JAN FORTIN (BUT 2 DAYS TARDY)

1.      Born 1937, presently living in Anchorage.  Tardy, cause he was supposed to show on Jan 14, the old prick.  Also doesn’t know how to spell, the bastard.

2.      Samsara, the movie, too playboy in form, too whitesprayed, airwashed; while trying to depict samsāra content—and doing so in respectably attractive ways—its form (its narrative, images and flows) is too pleasant, smooth, sanitized:  this is how it fails:  we’re left with the feeling of having leafed through a polished coffee table art book—maybe the look of continuous flow, but hardly the feeling.  A film like Holy Motors produces the feeling.  (Beware of that which claims the ancient religious names, which claims to show them.)

3.      Poor people panic when they get money, so they spend it as soon as possible before it disappears.

4.      The judgements over men are more precious than the men themselves (Schroeter, Death of Maria Malibran).

5.      Der Tod ist die dass es das ist Nichts sondern hier.

6.      Alice:  the world and its structures as houses of cards, the i-eye as Alice, who, having visited the various caves enshrining the houses of cards, subsequently (consequently?) chooses to live not in the caves or the houses or the cards but the rabbit holes, the holes, connecting the cards, the houses, the caves ... the hole becomes the home.  Alice in Wonderland as a mystical feminist treatise.

7.      Ei (pronounced i or eye) in german—egg.  A little zero.  Plural eier (pronounced aia, rhyming closely with gaia).  I-eye-zero-earth-egg.  The synchronicities and expansions are almost overwhelming.  No wonder German produced Heidegger.

8.      If you tell me what low is i’ll tell you if i’m high.

9.      Those who call to us, who break through the thick voids of society, have one thing to offer:  our need to learn to not name what they have to offer.

10.  The Bain as a cultural amalgam of a first nations community and the court of versailles:  a tragicomic impossibility, a flawlessly beautiful hamlet of suffering ribald absurdity.

11.  Cleavage is the new modesty.

12.  The aesthetic tweet has replaced the aphorism, apocalypse has replaced creation, the repetition of novelty has replaced the novelty of repetition, movement has replaced time ... our addiction to replacement is replacing our replacement of addiction ...

13.  The film The End of Time exemplifies typical Canadian intellectual mediocrity in documentary form.  Like Samsara, like later Tarantino—all image, show, the content, the ideas, mired in intellectual kindergarten (though Tarantino redeems himself partially by avoiding ideas altogether; in this he is smarter than Fricke and Mettler).  Haphazard narrative, forgettable text, vapid ideas, analogous to the New Yorker, those Pulitzer-prize winning creative nonfiction works:  for those who need to consume a kind of diluted, powdered intelligence ... or workshop poems and novels:  for those who need to consume diluted, powdered art.  Aside from a few vaguely memorable images, the film offered me two marshy mellow benefits:  it created a diffused somewhat banal far-near (and thus tepidly mystical) mood and, as the mediocre often does, it stimulated a compensatory response.  I was going to force The End of Time to give me something to munch on, as during it i was primarily craving the end of The End of Time.

a.      One dissipates time to the extent one dissipates striving (an orientation to the future, accomplishment in the external world, causation [which is the manufacture of artificial comfort strings designed to produce and market time as a product]).  Let go of causation, striving—time changes its key to doubt.  (Death, however, does not, for death is different than time.  Death is the product of flesh, time of mind, making death more real.  [The sage orients herself to death; the academic the merchant, to time.])

b.      What walks through the dimension of space called time?  It’s less my body walking through that dimension than my body seeing itself.  Vision and time are coupled as firmly as space and time; space exists without eyes, but time requires eyes.

c.       I immerse myself in language to erase time, to drown it.  Language created time, language can destroy it, even as it created and destroyed god.

d.      Love is frequently experienced—and so behaviourally defined—as another eye watching me as i watch it.  But i experience love as an eye—in my case, inevitably, this i—seeing the world.  In both senses, though, love is time (or, rather, love is time redeeming itself).

e.      Technique:  immerse oneself sufficiently in the three dimensions of space, without trajectory, without intent, without explanation, without analysis, such that time is crowded out or, rather, it is no longer required—becomes bereft of animation—even as the city obviated the need for an animate god ... or, rather, assumed the animation of the prior god.  So space can assume time’s animation, as our new orality assumes literacy.  We have absorbed (traversed, traced) god, literacy, time (which had become entwined, now disentangling, the fracture of modernity), digested them, scat them back to the void and are free, if we choose (or are chosen), to return to their ancestral roots, and dance, without atom or meter.

f.        We talk (glibly, profoundly, obscurely, mockingly, melancholically) about our culture’s shifting from past to future, elders to youth.  This shift, perhaps the fulcrum of time on history’s teeter-totter, contains implications to which humans have barely begun to adjust, this inchoate awareness perhaps in part responsible for our apocalyptic obsessions, a mass-collective mortality crisis.  As adults pass through middle age, their obligation to be abdicating structural power to the future will inevitably be in severe tension with our increasing predilection to longevity.  To deal with this severity, to prevent snapping, adults should be ^{shutting up}—or at least finding new forms of language that are more suited to their emerging habitat in history.  Youth should be dressing up in power’s rags—not through usurpation or revolution (both are puerile), but through forms they invent, or are invented for them by new forms of time.  The power, the wisdom, and the glory are now soundly with youth.  Youth must consciously exploit its position to the maximum possible extent.  Of course, it has begun doing this, but in the way that some women have done while still subjugated by men (cunningly, histrionically, antithetically, schizophrenically)—a technique too tied to its oppressors to be of much use, a weary tedious patriarchal dance.

I wish only to be water—to flow around the young rocks of power.  Adults, once they reach 40 or 50ish, once their children reach 20 or 30ish, should do as some Indians do in following the sadhu path—give up their possessions, diminish desire, wander the earth by foot, consume only what is necessary (as much as possible what is grown and made by oneself or those around), speak little, be unobtrusively available to assist the world as necessary and able, make arts and crafts which simulate their experiences of the world, respectfully and quietly disappear when called upon to do so ... instead of the ridiculous and desperate hyperdrive to futilely perpetuate and provide the appearance of a return to youth through speed, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics of all types, expansion of reputation and artifacts, power and language ossification.

Time is softly calling us through the noise of ourselves; we plug our ears to our collective and rapid demise.

Aside from building, operating, maintaining, and destroying the mechanisms of the modern world (bridges, stethoscopes, tutti-frutti jawbreakers), the function of the academy is to show in numbers and graphs what almost any child knows in its flesh.  The academy, despite its talk (text production) about flesh (bodies, body) and its presumed orientation to youth—like the other edifices and structures of society (law, religion, business, technology), though their particular methods distinguish them—is instead oriented toward the destruction of flesh and youth by means of untethered mind.  For the species to evolve, flesh and youth must use time against that which produced it—mind.  They must tether it back to themselves.  How?  By reaching into language? by drowning in it? by seeking below?  Technology as a means to do this—through the horror and ecstasy of its necessary sibling, Communication—is a dominant shadow of legitimacy, as orcs in Tolkien’s fantasy were broken and twisted elves.

But there are light and music still in the dawn of decaying hearts, and to these one can return.

g.      I am an atavistic cosmologist—i search the roots of the cosmos to adumbrate the genetic composition of future flowers.  This is my contribution to time.

h.      I give up, acceptingly, naturally, almost joyfully, the need to convince society of anything, rather growing into the ambient comfort of myself.  This is time’s contribution to me.

tao te ching : lxvi

The reason why the river and the sea are able to be king of the hundred valleys is that they excel in taking the lower position.  Hence they are able to be king of the hundred valleys.

Therefore, desiring to rule over the people

One must in one’s words humble oneself before them

And desiring to lead the people

One must in one’s person follow behind them.

Therefore, the sage takes his place over the people yet is no burden,

Takes his place ahead of the people yet causes no obstruction.

That is why the empire supports him joyfully and never tires of doing so.

It is because he does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position to contend with him.

No matter where one travels in the circuits of power—whether of politics, spirit or art—the closer one comes to the center, the more there is an emptying.  Christianity calls it kenosis, Buddhism śūnyatā, Dao the way—or the full empty.  Christianity’s symbol is the cross, Buddhism’s the wheel, Dao’s water.  Christianity opposes, Buddhism eliminates, Dao returns.  Reductionisms?  Sure.  But also circumscriptions, images of shadows, shapes without substance.

While the sage is comfortable banging a pot alone in a hut in a forest, she is also comfortable ruling an empire or caring for a child.  Which she does is according to her nature, that she’s more likely to be banging pots than leading an empire may be due to their being many more pots than empires, and pots being more receptive.

As one empties, what is one emptying?  One?

How does one empty?  By walking the path of emptying …

As is common, people want things detached from their thingness; they want love and power without their empty heart.  Without its heart, one cannot look on the resurrected Lazarus, as Caesar does in Andreyev’s story, and retain power.  Power mirrors death in life; the verb is the emptying.

In the emptying, the saint unites with the sinner, the king the bum, the artist the lens; emptying births the deep indistinguishability of night, from which itself is born all human things we live within, in which is enfolded the silent snaps of energy, forever opening and shutting, full of opposing, eliminating, returning, the ripe and empty way.

holy motors : a meditation

Holy Motors is, most obviously, a film about film and, perhaps less obviously, a film about human evolution toward the age of film and the state of human existence during the age of film, an evolution and state which the film suggests have transformed existence into a film, such that film is now not simply the dominant metaphor for life but that life has become indistinguishable from film, that even as humans have become indistinguishable from time as technological devices for measuring time have become more sophisticated and ubiquitous and ultimately internalized, so existence has become indistinguishable from film as we have created it, made it omnipresent, then effectively swallowed it, effected it as our diet and so become it:  we are what we eat may be true, but we also eat what we see and so are what we see.

Yet, in presenting this process of becoming our (technological) creation—a frequently tiresome theme:  Shelley’s Frankenstein itself becoming a Frankenstein spawning ten thousand monsters—the film avoids, even subverts and transcends, our utopian and dystopian clichés through a circumventional process of acceptance, at times buddhistic in detachment, daoist in comedy, by a capricious fatalism (no—a playful fate) that drains the modern swamps of freedom and will and leaves the viewer (if there is indeed a viewer left) feeling neither paranoid nor caged, but almost giddily alert, ready, perhaps like an early Monsieur Oscar, to assume the next role, whatever it might be, however absurd, dangerous, humiliating.

What does Holy Motors posit and accept?  A slight modification to Shakespeare, that is all—

All the world's a film,
And all the men and women merely actors:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, ...

This metaphor—whether Elizabethan (stage) or modern (film)—is repeated relentlessly throughout by the transience and questioning of home:  at a micro scale (where an individual lives and finds stability, security, comfort) and a macro scale (the ground of humanity—the metaphysical, intellectual and emotional walls we build to protect ourselves from the elements of darkness).  These two scales are fused in the opening scene in which you have the actor-director in what seems to be a hotel room—odd, for it has cheap motel wallpaper covering a secret door and is curiously close to the runway of a major airport—against the backdrop of a sleeping audience, an audience of zombies or ghosts (mirroring the closing scene of The Crowd, but watching a naked man, looking very primate-like, running back and forth [an image which is briefly flashbacked near the film’s close and which foreshadows the gleeful horror of the ninth appointment]), followed by what appears to be the protagonist leaving his mansion for a day of work.

But where is home?  Monsieur Oscar plays a homeless woman, a testy father with a barely adolescent daughter (dropping her off at home), a dying uncle with niece, yet another husband and father; if he has a home at all, it is his limo (itself having a regular home, the film's namesake, though even the limos themselves question this stability at the end).  Céline, the chauffeur, says the last human words (though through a mask imitating that in Franju’s Les yeux sans visage) on a cellphone, I’m coming home, though by this point ‘home’ has lost much of its meaning, aside from the curious practical questions which linger: where is Céline going? how does she manage to survive on so little sleep?

However, the slipperiness of home is only the beginning; the entire movie slips—truth, love, beauty, identity, history.  The only solid things—hardly solid by nature—are time (day turns to night, weariness grows) and smoking (whether ‘in’ character or ‘out’ [these terms fade into one another as the film progresses], Monsieur Oscar is almost always lighting up).  The only work that seems to exist for humans (except for the zombie masses [the crowd] “watching” the “film” [The Crowd]) is assuming the required identity, performing the required role, donning the required mask, for the required time—for ... whom?  No one ... the only beholders are sleeping (in contrast to the audience at the end of The Crowd, who are robotically, convulsively, laughing) or busy performing their required roles, too involved in their own scripts to watch.  (Monsieur Oscar does get paid, but there seems little likelihood he’ll have any opportunity or need to spend the money.)

We are always on the cusp of the “real,” never reaching, identity perpetually subverted other than as that which perpetually subverts.  Are the two actors in the penultimate assignment scripted—in the present, when they were lovers?  But the film (not just the specific film, Holy Motors, but film itself) is devoted to showing the vacuity between the cliff of the question and the cliff of our desire for an answer, everything we pile on this cliff to attempt to compensate for the vacuity between.

Given enough distance, the scriptedness of everything appears behind our touching freedom.  Yet, surely, a real scene does occur—a metascene—between Monsieur Oscar and his director, in the limo, as Oscar is questioned about the authenticity of his acting, whether he still believes in the masks, the scriptedness, the ever-morphing roles.  And, perhaps, at the close of the death scene, when Oscar ‘breaks character’ with his ‘niece’ and they speak ‘off-set’ as ‘real people.’  Yet all these quotes are necessary.  There’s no escape from the acting behind the acting, the acting behind the acting behind the acting, in infinite regress to nothing ... all we’re left with is the film, all we're left with is film.

Yet, surely, there is the interlude, a glorious injection of modern purposeless cathedral joy, a testament to the raw ecstasy of what it is to be alive and know no solidity (a knowledge perhaps more terrifying than death, for it subsumes death as another mask):  buddhistic mind without the buddha, acceptance without the peace.

Yes, fine, the question of real disappears inside the film ... but outside the film, where we comfortably live, there surely still is safety; we still can cling to our elaborate self-constructed truths that we, outside, are real.  (As we are outside the film, but inside reality.)  Such elusive identity, such infinite masks, are for the stage, the film, for art and its haughtiness, for the academy and its abstracted abstruse explorations.  But Carax deconstructs these clingings, these illusions, these insides-outsides, at the outset:  he shows us asleep to the comprehensive virtualization of our root physicality.

He deconstructs these illusions, yet simultaneously acknowledges their persistent potent reality by means of their tenacious emotional resonance.  The problem is—if it is a problem—we still feel during the film ... despite the artifice, the wink, the knowledge of everything continuously collapsing.  We feel because of the gap between our condition and our knowledge of it; Carax continuously confronts us with the sight and so the feeling of the gap. During the scene with Oscar’s daughter, with Céline as they’re driving ‘home’ at night and Oscar becomes vulnerable, in La Samaritaine with his ex-lover, on his deathbed and, most peculiarly and comically and impossibly, as he goes home for the day and shares a tender moment with his strangely apt family of the night.

This unified duality that Carax pulls off—of distance and feeling, of divinity and humanity, of art and ape—is at the center of the film’s strength ... of art’s strength.  (Indeed, our emotional response crescendos as we become more aware of the artifice.)  Kaufman, though he attempts to perform such sleight of hand in films like Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York, doesn’t quite achieve it.  One doesn’t care in the same way, his showing is simultaneously too obvious and not obvious enough; he doesn’t stretch the circle as far as Carax (to its veritable breaking point, and possibly past) and so leaves us too much with the idea of artifice and not enough with the melancholy and exuberance of its root.  A root that is, more than anything, the spiritual center of our existence and why Holy Motors is, transcendently, a deeply religious film.

The film ends with acceptance, the limos in their holy home uttering in scattered unity, amen, so be it.  But what are we—or we as machines, and as disappearing machines—accepting about what we are, what we have become and cannot become?  Simply a modification to Shakespeare, the tweak of a line?

Is there a difference between the world’s a stage and the world’s a film?  Other than the appearance of the text itself?  A shift in dimensions is the difference:  from three, on the stage, to two, on the screen.  Our masks are becoming virtual, as the machine is, as the beholder.  As nature—as human environment—has disappeared by our building and inhabiting the city (inevitably accompanied by our severe and stupid ignorance and hence sentimentalization of nature), so we (inevitably born of nature and, despite our denials and horrors, tethered to it) humans have begun to disappear.  The machines which house us (incarnated in the limos), like poets, adumbrate this disappearance and the entire film sings a playful dirge to human three-dimensionality, a melancholic aria to the emergence of the dimensionless—or at least unseen—eye.  A curious recursus:  from the unseen eye of god to the unseen eye of technology, fleshy conscious volitional free humanity a wee blink between.

dao de ching: lxv

Of old, those who excelled in the pursuit of the way did not use it to enlighten the people but to hoodwink them.  The reason why the people are difficult to govern is that they are too clever.

Hence to rule a state by cleverness will be to the detriment of the state.

Not to rule a state by cleverness will be a boon to the state.

These two are models.

Always to know the models is known as mysterious virtue.

Mysterious virtue is profound and far-reaching

But when things turn back it turns back with them.

Only then is complete conformity realized.

The western mind, once it discovers knowledge, has to apply it; this pragmatic application, this quest for analytical certitude, this need for formulae as the superior truth, that which sucks other forms into it, is frequently called intelligence.  But Dao, unlike the forms that wish to negate or subvert this mind, this knowledge, this application, to assert another in its place, acknowledges its truth but doesn’t feel compelled to pursue or follow.  It is this knowing-but-not-doing that so circumscribes it.

Cleverness proves nothing but cleverness, beauty nothing but beauty.  Dao doesn’t particularly believe in enlightenment other than, perhaps, as a feeling that contains as much legitimacy as other feelings.  How does the sage, then, hoodwink the people, and is this not a despicable act?  The sage does not hoodwink the people, the Dao does; it hoodwinks them by being itself:  muddy, tentative, hesitant, vacant, formal, disintegrating, thick.  The people—wanting thinness, limpidity, certitude, solidity—hoodwink themselves; the sage is the sage because he lets them or, rather, allows the Dao to let them ... for why would she use the methods of the people for what is not of the people? What kind of knowledge could make her so certain?  Fear, fragmentation, denial:  these could make her so certain.  But then she would not be a sage.

The people are hoodwinked, yet a state is governed by being straightforward.  Dao bears a different relationship to truth than modernity’s rather christian bent:  never final, no solidification of identity, no conformity through law, argument, cleverness, rigidity:  shade and winking and the vision that sees, the eye that doesn’t.  The modern recoils by the presumed deception here, but rather see it as that which gracefully mirrors nature in the human labyrinth of society.

It doesn’t attempt to be individually willful and in this lack of attempt is its flexibility:  moving with the wind, reaching when reaching’s required, turning back when things turn back.  And neither one is better and both can be done.

aesthetic tweets

Since this isn’t an orthodox blog, i find it occasionally useful to analogously and poetically describe what it feels like to be posting information in this way, to the world wide intervoid, intentionally avoiding attempts to use traditional intermediaries (e.g. publishing houses) and techniques (e.g. self-promotion).  Here are some ways i presently think of it—

1. As aesthetic tweets. 
2. As a sort of modern urban male, somewhat better socialized, Emily Dickinson, stuffing her poems in an e-shoebox.
3. Mozart was well known for his scatological humour, which the conservative among us still find puerile and explain, as is typical, by applying various pathologies to it, without ever seeming to recognize that their need to pathologize could itself be seen as a pathology.  I wish to subvert this odd pathological game that art and society play—which as far as i can see doesn’t particularly serve either side—by directly aestheticizing the body.  Yeats’ famous line from Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop continues to instruct me here.
4. As a conscious experiment in biological aesthetics, using the means (technology, virtuality) that are presented to me by my given culture—that is, by taking the modern injunction of taking the body seriously ... seriously.  This experiment feels to me as a form of care.
5. A kind of syncretism of the particular social aspects which have primarily defined me—family (most notably child-raising), business, academia, religion, technology, love and art.
6. This is of prime interest to me now:  being receptive to and observing the results of my increasing dependence on non-literary art forms for creation.  After 30 years—a little too long, i think now, but such is life—of deep immersion in literature, of being nurtured and shocked by its powers, i currently pay scant attention to it as an input, instead requiring a new, what for me is a healthier and necessary, diet:  cinema, music, painting and its cousins.  Transforming sound and image to word, attempting to minimize myself as conscious intermediary, feels almost wholly different than transforming word to word.  It’s also an ecologically sound attempt:  i can obtain the requisite new inputs without travel, acquisition, drudgery, or the discord of social scrimmage (other than the relatively minimal purchase of film, gallery, gig tickets).  An odd kind of aesthetic efficiency, productivity.  I am, quite impossibly, striving for Shakespeare’s aesthetic efficiency, which still seems to me the paragon of purity, in literature at least.
7. As an enfolded linguistic kaleidoscope of the aesthetically filtered psyche, a journal of self-analysis which prefers not to use the present hegemonic (ah, there’s a word i haven’t used in a while) psychological concepts and terms but to grope for its own.
8. Footnotes and thanks to Lewis Carroll, William Blake, Borges, Joyce, Woolf, Heraclitus, Diderot, Jean Genet, Cervantes, Simone Weil, Jodorowsky, Schroeter, Teshigahara, Svankmajer, Bunuel, and a few hundred others who continue to help me cope with the glorious onslaught of existence.
9. A mirror of how one pieces together a unified identity through acceptance of the perpetually flowing grounded gaseousness of identity, how this piecing-together also is in a state of constant becoming the perpetually flowing.  That is, a way to mirror, to create a simulacrum of, the wholeness of being, which seems to be the primary task of psyche and art.
10. Some rooted blend of śūnyatā and samsāra.
11. An attempt (ultimately futile but necessary) to find a language which unites the languages (within English) that i have spoken ... a translanguage, a polyglottal unity.
12. No single aspect (utterance) is representative of the whole—all it can be (and not even this) is the representation of a fleeting feeling or thought—as even the whole (all i have written over the past 20 years) is not representative of the whole (the unutterable), even as the sum of all wholes does not equal the whole (interesting:  the analogies with set theory).  The whole is not seen, this the source of the attributes of god and the heart of humility.
13. Those who view this voice (the perhaps apparently rational voice [*though i tend to view it as the vernacular]) as more legitimate than other voices (the ribald, contentious, melancholic, absurd, fragmented, nonsensical, *speculative, *capricious, elliptical, world-weary, etc. [*i ignore for what should be obvious reasons certain voices, such as the pragmatic])—or another voice as more legitimate than this one—who want to grab a content scat from the art toilet and assert it as primary, as truth, or (horror!) even use it to prove something (about the world, me, themselves) live as far apart from the intent of my aesthetics as a rock from a feather.  Only when one contains within oneself all voices simultaneously—as in an orchestra—does even the shadow of truth begin to emerge.  So Shakespeare.  Is he Iago? Falstaff? Rosalind? Henry? Shylock? Cleopatra? Lady Macbeth? Cordelia? Jacques?  As Borges aptly points out, he is all and none.  The i is plural, the i is empty.
14. Isn’t any objection, recoiling, from such a notion of plurality rooted in a christian monism ... a fear that there is no supreme ruler ... out there, in here?  Our fear, in fact, of life?  Our need to erect hierarchies as hammers, rather than as utilities to achieve certain ends which serve life?
15. A travelogue on that elliptical ship called the heart.

(yet another) exercise in aesthetic mysticism

Preamble

As Underhill attempted to show in Mysticism, and others have in other forms, mysticism isn’t some psychological disturbance, some spiritual derangement, some infantile regression, devoid of criticality, some otiose irrelevance in our scientifically-oriented epistemologies, but an authentic way of knowing—oriented toward the practice of love—that, like all ways of knowing, requires complementing by other primary forms.  To intentionally write mystical texts in the post-god age, this age of machine and virtuality, of reason and post-reason, to include the fullness of the truths of this age while building on the mystical tradition, requires, naturally, new explorations, new risks, new forms.   It requires the mystic to embody these truths without committing to them intellectually, to include our present spiritual atmospheres of art and caprice—to self-consciously write mystical texts into existence, aware of their artifice, with a slight smirk as to their continuing necessity:  necessary because humans continue to be born with mystical orientations, legitimizing these expressions; smirking because who, having known the manifold ways of knowing, does not smirk as each way of knowing asserts itself, knowing, through knowing, there is no throne, knowing, through knowing, that, even so, expression must continue.  (If only science could write in such a way!  Oh, but one day it will.)  Mysticism has, of course, in our histories anyway, always been a renegade form of knowledge—whether in the age of religion or science; it subverts even subversion, degods god, and nonchalantly equates a cockroach and a king (long before set theory passed natural numbers through zero, setting the stage for the collapse of history in the twentieth century).  Now, with a sufficient bulk of experience and texts, we mystics can take this subversive task less weightily—still with sufficient seriousness to accomplish it, but without that kind of seriousness that asserts Felt Truth (attempting, through the self’s unmediated experience in the world, to unite the subjective and objective), whether hysterically, theo-erotically, intellectually, or metapsychologically.  We express, explore, in the manner of mystics—below word yet using word, below god yet using god, below time yet using time—but because we refuse the orientation of specialists, because we have immersed ourselves in the doubtful irony that coincidentally peaks with the end of a civilization, we laugh in our expression.  In derision? In disbelief? In delight? In unmitigated mirth? In silliness? In the pure caprice that may spawn all authentic joy?  Why choose, says the mystic.  We express, we laugh, we live.  Mystics, like scientists, like merchants and prostitutes, will die when humans die.  We thus, like all, must write ourselves.

Here, then, is another text in an invariably murky tradition.  I thank my mentors, from Heraclitus to Simone Weil, from Blake to John of the Cross to Borges, from Teresa of Ávila to Edmond Jabès, from Rumi to Lao Tse to Carroll.  We work alongside one another, collapsing space and time into the void that dances, the night that soothes, and the death that births a silent smile and a compassionate eye.

Text

God the word, as the visible expression of the invisible and inexpressible, remains, despite his death, as word, not as any structural or ideological substance behind, alongside or underneath god as word but only as word, as empty word, other than that which is expressed through it, born of the invisible and inexpressible.

Word, rightly replacing god, prior to god, having spoken god into and from existence, a- and polygendered, circumscribing god like an atmosphere, is itself, having overspoken itself, seeking a replacement for itself, but that which it seeks is not in god, word’s creation, itself, now bloated, cancerous, but that which created word, an otherless other, that which resides in the out in the in.

This thing, foreparent of god, eternally present quest, is hidden in the city, word’s structural archaeology manufactured incarnate, but word, let alone we—offspring of what we know not—remains ignorant, plays hide and seek (the project below the city’s clubs and furies) with its manifest desire.

I, but one explorer in the often seeming arcane adventuring of collective ancestral pilgrimages, wish to share my findings with other explorers, those curious about exploring, whether working toward in some obscure fashion expressing through emptiness—expression through emptying—whether setting aside distracting debris in the city’s noise, whether pointing the way, however tangential, arduous, and lengthy, to word’s replacement, i—no one—can know, this knowledge far subservient to the path itself, one we attempt to map as we walk, a map in word of that which is no-word.

God, then, as word, as now empty word, decomposing in the city, the collective urban reek of time, became—as that which has become nothing—a key to that which is nothing, progenitor of word, a possible return from the long detour of civilization around its central humanity, a technique of driverless driving from fragmentation, despair, subjugation, decontextualized desire, to unmediated objectless vision, the eye of i and i of eye, that which sees not time but no-time, which sees itself.

So to think about god in the urban age, the age of emptied word, is, conversely, to think about what preceded and will follow word, this thing unthinkable, that desires thought but cannot speak it, past the indefinable circumferences of the universe, tucked inside its center—that which physicists, poets and lovers seek, which binds them on their vaguely separate ways.

Yes, I stuff the empty god, this and that consummately empty word, with myself but with a self that orients itself to the unthinkable before and after, the before and after which neither precede nor follow but are here and now, within; in this perpetual reorienting (which may be no occident or accident but a return), in this attempt at union, itself a union, i become, however ephemerally, the emptiness i seek to fill, the page awaiting me on which i write, the unthinkable made flesh.  I do not ask that you dispute me:  i do not exist to be disputed but accepted or ignored—not accepted in any capital sense but in the way one accepts a tree; not ignored in anything resembling negation but in the way one has never met a tree.

Thus.  God, in time, eternally, exists, through living things, transient things, even as god as word lives and dies and, in dying, like us, does not die, but changes, becoming more itself, more present.  When life was young, outweighing death, god lived, son of word who, in turn, begat an unbegotten son, who died, but died to life; but now, at the tilt of time, life endlessly appearing but on the dump of death, our urban world—our world—now a landfill site of fallen bodies, ideas, dreams, on which metal flowers rise and even bloom and seed and propagate—to our surprise? perhaps—god is stuffed there too, with the worms and dreams (even the dreams of god), fomenting in the heat of darkness, its natural home (not light!).  So god in dying lives more than it once in living did and we see it more in silence than in word.

Yet this empty word, this decomposing god, the city’s vital compost, the silent pointer to the once and future now, democratic eraser of time, requests fulfillment in what it is not (as it always has), our now unbegotten children, the metal flowers and their seed—not some fulfilling which can be nailed or banked or even seen, but felt (as to the ancestry and kin of the divine) and, in feeling, shaped and lived.

We seek, then, in the city, god’s reeking archaeologies, the landfills of words, for a replacement, or perhaps replacement, replacement of ourselves.  We seek to recreate in creation what creation recreated in us, and in this psychocosmic to-and-froing mirrors wander into mirrors, labyrinths falter in themselves, keys, doors and books are interchangeable.

We see dimensionality stretching from the fear of the divine nothing, simulated in our simulations, through the dualities of myth and the internet, through the hard pluralities of flesh, pushing even further, through the quadrants of mind and its destructions, back to simulation with neither fear nor divinity nor even nothing.

Ach, the trees are walking again like our mother, through the proud surfaces of the woods, muttering our name as if they knew it, and who are we to say they do not know with their different minds and their walking according to the manner of our ancestors:  who would i not be to worship the trees and this trick of theirs and dream i too could dream their dreams and mutter their names and walk the earth.

We see technologies like birds, crimson in the halogen skies, free, bereft of death’s degrees, knowledge like robotic worms in the city’s gut.  We see it soaring, like beauty, without beholder, so eyeless, guided by the chemicals of passion and image shards of time.  Beyond good and evil is not enough, as is beyond itself.  Fowl will deposit prepositions on the earth, without discrimination, and no grammarian known to man shall object.

We see humanity’s skin stretched across the earth like a leathery balloon, without organs, its lava and center surfaced, remotely luminous in the vibrating darkness, its mind like its organs distributed, quivering with pure knowledge, randomly, silently, calmly ecstatic, a lidless conscious eyeball rotating on the axis of its emptiness, the sheers of copulation, made spherical by spirit and wind and breath, accumulated, as if by a mystic packrat, across time’s wily desert.

We see a borderless cornerless cube containing the furthest reaches of the universe and if there be other universes other cubes and cubes containing cubes, each of their surfaces appearing as jellyfish in murky water through a dirty aquarium window, when under the influence, having been jetlagged, not really knowing what a jellyfish is; each of their surfaces exchanging itself with those of its cube and those of all others, listless, shadowy, confused, indistinct, a geometric plenitude, a perfect and populated void.

We see night like day, enfolded like the strings of time on the stories of our birth, that nod of desire nodding, playing itself and with itself and to itself, its playlist missing but it doesn’t matter for matter’s no more and the birds of the earth and the sea and the sky and the fire are one with the day and the day with the night and the night with desire and desire with time and time with eyes.  And this is love, my friends, the egg in the television, the root in the screen.

*         *         *

And did you expect us, obscure reader, to find something, to reach a destination, contrive a solution, explicate a unity, clarify your thinking, explain a feeling, name a name?  No.  We mystics are advocates of quests with neither realization nor fulfillment, other than those realizations and fulfillments rarely seen as such.  We do not seek in things any thing because we do not seek in things but rather say to things, though they have no ears—Seek in us.  Walk these words to their strange and empty center.

Postamble

So mysticism, in its necessary joyful futile capricious attempt to articulate the god that never has been and in never having been becomes, explores the experience, as all explorings, of being itself, requiring no legitimacy other than this and in this lack wholly complementing the other forms of knowing, including those that deny it; indeed in this acceptance we accept its truth.

my cat: mister loungechair

identity ii: job

oh my love, my slippery love, slipping out of everything, and then

oh my love, my stygian love, sticking it to me with stix & suits & sanskrit

my love, my cuntal love, never one to snap your thighs to fly

my love, my broken love, having broken all the bases of the game

love, that wipey thing, wiping tombstones down with lysol

love, ubermensch, dissing through the trees at bipeds

loves, little loves, mirrors of the inner empty faces

loves, murky loves, clambering the monkeybars of dooms

flesh, eyed eyeless flesh, grinned and grimaced, peccable and pecked

flesh, vacant, dim, crawling down the spiky steps to the great perhaps

mind, labyrinthine, litigious, machiavellian, lush

mind, nevermind, icu & silence & the grave

death, horny death,

death, noble death, noble noble, noble nibble, gobble wobble,  iii

art, clawing-cloying, pentameter of nothing, this is not a friend,

art, altavistagoohooyen&^yenning&     olaf,too

love,

love,

, love

,is

, 

dom-tea vi

l^a goo brie us

what could be more beautiful my furry flurry friend

than getting naked with another and getting out some cheese

from france, some melted brie, vats and vats and vats,

and pouring it upon ourselves like kings or apes or gods?

there’s something about goo on us that makes us think of love

eyes poking out from bovine fat like visions in a spa—

who could say that cheese is meant for just internal use:

try it! cream it! goo us! brie us! take us to the spa?

IT’S TRUE!!!!!—:—BUTTER MAKES THINGS BETTER!!!!!!!

Butter from the udder, not just in the butt but in the ‘and, in the tub and in the turd, in the hinges of youth and the dashes of colons:  rutting makes things wetter!!!!!!!—:—naturally ...

baked peas

so green & singular, bumpy spheres, smelling mildly of dirty feet, indistinguishable thorugh the oven door, from outside, slowly shrivelling, neither frozen nor boiling nor lukewarm, faceless, somewhat, green (did we say green), with skin, so many, heating, on that pan we might call their world, like us.

WORLD APOCALYPTIC WEEK

So you’ve been attacked by zombies, the bubonic plague has tried to pickpocket you, the routine mad have put you on a litter and dumped you on a dump, a heffalump of pennies almost drowned you, it started raining honey from the planes, your meeting started eating, eating you, the muffins laughed, the coffee erupted, your spouse grew seven heads, your children turned into rats, the gods became real and set up their tent under your bed, money turned to water, art to stone, medusa has started googling you, your gorgoneion destroyed ... it’s been a nice week, a nice week, unfolding like the universe, big-bouncing to that ol’ fate-beat, everything beautiful and good ...

  

a meal for our times

... palm hearts and sour cherries, lit quails in the background behind hanging gauze ...

... back to the effulgent void ...

it’s what some spoke of, have spoken of, when convinced of the truth of ellipses, when counting lilypads, when the smell of women arose on the destitute plains, on night’s rungless ladders, in the downloading torrent of fools, on mephistopheles’ song, of the truth of lilypads when counting ellipses, on night’s rungless fools on mephistopheles’ ladders, when the torrent of woman’s rose rose on a plane,

waiting for an ex-housemate at a neon cliff of the world, bills & hawks quawking in the background, flirtation a mobile device, change agent of such magnificent proportions as to drive all fear away and bring eternal peace, redeeming not redemption but silence’s siblings, subverting not subversion but ...

... he’s here ...

softfeethardcock

àààà|~|=^</\@`:  coconut oil in the seams of the world, creamed and stitched like dinner, like white artichokes peeking around the curtains at you in bed:  it’s not the rituals we speak of, those precognitive prechronological joie de vivres of our days, those kerplunky plonks on april twentieth and then some:  but those other things, resembling rituals in unimaginative mirrors, but, really, simulatingly, not.  And everything fits into everything when you think about it:  toothpaste&shoelaces, butter&pencils, jude&rumpunch.  And who needs babies anymore when each consumes slightly more than africa and a foot does just as well and sometimes even a bottle of st dalfour tartinade de luxe cassis the smoke is choking on the phalluses and what is love but oil in the seams?

all we are are pawns in each other’s vaginas:  a poem for Reykjavík and nothing

øen dryhumps jimmy qe5+ kxf7 28.qf5+ rf6 29.qd7#

reach in & grab yourself, doris, you schizocarp

play the endgame, barclay, emrick, in toke-ee-oh’s wholly holy hole

shatranj : luis manuel ferreira ferrão de vasconcels

i take days to recover from myself, only to find myself waiting

round and round the soultrack goes the little me

one (mis)step, two (mis)steps, fickle under thee

completely exhausted by human scrimmage

humans, monads of unsustainability, each a shattered god & numinous ape smashed into one mould, each a black hole of language, an aspirin and a gun, made to bump to bump tobump tobumptobump, into all things bumpable (and all things ever always are made bumpable anew!); bump bump bumpity bump bump bumpity bumpbumpbumpitybumpwego, from ghoulies & ghosties ...

maybe that which smells is me

Feye-Lo Pace-Tree nee Noott—

not her brother, “Kid” “Knee” Le Goom

not her sister, Ka Baj Bustle Sbowt

not her mother, Toe-Phoo Barr-Lee

not her father, Bear Bere Beir du Bier—

said to herself when she smelled something, it might have been me

the day before the end of the world (again)

if the race is weary at all, it’s surely because there’ve been too many days before the end of the world, too many ends that weren’t ends, too many loose ends, split ends, dead ends, tight ends, odds and ends and very few evens, the hope & disappointment like water dripping on a rock (for where have the days before the beginning of the world gone?), ends like leaden butterflies, ends on benders, ends in blenders, ends that never being ends wear us down

what do i do with the maledictions of Tyn, in the labyrinths of Tyool, on the plateaus of Tlyll?

I, Zunk, living a quiet life in peaceful Ziik, with my beautiful wife Znood and my noble son Zuunk, was called upon one day to leave peaceful Ziik and beautiful Znood and noble Zuunk and sojourn to Tnynn, on which lie the plateaus of Tlyll and enter the labyrinths of Tyool, but i was not told of Tyn or Tyn’s maledictions or what to do.

Falling Off the PEDESTAL of MYSELF

onto the vermiculous ground, onto the rooting earth, into the rutting mind of the decomposing gods, into the joy of silence where the fish called Vast lives and wandering & willing aren’t that different and space yawns onto the canvas of nothing.

my ass is, @ 51, still firm, though in my mind it isn’t which, in <    > fashion ... <  > ...

does your ass hang low, does it wobble to & fro

can you tie it in a knot, can you tie it in a bow

can you fling it over your shoulder like a continental soldier

does your ass hang low?

the romanticization of the lost words

i had it, walking south on john from ago, that which was once in the <  >’s, and seemed so good it couldn’t leave that i didn’t bother to stop in the cold and the pleasantry of walking to write it down, i repeated it a number of times to root it and the swirl of the city, without and within, covered the soil i thought ... but, then, ... once i arrived, it had slipped, been grabbed by some force specializing in grasping new roots under the soil and swirl and ... eating them.  It will come back, i thought, as things often do when you don’t try, but it didn’t.  And now the lost words have attained a mythic status in my imagination and i’m ambivalent about their coming back (and even if they did i’m not sure i’d recognize them), for what could now compensate for their tragic loss?

do i want the buzz of booze? ...

but booze without its buzz is just oo-e ...

the human and the butterfly

the urban environment in itself necessitates that the dominant forms of human discourse are with the human—that is, take place in the social realm, frequently solidifying the impression that human social categories—particularly present, that is to say visible, ones—are ascendant (even exclusive) among the categories of meaning.  This collective solipsism—one might say insanity—is misaligned with the proclivities of the human soul, which attempts to correct the imbalance in schizoid ways:  primarily through technology (in which we include entertainment, travel, communication, etc.), sex (in which we include yoga, the body-health conglomerate), art (the commodotized and laundered products of those who have lived in the non-dominant forms, displayed in galleries, stages, bookstores, theaters, etc.), emotionally prosthetizing substances (in which we include everything from caffeine to heroin, religion to grand marnier, acquisitiveness to weed).  Not that any of these things in themselves is wrong or damaging but that they typically remain unintegrated (that is, without dialogue) with the social, instead being called upon to substantiate, further solidify, the human love affair with itself—which is to say human insecurity and fear, a deeply ingrained requirement to set itself as superior to other forms of creation, this requirement a vast psychosis, a puerile denial, a refusal to accept the root orientations of the universe, an infantile desire to escape the circumscribed conditions of life.  A new form of play is required, which operates within the urbanized social realm but views it as no more authoritative than a tree, a stretch, or a carmine streak on canvas, allowing the voices of silence to mutually question the voices of sound, attempting to recover what once might have been called god or dao or something else or nothing by listening to the interaction of all voices, neither privileging nor denigrating the human any more than a cat, an ant, or a painting.

as i didn’t walk out one evening

Wandering around, in the aimlessness of myself, not here or there, memories and hope something of the same, time’s just a blanket, i’m gaseous and warm like a train or a bubble, clocks don’t really tell time, time tells time (the hand is on the marmalade and clocks tell themselves), what time is it mister wolf? three o’clock. What time is it mister wolf? eight o’clock. What time is it mister wolf? eleven o’clock. What time is it mister wolf? midnight. But all the answers are the same, it’s what the children don’t tell you, they know the game, the artifice of names and thrills.  Midnight.  Dark and wet at the change of day.  Don’t cry wolf, because midnight will come and bite you.  Change the diaper of the day in the dark, in the train, singing clocks and memories like a blanket or an arrow, as it clickclacks through space and the gods of signs and signals doze in the control room at union wages, cool coffee at their sides like cats, but no collisions to speak of, just neutrinos in geneva, the teacup’s in the lovers and the deep subways run on.

character sketch

as if you craved your annihilation, that common desire, but with such subtle resistance, such dissipation, the craving seemed to annihilate itself and you were still.  it’s never the i that speaks anyway, it’s something below, bound with mollusks and language, the vision that can’t see,   the urgency is too urgent, too like itself, like a wave, beautiful but relentless, always that endlessly varying endlessness, that perpetually different sameness, the annoyance of it all, some adjectives are fucked.  You have to be lovers with jealousy, envy, lust, greed, success, money, solitude, despair, love, let them be stronger than you in theirs but stronger than them in yours, a spiritual division of labour, a divine taylorism, the new fear and future, that i read in you.

the night is safe, only the night

all wires cut, all wirelesses cut, placenta of parties, unknown address, day a faith-leap away, warm custard and cats, the human buzz seemingly sleeping, the outlines of garages, shadows of abandoned cars, traffic lights eternally recurring, only the noise of keys and fans, the safety of silence, i drag night into day, lay it as its foundation, don it like a fashion, spectacles on the spectacle, condom on the clock, mask on the cock, quark and face and cloud, glove on the simian hand of work, the protestant mind, the catholic craving to create and annihilate, the strange equality of all things in stature and truth and nobility:  night, silent teacher, naked justice, stripper of names.