with respect ...

with respect to madness language is always somewhere else

literature – from poetry to philosophy to its consummate present example, the novel – has become the story : exploration through narrative, typically human narrative. it has relegated madness - literature’s precarious soul - to the inaccessible, the autistic, mentally ill, deranged, the solipsistic, the virus …   but these – regardless of whatever names they might appear to be attached to – have always been literature’s true home. and the definitionmongers, the rationalists, the prize and list people, the storyists in their infinite discomforts do what the spiritually insecure have always done – use force of whatever quality to displace their insecurities far from the sterile spaces they inhabit, even as the privileged displace garbage and pollution as far as possible from them geographically : onto the poor, unheard, inhuman

story was mad insofar as it was born from the placed derangement (a derangement that because of its place had real range, range of touchable knowable unknowable divine land) of the tribe, but as story’s become separated from this tribal ecstasy it becomes formulaic, conventional, conformist, expected … and so not literature

so those called to remain committed to literature in these darks ages of the word – when madness is still manifest in the garrets and cellars of music and film for reasons primarily technological – the exploration of madness and the exploration of literature become effectively the same. so psychology – not the academic laboratory variety that dominates in lit and official corridors but the kind that oozes like pus from the psyche itself – and word become bound, psychology and psychologies of word and words literature’s practice. the mental illness of the word, its dysfunctions and taboos, schizophrenias and pharmaceuticals, shunned babblings, urological rants ... these are literature's narrative. the writer takes each word to the couch even as each word takes the writer. not to any effect. effect is academic psychology’s domain. literature in effect is the record of word and writer taking each other there … to noplace (the utopia that is no utopia … not just noplace but no noplace – and the no’s as affixes may be stacked like turtles on the back of a collapsed universe, universes of places of diaspora, exile, apophatic mappedness) of the empty question

how then does literature dissolve its identity through technology in the way (but in its own way and ways) that music has done. (we discount film for film’s born of technology whereas music, ancient and fleshy, comprehensively tedious and weary by 1912, had to break through [we set aside all those for now seductive pathways of film as nature filtered through preexistent but previously underused dimensions, music as first technology, literature as cosmic babel, ... all pathways dreamt, all arguments made.].) music has accomplished its recreation, its identities and doubts, drones and genre asylums through the synthesizer – the ability to patch everything onto everything, anything onto anything, all nothings on nothings … through enabling sonic life as music. when i walk down a helhi street and hear honkings, harassments, dogs barking, sun screeching ... it's as if to me i’m sitting in my sunroom listening to an lp. you can say – but literature is this. not in its common talk and trade but on its edges. even a name like dfw does this. and he was mad. he suicided after all and that’s a good sign. sure, but sterne was edgy, mad too and didn’t suicide. (madness now’s more mad. or rather madness now has farther to travel to reach literature even as literature has farther to travel to reach madness. they need more patches, infinities, more nothings ... they need to forget society, themselves. and this takes so much ... effort ...)

literature craves to be unrecognizable, lusts after anonymity (art's altar and eucharist) in these polluted seas of name refuse. literature should be so much ourselves we don’t see ourselves. the uncanniness is too present. we shall seem to be wholly absent and in this hole we are here. dfw and his family are recognizable, his fragmented stories the shapes and blabs of our currency

atonal literature, astory literature, areason literature, aliterature literature, literature defying currency, written by the cthulhu ... for the cthulhu aren't the hideous other but the hideous us. organic life! love and hate! human passions, conditions, standards! one only needs to travel well into the soul that hoards toilet paper in our increasingly visible species narcissistic times to see this usotherness. this travel and need is literature. not as fact but horror

i don’t hear you

i don’t see you

i hardly understand

i can’t read

the word through its endless interrogations reanimates. rejoins, reintroduces thing and name, renatures language. each word is spirit in infinite language forests. not one spirit but countless. and as spirits amorphously drift, each word (most alchemically, most mystically) drifts into all others. each word’s in each word and for the writer, as the writer’s just another word, in it. not as god or christ is in the christian. this is hierarchical, separate. but as gods in gods, mycelium in trees, air in fire, water in dream. so as academic psychology attempts to effect identity (and effecting transgressive identity still follows the conventional path of identity effecting) for social relation (even if this relation is protest, rebellion, shock), the psychology of literature (hardly any different than the literature of psychology) enters the identity of word to travel to identity’s dissolution. while this journey is paramount, literature appears as the writer as journalist depicts as closely as possible the effects of the movings into words’ identity’s dissolution on its inveterate physicality, the wholesale range and limits of its sensations. as journalist. (though we must acknowledge it should be obvious that our journalist is as different from the common one – no matter how noble, influential, sacrificial, perspicacious – as our psychologists and scholars are different than those pedigreed among fluorescent peers and gowns and lecterns)

with respect to language language is always somewhere else

with respect to madness …

with respect to respect …

with respect to somewhere else …

with disrespect to …
without disrespect ...

without language …

without without    

a lesson in jurisprudence iv

now, sadoo, your views on the law are surely more nuanced than you’ve led us to believe here. on the one hand you raise olafa, using a simplistic example and unsophisticated thinking we might add, as a subtle model of one who transcends binaries and then you yourself construct a binary between olafa’s non-binarism and the law’s binarism. as you very well know the law’s binarism is itself offset by non-binarism within the law – it requires no offset outside itself. all this smacks of those gurus you deride who claim to have achieved non-duality or enlightenment and whom you and every other reasonable person know are still just chained to the vast complexities of flesh like everything else

the law – whether in the form of its makers, the government; the form of its external enforcers, the military; its internal enforcers, the police and penal system; its interpreters, lawyers and judges; its chattel and feedstock, the citizenry – is, despite inevitable inconsistencies, failures, contradictions, disagreements, successes (often euphemized as checks and balances), primarily the state-sanctioned and organized use of force to support capitalism’s interests: a highly restrictive and dubious apparatus of values that privileges a few humans at the expense of many and a notable majority of other living things and environments on earth. while the commons sentimentally celebrates the rare exercise of the law in correcting gross societal forms of injustice and, while flipping channels between sports extravaganzas and netflix serial killer retrospectives and reality shows of hoarders and cheaters, expressing necessary and scripted outrage at the murder or halfway house around the corner, lives in fear or respect of the law's invasive capacities, the law serves not the people but the systems that the people are required to serve, that they were born into as commodity requirements

you certainly wouldn’t like it if these systems of control you so easily despise were removed. while you may question the use of legitimized force – random brutishness, violence, and barbarism (which we know rapidly manifests when the former are diminished) would only be claimed to be an alternative or superior arrangement by the sickest or simplest of minds

naturally i recognize a certain efficacy to the law. bound in my criticisms are a root mistrust of tribal, grouped, mass humanity to behave sensibly, intelligently, creatively, contextually. so an implemented anarchy is, as you point out, highly problematic and we deal with this by organizing, hierarchizing violence, recognizing that such an arrangement, while still highly flawed, will at least provide the semblances sufficient for a public to be sufficiently consensual in its approval, a sufficiency it is largely trained in from birth

and yet you still complain. you’re a crass dreamer, a whimsical protester, a vain utopianist, a quixotic charlatan, a human unable to be pragmatic and thus effective, separating reality and concept, policy and practice, showing little or no awareness of history, civilization, diplomacy or even the actual daily society, culture, and life humans exist within. you would return to an arbitrariness rank with needless blood and suffering far inferior to the systems we’ve struggled to construct – which, while imperfect, at least function far better than any system you can point to elsewhere in time or space

the object of your advocacy aims at the middle and hits it firmly. and for this aiming and achieving you defend it. yet in being the system and expression of the middle – of raising and maintaining a middle – it fails in the very core of its success and limitation: that is, it must punish its transgressors: those who deviate from the middle and it ignores (and by ignoring, punishes) the non-human world on which the human depends. olafa has organized herself and her life to be vapour wafting around and through your monumentalizings. she would be a social or political anarchist but she knows anarchy, while perhaps a more superior system in theory, depends on a society of superior humans – that is, humans who are intelligent, creative, respectful, contextual rather than greedy, protective, conniving, ego- and anthropocentric. so she is an individual anarchist and bypasses the law until she can no longer. the law is necessary for the undeveloped and those who engage in the law – whether as policy-makers, enforcers, interpreters, or citizens – regardless of their relative cleverness or stupidity, ethical orientations or corruption – are profoundly drawn into the law’s material and spiritual composition, inevitably internalizing it and thereby incorporating it into their collective and individual constructions. yes, we can say a rare reformer – often at great cost to itself – can influence the law so that it drags the law in a certain aspect one more decimeter toward justice … but as long as this dragging largely takes place within parameters that are decontextualized, middling, tied to elitist interests, and antithetical to outside superior forms – whether mycelium or artistic expression – one must question the efficacy you with such pragmatic enculturated interest defend. olafa does not bypass the law from power, privilege, money, corruption – these tools of the law, the tools that sanction the bypassing of the law by the law: that which you refer to as the non-binary offset within the law’s binarism – but by the strength of the current within herself. the bypassing within the law the people may envy and resent but they fear it for they long for it, but it is this other bypassing that is beyond their comprehension, for they have never moved away from their training in their functions as commodities. and so it is not that we don’t recognize that there is a spectrum of justice within the law and that there are thus degrees of worthy and unworthy barristers, but that from this other bypassing we call all barristers bare-assters and all lawyers cloyers and all professors poofessors and all artists fartists and autists and …

we are all père and mère ubus

 ... – for how else do we breathe but through play? – and we watch the knowledge of olafa guide her on her way

seems as if you’re one of those who’s walked away from society and needs to rationalize your estrangement through cheap superiority

seems as if you’re one of those who’s never questioned the assumptions of the psychopathic society you were born into and rationalize your blind conformity through cheap derision

and you argue against the binary?

it is a question in my land to what extent the methods used to emigrate to it and retain one's citizenship – that is, to continue to reside in polypolarity rather than binarism – in the act itself of emigrating and retaining replace one in a new binarism, a new law, a new incarceration

there's no escape. you might as well join us

olafa is my reference. and my pal voomwyrd writes that in the individual justice universe the individual subject's universe is like the person-as-the-walled-moated-castle-town. it is under constant siege and desperately, obsessively seeking to keep the body – this body made out of food – away from others and retain it for ourselves alone. any attempt by others at sharing is regarded as an outrage, an injustice, that must be resisted to the hilt. in the other, heraclitean universe, being in your body is more like having a volume out from the library, a volume subject to more or less instant recall by other borrowers—who rewrite the whole story when they get it. olafa and voomwyrd don’t deny the binary – they see it replicated everywhere and everywhere in gradations. rather than orient myself to your world's exigency and pragmatism, manifest in the law you defend, a law that is leading in its insufficiencies to the brute anarchy you say it is superior to – an orientation that is genociding thousands of species, ruining the forests and oceans and air, and now seriously threatening humanity’s future – i orient myself to olafa, a world not of accumulation, aggression, castles, and genocide, hardly one of light and ease and prestige, but one sustainable, mature, contextual – using the human capacity to intelligently care, with vision and wisdom, using technology cautiously and judiciously, for the benefit of all living systems. this is olafa’s walk and laughter

you’re not going to go very far in your solipsistic delusions

i don’t want to go very far

daodejing 81

Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not truthful.

Good words are not persuasive, persuasive words are not good.

He who knows has no wide learning, he who has wide learning does not know.

The sage does not hoard.

Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more.

Having given all he has to others, he is richer still.

The way of heaven benefits and does not harm.

The way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.

Dao quietly overturns what might be described as the West’s mantra— 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

It overturns the mantra millennia before the above lines were written and about the same time the roots of this mantra were being developed.  It overturns by recognizing the polymorphousness of language, its undependability as a ground, long before Wittgenstein.  It overturns by saying that the whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful yet this is only the ugly; it overturns by returning to the gate where names diverge.

In returning, harm is deconstructed, contention dissolved through a withdrawal from clinging to anything that can be named.  The empty way, which use doesn’t drain, the beginning, the mother of the world, is the watery way we walk.