death iv

living a life of death can include eremiticism, primary destruction (regardless of the direction of the destruction and degree of laundering), obsessive morbidities, unthinking citizenship, and many other forms of simulation.  these are the traditional and primitive forms and they interest us far less than the living death of the future, which includes moving from life to life within life to such an extent that the moving, never stopping, becomes death, and so one lives more in the moving, death, the between, than any supposed origin or destination – these false atlantises:  too solid dreams.  yet death, being always unknown, escapes us and so living in escape – from solidity of fact, idea, person, work, direction, dream – is to live lives of verdant death.

so cain was exiled to nod, the land of wandering, after the first death, and there built the first city, and all who live in death live in nod.

if one is given to being committed to no path – hardly one who is aimless and given to regret – and given sufficient opportunity to move among paths to discover that this noncommittal commitment is itself a path, this one has emigrated to the death that lives in life and the life that dies in death.  this no-path path distinguishes itself from other paths in that one has lived it and then discovers oneself on it, in death.

one does not die for one is dying all the time; as a corollary, one does not live, as far as life is normally defined, for one is too busy dying.

i write my death as i write my life, my death is written as my life.  autothanatography and autobiography, wholly embedded in one another, as they are written, create my flesh and eyes.

(elsewhere, a colleague in the industry of sadoo has been exploring new forms of autobiography and is soon to direct this energy and innovation toward new forms of autothanatography.  those interested in creatively and diversely writing their deaths – or simply engaged with the idea of this emerging practice – may wish to seek out that sadoo’s experiments in the ether.)

the void is my mother, death my father …

i write my death.  words open to the abyss.  how can i remember the first time death visited me and said i am life and you will write me, i will be your one and faithful lover?  

we make believe, but we also make disbelieve, and the free movement between the two is death.

violence – regardless of the degree to which it’s laundered through diffusion, institutions – frequently named love – and the naming enforced by the launderers, the priests of money and professions – calls forth violence – immediate, direct, dirty, unmediated by communication, education – and the former, the necessary moralists, call their clean violence good and the dirty violence bad, but from the perspective of death each is equal on the indifferent scale of time, and any hierarchy that might be applied collapses under the weight and the pressing of the calling forth.  so a human who might see these mutual violences as equal and wish to bypass them still cannot bypass violence, but must recreate it using the energies of death.  and is this not the function of art, and the love that is less frequently named, and a calling forth that speaks far from language’s endless abyss?

surely one of the great deaths is the embodied knowledge of how incompatible the good of one loved can be with the good of one’s self.

in the age of technology, we reflesh death.  aloof, clean, optional, with options, impossible, remotely omnipresent and omnipresently nowhere, sexy, urban, statistical, whatever, aesthetic, like cancer conquerable, easy, marketable, objectified, soft like soap, it has become unlike any death anyone has known.  so technology specializes in possibility, a kind of bastard poeticism.

the iliad and blood meridian, bookends to western culture, outline myriad ways to die.  but i, in the outline of my life, find myriad ways to die in life.  someone says, … multiple, shifting, self-contradictory identity in contrast to male ideologies.  but i am male and have died many times to know male as multiple and shifting and self-contradictory and i have died from these easy binaries and i die each day from the words you speak, that are spoken, from words …

to live without goals is to live in death and so destroy death as any kind of end.

de nerval died with his hat on.  hat is in death.

how many have been killed from hate.  hate is in death.

the billions burned and are burning and will burn.  heat is in death.

hunger, hunger, hunger

death iii

death subverts life not by being opposed to life but by becoming life’s shameful necessity.

i do not write with words, but death.  words are just the result of such writing, like spray from the water when a body falls into it.

to translate the dislocation of existence, the chaos of light, our center without gravity, the collapse of time into colour, the precision of imprecision, oneiric exactness, a drawing into nothing through light, to provide memorable views of nothing, evanescent, airy and tinted steam, to make atmosphere a style and indistinctness a method, to transfer polydimensional sensuous form to adimensional planes of words … all this requires continuous and continuously inconclusive negotiations with death.

science is the primarily reproducible textures we spread on death to allay our unsettling relations with it.  i remotely admire the reliability of science’s textures, but use old words to detour around the microscopic admiration, thereby unsettling myself into death.

i was never enamoured of life, but of the devouring that made life tumescent.  disillusioned of the devouring, tired of the great expressions that beautifully show the devouring, i begin to comfortably dwell in the ancient spaces of silence and solitude – these deaths within life that hide in the heart of eating.  does life inevitably seep in?  perhaps, but as into a sieve, for if i am a dwelling for death i am one with many holes.

to live in possibility is to live in death – initially ecstatic, as one blurs oneself on borders between actuality and dream – this ecstasy of eros – and then what seems to be a deep melancholy develops (seemingly replacing the ecstasy yet becoming apparent as another form), as one blurs oneself on borders between sensuousness and death – this ecstasy of thanatos.  and so this living is religious – the unchanging religious life, far from institutional ravages, scholarly autopsies, and populist sentimentalities and launderings, rooted in a precognitive swooning before nothing less than the universe itself, a place of union of art and religion, of creation and awe, of desert and verdancy.

death’s face is absence.  in a culture of presence – of having, seeing, touching, of having to have … – death too must be made present.  technology is the factory that inputs the raw material of death’s absence and outputs (through converting, branding, marketing, shipping, retailing) death as presence.  to avoid this commercial output, a human itself enters into absence, a challenging but not impossible journey, for which there are indirect guides and maps in certain books of past travelers (although the risks and pathways now, in technology, being so recent, are poorly attested, and present sojourners, whether successful or not (and who would even use in this context the word success?), i encourage to write travelogues, such as i am doing, regardless of how partial and flawed they might be, in the hope that the combined experiences might aid in the continuing project of updating the guides and maps of absence in ever-shifting landscapes and ever-altering modes of the production of death in life’s grim, drugged, and regulated factories.

to seek the desert in the city of oneself is to forge a shovel from the junk of one’s soul and dig up death and in the digging see visions of a shroud of communication, and so doubt all things.

to seek the desert in the city is to kill.  what does one kill?  illusions of finding lay slain like soldiers in trench warfare, some though flayed still gasping.

to seek the desert is not of those activities that merit grant applications, book or film contracts, sex club clubbing, monastic vowing, vowing, the attention of the doctored class, beliefs.  at most it grants eyes and fills them with sand.

to see death in all things is not teleological, macabre, pessimistic, gross; it is just poetic vision – as natural as rice or lightning, as strange as television.  to see oneself comprised of death is not suicidal, sick, hateful, misguided; it is just aesthetic mirroring – as clear as avocados or oceans, as cloudy as highways.

death ii

processes and techniques of death –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

death i

i am of the sects of hamartia and planē, these gods of the order of death.  i establish shrines for them in the houses of my words.  for to devote one’s life to wandering, to the mastery of masks and the supremacy of void, is to err in the institutions of life that enforce life as supreme, distinguishable, standard and plaque, as artifact and station, but in the open air of the dying sea, for those born of movement and theatre and night, it is to breathe.

in the world each hierarchy – even though a hierarchy of an i – is incessantly being questioned by all other hierarchies, a process of death pettily delayed in small measures of time by each hierarchy bolstering itself – this bolstering the hierarchies agree in calling life, an agreement more essential than the competitive bolstering.

a dreamer once said a coward dies a thousand deaths before its death but the valiant taste of death but once.  but i say a coward only dies once and the valiant die a thousand times.  for the valiant are not afraid of death and so die as a matter of routine, because they like it.  it seems to me most strange that humans, seeing that death, a necessary change, comes when it comes, don’t integrate such necessity into their daily lives, dying thousands of deaths and so creating what we now call death as just another one.

the key, they said, is to become so intimate with death that one can use death’s techniques against it.

but then isn’t life also subverted by means of that same intimacy?

a double subversion, they said, an experiment in the laboratory of the soul.

a key, though, without a door.

the only worthy key.

becoming posthumous – …

birth and death, being our passages, present themselves singly as the aporia of life.

death is everywhere but everywhere life is devoted to placing death in small boxes to suit its small purposes.  yet death is large and hardly confined to cemeteries and movies, coffins and dictionaries.  it rides trams through crowded urbanscapes, presides at policy task forces, seduces you in bars, lectures you in ecobiology.   death is not some once and final act, a silencing, but endless flowing. 

i write for the people of the void and so use the methods of the void and the language hardly a language of those people.

living as i have in decades of eros – which only became explicitly named such as we moved away, an inexorable migration into thanatos:  that distance, sensing initially … now i will have lived in both spheres fully, beginning as seems appropriate in eros and closing in thanatos – followed by a shaded dawning that this life of death contains no less energy than that life of life and so, as all the poets have known and written:  eros is as in thanatos as thanatos in eros:  we live dying as we dying live.

forgetting iv

forgetting precedes and follows acquiring.  all possession lives in a forever womb of forgetfulness.

a newborn’s cry is a cry of forgetting, an immediate visceral recognition of loss, a scream of unmitigated authenticity, an audioholograph of life.  yet so also its laugh.  the socialized adult’s cry and laugh are but memories of this primal forgetting, melancholic replicas, brief resort vacations in the long winter of culture.

a master of the art of forgetting is given to accusations – expert, populist, arcane, articulate, pompous, ignorant – of heresy, obnoxiousness, socio- and psychopathologies, vast dysfunctions, diseases, all sorts, puerility, insanity, irrationality, sadomasochism, and others too numerous to name.  yet forgetting is the art that births the arts that renew the world.

what could we say of forgetting other than it is hardly the inverse of remembering but the very stuff of vitality, the highlighting, union, and diffusion of opposites, blurred and blurring hearts?

forgetting is the living art of death and if one would begin an apprenticeship of forgetting one would begin with the techniques, materials, subterfuges, nature, and functions of death, even as an itamae must spend years mastering rice.

those experienced in forgetting are desolate, though not from any specific condition or event – this less because they have forgotten, more because forgetting grows most naturally and verdantly in the desert.

forgetting is nothing permanent, as one must also forget forgetting.  so forgetting is a primary technique of subversion, refusing all supremacies, refusing any whole, any end or ends, platform, settling, comfort, but for a time:  as it, serving or amusing, accepts each.

just as one cannot be truly polygamous – we are presently physiologically constructed to permit ingress only between two at a time – so we are manufactured to remember (though we may remember less than we demember, metamember, para and ‘patamember) a concatenated and transient one, forgetting infinite other ones.  forgetting is our natural and perpetual state.

art is the sector of life that uses memory to present, represent, master, and remaster forgetting.

whether forgetting or memory comprise the greater part of love is a knowing that if ever known has been forgotten.

forgetting is the art of using illusion to subvert illusion.  forgetting is memory fulfilled, a primary means of celebration without lights, desolate affirmation, plays of infinite deserts.

when chuang tzu says to hui shi – look, when you asked me how i knew the fish were happy, you already knew that i knew the fish were happy … i knew it from my feelings standing on this bridge – he advocates forgetting – not any forgetting that absolutely forgets events, experiences, names, but a forgetting that forgets all the apparati (reason, logic as conclusive realms) that solidify apparati on these events, experiences, names and so remove us from these events, experiences, names in the radiance of drift and doubt, this radiance that illuminates forgetting.

forgetting iii

all true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of beggars' teeth.  so forgetting is the only path to truth, the only portal to the unspeakable.

of one being given over to being written, can it not be said, it is on the margins of the texts the human writes, passed over by the vast apparati of productive literacies … that it is an artifact of forgetting?

the arts of forgetting develop with time in ways not dissimilar to an advance of dreams, vision futures on some hallucinogenic exchange.

yes, there is a sort of stock exchange of forgetting, through which we, shareholders of obscure investments, trade our losses to unaccounted gain.

the hierarchies with which the bulk of humans move and speak perhaps are countered by the non-hierarchies of forgetting, unstaged dramas of the eternal new.

between memory and forgetting how much distance is there?  this gap – whatever it might be – and its exploration are the stuff of the question of the human.

forgetting is abdicating the confident memories of a civilization.  before this abdication may come another – of the memories of one’s self – and after yet another – of the memories of one’s species.  forgetting is a growing, infectious, and immense doubt that assumes different shapes of knowledge … assumes altered shapes less to evolve and more to continue moving.

i forget civilization (morality, culture) not to become savage (immoral, uncultured) but to forge new unknowns in spaces of nowhere.

forgetting is a misnomer for substituting – one memory for another, one artifact or name or object for another, one purpose for another, one forgetting for another.

forgetting – a set of relations, processes, techniques and movements between opposites (visible, invisible; female, male; beast, god; life, death; nature, technology; rich, poor) – has a manual for its operations held in liminal spaces, these spaces prime real estate of desire.

forgetting the future is easier than forgetting the past, which is why we simultaneously neglect and romanticize it.  such ease is not for the apparent and false reason – that the future hasn’t ostensibly occurred – but because the future is more comprised of forgetting.  forgetting advances with time.  how can it not, with time so addicted to obese purposes?

the relations of forgetting and movement are hardly explicated.  to devote one’s life to moving is to forget even forgetting, and the well-enculturated old are unable to forget forgetting for they hardly move and thus are mired in memory, which is to say – fens of forgetting.

as a sage once said, one hardly has to stir to know the world.  yet to have once said this with any substance one must have first used mind’s immensity to travel extensively.  and a core technology of such use is incarnate forgetting as a practice.

forgetting ii

homo sapiens is not a machine or device for producing recognitions of the human, but instead a machine or device for producing modalities of not recognizing – it is (as far as we can tell) the first fleshed modality of forgetting.

the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of reciprocal blindness.  technology as ecstatic trance.  the created as a forgetting to remember.

technology is mysticism – mysticism commonized, globalized, reflected, affordable, redeemed through metal, sleepless, improvable, systematized, visible, accepted and acceptable, light, sensuous.  in short, a sleight of hand, for mysticism does not appear as these things.  mysticism does not appear.  technology is a collective magic trick of a species, a longed-for ruse.

technology is a collective human creation to remember forgetting.

if mysticism is the void behind poetry, poetry the void behind language, language the void behind the human, and the human the void behind mysticism, what is technology?  might it be the movement of this circle, the circle itself, expansions and contractions of the circle to a sphere through ruach, the sphere itself?  might technology be the machine of forgetting what is behind and the drive to expand the circle so as to prolong the meeting ahead of what has been forgotten?

it is not as if memory is simply being increasingly externalized beyond sarcous surfaces, but that its diameter is being stretched while it is equally being internalized within such surfaces:  at one point – the unseen collective black hole of interiority; at the other – vast diffused exteriority; in between – the elasticity – the human.  interiority the lost and sought memory of origins, of myth and time now recycled through factories and apparati of historical reconstructions, recreations, resuscitations; exteriority the relational facticities of which the internet and its techno-meteorological formations are the most obvious.  and so of the human?  isn’t the human neither point nor point, but an experiment in cosmological pliability, the between among points of opaque, infinite, and gaseous memories?   the human may hold nothing itself, but may only be this stretching.  memory may be a function of divine interiority and technological exteriority, the human only necessary to provide currency – that is, transmission – for it.  so from plato’s alphabetic fears to our modern post-apocalyptic dramas, there has been no necessary devolution in human capacity:  it has always and equally depended on centers and extremities, interiorities and exteriorities – the only issue being the mass the human negotiates (regardless of its loci).  what sort of risks does this bulk – its possible increase – present to the human?  this rephrasing (recontextualization) of plato’s concern, made possible by technology, shifts the ground from the qualitative to quantitative concerns … through the shifting, the tectonic linguistic-cultural disasters and displacements, the negotiations and fears, the human clings to its betweens:  the human, which may be nothing more than incarnate forgetting, this eternal between.

forgetting i

forgetting is not the opposite of memory, but memory’s vitality and operations.

we say a primary function of technology is to help us remember – but, truly, its far greater function is to help us forget.

a crisis of humanity is its historic overdependence on natality to perform its chief creative – and so intelligent – function:  forgetting.

forgetting is directly proportional to truth in a similar manner to truth being directly proportional to loss and darkness.

forgetting and time are less related through death, as humanity has been inclined, and more through emptiness, of which death is but a simulation.

forgetting is a primary portal of truth – hardly of words, hardly even of knowledge, for truth’s portals are misnamed in the marketplace and one passes by means of the arts of diminishment.

forgetting is not an act of denial – which is a counterbalance and force of memory – but an ascent of affirmation, an ascent of neither balance nor force.

are you running away again? a neighbor asks me as i head out.  i never run away but only towards, i say.  such is a call and response of forgetting.

forgetting, like unlearning, like love or art, is a path forward that seems to lead backwards.

time is a child of forgetting and volition; let go of volition to forget blood’s thorny strictures and pour into one’s empty self.

time changes, but not readily.  so the migration from solar-lunar time to digital-clock time has been bumpy, slow, bloody, with the sun and moon still there, awkwardly, in the artificial sky.  forgetting in a technological age is digital.

analog forgetting is magical but digital forgetting is factual; nevertheless, each is an equal mode of time, with its own possibilities and limits.

collective forgetting embraces and is embraced by – an embrace of living death, eros’ animate skeleton – individual forgetting.  in this embrace, original and reproduction transmogrify into one another, authenticity and simulation, being and seeming, forgetting and returning.

forgetting is an oubliette, a secret dungeon reached only through a trapdoor.  the seen stage is public and sanctioned memory, but the purchased and articulate drama is sustained by the powers of forgetting, that which is often called negligence or irresponsibility by the ostensible powers.

a given society’s configuration of memory and forgetting reveals more about concentrations of energy than any worth that might have become sacred in these configurations.

forgetting is a letting go of grasping, an un-getting, a slipping of named power, a losing from and of mind, a failing of force and story.  forgetting is renewal, protest, a way out.

forgetting is the oblivion we distantly remember, the newness, fear and awe that are a periodic table of alchemical elements of our desire.

i no longer remember – i allow emptiness to remember on my behalf:  more efficient, yes, but also – more precise.

today's topic

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