The sun, we say, returns to the sky (though it is always in
the sky). The moon, we say, is full
tonight (though it is always full). Can
we not say in the same way that we are always there, still and pyretic, in the
void, always full – and that we speak of returning and newness as a result of
the confusion of bodies, ideas, events, passions, orbiting around us?
Returning
is a word we use for the perception of motion.
One could say, as some sages, that we all return to the
desert. But isn’t this to privilege the
desert? And isn’t it to set aside our
immobility, the desert’s crawl and reach? – the desert moves farther, faster
than we do; we only excel at the appearance of movement … the desert returns to
us.
What feels like the farthest distance from our origin may be
the moment when we have returned.
The tourist returns, but has to move to return – the tourist
forever visits Returning, is a resident alien in the no-place, Returning; the natural
citizen of Returning does not have to move to return, for returning is its
home.
The tourist
in fact has to move to re-image rememberings of returnings, to simulate the
no-place of returning through an onslaught of physicality and images. The function of technology, it could be said,
is to aid the increasingly vast industry of tourists to Returning.
Transportation
technologies – to move to returnings
Image and
sound technologies – to (re)capture the movement
Communication
technologies – to narrate the movement and the
capturing
In these conglomerations, society loudly assures itself that
the simulation of home is home, that tourism is citizenry, and that moving is
returning.
Isn’t returning less flying home after visiting another
continent, more—after having thought about visiting another continent—staying
home?
To return before one has to return –
Is this
less of a returning?
I have returned,
said the businesswoman to her partner as she entered the condo they shared.
I see that, her partner said.
I have been on a long
journey and discovered myself and lost myself and become nothing and become
everything and here i am, back.
But you just went to the store to get eggs, her partner said.
The two are not mutually exclusive, the businesswoman
replied.
And the two went their separate ways soon
after, for they had not journeyed together, nor had the returning been shared.
To return perhaps is to build a bridge of nothing between
the void of i and the void of world and walk to the midpoint of the bridge and
not move.
But would
we not rather say that the walking to the midpoint is the turning and the
not-movings the returnings?
I returned your book,
a friend says.
But,
surely, having gone on a journey, the book is new.
If you have been on a journey and have come home early and a
friend calls and says, Oh, have you
returned?
And you
respond, I’m unsure.
Your
response will be seen as a little joke, a nod to memory and movement and
dislocation.
But, truly, it is the only serious response.
We say, We are
returning from a trip on the journey back.
But we do
not say on the way there that we are turning toward a trip.
We think of return as a returning to home or ground … but –
if there is no home or ground – no return.
If we had to choose a space to return to, or a time, which would
we choose?
A space, for only it could be in the
future.
We may think that returning is a mapped act and the act of
reaching the point of returning unmapped, but this is only a feeling at the
point of returning. Once we embark on
returning we realize there is no map and never has been. There was a point we sought, the point at
which we turned back or felt we turned back, but our returning is less a
seeking than a negating of seeking, a negating of returning, a negating of
maps. We might say disturn instead of return,
except for return’s necessary euphemistic function.
I picture a return journey as a line with an arrow pointing
inward on each end, or a circle, with my point of departure and return at, say,
0°. Perhaps a serpentine line, a labyrinth. But the shape of my picture may be less
important than the composition or texture of its shape. If the shape is made of iron, the journey
will firmly be a circle or a serpent; if a string, throw it in the air – a new
shape (the journey renewed, reshapen, returned). If strings, many shapes; if water, the
journey reforms itself continuously. If
gas, the journey is everywhere, diffused, like a volcanic eruption affecting
the weather in another hemisphere generations later.
Returning
is a shape that has no shape.
We say we return to death from death through life (or, in
certain spiritual orientations, to life from life through death) but can the
i—of which they are comprised, like
structures and quarks—once returned to itself, be said to return to death or
life? i returns to i through i. life and death are just roadside concession
stands.
You are lost.
But you are lost to your lostness.
Who has returned?
Why don’t you return
to your homeland? asked her friend.
Because i
am a different i than when i left, and what was home will no longer be home,
and the land is always shifting. There
is no return.
Your home is now here?
I live
here, and i say for convenience, This is
my home, but if there is no returning there is only exile; exile is my
home.
What does it mean to
have no-home as home?
It is the
same as having no-place as place and no-time as time and no-god as god and
no-love as love.
How can this be? Only love is love and god is god and time is
time.
This is not
what the heresiarchs have said; the heresiarchs in art and thinking and spirit
and number and shape all agree.
The heresiarchs make
no sense.
Then
no-sense is sense, for my feeling of exile is more real than my feeling of
sense or home or place or time or god or love.
This doesn’t sound like
living, but dying.
But this
utopia—this no-place—has been humanity’s dream ever since it began the project
of the city; if we have been focusing on dystopias recently, hasn’t it been
because we sentimentalized no-place, even as we sentimentalize almost
everything? But our dream is a fate and
a passion, and all fates and passions involve dying in order to live. Exile is the human home and, regardless of
the names we give it, we seek it with our lives.
I have what i call memories of what i think are returnings. But to return to these memories – am i now
not caught in a travelogue of impossible directions?
What does the football fan seek in the return to his couch
and beer, in the return of the season?
Is he not like Odysseus returning to Penelope after unspeakable
absences? Does he not seek, again,
tears, again, shock and rage, again, death, again, great joy, again, the end and return
of a story?
The increasing misalignment between the returning of the
seasons, the returning of the moon, and the returnings with which we obsess is
perhaps a notable factor in the increase in our ennuis and neuroses, our
depressions and fragmentations.
Yet to
return to the returning of the seasons, the returning of the moon, would break
us, dependent as we now are on our obsessions.
Isn’t
this unspoken knowledge also a factor in our ecstatic enervation?
We say we return to the earth—ashes to ashes—but why not to
the clouds—rain to rain—or to the iPhone—text to text—or the toilet—dump to
dump—or the i—eye to eye: the gaze at
the black center of returning?
Life is not love,
we can’t help observing, despite their homophonic properties. Yet can’t we transform all of life to love
through a certain trick, a trick that, when performed, seems more legitimate
than the observing we first can’t help?
Doesn’t this trick, once performed, require many of the same manoeuvres
as returning? Is returning, then, the manual for the worthy simulation of love?
The body returns to the mind
the mind to
the body
The mind returns to the heart
the heart
to the mind
The heart returns to the spirit
the spirit
to the heart
We are complex prefabricated packages of returning.
Returning home with joy, returning home with foreboding
the same returning?
Returning home with grief, returning home with ambivalence
the same returning?
Returning to an alien ashram with grief, returning to your
ancestral home with grief
the same returning?
Returning to life, returning to death
the same returning?
suicide is the most extreme form of returning to life
A grain of sand returns to the beach from the water, returns
to a glass studio from the beach, returns to a vase in Manhattan from the
studio, returns to a landfill site from being a vase, returns to a gull’s belly
from the site, returns to the water from the gull, returns to the beach from
the water.
Which is
the true returning?
And
if i move from child to student to priest to husband to father to banker to lover to academic to poet to bum to student to priest to child?
So
am i not the ways i walk, the ways i am led upon? Don’t i hang names on myself and with each
hanging weigh myself down in my walking, my true returning?
When Chuang Tzu says after he dreamt he was a butterfly that
he’s unsure whether he is now a butterfly dreaming he is a human or he was a
human dreaming he was a butterfly … is there not contained in this doubt the
very vision and unspeakable truth of returning?
For what
seems to us solid sublimates to gas on slender accident, and what gas to solid.
Did not Heraclitus say this also when he wrote that gods in
dying live our lives and we in dying live the gods’?
So
the tunnel from womb to earth and that from earth to grave are equally
returnings. If we call one light, the
other darkness, is this more a function of our darkness, less the vision of
returning?
To the human on the shore, the wave keeps returning to the
beach.
But to the ocean it is always a new wave.
To the mother giving birth it is always a new baby.
To the reincarnationist, the soul keeps returning to the world.
So every return is also wholly novel and every novelty is
also wholly a return.
We could speak of the relations of money and returning. But we shall not.
When i am at life’s statistical midpoint, i could say that i
am beginning to return. Although could i
not equally say i am ending returning – for couldn’t life’s midpoint be the
consummation of the impossibility of returning?
When you remarry it is not as if you are married again.
It is a
different thing, requiring a new word.
We add a ‘re’ from laziness.
So with
return.
Returning may be less to silence than to the silence in
every word.
The city, being the alphabet in three dimensions, returns us
to an image of god’s original speaking—one that created a species to destroy
the Creator and destroy the silence that comprised god’s heart.
Our attempt to return to places in our minds has more
solidity than our attempt to return to them in physicality. For our minds are closer to the heart of
perception, having more purity and hallucinatory power. The cluttered facticity of objects in physicality
diminishes the efficacy of our attempts to return there. So returning is a spiritual discipline and it
is no accident that humanity’s great religions have it—though with different
spins—at the center of their cosmologies.
water returns to the earth from
the sky
water returns to the sky from the
earth
woman returns to man
man returns to woman
the adult returns to the child
the child to the adult
the sun returns to its deep bowl
of night
night returns to overturning its
bowl, releasing the sun
I travel india for a year and return to my home. I walk through a combination of valley paths
and urbanscapes to a café and return to my home after five hours’ absence. Yet the latter can be more of an adventure, a
longer journey, than the former. Fewer
prosthetics are required of the i. We
have hardly begun to explore the relationships between time, space, expenditure
(fiscal, ecological, physical, emotional) and returning.
Until we see every act as equally
returning (and thus accept a diversity of way), are we not the most wasteful
and inefficient of species, doomed to chains we do not call chains because we
have the capacity to make them long.
Returning Exam
In order to be shown the exit from the realm of shades after death and
enter eternal dissolution, one must pass an exam on returning. Here might be some of the exam’s
questions. A sample question, with
possible answer, is provided to aid in completing.
Sample question, with possible answer
Which two consonantless words are
homonyms, synonyms and antonyms, and might be the mantra of returning?
eye
and i
1. rotate regress
advance relay
Which is
the better synonym of return?
2. If we saw all words beginning with re as related, how would our lives be
changed?
real rebozo reckless redolent reefer referee regolith rehab reificatory rejectamenta rekindle reliquary Rembrandt renascence reodorant reprobate requiem reredos Reservoir return retiary Reuters revenant rewind rex reyong rezepte
3. Which is more of a journey—returning ourselves or
watching others return?
4. Based on the below patterns, fill in the blank
at the end of the question.
return – reword – renew – reshape – renumber – renew – recreate –
repent - redevelop
return – urn – nut – rut – run – net – ten
turn – tern - - torn
re-surrect (insurrect/ion)
upturn – overturn – downturn
disturn deturn unturn misturn in/out
turntable – turnkey
Turin
re-mind, re-body, re-spirit
If to decreate is not the same as
destroy (and dedestroy not the same as create), then dereturn is not the same
as ______________________________________.
5. none of us are what we seem
and
all of us are only what we seem
Is
returning a turning into this and?
6. Return – ret urn – wet urn – the living :
the dead – dry urn
Explore.
7. Are deconstructions and decreations returnings,
in their apparent removal of unnecessary debris, or do they accumulate debris
through adding to the material one has to negotiate in order to return?
8. We return our minds to accelerate our bodies on
the commodity exchange of spirit. Are
the industries of law, knowledge, religion, technology, health, justice,
ecology, and business the tentacled and transactional ghosts we reify to aid us
in our desperate barterings? To what
extent, and how?
9. Why do we go away? We go
away to come back.
Isn’t all
desire a desire to return, all action an attempt?
What we return to is what was hiding inside what we came
from.
The Eiffel tower is a return to
the postcard
Bloch’s novel is a return to the
film
The parent is the return to the
lover
Han Yu is a return to Kafka
The ocean is a return to the
bathtub
The pinnation of the leaf is a
return to the microchip
Following the model of christ, god in dying has
become—through its ultimate absence—more potent than when it was alive,
strutting through cathedral naves, solid walls in the cloisters of mind. So are not we, as god’s forebears, learning
from god’s play of potency? As christ
used blood and crosses, as god used education and enlightenment, are we not
using technology and communication for our ambitious ends? Are not christ, god and we walking parallel
paths of potent return?
To return is to find returning in not returning.
One cannot say one returns to the one for the one in
returning has negated the one it seeks – the one seeking, the one sought, the
returning itself – are there not always at least three and, by extension, a
myriad, in the one?
We now rest on unities as tenuous as thawing ice. Is this a return to our original solitude,
the height of human civilization a frozen pond, on either side a sea?
There is never a point of no return
the point of no-return is the point
of returning
Re-turn :
but we are
always turning and so always returning.
What do we return to?
is perhaps less the question than the questions we ask about our questions as
we return.
The merchant returns suddenly, as some zen students achieve
enlightenment, on his deathbed; the sage devotes her life to returning. Some advocate the gradual path, some the
sudden. Nevertheless, all return.
It is easy to say we return to nature or death or god or
ourselves or silence or love (through technology or life or humanity/the city
or love or words or greed) but what if rather than returning to nature we
return to technology (or words or greed)?
We speak of return or returning as singular … but …
only
returns and returnings.
Perhaps the most we do is return to returning – we see, as
the arcs of the spheres become visible, there was no original turn. Of course, we could also say all we do is
turn and that we never return.
How i love the efficient destruction of the city, this
attempt to return to god’s original destruction, not through word but the
destruction of word, to the decreation between and beyond our words.
Perhaps we can say we’ve returned when we perceive entering
sleep or night no differently than entering waking or day.
We don’t return to anything, any body, any idea; we return
to returning.
It is equally easy to argue that we surround ourselves with
ourselves (and surround the extensions of ourselves with our extensions) to
avoid returning and to consummate it. Is
this equal ease a returning?
The prefix re- assumes
an original. Do we add another re- for each returning?
But if
there is no original—or the original is irrevocably lost, like the name of
god—and there is neither a place to return to nor ever a repeating of place (or
i), then we are irrevocably lost between the original turn and the desire to return
to what never existed. This
irrevocability, this lostness, are perhaps our home, what we return to, our
only returning, although because of its no-place (its utopia) we deny it, and
construct homes from false places, covering the no-place of our home, as the
city covers the earth and the earth the void.
What is the opposite of return?
Isn’t it return?
Isn’t the knowledge we attribute to returning the human’s
ignorance and hubris, seeing return primarily through the arc of an isolated
self, culminating in personal death – this delusional elevation of an
infinitesimal part of the whole (a human, a species); isn’t our fear the
not-knowing of our root inability to attribute—of not being able to see any
point of origin or destination, of not being able to see the portion of the
shape we inhabit, let alone the shape?
So isn’t
returning a sub-fallacy of teleology (or teleology a sub-fallacy of returning)?
We always return, we never return, we sometimes return, we
partially return, we fully return, we never return.
The concept of turning seems easy—
I say, Turn your body to your left.
You do it.
I see it.
You have
turned.
But if i say, Return
your body to your left—
You
(re)turn your body to your left.
I (re)see
it.
But have you returned?
If one pictures a journey as a line,
all
returnings are measurable and finite.
If one pictures a journey as a circle,
all
returnings are immeasurable and infinite.
We can have recreate,
bound to recreation, but can we have redestroy? Does return
sit between recreate and redestroy, indecisive?
We visit nature but we no longer can know it. We know the city. We can only return to nature by recreating it
(its void, its desolation, its silence, its unknowing, its unmappedness, its
rhythmic infinitude) in ourselves. (Isn’t
technology the visible sign of this most virtual misplacement?) So this return to nature (in recreation and
signage) may be emblematic of all our returnings, misplaced (re-homed) in the
void of ourselves.
We turn to what we know we think,
return to
what we think we have known.
In both cases our knowledge, our thinking, is murky –
both a
gloaming … but which one leads to dawn, which to dusk?
I return to a home of my childhood after decades’
absence. Is it not like visiting a movie
set of a dream? So all returnings are
oneiric, any sensuous manifestations props and facades. So our returnings are films – we may be the
audience, but the director surely is unknown.
Returning
in history : film (a returning to literature, a returning to itself); the human
in the city (a returning to a pre-alphabetic age).
Return is not retreat, for retreating arises from
desperation or strategy whereas returning arises from an interstice of khôra
and qualia.
We think of return as moving toward something that existed
in the past, but why fix returning so solidly in time? Time may only be a one-way street to those
who rigidly follow history’s laws.
The house, the woman, the job we wish to return to – are
they not as elusive as the smell, the experience, the state we wish to return
to? Both are spontaneous configurations
of perception.
Your circumscriptions and so your
judgements are solid
return to the breath on the water
Your love is like an ax
return to
the breath on the water
Your words are like a traffic jam
return to the brook bubbling around
the rocks
Your desires are like apocalypses
return to the mist of the morning
Your way is littered with definitions
return to the path of hot coals and
rain
Your virtue is like medieval
armour
get naked, throw on a sarong and
tanktop
Your assets are like an airplane
hijack it; turn it into a bird
sanctuary
Your relations are like
tapestries of dustbunnies
There
is a paneled portal behind, hiding a secret passageway to silence. Return.
It’s close to midnight.
I crave potato chips. I return to
the store i was at a few hours earlier to obtain them. But first, before my returning, the potato
chips returned to me.
Before i
return, i am always returned to. I am a transit
hub of returnings.
We are homo homo
returnus. Whether talented or
middling, whether local or global, whether an EU president or a collections
agency officer, we each have our few favourite spots to return to: intellectual, emotional, physical. We live in our returnings to these spots and
are defined less by the spots and the returnings and more by the ways we
return—what we create on these ways: the
totality of these creations we might call the i. We die (why do we die?) …
we die … to assist in creating new ways of returnings for other returners, even
as others have done so for us. Our
dyings are our greatest collaborations, our greatest creations, our greatest
gifts. That we do not view our dyings as
such—that we even view them as our chief tragedies—is a sign of our skewered
geometry: we overfaith the apparent
solidity of our cities’ verticality. But
the ways of returnings are many and go down or sideways as often as up, are
gaseous as often as solid, doubt as often as know, and flounder as often as stride.
We are wind and stone.
Yet we fear wind, we fear stone.
Isn’t the fart the lightness of our fear of wind, the turd of our fear
of stone – the laughter of Balaam’s ass?
Sublimation
(chemical, psychic, aesthetic) as vital living.
Yet
the paths to walk between solidity and gaseousness longer, more circuitous,
more obstacled, more unmapped (despite our tsunamis of maps) – and this
distance now the mythic journey, riddled with suicides and breakdowns and
genocides and addictions and fragmentations and ennuis and despairs.
Returning
has always been at the center of myth.
But with myth now itself having gone on a mythic journey and returned to
itself—its self of returning—and so is at home nowhere and everywhere, the
distance between wind and stone is not a lifetime or a catastrophe—though it is
a lifetime and a catastrophe—but only the distance from i to i.
It isn’t what we came from or return to that present us with
the greatest challenges. It is our
returnings.
I return a smile. I
return a lawnmower. I return a favour.
Same returning?
Do we return by turning back or going beyond? Isn’t this the unspeakable question of the
universe, of creation and also of physics, of the spirit – the doubt and seed
of the human? Yet isn’t our doubt and
seed also their possible indistinguishability?
As i walk, as one foot returns to the earth the other
returns to the air, then the one that returned to the air returns to the earth
and the one that returned to the earth returns to the air. Are not all other returnings complications of
these returnings?
