comparative despisings

they despised them in that way the intelligent despise the intelligent, which is not the way the powerful despise the powerful, nor the poor the poor.

a vermiculology of question

10,000 rabbits are killed for humans in new zealand over easter –

what if 10,000 humans had been killed for rabbits?

why, instead of trying to get the autistic to speak, do we not learn silence from them?

earthworms can’t get cirrhosis

ideas are science (or rather technology) fiction and bodies fictions

science (  ) is how we negotiate our bodies

1. the decline of the external inhuman in the human rouses the inchoate internal inhuman
2. and should society, so responsible for this decline, then object to this rousing?
3. would this objection not take many forms – projection, incarceration, exclusion, insanitization, sanitation, institutionalization, monetization, civilization … ?

also, by the light shining out of chaos, the inhuman is guided

it does not make use of distinctions but is led on by the light

communication takes a quick toilet break

what holiness is in the movie theater, this temple and peace – waiting for a film in silence, as entering a cathedral and sitting on the still perfection of a pew … the six or seven waiting humans quiet, communication unusually negligent in its relentless global responsibilities and demands.

then, two humans enter and the one’s voice is resonant, traveling easily through the space, as he talks about his life history of biological weight, bmi, diet:  he is 10 rows in front of me, 15 seats to the left, yet he is next to me, his mouth sitting in my ear … this necessary profanity … holiness, if not aestheticized in the arc of a myth … always so brief.

what keeps me from decapitating him in my mind is that his voice is rich, unpretentiously melodious, and while his topic is ostensibly banal he is so engaged – even joyed – by his chatter – his bmi is the entire planet’s naturally, calmly ecstatic and consumptive concern! – that it’s hard not to get temporarily drawn in.  though i don’t give a shit, i want to ask him questions about his experiences with vegetarianism in his 20s, about those beets he had in morocco, about the geopolitical and historic relations between flatulence and bmi.

his voice, while never loud or aggressive, occupies every seat, the ceiling in its expanse, the ubiquitous air, of this 500-seat theater.  the nine or ten of us waiting for our sacred cinematic rite to officially begin – his companion too is obliterated – for the eight or so minutes between his entry and the film’s start, inhabit his voice and become nothing but his voice and his narrative about the mass of his meat is the world.

DeathLabs

in the migration in the mythic-historic-human complex from past to future, from power being invested in the old to power being invested in the young, and the old now foolish in their massive senescence, their technological obsolescence, the young not being permitted to nicely and biologically kill them but – yes – to sustain them as props for the stages on which they bounce – how do the old combat in this reconfiguration of energy, this simian and aesthetic comedy, this social inferno, this revitalized death?

is this not capitalism’s function and necessity?  to give the old a purpose, turning them into economic units for the young – the young’s revenge, for being used so cruelly for such millennia for the sweat and pleasure of their elders?  but now the old – if they have fulfilled themselves at all – have amassed property and savings, protected their retirements, carved a little monument of name … the established old passing their knowledge of amassment to the young (this the formal educational and therapeutic process).  but even if the coin was once tossed heads and is now tails, both sides remain bound to an alloyed currency, a pocket jingle, a cosmological flip in the indifferent air. 

and for those who attempt to simulate the air and nurture indifference in the sacred capitalistic environments in which they find themselves, environments with neither soil nor indigenous horticultural techniques, for whom then young and old, poor and rich, future and past, foolishness and wisdom, obsolescence and currency, power and poverty are all sides of the same randomness of jingling change?  what are they?

do we not see them indiscriminately driving the vans of DeathLabs through the cityspeaks of now, cackling like water bottles, blinking like cells, exiled from opposition like clinical tests on the flesh of an unknown god.

autothanatography as practice ii

autothanatography i have learned has many associated practices.  one of these, naturally, is autobiography, but autobiography transformed by death.  no longer is the account of one’s life dominated by time or even space.  language, form, loss, dream, degradation – all these and infinite other structures offer themselves as complements, substitutes, and subversions of time, identity, reputation, unity, facticity, social convention, of biography constructed according to life’s tyrannies and humanity’s relentless hierarchies … and so as much thanatography – as thanatography, being constituted in an animate form given to death, is also biography.

another associated practice is autohagiography.  in writing my life-death, i write my sainthood, the unmitigated holiness of my life.  saint genet wrote in his autobiothanatohagiography, sainthood is the loftiest human attitude.  the saint arrives at its goal if it sheds them; its expression is original, its sole basis renunciation – i therefore associate it with freedom.  as the loftiest sainthood was once martyrdom and now is its secularized child, suicide (martyrdom being impossible in capitalism, one of its many craftinesses, for it specializes in laundering and virtualizing its blood), i bring suicide into my life as a practice:  i plan my death and enact it in visions and words, my funeral becomes the stage on which i breathe.  more centrally, i build death into my relation to self and world through value and volition:  i pluralize and expand value to extents that empty any value of potency, that radically distribute value such that the human becomes what it is in distributed space:  a speck, a geranium petal, a bicycle.  i direct volition toward itself in carnivals of complexity.  such building effectively leaves me dead in society, a martyr of myself – judged, judge, journalist, spectator, scholar, protestor, crown and defense, indifferent other – the powers united, primal, pragmatically ineffectual, usefully useless, seething in voids of words.

autothanatography is the intentional and continuous denaming of myself to provide new perspectives, forms, obstacles, passages, a subverting of barriers and incarcerations through a weaving of the yes-no into new flesh.  technology, cyborgs, are for the unimaginative, the bifurcated, the scholarly.  i create a new body with the natural energies of myself.  who needs industrial complexes and pharmaceutical conspiracies and entitled academic circuses in fashions of synthetic knowledge?

and you, you so committed to life, to wellness, power, will, community, society, progress, health – i say to you i’ve lived your lives, your health, your communities.  i’ve lived the sickness and death and hatred that govern them.

living death and turning this living into writing minimizes – through death – the imprint of the i, except in that most energy-efficient resource, words, and so is ecological, contextual, non-speciest, and aligned with a reality that confers no distinction on any specific singularity or group.

autothanatography de-evolves the autothanatographer gradually through the process of removing the prosthetics we have been enculturated to associate with life without necessarily removing life.  a de-evolution travelling sufficiently back through to encounter tomorrow in nascent glory.

it returns the human to a pre-civilized state while merging the most noble aspects of that pre-civilization (a daily intimacy with existence’s core) with the most noble aspects of civilization (language), bypassing the production of waste of the between.

so daily i choose death and in this choosing find energy and life.  this is hardly some christian masochism any more than it is a nietzschean ubermenschanitis.  it bypasses the high and low by uniting both in itself.

autothanatography is protest:  against the brutality of names, against the hard hierarchies of the human, against the savage ennui of nature.  it distinguishes the human by its most distinctive capacity, combining its uncommon consciousness of death with its rare capacity to not fear death and its rarer capacity to translate this consciousness and not-fearing into language, that uncompromising compromising concatenation of human and inhuman infinity.

***

sadoo diaper and art obio, sadoos who met on a banana peel in thiruvetipuram during the overthrow of the cumhurbaşkanlığı külliyesi, are increasingly collaborating on an exercise in exercises of encountering death and birth through ripped myth, reimagining self-world in diverse ways, blurring the distinctions that the hierarchies of society and its linear obsessions with time say are the gifts we are given to work with.

what is the difference between autobiography and autothanatography then? asks sadoo diaper?

if we have done our work properly, replies art obio, this question hardly has a clear answer – both being liminal portals of possibility, even as autohagiography may very well be.

are you saying, continues sadoo diaper, that birth and death – and maybe even holiness should it exist – each being a marginal event at the center of things, participate equally in something more nameless, less articulate?

while not discounting any validity that might be resident in your words i would not say precisely this, replies art obio, but perhaps rather say … {and yet this conversation, like this blog, continues interminably and future fragments are saved for elsewhere and elsetime, for we will get no sleep if we never silence the sadoos who, despite their theories, like to talk …} …

autothanatography as practice i

long ago i realized i do not wish to think the way you think.  death is the only successful method i’ve found that provides a sufficient alternative, a kind of natural translation service into ways and structures of thought i admire.  the only method sufficiently radical, outside, playful, crafty – the one ruse life, regardless of its talents or powers, recoils from.  i crawl into death to destroy my thinking and allow death to think me.   i look at the way you think, live, write – only a few of you impress me.  all trying to follow each other.  each saying i’m in charge.  each building your life on a desperation to be recognized by a circus of the same.  you still operate according to life’s barbaric lawbook – its stultifying and petty rules which through fear and convention officially exclude death and in such ostensible exclusion diminish life.  only death is free.  only death is kind.  after years of apprenticeship – which have meant increasing self-exile from your congratulatory and cannibalistic systems – i maintain my flesh by giving everything else of me to death and so – in this sleight-of-hand that has learned from death and simulates it in that labyrinth of mirrors … that only environment death itself cannot enter other than in the briefest of moments (but this continuously):  animate flesh – survive by eavesdropping on the silences of death’s continuous and sometimes noisy transience.  i have changed citizenship.  i am of the republic of death, this world without visas or rules.  i wander among you.  i watch your antics and hear your proclamations.  you humans too scared to use the one distinctive gift of your species, your only and last gift, the one true fire, instead thinking you can depend on yourselves.  no wonder i avoid you though for the time being share your visible form – a disguise i’ve realized, a trite and amusing wardrobe.

if i am dead in the republic of the living, i can do anything but have no desire to – it is this gap – between infinity and nothing – a gap that is itself infinite, nothing, intimate, strange – that provides the most modest and efficient of energies.  recording my struggle with how to identify, harness, apply, and dispose of this energy becomes my citizenship in death, what i call an autothanatographical practice.

i seek the interstices where life and death sit down together at an unnamed table, where life’s laws and death’s disability are temporarily forgotten, and the two have become so indistinguishable that they hardly have to seek one another or define their separateness.  of course i can’t maintain such states.  i am yanked back into the prisons of life and forced into various humiliations called civilization or responsibility, the floor opens and i slip into oceans of death and have to fend off the cold, the gravity, the untaxomizable beasts, until i voluntarily accept humiliation again.  nevertheless, i seek.  and even now i find that the ocean is in the humiliations, the prison in the grave abyss, a different union of the two, a different temporary forgetting.

buddhism with its sunyata offers no more peace than daoism with its dao, christianity with its christ, judaism with its book and law, hinduism with its moksha, art with its play, business with its productivity, philosophy with its analytics, prophecy with its rage, silence with its eyes. 

i do not seek peace for peace is as illusory as justice, love, community.  they all exist, but as moments, moods, ideas, desires.  i seek death and seek it in all things, and find it – for it is always there.  most of all i seek death in myself, for, here, it is doubly at hand.  death, despite the claims of the living, offers no rest or peace to the living – for death’s oblivion obliterates all feeling.  death may be peaceful, but offers no peace; it may be kind, but offers no kindness.  it may be free, but offers no freedom.

more autothanatographical thoughts

some sunny day,

don't know where, don't know when ...

death viii

doesn’t death provide perspectives farther than asteroids and stars, nearer than super-resolved fluorescence microscopy?  isn’t it the constant immaterial material counterbalance to the human drives to build visible projections, now too vast and complex to be seen and so analyzed in fragments?  and i wonder of the reputed cleverness of the human, for it seems too often foolish to me, and to innovate without first knowing death a great imbecility no animal or god would ever do.

death dissolves hierarchical power, but can only do so through time – its chief limitation.  to overcome this limitation and yet retain death’s dissolving merits, the abolition of hierarchy and the strange equality of all things, i enter death alongside time – in art and consciousness, these alternate dimensions – and though, naturally, another limitation presents itself, the experiment i feel is worthy, and i invite others to join me and various similar experimenters housed in human form to don new forms of death – these sartorial laboratories without corporate or government sponsorship and so a new science, a physics of dream – and thus play with what otherwise appear to be sacred modes of being, these reified and ossified existences most blindly prostrate before with their very lives, and by playing see and by seeing transform.  so death is a poorly used tool and its apprenticeships and crafts hardly documented or understood.

to live a life of the imagination – of art, of creation, of possibility – without much interest in the immense and growing apparati of structures in politics, culture, knowledge, commerce, and science that dominate society is to live a life of death:  partly from the methods one must learn to use (methods borrowed from death) to circumvent society’s force, designed (inadvertently or not) to crush those who live such ways; partly because to live in such singular proximity to creation is inevitably to live likewise in singular proximity to destruction.  this relation has long been well reflected in the religious mythoi of the world’s cultures and, now, with the religious carpet pulled away, we take this mythoi into ourselves, become it.  we are shiva and orpheus, aeneas and yahweh.  let society spout wellness while it slaughters ten thousand kilometers from home; let the privileged ones argue against privilege and the diversity mongers hawk their packaged diversities … those whose home is the imagination are themselves their own abattoir and wet nurse, womb and war.

that this life given me has become a life of death – is this becoming not a co-creation between society and me:  the death in each co-creator joining to birth a new life of death?  so do not say i am responsible for the death i live.  you, you equally, live this death with me and share the birthing of its life.

i have never been better – primarily because i have never been less sure of what better does not mean.  the gap in this statement – between the first never been and the only less sure, between the first and second betters, between the possibilities of a superlative – is death.

it is true. it has come to this. and this is not unwelcome.  after all these experiences, all these humans who almost seem as one in their endless greediness, the collapse of i into distributed horror with all remittance technicized, the only thing that sustains my interest is death.  not others’ particularly, not mine especially.  but death as a mode of existence.  loss, diminishment, withdrawal.

when going one way means life and another means death, a third will be comrades of life, a third comrades of death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death and these also are a third.  why is this?  because they set too much store by life.

i have heard it said that one who excels in safeguarding its own life does not meet with plane or car crashes when travelling, nor is it touched by disease when moving through society.  there is nowhere for the plane to crash, there is nothing for the car to hit, there is no place for the disease to lodge.  why is this?  because for one who safeguards there is no realm of death.

so when a word is spoken, it dies, and so when death is lived, it goes into the grave.

at some point – the city teaches me this – i had to say:  everyone i respect … these mumbling ones … feels (so knows in their body : that knowledge) the human to be unsustainable and, so, knowing themselves to be ostensibly human, knowing the voids between this knowledge and this knowledge, stops.  this stopping is the madness and the sound, a step in a return, a protest hardly recognized in its avoiding voice, its decreation of form, its refusal of tears, its suspicion of love, its silent anger.

desolation over depression, for desolation experiences depression, as despair or death, as just another empty flower.  desolation is the soil in which sensations grow.  become desolate, and one’s garden will be vital and varied, with no care at all, but for the care of maintaining desolation … a great care.

death vii

a trick of those who combine intelligence, creativity, and an openness that resembles nothing is to – when presented with an orientation, concept, attitude, behaviour – accept the idea (orientation etc.) and simultaneously develop the idea’s opposite, its partially overlapping notions, and so on, with equanimity and equality, and through this process, when practiced regularly and so developed into a thorough discipline, such that it is embodied and has been applied to all significant aspects of thought and action, self and world re-present themselves as they are – though never directly, due to their vastness, and so their areness is nothing known in that way knowledge is now used – in their plurality, contradictoriness, offense, impossible unity.  this process, practice, this re- and representation, we could call death, for it refuses the privileges of articulate singularities, of sentient conglomerates, and lays the world-self naked and calm across the universe, almost adimensional, seemingly to the edges of the unknown margins of things

i record – how could i, who is so alive, not? – my deaths and how could i, so alive, not die endlessly?

emptiness is, precisely speaking, not emptiness – which is impossible, but a gradual and irrevocable commitment to relative withdrawal from human ascendancy.  i distance myself through relative anonymity, movement; i distance myself from religion and asceticism through art.  i distance myself from art through mysticism and eremeticism.  distance is death and by maintaining intimacy with distance, the far-near is embodied in a singularity and the experience of this embodiment – the way in which thoughts, emotions and behaviours are modified through non-committal to standard social forms and conventions – is the focus of meditation (not a particular practice but the marrow of a life) and the meditative process the subject and syntax of language

i watch myself dying and record the watching, focusing on recording with the engaged detachment i might feel in writing a commentary on a surrealistic or mystical movie – say andrei rublev, svankmajer’s alice or faust, woman in the dunes, sayat nova, persona, or satantango – i’m passionate about, knowing the passion arises in large measure due to the perfection with which the movie reveals the void-joy of existence.  i want, though with ambivalence, the writing to be drawn out, the dying to be as long as the living, combining with indistinction the love, hate, desire, and indifference i feel about any intimacy, action, idea, or feeling

i am going to be dead for a very long time and i’d like to devote my life to preparing for this

            my specialty – such as it is, for it ostensibly involves all specialties:  an impossible specialty – is the innovation and development of simulations of death, counterpoints to the otiose yet still overwhelmingly dominant and destructive dualisms of peace and war, brutality and sentimentality, life and death, master and worker, bourgeoisie and proletariat, success and failure, teacher and student

the finality of death, its singularity, is set against death’s overwhelming presence through absence – like god or consciousness, with whom death dines – as continuous and these two demarcations, fleshed by the infinite intervals between, are uncertain as to which is primarily of the imagination, which of the flesh, and so we live stretched between them; our body is the infinite intervals, our body the between

i am dead, i repeat over and over again, for months, and this saying is more living to me than saying anything like, i am alive.  it contains more freedom, more knowledge, more courage.  it permits me to wander along the infinite labyrinths of life, an unused and somewhat polished mirror

language, oh language, that which sustains and destroys me, betrays and befriends me, the far-near of technology and the bed’s abyss, thou on whom words wholly depend yet who never speaks, i hear that death is just another sound among your seemingly infinite seemings.  i do not ask you to confirm or deny this; i only utter in the manner of utterances to hear another hearing.  praise and curses.  glory and degradations.  silence and sounds.  amen