a thing in itself

Philosophers and similarly-minded people have been asking what things are—in themselves (as if they could be in something else), in relation to other things in themselves, in relation to what they might or should be, in relation to what they were or might have been, in relation to what they are not, not in relation to anything in particular:  in short, they’ve been asking (i.e. the philosophers, not the things) and some of the better ones have even been asking about asking:  what asking is—for as long as asking has asked philosophers to ask, some philosophers have asked.

That’s great.

But they’re always asking about the same things:  time, death, nothingness (as if you could ask about nothingness!), love occasionally (occasionally, since asking and loving seem to negate each other), truth (way too much), god (back in the god ages), and more recently about other things that nobody ever used to ask about (maybe because they [the things, not the askers, though also the askers] never existed or maybe because we finally got tired of truth and god and time, realizing they had no answers [and although they looked like substantive words were just punctuation marks {question marks specifically}, like everything else], needing as we seem to other things to pretend to have answers hidden behind or in them) but now seem urgently important, like communication, gender, sex, and money.

Maybe we just have to cycle through all the words until we realize that answers—like truth, god, time, nothingness, love, communication, sex, gender, money—don’t exist.  Only death exists … but what kind of answer is death?

In the meantime, though, I’d like to help humanity along its little path, its little discovery project, and begin asking what other things are in themselves and in relation to all those other things.

I could begin with tomato—a compelling choice, to be sure—as I’m pretty sure nobody knows what tomato really is, and philosophers seem to have entirely ignored tomato.  It’s not just the old debate about whether tomato is a fruit or vegetable (any real philosopher [but what is a philosopher?] knows this question is a decoy—it doesn’t probe deeply enough into the essence of tomato), it’s that this commonplace confusion points to the essence of tomato:  that is, its essential ambiguity.  Tomato has nothing to do with fruit or vegetable, lycopene, lutein, Vitamins A, C or E, potassium, zeaxanthin, or anything of the sort.  The truth of tomato is a kind of manifoldpointing.  (In order to sufficiently explore the nature of tomato, we are compelled to avoid the common expressions, for it is only through the uncommon that we have the opportunity to open up new understandings and see the original face, so to speak, of tomato.)  This manifoldpointing is no simple polyinterpretativeapparati, but goes far beyond this, into the realm of pointyplurality, an authentic multimurkiness of manifoldpointing beyond polyinterpretativeapparati thrusting us inevitably into polypointymaniplurality.

But we are not speaking of tomato.  We shall leave tomato in its manifoldpointing of pointyplurality.

Instead, we could begin with tree.  But nobody knows particularly what tree is anymore, so let’s not do that.  Or bicycle, which we would find—after much pain and evidence—is the only remaining freedom left humanity, the perfect fusion of nature and technology, the evolutionary apex of civilization, and the only reasonable successor to god.  Or coffee, which we would find after a thousand pages and a billion tears, as that-which-sustains:  the sanguinary-fuel-future-incarnation-of-liquidity-without-which-all-would-be-lost.  We would then have the necessary foundation to juxtapose bicycle and coffee, the simulated modern equivalents of freedom and fate (albeit in their solid and liquid manifestations, respectively) and begin discovering how things really work, not just in themselves but in relation to each other and so in relation to all things.  We would then have knowledge and vision.  We would be gods.

Yet, let’s not be too hasty.  The road to divinity has many limbs and absurdities on its besotted way, as the Greeks and many others have taught us.  Our thing-in-itself project is vast and we can only become gods the painful way—one word at a time.  (And there are so many words! And they [not us] keep making new ones!)  So—yes—let us not forget tomato and tree and bicycle and coffee, let us not even forget god and death and time, let us not forget (for we unfortunately can’t) communication and sex and money, but let us move on to a word that contains and transcends all these, that might very well be the-thing-under-and-in-and-over-and-through-the-thing-in-itself-and-the-things-in-themselves.  It might be the word behind the Word and words; it might be the word that spoke speaking into existence.

I’d like to ask (I’d like asking to ask me to ask) about something more (and even most) essential to modern times—a thing so central to what it means to be human in the third millennium that, to my knowledge, it’s entirely escaped being asked about by anyone who knows how to ask (or who asks or who wants to ask or thinks it has the right to ask or is known as an asker).  And, if our wheezy little species is anything, surely it’s Homo Askius (or Homo Askus—my Latin is rusty, even as everything before now is rusty).  This thing is ubiquitous, relatively novel, coveted, synecdochal (in that it’s emblematic, a portend, of a vast future, in the way that Christ begat and adumbrated a new age), almost (and perhaps becoming) self-generating, the archetypal union of opposites (clean-dirty, noisy-silent, evolved-primitive, seen-unseen), the far-near of Marguerite Porete, the eureka of Archimedesthe, the alaytheia of Heidegger, the kenosis of Paul, the Tao of the Tzus, the book-of-the-month of Oprah, the money shot of porn, the sunyata of Gautama, and the avocado-that’s-not-in-your-fridge-but-you-really-want-at-three-in-the-morning-but-you’re-too-lazy-to-go-to-that-24-hour-supermarket-five-minutes-away-and-get-it.  Most importantly, it’s vertical—and thus reaches for heaven in the way that Christ once did but can’t any longer because just like he was born twice, he’s died twice—once physically, a second time spiritually and symbolically.  Much as we say we love the earth—its horizontality, its inescapable sphericality—we really do love lines, stretching everywhere, stretching up, way way up … to immortality, clouds and eternal darkness.  And isn’t this the test of the human (the genitive plays both ways [and even more!]:  the human test of the universe, the universe’s test of us):  whether lines are historically and ontologically antecedent to circles and so embedded at the foundations of reality, whether circles are, whether somehow (god and gender forbid!) neither is or both are, and/or whether humanity can do anything but any of this other than perhaps pretend that it is and whether this pretending is sufficient (for a time at least), and even whether sufficiency is sufficient.  But we digress (or rather we are—or have been—digressed).

What, then, is a condo?  We must not say condominium, we must say condo, for reasons that will become apparent if they haven’t already.

We must, as good askers (there are no philosophers any more, as there is no longer any philosophy or philosophies; there are only askers and asking [or askings] or being-asked [or being-askeds]), take this thing, condo, place it in our palm as something fragile, new, original, vast, precious, caress it tenderly, peruse it through myriad lenses, drop it, throw it high, hit it with a sledgehammer, cover it, lose it, turn it around, describe it as the blind ones and the elephant (each description tentative, insufficient, passionate), allow it to describe us, destroy and recreate it in its manifold irreducibility, misspell it, play pinball with it ... in short, we must do to it and allow it to do to us what we have done to the world and the world to us ... without this, we will never know what condo is, we will never have had ourselves made known.

Naturally, we don’t have the time or even interest to do all this; thus, reconciling ourselves to the moderately depressing thought that condo will always remain elusive, murky, just-beyond-our-grasp, we nevertheless proceed, in hopeful futility, even as we get ourselves (or are gotten), somehow, out of the bed each morning and somehow trace the sun to its dubious decline and find ourselves back in bed, doing the same thing as the night before, more or less, without, frankly, having learned anything particularly or advancing anywhere other than toward that one thing of which we shall not speak at this moment, as the sun is shining and the trucks are roaring by and someone next to me in the cafe is blaring some stupid YouTube explanation about carbohydrates from her very loud Mac and i can barely think about condo let alone death that-other-thing, but we may speak of at (yes, two consecutive prepositions are ok) some point since it (the doing and the speaking) seems (seem) inevitable and that is that or this and let’s get back to condo.

Condo.

Disturbingly similar to condom.  Not a chance occurrence, we have been led to believe by credible sources in manners that enhance their credibility.  That one only has to add an m (or mmmmmmmmm—that culinary, sure, and peccable sign of embodied delights) to the end of condo to manufacture in language (the only reality, as every sophisticate knows, because the only dream) that modern shield of pleasure might very well begin to point us in the direction of condo’s natural and original face. 

The key, we will begin to understand in our challenging yet rewarding exploration, is modern shield of pleasure.  As is the nature of such constructions, we are initially in doubt as to whether condom—and so condo—protect us from pleasure or protect us from that-which-inhibits-pleasure.  For we first must acknowledge the hope of pleasure that is generated by the extensive fashion of condo:  the manufactured and reified prestige, the anonymous privatized sky-cell (a kind of heavenly incarceration, the self as jailed and jailor), the essential virtualization of home through the privileged divorce from land and history, the intangible yet compelling and pervasive marketing and branding (even to the point of having the developer imprinted on every door), the facticity of the buildings themselves—great conglomerates of urban clubbing and sterility (a kind of bloodless war mediated by coitus and pharmaceutical ecstasy), the vertiginous and expansive feeling of rising up to look down on the world, the metallic comfort of the womb of technology (its murmurings and lights).  These are all indisputable and, collectively, rough negotiators of significant sectors of significance in modernity.

Yet.  These very attributes that promise pleasure are also the ones that frustrate it, distancing as they do the human from its origins, leaving it to traverse greater and greater distances (requiring more sophisticated, novel, and expensive tools—prosthetics) to maintain even the semblance of a relationship with a ground of any sort (whether real or simulated is irrelevant), unless one accepts language itself as a ground, which it may be, but, like any nameable ground (and isn’t language the ultimate nameable ground, being comprised only of names?), is insufficient to ground.

So there is very little difference between standing before a floor layout of a prospective condo and a prophylactic display in a drug store, very little difference between the act of purchase, the imbued hopes, the ambiguity and ambivalence of the entering and exiting—the experience of temporary habitation—and the complex, varied, and dubious narratives that develop after the purchase and the act.

So the condo shields us from pleasure (through stretching our existential circumference further from the earth) and shields us from pleasure’s traditional enemies (death, decay, morality, children—all unavoidable products of the earth).  This dual movement is encapsulated in the removable m (mmmmmmmmm)—its sensuality, brevity, and innate ubiquity.  For there is far less spiritual, emotional, linguistic, and experiential distance between condo and condom than there is between condo and house.  

Condos’s intrinsicity (of stretching through a double-shielding) is seen—showing more ominously or enlightenedly, dependent on factors which we are ill-equipped (in time particularly) to deal with presently but seem to be related to such things as branches of science and art that haven’t yet been exposed or invented (dependent on factors which may be similar to the ill-equipped ones that were just referenced)—through the seeing that is novel to civilization, as it is euphemistically called, and central to the prostheticized heart of condo.  Central, because seen and seeing, eyeing and eyed, mirroring and mirrored, are the molecular building blocks of condo’s spirituality, without which it would crumble in the manner of the Tower of Babel.  Novel, because the Bentham-Foucault panopticon has been most fully actualized in condo (not primarily in prisons, hospitals, universities, courts, businesses, schools, factories, the military), most insidiously actualized in condo, because of its deeply embedded appearance of non-hierarchy, of privilege, of middling and rising money, privacy, and safety.  Condo is, before and above anything else, a complex system of eyes, in which the jailed are so wholly obsessed with the jailedness (politely termed freedom) of others that they come to think (indeed they come to think so long before they see the face of the obstetrician or midwife yawning at them through the vagina’s expulsory maw) of themselves as jailors.  Or they would so come to think if it were not that in their role of jailors watching the jailed, they cannot also help to see (albeit in shadow) the role of the others as jailors watching themselves as the jailed, thus exposing, in a manner, the necessary opposites, without ever uniting them except in the schizophrenia of the modern dweller of condo, yielding a foundation stone for the utterly corpulent and blind psychotherapy industry (or, rather, industries) to produce a simulacrum of union.

So condo’s stretching is also made manifest through the almost infinite separation of panopticonal jailed and jailor, sprinkled liberally through the fleshy diaspora of dwellers in condo.

As is typical in modernity, cinema comically and recently adumbrated the concept of condo, even if the Bentham-Foucault panopticon seriously and distantly adumbrated it in words.  I speak, of course, of Rear Window, which seems to us—in condo—the seed and egg of our modern situation, a homunculus of condo, a bonsai tree of eyed and eying.  That I can see—from a condo cell, without straining—roughly 1,700 other cells (I have counted) and, with binoculars (even Mr. Stewart used these), into these other cells, seeing then the abject incarceration of the jailed who think they are jailors, who think they are free—jailed to their 830h march downtown, jailed to their very large flatscreen TVs, jailed to their genitals, jailed to their laundry, jailed to their exercise regimen, jailed to their consumptive and desperate need to be jailed, clearly demonstrates the end of humanity and the beginning of condo, the human becoming (and in some cases having become) the Kinder Sorpresa, as it were, within the larger, more glamorous and necessary, egg.  For who really pays any attention to the cheap plastic forgettable toy within—it is almost immediately discarded, breaks, or is lost—what truly matters is the experience of egg (or cell), of branding and anticipation.  In short, what matters is condo, not what is inside.  The eyes, the jailed and jailing, simply provide the pretext for condo; condo, if it could act or speak (and its non-acting and non-speaking are its redemption and apotheosis), might rub its little necessity—us—on the head or derriere and say, Ah, how blessed, how eyed, how necessary … how irrelevant.

And here a most striking discovery presents itself—one which not only encapsulates the condo in its existing and future situation as the condom of the city, in its capacity  as shield and pleasure of the human, its protector and joyful spurting, but experiences the condo as the veritable stretching of significance:  both as the radii that evolve the human past its limits (the stolid vertically transcendent massively visible house and the glittering horizontally immanent massively felt home) and as the center (the repository of darkness, insignificance, doubt) and circumference (the edges of light, significance, knowledge) of that circle.  The condo is and has become and is becoming that mystical sphere, incarnate and incarnadine, bold and vulnerable, everywhere and nowhere, full and empty, shadowy and intractable, silent and boisterous, of which the ancient prophets foretold in their visions of the great city of god, of heaven on earth.

But all this is only a little scratching!  We could speak of con do – the con of action (in comic contrast to can do—the past slogan of a large North American bank), signifying the simulation of deed, its ruse, pointing to a returning to the wu wei of the East.  We could speak of con dough or even con doe.  We could speak of con dom – the domination of cons, the new king dom of simulacra.  Indeed, it is not a long bridge then to comedo (through condom and cum do and come do), Latin for glutton (noun) or I consume or squander (verb).  Or condor, a large predator that eats dead animals.  Condos are not far from the coffin-apartments advocated in the nouveau architecture of Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain.  It is not difficult to see the condo as an essential evolutionary stepping stone to a new race of short legs (for who needs to walk?) and huge eyes (all the better to see you with, my dear!), precipitating future wars between the horizontal people of the houses and the vertical and eyed race of the condos; like the Neanderthals before Homo Sapiens, the people of the earth will have no chance.  The condo dwellers will win.

We could speak of all this.  But we must return to our task of watching.  And, frankly, the exploration of things-in-themselves is exhausting.  But if the signs and signifiers that condo presents to us seem at times labyrinthine and murky, let that not reduce our attraction to condo’s truth but rather propel us toward it; for is not the truth of a thing not what it initially and superficially presents but the fruit of hard labor acquired only through pilgrimaging through a thing’s thingness, refusing the temptations of ease and escape, the fruit of becoming a thing’s thingness through significant and frequently arduous feats of hard empathy, the fruit of walking around the concrete commonplaces which comprise the marketplace of the thing into (while hardly ignoring these edifices, for they are highly instructive in their negative signs, in their pointing to the antithetical essence of their being) the commodious and healthy air of the thing itself, even as one mounts Everest to finally stand on the pinnacle, practices scales to perform at Lincoln Center, or lives to confront and so surpass death and so live.

***

So we have seen not what condo is or might be, perhaps, but what asking is—its nature, its essence, its face.  So we have seen that the question that is asked is often not the question that we think is being asked, but the question behind the question, the asking behind the asking, the condom behind the condo, the punctuation behind the substantive, the doubt behind the certitude, the awe behind the philosophy.  And this seeing, we see after our asking, is the nature of condo.  But not only of condo but of all things.  And this common nature—this bond—is our humanity:  our bestiality, our divinity.  That it is now encapsulated in 20 square metres in the sky should not surprise us.  We are a species that, surpassing, reach.  Now that our arms—or at least our prosthetics—reach horizontally around the spherical exuberance and despair of the earth, now that we have effectively abandoned the search for a vertical divinity, we can devote our fickle attention to sticking our prosthetic arms (indeed! all our prosthetics!) into the air, into space, beyond our natural reach, looking endlessly into the endless darkness of other eyes, and discovering (if that is the word) what is not there.

the rough advance of doves

the sadoo, seeking its muse, ceasing to be amused, in its ongoing quest to explore identity, embodiedly, against the backdrop of the world and in the great fiction of humanity, language, unrepentedly seeing the monopolar as homo sapiens saw neanderthals, seeing the polypolar as the blinking winking stinking eye of life and art (the bipolar perhaps as a misnomer on the prickly bridge of evolution), continues plodding toward itself, in this instance by presenting this formal yet inspirational essay on doves, their physiognomies, their olfactory limitations, serendipitous tendencies, mating and scatological preferences, kinship exigencies, and other matters of interest to the general reader and Mrs. Herbert H. Caraway, daughter of Wilma Pucker of Hardin, a suburb of St. Louis.

 

(Mrs. Caraway advises any further readers to accept the following text as sound, interpreting any meaning that might be begotten _&/^or linger as simply more sound.)

contents

            1.0       language

  03.     thinkinggggggggggggg                

17.4     life, culture, evolutionnnn

  ∞      void (truth, love, doubt)))))))

         11           art, arts, arting, articles, icicles, mandibles, kerplunk...…

           

 

…i

1.0              language

1.0              language

1.0              language

1.0              language

a student is confused by a use of ‘round’ instead of ‘around’ … as in she’ll probably come round if you leave her alone.  We look up ‘round’; there are 69 definitions.  How one could eternally fall into the infinite vortices of words, wells as deep as love.

to remain foraging for the language of one’s flesh in the bigbox of the socially mediated languages of money and names

            … an evolutionarily dubious move, but one that society calls forth, unable to wholly squelch its origins …

                                  and heresiarch sumli lisum luims said through the mouth of heresiarch xrcaa, one can't resent one's era without being swiftly punished by it.

didn’t heresiarch sumli lisum liums also say, hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner...

            (… and this ¾ofacentury ago …)

if god is the white space around the black lines of letters, are we not the keys by which the text is typed?

            are then the black lines our technology and laws, our structures and screams?

                        (as to the nature of the typist, is this not a question now lost in the indecipherable text of the tombstones of time’s graveyard?)

                                    is then the poet an archaeologist in the strata of air?

writing at the end of the word—like neanderthals clawing at existence under the boot of homo sapiens—we attempt to leave behind a record of verbal extinction in forms the future might have the capacity to recognize.

            the difference between word and world — el … the name of god.

                        word is absent god, which spoke itself out of language to place itself, in infinite fragments, in the world.

if, as rényi said with the inspiration of erdős, math is the process of transforming caffeine into formulae, isn’t poetry the process of transferring mud into breath, the spiritualized proclivity of worms?

the two full-word anagrams of funeral:  flâneur and frenula

            the fun to be had with this

                        putting the fun back in funeral:  real fun

isn’t the blank page the remnant of a dawn or dusk portending a twilight without end, its waiting words an invitation to god’s forgotten diaspora?

the blank page is unfiltered unblanched unsecured light.  Careers, money, what is normally called love … are inkblots on the page — craving to fill it, to be analyzed, interpreted, shutting out silence, light, buttresses against the white void … this night of the known, this page of black.

            poetry is the textured compromise, mediated in the poet’s flesh, between purity and the human scream protesting it … (shakespeare’s sonnet 66, bishop’s villanelle one love, nemerov’s because you asked about the line between prose and poetry
 

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow 
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

, soiled, quiet, writhing
on the foreground of the perfect page …) 

19⅕   life and spherolution

19⅕   life and spherolution

19⅕   life and spherolution

19⅕   life and spherolution

the first emancipation is from one’s parents, the second from one’s children, the third from one’s self … each gets more difficult, for each is an accumulation of freedoms and freedom in its fullness simulates the spherical mass of the world …

… trauma, like tenure, is transferable …

it’s said about f2’s recent suicide:  a life cut short.  Not untrue.  But our culture is biased (at significant cost) toward a life cut long.  Hence the incomprehension, disdain, fear, in response to the daoist thought—

• it is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life.
• when going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades in life, three in ten will be comrades in death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death, and these also number three in ten. Why is this so? Because they set too much store by life.

 

[[[[other lines the well-meaning spiritual class are frequently attracted to, with spectacular sentiment—

o  destroy your reputation (rumi)

o   do not go gentle into that good night (d thomas)

o   I took the one less travelled by,

             And that has made all the difference. (frost)
     o   do what you love (bus shelter and taxi ads everywhere)

                                                how long and long the list …]]]]

but as heresiarch sumli lisum liums says,

only fools, fanatics and gods can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire …

and did not heresiarch lev ray contend,

you have neither the patience that weaves long lines nor a feeling for the irregular, nor a sense of the fittest place for a thing … For you intelligence is not one thing among many. You … worship it as if it were an omnipotent beast … a man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decision, or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring Beings …. You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

did he not also say,

… politeness is organized indifference?

sex becomes easier and more difficult—easier through the portal of technology, more difficult because of the increasing distance between flesh and flesh’s prosthetics, a distance which now only technology can bridge.  Technology and flesh reach for each other across an abyss, but technology initiates and consummates the deal.

            isn’t this the melancholy and frenzy at the root of modern coitus?

how can acceptance and passion not be antithetical, other than through the hard-soft unity of the passion of acceptance or the acceptance of passion … these parallel and less-travelled roads?

ambivalence is always and equally present in every situation, event and person : it’s just a matter of its diameter’s extent and the number of surfaces required to contain it …

heresiarch enorjd-u^..en

wilde said that the greatest sin is being boring but i say that the greatest sin is to crucify symbols …

            … yet aren’t the two the same?

… to explore life not as a question but a wound …

… the greeks entered into death backwards

            we, though, are like the dreams of the christians:  we don’t enter into death at all

the something in the body that’s stronger than the body, that doesn’t simply confront death without fear but somehow overcomes the fear and so death …

            the attempt of physics and religion to codify this something … but doesn’t it only retain its strength as it eludes codification (the kierkegaardian dialectic)?

                        remaining committed to the eluding:  isn’t this heraclitus’ taut bow?

you have heard it said that novelty is oblivion, but i say to you that the city is a memory of an ancient infinite loop

overheard in a restaurant—

            i think of all the innocent housewives on oxycon …

it’s easy to discount teleology in a mathematical epoch, said heresiarch ullullul, but doesn’t the city indicate the truth of the human, the shape of its soul, by laying bare (though the laying bare of the city is like the laying bare of a stripper—it wears the eyes of its watchers and so, as mcluhan observed, is never naked) its contradictions—the eye of the truth of a thing?

            (don’t we then see the shape of our collective desire, the barbed wire of our limits, as we explore the urban ecosystem [{our creation and space—the two remaining frontiers]}, rippled watery mirror of our dark dreams?)

aren’t such gross summaries of time, space and power like the newsbites on subway platforms, but on the platform of myth?

07.    that medievalism—^thinking

07.    that medievalism—^thinking

07.    that medievalism—^thinkin

07.    that medievalism—^thinking

that ideas are dressed feelings, that feelings are chemical relations between the surface of a singularity, masking pluralities, and the surfaces of pluralities, masking singularities, that a large idea wardrobe begins to unmask both the unpresentable pluralities and the unpresentable singularities, that most prefer small wardrobes to maintain a minimal unmasking, any intimation of the inexpressible (we might be able to handle glimpses of flesh but not glimpses of spirit) … what else is there to know?

            that art’s task is enlarging the wardrobe, society’s restricting it …

                        feelings are the truest facts, silence their truest interpretation

                                    if we would speak, if we would attempt to draw nearer to the truth of silence in words, we would dress the feeling in an avalanche of words

                                                as we have rejected silence for the time, as the truest voice of feeling, we must talk endlessly.  Hence the rise and dominance of communication.  Hence tv, facebook, twitter, texting, therapy …

                                                            the Word may have gotten weary of flesh, but words themselves, Word’s children, are young and hungry …

… isn’t the truth a decoy more deceptive than falsity?

there is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses ... the truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

heresiarch azupo

one can’t think about language, art, thought—in the way one can’t think about sex—during the act itself, without destroying or at least diminishing it.

            wasn’t this heidegger’s error—in thinking about thinking during thinking, he failed thought?

isn’t this too the problem with academic and workshop’d art?

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

1,1,1,1       art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

aren’t words the film before the absurd certainty of our flesh and the absurd certainty of darkness, these two lights (eyes) of certainty comprising our sight, the film the spectacles we wear to shade ourselves from the two certain fires?

            would not art then be the film of the film, the technology allowing us to transgress the laws, traverse the spectacle, look on flesh and darkness, and not die?

À      religion, government, the academy are threatened by the future, which is to say their pasts

À      co-ops, non-profits, are threatened by themselves, which is to say a barely filtered humanity

À      only the business-technology conglomerate, aligned as it is with the modern sacred, strides, self-assured, through itself into the world, in pumps, on speed, suited, monumental, levitating, wise …

֟       (as to art, isn’t it threatened by what it always is and has been, its eternal nemesis and mother, the void?)

—art

o   that which brings forth a preexistent wound

o   that which cannot be translated into psychology or biography, politics, scholarship … which cannot be translated

o   not the mirror of nature or the cosine of god or technology’s strange companion

creation is prior to consciousness

            isn’t this the assumption, arrogance, the basis and breath of art, its trump against the pretenses of industry?

it is the price put on art that destroys the integrity of the art object, not the material or the creation itself

heresiarch bed.rod

if sometimes i speak of art as light and sometimes as darkness, isn’t this because it calls from a black noon and a blinding midnight which to me, human, of muted flashing neon, birthing blurs in the gloaming, are identical twins of passion, as extreme cold and extreme heat both push the body into similar states of oblivion?

can’s tago mago still a perfect musical incarnation of an exuberant descent into and ascent from hell, a kind of largely alinguistic shakespeare

            aren’t all carnivorous orgies and divine lunacies contained in aumgn, the album’s otherworldy centerpiece, which magically fuses atavism and futurism?

                        its anticlimactic close, bring me coffee or tea, softly imperative, comforting, like its title, like fortinbras at the end of hamlet—

—ah yes, recognizable melodies, rhythms … society, order, those living and necessary sleeps …

we could taxonomize the arts, not according to the standard divisions (literature, film, dance, architecture, etc.), which are blurred and blurring anyway, but according to the vague spaces from which they emerge, corresponding vaguely to vague functions they fulfill:  the social-ritual arts, the political arts, the craft arts, the absurdist arts, the arts of the void, the subversive arts, the arts of resistance, the mob&savage arts, the academic arts … each with their gods, proclivities, demons, traps, circumscriptions  ...

            doesn’t this taxonomic difference emerge from the same space as differences between substantive and functional perspectives of religion (family, politics—any cultural expression and its visible and institutional manifestations)?

we know, from theory—the reflection of others and ourselves—and practice—our own experience in others’ creation and our own, in creation itself (to the extent we can enter it without combusting), this immersion blending with mysticism (any difference being the particular relation established with combustion)—that art, in its experience as art, establishes an unsettled relationship with ‘normal’ life.  This knowledge co-exists with the knowledge of another ‘art,’ which quantitatively overwhelms, the reproducible (the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction), the socially-generated and generative, the socially affirmative and cohesive, which we acknowledge as legitimate, which we also affirm, but require quotations for, due to the relative ease of its relation with ‘normal’ life, even its comfortable function of support and furtherance of such life.

this doesn’t interest us, other than as a dinner party or casual fuck:  its degree of engagement, even exhilaration, varies (and, yes!, how it can exhilarate—this marker’s insight on banality—not of arendt’s evil but of dissipating normalcy), its occasional necessity—insofar as it re-bares necessity and so at least circuitously reaffirms transience and truth—neither irrelevant, tangential nor trite—not uninstructive.

what interests us is the art (or arts) which emerge from a troubled relationship with ‘normal’ life.  what interests us is that which displaces quotations—i.e. the surreal, the displaced—from ‘art’ to ‘normal.’  This displacement, this replacement, is our curiosity.

(certainly not trouble itself is sought, as the trite, as those who seek trouble, would have it, but a transmigration of quotations, this movement of markers …)

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the judgments directed at us—in their diversity, subtlety, severity, comedy—are always gifts:  not primarily in their truth, which soon collapses into the vaster truth of the void of contradiction, but in their energy.  Most judgments, however, are simply transformed into judgments:  a simian efficiency.  But their energy potential is greater:  they are capable of aesthetic fission.

            isn’t this another way of stating the adage, the pen is mightier than the sword?

we don’t seek love, as we say and feel, but the same unnamable thing art seeks—a kind of geometry of god, the architectures of dreams …

it’s not god that interests me, it’s the artifice of god

not the city but the incarnated idea of the city

not love but the question of love

not art but its circumstances and crib

not i but the void of i

heresiarch asbermo

how many times have i undressed truth in the closets of night and found it to be a heap of clothes on the floor?

… how we all want to stain the stained world …

            but in a world so stained, stain upon stain, oil upon oil, isn’t the absence of a stain the more beautiful—and even in a paradoxical sense the more noticeable—mark?

to not reject, but set aside, narrative, the novel, stories, as the primary aesthetic or epistemological form of telling (outside of science) is to displace oneself in what might be described as a non-form (or, perhaps, more authentically, a form yet without form).  We might also call this poetry, if by poetry we mean not received (defined) forms but the quest to fish unborn shapes from the void—these shapes having their only appearance as the perception of a feeling of a silent seeking, which seems to reflect the displacement of the self, the mirroring of the human and the void

                        so the novel is not rejected—as evil, irrelevant (but, oh!, so relevant!), passé, expected, tired, explored …

                                    didn’t both borges &jabes more or less say—the novel … everyone’s doing it, why would i?

                                                aesthetically, hasn’t the novel become like the sonnet in the nineteenth century … awaiting an aesthetic holocaust?

                                                epistemologically, hasn’t it become like catholicism in valencia in 1502?

what compels me has always been not primarily the stories we construct to explain, recreate, justify and cohere our lives, but the architectures of the stories’ creation.  I could call these architectures poetry—in the way that poetry preceded the novel in the artform called literature—but i would rather (rather, because i aim for a spiritual-linguistic precision) call them geometry … the geometry of creation.  If people wonder why stories don’t dominate my aesthetics and psyche, it is because the shapes of the emergence of the stories are those that joust in my consciousness.  I recognize the necessity (in the sense of the existential given) of narrative, society, money, ‘traditional’ work and family … but it is not the appearance of these necessities that is my task; instead, it is the processes by which they appear, the translation of these processes into the shapes of language.

                        to confess a certain mutual incomprehension between the story-focused and geometry-focused, a quantitative imbalance, is almost unnecessary to state.  But it must be confessed.  This certain mutual incomprehension is itself a shape, perhaps one that holds a key to language.

                                    might there not be a relation between this exploration of shape i attempt to describe and the root tasks and obsessions of modern mathematics and physics?  The very large and the very small interest me—that which circumscribe and ground—and the corpulent middle only to the extent that its flesh at times clarifies the circumscriptions and ground.

the void is not black but light

            the void blinds us so we seek the blackness of the blotted page

                        don’t we desire—flappingly, subversively, resistingly, sometimes torn like spider legs in the hands of certain boys—to keep the page as blank as possible, to give words a place, living space, to land, breathe, choked and mobbed as they are in the claustrophobic communication of the world?

                                    what is this attempt called from the known?

                                                whimsy, delusion, insanity, psychosis, all manner of dysfunction?

                                    and from the cloud of unknowing?

                                                freedom, truth, love, poetry?

                                                            and heresiarch gladioozer said, do not the unknowing and known feed on each other like lovers in a condemned building?

doesn’t night’s maw open to a throated vertigo promising an aesthetic feast foreign to the day? Isn’t this why we leap before we look?

            and heresiarch edanu said, yes, and the first surprise is that the maw’s promise is fulfilled.  The second is that the meat for the feasting includes the one who leaps.

                        but those of the night are given to it as a baby to the breast, though the tits be deliquescent and the milk the stuff of sewers

the void is not more real than its orbiting masks, night not truer than day.

            don’t they take turns exposing each other, as lovers in the discovery and decline of their love?

                        this place where love and art kiss, bound by that contract between void and mask, signed in a bloodless cloister in the monastery of dust

                                    we plunk the yinyang on mugs, tshirts, workshop logos, pc backgrounds, as if the union of night and day were something other than that which has the power to combust worlds

                                                —now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds—

                                                            as if it weren’t the stretched and stretching diameter of our confused and dying souls

the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madperson has only one.

heresiarch nazeeliolo

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i experience little difference between my past extroverted life and this present one:  both have attempted to translate into language the inner necessity—and the feeling of the energy of this translation remains constant, regardless of the environment in which it takes place.

            in the way that no matter where you travel in the world, humans are humans and you are you? asked heresiarch wilminina;

                        yes, i answered, but with this difference: 

having had to become more than i expect to myself, i became it, and in the becoming asked the question of identity (not what or who [or, horror!, why] am i?—those questions of adolescence, but the question of creation), of the form of formlessness, the question of a dream divided against itself.

in the vast worlds of injustice, your act, arising from cruelty’s sectors but without its claws, is so petty as to be invisible.

the simulation of seeming, the seeming of simulation … 

i remember you

indifferent to my caresses

crawled into the tent of your sleep

your breasts like soft moons

as if we hadn’t just clawed

each other to another death

light, open spaces, the absence of linguistic pollution become more essential to me.  But what to do in toronto—half of its life dark, enclosed, mobbed with disruptions to thought, this half beginning?

            vonnegut's harrison bergeron

                        can i begin to experience this lightless-closed-clamoring half as a necessary darkness, an impetus, a spawning ground, for greater light and silence, not those of the sun and desert but of the soul stretched on the weightless horror of itself?

a nice thing about having led an absurd life is that everything begins to make sense—not just absurdity, which has made sense for some time, but even sense.

i wish to speak of the Bain as a lover, known, unknown, fuckedup, worn, juvenile, dense, awkward, edgy, utopian, opaque, multifarious, sticky, corpulent, miasmic, impossible, (can we say it? … ) … beautiful, hated, prehistoric, craving, brittle, shimmering, broken, volcanic, ovine, turgid, … … …

            but how can i, having been a pilgrim to the temple of adjectives and sat under the silence of their liquid teachings?

here i am,

      friend of the spaces between minutes

      of the darkness in the darkness

      not much knowing if the future is the past or failure is success

      wandering from stool to stool as if it meant something

      full of blinks and stinks and the western wind

there i am,

      in the bathtub with my penis on

      confusing it somewhat with the light in the bedroom

      counting to 81 in the manner of another century

      my mind a casino of bears and playlists

      discounting the darkness as if it were a friend

and not much has happened since (heraclitus or mencius or aeschylus or)

except that maybe what was said has been forgotten

i am far more your creation than mine; i am a mosaic of yous … yet in our primitive justices, we coalesce responsibility onto the singular, simply because it’s visible and so easy (in the manner of visible and psychic diversity).  If humanity survives and evolves, won’t it look back at our present laws and attitudes in the same way we look at the aztecs or nazis—scapegoating the other to avoid our fears, the renaming of this scapegoating a primary social project? 

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