grammars

why does no one sentence me to death?

i am not a pessimist. i am no believer in the apocalypse or guilt

but i read of others being sentenced

and don’t understand why i’m not included in the readings

which grammar has provided such passage?

how do pronouns work?

it hides in my life

i seek to hide in it

and as i do whies hide too

the art of discovering possibility in grammar – less innovations inherent in ready mixing, more waiting for uninvented mixers, new instruments of relation. the former is the rite of spring, the latter the modular synthesizer

the soul in any age establishes transactional grammars for which money is the vocabulary – the confessional in the age of western religion, the therapists’ couch in the age of religion’s child. we should also include drugs in the latter, which are orthodoxy’s necessary dream even as the occult and its ancillaries were in the former

the grammars of language – at least in its distilled form: poetry – more similar to the grammars of plants than, say, the grammars of money. develop kinships and genealogies of grammars, a work having some rough precedents

the neoliberal class’s objection to war is to past forms of war – ones still bound to the conservative common diction, linguistic lingerers – and hardly to future ones, which it specializes in, using shells of anachronism, undiscovered mines, as decoys, distracting from its forms of strategic domination. grammars of war themselves battle on desolate plains. the epilogue to blood meridian

i have dreamt grammar – great grammars so complex, logical, and absurd i awoke sweating blood and cum in my eyes. i have sat at the roots of plants and knew there the grammars of the human to be false, false in their ambition to be superlative. nothing works anymore. dreams of grammars are grammars and the grammar of dreams is true

all true grammar is incomprehensible, says sadoo art-oh! on precipices of vitality

drop me down the wells of foolishness i say to the bucket that kicked god. i am holy says the bucket. drop me down say i

as we know that dream is the only reality so we know the chasm between consciousness and barbarism (we cannot say light and darkness) is now of such distance as to be the primary seduction for humanity. it is this seduction that draws me down

no longer able to overflow into society i overflow into myself. and this shift in locus ... this migration ... i call a grammar of myself, a song of electric leaves

death ii

processes and techniques of death –

• hardly protest, argument, objection.  rather – using death as a tool of one’s self to continually eradicate what one thinks the self is.

• a chief art of death is anonymity, one that may be critical for the human to craftily use for its collective survival.  for does not a refusal to use names as root – an essence of anonymity – entail abdicating the supremacy of anything human … and this subversion, this unnaturalness which may be a simulated naturalness more central than technology’s simulations, an unparalleled energy (and this rather than a power) that evokes fear initially, for its vastness, its perceived darkness … and this collective entwining, this seemingly dissipating choice of setting alongside the hyena and termite and hydrant and hookah, an experiencing language for what it is and not some pretty tyranny, some gift of dead or living gods?

• i have always learned far more by not being myself than being myself.  first by not knowing myself sufficiently to not know i was not being myself.  subsequently by not knowing what a self was to an extent that i didn’t know what it was to not be or be myself.  in all cases – the learning, the first not knowing, and the subsequent not knowing – death at the center:  as technique, as question, as energy, as self and selves.

• as it takes a great deal of desire to desire to not-desire, so it takes a great deal of life to live in death.

• that we read the textures of life based on the parameters of death may be obvious, but that we read the textures of death – present to us in life as black glyphs on infinite seas of white – and in this other reading are commonly illiterate is hardly seen.

• a new form of death – a redirecting of death’s energies from their present primary outlets of war and love – would be if the majority of human communication were in art rather than functional, animalistic, or even capricious social discourse.

the human world, curved into itself, itself gravitation and objects, cooperation and enmity more ubiquitous than air, the city now the inescapable environment, objectives raised by the slough of groups and science fumbling enchantment’s ancient sphere, mysticism – being endlessly solitary, silent, of many environments equally (interiorally and exteriorally) but of any single one not at all – may be unable to survive in the present and coming urban and mass technology, it may be the only thing with the subversive skills to survive, or it may – as it has been – amble along, carrying quietly the torch of death through life, so that those who inexplicably find themselves cast from their accustomed environment may have help knowing the selfsame thread that winds through all – whether time, environments, technologies, names, cultures – without distinction. 

writing is easy.  what’s difficult is placing and maintaining one’s self in the spaces of death that make writing possible.

as once could happen with god and nature and no longer, so now one can enter consciousness to leave it, can enter thought to leave it, can enter passion to leave it – this leaving before force forces the leaving (what is colloquially known as death and what is technically a manner of death, a transition of a physical singularity into new forms) is an entering into death to life in certain modes.  so, too, perhaps, this can happen with technology and art and time.

death is the distance that enables life, the distance that is here, on the tram, in your wallet, smiling through a closet of masks, the void of words and the rave of solitude, the clickity-clack of time on the punctual and shiny rails of your brain.  death, like life or jesus or the future, is no friend, not friendly, but an environment, an ecology of turning and returning form.  death is neither darkness nor light, peace nor war, but a way that navigates all without mentioning any.  indifferent to creating names, this energy that trumps and fashions life, that assumes disguises like the sky, it flies, vast across the earth, atonal, lacking purpose, acquainted, limpid, hardly counted, nested, the architecture of galaxies and the technology of insects, enough.

today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.