mister loungechair being coy

 cat and man play under-the-door eye games ...

factory of light, factory of darkness

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

fact^ory ^of light, fact^ory ^of darkn_eess  

(in elusive instalments)

I am unable to separate art from god; so my desire to see and be seen can only be met in life—which is the attempt to love and be loved.  Art, like god, is of a space so pure it is committed to creating a detour around the rights and tears of eyes.

Art is the shadow of god, even as god is art’s shadow.  Life—its eyes, the igneous eruptions of love—is the shadow of neither god nor art; it is the shadow of nothing and casts no shadow, for it only bears a blood relation with death and death is death only be virtue of being a shadow of itself.  This is what justly terrifies us about life:  it is eyes, random lava and hardening—in which we seek for shadows, for shade, for respite, but find only the endless onslaught of light.

            Goethe’s reputed last words … more light, more light …

                        The gooey comfort of the television, the internet, storefronts, the city in its effulgent sleeplessness.  Life’s bloodless consummation.

Money, in its minority tangible and majority intangible (electronic, digital) forms, gathers from across the globe’s currencies into a virtual factory, whose only output is light.  Poetry too (for it must) transacts with this factory and is not unacquainted with its procedures—aspects of the poet’s utility.  But how can the poet be in love with this factory, its productions of light, its standards, exchanges and white blindness?  The poet is in love with darkness, the darkness hiding in the kernel of words, which money—despite its machines of volition, its trucks of drugged desire, its insured and polished efficacies—has not yet been able to penetrate, drilling though it has been for millennia at the cunning smoky shells of words.

The poet, like the merchant, politician, custodian or butcher, has its task—eternal, unalterable, from certain angles; constantly adapting to its shifting contexts, from others.  Like all professions, it allows for various temperaments and orientations, yet still is oriented in its own ineluctable ways.

We could say that the merchant is oriented toward exchanging services for money, the politician laws for money, the custodian cleanliness for money and the butcher meat for money.  So—whether we venture into prostitution, priesthood, the professoriate or podiatry—we find that money is the one side of the scale (of human justice, in a sense, as it maintains a rough equilibrium between individuals, classes to which they belong, society at large, and even—for the enduring professions at least—what we might call civilized history).

Money—society’s common denominator and sacred language (sacred, for it is not spoken, but speaks itself)—provides the mobile ubiquitous generalized legitimacy for more transient localized and specific legitimacies.  (While the Internet challenges certain notions, particularly of space, it has not yet fundamentally altered them).

By money it is certainly not meant any reduction to cash, or even money in its now primarily virtual forms.  Money is a structure of the soul.  A structure that is oriented toward using words to the end of things that are not words; it wishes to trade words in for other things.  In poetry, the soul is not an exchange but a lake without borders, without land, unrippled in itself, vulnerable to being disturbed by words.  Money is necessary to maintain the holy ecology in which the lake resides—what we might call flesh—an ecology which seems to seek language, to disturb, it seems, the lake.

So in money the body is composed of money; in poetry the body is composed of seeking, seeking for a vision of a lake brought to life with words and stilled by silence.

The poet, however, regardless of how it lives, what it says, how much it talks, bypasses money in its vocation (which is, most wholly, its life); it encounters it by accident and so must find justice by other means, the seeking for this law and balance a frequently treacherous and sometimes deadly enterprise, one which society is typically indifferent or ambivalent to, as the poet seeks for what society can only provide transgressively—outside of its sacred apparatuses, those established and maintained by money.

The poet, then, seeks to balance its work—not butchering, mopping, legislating, arguing or haberdashing, but language—not with money (the common trade) but language and so, in this balancing of like with like, but a like that in its vastness includes myriad subtle unlikenesses, it falters, as the structures and processes of language—so readily available, encouraged and rewarded for the butcher and lawyer if they are the least bit competent or fortunate—are vague, elusive, and discreet for the poet; it must seek with shifting, unlabeled and often unexpected and unknown tools, reaching frequently into the realms of the dead and yettobeborn, with the usual risks of such enterprises, excavating, sourcing materials, fuels, that find their way into its shop to manufacture materials, fuels, of equal worth and substance.  Considering the extreme and bulky irrelevance and unworthiness of much of this material, and the rare impossible glorious malevolent concatenations of the divine, the poet can spend much of its time vainly seeking and sorting, weighing, overcome with doubt, overcompensating with arrogance, flung like bills in a storm between environments not necessarily described as hospitable.  That the butchers and politicians attempt to pathologize the poet and remedy their imposed pathologies with an array of pharmaceuticals, operations, ostracizations, marriages, religions, incantations, forms of weighty and innumerable description, then wonder in astonishment or scorn (if they are still capable of wonder [they are still capable of scorn]) why the poet wails, rants or hides against or from them—well, the able poet must use even unusual inputs as material, if it can.

If it can? It must.  Poetry, like money, is a factory, transforming the world’s jewels and garbage into words.  Poets are workers in the dark factory of words, even as merchants are workers in money’s bright factory.

Money, as a vastness, as that which can trade in language but not subsume it, as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through social scrimmage—devout negotiations:  building and maintaining given and battled-for positions—demands to be a totality and so, in its reach, desires to embrace its only true competition (not God, as Jesus would necessarily have had it [necessarily because of the way time unfolds in space] but language, as that which birthed God).

Language, as a vastness, as that which can trade in money—at least as but one of its aspects—as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through scrimmages in the void, demands, though in different voices and on different paths, to be a totality and so also reaches to embrace its only true competition.

One can reconcile this seeming dispute between two seeking totalities by modifying Jesus’ clever retort to the scribes and chief priests and say, with and beyond and before him—Give to money that which is money’s and give to language that which is language’s … and this is not untrue.  (No Manichaeism, unless you want it to be; this bifurcation can just as easily be the secrets and manifestations of desire, diverging in name as they issue forth, mystery and gateway and way of ways.)

We might also attempt to resolve the seeming antithesis of these totalities by discovering a more legitimate or antecedent claim by one or the other.  Did money, for example, precede language in time, even as First Nations preceded Europeans in North America?  Does language have a greater or deeper share of being than money—or is this a question only language can ask?  And what might the criteria be to judge any historical or ontological merits?

But.  Should we not stay on the shores of this dubious ocean, on the edges of the waters of knowledge, frolicking in the sands of doubt, building castles of words alongside knowledge’s monsters?

So the poet is always between the elements, between land and sea, air and fire, forced by blood to trade in competing factories, of dual citizenship, exiled into no particular home or habitat, a sojourner in the darkness that is the bed and roof of stars and worms alike, seeking to make itself, its very soul and body, a hospitable environment not for itself but words in their farflung hermitages across the inarticulate infinity of space.

henry moore sculpture centre

11 figures, wombs of stone, like the charred of auschwitz, eyes dug from death before death was named, lie strewn, almost casually, disregarding.

11 figures, neither of word nor opposed, without memory, without dreams, lie on their random pedestals, in a gallery of moors with night for walls, indifference for a ceiling, unmeasured time for a floor.

11 figures, as if they are acquainted not through anything resembling knowledge but in their geometric relations and the nature of their eyes which do not meet, lie in a gallery, without purpose, uncouth.

11 figures, though in a space that could be fathomless, seem to consume space, not through any sight, for no one sees, but through the presence of a quality that might be a function of their being stone.

11 figures, of a poverty so vast they would be saints if it weren’t for the lack of word and regard and function, lie in silence as you do in hope and pain.

Their faces—though this is too friendly a name for what might be claimed to be an aspect of their uncanny heads—somehow point to the palette of the human heart, without colour, expression, experience or capacity.

11 figures, notwithstanding their lack of legal rights and freedoms, are chained to a law that knows no rights, to a freedom that resembles black’s freedom to be black.

11 figures, belonging to various clubs of dismemberment and mutilations so unorthodox we might recognize them only when mad or in the pit of love, lie, as if they are exhausted by their very immobility.

11 figures, with holes for brains and hearts and eyes and gods, are and have been—though to be is too strong a word for such conditions and are and have been require a tense not yet available in language—of this gallery bereft of names and limits and will be.

11 figures, women, erotic in their unattractiveness, some wearing dresses, others outside of fashion, are as if they themselves were born of something that preceded stone.

11 figures lie—can we say in wait in such conditions?—and could we—if we were ever capable of entering a space that wasn’t full of waiting—say what lies so heavily upon them, who lack our hearts?

the comfortable numbing of art

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

th_e c^omf^ortabl_e n_umbing ^of art  

(in elusive instalments)

As the cliché goes, art no longer has the power to shock.  This is true only in certain respects, however (art is lost if it loses this power, the power though becomes hidden at times).  We might say the cliché is true in content, but not in form—or, rather, in the forms that have been usurped by money and that art has allowed to be usurped; that is, shock remains possible only in the forms that still permit of transgression (yet this is always true:  it is art’s task to seek for the forms that still so permit).

To see these forms, one has to look at the present orthodoxies of art.  There are no heresies in words themselves anymore, no dogmas, no taboos.  I can write about sodomizing the Queen of England in the Vatican, with my mother eating shrunken baby head cereal on a nearby chaise longue and only a puritan would blink.  One can publish anything in the traditional ways (or even the neo-traditional ways, such as e-books) and amuse, titillate, but not truly shock (other than those time-warped in regressive cultural bubbles; those who are still, shall we say, aesthetic cannibals:  The Satanic Verses is a sufficient illustrative case).

What, then, is expected of the writer who wishes to follow in the ancient path of poetry—which is to challenge the collapsed present to see (and there is no more painful or shocking act than sight)? 

Simply this:  that she seek to make their words known in ways, in packages (in non-packages, post-packages, neopackages, apackages), that have not been pre-approved, prefabricated, by our culture.  The new forms for art to explore, in order for it to shock (and not for shock itself, of course, which is a kind of aesthetic pornography, but in order to continually seek itself, which is its task, in the broken glass of the world), are to handle its cradle-to-grave production according to a vision born outside of the expected packages.

(This is what our adefinable book, t⁵, and its forms of release—the secular sadoo and other means [some named, some not; some accessible, some in–)—attempt … and why their means are inseparable from their words, their aesthetics from this psyche.)

            Also why this poet must accept an abyss between words and money, for money is ^the orthodoxy incarnate, the heavenly judgement seat … and poetry, while knowing orthodoxy, must follow the way of vision, the way of the eye …

(We don't speak of shock in the common way, but in the way that one speaks of terror, not in relation to a thief in the night or the blair witch project, but the trial. A soft shock, one that might only be felt if lying on the bedrock of the world.)

In other words, money has been clever, as money can be (in a limited way, a way it markets as unlimited).  It has segmented art, claimed it as a cut of its carcass (even the prime rib of its meat!), created a subdivision within itself through a (hostile?) takeover, a centuries-long M&A; it has defined the book, assumed control over its factors and means of production, and subjugated aesthetics to biography (vision to name), thereby chaining the eye to a rock as opposed to permitting or even facilitating its natural flight.

The joke of course—and if it is not the joke it is at least one of the jokes—is that art’s transgression—even when it is accomplished—is only transgressive to those committed to money’s packages and productions.  Only money permits transgression for only money is sacred.  One detects the devout, the pious, by spotting those for whom transgression is still possible.

Poetry is the deeper sacred, that which can violate itself and not be offended (or at least be offended and also laugh), that which is indistinguishable from (or knowingly bound to) the profane.  It is this indistinguishability, this knowing boundness, that violates money, for money demands separation (of people, buildings, gods, means).

So the most complete poets may be those exceptional ones—Euripides, Chaucer, Shakespeare are obvious examples (who may only be possible at certain convergences of history)—who appear to follow money’s path while following poetry’s, thus mirroring the soul’s peculiar and pyretic navigation through society’s arbitrary labyrinth, money’s middling maze.

a dialogue with father william

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

a dial^og_ue with fath_er william  

(in elusive instalments)

Your only asset, desire, is the common trade of everything, so you cling to its value as if it were the supreme and only good, denying its tortured past, the raining thorns of its present, the whimsical frenzy and blood of its future.

You extract desire’s tweets and smiley faces, place heaven on one side of the scales of lonely justice, automobiles and securities and veterinary-approved dogfood and penetration on the other, and find them equal.  You bury desire’s night, its true and other side, in two dimensions, in the planet’s unpronounceable names, in the video of nature.  You launder it with expedia and booze and the registered denial of night.

You purchase culture as a mask to cover the maggots of your face.  You drop art like an addict, as if its names could save you.  You hide behind the towers of noise, in selves of fearful nothingness, a sleight which only works because of our mass hiding, an efficacy requiring years of education to accept.

These are the necessary lies that are truths not from their falsity but from their necessity.  And if we were to imagine another necessity, would it be as false or true?

Little can be said concerning the destiny of humans.  Yet isn’t this all we speak of, in the flashing carousel of words?

This gap, between the vastness of what cannot be said and the vastness of what is, i call our sadness.  Isn’t this gap the poet’s home and the death of gods?

Money is the bridge over the gap between the two vastnesses, the soil of gods.

the poet and money

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

aka … th_e disciplin_e and practic_e ^of madn_ess

^or … a mystic’s q_uarr_el with th_e w^orld

(in elusive instalments)

jabes, applied

What is the book i wish to recreate, a book of origins without origin, a lost book, the siamese twin of the god i wish to recreate?

The attributes of this book, this god, are likewise lost; this is why i approach my task tentatively, on paths of murkiness, setting myself aside as one sets oneself aside when leaving a mirror.

The internet aids me in my groping, in my task, as the printing press aided others in their quest of the book.  They wished to make copies, to pass the task of the hand to the machine, to promulgate the Word.  I wish to return to the space before the hand, to when copying was an idea and remained an idea.  This wish i feel has something to do with the book i seek to recreate … or rather (or equally) the book that seeks to recreate me.

            My book is a record of my seeking for the book.  It takes place in the gloaming so i place it in the technology of the gloaming, its wholly ambivalent invention.  Whether dusk or dawn (of the book? humanity? me? machines?) i don’t know.

                        My book has no limits because my quest has none.  I must only seek the book without the book, in death but without affirming death, in life but without affirming life, without even affirming the book or the quest.

                                    The book is my body i cannot see yet cannot escape.

The internet, in its natural infancy, has been seen as an extension of (has been used to extend) the powers of the printing press—more copies; more rapidly disseminated; more swirl, dissent, reform—even as the computer was initially seen and used as a glorified adding machine.  But this is to ignore (through fear? ignorance? novelty? surprise, as by ambush?) the internet’s natural powers, as our attempted simulation of the mind of god, as the adimensional book (neither tower nor library) of babel:  nameless (because it assumes all names), attributeless (because it assumes all attributes), powerless (because it assumes all powers), limitless (because it assumes all limits), without knowing (for knowing has walked past the end of itself), spaceless (for it is everywhere), without extension (for extension is a function of time and the internet is the mystics’ technology in its bypassing of time).

            Humanity was not defeated at the stunted tower at the beginning, nor was it silenced by the library’s confined infinitude.  Babel, to fulfill itself, is to circumvent not only verticality but horizontality; it is to translate the random emptiness and plenitude of blind borges from the virtuality of a story to the story of virtuality, to explode it from the confines of eight pages to the infinitely reproducing electrons of empty freedom.

                        The internet is Babel, the consummation of communication; through it we have defeated god and in defeat have founded the visible asomatous quest for the book.

Conformity as Enculturation of Function

We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach these virtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire us a reputation for bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being!

Pascal’s Pensées

the rite of pasta primavera

text city

We will have dragged the heaven of The Apocalypse onto earth, as the prophets foretold some two millennia ago, but the streets will be paved not with gold but text.

Texting i find disabling, like social media.  A shorthand, factual, tedious, transactional, of the mind, heart; a Pfizer pharmaceutical to cloud and numb the spirit.  Like so much of what is taken for intimacy.  Of course, like advertizing, every now and then there’s a soundbite that dazzles, a moment that seduces, a convenience that relieves, an artifact that rises, sparkling, above the rubble.  Even email i’ve found tedious, disembodied, unnatural, recently.  I begin to long to write letters, perhaps in hieroglyphics, elaborate customized postcards that jam the postal processing machines, with fragments flying, glimpsed; OOF in Orange B inspiring a fulltime operator, from Xi'an, to quit, return to China, and invent 11 new forms of ontology.

The legion that Jesus casts out of the madman into the pigs in the Gospels indicates the feminine, the plural, in man, that he denies, that the Judeo-Christian complex denies.  The origins of psychology recognize this, the necessary emerging validity of the feminine, the amorphous ground of muliebrity, but deal with it in classic male form:  by examining, analyzing, laboratory style, female plurality—male struggles of it in a male-dominated world—and having affairs with certain women who particularly embody that plurality.  But how does one embody this plurality oneself, in a male body, in the city (which is a kind of conglomerated phallus), without the classic primary dependencies on multiple female bodies (which is using plurality as a prosthetic, avoiding finding the way between inner and outer plurality, the abdication of the [inner] knowledge of plurality)?  How far into oneself can one take plurality, accept it as the primary legitimacy, without destroying oneself?  Is this the new death?  (Despite the superficial paganism, our culture remains deeply Christian.)  Is it simply redefining the possibility of what maleness means, in the midst of a radical sparseness of living examples?

Aesthetically, of course, Woolf brilliantly articulates the plurality and amorphousness of identity in The Waves.

Do men even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense, or are they simply extensions of some unspeakable primordial darkness, a category uncategorized in time’s categorical categories?

The challenge of maintaining the rhythms of nature in the body—and consequently, the mind—while living in an antithetical environment—the city.  The yoga-sex-workout regime seems inadequate, trite; a certified organic sticker on rotting pesticide-ridden meat, haute fashion covering postulated skin and AIDS-infected flesh; a frequent flyer, 5000⁺-square-foot homeowner, two⁺-car householder putting out his recycling bin, feeling good about his greenity.  Central seems the vision of seeing what is not seen:  not god, as in the past, but nature.  (Not the unreal as an object of faith, but the real!)  Yet god —the gods—has (have) been seen as easily as the trees, in an age and culture when the two were inseparable.  Seeing, then, the rivers of China in the 401, puca sapos in iPads.  A de-identification with one’s own species (a re-narrativing from the-uniqueness-of-humanity-as-being-more­-unique-than-any-other [and, consequently, my-uniqueness-being-more-unique-than-any-other] to a uniqueness as one-among-a-vast-plurality-of-uniquenesses), within an environment which—through the monolithic immensity of its structures—incessantly demands identification and supremacy.  To see earth and all it contains holographically in our actions and thoughts …

Is this not what is meant by the doors of perception?

One can see the (admittedly frequently puerile) increase of pet-love also (as with, although differently, our frequently puerile spiritual practices [yoga, eco-]) as indicating a gateway to the diminishment of assumed human supremacy.  (The puerility enters through factors such as the undue waste/attention on pets [packaging, preferring ‘cuteness’—i.e. we love {care for} our cats but not our worms and bees …].)

The train to and from Montreal:  whom would i rather have around me:  the phone-text-techno-babbling self-importance of the business grandmother on the way or the techno-talk of the children’s machines on the return?  Earplugs in both cases.

I watch the dark void of nature through the window, punctuated by the lights of occasional stark settlements, punctuated by the reflected lights of the videos, games and communication devices surrounding me, both punctuations real-unreal.

I check email in Montreal, then on the train back to Toronto.  Yet as i approach home and think about checking email again, the feeling is there (though the reason is not) that i will be collecting mail for three days—ever since i left Toronto.  The electronic in-tray still rooted emotionally in the physical mailbox, yet surely exacerbated by the present’s ethos of speed.

art&god

The insidious pervasive attempt of psychotherapy, culture, to reduce the body-psyche complex to one, to continue the monist regressions of Christianity.  The healthy plurality of the body-psyche complex routinely squeezed into the appearance of a singular social identity, this squeezing euphemistically named health by the monist regulators of culture and spirit.

An ex-girlfriend calls me Protestant for certain emotional configurations she experienced; an acquaintance insinuates a connection between my marrying young and my present moral orientations.  How trite, reductionistic:  connections not technically untrue or imaginatively vapid but which become untrue, vapid, by means of their radical insufficiency, their decontextualization, their decoupling and hierarchizing of subject and object.  The problem with these facile psychologizations (which present themselves as insight!) of life and art (just look at biography-of-artist as explanation and replacement of the artist’s art [and in the mediocre the life is preferable to the art]) is the inarticulated and presumably unacknowledged assumed etiology, a fact-value relation, behind … (typically event --> applauded or derided value, often linked to common and unquestioned notions of success, beauty, truth …).

The environment of writing shifts for me, causing confusion, despair, exasperation, fragmentation, loss.  I can’t find or recreate my historic faith in art any longer.  This doesn’t seem to me primarily a matter of my obvious insignificance in the human world of words and names (crises of faith are hardly absent from those in that world) or having exhausted the themes intrinsic to the relation-of-i-with-the-world (these seem infinite [dependent primarily on sufficient attention and care] for their configurations are constantly changing, spawning a perpetually shifting reflected image-collage of words), but rather the atmosphere in which writing takes place has been modified and my orientation, my practice, lags behind.  I have hit certain apparent emotional and linguistic walls; i extend words across the walls like vines, hoping to infiltrate and crumble them.

Yet:  instead of breathing in airs of faith and ecstasy, my spiritual lungs are learning to adapt to breathing in doubt and stillness.  (I thus am in a state of exhaustion and death in relation to my past atmosphere but a state of birth, a fumbling novice, in relation to these emerging unknown elements.  The confusion created by this:  working still in what seems to be the same medium (words) but in a different atmosphere on perhaps a different planet … all this genetically altering the medium.

So how to write?  The way i have been:  waiting, despair, impatience, exasperation, calm, focus, inspiration, doubt, anger, faith, caprice, vapidity, toilet-cleaning … describing the world through this i-eye, describing my mind through this eye-i, attempting to eliminate judgement of the world, my mind, other than as it implicitly must be in the contours of language which reflect the particular colourings and contractions of the iris of this eye, the irides of these i’s (which, without the apostrophe, is is:  a recreation of yhwh in its, in their, tobetobeness) …

            My exploration of god, use of god, the attempt to describe the irides, to look at that which looks (the origin and end of the mirror, the labyrinth as the path between those origins and ends [borges always, always borges) …

                        It has taken me 20 years to return to using the word god, to resurrect the name, to claim it in my own image while making my image an image of god, image on image, the gateway of the manifold secrets …

If i write for Time at all (and how i despise those who assume Time is the only or primary audience), it certainly isn’t for what is typically meant by the present face of that audience …

All systems of thought are systems of restricted desire, of the way a mind (a group of minds) want themselves (the world) to be or imagine it to already be.  But the world, the mind, Mind, defy articulated desire by encircling all desires and their denial.

            This is what Jabes beautifully, horribly, cleverly, labyrinthinely, midrashingly does in The Book of Questions:  i am left with nothing through his articulation, his seeming affirmation of all, his simultaneous dispute, his equal seeming negation of all …

                        He stretches his endlessly shifting passionate and contradictory feelings so far into words the mind shatters into itself … words constantly being sucked back into their voids, peering over their edges like scared and pretty children.

Student story #1.  I read an academic article on teaching ESL using the principles of “imaginative education.”  Wholly banal, conceptually risible, spiritually infantile:  what sort of competent teacher would not simply know, embody, actualize the advocated principles?  Yet, such is the bulky output of academia, a kind of factory spirituality, a mapping for robots of what any human—anyone reflectively embedded in experience—would know and (automatically, unthinkingly, daoistically) practice in the classroom.

Student story #2.  For a business ethics course we discuss a case study on Pfizer, talk about how the company could rebrand itself more ethically—part of this public relations campaign could be providing cheaper AIDS medication to Zambia, for example, in exchange for renaming Zambia Pfizer.  Many multinationals are now more fiscally and politically powerful than many nations; why not effectively actualize this in our geopolitics?

These discussions take place in the context of my increasing non-misanthropic indifference toward humanity as a species (vis-a-vis not only other species but other categories of natural things).  I view this change as an equalization program and as i slowly immerse myself in it, as it feels increasingly comfortable, right, for me, my legacy misanthropy mostly fades (which only works if i carefully limit the quality and quantity of my human interaction).  Even if i now respect worms and bees more than most humans, my schizoid response to humans lessens, as my initial confusion over the tension between my feelings of disrespect for the species to which i belong and most of its members (a disrespect extending to myself in my historic values and practices) and my inevitably greater fondness of some specific humans over any specific worms and bees evolves toward the emotional complexes becoming integrated into a larger vision of my-body-in-relation-to-earth, as i allow my values and practices to be modified by what-i-see-in-what-is-not-seen.

Don’t i enter words in doubt and leave them in faith … and in between there is neither doubt nor faith but only words, among which are doubt and faith?

And if all my writing were reduced to writing about not being able to write, would this be an expansion?

Everything increasingly seems like a spiritual prosthetic, other than food, touch, walking, and the void in words:  only flesh and language remain real, everything else a house of cards.

And yet, still, wispy friendship, fondness, affection, in splips and shplots—a thread through flesh and language even as they are threads through …

^co_mi_n^g s^oo_n (though coming and soon are as slippery as doubt and faith):

            ^{the poet and money}

            _oem’s (origins, ends, middles:  creation stories for those oriented toward renarrating)

            closing ^daodejing meditations:  lxxii – lxxxi (let’s wrap this up, baby; it’s been a long ride)

            daoism & _anarchy; ^anarchy & a neo aesthetics

From Montreal

A recent journalistic skirmish occurs between Chicago and Toronto as the latter has overtaken the former in population.  Chicago says--Yes, you now quantitatively beat us, but we qualitatively beat you:  no one sings about you, Toronto; the films shot in your city are set somewhere else.

True.  But the point misses the point; it speaks from the grave of an age.

Chicago, as a city-state in the world's last super-republic of modern civilization, thumps its proud and hairy chest according to established simian and republican laws.  Toronto, as a city-state in the world's first postmodern nation, a nation of text and indistinctions, fashions itself into the new civilization of numbers and disappearance.  Chicago produces yet another musical on the stage of spectacle, Toronto yields Gould, who walks away from the stage into the virtualized purity of the abstracted studio, who camouflages himself in the white bed of the north, the black bath of space.

If Toronto is what i imagine it to be, it will not compete with common American bombast, European ponderosity, or Asian production, but will enter the future with the future's trade, which by no means uses the materials to which we have become accustomed--volitional opinion, staked-out individuality, lit&networked reputation--to assert itself above or over, but uses these same materials (for they are inexorable) to non-assert alongsidedness, inness, throughness.  Toronto has the potential to be the first human settlement founded not on land and assertion, but text and disappearance.

(This is why a figure like R. Ford, who naturally belongs as a sheriff in the swamps of Louisiana, is a brilliant creation of Toronto and should not be dissed but celebrated, viewed in the manner one views television--as a parody of anything human--humoured as a babbling baby in a crib.  We cleverly erect him as a caricature of the Republic:  a post-man, a perfected corpulent blend of amusement and death, barely clinging to the corpse of the last man, an embodiment of our return to our ape-roots, aesthetic primitivism made flesh.  We should vote him as our eternal mayor, encase him in a glass hamburger above Nathan Phillips Square, and pretend to honour and respect him.)

Let Chicago sing its worn tunes. Toronto casts its digital discus past the tired orbits of time.  There is a new exchange.  America remains addicted to its stocks of garbage, patriotism, sentimentality, militarism, the bored game of unsullied virtue, the proud and hairy stage.  Toronto  should shrug at these maudlin qualities and quietly smile as it obliviously walks a new path of nonchalant virtuality, as it walks away from barbaric and republican chests into spaces without present circumference or definition.