stupider than birds

i am turning toward a kind of aesthetic mysticism…. when there is no encouragement to be derived from one’s fellows, when the exterior world is disgusting, enervating, corruptive, and brutalizing, honest and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live. if society continues on its present path i believe we shall see the return of such mystics as have existed in all the dark ages of the world. the soul, unable to overflow, will be concentrated in itself. the time is not far off when we shall see the return of world-sicknesses – beliefs in the last day, expectation of a messiah, etc. but all this enthusiasm will be ignorant of its own nature, and, the age being what it is, can have no theological foundation: what will be its basis? some will seek it in the flesh, others in the ancient religions, others in art; humanity, like the jewish tribes in the desert, will adore all kinds of idols. we were born a little too early: in twenty-five years the points of intersection of these quests will provide superb subjects for masters. then prose (prose especially, the youngest form) will be able to play a magnificent humanitarian symphony. books like the satyricon and the golden ass will be written once more, containing on the intellectual plane all the lush excesses which those books have on the sensual. that is what all the socialists in the world have not been willing to see, with their eternal materialistic preachings. they have denied pain, they have blasphemed three-quarters of modern poetry, the blood of technology that quickens within us. if the feeling of human insufficiency, of the nothingness of life, were to perish (the logical consequence of their hypothesis), we should be more stupid than the birds… perhaps beauty will become a feeling useless to humanity, and art something half-way between algebra and music

diatomaceous earth

the old boys network demonstrated certain admirable skills but mostly i met it with a shrug after learning its proclivities and rites. so too the old girls network. despite any difference in method, presumed virtues and pragmatisms, they both claim an elitism, exuding exclusion. (revolution has been more about revolution than anyone thought!) like all hope, things have been oversold

it’s not what precedes the –archy

but the –archy …

my feet are on the ground, but only because the grave chains them there

my feet are on the ground – or rather in it, rooted in the grave

these scholars who seem to specialize in little more than de-essentializing and essentializing simultaneously, according to no criteria other than ones unacknowledged and self-serving

there are no rules

that is how art is born

how breakthroughs happen

go against the rules or ignore the rules

that is what invention is about

but this is said by one lacking challenges

in money or access to art’s hierarchies

it’s not that we disagree with her

but the conditions from which words are born change the words

increasingly i can only speak the unspeakable

as the unspeakable can hardly be spoken i cannot speak

writing then becomes about this inability

in these nothing days

days of death voices scamper

through my distributed bod

y, chuckling scrubbing

from the guardian –

in moma’s magisterial, blockbuster show of 2012, inventing abstraction: 1910-1925, af klint was excluded. reflex alarm at the occult seems to have been the explanation. what was harder to fathom was curator leah dickerman’s contention that af klint disqualifies herself by not having defined her paintings as art. isn’t it amazing, i remark, how conservative art historians who specialise in the radical can be?

i read

hell’s orgy is the apotheosis of the neutral

as

hell’s orgy is the apothecary of the neutral

which after realizing what the original is seems more evocative

the differences and similarities among the amorality of childhood, adolescence, youth, middle age, older age … a cartography of amorality

the end-to-end costs of happiness (wellness, wealth – pick a commonly desired state). we can only function because we relentlessly decontextualize and then impose on this decontextualization rhetorics of holism to simulatedly compensate for our embodied splinteredness … the growing gaps between consciousness and our singular conditions, gaps we fill with flesh

who isn’t tired of listening to the white man? but who isn’t also tired of listening to the human (somewhat less so than the white man?)? the few white men i’m not tired of listening to are less white men than things-barely-human hidden in the skin of white men. but for these things-barely-human colour, gender (but also – class, psychic-emotional configs, the manifold intelligences …), these skins and hidings, are just movies one might watch twice or once –

prewonder

a longterm project of sadoo diaper

(and which project isn’t longterm?

causing it to frequently wonder what among the everythings at all is brief)

is sadook sabook

its slow fetus slowly fleshing

stretching through the sadoo’s subterranes

its first cuticles and eyes beginning to appear in the holes through which such things appear.

sadook sabook

has countless and morphing pieces before itself –

some of these so scattered among and after that some

(but who are these some?)

have asked if it is nothing but these pieces –

which in a book

a piece of technology

are none or few and named factory names like

introduction, preamble, foreword, preface.

sadook sabook

has these factory pieces too.

(diaper has nothing more against or less for the factory

than much or many else yet knows the factory is nothing

but a necessary and forceful squalor in an infinite babel of forms.)

but it also has a

preramble, pregamble, prebramble, prestroll, pretroll, pretoll, presaunter, presanders, prewander, prewonder, prepromenade ultrapseudopropreantepenultimate, prewalk, prewort, prewyrt, prewart, preforeintrowort

and many more here unnamed and even more than one of each in cases.

little agreement is discernible.

each is placed itself among complements

subversions

and sometimes condiments

to not aid in those professional objectives of conciseness and clarity.

here’s a taste (an a- or anti- or otherprefix-taste no doubt for most) –

technology doesn’t change the book for the book is technology. it may add or subtract pages, modify their size, colour, texture, smell, cast it among varied screens, dimensions, formats, substances, scramble, merge, split it. the more i fully live in technology the more i enter the book and the book (as i) becomes redundant, for technology ontologically and historically precedes the book on the spheres of counting and living. in this way the city is the consummation of the book and its end.

the only way to change the book is for the human to enter nature – that is its flesh – and birth book from there. and there (it will be asked!) – in the way it has been asked whether music is still music, (film still film, silence silence,) dance dance, painting painting, god god, thinking thinking and loving loving – after flesh has had its way whether book is still book. ask. the question is yours, not book’s.

that book is – and this only through flesh, rebirth – only now entering the possibilities of abstraction is a concern and smile of sadook sabook. for while it has simulated abstraction through playing with its makeup, its flesh is still its flesh. that book has resisted any comprehensive alterations shouldn’t surprise us – it has been around in names (its presumed environment) longer than its siblings in art’s gross and dysfunctional family and so (especially with everything else happening around) would have developed more resistances to rebeing itself.

we are hardly speaking of philosophical abstraction, which abounds, which attempts abstraction through bypassing flesh, by severing it like meat cuts from a pig. philosophers (the western academic type surely!) are carnivores, butchers of themselves.

we are interested in removing literature from its degree of dependence on referents in social life, but remaining (indeed, returning to!) in flesh so that book is reborn as something from flesh and foreign to it. we have no logic of perspective, no illusions of reproducing illusions of what people call reality. we wish to bear no trace of any reference to anything recognizable other than – as in abstract painting, dance … – that which is most recognizable: that which walks with many names but could be called breath, being, soul, vision, god, consciousness, spirit, truth, sensation, body. that this most recognizable thing is so elusive in the realm of names is another reason why literature has been so successful for so long at avoiding abstraction, being (again) ostensibly the art of the realm of names.

abstraction is just a use of flesh and technology, an ambivalence of words and time.

in literature, abstraction is simply microscoping into the yoctoguts of words, telescoping out to their yottanebulae, to enable appearing geometries. these geometries are what we write. that most are writing words as they appear on the street, human-scale, the size of money and genitalia, this realism ... is an aberration unworthy of the scales of the city we find ourselves in.

that technology has brought us here cannot escape us. it brings us here, but cannot bring us through. only we ourselves can do this in the vermiculous horrors of our bodies, their smirking exuberances, in their radical indistinguishabilities and separations, the severe and proximate abstraction of birth itself. this what-we-can-do-only-ourselves is sadook sabook.

the systems of doctors tarr and professors fether

all the usual values – teamwork, stewardship, excellence, innovation, cooperation – imbecilic. excellence eg. anwar congo maintained it in killing through the mid-60s and – in the 2012 film the act of killing an odder excellence (for excellence in killing is as tediously common and desired as excellence in business, manipulation, and schadenfreude) in aesthetically simulating killing. christopher edward wollaston mackenzie geidt maintains excellence at establishment strategic defense and offence {{{{{{{{{{😀that game😀}}}}}}}}}}. elizabeth bishop at poetry. if i admire excellence – and how could i not? – i admire congo, geidt, bishop, and the million other dictators, murderers, general managers, and poets who have whatever combination of tenacity, volition, opportunity, and skill to do what can and probably should be called success in a specific segment of human endeavour

true, a formal value typically is placed in a smallish list – that which can often be found these valued days in institutions – the ostensible intent being that each metaphysical member counsels and balances the others. (sadoo diaper attempts, perversely, subterranely this very thing, this poly-appendaged teetertotter of energies, in its various writings on its council of i.) take a major global bank’s values: trust, teamwork, accountability. nowhere do we find competitiveness, cunning, avarice, mistrust, deception – these additional attributes required for successful management and perhaps for surviving life (the cooperative housing complex i live in is the least cooperative institution i’ve been involved with – exacerbated in part because of its relative impecuniousness and so proximity to the exigencies of the anthill. [but also its embodied and so impractical diversity, its ...])

a cinematic bookend is slowly arriving from the director
of one of the world’s premier debut features
(něco z alenkye 1988) – his last (hmyz 2018) –

humans are more like insects

this civilization more like an anthill

like his neighbor, be tar (who directed his stated last in 2011)
both having lived inescapably through the anthill
transforming it, using very different means in film
into dark comedies, obscure redemptions of the human

none of this is saying much beyond what’s nascent in heraclitus and developed with increasing complexity and parallel inefficacy across the aesthetic and philosophic subsidiaries of time. but value – which sadoo r die f rich reflung into vocabulary, now, like all glories, commercialized and stupiditized by fawning insects – this substantive, walks among the adjectives quite democratically (even willful!), dreaming of becoming verbs

ayahuasca and middleclass capitalism –

focusing one’s fragmented and inchoate desires on

growing the weed of the human?

fear after a time ... is narcotic

it can lull one by fatigue into sleep

but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably

apprehension, anxiety –

drugs of the age, manufactured by the

pfizer ink in our souls

snails and lasers for mpp or ph or cm

i choose to live alone because my imagination functions better when I don't have to speak with people,

nihil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio

i’m here to apply for the position of dog-walker

oh great. a few questions then

sure

tell me about your history with dogs, your love for them, …

i don’t like dogs, they seem too much like humans

i’m not sure how comfortable i am having someone walk fifi who doesn’t like dogs

i like plants

bujja needs her plants walked!

i’ve liked a few dogs in my life who seem like plants  – why don’t you put fifi on the windowsill and i’ll tell you if i like it

she’s a she … fifi … fifi ... fifi ... oh fifi my little ball of fluff, my darling, oh sweetsipie, oh my chubbawoofpoo, my …

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

oh no i don’t like it. in fact i wholly detest it

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

it’s out of the question then. you can’t walk fifi

i’d like to walk it

look – i must have someone who minimally tolerates dogs, who at least can pretend to like fifi. i know she can be annoying but all of us can be, and she had a difficult puppyhood and we’ve grown up together really and now – it sounds a bit silly i know – but she’s my closest friend, i shouldn't admit this but we cuddle at nights, sometimes quite intimately …

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

i must walk it, give it to me now

i’m sorry, i’ll have to ask you to leave or i’m going to call the police

i will leave, but only with fifi

i’m calling the police

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

fifi bites the owner and runs out the open door

with the dog-walker, who

– along with fifi – is never seen again

m.d.

the feeling that comes with aging … feels like nostalgia but isn’t, lacking its reduced colour, its need to experience certain configurations of time and identity as superior (or inferior – as regret, bitterness).

nevertheless, with accumulation of losses, a feeling visits in relation to these accumulations, these assets, that feels as if it has something to do with time. but, when explored, has more to do with the nature of dream.

my experience of dreaming has increased and it is this – oneirocompetence – that i would name this feeling, and nothing sentimental ... experience that skirts deftly around the scrimmage of opinions, the tedium of politics, the oppositions of feeling, and a false pretense of language toward knowing.

sauerkraut in india

fukky risotto and a sadoo are riding the marudhar express when a tourist across the way says – look, there’s the taj mahal. the sadoo says no that’s the mona lisa. the tourist looks confused and annoyed, says it’s obviously the taj mahal. the sadoo says you obviously know nothing about signs.

the air india attendant at narita asks to weigh my carry-on – limit 7kg. i know it’s over because of the food. so i take out the food, put it on the floor and weigh my bag without it: 6.5kg. take the bag off the scale, return my food, leave.

a german, a swede, and a canadian

are sitting on the rooftop of a guest house ...

why travel? –

• to record humanity in its dusty dusk
• to re-savour the wilderness
• to hear the silent song of the plant
• to keep the bow taut (for contrast, for the sameness of things)
• to see the moon and sun
• to trip over time’s mirrors
• to reanimate death
• to ask this question
• to have the eyes scrubbed and the body bodied
• to virtualize nature and skin the internet
• to re-eroticize absence and presence
• to participate, however tentatively and disdainfully, in my fellow species’ orthodoxy – money
• to immerse myself in that film about flesh, the common human plot – and there plot that plot in words
• to put poetry in its place and replace place
• to glorify unpasteurized organic sauerkraut

 

varanasi and jerusalem – coital spirit partners in the production of religious babies (with astounding longevity)

you see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons

if you don't know the rules, you are crushed; but if you do know the rules you are cut off from your own nature

so simple and so labyrinthine, so guileless and so angry, so innocent and so dangerous ...

depicting the failure of love, the failure of society, and the failure of humans to rise above the ridiculous

do indians get sick when they visit the west because it's too hygienic?

everyone on these long-haul international flights just sleeps or watches movies – don’t they have minds to use during their brief transit through life?

whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate

                but we have a drug for this!

i see the world is mad

if i tell the truth they rush to beat me

if i lie they trust me

  keep the slanderer near you, build it a hut in your courtyard –

  for, without soap or water, it will scrub your character clean