            (daodejing xlii:  thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to …)

the body is the way that gets in the way

the body is the way and the body gets in the way

the body is the way that gets in the way of the body, in the body of the way

the body is the way of the body of the way

            heresiarch ramarooroo

 

god i take to be the inexplicable incommunicable infinite resource i draw from to attempt to describe the quantumly human (what feels at times like a siege of twinkies).

 
grey is the god of the city, who slips on its vomit in the back of taxis, who leaps before trains from a pedestal of pills, who rides elevators, prime past prime, until light itself snaps and the god forgets its names.
            grey is the god of the city, who has forgotten the energy of unconsummated desire, the fomenting pit of silence, who races up the steps of the future without faltering or looking back at the pillar of love.
                        grey is the god of the city, grey and pricked and sated and beautiful and doomed.
 
it has long been known that god is a failed alchemist and we its confused apprentices.

the urban streets are god’s neurons, its intersections its synapses.  We inhabit the divine cranium to explore our resilience in new environments, to explore new explorings, to trace circumferences on night’s unblinking canvas (the arctic, everest, the congo were nothing next to this critically acclaimed [and popular!!!] choreography of the unseen and seen!).  The visions of the Apocalypse are fulfilled, and we stumble along heaven’s alleys and boulevards (where the sun is no longer necessary! finally!), not (of course) according to anyone’s expectations, as is the nature of visions, wily to the squiggles in their vast and microscopic core.
            this mind incarnate we inhabit:

• our collective flesh turned inside out and hammered into shapes of certain dreams?
• the essence of a substance of a shadow ^{(dream’s definition?)} shoved through time’s leathery funnel, splatting architectures on the shaved and antiseptic earth?
• our lusty tongues, strung out on themselves, drooling patterns we barely understand, the woven spit of history?
• the imago of a race neither won nor lost and maybe hardly run?

 
doesn’t god wait for me in darkness, less like a lover, somewhat like a corpse, more like a word dropped into a bottomless desert well?
 
what drives us to god?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy and small-mindedness and the arrogance that pretends it’s not, the cruelty and aggressiveness at the heart of the good, the greed that disguises itself as cooperation and the cooperation that disguises itself as greed, …  what drives us away?  The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy …
            and of these other things:  tenderness, understanding, friendship, care, forgiveness … do they not drive us to the human … or, rather, do they not drive?
                        those who would call the driving evil or ignorant or otiose or tired but gladly accept its effects (planes, trains, automobiles, yoga, to name just a few) … what do we call them? might we call them unjust?
 
texting is a bridge from god to nothingness, from the nothingness of god to the nothingness of god … god, simply, was insufficient as a bridge (at least it learns on its śūnyatā designer couch!); we need aids:  two thousand years ago it gave us Christ the Word, now it gives us texting—the ultimate instant communion, oh bouncy host!
 
one doesn’t oppose society and god (other than in that particular way, the scrubless plain on which things legitimately confront one another in the joy and desolations of themselves), one doesn’t unite them either (other than in that other particular way, on the supersonic planes of the air show of ourselves).  But one can perhaps, in some geometric spinozean vertiginous calm, listen faintly to a dialogue between them, not without meaning not dissimilar to the feeling of glimpsing a silent mob under a night clear rural sky. 

haiku on the trans-siberian at three a.m.

dazed, god speeds down the

miles of its deadlines, which it

would confuse with visions but

for the treasure in

its impermanent lantern

like virginia, with her waves and rocks, i refuse to watch art kneel before psychology, vision before analysis, enthusiasm before pragmatism, spirit before money.  This refusal i could call god.
           (you call my divisions false, my refusal puerile, my methods dubious?  Do i not also?  [But what shall we call the calling?]  I appeal, in part, in the broken pitch, from the whispers of stone, to the uncarved block of the dao, lay my oily fingers on its surfaces, cling to muddled images of murkiness and turning back and vacancy and the ancestors of beginnings—the project of the unnaming of names, beyond death’s caress, life’s claws.)

2:0 - the world of 2 (2)

Let’s list dualities, not from some solid space, from the pinnacle or interior of some obelisk, but rather as if we’re collecting them—like the seeds of dandelions—from the gaseous swirl above the foggy meadow of history.   (Perhaps to place in some future metaphysical museum.)  Do they point to certain elements that circumscribe experiences?  What kind of words are they?  Is such a list simply crass and juvenescent?  Do these primal words—these big and scary words—neither exist in isolation from our experience nor are more real than our experience?  Such lists may be play, but is not authentic play related to the real, a deep and particular articulation of the real?

good – evil (day – night, white – black, light – dark) (love – hate, justice – injustice)	male – female	seen – unseen (visible world – invisible world; sense – imagination)
transcendence – immanence (heaven – earth, earth – hell, heaven – hell)	creator – creature (parent – child, god – humanity, humanity – technology, humanity – art)	freedom – necessity (choice – fate, free-will – determinism)
body – mind (life – knowledge)	life – death (being – non-being)	nature – technology (human – machine)
master – slave (ruler – ruled, sadist – masochist, tyrant – victim)	eternity – time (infinity – space)	subject – object (I – It)
desire – acceptance (action – non-action)	truth – falsity	specific – general (one – many)

[

Thinking about God has historically been at home in the world of 2.  One of language’s core past functions may have been to help us cope in this world, which seems so liminal and real simultaneously.  Yet with the breakdown of Word, the partial transference of the divine functions to language, the birthing of the plurality of words and languages, the irreducible contradictoriness of existence, thinking about God must also change.  It must accept 2 and yet expand, leaving the supremacy of 2 (and so duality, myth, binary constructs) behind.  How does this happen?  It happens by grounding thinking in 2:0 as a diverse whole—in short, by rooting thinking in the body. 

2:0 - opening 3

We can think of God as the ratio 2:0.  This ratio itself is an object.  But, more fundamentally, 2:0 is an experience.

2 is the myriad world of opposites — love and hate, life and death, female and male, creator and creature.  It both includes and does not include God.  But even the exclusion includes God.

0 is utter emptiness, and reduces humanity to the starkest midnight isolation.  0 is wholly other.

2 is in relationship with 0 because of : or Spirit.  If it were otherwise, emptiness would be wholly unknowable to us and us to emptiness.  : is the bridge between our unspeakable void and our word-filled life.

God is the totality of the worlds of 2, 0 and the relational space perpetually in motion between them.  All errors spring from emphasizing one part of the ratio and diminishing one or more of the others.  God only lives as an irreducible totality.

[

To use language to speak of God is necessary, real and inevitable.  Yet to leave God in language is a reduction and desecration.  To think that God only exists in thinking and speaking is not to have had experience of God.  If you have not experienced God, words may point you to God but they can never in themselves show God to you.  More likely, you will want to treat words as an object and dispute them.  Language and ideas are partially objects and so can and should be disputed.  But God, in the divine totality, includes but is beyond disputation.

2:0 - opening 2

The world does not believe in God anymore, not because anything in God has changed, but because the world only believes in objects and God dies if made into an object.  It is not as if God is not known through subject and object but that this knowing is not adequate.

Once God is an object and we are the subject, anything can be done with this portable divine artifact.  We can write God’s biography, we can give God a sex change, we can turn the one god into the many gods, we can heap irony, ridicule, scorn and apathy upon it.  We can give it its due a few hours a week while our lives remain indistinguishable from those who don’t.  God as object is a definition.  God as definition is something to object to—whether we define this God as male or female, dead or alive, a god or the gods, transcendent or immanent, beautiful or absurd, terrifying or irrelevant.

The modern God sits beside cars and investments, houses and entertainment, Caribbean vacations and creative workshops.  A feeble “choose” dribbles from the sagging divine lips. The sound falls like a tear in a torrent rushing towards a street sewer and disappears.  We rightly laugh at its absurdity.  God as object stands no chance.  God as object is a pitiable farce, a three-year fad, a bitter fling founded on protestations of lust and eternal love, a rusting coin in a safety deposit box.

[

The experience of God cannot be taught.  It cannot be set in rules, dogma or moral prescriptions.  The path to God cannot be prescribed or in any way directly imparted.  It can only be pointed to.  It is the responsibility of those who have experienced God to point to God.  It is the responsibility of those who have not experienced God to follow the pointing.

One never finally arrives at the experience of God.  God is not a goal, an end, a static state.  But neither is God an incessant dynamism, a perpetual elusiveness, an unreachable chaos.  While God contains both end and flux, God is not primarily experienced as either.  Fundamentally, God is not experienced as anything.  God is simply experienced.

2:0 - Biography and Opening

Biography

Svoo—born John Smith—was an English aristocrat and Lord Spiritual who went mad when his wife died and wandered for seven years on the moors, munching on heather and mumbling to himself.  At the end of the seven years, he dictated 2:0 to Dominica, a golden plover, who transmitted the text to the Secular Sadoo.  We thank Svoo, Dominica, and the moors for their cooperation.

In a simple—some might say simplistic—and occasionally disarming way, Svoo examines the world of duality (2), nothingness (0), relation (:), and unity (1).  Written in brief, loosely connected vignettes, we’ll post sections on available improper days.

2:0

There is no definition of God.  There is only an experience of God.

Experience should not be understood as an experience from within me or an experience of something “out there.”  While the experience of God contains both, it is beyond both.

Experience should not be understood as feeling or using.  Feeling and using separate subject and object.  I feel love towards this person.  I use this person to gain information or pleasure, to reduce my loneliness.  The experience of God may include these things, but it is far more than these things.

We could also say knowledge instead of experience.  But it is not knowledge about something.  I do not know God if I can make a list of divine characteristics.  I do not know God if I have uncommunicable visions of God’s essence.  I do not know God if I have religious training or follow certain rituals.  All this, while it may be part of knowing God, is not knowing God.  If this is all that one knows about God, one only knows God as an object.

The Nature of My God

My god is virtual.  As virtual as a website, digital time, playlists and participles, nightmares, Blairism, gamma rays, memories, smog, desire, sublimation, and you.  My god is virtual not because it cannot deposition but because it will not; it is my god for its refusal to condense and freeze, instead allowing solids to be solids, infusing them with itself under conditions that still remain—despite our reputed advances—largely inexplicable.  If my god were a solid—or even all solids in sum—it would not be a god but simply a dump of solids.  And my god is no dump but a fart.

My god is a fart and lives no longer than a fart.  It smells like a fart, is as unpredictable as a fart, dissipates and eternally recurs like a fart, and is as joyous and iconoclastic as a fart.  My god rhymes with heart and art but does not rhyme with news or business or money or marriage or time.

If it offends you that my god is a fart—maybe even the sum of all farts—we (my god and I) might very well politely suggest that you leave the room and visit your local museum, perhaps renting those special guided-audio-tour headphones and muttering, in that particular way, hmm-hmmm from time to time.

Being the sum of all farts, my god everywhere always exists—in potentia, in formaldia, in speedia, in purposia—and this is what theologians mean when they refer to the omnipresence, omnipotence, and eternal nature of God.  But my god is slipperier than the theologians’ cheap and easy god.  I dare the tome-laden smirkless god (or no-god) of Augustine, Aquinas, Barth, Tillich and Van Buren to meet my god (or no-god) on Mount Caramel in a cow-lighting competition.  Oh … my giggly farty god would win.

You might say, if you wish to use the old language, that my god is spirit, but any competent philologist knows that spirit is booze and spirit is wind and spirit has 33 entries in the OED.  The Internet is spirit and the Internet grew from spirit and spawns spirit, but spirit­—in the corporation of words—is a major global subsidiary reporting to the Fart Division.  That my corporation has no CEO, that its divisions have no stable leaders, that my god is but one element of one division in it … shouldn’t surprise you.  Farts are tricky.  This, at least, you know.

But we don’t wish to use the old language, do we?  My god doesn’t want to use it, I don’t want to use it, and you don’t want to use it unless you’re a schmockity-schmuck.  We all—all three of us:  I, my god, and you (which covers all the bases, truly)—can use it if we want to, but we don’t often want to, do we, being, as we are, members of the nouveau flatia of language, leaving the ossuariacical functions to the zombies who comprise society?

My god is a servant of language and language is a servant of flatulence and flatulence is a servant of my god and if you accuse me of circularity, I say to you—my god is a circle or maybe my god is an egg or a cloud or a game, who, being in the form of farts, doesn’t think it’s unjustified to become a fart which, seeming to be of no reputation, no name, little duration, being found in the fashion of the mammal, exalts itself, and puffs itself up like a puffin, and gives itself an aim which is above every aim, that at the aim of itself, presidents should bow and starlets should swoon and every lung confess that my god is my god, until the last star melts and the last bear pirouettes.

To speak of the nature of fart may seem to some to be unnatural.  To break wind with my god, to divine with my wind, may seem to some to break faith with faith.  To shift the paradigm from lip to sphincter, from word to turd, from art to fart, from ego to eggo, from Jeez to cheese, from God to bod, may seem to some a transmogrification not worthy of somber traditional theological pursuits.  To take the faux pas and elevate it to the true dance may seem to some gauche.  To transform the transgression, the mutation, the offense, into sacrament, aesthetics, relief, may seem to some uncalled for.  But a call is a call and one who misses the call an ox and a moron but one who catches it an oxymoron and a pleonasm and a retronym.  My god doesn’t care and this is why it is my god.

My god rises above the petty concerns of pants and skirts, de-naturing nature, de-divining the divine, de-deing de-.

Discussing nature in an age (in an egg?) when nature no longer exists is to align ourselves with the nature (with the fowl?) of our god, which exists in an egg when chickens no longer exist.  This is why my god is born in and lives in and dies in air—the media of pantheons and progress and nothing.

Have you not smelled?  Have you not heard?  How you dream of the hard human harrowing, that underwear descent, sweet sonatas of the golden ass, the nanogod?  How you dream, when you dream, of all society isn’t, all your life and life has not become? 

The only ground is dream, my god my only dream.  My god turns farts to dreams and dreams to farts and this is why it is my god.

That the one who loves my god doesn’t distinguish between the breaking of bread and the breaking of reality is an argument for, for the discerning, my god.  The flatulogical argument.  (Ontology, like God, is dead.)

Does my god have a nature if its only nature is gas, vague electrons streaming from the universe’s silent bulgy buttocks?  What nature is this that has been denaturized?  What god is this that has been degodded?  It is my god and I see it as plainly as I see the night.