Embryonic Coalescences

The Third Dimension

All the world’s a stage has changed to All the world’s a film.  It was a stage and all us talking bipeds merely players, strutting and fretting, signifying nothing (blending Jaques and Macbeth is smooth).  It has become a film and all us talking bipeds still merely players, still strutting, still fretting, still signifying nothing.  Sure.  But beyond the perpetual maw of nothingness, what can we make this shift mean and what might it signify on the bed of nothingness, between the sheets of time?

Since art adumbrates life (which is not to say that life does not also adumbrate art), an engaging task for the curious human is to look for historical evidence for such adumbration.  Shakespeare, naturally (as Mr. Bloom—the one from Yale, not the one from Dublin—made a point of making, albeit in over 700 pages), foreshadows in his world-stage metaphor (which he did us the service of living also) the modern participant-observer and, through this, the Internet:  the present center stage (or film) of our global community.

But the stage qua stage—think the Globe in 1600, think  back to the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus in 409BCE—was both more and less distant than the modern cinematic experience (and by cinema I am including TV and the Internet; by cinema I mean any human-manufactured artifact that appears in two dimensions and appears animate or appears to have the idea of animation behind it [this latter convolution is due to those like Andy Warhol who make films like Empire]).  Less distant, because of the very real physical possibility of the actors moving into the audience, the audience moving onto the stage (Artaud of course was the consummation of this idea, of trying to eradicate distance), of belching or farting or fire distracting or disrupting the antics on stage.  More distant, because the entire enterprise operated with—was predicated upon—the unquestioned assumption of a three-dimensional world, which, in its plural dimensionality, allowed for more overall space.

But cinema eliminates a dimension; we are left with only two.  (Cinema achieves what Artaud futilely strove for on the stage, which is perhaps a good part of his madness.)  The stage is cinema’s most proximate art form but the latter is the begetting of simulacra.  (Again, art precedes the name, cinema advents Baudrillard.)  This is its seduction, its disorientation, its horror.

So cinema, in its radical simulation, subverts the stage by being (or becoming) more and less distant than it.  Less, in that we can stroke Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and she remains utterly indifferent (while this is her typical screen persona, presumably in three-dimensional life, she would have some response).  More, in that the third dimension has to be created by us, the supposed viewer, and, as is sometimes the case with the Internet, the intervener and manipulator.  But the thought of us being the third dimension, of us having become a necessary part of sustaining the physical universe, is a thought potentially too great for much of humanity.  We retreat to acquisitiveness, commercial cloisters, and clichés.

Nevertheless.

Assuming the burden of the third dimension of art—all of us, collectively, not simply the “artists”—is a new existential challenge for humanity, although only new in its present form, as so-called primitive societies were sophisticated in their complete integration of art into their communities.  So, there and then, art did not exist for it was everywhere, even as our present task may be to once again eradicate art—the only difference is that this time we have travelled around the circle as a species and are attempting a return; we attempt to consciously eradicate art.  All the frequently facile blab about the death of art is really about this.  All the frequently facile blab about myth is really about this, for myth is nothing other than a reduction of dimensionality to two in order to animatedly encapsulate the ineffable plenitude of life.

Various discourses of the mystics—I think particularly of Marguerite Porete's concept of the far-near—inevitably come to mind.  With cinema, are we in fact stretching the diameter of the circle or reducing it?  The question surely is linked to a (the?) basic question in physics:  is the universe expanding or shrinking?  Perhaps, to borrow from Yeats’ The Vision, it is doing both, in which case cinema (which is to say, humanity) is simultaneously expanding and shrinking dimensionality; yet, as we are now cinema ourselves, we ourselves are expanding and shrinking, choreographing the unseen and seen (god and physics, to speak crassly) in new forms.

I have left numerous related issues unexplored—for example, the still very rudimentary use of 3D technology in cinema; the dimensionality of other art forms (is literature one dimension? music zero?) and the relationship of this dimensionality (or lack) to cinema (we could conveniently [or inconveniently] argue that cinema accommodates, assimilates, the other forms but they are unable to as commodiously return the favor, for example); the relationship between this modern discourse about cinema and past and present discourses about god; the relationship with memory and prosthetics; etc.

Art, Psyche, and Society

The face in the mirror seems to bear (bare?) no relationship with the face in the soul.  Is it that the former has a visible face, the latter does not?  That each has eyes of a different nature?  But as we all know, the longer one stares in the physical mirror at oneself, the more one disappears.  (What disappears?  One's face?  One's self?)  The more one becomes the face in the soul.  Perhaps the reason they seem different is that we simply don’t look long enough, for to see the face disappear, to see the no-face, is the unfortunate central terror of humanity.

In order to function as an artist in society, without undue murder or suicide, one requires one content skill and one form skill:  in terms of content, one must possess a significant wardrobe; in terms of form, one must be able to rapidly change.

One pays debt in life not death.  One makes mistakes, one doesn’t make the mistake of attempting to eliminate mistakes.  This shift (from debt in death to death in life, from mistake to mistakes) indicates a shift from a Christian to a pagan morality.

Sex, frequently damaging and stupid because too psychically autonomous, is best recognized as something a member of the council of the psyche requires.  (Think of the council as a well-functioning board of governance, in which each member has specific interests, skills, and experiences but also affirms the diverse interests, skills, and experiences of the other members:  I call this psychic council the Council of I—in my case, we meet regularly and, after decades of rancorous and almost deadly fighting, seem to be functioning fairly well most days).  Thus Sex, as a member of the Council, must be accomplished to keep the Council in order.  But it must also be accomplished in such a way as to keep the other members from rebelling.  This is not a moral issue (morality is based on the fear of various members of the Council, of a lack of proper listening), but one of psychic cohesion.  Ethics begins with such cohesion.  But how can one recognize, name, and affirm the plurality of external voices in society until one has recognized, named, and affirmed the plurality of inner voices?

My vocation has always been to develop inner power (I might say energy, but both words have their drawbacks:  power because it’s too associated with tyranny, energy because it’s too associated with a certain kind of utility or a new-age flakiness) at the cost of outer power--to focus on creating, as it were, rather than the products of creation (moving them into society and the consequences [fame, money, the lack of fame money, it makes little difference]).  Society is based on the institutionalization of inner power (that is, the assumption of inner power by external power).  So most priests aren’t priestly, most therapists aren’t therapeutic, most professors aren’t knowledgeable, etc.  The sham priests, therapists and professors aren’t more to blame than anybody else—society prefers (through indolence, fear) to identify spirit and object, this ease of identification being society’s seed and egg.  This ease, however, gives me dis-ease; it is the source of all authentic spiritual nausea and the seed and egg of art.

The violence of Blood Meridian is central to McCarthy’s aesthetic and existential vision.  As all the best art, it transforms existential violence into aesthetic violence.  It calmly recognizes that the human animal is inextricably, eternally, irredeemably violent and silently mocks the puerile blab of peace and unity, so common among shouting activists, bitter hermits, and cloistered hobbits.  It affirms violence through its transformation.  The issue is not to attempt to eradicate violence—which is bound to be fundamentally counter-productive, through its rousing of its opposite—but to attempt to exploit violence through sex and art.  As long as we have flesh, art, of course, is not enough.  (This is the error of those like Nietzsche, who inevitably [though unintentionally] rouse those like Nazis to compensate for the formers' lack of passionate physicality in the world.  [The spiritual scales must balance and they do this with little regard to time, space, or what is often called reason--which, considering that time, space and what is often called reason are the solid infrastructure most humans inhabit, is why the scales are only infrequently seen, and then only dimly, intermittently, like a tugboat in the fog at night, off the coast of Labrador, on the Strait of Belle Isle.])  In psychic-societal terms, the human animal, to evolve, needs to release and harness its violent energies, to collectively build a cultural steam engine—not to attempt to seal it (as the moralists), to deny it (as the pacifists), or to expend it (as the acquisitive and anarchical).

Art, like any production, requires fuel to survive.  The artist feeds on itself (Nietzsche, Van Gogh), feeds on others (Baudelaire, Picasso), feeds on both (Shakespeare, Sophocles).  Fine.  However, present society is poorly structured to accommodate this need, resulting in schizophrenia in itself and the artist.  What does the artist do?  It subverts society—a subversion that society turns into a commodity, as society's function is to commodotize.  This dialectic—of demonizing and glorifying—indicates a highly imbalanced society, which is too insecure to see, acknowledge, and effectively integrate art.  I call for the development of an aesthetic ethics (an ethical aesthetics), which artists and society will perform in collaboration.  What the West has considered irrational, mad, schizoid, fragmented, unhealthy, dysfunctional can begin to dissipate (as autonomous complexes), as various disciplines (Kierkegaard points to them in his three spheres of existence, the medieval Sufis demonstrate them in their practices of “madness”) are developed.

Aesthetic Security

The concept of Food Security is relatively new and reflects a legitimate concern:  with so many people on a rolling sphere, with human production and greed being what they are, how do we secure consistent healthy food for as many people as possible?

Yet we are not just beasts.  I propose that Aesthetic Security be considered a top human priority along with Food Security.  This is not Shelley’s rhetoric of poets being the legislators (unacknowledged or not) of the world, which is too hierarchical, too misplaced and inaccurate, too legislative.  Rather Aesthetic Security attempts to ensure that sufficient quantities of awe are consistently available to all humans, including a distributed stockpiling on and off the earth—not entirely technologically dependent—to prepare for all imaginable setbacks and disasters.  One is reminded of the role of the foundation in Asimov's trilogy (but, ah!--mutation!). One is reminded of Joseph’s dream in the Torah (which he fulfilled in his Egyptian leadership role) of setting aside extra during the fat years to facilitate survival during the lean years.  Doing this with food makes obvious sense; but why not do it with art?

Yet.

Aren’t we already doing this?  Isn’t this what technology is most fundamentally about?  (Heidegger said the essence of technology was aletheia [truth or, more accurately, disclosure], which, if we modernize his concept somewhat, can be renamed, in a somewhat programmatic sense perhaps, Aesthetic Security:  the essence of technology is to nurture awe through art, to disclose art to the universe.)

Isn’t this why the space program, why digitization, why photography, why the virtual project, why the waste and plunder, why that mother of distribution—the Internet--exist … to secure beauty, to secure god?  Secure, of course, may be too strong a word:  too Western, definitive, teleological; we need something that has a stronger relationship with nothingness.  We could then say that the purpose of Aesthetic Security is to increase the likelihood of the continuance of awe in the universe.  A bit corporate, but if art and technology are going to continue flirting, moving toward some form of ecstatic consummation, the corporate element may be necessary.

Monday Thoughts from the Sky

Aging

In the first world, in sufficient circumstances, we’re born into a seemingly infinite candy store.  By the time we no longer feel lost—or, rather, by the time we accept our perpetual lostness as our inevitable orientation—realizing (in our bodies) that we don’t have a taste for candy, that candy (despite its rush and colour) is largely antithetical to our health and vigor, our health and vigor have begun to decline and our waning energy has limited outlets:  to deny our knowledge, remaining committed to candy, though often exerting substantial effort to wrapping candy in different names … or to attempt to join the arduous joyful melancholic murky seemingly eternal effort of building alternatives to the candy store.

The gradual evolution from a vision of one’s individual future to a vision of humanity—the displacement of one’s insignificance, limitations, onto the hope of an unseen significance, limitlessness, of humanity.  But what could ever provide the ground for this hope, considering that humanity is simply the sum of all insignificances, all limitations?  Only mutation, seemingly.  But isn’t what is required mutation on a collective level?  A question concerning mutation is whether technology can be considered an aspect of it, even solely as a prosthetic.

Each child, regardless of its level of articulation, knows that no adult is superior to it.  The assumption of an adult as to its superiority is at the root of developmental anger and, consequently, the cancerous collective anger that frequently defines and underpins society.  The only authentic thing the adult has to offer the child is the hope of continuing expansive awe—something the child innately has, something the adult too often has had forcibly, deeply, buried in it and, through resentment, negative enculturation, and fear, misnames immaturity, psychosis, irresponsibility.

Ecstasy, The Law, Banging Balzac, & Condo Dwellers

Ecstasy as the seeming extension of nature called the human.  To move outside of stasis, darkness, to live in the quivering spark of creation, is not to move outside as it may seem in ecstasy’s youth but to move toward nature’s center.  Ecstasy exhausts itself in the progression toward its negation—or rather the human exhausts itself in its quest to place itself outside itself (though this quest itself becomes the human).  This is perhaps why the purest ecstasy seems to exist in silence, solitude, stillness and its necessary impure other—resident so voraciously and presently in sound, communication, activity—a curious shadow, a ruse, a detour, a manifestation, a necessary and puerile sputter.

The law is necessary to keep the brutes in check and to order technological society—that is, to order the bulk movement of humans in their brutish and prosthetic necessities (e.g. as millions of them encase themselves in wheeled metal in a severely concentrated space).

I say to a friend about Balzac, He banged out a novel a year.  She laughs and rightly comments on the comic inappropriateness of the verb, to bang — for the verb is incorrect from a historic perspective (Balzac didn’t used a typewriter) and a present perspective (no one would say this today, as the verb is now sexual).  One could only bang out novels in the Age of Typewriters and Balzac missed the onset of this Age by about 15 years.

  

A scifi story:  condo dwellers form their own republic:  the world’s first significantly diffused, fragmented and essentially vertical state.  Condo dwellers gradually physically evolve to their conditions:  short squatty legs (as their lives are spent in small cells, elevators, cars), huge heads (from the lack of oxygen), albino (from the lack of sunlight), huge eyes (for voyeurism/as binocular replacement).  War develops between the horizontal (earth dwellers) and the vertical people (sky dwellers).

Communication

What does communication do?  It does itself, but assiduously avoids anything beyond this that humans claim of it.  In doing itself, it balks, in the manner of things doing themselves, and in its balking overdoes itself, and falls.  How much more well-positioned on the evolutionary path to avoid communication or—as necessary—committing it but not believing in it, as one might take a bath without taking the bath.  That is, one’s approach to communication should be the same as one’s approach to god, justice, art, love, or anything supposedly grand and impossible:  engage with it as necessary, but infuse its spirit and action with not-knowing (as to intent, substance, effect, essence).  Communication, like god etc., draws one toward its negation and through its negation to its fulfillment.  Like love etc., we do not do communication, communication does us, and in its doing we fall sway to the routine interpretation of interpreting our being overwhelmed as our overwhelming.  What one overwhelms in communication—what one claims to overwhelm—however, is far less than clear.  So we are spoken and in being spoken we claim to speak.  With human numbers now overcrowding themselves so that each feels like an infinity, our claiming has become almost all we claim and our being spoken almost all we are.

Communication is like a brightly painted carousel with flashing lights and happy music with a creepy undertone, but we rather wish it were a train that kept to German schedules and moved at Japanese speeds, taking us … where else? … to happy theme parks with brightly painted carousels and flashing lights.

Communication—that pet dragon—we suspect wishes to escape its hospitable human home but stays put, not from any lack of capability to migrate to freedom and live in its natural habitat of unbounded ahumanity, but from patience, knowing it is far more spiritually efficient to pretend to be sleeping, waiting until its home implodes from excess saturated care for humanity's supposed pet.

Thoughts @ 51

51 looks like a prime but isn’t, even as I look like a prime, but am not.

Cinema:

Tarkovsky as slow perfect beautiful as Tarr, without the omnipresent palpable despair.  Instead, omnipresent palpable emptiness.

Two of the great cinematic spiritual biographies:  Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror.  Each shows a soul’s life visually, the facts—so omnipresent in modernity—subservient, almost absent.

Tarkovsky says that art requires imperfection.  But, there being no perfection, there is no imperfection and so no art.  Or else art does not require imperfection ... it feeds on its requirement for imperfection differently than it does its non-requirement.

On the Bain:

No individual loss, voice, is important, no one is missed for long because the one of the whole is palpably, authentically stronger than the inevitable eternal palpable authentic individual one.  The Bain confronts its members with the truth of the whole:  it forces a spiritual principle into incarnation, shoves god not into a named individual perfected body but a polynamed transnamed collective imperfect body—that which Jesus attempted but failed at.  It is thus not—it is thus no longer—a name above or edifice that is aimed at or arrived at, but a form below that is here.

The culture doesn’t need to be changed—the culture is here—it simply needs to be effectively and environmentally mined.  But the culture may be such as to be severely resistant to mining.

Feelings, Will, and Body:

Society is structured feeling.

The young require passion to express their feelings.  If one matures at all, the feelings become directly capable of expressing themselves without the presence of an intermediary—or, in other words, without one particular half of the emotional spectrum (passion, life) dominating.  That so many endure life devoted to passion—or its brother, bitterness—indicates a society given to the avoidance of death (that is, the body)—hence the ubiquity of the proclamation of the body inevitably a cultural indication of a desperate denial (also with freedom). Yet with death accepted, passion sits in balanced tension with it and the feelings are laid out on a level.  But the sentimental decadence of the age demands a spinning, without death to temper the passion of existence.  So one’s life becomes a fact in the way that that tree is a fact, or that love, that cat, that chair, that committee, that idea, that century, is a fact.  I am piled on the heap of time and regard myself in it.  What is it that regards me?  Death?  I say death regards me regarding it:  two mirrors—in some state of being polished—confronting each other in darkness (the confrontation being light).  The question shifts:  what does the polishing?  Could the answer be death also?  Death:  the active agent in life.

How can anyone reasonably defend the existence of the individual will?  Will, yes, but as anything but wholly and perpetually relational and collective?  Individuality will surely be looked upon by our descendants—should they exist—as blood-letting or slavery is by us.  Our modes, theories, structures, are all modelled on radically primitive notions of being.

My body is my spirit; i breathe—that is, i speak—my body.  My words are simply my particular body made articulate.  Who expects one’s body to be the same each day?  It is—that is, it feels—like a different body each day, each hour, so who expects one’s thoughts, theories, words, systems, motivations, attitudes, values to be the same?  Why would i use my mind to chain this energy?  Would i not rather use my mind simply as a tool in service of this energy?  To do so, however, requires an ongoing comfort with death—transience—for the mind, as it presents itself to the modern self, contains death as its core, but hidden.  The task of the modern mind is to dig through itself to death and so rediscover nature through the discovery of the body.  Society, however, avoids this primary task by erecting a simulacrum of the body and taking care of this simulacrum through prosthetic—technical—means, which is the only effective way to deal with simulacra if one would not have them disappear.

Art:

The artist, of course, has lost its relevance.  Art hasn’t and can never; the confusion between artist and art, between creator and creature, between spirit and flesh, has lead to the conclusion that art has lost its relevance.

Art is not the spirit of commerce, of transaction, of the particular relation between things, but of the relation of all things, the code that circumscribes transactions, that which gave birth to and subverted commerce by its very existence.  This is why art overwhelms and must overwhelm, why art is like god and is in a sense god’s replacement.  Not the art of names and labels, the art of volition and cocktails, the art of pedigree and list, but the art of the sum of all relational monads, the art of nature before it was named, the art of joyful madness and chaos and doom.  Art is spirit and we have entered the age of the holy spirit, of secularized sacred art—when art is no longer something separate and apart but the very molecular structure of existence.  Art is life, life is art, art annihilates itself in life, life in art, and in this annihilation is the authentic rebirth of the apocalypse:   no destruction of the earth, of flesh, and its beauty, but the complete eradication of all structures of the soul and its bastard child, mind, so that soul appears—or reappears—in its original and transformed state:  empty, free, glorious, transfigured.  In such a way art laughs at money, fame, career, and stares at itself as itself:  a series of infinite polished mirrors of unparalleled flawed beauty and perfection:  reflection of reflections and end of origins.  Only in this way is art released from itself to be itself, does it enter into the birth of its fate.

Art is, simply, the inversion of the spirit of nature, whereby nature overcomes itself through its excess.  This larger framework is what the moralists perpetually overlook.  Art was never meant to be what it has become, but only what it is becoming and will never be except in its becoming.  Art is reflection, without an end—which is to say with no goal, finality, definition (beyond the space of the moment) and—truly—no reflection in its reflection.  Reflections reflecting not themselves in themselves but the totality of all reflections reflecting not themselves in themselves and themselves.  It is the “and themselves” that creates the requirement for ethics and the present circumscriptions of art. The role of the “and themselves” is perhaps the critical evolutionary question of the next few millennia. 

May 8 - Saint Thomas, Poet

As a boy, Alfred Coker never felt much happiness.  But as he grew, even the few annual stabs of joy he thought were his diminished to paltry intimations of something other than despair.  By the time maturity clasped him, the constant gush of flesh humans dotingly call life seemed to him a mistake Death once made and couldn’t fix.

He’d wake in the morning.  Peer at the calamitous solitude below the lumpy sheet.  He dryly tasted the foul archaeology of his dreams, once glittered with wailing demons, now stagnant, vaguely anxious.  Night’s stored flatulence assailed his lungs.  Dust, soundless dust from unswept corners established shrines of oppression in his nails.  What had been called his manhood by one or maybe two littered the wastage of his groin, a withered blossom without destination or even the primitive pentecost of vulgar song.  Oh limpid morn.

He heard his dripping wife already complicating the day.  Clouds of twitter.  Intractably rummaging for her special teapot in shelves of gossip, she moved in clumsy constellations of ignorance.  Love was a dahlia sleeping in the empty silence … nothing human.

He thought of the Bank patiently waiting for him.  So patiently.  That house of voiceless fallacies and financial lizards.  As triumphant as a bramble.  As permanent as glaciers.  His frigid desk.  The office bile.  Ganga, snake-eared boss, Mr. Eugenides and his gaseous Phlebas, often known to be in Mrs. Porter or her office, genetically malefic Tiresias, Bill and Lou and Lil and May, Lil’s husband, Mrs. Porter, the hooded Chair, Madame Sosostris, sometimes also sweet Marie, Mrs. Porter, Lord Robert Nonsense, exhumed Leman, the Very Mrs. Equidrone, Philomel Hyacinth of silent staves, Mrs. Porter, carious George, Albertetta, Porter’s daughter, with her breasts, Victoria Breen of Poxford, coffee-unguent Elizabeth Leicester, snarling Data, damned demoted Dayadhvam, the numbers man, Damyata, the rats, Mr. Warren, Mrs. Porter’s antique laquearia … the whole collegial mess.

His unpropitious body, the closet-minded wife, apotheosized endless pompous competition of production, shabby blood, deceits of wisdom, hebetative scorpions, gods and roses, follycocks, vortex futures, value, value, happy executive sortilege, ice-cap stocks, post-mortem waste and things and budgets, the life of significant oil, decayed mountains, reminiscent rumors, arid hand gusts falling down like London, swallow all the sordid dreary daily horror and that was it, the car was in the fir trees, Coker’s sea yelp gulped by squirrels.

So it was from this desiccation that on September 26 1888, under the conscious heritage of Henry Ware Eliot, a successful businessman and president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champe nee Stearns, a flimsy poetess, St. Thomas entered interminable sodden life in St. Louis.

A fluorescent light of transitional aesthetics, a gastronomical wordman, skilled at turning misfortune into fate, he tiptoed through despair to religion’s muted blood.  Never a husband, he became one.  Never modern, he described what he wasn’t.  In love with nothing, he turned his love around and showed her to the world.  Believing in extinction more than days, how was he to navigate life’s flower but from the muddy shores of death?  He swooned.  Swooned from muliebrity’s stark origins and the great flowing stream of human physicality.  Swooned in disgust and fell to the desolation of self-sacrifice.  Life passed over him in a triumphal chariot, and he remained, a slave harnessed to it.

Worn by the dust, dust’s decadence, dust’s desultory derisions, he knelt to pray on a possum skin in London on January 4 1965 and upon uttering the name of God turned to ash to the applause of roses and was placed on tongues of fire on the sea.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on May 18 2004 because it was a good and proper thing to do.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

April 27 - Saint John the Lady of the Devil’s Party

Any knowledge worth having is hidden; the good stuff lurks just below the surface, tantalizing us with its shadowy limbs which seem to be undressing, inviting us down.  Once we’ve leapt in, though, mad with desire, consequences safely, sanely, left in some closet, our phantasmagoria fights with us and we almost drown in our lust to grasp what we thought we saw and seem to hold.  Whether we live or die really doesn’t matter¾the rush of the dive is why we breathe, truth’s hot clammy fingers clinging to us, providing for glorious seconds relief from the heavy facts of earth.  The world’s paved playground is information and tedium, but the swamp of unknowing vitality and desire.  Is there a bottom to this swamp?  A bottom called God or Reality, annihilation or nirvana?  A bottom without a name?  The lovers and monsters who seduce us down seem to be the only bottom there is¾and they’re endless.

What does the dive lead to?  Insulin, holocausts, SARS, Raid, genocides, rape, car fatalities, iPods, the Oedipal complex, tears, plastic, IR guided missiles, government policy, fuzzy peaches, sewage treatment plants, divorce, multinationals, votes for women, Draino, many many babies, and, very occasionally, art.

At the swampy shores … that’s where the poet lives.  Not earthy enough to trust the facts, too acquainted with the ways of monsters to romanticize the dive, he hides in the prickly weeds and the ideologies of survival and hopes for the best.  But he can’t help himself¾his soul sides with the monsters.  He holds out as long as he can, clinging to the sane precipices of the world, then feels the seduction of open night and lets go.  It’s in that fall he produces any work worth saving, the rest suburban trinkets.  He dies soon afterwards, knowing that everything worthwhile is in the past and the only thing left to do is mutely scream.  So he joins his creation and omits the scream.

On December 9 1608, in Cheapside under the sign of the Spread Strumpet, St. John was born.  He lost his eyesight and fell into the swamp in the 50s, where he transformed intellectual nihilism into metaphysical drama and substituted the tyranny of Hell for Heaven.  When he emerged, covered with the Devil’s slobber and the green slime of words, he married a third time and died of gout on November 8 1674.  The Council of I raised him to sainthood in 1790 for believing nothing and disguising everything.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

Thoughts from Bonn & Köln on a Wednesday in a Fickle April

Near the close of what I think is my eighth trip to Europe, I sweep some thoughts from my mind's messy floor and display them in that other dusty ether--the Internet (the Ethernet?):

1.  Seen on a tombstone in Le Bourg d'Oisaris:  The true tomb of death is the heart of the living.

2.  It requires money to realize how unimportant money is; education to realize education's unimportance; art, success, knowledge, fame to realize ...  Only love does one require to realize its importance.

3.  Art is the sensuous expression of spirit, but also is refusing to indulge in this expression:  the art of presence, the art of absence; the art of art, the art of god (mysticism).

4.  The civilization of being able to drink, smoke, and talk about art in pubs.  This, along with its transit and architecture, is the primary attraction to Europe for me.  Who in the New World cares for art other than as an extension of Facebook?  Who still can envision and risk art through the potency of a life?  Smoking seems to help with this.  The techno-purity irritation of the New World, which seems all metal and money to me now.  How to use this feeling to subvert, exploit, transform, and transcend?

5.  Two nights ago, after watching Vertigo for the first time in Germany, after absinthe and nicotine and marijuana, I dreamed I worked as some consultant of vague concerns for an unnamed police force, in which the officers sat on the Chief's lap like little boys on Santa Claus'.  I thought--in the dream--"How pleasant! I am getting real money deposited in a real bank account in real life!  Then I woke up and realized it wasn't true.

6.  I travel not for the usual reasons (to evoke envy) or to entertain myself (when am I not entertained?), but to viscerally re-embody (or more deeply embody) detachment.  That I have to physically travel to do this is a weakness, of course, a sign of certain spiritual incapacities on my part.  I frequently and sufficiently maintain a kind of compassionate detachment while at home; traveling feels like refueling my spirit at an emptiness station.

7.  The difference between French and German bread is that the French use bread to carry things, as a mode of transportation, whereas the Germans use bread as a substance, as a thing in itself.

8.  One travels for the shifting surface magnetism of architecture and faces; underneath--the others, the self--everything remains the same.  The greedy mediocre human spirit in all its global horror.

9.  Sign in Bonn department store:  Uhren and Schmuck Service.

10.  Fleeing is an underrated form of power.

11.  In the past, the powerful had money and the slaves were poor; now, in the First World only, the situation is reversed:  the slaves possess money, social position; the powerful are those who step outside such possession.  I shall choose to accept this as true and, by accepting, transform my world through the power of vision.

12.  The Tao Te Ching presents a philosophy (of management) rooted in the Tree of Life.  The ruler-managers (sages) have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, lived, and live now to secure (re-secure?) the Tree of Life (which is simultaneously older and newer in the West) and point people to it.  The Tao Te Ching simultaneously as a pre-Christian and post-Christian (management) philosophy.

13.  I must write a cultural analysis of the difference between Europe and North America based on the experience of pissing as a tourist.

14.  Someone I meet here says I look like Catweazle, an odd creature from the Middle Ages who appears in modern Europe (some UK TV show that broadcast in Europe, Quebec and other places in the early 70s).  After I research the thing, I want to shave my head again, as I realize my present persona presents me too much as I am:  a medieval madman.  Far better to use non-hair to reveal to others what they need to see to protect themselves from themselves.

15.  I've never traveled for the usual touristy reasons--the museums and landmarks, the safety of the thing, the affirmation.  I travel to feel uncomfortable, jarred, fucked over, anonymous, displaced, ignorant.  Yet the experience this time of jostling from place to place irritates me, unproductively.  I'm now more inclined to stay in one spot--in this instance Köln--and explore it randomly on foot, absorb its character.  I wish to spend a month or six in every city in this way, to write a collection of psychic summaries of each city:  and thereby, through the collection as a whole, describe the human soul through its habitational incarnation.

16.  Always the bells of Europe, reminders that the Christian God once lived here.  Always the presence of art, but frequently ossified.  The young German artists I meet quietly criticize the art scene here, its associated psyche, as too intellectual, disembodied.  Tempting to apply this to twentieth century European history, of course:  the Cartesianism of a nation seeking unity through tragedy.

17.  So many German cities 50 years old in architecture, centuries old in feeling.  Wuppertal--which I visited to see Pina Bausch's 1980--an exception, magnificent in its spilled historicity.  The Köln Cathedral spared only because it served as a landmark for Allied bombing.

18.  The German flag:  black, red, yellow:  death, blood, piss.  Death on top.

19.  Exit sign for a town on a German autobahn:  Bad Durkheim.  Academic warfare even on the freeways here.

20.  One can largely stop fearing death, but it's hard to stop being irritated by the body's decline.  I handle the irritation through spiritual prosthetics.

21.  Traveling in Europe:  apes paying apes for packaged god.

22.  Historic sign on French freeway:  Les Poulets de Bresse.  These poulets are everywhere:  in the freeway gas stations, squawking at you from passing trucks and cars.   Everyone must have something to be proud of. 

April 24 - St. Hairy Clitoris, Primal Philosopher

Eleutheria was born into the world shortly after the alphabet was invented and men began to use words to build the foundation of what is now called civilization.  Back then, it was just called sweat.  Without a plan particularly, they placed brick on brick, and often a brick was a few generations or a life. Words became the currency on sophistication’s exchange and for the first time in history’s murmur, men were required to trade in words to survive.  Some did not, and fell back into the well of woods, where they wandered with beasts and negotiated life each hour in the disorder of unmitigated flesh.

Orphaned at 6, Eleutheria learned to fend for herself. Equally at home with the meadow’s butterflies and the city’s scrimmage, her favourite activity was observing the world. She’d sit for days at a time watching the churn of nature and men as if they were all part of her but not she one of them.  Then she became a woman and she was beautiful and all the men in the town wanted her. So she fled to the forest and hid, but the men found her and gave her to the mayor to decide what to do with her, and he made her his wife.  She was given the best food, a generous clothing allowance and three servants; in exchange, she was required to bear children and attend official functions and always be polite and show off her beauty.  So she grew bitter toward the world and swore dark prophecies against it.  On one of these nights she placed a hot iron on her face to disfigure it so that men would be repelled by her, and she ran into the woods and rutted with a bear and gave birth to St. Hairy Clitoris in 535 BCE.  She took the boy with her as she sat and watched the birds in the meadow and the men in the market. And no one talked to her and they avoided her eyes.

When St. Hairy Clitoris was 6, Eleutheria died. He went into the city and watched the affairs of men and listened to their words.  When he was a man, he began speaking, but the men in the marketplace resented him and told him his job was to watch.  St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, my job is to watch.  And then it’s to say what I’ve seen. And he kept speaking. And the men told him he was too useless for the city - which was a place of action and not for one who simply sat around and criticized.

St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, I am useless, and if you would listen to my uselessness, your lives would be more useful.  And the men of the city bound St. Hairy Clitoris to the ground and shat on him until he suffocated.

From the gap between his mother’s beauty and disfigurement,

From the gap between her fashion and his conception,

From the gap between the butterflies and the market,

From the gap between his silence and his speaking,

From the gap between his solitude and his desire,

From the gap between his uselessness and the merchants,

He wrote a book and its words are one and the one is fire.

The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on the first day a flower grew from his makeshift tomb.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.