A My-god-sanctioned Funeral

My god, being a companion of death, like all gods, twisted into transience, whispers its fantasies to me in the wormy glory of night.  (What language does my god speak?  English? Sanskrit? Godic? Silence? Brik?  Only my god knows.  I only know I understand.)  One such recent fantasy suggested a perfect aesthetic-physical union, joining eros (art in its purity) and thanatos (flesh in its purity) on the social-historical stage.  (My god excels at such metaphysical copulations, being my god.)  The fantasy spectacularly consummated Jerusalem and Athens, time and eternity, in an orgy of calm and seasoned histrionics, the archetypal Artaudian[1] Théâtre de la Cruauté, the dream of every civilized human if humans were civilized, which they aren’t, civilization simply being to be in love with one’s god and, yet, when we look around, so many aren’t in love and this is the only thing to mourn.

The fantasy was this.

When I’m ready to die[2] I hold a great feast—13 grand courses, which I prepare myself, outrageously aged and expensive wines researched and paired for each course, the entire enterprise being decades envisioning, years planning, months executing, and weeks in kitchen chaos … indeed, we could say that my entire life would be devoted solely to its meticulous enactment.  I invite 100 people to it:  the 100 people who have been most important in my life—not determined primarily by recent influence, by time, but by the deep algorithms of the soul.

Five minutes into the feast and every five minutes thereafter one of the guests leaves:  beginning with the least important to me of the 100, and so on, until only my four children remain.  While I objected that the selection (and, most particularly, the order) would cause friction (both in myself and the guests), my god just shrugged—What, I heard, is fiction,[3] other than a seal on the desk of the divine?

The meal goes on through all of this:  hours and hours and quaff and quaff while the driff and hours and droff depart and the quaff lingers like an opaque and circuitous joke.  Then, finally, bliss and gorge united, at the end of the twelfth course, I kill myself in an innovative and comic way (my god leaves no detailed prescriptions as to method), my children prepare my body in a suitable manner and eat me as the thirteenth course.  A fulfillment and parody of Christ, of Athens, London, a live parody play of the play and parody and life … and, so, art and religion, art and death, art and everything, everything and everything, are consummated.

My god!  What impossible perfection! What seductive fantasy! What smooth and edible ends!

Yet, should you respond less than positively to this plan, should you be enticed and bubbly by the happy victuals but less so, quite less so, by the hierarchies and blood (yet were there not hierarchies and blood in so many of the courses, in the genealogies of wine?), might you be tempted to interpret your responses as a sign of your virtue?  But might your temptation (like so many temptations) be a comfortable invitation into a cushioned corner in a closet of the mind, away from the searing bonfires of flesh?  Might this not be a sign of our cultural pathos about pathos?  Might it be cowardice wearing an expensive coat of intelligence?

Our funerals are pathetic, kinspeople in death!  Funerals should be orgies of doors, searing portals of imagination, the raw truth of the body stuck between our teeth, vaudeville and leaping … they should go on for years.

We are a people who do not celebrate death; is this not because we fear, in the absence of God and the overweening presence of pharmaceuticals, the lack of any semblance of solid hope … that is, we fear ourselves, whom we must know, if we know at all, are hardly any avatars of dependability or certainty, but, if anything, vague gusts in a mottled and eternal dusk or dawn (we don’t know which or what!)?  Death is what we are, kin-coffins and sockets of vision.  Homo homo thanatoi.  What pansies are we not to paint pirouetting colors on our verdant mortality, on that substance of substances, on our fear?

Perhaps we have swallowed—yet not adequately digested and shat out—the Christian god’s teleology and think (most perversely!) that we now live on the golden bricks that pave the path to Heaven or Oz (or Redmond … what does it matter?).  Can we play a ruse on time (this our trust and gamble), using technology (that god’s firstborn son), encoding ourselves in worms and algorithms and satellites (where does it matter? it matters! everywhere!) so that we shall play endlessly—mirrors of math, morphing amoebas of art, encapsulated cold divinities—to the gasping stars?

Ah, my cool and cooling rationalists, who shall celebrate the sparkling doubt of molecules on the banquet table of their body?  Who shall climb the ladder of the stars?

I have listened to a fantasy my god whispered to me in the wormy glory of night and when I am ready to die I will prepare a feast and invite 100 guests and be eaten by my children.

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[1] See Dr. Foof β. Spätlese’s article, “Correspondences of Artaud, With a Notable Absence of References to B*********” in Non-Baudelairean Correspondences (LXII:18), in which Dr. Spätlese examines the dialectic of art and toad in Artaud and its relationship to a proposed Tanzanian literature on suffering intimated in Schulz’ The Street of Crocodiles.

[2] A certain indicator of our lack of civilization is that we don’t know when we’re ready to die, but think that we must cling to life with whatever savings plans and vials we can muster.  The elder monk in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is the noble and stark antithesis of our decadence:  he knows his god—his body-spirit unity—and thus knows equally when his god is ready to seek a new home.  What arrogance! What humility! What union of eyes! What evolutionary bliss!

[3] It’s true—I heard fiction … but what’s an ar or an or between heaven and earth?

Energy and the Object: A Practical Guide for Traders in Energy

Forgione closes his exploration of energy and objects by suggesting the outline or outlines of a method or methods which could, if implemented, alter the spiritual DNA of the species.

6.      A Practical Guide for Traders in Energy

6.1.   Follow energy.  If energy has fled the object it once invested, you do not need to seek a new object; the energy may be hiding between you and the object.  Stay close to the object which energy has fled and by so doing you may keep the energy that was once in the object with you.  This energy may be the energy of the object stripped of energy, but this can be more potent than the object invested with it.

6.1.1.      Since energy is constant, the only inconstant is the degree to which energy’s participants feel energy’s constancy.

6.1.2.      Since energy is omnipresent, only the participant’s hardened definitions can block its flow.

6.1.3.      Sacrifice, loss, and death are more ripe with energy than will, gain and life.  Who knows this other than these traders?  Yet who then knows that even more energy exists in the taut opposition of sacrifice and will?  Yet the greatest uses the wills of others to create the pole of will in himself.

6.1.4.      Here are but two examples showing how the trader in energy can create and trade energy on the universe’s exchange.

6.1.4.1.            Example One:  Simulation¾a step-by-step process

6.1.4.1.1.      One’s spouse is expected to arrive home in the early evening.

6.1.4.1.2.      The trader in energy, working from home, is feeling lecherous in the afternoon and drafts a note resembling this:

I, being the I upstairs, am tired of talk, am tired of its tatty chatter.  But, if you would like to manufacture love, if you would like to produce the licksickle of love on flesh’s fat factory, you may demonstrate this by being bold.  Specifically, I will know your interest by your entering my room without any due politeness, with the rank arrogance of female sexuality, wearing fashion that will permit groping up your lower and down your upper.

As I am solely interested in your body this evening and not any other aspect of you, as I doubt whether any other aspect of you exists, I do not want to be aware of you unless you want yourself exposed and violated.

6.1.4.1.3.      He plans to put the note by the front door, and thinks through the primarily possibilities:  fulfillment (assorted shapes, smells and stages), rejection (infinite imaginative and transformative possibilities), other (e.g. planned arrival doesn’t occur, the note is unnoticed and the path of rejection is falsely followed but truly simulated, etc.).

6.1.4.1.4.      But after he has explored his hopes and disappointments, incarnating through simulation the equal forms of energy of each, he realizes the energy has been realized through simulation, more energy, more fully, than in any of the possible actions resulting from his placed note; thus, rather than printing the note, he saves it in a password-protected folder along with a thousand other secrets¾a simulation of a simulation of simulations.

6.1.4.1.5.      He thus sets aside the binary choice he imagined offering to his spouse¾to couple with him or not¾and instead leaves himself with the greater unknown resulting from the unoffered choice.

6.1.4.1.6.      He hears his spouse arrive, make supper; he continues working, awaiting the now infinite possibilities of the night.

6.1.4.1.7.      The trader has lived and not lived.  He has been through a thousand worlds without leaving his chair.  He has made love to his spouse and been rejected by her.  She has been slain, she has run off with a lover.  He has breakfast with her the next morning; how much richer she is, having been invested with ten dozen lives.  He revels in the energy created from what was not done, from the gap between them.  He trades this energy for what he values most¾words’ raw rule, perhaps, fugues’ tight fancy:  it is up to him, what he does on his curious exchange.

6.1.4.2.            Example Two:  Negation¾a step-by-step process

6.1.4.2.1.      The trader in energy cherishes a relationship he has established in his mind.  Perhaps he thinks he is more powerful because of an artifact or person in his life, perhaps he has concluded that the best conditions for producing beauty are such-and-such.

6.1.4.2.2.      He throws away his cherishing.  He casts his conclusions over the edge of whatever planet he inhabits and watches them course into space like the limbs of lambs.

6.1.4.2.3.      According to desire’s rule, such actions would be sacrifices.  But in energy’s alligopoly, they are freedoms.  The energy trader knows that cherishing is the process for attempting to put energy in a cage, that concluding is a synonym for incarceration and death.  But he wants life and life is energy¾felt, free.

6.1.4.2.4.      He experiments, our oomphy merchant.  He knows energy is created more by loss and falling than construction.  Construction uses energy!  How much more efficient to allow falling to construct for him.

6.1.4.2.5.      He crawls into the space between what he thought he wanted and what he obtains.  Vast energy is there.  It can almost kill him.

6.1.4.2.6.      His silent exchange emulates energy’s exchange; this emulation is his revelry.  He pities the poor many who thinks energy lives in objects; he sees them atrophy themselves in objects’ laughing twine and wonders at the foolishness of man.

6.1.4.3.            While no fee or credentials are necessary to trade in energy in the manner I have described, one is required to subject oneself to energy’s curriculum, and one is required to find the curriculum first.  This takes time and, as we have learned, time is an elusive lover.

6.2.   Energy can, in theoretical terms, be directed at objectless objects:  desire’s God or energy’s art; or it can be directed at objective objects:  desire’s nature or energy’s technology.  But as desire’s objects only exist now in simulation and energy’s only objective object, technology, is the tool of simulation¾increasingly the simulator of simulation¾the trader has no choice of his direction.

6.2.1.      Energy’s trader thus is free and bound, educated and foolish, powerful and weak, a miggled merchant on the isotopes of time’s tictalk ruse.

6.2.2.      He displays characteristics based on energy’s dictates.  When will he display, and what?  Neither he nor energy knows.

6.2.3.      These characteristics are not his own¾which is the common man’s claim¾but simulations of energy.

6.2.4.      He confuses people, not by intent but as a by-product of his seeking the energy that’s present to him.

6.2.4.1.            Others are confused because they think flesh indicates energy is a solid, but the trader in energy knows that while energy takes solid form, the form is only as solid as a kiss.

6.2.4.2.            The trader in energy is hardly energy’s devotee¾energy is capable of commerce not religion¾but simply its extension; this knowledge helps the trader avoid religion’s classic stupidities.

6.2.4.2.1.      If one who claims to be a trader shows religion’s cracked yellow teeth while he talks, he hasn’t even begun to walk the orbits of space.

6.2.4.2.2.      But watch it¾even the true trader can wear religion as an evening fashion if energy directs him.  Energy is large enough to embrace religion for a night.

6.3.   The trader must attempt to transform his energy fully into another form.

6.3.1.      This fate is energy’s only one, but it is equally the only fate.

6.3.2.      The degree to which the trader is allowed to do this is known as efficiency.

6.3.2.1.            What allows him?

6.3.2.2.            Energy.

6.3.3.      The amount of concentration and the degree of transformation combine to produce the greatest names.

6.3.3.1.            The amount of concentration and the degree of transformation are determined by chance and opportunity.

6.3.3.2.            While names differ in weight, all humans are equally proud of their concentrations and transformations; their experience of energy is energy to them.

6.4.   Whether I act or lie still, whether I am calm or terrified, whether I weep or laugh, whether I speak or am silent¾energy remains equal without and within me.

6.4.1.      The lawyers and scribes of energy may wish to record the implications of this ambivalence, seeking laws in the thick horror of play, but the only implication is the transient shadow cast on others by my passion.

6.4.2.      Why does the trader have to seek energy, when it’s always within grasp?  Only because he is dense; if he were as brilliant as energy, he would always be centered in it and would disappear, as God in desire’s kingdom has disappeared and energy even as a word and rule one day will.

6.5.   If boats are feminine and robots are masculine, energy belongs with the former.  The trader in energy thus emulates the feminine as he emulates energy.  He emulates receptivity, indifference, caprice and compassion.  Without these, he is no trader in energy, but a trader in objects¾and the object is himself.

6.5.1.      Energy has knowledge, but it is the knowledge of the sun.

6.5.2.      Energy has a plan, but it is the plan of flesh.

6.5.3.      He who would trade in energy should learn first the sun and flesh; then he can trade.

6.5.4.      Movement is the first law of energy.  All is movement is the second law.

6.6.   You may object¾these classifications and divisions, this hierarchy, they betray an unsettled mind.  But all they betray is a mind given to energy; you betray a mind given to science.

6.6.1.      The trader in energy thus does not object, but builds.

6.6.2.      What does he build?  He builds simulacra of energy, tight words of joy bouncing on black surfaces of space.

6.6.3.      The trader blows hierarchies as a child blows bubbles; he is as unsettled as the wind.

6.6.4.      Does energy betray?  Betrayal is outside energy’s possibilities.  Betrayal is a function of desire.

6.6.5.      The trader in energy does not build by building, but by hiding behind energy’s building and wearing that hiding as his constant fashion.

6.6.6.      How does he hide?  Like the snake in its skin, the god in its pointing, the eagle in its pride.