the impropriety of a hand of bananas

it takes centuries for words to separate themselves from the human that produced them, from the accidents of the living body, and become free.  So our judgements of contemporary writers are unstable and we must leave it to the yet-to-be-born to see the words apart from flesh’s faults.

heresiarch uzasoz

hallucination is a form of biographical transformation

                  why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?

            ill-informed anyone who would announce himself his own contemporary

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop …

my drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

i can’t understand why people are frightened of new forms. I’m frightened of the old ones.

it is the pen which dreams

apologia

Do i need an apology for the pieces that will follow?  No, of course not.  Creation, like its destructive twin, doesn’t apologize.  It presents.
 
I do not need one, but one is required, so please accept this disingenuousness authentically, as we do the endless artifices we live within.  A caprice on my part does not have to be a caprice on yours, for those on opposite sides of what is pleasantly called the communication chasm rarely share intent, aspect, or effect, but only signs.  Signs, and a certain mood.

Some nine years ago, in one of many fits of madness, i envisioned an intricately structured collection of 81 pieces entitled mirror mirror; they were to be radical excessive even garish experiments in language, most of them starring an elusive franz von vemeer, an urban dilettante of unknown origin, a disbeliever in mirrors.  They were, if nothing else, tectonically-rupturing descents into language, into grammars of barely contained intelligibility (or barely contained unintelligibility—on the edge i work, it makes little difference).  I completed slightly over half of these, at which point i stopped—as sometimes happens, even the fragmentation began fragmenting, the sovereignty of icy exploration began seeking its impoverishment and death, producing a continent of silence, and i left the collection, wandering in other kingdoms, until the wind that evoked mirror mirror blew me back to its malefic bounds.  As the mirror is bottomless (or, rather, its bottom is not discernible), i expected the requisite forces to converge at some point, enabling me to complete the work. 

This re-convergence began happening, as is not unusual, before i began recognizing it.  And once the recognition had begun, the forms were so different (the kingdom had so changed)—and yet shared such a deep geological structure (certain distinctive linguistic-cultural proclivities)—that, if not delighted, i was at least motivated to stay a while and see what happened.

So i placed the new forms (of which there are about a dozen so far) in the second half of mirror mirror.  But due to their difference, the inevitable changes, i felt they needed a name (or a sub-name) of their own; it became obvious that this must be exercises in saying nothing.  A work called mirror mirror should exit very differently than it enters, similar to the difference between how we approach a mirror when examining our face and how we leave.  Here are but a few (too many french, it’s true [but have not the french excelled beyond other races in saying nothing?]) of its influences (the well-read among my readers, if there are any remaining these hashtag days, can easily name more)—

erasmus’ copia (chapter 33 particularly)
queneau’s exercices de style
baudelaire’s le spleen de paris
foucault’s sexuality and solitude
bataille’s literature and evil
chevrier’s l’hallucination artistique
wood’s beyond the simulacrum of religion versus secularism:  modernist aesthetic “mysticism” (in religion and literature)
de lautréamont’s les chants de maldoror and poems
 

Here are but a few of its intents—

1. to proclaim my passionate unshatterable love for the detached compassionate capricious divinity coursing through human flesh—tappable, growable, limitless, renewable—and my faith in its ability to transform devouring flesh (not its mortal attributes but its fear of the infinite finite mortalities), not primarily through technology (though using it), but through itself.
2. to create forms that go nowhere, surprised, surprising; dramas that emerge from outside routine human drama, from these things themselves, from their forms—forms of the marrow of language:  not of us, our marrow, our gains and losses, the palpitations of our hearts, but of language’s anxieties, its holiday gatherings, family dysfunctions, its incests and love affairs and lonelinesses, quests and deserts, madnesses and laboratories, prizes and ecstasies, drugs and highs and suicides, its laughter … not about inhumans, aliens, but about humans – to modify the dominance of the human.
3. to map a land without borders, names or technologies:  uninhabitable, uninhabited, infinite and beautiful and eternally empty; to map quests for maps for such a land.
4. to build language pieces as abstract paintings, building them up with layers, achieving an effect, a mood, a collectivity of sensations and ideas, a loose confederate of images:  for all art is abstract, abstraction simply being the aesthetic term for interiority—or the perception of lived experience.
5. to attempt to reflectively sound out what most societal sounds (which we euphemistically call communication) sound like to me.
6. to describe the process by which we are forced to accept the process by which we are forced to accept living within ourselves …
7. to be frustrating pieces to learn to read, in the way that the goldberg variations are frustrating pieces to learn to play.  One might say, Well, with the gv at least once one has learned to play them they at least sound good but your exercises—they clunk like nepalese trucks falling off the mahendra highway.  But this is not true.  You have just not learned to read.  Even if you learn to read, you may yet say, Well, ok, i have learned to read, but, still, i don’t know what it means.  Sure.  But what do the goldberg variations mean?
8. one could say i’ve sought a space that is uncrowded, undesirable – desserts of deserts.
9. isn’t it at some point less that we care about ending life and more that we care about joining the dead—that’s where the action is?

Here are but a few of its titles—

the difference between a tylenol 500, a gerund, and glory

            hanaϡelah and the chair

            the story of of

            haar lof and the space and twējē

At HP, we don't just believe in the power of technology, we believe in the power of people when technology works for you. We believe in applying new thinking and ideas to improve the way our customers live and work.

If you are going to do something, Make it Matter

(or [or and] ‘the fifty-move rule’)

            (or athpwe)

            hallibl and molok

            ulica lutk

            wawn wakes up

my əld leigh goshe

            andre the giant and the strawberry

            gilberta tedeschi eats her man

Here are but a few excerpts from its reviews—

1. The positive central idea of exercises is that the human psyche, or soul, really believes in itself, and in nothing else.
2. The author is simultaneously a terrorist of the plastic soul and a supervisor in its factories.
3. These nothing stories find resolution in different keys, at different pitches, than routine narratives, resolution revealing itself when sufficient pointers have begun pointing, when a sufficient web has been spun for literary spiders to run across and catch prosaic prey.
4. I cannot help but be reminded of rimbaud’s the poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned unsettling of all the senses and mallarme’s i have no wish to pander to a reader’s need for simplification.
5. Much of this would have to do with the grammar of hiding, of hiding in itself, and of hiding in hiding.  Communicating in poetic caesuras, executive falters, journalistic gaffes, sleeps of the tongue, these exercises are prophetic—the only future grammar is a grammar of hiding. 
6. At best, a clandestine subjectivity; at worst, turds in a boardroom – as if lou gehrig’s disease had become spiritualized in the author.
7. During the late second and early third millennia, the task of interpreting the psyche and art through the written word was restricted to professional technocrats (the spiritual descendants of medieval patriarchy), specifically sanctioned as scholars, therapists and psychiatrists; to interpret the psyche and art through the senses and the body became the domain of artists.  Artists (the spiritual descendants of medieval female mystics) directly experienced the psyche and art in three classical ways: first, bodily visions, meaning to be aware with one's senses—sight, sound, or others; second, ghostly visions, such as spiritual visions and sayings directly imparted to the soul; and lastly, intellectual enlightenment, where one’s mind came into a new understanding of itself and so world.  These exercises belong to all three categories and transgress in the way that all mystics transgress when they futilely attempt to translate mystic experience into language.
8. Whitman’s song of myself has been changed to sign of myself – to what end? to what sign? to what self? to what song?
9. I see these exercises as exercises in saying it is as if—
   1. It is as if the author is translating from, say, ancient Hebrew to modern English, but trying to keep the grammar and cadences of the former.
   2. It is as if the author were given a set of random rules for each piece to establish a game inside a game inside a game – matryoshka dolls of language.
   3. It is as if Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him—as if anyone could—but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted.
   4. It is as if the author is an unidentified thief in a global mall, in which all the stores sell language, in which a theft has not happened for ages, stealing willy-nilly, hiding his goods in the sable reaches of the night.
      

      
10. These nothing pieces are obviously attempts to translate communicative human experiences—superficially common but emotionally bizarre—into a precise emotional language, avoiding (while pointing to) the emotional shorthand which is expected.  These are rupturous rapturous expressions which stuff emotional clichés where they belong—in toilet tanks in museums.
11. The irony being that what is said in society that is supposed to say something says nothing and these exercises which appear to say nothing (and about which it is said they say nothing and may very well say nothing) say something.  What do they say?  They say that a formalism that says that language is not the servant of thought but thought the servant of language is not necessarily a formalism.

I shall post these pieces, at whimsy, over time.  But the reader should be warned that my intent, as always, is not to communicate (if by communication we mean anything like participate in the common transactions of the heart and mind).  But if we mean by communicate—work toward the failure of communication so that communication can be glimpsed— … well … that is another story.

route 66

In the democratization of literacy, education, written communication—the requirement to text, blog (if one largely wishes to avoid social ostracization) pervasive, assumed—i text, i blog.  I text occasionally, transactionally, to play now and then.  I blog, at times voluminously, but not in any way that the normally literate, the normally educated, would take any interest in.  I blog—whatever they might say—not primarily as an anti-blog—a protest against any perceived dilution of language, any seeming degradation of the more noble (ah, there’s a word) aspirations of literacy, education, the orthodoxies of the mind and heart and psyche.  (I am not convinced language has been diluted, education has been debased; their loci, however, have shifted—and they are found at the edges of their names, in the necessary and glorious profanations of the sacred word and valued teacher.)  I blog, rather—though i test the verb (verbs are designed to bend and stretch)—to reveal a face of blog that may be the face it’s been trying to hide.  The computer was thought to be a calculation device.  (We still don’t know what it is.)  The internet was thought to be a tool of liberation for the masses, a binding of the high and the low, a spiritually geometric transformative tool flipping verticality to horizontality.  The blog—a mechanism to disseminate our sweet opinions, our special feelings?  Perhaps.  But i think it might be instead—

We begin today’s mystic allsorts, a kind of licorice stick at year’s start and belch, with the words of everyone’s favourite heresiarch—Heresiarch Klyssvhok:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

nine lineaments of myth

1.  Myth is not the stories that were that built our psychic habitations, but the psyche we inhabit fashioned with stories that we tell.

2.  Myth is both the sphere in which language dwells as a drifter and an antique in language’s mansion.

3.  Myth breathes, and whether it now breathes with iron or plastic lungs or breathes as cgi or the daydreams of the dead or even cancerously, choked with chronic smoke, is less important than our doubt about its animation.

4.  I would say—or i might—that myth is like the routers of the web that we don’t see and are sustained by obscure technicians, but i would rather say it is the web that permits us to see it as the thin beautiful home we spiders run across to eat, naked in the wind, and strong.

5.  It’s easy to see myth as the twilight that questionably separates night from day, day from night, but more difficult to see myth seeing from its dubious divisions.  Is this shift in seeing what we could call evolution, if we mean by this not anything like an ameliorating of ourselves?  Is our struggle to accept another vista what we call our present simulation, the virtualities we construct and crawl within to draw a bridge between impossible flesh and impossible spirit?

6.  You have heard it said that myth is the collection of stories that our collective unconscious tells or shows; but i say that myth is the living dream that reveals us in the murky shape of words.

7.  If myth were a dancer that desired another occupation, would i be a long-saved-for refrigerator preserving random foods?

8.  Heresiarch Ramololo said to me, myth talks to itself of itself.  And i said, in the way that everything talks to itself of itself or more in the way the wind appears to do so but secretly speaks of us?

9.  The question of whether we die with myth or it dies with us is not simply one of pronouns, as one might initially expect, but more of the nature of the silence that can still be engendered when encountering unexpected light.

desire and myth_________

myth __+++___+

and______________

desire_________________

I would like to explore myth not as a system of stories—or even an apparatus of apparati (narrative simply being the scaffolding around the distribution of buildings we believe ourselves to inhabit)—but as the necessary tensions we feel as a function of existence.

I would like to explore myth from the position of a human who has the consciousness of our animate history without any commensurate experience—in other words, from within the conscious databanks of a demised humanity.

I would like to explore myth as one exiled from the myth he was born into.  This is not simply a fantasy for time travel (or eternity travel, if myth and time are somehow antithetical) or the inevitable wish to step outside what one is customarily within and see that, in time, withins, as was envisioned and perhaps experienced by ancient adventurers, are just withouts in different phases of their revolutions, but i want a personified myth—one intimate, embodied, vastly collective, enthroned on exquisitely architected polymillennia jewels—to send me, for crimes against the chronological state not entirely understood by history, into a desert bereft of prefabricated words, of a tradition of images, and there construct a verbal tower of light that disturbs the dreams of my personification and draws it to the desert in itself.

I would like to explore myth from deep within the fruit of words, their varied pits, looking out, as it were, into juicy darkness, about to be bitten by a hungry consciousness, permitting a dubious air to startle my surfaces.

I would like to explore myth with the grace of one unacquainted with myth but acquainted with god, assuming grace is a faculty of those so constituted.

I would like to explore myth on a carousel populated by the animals who exist only in myth, and have them talking through the music and the excitement of the upanddowns and roundandrounds of their experiences in that shadowy world of lightful flashes.

I would like to explore myth to not reach a destination or even pretend to be aiming for one, nor to produce a map or maps of intricate beauty which somehow show the landscape of our souls, nor to say aloud on the silent bed of death that myth is stronger, regardless of its truth, nor to succumb forever to a woman worthy of her beauty, nor to know, trampled, the desolation of the saints, nor to explain, as a doctor of the mind, in mighty tomes the erasure of the face of man, nor even to see (or feel i see) in darkness a light on the horizon of the infinite distance that refuses to go out, its energy itself the source also of my need to explore.

I would like to explore myth from within the womb and watch time’s phalli appear now and then, like gargoyles in lightning in perfect pitch, and translate, unmediated, this experience into song, which would take incarnate form in a previously non-existent race which fed only on sound.

I would like to explore myth as if it were not myth but the memory of a dream of a book in a mirror that was not greater than love because it was not different from it.

exercises_inthepastperfectcontinuouspassivesubjunctive

If someone says oh she’s well-adjusted and you respond adjusted to what? or (perhaps better) adjusted from what?, what sort of answer do you receive?

In hypermodernity we don’t forage for food like our mythical ancestors; we forage for meaning, frequently with the tools of love, and find, like our ancestors, it a sparse and treacherous quest.

For the first quarter century of my adulthood, everything was easy.  Now everything is not.  The only possibly curious thing is that there’s little difference.

Did not Heresiarch Yrtadol say in his lecture to the mongeese, his ears chattering with indignation, his nostrils flared with hoary visions—The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of _{what will have been done}.

Nietzsche was right of course at the time to not proclaim god in his passionate quest, naming only the death he had to name.  The name had to die on the vatic western lips, even as Christ had to die on a pragmatic western cross.  When we use the name again, tentatively, as if it were the wind that once was, it is not as if it were the name that has been or even is now, but a name hiding in a name; it needs (in the way we speak of god needing, which is only to speak of its name needing, according to the tradition of the greed of words) to hide and always has:  hiding once in the sacred unwritten name, the holy fire; hiding now in the banal written name, the polluted plastic.  God has come down to earth and is heaped in garbage dumps in Delhi; god has come down to earth and contains your pine nuts; god has come down to earth and hides not in the elements of earth, which have lost the sacred power to hold, but the shifting, murky and irreconcilable grammars of language.

a few mumbles from a few heresiarchs

The air must move in as well as out—no sadness, just disaster.

An art that measured itself by its reflection of the immeasurable.

            The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race—of the earth—as a practical objective.

What right do i have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me?

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life, Why are you living? life, if it could answer, would only say, i live so that i may live. That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living.

It is not a question of observation which propels humanity forward as if toward a looking glass of great magnitude; it is an instance of aggrandized reflection that insinuates the human psyche to the inhuman.

            The core feature of every constructed subjectivity (what we recognize as someone’s ‘personality’) is a defense mechanism designed to resist and avoid the pain of life.

                        However it may be, life is good.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

It is the immediacy and absolute transparency of life which explains the difficulty of grasping it as a thought:  it is much easier to speak of what we see than of this invisible life, which fundamentally avoids being seen from the outside.

What is harder than faith?  What is harder than faith when it must rest on a bed of doubt in a house of ideology decorated with posters of skepticism?

The practice of mutually imaginatively ongoingly collaboratively enlisting the help of other people, animals, tools, ideas and resources as necessary—building, repairing, planning, decorating and destroying footbridges over the inevitable and shifting chasms of miscommunication—is the practice of friendship.

You’re in mourning I see.  Is your wife dead?

            No, she’s very much alive; she just lacks a body.  I mourn her perpetual amorphousness.
I’m sorry.
            I mourn also that i have to assume her burden of a body.
That must be difficult.
            I mourn also that i have to talk to people like you who don’t have a clue what i’m talking about.
Look—i was just trying to …
            I mourn that the stars don’t come to earth each night and play, that the moon isn’t conscious reggiano, that you aren’t a geranium on the tomb of someone once wonderful, that … hmmm … where did he go?

Aesthetic mysticism recreates a prelapsarian state by questioning the commonplace etiologies.

Slim solemn Salome seldom eats slimy salami while sublimely slaloming in Salem’s slums.

What do you call people who are, consciously or otherwise (and isn’t it usually otherwise?), practically prejudiced against mystics?

Mystophobes? Mysticophobes? Misomysts?
                        Misomysticism (the movement against mystics); mismystology (the study of the hatred of mystics).

What i am is the sum of imaginings of what i am, this sum the sum of the endless sums of other sums of imaginings.

I suspect he doesn’t know the code, she said to me after i expressed vague anxieties.

            In thinking about it later, i realized she probably was right, although this did little to alleviate my anxieties, for, i thought to myself (and at this point she was gone), the code provides legitimate access but what’s legitimately being correlated are anxieties and illegitimacy.  And with that i slept yet another uneasy sleep.

The clouds over the city are like the thoughts of puffy jokes never told, cruising over human absurdity, withholding their secret humor for another age.

I cannot object to the absurdity of expecting impossible things of the world, of others, of myself … for sometimes the possible sneaks through the impassable impossible.  And who are we to tell, mere and blind mortals, the conditions under which this might happen?  If the risk of failure is high, our hope also depends on it not being absolute and we sense that our greatest hope, infinitesimal though it might be, perhaps our only hope, is on the possibility of this sneaky passage, of something slipping through the brutality of time.

Someone asks me new year’s day as i’m writing in a notebook:  are you journaling?

            Well, not in the usual sense, i say.  I maintain a book.

A Woolf-inspired syllogism:

            words are useless
            words tell the truth
            the truth is useless
            the truth tells words

This translated into an effective harvard-inspired corporate model—

 

words and truth, being and speaking,		words
		are	tell
truth	is	useless	truth
	tells	words