notes from a testtube desert

on ^films recently seen, ^film _thoughts recently _thought:

·         sans soleil, the first documentary i immediately want to see again, that thrills me as only the best features and shorts do, quietly advocates a lifestyle of aesthetic detachment, of a lens (more correctly, lenses) correcting (uncorrecting) vision(s):  (lenses replacing [being added to] masks in identity theory)

·         playtime, a film of futility, affirmation, and comedy:  a rare trio

·         andrei rublev:  i now view as tarkovsky’s best, a masterful meditation on art, god, time, love, politics, desire, modernity, through a non-linear story of a medieval painter-monk; one of the few films i want to call perfect

·         the pied piper of hamelin:  a ridiculously terrible film

·         alphaville:  where art, technology, society intersect in a comic dystopian scifi film noir

·         four notable romantic comedies:  annie hall, eternal sunshine, amelie, chungking express; but only one notable sexual comedy (if one ignores comic porn like deep throat) comes to mind:  conspirators of pleasure

a^p_hor_d^IT_tyacs—

the flowering of the internet:  humans rooted in the screen, the veil—now no impenetrable seduction of god or woman or man or even nature or consciousness (which also have now truly been usurped by the homogeneity of the human) but the impenetrable seduction of technology:  no birth or death, no love, but by means of the screen …

a new beatitude:  blessed are the witless, for they shall inherit.

… to continue refraining from yielding to two temptations, each aesthetic and political:   1) to reduce the plurality of narrative in content or form (other than that which my flesh inevitably bounds)—in other words, a continual regrounding in doubt (in doubt [is it not?] of the limits and whispers of flesh; 2) to raise theory, abstraction (the need to explain), to anything other than one-among-many narratives.  (The only temptation to iteratively yield to is the labyrinthine advance of flesh’s murky dictates—which roughly, opaquely circumscribe and advocate our doubt—which are our doubt, being death.)

we have bartered earth for fire, water, light.  The elements are imbalanced.

art is born of an ill-designed world …

knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life …

… live between divine forgiveness and your own torment …

no authentic art permits the response, I don’t agree; it avoids the traps of mental segmentation, the call of the collapsed one … i have to extract, reduce it to the size of something smaller, within or of myself, to then dispute an extraction, amputation.  It becomes like a dachshund arguing with the severed leg of a horse.

envy needs to be restructured into fantasy for it to be socially productive, palatable.  (reconstituting, modernizing, our psychic factories; rewiring how we transform the raw inputs of social aggression, apathy, hostility … into aesthetic outputs)

if i believed in protests, i’d protest against them.

the only standard is aesthetic perfection—not a measure of moral goodness, not even a measure.  Like all standards, itself it is not visible.  Yet what else to believe in?

the internet is democratic only for those who have negotiated the root democracies of the transient; for the rest, it is commercial and exploitive, a commercialism and exploitation which society so frequently and masochistically aspires to as if emancipatory.  One rather has to use it as a transport to bypass the (official) structures of enculturation, incarceration; to suck from it its deep nutrients.  So with all technology.

… you can get lost in others’ illusions or your own, others’ language games, your own …

the historic poetic-religious-philosophic perception of solitude, silence, darkness as the bedrock of existence … as the negotiated encounter with these, without recourse to simian forms of vengeance, as noble; what happens when communication, noise, light become the foundation built on (certain optimists would say replacing) the bedrock?  How will the new ground be tested? How will it perform? What happens as it’s stressed, becomes cracked? How is nobility being redefined? (Yes, it’s being surfaced, as all things, and so is being reorganized into a subdivision of money, a star on its walk of fame.)

… when you live in darkness, the shadow you cast is made of light …

since no longer was there any authority that legitimates, it has become this no longer that legitimates …

the deck is large and who would not use the alice card as necessary—the card that trumps even trump … (isn’t society a competition to hold a hand composed entirely of alice cards? and don’t we all fail, this failure one form of an authentic [emotional] democracy?)

idiocy is like a hollywood movie—it requires a large production of people and money to make it happen.

if only the self burns in hell and the self is unlocatable, unidentifiable, indescribable, it may be that there still is a hell but there is no self and so nothing burns …

            (blood meridian’s cold currency, fire)

the coincidence of nietzsche (1889), modern physics (1896), aesthetic reconstruction (1913 – 22), the atomic bomb (1930 – 1945, flowing from physics) … the collective human spirit makes a giant collective stumble forward, (for humankind? for anything? [objectless stumbling, perhaps the only authentic stumbling—a kind of secularized gita]) …

social normalcy, respectability, is frequently achieved by bullying one’s way into a corner of the human cosmos and devoting one’s life to defending, buttressing, expanding that corner:  this process called civilization, its detached description an aspect of art.

some hundreds of years ago, man swallowed the clock, internalizing time; now humanity swallows the computer, internalizing eternity:  is it not this mixture of elements in our bellies that necessitates the present spiritual indigestion …

the artist is light and soft, like an oyster; it develops, slowly, a hard dark pearl to protect itself against the incessant irritation of the demands to kill itself—that is, to reduce its innate sense of teeming multiplicity (of world) to the stupid solidity and request of a single grain of sand … (but the masses’ lust for pearls, for pretty spheres …):  this abrasive dialogue in the substrata of desire …

 overhead conversations:

in a bar:

she:  people like birds

he:  i like birds a lot

she:  {unintelligible}

                  he:  i just don’t get them …

in a café:

look, we’ve got three maximums:  regular maximum, extra maximum, and maximum maximum

meta- is all that remains:  there is no metaphysics, only meta-; no metanarrative, only meta-; with the dissolution of substantives, only prefixes … (lyotard’s metanarrative collapse combined with baudrillard’s hyperreal:  the hypermeta, the metahyper, the posthyper, historiopost, uberhistorio, …)

the insecticidation of humanity:  the buzzing of endlessly competing and incompatible narratives, many of which are and must be largely incomprehensible, as little different than mosquitoes, wasps, fruit flies …

care is a form of harm minimalization, a reduction of damage … or at least its maintenance at present levels …

dogs have become handbags, or at least handbag accessories … animate&hairy birkins …

yoga:  your orgasmic guru airhead

most relationships:  alliances of tedium, carnages of possession, structures of veiled terrorism …

the toronto special:  a 39-storey tower, with no 13^th floor or floors with 4 in the unit space (thus 34-stories) …

… what do the people clap for when they clap?

everything you inhabit was whimsy once; today’s law and truth, our precious modes, committed patterns, are built from and on yesterday’s whimsy …

the soft strings of language, which we pluck to still the ragged scream of time …

everything is possible, possibility a function of vision:  even death is possibility, especially death—the furthest reaches of vision … hence our fascination with it, not in blood (for blood is as impossible for us to imagine as a macbook air was for citizens of the thirteenth century) but in our incarnated dreams—in film, television, video games, all forms of news and media, therapy and psychology, in the technourban soundscapes we inhabit—fascinating in concept, as we were once fascinated with God.

how can one be committed to any idea?  Ideas are hardly committed to you.

it’s quite reasonable to postulate in these hypermad days, overgrown with weeds of conformity in the name of freedom, with ubiquitous bombs of balm, that only those not pretending to be mad are mad …

society grants individuals as much slack as time:  with both accumulating, accelerating, the citizen counteracts the double increasing tension typically through money, pharmaceuticals, work, entertainment … the artist, to the extent it doesn’t use these, must find other means:  cracks in time’s edifices, peepholes in society’s walls, sinkholes in culture’s pavement …

an ode to a high digger:

         how time times

how time times, timing

how time times, timing, timed

to have a book which contains a table of contents which refers only to tables of contents:  a book of possible books … the referents not random and whole, as in the library of babel, but encyclopedically exhaustive in suggestibility:  so we would accept the parameters of possibility suggested by these taxonomies as we do our present society through its artifactual and conceptual summaries, with little ability or time to ever independently explore the evidence.

significant books from a rough onset of postmodernity—

blood meridian

(’86: the last authentic literature of unity, bookend of the iliad and the bible, of western civilization)

the book of questions

(’63 – ’72: the first authentic literature of fragmentation, born of the holocaust)

the waves – orlando

(of gender and identity)

waiting for godot – proust

(of a new spirituality of infinite waiting, of a subsistence of time and its subservience to memory, of a deconstruction of linearity, a subjugation of the line)

ulysses

(of the reconstitution of society and language)

the second sex

(of a new pandoran psychology)

kafka – borges – nietzsche

(of a new urban forest of symbols and dreams)

alice in wonderland

(of the union of mathematics and art, science and fancy)

straightup poetry excludes itself, for it by nature must be insignificant

but when we ask for a list of significant films, paintings, albums … ! … the list is significantly longer …

the age and weight of an art:  modern technology spreads open, cracks, all the arts except literature which, as the first art that was also a technology, seeks its proper revolution not in technology, that which opened its siblings, but in the dark forces that spawned it, an odd return to that point in its revolution when it was a point … a coupling of innocence and guilt on the present desert of language …

 

^{coming soon to a dream near you—}

^the pathologization ^of _di^ff_E^re_n^ce

                a          the projection of acceptance onto the visible

            b          the transference of christian dogma into the secularized psyche

            c          the roots of the fear of plurality

            d          the desperate competition for sanity

            e          our inability to find a proper home for death

            f           the technicization of aesthetics:  a matter of geometry

            principles of a quantum spirituality

                        thoughts on religion, science, time …

            world war iii and other stories

three traumas

advocating a psychic periodic table of elements

questions for the book …

I only had eyes for the infinite.  I tended to let the days pass by.  They punished me.

heresiarch alben

The writer alone decides his own death, pledged as he is to go through with the task he set himself:  to have us read the blank universe at the price of the instant.

heresiarch brudenhöffer

 

 

Is not every thought a prisoner?  Thought is set free by another thought, an accomplice.  All we do with the latter's help is change jails.

heresiarch nuck 

 

 

The body adjusts to death, the soul to life.

heresiarch woondaŧœƫǣ 

mister loungechair being coy

 cat and man play under-the-door eye games ...

factory of light, factory of darkness

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

fact^ory ^of light, fact^ory ^of darkn_eess  

(in elusive instalments)

I am unable to separate art from god; so my desire to see and be seen can only be met in life—which is the attempt to love and be loved.  Art, like god, is of a space so pure it is committed to creating a detour around the rights and tears of eyes.

Art is the shadow of god, even as god is art’s shadow.  Life—its eyes, the igneous eruptions of love—is the shadow of neither god nor art; it is the shadow of nothing and casts no shadow, for it only bears a blood relation with death and death is death only be virtue of being a shadow of itself.  This is what justly terrifies us about life:  it is eyes, random lava and hardening—in which we seek for shadows, for shade, for respite, but find only the endless onslaught of light.

            Goethe’s reputed last words … more light, more light …

                        The gooey comfort of the television, the internet, storefronts, the city in its effulgent sleeplessness.  Life’s bloodless consummation.

Money, in its minority tangible and majority intangible (electronic, digital) forms, gathers from across the globe’s currencies into a virtual factory, whose only output is light.  Poetry too (for it must) transacts with this factory and is not unacquainted with its procedures—aspects of the poet’s utility.  But how can the poet be in love with this factory, its productions of light, its standards, exchanges and white blindness?  The poet is in love with darkness, the darkness hiding in the kernel of words, which money—despite its machines of volition, its trucks of drugged desire, its insured and polished efficacies—has not yet been able to penetrate, drilling though it has been for millennia at the cunning smoky shells of words.

The poet, like the merchant, politician, custodian or butcher, has its task—eternal, unalterable, from certain angles; constantly adapting to its shifting contexts, from others.  Like all professions, it allows for various temperaments and orientations, yet still is oriented in its own ineluctable ways.

We could say that the merchant is oriented toward exchanging services for money, the politician laws for money, the custodian cleanliness for money and the butcher meat for money.  So—whether we venture into prostitution, priesthood, the professoriate or podiatry—we find that money is the one side of the scale (of human justice, in a sense, as it maintains a rough equilibrium between individuals, classes to which they belong, society at large, and even—for the enduring professions at least—what we might call civilized history).

Money—society’s common denominator and sacred language (sacred, for it is not spoken, but speaks itself)—provides the mobile ubiquitous generalized legitimacy for more transient localized and specific legitimacies.  (While the Internet challenges certain notions, particularly of space, it has not yet fundamentally altered them).

By money it is certainly not meant any reduction to cash, or even money in its now primarily virtual forms.  Money is a structure of the soul.  A structure that is oriented toward using words to the end of things that are not words; it wishes to trade words in for other things.  In poetry, the soul is not an exchange but a lake without borders, without land, unrippled in itself, vulnerable to being disturbed by words.  Money is necessary to maintain the holy ecology in which the lake resides—what we might call flesh—an ecology which seems to seek language, to disturb, it seems, the lake.

So in money the body is composed of money; in poetry the body is composed of seeking, seeking for a vision of a lake brought to life with words and stilled by silence.

The poet, however, regardless of how it lives, what it says, how much it talks, bypasses money in its vocation (which is, most wholly, its life); it encounters it by accident and so must find justice by other means, the seeking for this law and balance a frequently treacherous and sometimes deadly enterprise, one which society is typically indifferent or ambivalent to, as the poet seeks for what society can only provide transgressively—outside of its sacred apparatuses, those established and maintained by money.

The poet, then, seeks to balance its work—not butchering, mopping, legislating, arguing or haberdashing, but language—not with money (the common trade) but language and so, in this balancing of like with like, but a like that in its vastness includes myriad subtle unlikenesses, it falters, as the structures and processes of language—so readily available, encouraged and rewarded for the butcher and lawyer if they are the least bit competent or fortunate—are vague, elusive, and discreet for the poet; it must seek with shifting, unlabeled and often unexpected and unknown tools, reaching frequently into the realms of the dead and yettobeborn, with the usual risks of such enterprises, excavating, sourcing materials, fuels, that find their way into its shop to manufacture materials, fuels, of equal worth and substance.  Considering the extreme and bulky irrelevance and unworthiness of much of this material, and the rare impossible glorious malevolent concatenations of the divine, the poet can spend much of its time vainly seeking and sorting, weighing, overcome with doubt, overcompensating with arrogance, flung like bills in a storm between environments not necessarily described as hospitable.  That the butchers and politicians attempt to pathologize the poet and remedy their imposed pathologies with an array of pharmaceuticals, operations, ostracizations, marriages, religions, incantations, forms of weighty and innumerable description, then wonder in astonishment or scorn (if they are still capable of wonder [they are still capable of scorn]) why the poet wails, rants or hides against or from them—well, the able poet must use even unusual inputs as material, if it can.

If it can? It must.  Poetry, like money, is a factory, transforming the world’s jewels and garbage into words.  Poets are workers in the dark factory of words, even as merchants are workers in money’s bright factory.

Money, as a vastness, as that which can trade in language but not subsume it, as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through social scrimmage—devout negotiations:  building and maintaining given and battled-for positions—demands to be a totality and so, in its reach, desires to embrace its only true competition (not God, as Jesus would necessarily have had it [necessarily because of the way time unfolds in space] but language, as that which birthed God).

Language, as a vastness, as that which can trade in money—at least as but one of its aspects—as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through scrimmages in the void, demands, though in different voices and on different paths, to be a totality and so also reaches to embrace its only true competition.

One can reconcile this seeming dispute between two seeking totalities by modifying Jesus’ clever retort to the scribes and chief priests and say, with and beyond and before him—Give to money that which is money’s and give to language that which is language’s … and this is not untrue.  (No Manichaeism, unless you want it to be; this bifurcation can just as easily be the secrets and manifestations of desire, diverging in name as they issue forth, mystery and gateway and way of ways.)

We might also attempt to resolve the seeming antithesis of these totalities by discovering a more legitimate or antecedent claim by one or the other.  Did money, for example, precede language in time, even as First Nations preceded Europeans in North America?  Does language have a greater or deeper share of being than money—or is this a question only language can ask?  And what might the criteria be to judge any historical or ontological merits?

But.  Should we not stay on the shores of this dubious ocean, on the edges of the waters of knowledge, frolicking in the sands of doubt, building castles of words alongside knowledge’s monsters?

So the poet is always between the elements, between land and sea, air and fire, forced by blood to trade in competing factories, of dual citizenship, exiled into no particular home or habitat, a sojourner in the darkness that is the bed and roof of stars and worms alike, seeking to make itself, its very soul and body, a hospitable environment not for itself but words in their farflung hermitages across the inarticulate infinity of space.

henry moore sculpture centre

11 figures, wombs of stone, like the charred of auschwitz, eyes dug from death before death was named, lie strewn, almost casually, disregarding.

11 figures, neither of word nor opposed, without memory, without dreams, lie on their random pedestals, in a gallery of moors with night for walls, indifference for a ceiling, unmeasured time for a floor.

11 figures, as if they are acquainted not through anything resembling knowledge but in their geometric relations and the nature of their eyes which do not meet, lie in a gallery, without purpose, uncouth.

11 figures, though in a space that could be fathomless, seem to consume space, not through any sight, for no one sees, but through the presence of a quality that might be a function of their being stone.

11 figures, of a poverty so vast they would be saints if it weren’t for the lack of word and regard and function, lie in silence as you do in hope and pain.

Their faces—though this is too friendly a name for what might be claimed to be an aspect of their uncanny heads—somehow point to the palette of the human heart, without colour, expression, experience or capacity.

11 figures, notwithstanding their lack of legal rights and freedoms, are chained to a law that knows no rights, to a freedom that resembles black’s freedom to be black.

11 figures, belonging to various clubs of dismemberment and mutilations so unorthodox we might recognize them only when mad or in the pit of love, lie, as if they are exhausted by their very immobility.

11 figures, with holes for brains and hearts and eyes and gods, are and have been—though to be is too strong a word for such conditions and are and have been require a tense not yet available in language—of this gallery bereft of names and limits and will be.

11 figures, women, erotic in their unattractiveness, some wearing dresses, others outside of fashion, are as if they themselves were born of something that preceded stone.

11 figures lie—can we say in wait in such conditions?—and could we—if we were ever capable of entering a space that wasn’t full of waiting—say what lies so heavily upon them, who lack our hearts?

the comfortable numbing of art

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

th_e c^omf^ortabl_e n_umbing ^of art  

(in elusive instalments)

As the cliché goes, art no longer has the power to shock.  This is true only in certain respects, however (art is lost if it loses this power, the power though becomes hidden at times).  We might say the cliché is true in content, but not in form—or, rather, in the forms that have been usurped by money and that art has allowed to be usurped; that is, shock remains possible only in the forms that still permit of transgression (yet this is always true:  it is art’s task to seek for the forms that still so permit).

To see these forms, one has to look at the present orthodoxies of art.  There are no heresies in words themselves anymore, no dogmas, no taboos.  I can write about sodomizing the Queen of England in the Vatican, with my mother eating shrunken baby head cereal on a nearby chaise longue and only a puritan would blink.  One can publish anything in the traditional ways (or even the neo-traditional ways, such as e-books) and amuse, titillate, but not truly shock (other than those time-warped in regressive cultural bubbles; those who are still, shall we say, aesthetic cannibals:  The Satanic Verses is a sufficient illustrative case).

What, then, is expected of the writer who wishes to follow in the ancient path of poetry—which is to challenge the collapsed present to see (and there is no more painful or shocking act than sight)? 

Simply this:  that she seek to make their words known in ways, in packages (in non-packages, post-packages, neopackages, apackages), that have not been pre-approved, prefabricated, by our culture.  The new forms for art to explore, in order for it to shock (and not for shock itself, of course, which is a kind of aesthetic pornography, but in order to continually seek itself, which is its task, in the broken glass of the world), are to handle its cradle-to-grave production according to a vision born outside of the expected packages.

(This is what our adefinable book, t⁵, and its forms of release—the secular sadoo and other means [some named, some not; some accessible, some in–)—attempt … and why their means are inseparable from their words, their aesthetics from this psyche.)

            Also why this poet must accept an abyss between words and money, for money is ^the orthodoxy incarnate, the heavenly judgement seat … and poetry, while knowing orthodoxy, must follow the way of vision, the way of the eye …

(We don't speak of shock in the common way, but in the way that one speaks of terror, not in relation to a thief in the night or the blair witch project, but the trial. A soft shock, one that might only be felt if lying on the bedrock of the world.)

In other words, money has been clever, as money can be (in a limited way, a way it markets as unlimited).  It has segmented art, claimed it as a cut of its carcass (even the prime rib of its meat!), created a subdivision within itself through a (hostile?) takeover, a centuries-long M&A; it has defined the book, assumed control over its factors and means of production, and subjugated aesthetics to biography (vision to name), thereby chaining the eye to a rock as opposed to permitting or even facilitating its natural flight.

The joke of course—and if it is not the joke it is at least one of the jokes—is that art’s transgression—even when it is accomplished—is only transgressive to those committed to money’s packages and productions.  Only money permits transgression for only money is sacred.  One detects the devout, the pious, by spotting those for whom transgression is still possible.

Poetry is the deeper sacred, that which can violate itself and not be offended (or at least be offended and also laugh), that which is indistinguishable from (or knowingly bound to) the profane.  It is this indistinguishability, this knowing boundness, that violates money, for money demands separation (of people, buildings, gods, means).

So the most complete poets may be those exceptional ones—Euripides, Chaucer, Shakespeare are obvious examples (who may only be possible at certain convergences of history)—who appear to follow money’s path while following poetry’s, thus mirroring the soul’s peculiar and pyretic navigation through society’s arbitrary labyrinth, money’s middling maze.

a dialogue with father william

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

a dial^og_ue with fath_er william  

(in elusive instalments)

Your only asset, desire, is the common trade of everything, so you cling to its value as if it were the supreme and only good, denying its tortured past, the raining thorns of its present, the whimsical frenzy and blood of its future.

You extract desire’s tweets and smiley faces, place heaven on one side of the scales of lonely justice, automobiles and securities and veterinary-approved dogfood and penetration on the other, and find them equal.  You bury desire’s night, its true and other side, in two dimensions, in the planet’s unpronounceable names, in the video of nature.  You launder it with expedia and booze and the registered denial of night.

You purchase culture as a mask to cover the maggots of your face.  You drop art like an addict, as if its names could save you.  You hide behind the towers of noise, in selves of fearful nothingness, a sleight which only works because of our mass hiding, an efficacy requiring years of education to accept.

These are the necessary lies that are truths not from their falsity but from their necessity.  And if we were to imagine another necessity, would it be as false or true?

Little can be said concerning the destiny of humans.  Yet isn’t this all we speak of, in the flashing carousel of words?

This gap, between the vastness of what cannot be said and the vastness of what is, i call our sadness.  Isn’t this gap the poet’s home and the death of gods?

Money is the bridge over the gap between the two vastnesses, the soil of gods.