Proper of Saints: Doo's bio-

Hesperia Lingarius Masma Doo wrote the Proper of Saints in 94 days, when incarcerated in the tenth century with only a jar of pickles and the Roman Gradual.

Mr. Ms. Doo (having been subject to numerous sexual transformations throughout his and her life), upon being captivated by the Proprium de Sanctis, immediately realized that in her home century—the twenty-first—sainthood had secretly migrated from religion to art, for it was the artists who mediated between heaven, earth, and hell in modernity; religion had become a relic which mediated only fear—and that very poorly.  Augustine, Aquinas, and Mother Teresa are saints no longer … they’ve been replaced by Homer, Bach, and Van Gogh.

Doo, then, in a flurry of medieval inspiration, wrote the true biographies of 81 great saints, along with 12 malfeasances and an introduction that effectively places the religion-art transformation in a historical-philosophical-aesthetic-cultural-linguistic-spiritual context.  Upon completion, Doo returned to the third millennium to test some of his and her ideas in the bedrooms, boardrooms, kitchens, and alleys of the human world.  To this day, Doo finds her theory gloriously seductive which, as any evolved human knows, is a prime indicator of truth.

The Secular Sadoo is pleased to introduce Doo’s Proper of Saints to its reading public.  We will be following the liturgical calendar, publishing each Proper on its proper day throughout 2012.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Its black flame is more potent, its reach further, its hope more boundless.  Light is the child of darkness and those who fear darkness the children of light.  These grandchildren, happy in forgetting their grandparent, presumed lost at sea, to dance on the shoals of knowledge.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  The sheets of darkness are pulled across your nudity, across your eyes, at night, and night again, and you forget its flames in the pills and disasters of the technological morning or you present them, wrapped in strings of words, to analysts, who turn them into light for cash or sex or children or something else or all of the above, or you use art or its shadow, entertainment, this heat, this tongue, to enter a lighter sleep, cool-warm, the make-believe womb of power, art’s frequent effect.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Do not flee the brighter light, even though it sucks you down.  Without this danger, darkness is not darkness and you can never burn.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  What is darkness?  Darkness is waiting and watching, stillness and nothing, the wordless equality that crawls from the embodied knowledge that every thing is a god.  It is the chaos we crave and fear and work toward in our cosmopolitan denial.  For darkness must be the center of all acts and words and thoughts and things, and that is why all things are gods.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Its fuel is a composite of doubt and death, the egg and seed of life.  Darkness is no friend or savior, but neither is light.  Light pretends to befriend, but darkness does not.  Light pretends and its pretense is not unreal.  Darkness does not pretend and its lack of pretense is not a matter of trust or nobility or anything particular, but the feeling evoked in its presence.  Light is the absence of darkness and darkness the fullness of light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Every gram of new consciousness, each euphoric and progressive comma, everything making your life comfortable and pleasurable, each truth that dams the night, leaks from darkness’ masked expanse.  Yet humans, who seem to crave little more than comfortable pleasures, would hide and try to slay their source, as if they were babes of spirit and cowards of the soul.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  The birds of darkness, screeching silently through centuries, broke through my bedroom window one lost November, pecking out my eyes, filling the cavities with fire.  I walked into the streets and the people of the bright urban night, upon seeing me, fled to drink and flesh and the caresses of electricity.  I walked on.  Was I to thank the birds of darkness?  Was I to curse them?  I only knew they do what they must do when they must, ripping aside the lighted veil to show the still translucent veil of darkness.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  This darkness is not some esoteric, cultic, theosophist, ecstatic or depressive, exclusivist, occult, or material knowledge, other than the material knowledge that is not usually called knowledge, for it simply exists, without need to explain or describe.  This darkness is calm, unruffled, without impulse, below and in and through every word.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Darkness eats light and desires it.  Producing gargantuan quantities of light from our secret love of darkness and knowledge of its need, we feed darkness rather than resting in it, but in doing so cloister and abuse its capacities while remaining encapsulated in our burden of light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Darkness is more passionate, more intelligent, witty, more courageous, innovative, and more fun than light.  It dances harder, lighter, longer; it makes the dance and is the memory of the dance.  Darkness stretches the circle to its ecstatic limits of futility and in stretching breaks what it contains, and its methods of breaking are myriad; the impossibilities and the breaking drive the people to light.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  The creatures of darkness, knowing their namelessness, know darkness is a moniker, its nickname often confused by those buried in names with light’s enemy, as if light—if it is truly light—could have an enemy.  But light, being born of darkness and not something other than it, knows no enemies until it forgets its ancestry and falsely claims autonomy on god’s infinite palette.  What structures are there which enable such forgetting and what is their appeal?  The creatures of darkness, having been compelled to burrow through them, might be able to say, but seem to choose silence, and this silencing may say more about what enables than the saying.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  It is made of flame and fuel and charcoal formed of the bodies of gods long dead and forgotten.  They who would burn, not with electric light, that cool copy and shadow and regulation, but with the inferno of origins and the death of origins, which is no hell unless heaven be hell, become flame and fuel and charcoal and in becoming must live in death according to the means granted them, though this death, like this darkness, has no opposition.

Darkness burns far brighter than light.  Darkness washes sin and erases alienation.  It looks at telephone poles and presidents and through its eyeless vision sees no difference.  Would all humans have these eyes, how would the trees and rivers appear?  How might we talk about this representation?  Would we see it as a gift and is this gift the gift, the one we cannot give ourselves?

Darkness burns.  Burns brighter.  Light burns.  Far brighter.  Far.  Light brighter, darkness far.  Burns.  Burns far.  Burns far brighter.  Darkness light.  Light light far burns.  Brighter darkness brighter light.  Far, far the darkness, far the light, burns far brighter, light than far and far than light, far than burns, burns than bright, far than far, light than light darkness brighter light than light far far

darkness burns far brighter than light

dirty old man

i’m a dirty old man and when i was young I was a dirty young man and if i grow to be ancient i’ll be a dirty ancient man and when i was a boy i was a dirty boy and when i was middleaged there i was squashed between innocence and incapacity, on the throne of dirty, and when i was an infant i was an especially dirty infant and when i was a fucking teenager i was a fucking dirty teenager and i’ll always be dirty because i love being dirty and i’ll be dirty even if i live forever and dirty’s more fun than being clean and if mommy or daddy told you otherwise they can go to hell and this is what dirty is:

1.  it’s wanting to rub your sex on elephants and streetcar poles and wasted poles

2. it's thinking about everyone you meet without

their clothes on and piled higher than everest

doing the kama sutra forward and reverse and everything covered in gas and zeus with his matchstick ready and lit

3.  it’s wanting big black pricks—fuck the clichés—ramming me in tropical plant greenhouse washrooms, my ass spread like a book over the dripping sink and whoever coming in and watching and joining like some de sade cuckoo clock, some sex du soleil, some carousel of rising falling whirling oysters! roosters! lights! music! and it’s knowing dirty has nothing to do with political correctness or anything but being dirty and feeling great about that, as if the world’s a big hairy testicle or a woody allen boob

4. it's seeing juicy screaming pussies wide

as mirrors on velvet couches like those

brothels in your brain, hands coming out of them, fingers soaked and beckoning, and clits like talking pomegranates, blabbing slutty, seedy, crimson, the way you like it, the blood, the blood

5. it's getting through dentist hell by having her say,

did you know it’s international nude

dental day today? then her stripping, feeling her

soft saggy catholic bubs against my cheek as she’s drilling in my mouth and after i’ve done the final rinse she says time for you to drill me now and she clambers up doggy-style half-geriatric on the drilling chair and i’m hard as god, life’s just endless porn clips unless you’re mormon then it’s endless mormon porn clips

(what else do you do with that throbbing thing between your legs? cut it off? sew it up? get some deity to delegitimize it? bury it in meetings and skating lessons and mortgages and muffins? what else with those manic memories? say oh me oh my oh silly youth! or i used to be bad but i don’t need to be bad no more or the highest functions of our species are hardly simian but those of virtue and honesty and discipline, which are their own rewards and devoting your life to proving this despite the seven billion pieces of evidence to the contrary but it’s so much fun to say fuck and even more fun to do it and if towers should fall and all the fish die and bugs overrun us, who cares, really? everything dies and it surely isn’t an accident eros and thanatos have always been friends with benefits, doing it in their mythic bouncy castle—always an open bday party at the hard shag café on planet moof)

6.  it’s spending my time in elevators

undressing people because it’s a helluva lot more interesting than whatever tragedy is being broadcast on the monitor

7.  it’s looking at that boxer’s swinging balls in the doggie park and thinking maybe they might taste good

(that’s not all i am:  i bake flognardes and babysit my grandchildren and read mallarme and take long walks and scrub my bathtub using allnatural cleaners and don’t own a car and compost a lot and am mostly nice to my neighbors and ponder the nature of god in something of a spinozean way and drink only the finest global beers and am told—but who isn’t these democratic days?—that i’m a great lover and volunteer in my community and feel no desire to abuse my cats and behave more or less like the citizen i’m supposed to be and don’t censor any of my thoughts so)

8.  if you’re walking down the street and your

stockings stop at just the right spot and i’m in a particular mood i’ll pull you into my mind and throw you facefirst on a desk on the 72^nd floor and yank your panties down and your skirt up and do what any certified ape thinks about at least 81 times a day

9.  if you and your mother or brother or sister or

cousin or boss or grandmother or whatever are

sitting there across from me (but only if everyone’s legal of course because i’m canadian) … we’re all bonobos, little copulation deities, fulfilling the only thing that’s ever fulfilled (nature, stupid) … what are couches for anyway? (and here we are, all this flesh, black time holes, collapsed, sucking darkness like it’s a milkshake) … what the hell, it’s all in the family, names are constructs, we’re all related

10. all this, this hindu heaven, love here on

earth, pure bodhisattvas of glorious

nothingness, and you’re a perfect 10 even

if you’re 100 (in the baptismal tank, in

the name of the mother and the

daughter and the holey host, laid

down and dying dying dead, you’re

resurrected! thank aphrodite and the virgin

mary and that whore, magdalene, made ever

new!)

(and we’re night and fire and ice and words are a lie, we’re all hair and goobers and drive to the grave in our b-52s like the idea of a certain kind of god dreamed by another kind of god in a messy nest of chirping gods)

… and you wouldn’t think this if you met me but who cares the mask is all as willy taught us and that’s what being dirty is and i’ve always been dirty and i love being

dirty and my god’s dirty too and so are

you.

Peering and Peering

My god peers through human eyes, hiding as it does in vision’s absence.  It peers through this human—this human that something sometimes calls my I—at other humans, seeking what blocks it from seeing other gods.

Is it trying to remove the blockages?  For what purpose, if any?  Does it think in terms of ends or is my god—are all gods—being, it seems, in strange relation to time, resident outside of ends?  Does it have means?  Are these means technological, biological, aesthetic, or according to some other mechanism that might be intuited, then forgotten, in sleepless nights?  Is flesh the blockage? Society? Convention? Ego? Language? Sex? Is it, perhaps most horribly, the gods themselves?  What is it in me (but prepositions and pronouns quickly fail) that even senses and names that something peers?

My god peers through human eyes, and maybe other eyes, and maybe all the eyes that ever are (but this would be quite a feat), and eyes seem in relation to my god as chance to fate or fate to freedom or freedom to chance.

It peers, and seems to pass at times emotions, often violent, into this thing something sometimes calls the I, then this I falls to flesh and fury in whatever form has overcome it.  Does my god enjoy this?  Does it flinch?  Is it the one that calmly seems to say the passing and what’s passed are not important in proportion to my sense of my experience?

My god watches human greed, lust, stupidity, incompetence, corruption, Schadenfreude, pettiness, fear, injustice, indolence, and the common acts of affection that gently stab our veils of misery, and what does it do?  It peers through my peering, and whether the words, feelings­—and consequent thoughts and action—that arise from these concentric circles of eyes are something that are passed between the circles, whether they are passed unidirectionally, bidirectionally, according to different principles according to which direction, not at all, or in rough conjunction with some geometry yet undiscovered, who might claim to know?  And if someone should have the audacity, ignorance, and/or blessed-cursed gift to somewhat say, what criteria would the rest of us have to separate their words (if words they [or their gods] choose [or are compelled] to use) from that noise we not infrequently call communication, if separation is indeed the act most efficacious for a process that we barely seem to comprehend, if it exists at all?

Nevertheless, my god peers and all this peering is not tumult.  On occasion, an occasion brought about (if we can even speak of causation here) by exhaustion or serendipity or what certain humans might call failure, eye through eye passes onto other eyes and all that seems to happen is this passing.  Silent, bright-dark, calm, seemingly impossible in the molecular chaos that circumscribes us.  Are such occasions­—pure peering—what we might want to call enlightenment?  Can we, as certain gurus proclaim, sometimes loudly, never leave this state?  Or, as certain poets indicate, sometimes softly, do we truly enter it only in death?  But there must be other ors, which maybe stretch as far as language into the night we cannot grasp, snapping back at times to nothing.

If all gods peer—if the very nature of the divine is peering and all that we might have ascribed to divinity simply our own conflicted responses to peering projected, often desperately, onto the eyed peering itself—but peer differently, through diverse modes, hindered in various degrees by the humans they inhabit, then what might be the sum of these peerings, if indeed we can even place this problem (if it is a problem) in the crisp sphere of mathematics?

My god’s peering feels to me as if some other eyes have abducted a space behind my eyes—some hermitage or forge hacked from old rock and fossil, a stranger pitching residence, an occupation my mind may deny, resent, attack, or describe.  I prefer to describe and in describing feel my eyes staring in a mirror at eyes that might not be mine, this feeling an encounter I might call a womb of art.

Is my god, then, a voyeur, a kind of transcendent peeping tom, one who peers itself but resists all standard human methods of being peered at?  Oh vision of vision!—which seems even not to require human eyes for its murky work but only itself, housed in living flesh, some senses active, requiring not even output for its satisfaction (output being a human manufacture, perhaps to attempt to counteract [or mimic] the foreign force behind), but only peering.  A vision that often has no vision, a dependent vision, a concatenation of prosthetics and little else, source and defiance of science and art, a usurper of space, a tramp and sneak, a rogue, a thief, a chameleon, opportunist, liar, a human-eating dog … what god is this?

My god peers, and Peering might be its name if it were given to names.  But I am given names and given to being given and given to peering at that which peers through me.  And what—the question lurks, anxiously—is the effect on me as I begin to peer at peering?  Do my god and I become peering peers?  Do I usurp space (non-space?) in it behind its non-existent eyes?  Does my god become unsettled as it realizes two can play its unsettling game?  And then what happens?  More eyes?  Eyes manifold and multiplying, crawling into beckoning space on language’s weary crumbling track, eating words into the wordless night?

If some thing bumps into earth some billion years from now, might it discover only a sphere of eyes—this our tribute to existence, a footnote to the fact that vision has existed?  Or, still, the same old war and garbage?  Maybe this thing that bumps eats eyes or vision, and is grateful, for it is hungry after many light years of traveling; it eats our tribute and our gods, belches, and returns, spawning stories of a planet of eyes and more hunger.

My god and I, competitors and collaborators on the ancient stage of eyes.

Teleology

Another one’s god suggested to her this—

It had occurred to me that if a composer creates individual 'pieces of music' that at the end of his/her life there will only be a finite number of musical works by that composer. I had found myself wishing I could discover new works by long-dead composers whose music I loved but already knew too well to be able to have the pleasure of first hearing of any of their music. If instead of composing individual, finite length works, a composer could encode in computer software their personal compositional methods, preferences, processes and ways of making musical decisions, and somehow their aesthetic sensibility too, then they could go on composing and generating new music long after the biological human had ceased to exist.

Gods speak with gods in the secret burrows of our flesh, and it is this odd conversation that sustains—and maybe is—the most vibrant and distinctive human project.  So her god and mine sat down on a couch in my soul and chatted, over Olympian and pretty biscuits, steaming and sassy, of the task suggested by what had occurred to her.

her god:	Pleasant weather we’re having.
my god:	Where do you get a beer in this soul?
her god:	The consortium of discursive gods has placed …
my god:	Nice.  Yeah, a Westvleteren … nah, make it two.  Want one?
her god:	… has placed the technological urge in the human for one purpose and one purpose only:  …
my god:	Thank God monks are good for something.
her god:	… to facilitate the human’s placing its highest creative functions—which they call art and we call ourselves—into it to incarnate and extend the divine spark in what they call time and we don’t call anything, so that they have what they call hope and we call comedy that others, after human annihilation, will discover us or them or something.
my god:	Two more.
her god:	My human, for example, …
another god:	Speaking of naming, people routinely call my human intelligent, but she is truly only artificially intelligent.  A cat, a tree, a wombat, a hurricane … these are naturally intelligent.  No wonder, then, that the human has been embarking on its little project of making intelligence in its own image, presumably adding the adjective artificial as a nostalgic nod to its mythological roots in the garden.
my god:	Hey … give me back my fucking Westvleteren.
another god:	You still have an unopened bottle there.
my god:	You deranged cuntface degenerate.
her god:	Now, now, have another biscuit.  My point is this.  I have placed in my female human, as some of our compatriots have done in theirs …
another god:	It’s a fad, it’ll be over in two or three thousand years.
another god:	I’m placing in my human the necessity of severe finitude:  of producing only one work—a single villanelle—in her lifetime, but the most perfect villanelle—indeed the most perfect poem—that a human will ever produce.  I prefer this to this crass fad of infinite reproduction.
another god:	Isn’t your method just another form of her god’s?  Aren’t we falling prey to that all-too-human fallacy of inappropriately conflating the specific and the general?
another god:	Huh?
another god:	My human’s obsessed with puppets.
another god:	I see this as simply another five million monkeys on five million keyboards sort of problem.
her god	… I have placed in her the urge and capability that many of us believe is not a fad but the objective, end, and being of the human:  to essentially replace herself with a digital copy of her impulses, eternally creating, replicating, interacting and merging with other copies, producing an infinite variety of new forms.  So the human rebecomes spirit, from whence it came.  In short, it returns to us and nature is, thankfully, once again, left to its own devices, without the pretense of consciousness or goal.  This teleological experiment of ours—the human—will have fulfilled its purpose:  it will provide us with many kalpas of entertainment and a basis for future research in incarnating ourselves.
some other gods:	fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! fad! …
my god:	I like flesh.  It’s strange.  {belches loudly and for many minutes}
her god:	You will still have the memory of residing in a soul in flesh, which will be no different for you than the experience of residing in a soul in flesh, as for us gods memories and experiences are identical, as so many things are identical.  The only difference will be to the human; although it will not notice its demise, at least not in a biological sense, it will continue to explore its biological non-existence in digital form.
another god:	Pass the pretzels.

Although the conversation went on interminably, for months—my soul sodden, ripped, and wretched by the time the others left (how many gods had there been in that hoppy and philosophical debauch!?), my god asleep in a bathtub in one of my soul’s lower spas—the gist of the conversation seemed to come to me in a dream some nights later.

Fifteen ovaltine daguerreotypes crept down the valley of the Korean armistice, waving slightly.  I was nowhere to be seen.  The most welcome aperture, notwithstanding its lithographic allusions to the Hilton Arc de Triomphe Paris hotel, was rejected in favor of seven singing sirens, reminiscent of very little.  Mammals were being bludgeoned, though happily, while Joe and I sat in Leopold Café and painted squirrels on the five-limbed body of a Bollywood starlet, who bored us with stories of a second century on another planet.  Where is my teacup? someone screamed.  A battalion of Yukari Royale fountain pens floated from the ceiling fans, shooting magi in liquid efflorescence.  Get Kurtz.  No.  The Weebles didn’t wobble.  What?  What was that?  A woofle?  Three woofles.  Quaffing mammals in a singing lesion.  Quoting legion to the blimey annals. Oh!  A star! A star! Setting like a satellite to tinkles from a Juicy Fruit or bum.

DSM 21

Despite God officially being declared dead, his funeral long past, its attendees too dead, and the marketplace partially swept of the drunken funereal debris (though a surprising number of priests and churches seem to be loitering, lurching, lying, among the living), we continue to act and think as if we were still his undeveloped children, unable to come into our own, perhaps even unable to know what “our own” is, dependent as we were for so long on that heavenly paternalism.  Our strident belief in our freedom, despite little evidence of its practice, is one sign of our unacknowledged insecurity about our prolonged and perhaps eternal childhood.

One of the many areas in which we seemingly unwittingly perpetuate God’s continued dominance over us is psychology.  Not surprisingly, psychology being theology’s golem, our dark freakish attempt to consciously create spiritual life.  (Yet it hobbles, doesn’t it, this lump of desperate fumbling theories and methods, and may end up attacking its creators.  Perhaps it already is.)  One of the many areas in psychology in which we see God’s continued pervasive presence is that of disease—particularly in the taxonomies, hierarchies, enforcements, enculturations, linguistic solidities and artilleries, evolutionary and maturation norms, and dogmatisms with which we typically relate to what is typically called mental disease.

But if we wish to get beyond Our Father and create ourselves in our own image, might we not want to experiment a little?  Might we rather think that diseases—particularly psychic ones—must become individual, transient, and capricious with individual names and descriptors?  Might we not want to grow up?

I don’t have schizophrenia, bipolarity, or depression; tardive dyskinesia, kleptomania, dyspareunia, Münchausen syndrome, or DID; ADHD, adjustment or depersonalization disorder, bulimia, or onto- or etio- or epistemophobia.  I have the disease of myself.  And that’s it.  That’s all I have.  That’s all anyone has.  My disease is inescapable (and so beloved), ineffable (and so numinous), and inarticulate (and so naturally potent).  It is my responsibility—my primary responsibility in this schplot of a life—to search for the best possible way in the moment to precisely describe my illness … a description that is perpetually shifting.  The ossified disease—collective, static, borrowed, imposed—is wholly passé; it is psychically analogous to witch-burnings and racial and sexual inequality.  An ossified disease is tedious, clinical, and dead.  A living disease is vibrant, creative, and flexible.  Living disease is individual, free (in the sense that I may describe it in any way I choose), original, and thoroughly transient.  Yet it is also as whole and constant as myself.

My job is to self-diagnose myself, write papers analyzing myself from as many perspectives and in as many forms as possible, and attempt to sustain myself vitally for as long as possible, primarily if not exclusively to prolong the amount of time I can study my diseases.  Self-disease creation, analysis, and management are the future of the psyche and, if enacted, would be a prime indicator of our capacity to evolve.  I am my disease and therapist.  There are no diseases and therapists other than me, other than in the sense that everyone is a disease and therapist.

I never wake up with the same disease, other than the disease of myself.  My diseases never have one name or one that lasts; sometimes a day’s disease is the sum of all the words used in that day … and the disease perhaps might be the words.

{Hey, you psychiatrist who’s never gone nuts, who sleeps with needle-sellers, who walks on the souls you claim to heal, who doesn’t believe in the soul … we’re all fucked up.  And that’s our crown and lubrication.}

That this infers the acceptance—even celebration—of disease is obvious … but not in any way typically associated with these words.  This is not some self-victimization, some whiny withdrawal, some geriatric capitulation … just the opposite:  it’s humanity becoming itself:  confronting itself:  accepting imperfection as a necessary condition of perfection:  assuming the necessary multiple roles toward our essential condition (participant, observer, therapist, artist, researcher, circus performer, machine …).

I long for disease, for new diseases, for new descriptors, new mutations, new remedies.  You treat your diseases with pills and purchased pomposity and pedantic pity if you want.  I treat mine with disease—a little vaccination (homeopathy, if you’re the placebo type) of the spirit.  The best treatment for any disease is itself.  A spiritual inoculation strategy.

Healing is hell.  People frequently ascribe a teleology to it.  They make it a substantive whereas it’s a participle.  They assume too much:  a disease’s goal is unknown, arbitrary, and tautological.  They sanitize the process:  healing is dark, destructive, ecstatic, and may cost you your life.  If it doesn’t carry this risk, it’s coddled kindergarten healing.  Adult healing has been to hell and loves it.  It knows healing is just a path to another disease.  Life is a disease-collection ritual, an afflicted ceremony, and those who collect the greatest number of interesting and novel diseases and survive the longest are closest to god.  Diseases add more surfaces, more ways to articulate darkness, to play with life.

And if someone should say, None of this sounds like freedom!  For freedom is surely escaping disease and fleeing freely, smilily, to the sunny meadows of health and healing! … I say to you, You understand nothing of freedom, says my god, for you pretend you have no god.

What then is my god’s relationship to my disease, my diseases, my diseased state, my ambivalence and love of disease, my endless talk of and research into it?  Is it the cause, the effect, both, some other thing?

I don’t know what my god is.  Maybe it’s my disease or my therapist, maybe that which allows both to co-exist in one body, this body, my body … home of my god and my love.  My disease, which I do not call my disease, but my ease—my inspiration and my comfort.  My disease, which I don’t try to heal but instead transform into a liquid I blow bubbles with.  My disease is my god, my disease is myself, my disease is you.

The New Shamanism

Not some network, some organization, principles formed of committee, a light and fluffy healing, as if we were running a marshmallow spa, not some ISO spirituality or social-scientific temperament quiz or hallucinogenic or pleasurable tent, but those pioneers of the modern techno-spirit, who disdain society to love it, have unalterably eternal and tumultuous and sometimes deadly affairs with art and whatever, who throw everything away with regularity and hard sorrow, who sleep on bleak beds, who believe madness is health and health is madness, who know everything is alive (subways, falafels, notebooks, dishwashing detergent, ideas) and dialogue with everything alive and know the voices of subways, who see the burning darkness at the center of things as you see your dentist, who don’t particularly distinguish between them and you, who care for money as you might care for a bedbug, who are genetically incapable of working in any manner you might normally call work and yet are equally genetically incapable of indolence in any manner you might normally call indolence, who are their own gods and yet know no gods yet know all gods, who fear nothing but mediocrity, who eat fear like chocolate chip cookies, who howl at anything if the mood is right and the mood is not unoften right, who drink whatever they must drink, who have strobes for hearts and hearts for eyes and eyes for strobes, who know there are two kinds of laws, two kinds of education, and two kinds of love and in the second myriad kinds and in the first only one, and there is a law the masses and their masters build around them like a suburb and one the others use to traverse the wasteland of themselves, who might be anything, who conjure curses as you might make fast food appear and think both more and less of it than you, who must obey silence, those of legion and maybe spinach, of that horrible and only true certitude at the center of doubt, of ice and zen, dice and then, shapes in dark skies, vision in sewers, desire in death, sweetness in betrayal, of the this is that before the this is that, who does not know the difference between a cat and a court, who eructates on demand… no no no no no no:  not some new nude new age lickspittle nor some unctuous psychobabbler with a Fulsome Scholarship nor some mummified academic nor some lobotomized lobotomizer nor some one-track vegan anarchist but those …

Is it progress, really, that we have eradicated the one who sits in its situation—temporally atemporal, gnostically agnostic, sanely insane, in a mudhut or mudpenthouse, to whom the schlock and wealthy go with their whatevers, and—put in its place possibly—tweets and genomes?  I—or my god, apparently—am hardly one to throw out genomes, but we both—we’re one on this, it seems—think, like Freddy Mercury[1], why can’t we have it all:  tweets and shamans?  Why must we be so tiny as to think darkness is ever dead, that we’ve slain it with something as wimpy as electricity? Where did electricity come from, Chimps?  Darkness.  And its infinite eyes of fire streaming from the hydrants.

The New Shamanism is not some institution, some professional association, some list of accreditations, some piety or anything growing from a natural tradition (herbs and wails and totems), but a twisted metal hybrid, a construction dump, still perhaps without a name, manufactured—not begotten—in the data center of the urban present (the best name may not be shamanism but some other bastard name—something capricious, bold, obnoxious, heretical, necessary … something ecstatic, sad and true and new too, too new …), … and its practitioners …

… whose eyes verb and never noun, whose bodies roam the grave and who never leave the grave, who build bridges from the pain of themselves between madness and society, who spell dervish any way they want, who are snakes to snakes and lemmings to lemmings and ducks to ducks and for this divine flexibility they are sometimes shammed!, for the new shaman is a new Noah’s Ark bouncing on the flood of the global psyche—Noah! his wife! his drunken daughters! the sinful memories! all the crazy animals mating like there’s no yesterday! the boat itself! the rain! the stupid hope! rainbows! that bossy god! the whole fucking hopeless soggy mess—, who has forgotten the taste for land, this voyage out, through the unknown, the sky and sea black as your mortgage, our hearts drowning in the abyss, drinking poison as if it were mango juice from deliquescent tits, some oracle to oracles yet always somehow oracled, who really don’t see the difference between a mushroom and a caterpillar, made half of maggots, half of pomegranate dreams, and half of other things:

we are the new shamans and yes we’re stealing because that’s what good ideas are for and we’re stealing everything we like from everybody and everything but it’s not ours just like it wasn’t theirs just like it’s not yours because the earth’s the earth and factories are factories and these are what we’re made of and, like them, a shaman is whatever I want it to be:  warped, garbled, incompetent, corrupt, possessed, ennui’d, pure, curious, rigorous, amoral, contradictory, impossible, a little screw in a dirty cubicle, virtuous, productive, ecstatic as the stars, rarely clear, a liar in a lair some say, a miasma of melancholy, whimsical, indolent, a little granola with your tea? a schlump, an imposter, a thorny horny corny whiny porny wornout sage, a barometer of nothing and a stroll down Madison what is it? yeah yeah you’re one too and so am I and so’s my god amen.

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[1] ([{Who are some modern shamans?  You want names, you who love to acquire names, who stack them like money, thinking this will give good account of your souls?  I’ll give you names.  Artaud, Weil, Nietzsche, Whitman, Bozulich, Baudelaire, a poet or inmate here and there (no shaman will call itself a shaman), all nameless naming ones, of the cry in the dishwasher, of titillating night}])