death iii

death subverts life not by being opposed to life but by becoming life’s shameful necessity.

i do not write with words, but death.  words are just the result of such writing, like spray from the water when a body falls into it.

to translate the dislocation of existence, the chaos of light, our center without gravity, the collapse of time into colour, the precision of imprecision, oneiric exactness, a drawing into nothing through light, to provide memorable views of nothing, evanescent, airy and tinted steam, to make atmosphere a style and indistinctness a method, to transfer polydimensional sensuous form to adimensional planes of words … all this requires continuous and continuously inconclusive negotiations with death.

science is the primarily reproducible textures we spread on death to allay our unsettling relations with it.  i remotely admire the reliability of science’s textures, but use old words to detour around the microscopic admiration, thereby unsettling myself into death.

i was never enamoured of life, but of the devouring that made life tumescent.  disillusioned of the devouring, tired of the great expressions that beautifully show the devouring, i begin to comfortably dwell in the ancient spaces of silence and solitude – these deaths within life that hide in the heart of eating.  does life inevitably seep in?  perhaps, but as into a sieve, for if i am a dwelling for death i am one with many holes.

to live in possibility is to live in death – initially ecstatic, as one blurs oneself on borders between actuality and dream – this ecstasy of eros – and then what seems to be a deep melancholy develops (seemingly replacing the ecstasy yet becoming apparent as another form), as one blurs oneself on borders between sensuousness and death – this ecstasy of thanatos.  and so this living is religious – the unchanging religious life, far from institutional ravages, scholarly autopsies, and populist sentimentalities and launderings, rooted in a precognitive swooning before nothing less than the universe itself, a place of union of art and religion, of creation and awe, of desert and verdancy.

death’s face is absence.  in a culture of presence – of having, seeing, touching, of having to have … – death too must be made present.  technology is the factory that inputs the raw material of death’s absence and outputs (through converting, branding, marketing, shipping, retailing) death as presence.  to avoid this commercial output, a human itself enters into absence, a challenging but not impossible journey, for which there are indirect guides and maps in certain books of past travelers (although the risks and pathways now, in technology, being so recent, are poorly attested, and present sojourners, whether successful or not (and who would even use in this context the word success?), i encourage to write travelogues, such as i am doing, regardless of how partial and flawed they might be, in the hope that the combined experiences might aid in the continuing project of updating the guides and maps of absence in ever-shifting landscapes and ever-altering modes of the production of death in life’s grim, drugged, and regulated factories.

to seek the desert in the city of oneself is to forge a shovel from the junk of one’s soul and dig up death and in the digging see visions of a shroud of communication, and so doubt all things.

to seek the desert in the city is to kill.  what does one kill?  illusions of finding lay slain like soldiers in trench warfare, some though flayed still gasping.

to seek the desert is not of those activities that merit grant applications, book or film contracts, sex club clubbing, monastic vowing, vowing, the attention of the doctored class, beliefs.  at most it grants eyes and fills them with sand.

to see death in all things is not teleological, macabre, pessimistic, gross; it is just poetic vision – as natural as rice or lightning, as strange as television.  to see oneself comprised of death is not suicidal, sick, hateful, misguided; it is just aesthetic mirroring – as clear as avocados or oceans, as cloudy as highways.

THE STORY OF OF

THE STORY OF OF

of was waiting by the western window watering her wisteria when she spotted a naked man swatting his northern window with what appeared to be a book of sorts.  Both were inside, as being outside would have, under normal conditions, without having something directly underneath them, if by being outside we mean outside their windows, meant their deaths.  What piqued her inquisitiveness were not his almost absolute nudity (if it were not for the black glove on his left hand), not his exceptionally fine penis, which hung with a graceful and not entirely limp nobility from the usual places, not the obvious fact that he was exposing himself with seeming aplomb, nonchalance and (it must be confessed) a casual eroticism, not even what he was doing there, with his hanging and swattings, but if it was actually a book he was using and, if so, how thick, how long, if it had been wholly loved or simply fingered and under what conditions, the thoughts that might have grown under its tutelage, whether it was the kind of book about which we say, that was a fine book, that was a great book, that was a book to remember, or whether the remarks were more of the type—oh well, it held notable promise but, in the end, quite forgettable you know.


she had spent most of the remainder of the day regretting she had dropped the binoculars after rapidly having grabbed them from the cassone and examined in the available details their refined quality permitted (they had been a gift from Gili, her colleague at Burberry during the Bravo years, when affairs were like acrylics and masturbation like a well-used ellipsis) the glove, the nobility, though not necessarily in that order and without necessarily equal attention given to both.  As she was thinking about preparing to move to the book (or what appeared to be the book and, more accurately, move the binoculars to focus on the book rather than those ancillary things), her cat, Miflufalot, had, in one of its periodic and always entirely unexpected episodes of severe neuroticism, leapt from one of the nearby bookcases onto Of’s right shoulder, causing her (etiology, though, we must confess again, is said by certain people about whom it’s sometimes said they might be expected not to know better to be an inexact science) to scream, drop the binoculars, breaking them irreparably (for her floors were firm), and orgasm slightly, these activities roughly simultaneous.  (Incidentally, her eastern neighbor, a Mr. Razmoos Höggendötter, heard the scream, causing him, quite indirectly and with the usual caveats, to call his wife and admit to a fling he’d been having with a dental assistant, though not Of, though she was frequently his fantasy, for she was not a dental assistant.)


of whiffled.  She thought of the book.  She spoke aloud to herself, as she had been accustomed to do ever since she had received Mikal’s note from Bangalore.  Of, she said … oh.  Here we are, our binoculars broken … Gili will be so upset … can’t tell her, she’ll tell Anah … then it’ll all end.


she casually lifted her head and looked over and above, to the window that had been swatted.  There he was not there again.  Bungled.  Yet she had seen, or thought she had seen, before the intimate distance had snapped, before she had had a chance to focus on what was most important—the very nature of the instrument he was using to hit the window—somewhere between the furthest reaches of her now defunct field glasses and the two appendages she had mistakenly and momentarily permitted herself to be distracted by thin long smears resembling the colour of blood.  The slight orgasm obviously hadn’t been enough.  It was as if, with the binoculars gone and Miflufalot having concluded, once again, that the human world was supernaturally deficient in all imaginable and unimaginable aspects, Of’s labia became like the book she hadn’t seen, that she had so wanted to languorously leaf through and become absorbed in.  This growing necessity, spurred by strange and coalescent forces, drew her from the couch on which she had intended to read back to the wisteria and the western window, fumbling now almost desperately but still with a modicum of control in the chest that had been purchased instead of the trip to Nueva Gerona, that significant budgetary struggle which had stressed her unduly for weeks until she discovered she had actually missed the deadline of discounted tickets thus making the decision effectively made, for those kidskin black opera gloves that she had inherited from her mother who had most fortunately been run over by the dysfunctional tram in Prague during that one summer of blossoms and happiness, grapping the left one and wrenching it past her elbow—thank god she and her mother were both size 19!—ripping off her blouse and earrings and bra and bracelets and skirt and necklace and hose and thong and anklet and even rings—what work they were! she even had to run to the bathroom and use soap! but that wasn’t a bad thing! her hands now smelt like tea tree and lavender! the kidskin was wet though!—running, galloping, back to the wisteria and western window, on the way tearing a chair from the table, splaying herself on it like a dropped cat furiously going to work hoping the man had binoculars but not a cat oh something was missing she ran to the bookcase almost slipping on herself and yanked a book what should it be? oh fuck it didn’t matter back to the wisteria back to the window back to the splayed chair everything was ready now hallelujah she began frantically swatting the window with one hand and with the other … how many pages were down there!? what a tome! and one to remember! like those drenched books pressed on the rooftops of Sayat-Nova no no the images! the images! back to business … that he was using them … she was forgetting to swat but something was … still missing oh … fuck the smears the … smears she shoved one of her many hands into a drawer she hoped he was there the … book the glove the smears the tumescent … perfection gathering … like … doves on the ark of the … covenant that was the whole thing the … tongue of … the kernel … of … mystery the … finger of … doubt the long … leaves … of questions … was … it … Of … or … was … it …