death vi

have i not zealously sought constructive vitalized non-existence for the attendant wound – a wound without which life is not life, this home and womb of words?

to be declared mentally unhealthy in the present age is analogous to being declared a heretic during the inquisition:  the standards experts move in, enforcing what and how the brain can think.   to calmly claim one’s own standards, rooted in one’s flesh rather than institutional-cultural-economic mass and privilege is a death – like all deaths, permanent, silent, solitary, operating with configurations of weakness and strength unfound in the lives of standards

not unrelated to the death of sanity is the death of class – this path of removing oneself from class and the corollary struggles.  unwilling to assume the pecuniary and productive values of the middle class, unwilling and unable to assume the privilege and sanctimoniousness of the upper, unable to assume the envy and jokes of the lower, it – regardless of how it is viewed by those in class, regardless of the degree to which it lacks the prosthetics (money, possessions, name, reputation, comfort, security) desired and sometimes possessed to some extent by those in class – experiences itself as outside of class:  at least these classes defined by currency.  it seeks in death (where else?) the manual for living in this outside

the madness with which i write and live is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of some label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final phase capitalist society. so when i use the word mad here i'm not referring to a special race of people, but the mad in me addressing the mad in you in the hope that the former mad speaks clearly or loudly enough for the latter to hear.  so too with death

to live in what might be called dreams and to die in what might be called reality in a society given to the latter is to live a life of death and die a death of life.  and if you find my nomenclature strange – if you say, well reality is all there is – … ?  doesn’t what i call the modern secular mystic aesthetic (from pessoa to woolf, from dickinson to genet) carry a culture of dreams from the slaughter of certain people of these and other lands, from old men who dreamed visions and old women who dreamed dreams, who walked with spirits and knew waking life had no superiority, carry this culture in the emptiness of their hearts through a metallic desolation, dogmatic in its faith in things and facts.  no – despite the institutionalized cries of the light and newly voiced, of the heavy established names, that they have justice, truth, power – i rest in crypts of gaseous doubt, the incessant blurring of ideas and species, of all singularities.  the world, existence, is for me and those rough ones of my tribe – spread across death like fog – hardly solid, hardly true … a question among infinite questions, a dream among infinite dreams

why would i be interested in writing in the common tongue, in writing about the tedious topics of money, sex, society – whatever arbitrary concerns and styles the day ejects and the gouged desperados conform to as if they have objective value?  the overwhelmingly vast portion of the universe is radically inhuman and at the center and margins of the human – there too the inhuman, masked and hardly masked.  so i seek languages, forms, syntaxes, dictions, that reflect the energies that dominate and circumscribe the universe and, inescapably, often surreptitiously, the human; the tools i use for such seeking i have found far more readily in death than life, in the apophatic rather than the analytic, silence rather than what we call communication.  i hardly aim for lucidity or that most puerile of objectives – to be understood.  in art – as in love – we must remember to leave any humanity we might have behind

bricks move and sing.  bricks are made of language.  we do not hear them less because they lack mouths, more because our ears are unschooled and the words in a single brick so vast as to rival a dictionary, syntactically arranged unexpectedly for our brains so trained to certain orders.  would we hear bricks with the same ease we hear humans, would our identities not be spontaneously reconfigured, the human voice returned to its place among places, the grammars of things vast and diverse, our brains as empty and fluid as clouds?

to abdicate using others’ illusions for what may be one’s own is to find oneself in force or – more rarely – energy:  each an intimacy with death, the difference being its primordial orientation to diffusion

darkness iii

in the absence of visible darkness yet with its desire persistent, remnant, and present, with darkness having migrated from exteriority to interiority, our relations with it shift on psycho-mythic registers, and we seek for the unseen darkness in the human as we once sought the unseen light of god.  so the human disappears, while our seeking, while remaining infinite, turns toward our absent selves.

in the age of knowledge, with the human more tangibly and relatively omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient than god once was, darkness becomes the ungraspable, apocalypse the dream, disintegration the hope.

only flesh in its darkest knowledge can rise to look light in the eye.

to love darkness is to avoid in its entirety the statement – let there be light (and consequently let there be …, which is always and simply a variation) – and rather remain hovering on voids, exhorting nothing.  this is no statement of fate, any more than let there be light or money or love or knowledge be statements of fate, but of the indivisibility of fate and freedom and chance.  this indivisibility is darkness.

to exist on the margins – but rather, no:  to exist in places those with money and hierarchical social power name as outside the light, their light – and not attempt to move (or rather to move only among these places so named by such) is to subject one’s selves (oneselves) to visions that, in language, are given by and to darkness, but outside of language (or rather in languages other than language), and this outside given to a deeper darkness:  that of not knowing whether the visions are comprised of light or darkness.

to see, it is said, requires light.  and yet can we not say that the blind-from-birth see, yet through language.  words are dark eyes.  language has the capacity to bypass light and see.  this is its energy – energy that subverts the power of the beasts of the world and the screams and resentments they plod on.

and so when we say in the beginning was the word, we know the word existed before light, and the word was void, and vision was only the capacity to remain in relation to word.  so technology permits new paths of remaining in relation, new patterns of darkness, new visions of creating.

i take the lights of society and weave them – though weaving be now an art of industry – with the scattered skeins of my flesh’s black thread.  how do i know this weaving when its schools are destroyed and its masters dead?  i take my lessons in the night, i read the texts of void.  madness becomes my lover and emptiness my friend.

mysticism, as its more visible sibling, society, takes on darkness as root metaphor rather than light – for darkness is the present greater energy.

i am oriented to those without names in the world – not as any advocate to give them names or to protest their namelessness or even to judge the named in their greed for names and all that clambering entails or to become through advocacy or other means among the named – but as a naturalized citizen of the tribe of the anamed.  i recognize my kinspeople; we are those who find it difficult to breathe in the air of names; we are those whose rough and disturbing comfort is wandering in the darkness between creation and destruction, affirmation and protest, between the ruling and the ruled.  we are the nomads of darkness.  should we – through chance or fortune or talent or love – come too close to the republic of names, we cannot help but sabotage any process of citizenry that might be thrust upon us … neither through denial nor hate but an eyed and replete acceptance … and return to our people, the people of night and the impossible eternity of words, those who stumble, without object, objects, through the alleys in those dark regions that connect city and soul.

madnesses iii

the official migration from nomenclatures of madness to nomenclatures of mental illness, like that from personnel to human resources, like that from word to language, indicates typically less the truth being stated, more questions of the distance between dark and light.

as published values and laws provide quotidian dreams and nightmares to navigate the expressed emotionality of society and the unwritten, value and law permeating the published, provides the actualized sacred, so money and sanity.

the sacred that refuses actualization but in transient form is madness.

the varied circumscriptions of madness are surely differently delineated than the varied circumscriptions of sanity.  but by what? and by whom? and this what and this whom on what authority outside these particular circumscriptions?

if the will to power is already and equally a past twig in the rapids of history as madness, personnel, god, word, nature, what might it now be?  the will or non-will to energy? a reproduction?  a misnomer, misboner?  and how might this be related to the will to sanity?

sanity is collective, madness is individual.  sanity is individual, madness is collective.  what is the despoken word that holds supplely this appearing contradiction?

madness might only be the air that surrounds and infiltrates solidity, the necessary elemental counterpoint to monumental sanity.

madness might be another name for sanity if it were not for sanity’s necessitated need for definitional existence.

i have walked, with purpose and without and often not knowing which was which, the alleys of words and shifted through their garbage.  i have seen the worn walls of meaning and not gone mad. or wholly mad.  i have known in my blood that all the sane have said and all the mad have said balance on the scales that hold the universe.  and to some of the sane and some of the mad this knowledge is the greatest sanity; and to some of the mad and some of the sane it is the greatest madness.

it is not as if i would have the mad rule the present world.  but some other world?  (and, even so, i would hardly have the sane rule this one.)

if the present world is the best of all possible worlds and the worst and neither – which it all surely is – i would not (being not given to be able to choose between sanity and madness) present myself to the present (and so to those who rule it) but attempt to develop the arts of depresenting and through these avoid it.

we might speak of sanity as the void that bespeaks itself in the falseness that wears truth, and of madness as the void that bespeaks itself in the truth that wears falsehood.  two dancers on an infinite empty stage in perfect night, the only audience themselves.

sanity is less a reason that, founded on sensuous evidence, founds a more proximate relation with truth than other modes, founded on other evidence in other ways, and more a way that wears the name of reason, as a stretch of road might bear the name ‘Alphonsi’ but instead bears ‘Fifth.’  This ability to hold onto a particular name and have a particular value ascribed to that particular name, when wholesale evidence is lacking, being as we are minutely in time and hardly even in eternity, is perhaps sanity’s greatest attribute.  madness might be less committed to founding and holding and ascribing, and for this it is called mad.

as sanity manufactures madness to further its purposes, can we also – and if so in what similar and different ways – speak of madness manufacturing sanity?

for are not the mad the ones who see death in the lineaments of life, hope in the lineaments of despair, and leaves on the lineaments of words?  for seeing what is not and yet what is in what is, are they not mad?

that the sane see cannot be denied except at a certain cost.  the legitimacies and illegitimacies of this seeing, this denying of denying, this cannot, may be the seeing of the mad.

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?

madnesses i

while in capitalism money and its obvious prosthetics, ancillaries, and symbols are the regime’s official currency, any regime must – by the laws that govern laws – have a shadow currency that (through its capacity to out-flexibilize officiality, through its dimensional surprises, through its greater orientation toward energy) circumscribes the official – in this case money – and confronts humanity most deeply with the sacred struggle of its age.  in capitalism, this greater currency is sanity.

only the sane are permitted access to the corridors that manipulate, circulate, and define money; in such a way building and maintaining assets of sanity precedes physical acquiring and accumulating.

sanity is a matter of defending certain geometrical configurations over others.  thus ‘marginalization’ – a term not infrequently used by those claiming to be nearer the center or middle of something humanity values (and yet the meaning of this something is uncertain, contradictory:  take knowledge, justice, power, goodness) – is typically and covertly a plea for certain orbitings.

yet in some worlds of the mad, a ground is no fixed orbiting – there are no margins, for margins are everywhere.  humanity itself is no center – despite various religious, philosophical and populist attempts to wish-claim otherwise – but yet another orbiting:  elliptical, thoroughly transient, even the star it once claimed gone, and that star, in the presumed memory of its presence or the palpable appearance of its absence, still hardly humanity.

money and sanity are related as the biological sexes are related:  each can express various genders but the binary relation remains required to perpetuate the species.

many paths exist to be deemed mad by the sane; a rare but occasionally fruitful path is to conform as wholly as possible (or attempt to conform) to one or more of the sane’s ideals.

since we know we know how to assemble spaceships, to cook falafels, to theorize and write texts, to manipulate ourselves, other members of the species, and objects throughout the planet, to play horseshoes with competence, but know we hardly know what wisdom is and even whether it exists – and without this knowledge and its practice what are we other than another shooting scream – sanity’s definitions, their institutionalizations and enforcements, are melancholic in their brutalities and injustices, faintly comic in their strewn caprice.

that sanity requires madness for itself and to be itself is obvious.  and so too is sanity’s need – without which it would be lost – to manufacture madness, to forge and reproduce it from whatever materials are at hand.  for a human to observe this process and choose to be such material-at-hand for further observation – what discipline might we call this?  and would it be a discipline of the mad or sane?  an interdisciplinary venture, a new alliance?

while we might be tempted to distinguish between pathological and productive madnesses – even as we might distinguish between pathological and productive sanities – this temptation, while not necessarily misguided, assumes pathology is unproductive, productivity superior and good.  a question inhabits this, as all, temptations – whether pathological madnesses and sanities are in fact a different configuration of mad and productive madnesses and sanities of sanity, or the reverse?  and another inhabiting question – whether these questions of sanity are nested endlessly, whether the moats that surround it are mirage-moats, its fortresses of sand?

i ask questions of the oracles hidden in the fallen temples of the luminescent city, see them point to darkness, write in hallucinatory nights tangled, alabaster visions.  for this i am deemed mad.  and the one who pays its taxes and owns a home and has a career in the official taxonomies and carries out the necessary appearances of love is deemed sane.  yet is there not a conflict of interest in the naming – are there not governance issues in the management of the world and the structures and processes of names?  is not an audit lacking of humanity?  or rather has it not been made, and filed far away, and down?