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.
