the impropriety of a hand of bananas

it takes centuries for words to separate themselves from the human that produced them, from the accidents of the living body, and become free.  So our judgements of contemporary writers are unstable and we must leave it to the yet-to-be-born to see the words apart from flesh’s faults.

heresiarch uzasoz

hallucination is a form of biographical transformation

                  why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?

            ill-informed anyone who would announce himself his own contemporary

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop …

my drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

i can’t understand why people are frightened of new forms. I’m frightened of the old ones.

it is the pen which dreams

apologia

Do i need an apology for the pieces that will follow?  No, of course not.  Creation, like its destructive twin, doesn’t apologize.  It presents.
 
I do not need one, but one is required, so please accept this disingenuousness authentically, as we do the endless artifices we live within.  A caprice on my part does not have to be a caprice on yours, for those on opposite sides of what is pleasantly called the communication chasm rarely share intent, aspect, or effect, but only signs.  Signs, and a certain mood.

Some nine years ago, in one of many fits of madness, i envisioned an intricately structured collection of 81 pieces entitled mirror mirror; they were to be radical excessive even garish experiments in language, most of them starring an elusive franz von vemeer, an urban dilettante of unknown origin, a disbeliever in mirrors.  They were, if nothing else, tectonically-rupturing descents into language, into grammars of barely contained intelligibility (or barely contained unintelligibility—on the edge i work, it makes little difference).  I completed slightly over half of these, at which point i stopped—as sometimes happens, even the fragmentation began fragmenting, the sovereignty of icy exploration began seeking its impoverishment and death, producing a continent of silence, and i left the collection, wandering in other kingdoms, until the wind that evoked mirror mirror blew me back to its malefic bounds.  As the mirror is bottomless (or, rather, its bottom is not discernible), i expected the requisite forces to converge at some point, enabling me to complete the work. 

This re-convergence began happening, as is not unusual, before i began recognizing it.  And once the recognition had begun, the forms were so different (the kingdom had so changed)—and yet shared such a deep geological structure (certain distinctive linguistic-cultural proclivities)—that, if not delighted, i was at least motivated to stay a while and see what happened.

So i placed the new forms (of which there are about a dozen so far) in the second half of mirror mirror.  But due to their difference, the inevitable changes, i felt they needed a name (or a sub-name) of their own; it became obvious that this must be exercises in saying nothing.  A work called mirror mirror should exit very differently than it enters, similar to the difference between how we approach a mirror when examining our face and how we leave.  Here are but a few (too many french, it’s true [but have not the french excelled beyond other races in saying nothing?]) of its influences (the well-read among my readers, if there are any remaining these hashtag days, can easily name more)—

erasmus’ copia (chapter 33 particularly)
queneau’s exercices de style
baudelaire’s le spleen de paris
foucault’s sexuality and solitude
bataille’s literature and evil
chevrier’s l’hallucination artistique
wood’s beyond the simulacrum of religion versus secularism:  modernist aesthetic “mysticism” (in religion and literature)
de lautréamont’s les chants de maldoror and poems
 

Here are but a few of its intents—

1. to proclaim my passionate unshatterable love for the detached compassionate capricious divinity coursing through human flesh—tappable, growable, limitless, renewable—and my faith in its ability to transform devouring flesh (not its mortal attributes but its fear of the infinite finite mortalities), not primarily through technology (though using it), but through itself.
2. to create forms that go nowhere, surprised, surprising; dramas that emerge from outside routine human drama, from these things themselves, from their forms—forms of the marrow of language:  not of us, our marrow, our gains and losses, the palpitations of our hearts, but of language’s anxieties, its holiday gatherings, family dysfunctions, its incests and love affairs and lonelinesses, quests and deserts, madnesses and laboratories, prizes and ecstasies, drugs and highs and suicides, its laughter … not about inhumans, aliens, but about humans – to modify the dominance of the human.
3. to map a land without borders, names or technologies:  uninhabitable, uninhabited, infinite and beautiful and eternally empty; to map quests for maps for such a land.
4. to build language pieces as abstract paintings, building them up with layers, achieving an effect, a mood, a collectivity of sensations and ideas, a loose confederate of images:  for all art is abstract, abstraction simply being the aesthetic term for interiority—or the perception of lived experience.
5. to attempt to reflectively sound out what most societal sounds (which we euphemistically call communication) sound like to me.
6. to describe the process by which we are forced to accept the process by which we are forced to accept living within ourselves …
7. to be frustrating pieces to learn to read, in the way that the goldberg variations are frustrating pieces to learn to play.  One might say, Well, with the gv at least once one has learned to play them they at least sound good but your exercises—they clunk like nepalese trucks falling off the mahendra highway.  But this is not true.  You have just not learned to read.  Even if you learn to read, you may yet say, Well, ok, i have learned to read, but, still, i don’t know what it means.  Sure.  But what do the goldberg variations mean?
8. one could say i’ve sought a space that is uncrowded, undesirable – desserts of deserts.
9. isn’t it at some point less that we care about ending life and more that we care about joining the dead—that’s where the action is?

Here are but a few of its titles—

the difference between a tylenol 500, a gerund, and glory

            hanaϡelah and the chair

            the story of of

            haar lof and the space and twējē

At HP, we don't just believe in the power of technology, we believe in the power of people when technology works for you. We believe in applying new thinking and ideas to improve the way our customers live and work.

If you are going to do something, Make it Matter

(or [or and] ‘the fifty-move rule’)

            (or athpwe)

            hallibl and molok

            ulica lutk

            wawn wakes up

my əld leigh goshe

            andre the giant and the strawberry

            gilberta tedeschi eats her man

Here are but a few excerpts from its reviews—

1. The positive central idea of exercises is that the human psyche, or soul, really believes in itself, and in nothing else.
2. The author is simultaneously a terrorist of the plastic soul and a supervisor in its factories.
3. These nothing stories find resolution in different keys, at different pitches, than routine narratives, resolution revealing itself when sufficient pointers have begun pointing, when a sufficient web has been spun for literary spiders to run across and catch prosaic prey.
4. I cannot help but be reminded of rimbaud’s the poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned unsettling of all the senses and mallarme’s i have no wish to pander to a reader’s need for simplification.
5. Much of this would have to do with the grammar of hiding, of hiding in itself, and of hiding in hiding.  Communicating in poetic caesuras, executive falters, journalistic gaffes, sleeps of the tongue, these exercises are prophetic—the only future grammar is a grammar of hiding. 
6. At best, a clandestine subjectivity; at worst, turds in a boardroom – as if lou gehrig’s disease had become spiritualized in the author.
7. During the late second and early third millennia, the task of interpreting the psyche and art through the written word was restricted to professional technocrats (the spiritual descendants of medieval patriarchy), specifically sanctioned as scholars, therapists and psychiatrists; to interpret the psyche and art through the senses and the body became the domain of artists.  Artists (the spiritual descendants of medieval female mystics) directly experienced the psyche and art in three classical ways: first, bodily visions, meaning to be aware with one's senses—sight, sound, or others; second, ghostly visions, such as spiritual visions and sayings directly imparted to the soul; and lastly, intellectual enlightenment, where one’s mind came into a new understanding of itself and so world.  These exercises belong to all three categories and transgress in the way that all mystics transgress when they futilely attempt to translate mystic experience into language.
8. Whitman’s song of myself has been changed to sign of myself – to what end? to what sign? to what self? to what song?
9. I see these exercises as exercises in saying it is as if—
   1. It is as if the author is translating from, say, ancient Hebrew to modern English, but trying to keep the grammar and cadences of the former.
   2. It is as if the author were given a set of random rules for each piece to establish a game inside a game inside a game – matryoshka dolls of language.
   3. It is as if Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him—as if anyone could—but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted.
   4. It is as if the author is an unidentified thief in a global mall, in which all the stores sell language, in which a theft has not happened for ages, stealing willy-nilly, hiding his goods in the sable reaches of the night.
      

      
10. These nothing pieces are obviously attempts to translate communicative human experiences—superficially common but emotionally bizarre—into a precise emotional language, avoiding (while pointing to) the emotional shorthand which is expected.  These are rupturous rapturous expressions which stuff emotional clichés where they belong—in toilet tanks in museums.
11. The irony being that what is said in society that is supposed to say something says nothing and these exercises which appear to say nothing (and about which it is said they say nothing and may very well say nothing) say something.  What do they say?  They say that a formalism that says that language is not the servant of thought but thought the servant of language is not necessarily a formalism.

I shall post these pieces, at whimsy, over time.  But the reader should be warned that my intent, as always, is not to communicate (if by communication we mean anything like participate in the common transactions of the heart and mind).  But if we mean by communicate—work toward the failure of communication so that communication can be glimpsed— … well … that is another story.

Energy and the Object: Objects and Subjects

Forgione indirectly attacks the foundations of etiology, ontology, epistemology, political science, journalism, glue-making, dentistry, husbandry, egg-farming, biochemistry and ... well ... practically everything.

4.      Objects and Subjects

4.1.   Whether God (the inaccessible other), another human (the seemingly attainable other), one’s self (the omnipresently elusive other), or an artifact (the cheap other), the object has always circled around desire like an artificial horse around a carousel’s engine.

4.1.1.      The subject has traditionally been said to circle around the object; more recently, around itself by means of a mirror.

4.1.1.1.            Mirror?  Another word for doubt.

4.1.1.2.            The mirror still is necessary, but for what?

4.1.1.2.1.      The mirror transforms something to nothing.

4.1.1.2.2.      The mirror negates construction and negation.

4.1.1.2.3.      The mirror laughs at subject and object by means of silence.

4.1.1.2.4.      The mirror plays with shadows in Dream’s dim purgatory; we think we wake, thinking we’ve been played with; do we laugh?

4.1.1.2.5.      The mirror murders its devotees as dutifully as morning’s mawkish millions moan.

4.1.1.2.6.      The mirror resurrects flesh as spirit and sees this as routine.

4.1.1.2.7.      The mirror wanders in the halls of mirrors, not as trickster or priest, but as darkness peering through itself at light.

4.1.1.2.8.      The mirror beckons, but just to beckoning.

4.1.1.2.9.      The mirror mirrors mirroring and, mirrored, dies.

4.1.2.      Neither subject nor object has the power to center gravity; a more amorphous beast from another realm has done this, one whose tentacles mock proud conquests and flesh’s transient designs.

4.1.2.1.            What is this beast other than that we once thought centered gravity but now intuit is gravity itself?

4.1.2.2.            So desire is grave and wears play and laughter as its clothes.

4.1.3.      With energy, though, there is no center; the carousel continues, but each object and subject is horse, mirror and engine.  This multi-functionality and role-revolving is the source of our exuberance and confusion.

4.1.3.1.            To be centerless is to have everything as center.  But isn’t this a kind of centering?

4.1.3.2.            This contradiction is energy’s, but only we call it contradiction.

4.1.3.2.1.      I see a dancer who refuses to name, not from discipline, but from her love of movement.  She might be like something that we seek.

4.1.3.2.2.      I see the dawn gobbling up the dusk using dusk’s own laws.  This might be a methodology dreams dream of.

4.1.4.      Subject and object move in relation to each other like protons and electrons.  Is there a quark or are there quarks around which they spin?  There may be art and madness and God, but what are these other than subject and object questioning each other?

4.1.4.1.            I think the question is all that remains of nature.

4.1.4.2.            I think quarks are questions, and questions mindless Cronoses of the mind.

4.2.   Discourse about individuality, the ecstasy of communication about freedom, the perpetual tsunami of names¾these are processes attendant with the appearance and rise of subjects.

4.2.1.      This appearance and rise, subjects’ dominance, is the bright face of the two-faced god.

4.2.1.1.            The other face is grief that we must bear ourselves on the carriage of our names.

4.2.1.2.            The other face communes with the one we see at interstices of injustice and incomprehension.

4.2.2.      Would we be human without the constant overwhelment?  If we were taken to the dawn of names, the gentle lapping of that distant sea, would we recognize ourselves?

4.2.3.      The present name-tsunami was caused by an undersoul tectonic shift, whereby newling plates of desire collapsed into ageless pits of energy.

4.2.3.1.            Normally I do not speak of causation and even here the cause behind the cause throws my speaking to the wind.

4.2.3.2.            Even now, the waves are diminishing and names return to their function as markers to guide us on death’s pitch path.

4.3.   While desire always makes its objects desirable, it does not necessarily make its subjects desirable; if the subjects produce, however, their products become more desirable than the objects of desire’s subjects.

4.4.   The more the subject of desire displaces desire onto desire’s objects, the more he moves away from desire’s center or circumference; this process is displacement and it is fatal to desire and the human.

4.5.   Males and females experience objects differently¾the latter as diffused dances that momentarily coalesce into satellites, the former as extensions that blink.

4.5.1.      Male and female are not the embodiment of subject and object, but the dimensions of experience we have in relation to mirrors.

4.5.2.      If you think of male and female as solids, you might extend your name.  If you think of them as liquids, you might know love.  If you think of them as gases, you might see God.

4.5.3.      I cannot will myself to experience the world differently, but if I am receptive to the world, though I may die, I may experience the world the way it is.

4.6.   I see the object, but in a mist.  I hear it, but underwater.  I touch it, but sheathed in letters.

4.7.   The closer one gets to the center of energy, the more one loses oneself.  This is true equally for political and spiritual power, although we associate selflessness with the latter because of the paucity of our vision and the horror of our solitude.

4.7.1.      So politics and spirit were united once; so they are again.  So they have always been, but words have spun and pointed down any avenue that happened to be built.

4.7.2.      We each long to live in this center of loss.  Together we stand and love and kill to bring ourselves united to this space.

4.7.3.      Who though has oneself?  Do those moderately distant, far, from energy’s center?  No.  They have lost themselves less and seem to have even themselves less.

4.7.3.1.            So losing and having are most potent at energy’s center, though this center is itself lost by virtue of its omnipresence.

4.7.3.2.            That Galilean, being a precise articulation of energy in desire’s terms, provided a passable symbol for energy’s vision.

4.7.3.2.1.      If a subject had been his neighbor and observed him, as has been suggested by another of energy’s lovers, would time have lost two thousand years?  For are we not his neighbor, and are we not describing his psychoses now?  Was not Christ the Christ because we were lacking?

4.7.3.2.2.      That symbol, spanning two millennia of human suffering, has collapsed into energy’s hunger and itself been buried under a cross.  Yet its burial has produced energy equal to its life; those spiritual archaeologists and paleontologists who might have received training in these material times should be forewarned.  There is much to do, few hands, and many mines.

4.8.   Energy does not unite or dissolve subjects and objects.  Rather, it makes them interchangeable.  Energy is the code and era of mysticism.

4.8.1.      In the age of energy, everything becomes interchangeable.

4.8.1.1.            As mechanical parts became interchangeable with Taylorism, so spiritual parts are becoming interchangeable.  This is a natural consequence of the commoditization of energy.

4.8.1.2.            As interchangeability becomes the law, so humans object to the law through their proclamations of specialization, uniqueness, and dignity.

4.8.2.      The mirror is the agent of this interchangeability.

4.8.2.1.            While the mirror has not changed, what we see in the mirror has.

4.8.2.1.1.      We once saw trees and kobolds, divine designs etching awe on slaughtered towns.

4.8.2.1.2.      Now we look and see vague constellations of electrons.  Might these be us?

4.8.2.1.2.1.            We are the moon rising in the east, the sun’s death dance.  Will we be too frenzied to be silent in the confrontation of ourselves?

4.8.2.1.2.2.            We are the law that lies within itself, we are the mad transgression that denies.  Will we be too divine to remember awe, love’s last vision?

4.8.2.2.            Nature’s mirror offered the hot comforts of desire:  lust, blood, night, death.  We now see the cold comforts of energy, which are without the mediums of trees.  The priests of trees have died and what have we left between us and nothing?

4.8.2.2.1.      This is the portend of Protestantism, its iconoclastic rage.

4.8.2.2.2.      We could imagine trees were priests, but us?  We are no priests, but all wanderers before the god of night.

4.8.3.      Physics, mathematics, engineering¾these are the codified articulation of the wordy intuitions made by sages intimate with dreams.  We live in the architecture of our visions.

4.8.3.1.            I am the wriggling worm below my eye, below my microscope.  I am the deadened claw.

4.8.3.2.            Miasma of sputum stare at us in what we call reverse through misoscope and eye and this is that again.

4.8.3.2.1.      What detours are made in the labyrinths of time to arrive at an acquaintance of words!

4.8.3.2.2.      How many tonnes of hate are necessary input to produce a gram of love!

4.8.4.      Hasn’t the human been created solely for cold vision on cold current, an eye of awe on death, a wordy tail on God’s random comet, silence struggling not to be itself?

4.8.4.1.            Those who deny teleology are as dense as those who deny chance.  If you know energy, you know we are plans, but blind plans, blind recurrent plans stabbing time’s thick back with tears.

4.8.4.2.            If you can play subject and object like a fugue, you can do the same with intent and consciousness.

4.8.4.2.1.      Too long, human, have you welded words to steel.

4.8.4.2.2.      Let them free to breathe.

4.8.4.3.            Don’t we wish above all else to be energy’s scribe?  Isn’t this what we are?

4.8.4.3.1.      The gap between our wish and our existence is language.

4.8.4.3.2.      The identification of our wish and our existence is vision.

4.8.4.3.3.      Who can speak with vision and who can see with words?  Wouldn’t such a one be God?

4.9.   What really cares if it is a subject or object?  Only the fool.

4.9.1.      Subject and object, like male and female, are ingredients on a recipe list; only an inexperienced cook follows a recipe like law.  Surprises and substitutions are the prerogative of the true chef.  The destruction and creation of recipes are the chef’s delight.

4.9.2.      Subject and object are eye and eye, left and right; who walks around with one eye shut?

4.9.3.      What would be a who, with amputated vision and fossilized name?  Only the one who spurns energy’s infinite mad love and seeks solace in the trade of body parts.

4.9.4.      I would be subject, object, fool, chef, who, what and recipe.  I would be I and thou and it and all and none.