Energy and the Object: Desire

Energy and the Object, in post-Spinozean form, explores the relationship between energy and the object in six sections:  Desire, Desire and Suffering, Energy, Objects and Subjects, Energy and the Object, A Practical Guide for Traders in Energy.  This is the first section.

1.      Desire

1.1.   Desire is at the center of God, nature, technology and art - the four dimensions that comprise the human.

1.1.1.      Desire is at the center and circumference of these dimensions; the further one draws toward the middle - corruption of desire in the forms of repression, moderation and stagnation.

1.1.2.      No human reaches the center or circumference, although occasionally some feel as if they have; the fullest descriptions or enactments of this feeling are what humans chiefly celebrate.

1.1.3.      The center and circumference are both desire’s purity, but the former is desire for desire and the latter desire for non-desire.  Both, however, are equally desire, and this equation unites what has classically been called the sinner and the saint.

1.1.3.1.            The sinner, who strives to live at desire’s center, is typically associated with life, although death is his shadow; the saint, who strives to live at desire’s circumference, is typically associated with death, and life is his shadow.

1.1.3.2.            Death and life are embedded in each other like a fruit and its seed; so desire’s two pure forms know each other like transgression and the law.

1.2.   Desire is amoral and without identity; these characteristics are both what draw humans toward it and away.

1.2.1.      While the draw toward and away are equal, and most are given to primarily moving away, with occasional and decreasing spurts toward the center and circumference, those whom we most celebrate are those drawn to desire’s amorality and namelessness.

1.2.2.      All are born amoral and nameless, ripe with raw desire; some are simply unable to move far from birth though they themselves may want to; desire itself holds them back.  This holding back is what humans celebrate, for it seems to them mysterious, though it is no more mysterious than what is called maturation; it is simply less common.

1.2.2.1.            Naturally, those who are withheld are those forced to encounter creation.

1.2.2.2.            These ones are often called creators, although all they do is describe their relationship to the birth they can’t escape.

1.2.3.      The artifacts that seduce away from desire offer the shadow of seduction for those who are disinclined to the stark light and darkness of its purer forms; these artifacts include alcohol, money, acquisitions, reputation and institutions.  These products are the children of the fear of desire; desire breaks them as easily as a hurricane does a tree.

1.2.4.      Desire’s attributes are the attributes of origins and apocalypses - whirling masses of black light whose gravity pulls the universe in, and spits it out.

1.2.5.      Those who seek names are never those of the greatest desire, for to desire desire or its negation is to enter on a quest where names are worms; those of desire seek something else and this something else eternally sets names aside.

1.3.   The greatest desire is the greatest tension between the greatest impossibilities.

1.3.1.      If I could desire equally both absolute light and absolute darkness, both desire’s center and circumference, I would become desire.  But this is impossible and this impossibility is the substance of all our fantasies.  He who dwells equally in these fantasies and their impossibility is the one who dwells closest to absolute desire; but even this indwelling is nearly impossible and is, if achieved, just the shadow of divinity on earth.  As if God Himself were passing over like a cloud and the indwelling one born into the transient discoloration of its passing.

1.3.2.      To reduce tension is to reduce the dimensions that comprise the human which is to reduce the human.  God, technology, nature and art are all reduced by the promulgation of moderation and peace.  Each of these requires diversity and blood, the antitheses of peace.

1.3.2.1.            The greatest subjects of desire are not those who displace desire’s tension onto groups through war or institutions, but those who carry the tension in themselves and funnel it into the dimension they are called to.  They internalize war, live on its inner battlefield and reform the hidden vain sound and fury into human forms.

1.3.2.2.            Desire’s subjects create new forms of God, technology, nature and art; each new form requires a thousand or a million objects to maintain it, balancing the scales of flesh in time’s peculiar courtroom.

1.3.2.3.            Some would say that the human lives far from edges and centers; they would rename the human - animal.  But isn’t everything defined by its distinctiveness and human distinctiveness by eros (tension) and thanatos (tension’s snapping).

1.4.   Desire is the God behind God, the form behind forms, the darkness preceding the division of night and day, the good below good and evil, the breath that sparks and the wind that kills.  Desire is the force that terminates God and stuffs nature into a monitor.  It does not care what it does or what it makes, as long as it is constantly doing and making.  Its products are relevant to humans, but irrelevant to desire; desire is constant movement, the process from which forms are born and to which they return.

1.4.1.      Humans tend to cling to products, but desire will wrench their fingers from the objects of their clinging, throw them in the sea and leave the humans spun and desperate.

1.4.2.      As the world is made of products - an ever increasing number - often humans can flop from one to one and mistake their flopping for desire.  It’s the laughter of desire, but desire is the sea.  Humans are pale images of desire’s totality and contradiction.

1.5.   Desire!  What is it but the chasm between time and sensation?

1.5.1.      The chasm

1.5.1.1.            Some would call this chasm Hell and avoid it at any price or fall forever in its teeth.

1.5.1.2.            Some would invert it and call it Heaven - the heaven of humanity.

1.5.1.3.            To desire, these names and movements are the same; let humans invent and move.

1.5.2.      Time

1.5.2.1.            Desire once worked through God and nature in their presence and art and technology in their absence.

1.5.2.2.            As desire has stretched from its clockless origins, it has begun working through God and nature in their absence and art and technology in their presence.

1.5.2.3.            For time to function, both the workings of absence and presence are necessary; what each is attached to is irrelevant, as long as the attachments balance.

1.5.3.      Sensation

1.5.3.1.            Human orientation to desire has been evolving from its circumference to its center.  This is analogous to desire crossing the chasm from time to sensation and with this crossing, human perspective changing, for what is human perspective other than our relationship to desire?

1.5.3.2.            As desire crosses, time becomes something not natal and living but geriatric and prosthetic.

1.5.3.3.            Sensation becomes primary because all that is absent, all that is at desire’s circumference, is held solely in one place - the surface of human flesh - and the burden of this holding has become the burden of desire.  So the world is oriented to its burden and time fades to an autumn flower.

1.5.3.3.1.      The tool to deal with the human burden is technology, and technology’s spirit that sustains and destroys it is art.

1.5.3.3.2.      Humans peer through the thick lens of desire at sensation’s shore and think they see salvation.  Why not?  But when desire meets sensation, God and nature will have become a point so dense with absence that technology and art will have been forced to become almost all to compensate.

1.5.4.      Falling

1.5.4.1.            Desire is like the surface of the ocean, but without substance at its surface or below.  Desire is an ocean of nothingness.

1.5.4.2.            If humans give up on desire, they fall between the shores of time and sensation and present themselves to the chimera of forgetting.

1.6.   Desire does not change; only humans change in relation to desire.

1.6.1.      Desire’s manifestations ceaselessly change; this is why desire never changes.

1.6.2.      Humans could be said to be nothing other than manifestations of desire.

1.6.3.      Because desire is wrapped in humans like death in tombs, the only way for them to gain perspective on their fashion is to fall and see desire from below or, by a severe act of the imagination, use desire to see themselves on either shore - time or sensation - looking at desire from its origin or end.

1.6.4.      Using a substance (even a substanceless substance) to look at the same substance when the looker is comprised only of this substance is problematic.  This disorientation is at the root of confusion; we could call this root alienation or, more classically, sin.

1.6.4.1.            Only a human who becomes easeful with this root can be said to be most human, for this root is the human.

1.6.4.2.            Such ease does not remove the disorientation, confusion or alienation; it is simply ease with them, ease being the acknowledgement that they are necessary aspects of the human condition.  A human who claims to remove any of these dissatisfactions is false to humanity and itself, what in classical language was called a false prophet.

1.7.   We can think of desire not simply as the center and circumference of all human constituents, but as the constituent material of existence.

1.7.1.      This existence is not simply what is scientifically, misanthropically, shockingly or pleasantly called life (birth, comforts, survival, growth), but equally all that which is attached to life (disease, decay, termination, brutality, accident).  Desire, though it end life or make life look anathema to life, is for all and in all.

1.7.2.      The human soul is simply desire for everything and the greatest individual souls are closest to this impossibly contradictory plurality, though existence itself, ironically, indifferently and silently, forces even them, through its tools - the finely meshed sieve of time, fate’s indestructible hammer - to a single pathway, though this singularity is paved for them with more diverse materials than those who accept it early, blindly, naturally.

Definitions of God

God is surely dead, according to any traditional notions.  But "god" continues to live as a word; consequently, it is up to those of us dedicated to capricious semantics to usurp the word for our own delight and future transformations.  So, below, sadoo diaper offers some new definitions of God, in his attempt to re-create divinity in his own image.

1. God is that which most fully can not and never be described; that which most fully has not, does not, and can never exist.

2. God is desire, the waiting for that which may never come.  That which we desire, but do not obtain--the ever-present unknown--is God.

3. Each moment judges the other and finds it wanting; the collection of all these moments is the judgment of God.  Stories are formed from the two gaps that define the human:  the gap between the least a person is able to achieve and the most, and the gap between what a person achieves and what that person longs for.  The first gap is a subset of the second gap.  The second gap is God.

4. In our nightmares, we live our fears of losing what we have.  In our daydreams, we live our hopes of gaining what we do not have.  The union of our nightmares and daydreams, of what we possess and lack, is God.  We stand between, forever in the same position, at the midpoint of fear and desire--the opposite of God.

5. God, from a psychoanalytical perspective, is nothing other than the male fear of female beauty organized into a deity.  But psychoanalysis is only one lens in the fly-eye of God, even as each definition is only one lens in an eye of infinite lenses.

6. Everything can kill us--restraint, abandon, prudence, whimsy, intelligence, stupidity, solitude, society, justice, injustice, religion, atheism, thought, emptiness.  We tell stories about what has killed or might kill, but these are attempts to order the chaos at the guts of life and death.  God is this everything.

7. The artist’s call is to directly experience beauty and pain and to transform this dual experience into a unified work.  This experience is the experience of God.

8. One can only be in relation to two things:  zero and infinity.  The first is the mystic, the second the philanderer.  Meister Eckhart and Don Juan.  Everyone else—the majority—deny the fact of the choice of these two relations and thus exist continually in no relation:  ones in relation to ones.  Here is the hope, the messianic hope, the hope of both physics and poetry:  the one who would be in equal relation to both zero and infinity continuously.  In short, God.

9. God is cabbage soup on a cold day.

10. The nameless wants to be named, for the nameless perceives that to be named is an increase in power; but the nameless moves at its peak power the closer to namelessness it remains; energy is most concentrated in the nameless.  The more something is named, the more it repeats itself in its addiction to remain named.  God is that which is not tempted to become named.

11. God is what is created from the sight of the gap between our attitude toward the universe and the universe’s lack of an attitude toward us.

12. God is that which muddles yes and no.  As that which is perpetually creation and apocalypse--never that thing in-between:  time--God scatters and melds the categories, without intent.  Humanity is the intent.

13. God is that which overcomes passion by means of passion, offering justifications for this overcoming.  We call these justifications myth.  We are now myth’s partially conscious co-creators; hence, our present potency and malaise.

14. In music and sound, there are pitches below and above human capability of hearing; so in painting and color, there are portions of the spectrum invisible to the human eye.  God is that which, in literature and language, falls outside of human thought.

The Sadoo, Walking

the sadoo walks. it walks and walks, walking through walls of talk (what a magician!), wearing out its socks (where will it get new ones?), listening to its cock (what a blabby flabby thing!), death's clock tick-tock knock (how calm! how turbulent!). why does it walk, this doo-doo dao face? just to listen and wear out and wonder? if it were just these things, wouldn't that be fine?  but the sadoo is not as evolved as it sometimes wants itself to be--being human and mortal and not much more--so it also walks for other things.  it walks to dissipate its desolation, to laugh at its haplessness, to place its solitude on the wings of the sun and watch it burn. walking transplants the false roots in the sadoo's controlling mind, in its greedy heart, in its hungry ticky-cock, into the movement of its feet, the stillness of its eyes. what grows in such transplanted soil? walking, wearing out, listening, walking

THE SADOO AS FLANEUR

A serious question that must be addressed in the future discipline of Sadoo Studies is the extent to which the sadoo is a flâneur.  A number of significant obstacles are immediately raised.

The flâneur is most ecstatically, horribly, and originally linked to Saint Charles Baudelaire and the museum of Paris.  Saint Baudelaire wandered that museum—before it became a museum—during The Great Age of the Birth of The Modern City, when pedestrians were pedestrians not the extensions of cars; when cities were livable and scalable and walkable; when Paris was a living beauty and not a postcard of itself.

It would take many days to walk across Delhi today—most of it tedious, sterile, feet-unfriendly, eye-unfriendly.  So in the 143 years since St. Baudelaire died, the psychic and artifactual mass one has to negotiate to see God—the only objective of any authentic sadoo or flâneur—has exponentially and continues to exponentially increase.  The distance between the genitals and purity, beast and divinity, ignorance and knowledge, the sacred and the profane, commerce and creation, is now so great as to break the feet of all but the greatest stroller.  The human soul itself is being stretched from creation’s dim dawn to apocalypse’s eager maw and what tends to fill its corpulent diameters are money, mirrors, and noisy wills.

Since the ugly tepid demise of St. Charles, the term flâneur has been usurped by the academy and its pedants.  This began with Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life) and Walter Benjamin (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire), both likable enough, and from them into the rhetorical discursive polemical psychosociocultural analytical critical mediocre gobbledyfoofoo that passes for knowledge among those who dispense degrees from within the pomo vending machine which in the common tongue is called the university.

But the flâneur is no idea, but first a leaf in bodily form, second the eye that God lacks, and third a continuous visceral-emotional shock that the world in its corrupt incompetent horror and beauty is the way it is.

Whether the flâneur was moneyed or impecunious, he was invariably indolent—at least according to any standard definition of industry.  Yet St. Charles flâneured in the pre-nanosecond world when art, God, and nature still were legitimate republics in their own right and had not yet capitulated to money’s false monistic claim.  So leisure, anonymity, and caprice have been increasingly desecrated and, with these, the flâneur.  Even artists these days—with their workshops and websites, careers and conformance—have lost not just the ability to walk, but their right to walk.

The rise and dominance of virtualization means that a flâneur is now a simulacrum of the flâneur:  one can walk the world without walking; one can stroll Parisian streets through two-dimensions from a St. Louis suburb; one can receive mock-shocks and e-bustles from a virtual crowd in a potato-chip-chomping bedroom.

Three or four or more questions arise from these meandering musings and thick conceptual walls.

1.  Is the flâneur dead?

2.  If not, why?  If not, how is it and/or can it—it being flâneurism—be transformed?

3.  How is the sadoo a flâneur?

An attempt at answers.

St. Baudelaire’s flâneur is dead—or at least seriously maimed—but the flâneur lives on, minimally in the imagination and quite possibly in that most archaic of possibilities—the body.

The flâneur may continue to live because—

—  the crowd—as offensive, cloacal, faceless, goalful, merging,  as the nineteenth century—continues to exist and grow and throb in its active urban malaise.  As long as the urban crowd exists and bulges, so must the flâneur.

—  money—modernity’s cheap divinity—is no longer transcended through art, God, or nature but only through that which money now utterly depends on … movement—continuous meaningless movement—the flâneur’s chief love.

—  one subverts the dominance of technomoney (and all money is now technology) by returning to the body in its schizoid simplicity.  Certainly the urban throb-mob tries to return through sex, Baudelaire capturing this in his observation—sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.  More modernly and popularly, TV shows such as Sex and The City express Baudelaire’s thought mythically and specifically.  But the flâneur goes deeper than sex—which reeks too much of self-interest, groupgrasp, and false promises—into the body’s rank core:  the combination of futile bestial wandering with the raw deep eye of God.  It is a truism to say that nature no longer exists except as metaphor.  There is one exception, though.  And that is the body in the city—nature’s last stronghold.  The flâneur does not primarily give his body over to other individual bodies (the sexual frenzy which dominates urban despair and ecstasy), but to the body of the city in its entirety and so attempts to recover the ancient trees and texts as they were once alive.  Attempts to recover them on the shimmering sweat of his flesh.

This particular sadoo has extensively and precisely imagined the modern city as the sarcophagus of God—that we are secretly sustained by decaying divinity, affording the ecstasy our species requires.  The human has always thrived on death—we kill (physically, emotionally) to risk extending ourselves—and the city affords great feasting.  Faith in the city—the only faith remaining—necessitates believing God is dead; this is no textbook belief, no parched cognitive truth, but one as living and sinewy as water.  This faith in the city is an aspect of the sadoo’s faith and an aspect of what drives him to walk.

So, then, the sadoo as flâneur sojourns aimlessly through God’s decaying body to observe and document the great convulsing human mass which has dubiously taken the burden of god upon itself; he sojourns, observes, and documents before the eye that circumscribes divinity, humanity, and bestiality disappears into itself, the city collapses to two dimensions, and the resultant mirror reflects nothing.

THE SADOO MAT

In a world of acceleration, the sadoo slows down; even stops.  In a world of specialization and consequent ideology, the sadoo skims across the ocean of knowledge in his scatoo and the only thing he knows is the waves.  In a world scared of darkness and silence, the sadoo avoids neither light nor noise but they seem to him simply different faces of night.  The busy heap is busy buzzing, being anxious.  About money, security, reputation, love, health, and--behind it all--that great diffused monolith, death.  The bedsheets of memory, the duvets of hope, are happy escapes.

What does the sadoo do?  He laughs and dances and eats and breaks his celibacy vows when necessary.  When money happens, it happens; when it doesn't, it doesn't.  So with love and death.  Does he notice a difference in quality between having and lacking?  How could he?  The world is always full and verdant and he is in the world.  Every day is much the same, every day is entirely new.

This particular sadoo--Sadoo Diaper--has taken recently to sleeping on a foam mat on the floor and performs a twice-daily pilgrimage to store and retrieve his mat and bedding.  He views this as a comic ritual.  Ritual--and thus serious--in that it occurs regularly and reminds him of old unspeakable things--as a dog might piss at a space where a church wall once stood.  Comic in that the gap between the modesty of his sadoo-mat and the glory of the mighty mattresses he has had seems like no gap (he sleeps just as well, dreams as pleasantly) and he chuckles at the non-difference.  He chortles at the thought that the only difference is that he makes a daily silly pilgrimage, which he ponders and enjoys.

The only hero left is the non-hero.  So as bumbling Bloom is to Odysseus, the farting sadoo is to Buddha, we all--absurd, passionate, and mortal--are to the swirling forces of life (once named the gods) that cast us up, swirl us around, and soon enough feed us to monsters and flowers.

The sadoo is free not by exercising his will, expanding the artifacts and prosthetics around him, or attempting to nail his name to the sky ... but by watching the clouds blot out the moon and hearing a cat's bell tinkle in the distance.

Of Merdia III

I cannot create from the power of myself, for what am I but the extension of my mother?  Yet when I look at the perfect brown spirals curled happily in the tranquil waters awaiting their fate with dignity and silence, I know I too am capable of extensions as holy as my mother’s.

Of Merdia II

In the low is the high, in excrement are mansions.  Every artist and homosexual knows this.  Art swirls in the toilet.  Sewers give birth to visions.  Should I ignore Merdia, my life will be a suburb, smelling only of Mr. Clean and Lysol.  Merdia is my fire for another world, a world I create to set against the power of my mother.

Of Merdia I

I am deeply in love with Merdia, goddess of first creations.  She shows me my true destiny; she, more than any of the millions in the teeming pantheon, smells of truth.  She, not my mother, was my first love.  My mother I cannot help but resent; I am her creation, not she mine.  We both know this, and this is her eternal power over me.  How do I transcend this knowledge?  To whom do I turn to draw power to combat my mother's supernatural strength?  Merdia, she is the goddess of my first creation and the power of my once and future combats.

THE BOWL AND THE QUILT

The Sadoo wishes in their blog to weave a strange quilt.  Not—it should be obvious—one that records having omelets for breakfast and little thoughts about the NFL.  She does not wish to post pictures of the pricks of Supermodels or discuss the relationship between the Udder Pata Ash psyche and its suburban literature.  No, they has other little threads to weave.  He wishes to keep you suspended over the ultimate design of her comfy canopy.  What is the Vision it dreamt 20 years ago?  How shall it integrate or not with his Group Names and those additions of Others?  Will her Group Names ever be complete or are they, like desire, infinite?

Now that my method is clear (or methodology, as the academics prefer), allow them to foreshadow two of the imminent threads.

One is a meditation on the Tao Te Ching, a book which has fascinated The Sadoo with its natural polarity to the bulk of Christian texts and its this-worldly orientation.  Sadoo has taken to memorizing the DC Lau translation and, after each vignette is racing comfortably around with ou blood, they allows it to speak itself through him.

Two is a more comic (or is it?) meditation on one of The Sadoo’s most excellent activities—scatting.  Sadoo has long noticed a distinct lack of adequate homage to the Noble Scat in literature.  Certainly Chaucer and Shakespeare exploited the fart and Bloom's lingering Pprrpffrrppffff in Ulysses does modern justice.  And a not incorrect interpretation of art in its entirety is that it's humanity's flatulence directed toward the heavens.  We wish for a voice to be heard, "Whoa ... my beloved species ... my Divine Nose! ... in whom I am ... phew! ... well pleased" ... it won't happen, of course, but we're genetically predisposed to keep trying.  Ze has also noticed that the traditional divine pantheons lack an adequate Holy Member to receive our praise and distress for what happens in The Bowl.

Being not just a taxonomist, but a scatologist, The Sadoo conjured with ve hapless sadooic colleagues and, in a terribly joyous and volcanic moment, encountered Merdia—goddess of ribald smells and steaming coils.  All beauty is born in the toilet, all art crawls from mud and—as Yeats taught us—love itself has pitched yo mansion in the place of excrement.  The Sadoo lives, as tey must, in the source and origin of things, laughing at how others despise that source and yet depend on it for life and culture.  The Scat is where all things begin. Merdia must receive her due.

Weaving patterns in ways the loom directs, with a nidus of mothers and Tao and merde, the quilt begins.  I wish it to cover the earth with sleepy exuberant tones and the down of gods.