Dictionary of Modern Times vii

to pray

God, the unspeakable, who rarely uses words and has now almost forgotten how, who is white like an infinite desert of arctic snow but hides in the palettes of painters and fashion designers, who comes and goes like steam on a window, about whom it might be said that little can be said and in this saying is our speaking, whom I think I saw once at the bottom of a tube of toothpaste, who may resemble numbers in their purity, who may resemble filthy rectums and schizophrenia and maggots in a putrid kitten, who does not exist, who played a tune once in a bar in the twelfth century in Perm, who had grown weary of love by the time of the dinosaurs, who prefers backgammon to bridge and Pauline Phillips to Martha Stewart, who owns a schnauzer and calls it Misfortune, who presently drives a ’72 Honda Civic hatchback but complains about it bitterly, whose LSAT scores are average, except in 1949 when a 179 was obtained, who’s sort of like you on one of those days, be near us we pray and be with Aunt Jennie and her dementia and watch over the situation in Belarus and take care of the distressed and starving everywhere and help me live forever without any problems and can we colonize another planet soon cause that would be really cool and I’m sorry for what happened in Auschwitz and please especially give me an iPad4 for my birthday and get rid of Mark who’s really annoying amen.

eat your greens, mister murray

Mister Murray was a carnivore from 1964—

cow and pig and fowl and horse and whale and wild boar.

No matter how much Spousey tried to get him to eat greens,

the most he’d have (perhaps once a week) would be a lima bean.

She tried the oldest time-aged tricks that Gramma had once used:

she lined her thighs with chard and kale, put lettuce in the booze;

but all that Mister Murray’d do was flick those greens away,

get some beer from the corner store then say, Ok, now let’s play.

Until finally one day she chained him to the rad,

took off her clothes and yelled—you won’t get had

until you eat four pounds of spinach, borage, collards and garden cress,

till then I’m just gonna sit here and taunt you with my breasts.

It was, you must admit, a fairly classic scene

of dueling wife and husband, of sizzling flesh and greens.

Who won, you ask?  Did Mister Murray get his meat?

Or was Spousey there till doomsday, throwing fennel on her teats?

We’ll never know, because it just so happened then

that Franky Rank, a drunk, was driving his volkswagen,

crashed into the living room where that war was going on

and killed all three, the dachshund too, and the teacup persian.

All the leafy things that Mister Murray’s wife had so carefully prepared,

laid on her lovely body, so eager to be shared,

slowly were forgotten, dried, and quietly withered to dust ...

and all that remains is this memory of human lust.

  

jabès, even, wipes his ass, too, like god

... it’s not a stretch to think of the two of them

squatting on eternity’s jakes

sharing a joke about scatology and suffering

pulling on the heavenly toilet paper roll they share

helping each other out a bit, the way friends do,

then jabès wandering off to write the book of rolls, or something,

and god, doing what he’s made to do—

silently watching the dumpings of humanity,

listening to jabès yab until he can yab no more

and becomes, like god, silent and watching,

dumping, pulling, sharing, wiping,

squatting at the right hand of ...

and the word redeemed, once, the silence,

or seemed to, in its empty suffering,

now so full of itself, it’s not a stretch to think ...

You know how it is, in the south of france, with all those grapes.

Petite Pierre preferred to spend his dimanches

not under Bishop Balustrade’s barbed brimstone

but under Boucher Borduas’ bobonne, Bernadette,

in the vineyards, with all those grapes,

until the bishop and the boucher

found and chopped Petite Pierre and Bernadette into itty bitty bits

and buried them near Bresse,

where they flowered into fabulous vintages

which you drank while touring

and said, How lovely, how marvelous, the wine, in the south of France,

with all those grapes,

you know how it is.

ode to coconut oil

- as if the great iam-iam had coconuts for balls

- as if he spread the earth with it then bowled down the alley of the coco-milky way
- this, not amniotic fluid, our squishy birthright

- probe & astroglide & k-y & even butter (& always vaseline) be damned:  cocoil!—the healthier alternative (got coc & nut & o! in it ... it’s meant to be!)
-  oh oil of the coconut, be praised!

lover in bombay, margarita in oaxaca

recently the Council of Doves in Bad Worms confirmed the vatic cries of the heresiarchs in their distress and declared that god is cheese and his angels worms, that god was formed of the milky way and his angels of him when he was sour.  Consequently, through the declaration, the heresiarchs were put to death, their distress silenced, but the truth of cheese remains.

i have a lover in Bombay, a margarita in Oaxaca, and this is the truth i see in the cold and the soil and the cries of loneliness as they swoop on the vivid wings of night.

flinging w/o flinging

the jade of middle age

jaded, middle aged

the age of mutton fat jade

do you hear the war cry that men hurl

into the face of the future,

challenging it to strife?

not wishing to be one among many like jade

nor to be aloof like stone

faith 0 doubt 0

After 6,000 overtime periods, the score remains ...

... if you must shake your fist at something, do not shake your fist at fate, shake it at freedom ...

unit of pain:  microouch

¹ base unit of felt pain

² Microsoft’s underground subsidiary and parent

i see myself through the rearview mirror of a passing motorcycle seen on the bumper of a vintage car reflected on the concave chrome of some trinket on the dash

Yet, even so, there i am.  Solid, in a sense, like industrial smoke at night when it’s -25°.  Indisputable, really.  Something that surely wouldn’t be there, that appearing, in a world just of machines and mirrors.  Distorted, perhaps, but what isn’t, considering the nature of reflection and the reflection of technology and the technology of nature?  It’s the case, i suppose, if i hadn’t got the trinket that i wouldn’t have been seen and so, presumably, would be nothing, unless you’re one of those who believe there’s always a surface somewhere that’s reflecting the immanent image, if one knows where to look, under the views, in the closets of mirrors, in the blood of machines, the hidden alphabets, if one needs to see that much, if it’s a quest instead of simply just an accident.

i sensed myself passing in a mirror, and i was not undone

this is it, the self as an intuition of a simulacrum of a self.  This isn’t only time, its elusiveness, its impossibility, its eternal game, that peepshow on the bottomless lake of the heart.  It’s what we are, in our ... what shall we call it? ... our ... our ... our humanity ... but can we say it(, how can we say it)?  ([Humanity is so inhuman.])  It’s the inability to grasp that’s at the center of the mirror, our recoiling, our glimpse of that glimpse of the glimpse.  I walked on, though, as if i had seen nothing, and the mirror, too, did little other than what it does.

we travel to the moon but, still, our brains are underwater, our hearts are in the womb (_{and this is to say nothing of our gonads, which seem to be, most of the time, just in themselves})

and what connects these odd devices—brains and hearts and moons?  Something in the drugstore or the eucharist?  The black and white prints of dyer or wilbur or osho or katie or ouspensky or jesus (who didn’t do prints [unless you count the shroud]) or dürer or you?  A tweak to the brain or the heart or the moon? You? The plague or the crash of the web or a plane, the planes or plains of non-euclidean geometry, sweet flowers of absurdity, elliptical love?  An exclusion of thoughts (new thought, higher thought, severed thought, california thought), ^the work, the negation of suffering ... or their inclusion—mind’s niagara falls:  seduction, death, and power, the high-wire over the lyric eddies of the masses?  Perhaps god has a giant elastic, a collection of twine and ribbon, which he wraps around the stuff when he’s in the mood or it’s about to snap.  Or maybe it all just somehow hangs together on its own, despite our plagues and drugs and books and amulets and work, and nobody really knows why or how.

... and, for our excited readership, lounging at home in their petunias, sipping chai and turnip juice, we hint at definitions to come—

1. Melencolia I 
2. sssssssssso^domy,sssssssssso^dome
3. hitting the jillpot
4. ... and ^flesh fulfilled its destiny as _flesh ...
5. a sociology of use
6. bach:  so insufficient now, so sufficient
7. death roe

Prayers & Reveries: god the everywhere, the egg

A number of entries from the ponderous Reveries & Prayers were released by The Sadoo in January 2012.  Readers may recall that this ponderosity was written by Xavier Xavier von Xavier, a Vergobret crucified in Belgica Prima by his Council for taking certain Druidic practices beyond what was deemed acceptable by the tribe.  While he was dying—and the Guinness World Tortures lists his CDT (crucifixion death time) as the longest in civilization, clocking in at a whopping 12 years, 7 months, 12 days, 3 hours, 17 minutes, and 53 seconds—he dictated Reveries and Prayers to his milkmaid.  While only fragments remain, it seems certain that Xavier’s work consists of 81 pieces, radically different in form and orientation, direct utterances of the mystic's spirit, suspended, ecstatic and dolorous, over the chasm between life and death.  The Secular Sadoo is pleased to bring, once again and under impulse, a moderately comprehensible fragment to its readership and likewise thanks Sissy Spacek for translating from Gaulish to English.

god the everywhere, the egg

The question of whether god was hatched and, if so, how, is considered moot by many, the issues being more substantially of the egg’s diameter and incubation.

Heresiarch Hillela upholds the majority opinion that the egg was 300 cubits long, 50 wide, and 30 high, with a roof finished to a cubit upward and an entrance on the side, made of gopher wood, smeared inside and out with pitch, with three decks and internal compartments, being incubated in the forehead of Richard El Mundo Wolff Mallorca Te Quiero III of Porto Alegre when he was on his way to Novo Nordisk, thinking it was Novosibirsk, and got stuck on the obscure island of Tago Maaago for seven years because of marital troubles.

Others, notably Heresiarchs Gamelana and Shringa, maintain the earth was once an egg and this egg an eye, the eye and only eye of Isis, before she was named and bodied.  After an eternity less an hour, the earth cracked and Isis became blind and from the power of the pain usurped a body from the stars and stole the eyes of god so that he could not see humanity’s suffering, and moved to Egypt, where she lived for many years.

There are still others—the Mouflon sect of the Ruminant Quadrupedalists particularly—who defend the view put forward in The Ovine Egg of God, that sheep lay eggs and in each egg is god and in each god a sheep and in each sheep an egg, a nested birth and herd and divinity without end.

Heresiarch Ensi is inclined as the moon is waxing to purport that all is egg, and everything; there is naught that is not egg.  So god is continually in embryo, hatching, being conceived—inescapably one and many, the ubiquitous yolk and white and shell of all, forever egging itself into eggsistence, ache and ach, our shellves, yellow laughs of purity, we eggy gods.  When the moon is waning, however, she is less so inclined, and when the moon is absent, she is silent, and if asked about the subject shakes her somewhat oval head and only moans.

The Role of the Prophet in the Cinematic Age

The prophet, by nature, stands outside.  But where does he stand in the cinematic age, when all the world’s a film and the prophet but another strutter stuttering his lines?

He once stood outside of society; he had nature to stand in.  Nature, hardly hospitable, but still a home to those who lived without extensions, offered pyretic inspiration to the vatic class.  But in this age of moving pictures, shadows collaboratively scripting, where even nature has become another movie, the prophet has nowhere to stand but within the script.

Never one to toe the party line or even to attend to parties, he tended to appeal to one of two trajectories:  law or perfection.  While both his appeals were impossible to fully follow, at least the gap between behavior and ideal in the former was measurable; but in the latter it was infinite ... and infinity, despite the modern mathematical set, is troublesome to measure.

Yet prophets still are born.  The human soul has not kept pace with its technological extensions and continues to blindly cast anachronisms into the urban ball.  Not just prophets, but an entire assortment of leftovers and hangovers from the age of nature and religion swirl democratically with the adaptable, awaiting death or genetic modification to make them palatable or sterile or both.

Prophets still are born and have no choice, as with the rest of us, but to be who they are.  Where do they stand?  What do they say?  Can and should they do anything to perpetuate their kind?

I have answered the first question:  they stand inside and must find the outside from within.  If the path to prophecy is less direct than it used to be, this simply reflects the growth of the mirror-lined labyrinth in which we all find ourselves; the path to all vocations is less direct; there is more life--and death--to negotiate to travel anywhere.  Time and space have not shrunk, as false prophets glibly claim in DOA bestsellers, but expanded; they both reach for infinity with their greedy hands and we, peculiar configurations of time and space, are compelled to follow.

I have inferred the answer to the second question.  They say what they have been given.  They search in the labyrinth for the prophetic script, find their lines, and read them.  Law or perfection, it doesn’t matter:  they both are now immeasurable.  Law has become a discipline of cinematography, as all disciplines have, without depth or limit, a surface of screens and regulations stretched across the feral earth; and perfection is the only thing outside the law.  Does this seem futile?  Does it seem vain?  Does it seem as if one speaks to noise-plugged ears and beam-scaled eyes?  Well, this is in the job description.

As to the third question, I am no prophet.  I peer into the eye of the past, but the future’s blind, its eyeballs gouged.  Can and should are modals and modals are politicians’ province.  I am no politician.  I simply say:  let soul and technology battle it out on eros’ primrose fields.  Can technology modify soul?  Can soul’s extensions modify their source?  This is the human experiment, and prophets are simply little litmus tests to tell which way the battle’s going.  In short, prophets can perpetuate their kind as long as soul retains sectors free from technology’s reach; once soul and technology are synonymous, however, perpetuation will not only not be achievable, it will not be attempted, for it will not be thought.

If I am no prophet or politician, what am I?  I am what so many are:  a journalist.  I simply describe what I have seen and see.  Prophets, though, are prophets, and are compelled to babble their outside from within until the outside is no more.  Their role is as it always has been:  impossible, necessary, repetitive, unheard.   Cinema itself, this flatland we have constructed for ourselves and moved within, modifies perhaps the challenges, but only at a technical level, not a spiritual one.  This would in fact modify the role for many others, but not for the prophet; for he, as we know, lives spiritually not technically, and technical vicissitudes, their domain and power, are outside his comprehension.

The cinema not only lives, but we live within it.  The prophet too cannot escape this newfound air, the ventilated air of the theater, but breathes it along with everyone else.  He peers not from darkness directly--this capacity is lost to the species--but through a front or backlit screen and says what he must say in such a manner.  Nevertheless, he will be ignored.

Those whose home is the theater, who find the within from within, are often called prophets, but they are not; they are managers and moneychangers and scribes of all assortments and, yes, even journalists; their words are gold, though even in this age as they must be--orbiting flecks of gold.  The prophet, though, bumbles forth, in certainty lost, and now, in the cinematic age, lost even to his lostness. 

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.