have i not
zealously sought constructive vitalized non-existence for the attendant wound –
a wound without which life is not life, this home and womb of words?
to be
declared mentally unhealthy in the present age is analogous to being declared a
heretic during the inquisition: the
standards experts move in, enforcing what and how the brain can think. to calmly claim one’s own standards, rooted
in one’s flesh rather than institutional-cultural-economic mass and privilege
is a death – like all deaths, permanent, silent, solitary, operating with
configurations of weakness and strength unfound in the lives of standards
not
unrelated to the death of sanity is the death of class – this path of removing
oneself from class and the corollary struggles.
unwilling to assume the pecuniary and productive values of the middle
class, unwilling and unable to assume the privilege and sanctimoniousness of
the upper, unable to assume the envy and jokes of the lower, it – regardless of
how it is viewed by those in class, regardless of the degree to which it lacks
the prosthetics (money, possessions, name, reputation, comfort, security)
desired and sometimes possessed to some extent by those in class – experiences
itself as outside of class: at least
these classes defined by currency. it
seeks in death (where else?) the manual for living in this outside
the
madness with which i write and live is the madness that is more or less present
in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by
diagnosis of some label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final
phase capitalist society. so when i use the word mad here i'm not referring to a special race of people, but the mad
in me addressing the mad in you in the hope that the former mad speaks clearly
or loudly enough for the latter to hear. so too with death
to live in
what might be called dreams and to die in what might be called reality in a
society given to the latter is to live a life of death and die a death of
life. and if you find my nomenclature
strange – if you say, well reality is all
there is – … ? doesn’t what i call
the modern secular mystic aesthetic (from pessoa to woolf, from dickinson to
genet) carry a culture of dreams from the slaughter of certain people of these
and other lands, from old men who dreamed visions and old women who dreamed
dreams, who walked with spirits and knew waking life had no superiority, carry
this culture in the emptiness of their hearts through a metallic desolation,
dogmatic in its faith in things and facts.
no – despite the institutionalized cries of the light and newly voiced,
of the heavy established names, that they have justice, truth, power – i rest
in crypts of gaseous doubt, the incessant blurring of ideas and species, of all
singularities. the world, existence, is
for me and those rough ones of my tribe – spread across death like fog – hardly
solid, hardly true … a question among infinite questions, a dream among
infinite dreams
why would i
be interested in writing in the common tongue, in writing about the tedious
topics of money, sex, society – whatever arbitrary concerns and styles the day
ejects and the gouged desperados conform to as if they have objective value? the overwhelmingly vast portion of the
universe is radically inhuman and at the center and margins of the human –
there too the inhuman, masked and hardly masked. so i seek languages, forms, syntaxes,
dictions, that reflect the energies that dominate and circumscribe the universe
and, inescapably, often surreptitiously, the human; the tools i use for such
seeking i have found far more readily in death than life, in the apophatic
rather than the analytic, silence rather than what we call communication. i hardly aim for lucidity or that most
puerile of objectives – to be understood. in art – as in love – we must remember to
leave any humanity we might have behind
bricks move
and sing. bricks are made of
language. we do not hear them less
because they lack mouths, more because our ears are unschooled and the words in
a single brick so vast as to rival a dictionary, syntactically arranged unexpectedly
for our brains so trained to certain orders.
would we hear bricks with the same ease we hear humans, would our
identities not be spontaneously reconfigured, the human voice returned to its
place among places, the grammars of things vast and diverse, our brains as
empty and fluid as clouds?
to abdicate
using others’ illusions for what may be one’s own is to find oneself in force
or – more rarely – energy: each an
intimacy with death, the difference being its primordial orientation to
diffusion
