toke ee-eye-ee-eye yo

english signs frequently amuse; a sampling –

• this is the very steak, the big cut of steak
• italian tomato cafe jr.
• we are going to construction on coming 12nd of february. it will be make noisy a few times.

tokyo is all hospital. surgical masks are the baseball caps of the world’s largest richest yottalopolis, adumbrating pandemic as the newest hippest sport. 20% of the populace routinely wears them.

the fashion on the metro is as bland as the tube’s – browns, blacks, greys, dark blues, contrasting with the bubble gum pink and manga lime that dominate those other nipponic dimensions.

the bulge and sprawl of this place like a five-star god gulped by and digesting in a constellated arcade. tokyo isn’t pomo, it’s pofu (postfuture).

in paris one’s compelled to piss everywhere – a rite and sophistication of sorts. here, if one were to pull out one’s dick in even the most deserted street a shinto priest would surely appear, saying no piss no piss ...    ... bowing, bowing ...    ...

japan is easier to enter than amerika. the Empire’s border umpires scrutinize me as if i might be carrying a copy of the koran and hiding in it a t-55 tank, a blueprint for the miscarriage of texas, and a load of banisteriopsis caapi. the immigration and customs people at narita look 15 and nervous, as if they’d like to apologize for the geopolitical necessity of this impolite ritual. i am of course no more on japan’s side than amerika’s – they each are genetically jurisdictionally modified vegetables i snack on to supplement my usually strict and robust psychic-aesthetic diet.

a metro – at least one of any size – grounds a city. lost aboveground, weary, blistered, this moving matrix of mercantile production, mapped infinities, i descend into any frequent staircase and am immediately at home. even in a large metro like tokyo’s, its graspable finitude – about 285 stations and 13 lines – is readily mastered and i can moor the airy limitlessness of urban supraterranean life in the colourful countability of a numbered subterranean system, which is so impeccably and thoroughly – even anally! – signed i don’t hesitate directionally once during my tenure. i’m never lost below the soil. above ground, i can’t find anything. chthonically yours.

shibuya (shinjuku ...) i expect to overwhelm times square but it doesn’t, other than in its scramble – a choreographed technical animation, dance of a hive, auto and human rigorously symbiotic. new york’s central absurdity does neon, achieves a gawdiness shibuya doesn’t seem interested in. the latter is a lit-and-technical brand-and-buy outdoor mall; times square is religious vertigo, the light of heaven dragged and chained to earth, the new jerusalem of spectral vision, god on broadway bodway.

my insignificance in solitude in nature is mathematically matched, jurisprudently balanced by my insignificance in tokyo. despite the mono-ethnicity (i see a few aliens for every few hundred japanese, a non-diversity that would be more offensive if it weren’t for the city’s obvious techno-cosmopolitanism [the world is here, just not in flesh – or rather not in flesh’s legacy bestial signs]) ... as a rare caucasian i am wholesalely ignored. in mexico city, marginally more diverse – particularly on its metro – i am often stared at. the blasé of being at the top?

i transit globally to feast spiritually on my nothingness – this gigapolitic a trans-creation on that sticky theme of consciousness flickering on the immeasurable screen of night.

it’s 2200h – late rush hour. tokyo’s metro closes soon after midnight to accommodate straggling commuters, hardly for the drug and party crowd. there’s no smoking on the streets except in designated areas. no one jaywalks, crosses against red lights. i see nobody eating or drinking (even water) on the metro or outside. 2 or 3 white-gloved transit attendants line every subway platform and if i inadvertently break a regulation one instantly appears, its arms in the form of an x. the place reeks of obedience.

intermittent digital reassurances appear on metro cars – in case of an earthquake, stay calm – a thorough plan is fully in place

• throughout the city elevations above sea level are posted – some are as low as 0.3 meters
• the pacific is right there. so is north korea.
• ... and where is the plan for all those three-star michelin restaurants? who could stay calm if tokyo loses its #1 spot in food?

does the beast yet survive in this cacophony of hyperorder?

well, there are women-only metro cars so that females can ride without being groped.

in the washroom cubicle at the meiji jingo shrine there are heated toilet seats but no soap for washing. having shat, once outside, i rub dirt on my hands making them look shit-splattered, deteriorating the situation on the 10-minute walk back to the metro by rubbing leaves on my hands, spitting on them, rubbing more. i look like a scatological wreck by the time i make it to soap. all this on acid and the anniversary of the founding of the nation. i don’t know if emperor jimmu would have been pleased ... but i’m as blapper happy as blotter paper.

the hostel i stay at has –

• in the toilets integrated machines that do a pantheon of functions from the convenience of a seat-side panel:  warm-water bidet with adjustable pressure, front and rear hole options, modifiable odour-reducing deodorizer, flush music sound with volume control to muffle any rude ass audio
• a communal bath (divided by the sexes), available mornings and evenings, in which it is mandated that you’re naked
• provided slippers, which someone replaces each day and neatly arranges at the foot of one’s bunk
• me as the only westerner among ~150 guests
• a lock-in from 2300 – 0600h
• families! scores of children, as if school trips from japanese hickland flit here for outings ... i saunter to the washroom to go pee one evening and battalions of screaming pyjamad 5-year-olds tumble polydirectionally in the hallways, whirled in that pre-bed ecstasy only the biologically young can pull off with such reckless grace
• ... families ... children ... and middle-aged traveling used sushi salesmen, who belch, fart, bellow and snore like antediluvian sumo wrestlers ...
• ... everyone’s in bed by 2200h and stirring by 0500 ...

where am i?

lost in ratiocination

a lead piece from an

in-flight entertainment magazine –

 

once a research shows that the less privileged students are not the only ones that are more likely to be bullied in class. anyone not ordinary enough could be left out, including geniuses. although it’s commonly perceived that outstanding elites do not have issues and they are able to address their own problems, is it so?

 

there are people who prefer to be alone. they rarely have eye contacts with others and the facial expressions of others are incomprehensible to them. in addition, they are particularly meticulous about what they are interested in. they don’t care about people around them or the social norm.

 

in the movie, the accountant, ben affleck plays the math genius, christian wolff, who’s diagnosed with asperger syndrome.

 

china airlines presents the accountant to all of you who are unique and extraordinary out there.

 

a'a'a and the volcano

a’a’a is from ha’apulī’imokenu’u. her brother is i’i’i and he has a twin called u’u’u. when a’a’a is three her parents – e’e’e and o’o’o – move to kipimule’ēlopohahanapolu. a’a’a is not happy in kipimule’ēlopohahanapolu. she is sad.

 

confused, lost, outside of happiness, she travels alone to mount li’āmihuno’okepupu to consult the oracle in the crater in the lava to see what she should do. but when she gets to mount li’āmihuno’okepupu and to the oracle in the crater in the lava the lava is cold and the crater filled and the oracle silent. if i was lost before i am truly lost now, a’a’a says to herself. and she maintains a vigil for 40 days and 40 nights, eating only ash, drinking only vog, waiting for the lava to flow and the crater to be a crater and the oracle to speak.

 

and – behold! – after 40 days and 40 nights, a’a’a, as close to death as someone in that situation can be, the earth opens to expose the fire in its heart and the voices speak from before the time of a’a’a and i’i’i and u’u’u and, yes, from before the time of e’e’e and o’o’o, and – yes upon yes! – from even before the time of ha’apulī’imokenu’u and kipimule’ēlopohahanapolu and – believe it readers – if possible (and it is possible) before the time of mount li’āmihuno’okepupu, and they say in their voices that are not voices and yet speak:  a’a’a, climb on the back of the fire of the heart and ride with us to pihapukomenalī’i or what is sometimes called nana’aholikenomupo or rarely but hardly never mahū’olapi’ekano or in the ancient tongues wanders without a name.

 

and why should i go with you to mahū’olapi’ekano or nana’aholikenomupo or pihapukomenalī’i when i have been living in kipimule’ēlopohahanapolu with i’i’i and u’u’u and e’e’e and o’o’o but longing for ha’apulī’imokenu’u? says a’a’a.

 

but the fire in the earth does not answer and a’a’a climbs on the back of the fire of the heart and goes with the voices to the ancient tongues without a name.

gently fall the subway cars on indifference

across large swaths of society the sane are routinely, unquestioningly separated from those insane or questionable, the normal from the abnormal, eccentric, strange, objectionable. as i dig around in these separations, what is mostly meant is that the sane, the normal are middle class professionals. doesn’t matter whether they’re black or white, male or female, hindu or secular, gay, straight, bi …

next phase diversity challenges? technocapitalist inquisitional homogenization?

i no longer need to think of my body for my body is nature and nature doesn’t think of itself. and the world is in my body as it is in a bear or a patch of grass or the moon

i took 25 years to find my voice and as i found it it began tiring me. so i give the found voice up, seek voices far outside, wearing them as passable fashions

the metro mobs i used to avoid i now join freely. traveling transit in rush hour becomes a fascination, novelty, a ride on the ride called otherness, meditation, lucid dream, comedy, living anthropology class, a question and awe … what is this species?! how can its modes be mine?

as we build more and bigger dams across the earth’s physical rivers, so we build more and bigger dams across the rivers of the human psyche – the flow of emotions, passions, drives, now channeled, diverted, managed. so if i feel depressed, despairing, anxious, schizoid, hyper, manic, lethargic, suicidal – all these are something to be labeled, diagnosed, analyzed, possibly pathologized, overcome, corrected – transforming me (through whatever means – work, pharmaceuticals, therapy, religion, yoga or exercise) into an avatar of happiness

the dams grow, with consequent environmental damage

and the techniques (if these are what they are?) for simply (is this the adverb?) allowing the river(s) to flow (rapidly, slowly, stagnantly, vortically, …) without judgment, damming, without pulling others into my river – yet an interest in accepting the environment within, becoming acquainted (even intimate) with the landscape, describing them possibly – or at least the sensations aroused during wandering – as you would a river near your home, a river you love?

but who has time for such exploration? for – yes – exploring takes time. but dams demand time be used for building more dams. exploring takes risk. but dams demand that risk be subject to risk management models and governance. exploring requires flawed or missing maps. but …

western philosophy – that moated walled fortified edifice:  an unbalanced input in history’s mixing console

only once the majority of humans were urbanized could the statement everything is political make sense; spend sufficient time alone in nature – increasingly a rarity and privilege – and such statements dematerialize

love, once such a

meteorological

wrestle,

slips into

its wardrobe,

changing clothes

meanwhile,

rain falls in a northern

january

and

a sadoo

walks gently

this month this time

january is sleep and death and dream

i travel to sad, snack on terror,

wash on ruins

everything talks but only the trees listen

they keep their secrets

each day i count the seconds of extra sun

it is cloudy most days

i dream and sleep and die

where are the schools?

not the analysts, pills, doulas, degrees

but the classes of dying dreaming sleeping?

there – the trees, they are dying

the sun it is dreaming

the earth it is sleeping

let me learn from them

can i reach them? can i see them? can i touch them?

they are here, in my body

in my deaths and dreams and sleeps

necroaesthetics

she is solitary. under a lot of pressure. committed as ever to her cause, but i would imagine feeling somewhat defeated, tired, and pissed.

            this princess leia pez dispenser

writing – and by this i mean poetry, writing’s conscience and concupiscence, not poetry necessarily in any substantive sense but that which breaks through language the spirit of language in the human – lacks volition and in this lack substitutes desire. that poetry seems to be contained in that other writing, and that in this, gives writers a distinct advantage and disadvantage alongside other artists. with the former, they work with the most common human element – so always (ostensibly) available; with the latter, the inbred schizophrenic choreographies are so omnipotent, omnipresent, and impotent that the work is constantly falling into itself, this element so polluted by history who can still give oneself over to it?

let it all be animal, my life and death, hard and clean like that, anything but human … a lot i care, me with my red heart in the dark earth and my tattooed feet following the animal ways

i am now beginning to understand the languages of dreams and fungi more than the human languages ...

the chinese poet du fu in 758 complains about his office job …

i am about to scream madly in the office

especially when they bring more papers to pile higher on my desk

a problem with and enticement of interiority is that one can reach the abyss with sufficient time and work (this perhaps is the record of mysticism and poetry); the abyss, though, is always just beyond, with exteriority … isn’t this why we’ve migrated from poetry and religion to prose and science?

            though this just beyond – is it not just a just beyond hiding in the reaching?

even with 7.5 billion of us vertical now, the human dead outnumber the human living 14:1

i wiggle tubes into the heat of my decay, suck on them. what cold fire. i almost don’t need food. food makes me sick anyway, makes my gut curl into itself, my ass splutter its garbage. i eat the vapours of myself and become some elemental thing. my eyes are a periodic table of putrefaction. i record my rot, the artist-i a coroner, the rest a body farm.

exhibition is a practice to produce permanence, to arrest decay

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earthearth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwflate capitalismhttps://www.versobooks.com/books/1570-24-7 and the ends of sleep

tosf - art obio

the online sadoo family – #6

autoarto:artoauto - Art Obio
http://artobio.blogspot.ca/

1. we’re born from oneness and die to it, live between in hapless fragmentings
2. life, our lives, are unities we can’t directly see but can be felt in rare or occasional moments, what some call mysticism, romance, friendship, war, work, love, fucking, art, god, nature, sport, …
3. integration, wholeness are experiences, attitudes we can orient ourselves to fully and joyfully, this consummate light, omega puncta, noosphere of noospheres
4. unity in any form other than the transient and ephemeral body is a monist illusion, a hangover from some more primitive and less knowledgeable age, an old and tired language
5. i am one and not-one, not-one and many, null and three and seventy-eight
6. stories are pushed from my mind’s sphincter not to decry my past, not to delude any truth, not to fulfill individuation or will, not to satisfy some story-making dna, not to drown in bouncy joy, nor to dance nor drown
7. i make my death as i do my birth. i make my sainthood as my vileness
8. my body is my autobiography (my autobodography), ever unwritten (unless breath be word)
9. the autobiographies i write are more my life than my life; this more becomes their writing
10. the autobiographies i write are less my life than my life; this less becomes their writing
11. who are you in your eyes to join me in this more and less? who are we in our blindness to play at becoming alongside?

i am always becoming born and my death – so it goes – is just another birth

art obio was written to write about the writing of becoming born

art puts up dick pics – why?

not for some mapplethorpean porn-cum-art magic show (hey – that’s being done by maplecorp – visit 1380 sherbrooke o), not to primly show half of what we’re born from, not because he likes his, not to play with batteries, not for statements, not to not to … oh, you make up the reason(s) …

art obio is a citizen of the tundra of the soul, tirelessly works in the non-profit industry. it awakens in horizonless whiteness, sleeps on footstools of ice. its passport is its penis, its government the stories of its sphincter

when we say art is the only reality, the rest imagination, reversing (in that peculiar politics – language) the brutal substantiality of daily life, is this but an upgrade (downgrade? sidegrade?) on those geriatric patriarchal paternalistic white-washed eurocentric myths?

art? art doesn’t know

sadoo next - el-spet clitia

gravity doesn't exist (but grace, simone?)

four humans/strangers tell me this past week they know someone who looks like me. one of my sons used to call me standard face based on my telling him i would periodically be asked, for example, where the toothpaste was at the drugstore, as if i had one of those toothpaste-knowledge-whereabouts faces.

naturally, i conclude i’m being cloned or am one. i feel indifferent about this knowledge. raises those tired doubts about consciousness.

what makes all this slightly more engaging is that these reminders of my facial genericism occur as i read that it’s realistic to expect that by 2050 we’ll be able to have satisfying and reasonably simulated sex with robots. a clone and robot getting it on. i’ll try to stay alive until i can see how if at all that sort of fling differs from the old-fashioned chaos and boredom of presumed flesh with presumed flesh.

janis – freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

janus – nothing left to lose, but freedom

i’m out of the closet as a vaguely polygamist celibate aromantic, protesting (with similar vagaries) amatonormativity –

http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/04/amatonormativity-expectations/

my social housing co-op governance like an antibiotic – gets rid of the bad stuff (through antibiotic force, here the law) … but equally the good stuff too; consequently, the entire system – its vitality – has gradually weakened through a continual barrage on productive bacteria

art, a mode of play, wants to be played

one of myriad methods i use is watching movies to alternative audio:

recently i play sfumato (a painterly film about a painter) to the story of moondog followed by evangelista’s boy; then cremaster 2 (bjork's ex's uberstylissimo dandypiece) to esmerine’s dalmak followed by subotnick’s silver apples of the moon

            contrapuntalities emerge, unintentional intentionalities, definitions and meaning as weather, i chings of art

   age gracefully?

i’ll age with the same turmoil, adrenalin, order, doubt, disdain, acceptance, horror, ecstasy as i’ve always aged, the body manifesting in gross recurrence without adjectives

   sure, call it grace 

mystical landscapes

visiting toronto from mumbai recently, i treated myself to the mystical landscapes exhibit at the art gallery of ontario. aside from any specific surprises, disappointments or expected delights, some more general impressions:

canada’s troupe (including carr and the group of seven) plunge into god as well or better than most of the rest of that presented world

the extra-thick crowds around van gogh, while not unjustified (the represented starry night is powerful) and not as wholesale an absurdity as the gaggling routine camera competition around the louvre’s mona lisa, remind of something mostly to be forgotten

humans (and other animals) – while thick as art voyeurs on the exhibit floor – are almost entirely absent from the art. yes, we can say this emerges partially from the period – mostly a century ago, the selection process, in which a certain strain of artists struggled with the increasing potency and pervasiveness of a technocapitalistic society by withdrawing from its human and industrial faces. but it is not just this (and related factors)

the divine vision – almost however we define it, palpably elusive in definition though it must be – places the human alongside the myriad creatures, without ascendancy … and how then can it appear in greater proportion than the entirety of creation – almost [but not quite] nothing, an aspect among teeming aspects of the creator, oneness, the universe, thingness, irreducible and vast complexity, love (call it what you want)

starry night has, for example, some humans, blurred individuals, hardly individuals, forms of sorts really, in the foreground, but small, more like re-shaped stars … and those other stars (the original ones, our likely destiny), those popping out like thoughts in god’s universal mind are the backdrop and centerpiece of the drama, the settlements and affairs of earth like icharus rippling into the sea in auden’s poem or bruegel’s painting … a reality to be sure, but one like a shutter being closed or opened on some lane in a village beside drying laundry in dusty-sunny air, clouds working nonchalantly as they do on their important projects

and now? a century later? 6 billion more humans, the urbanized percentage having risen from 13 to 58%,12 cities with more than 1,000,000 humans leaping to over 400, technology our skin and consciousness, god in an unmarked grave, capitalism like nero in an rpg of rpgs, art a useless caboose, a used tampon, a credit limit of vision, a dream journal, a cosmic rosary, a desert song … now … where are the mystic landscapes and those who paint them? with the soul made of garbage rather than numinous emptiness, how shall we ascend descend migrate to the forbidden light?

around the time nietzsche went mad, georges-albert aurier wrote – and this quote is prominent in the ago’s exhibit –

we must become mystics again. mysticism is what we need today; only mysticism can save our society from brutalization, sensualism and utilitarianism. the noblest faculties of our soul are atrophying … we must react.

is this sentiment even translatable in 2016?

(the journalistic reports on the exhibit in the dailies suggest in their expected prose thudding lightly across pragmatic landscapes that mysticism isn’t for everyone – a little out of place really – but that they’re glad at least the results exist even if the origins seem somewhat off to the orthodox)

does the more contemporary reel-unreel short shot in kabul (on the ago’s 5^th floor presently) hold hints?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IuEM4w7Gbc

do the films on https://vimeo.com/videovectors ?

the paintings in http://bernardlegay.fr/ ?

the sounds on https://thenidus.bandcamp.com/ ?

the dancing dead, holding hands across the waking world?