sadoo

23.10.13

the rough advance of doves

the sadoo, seeking its muse, ceasing to be amused, in its ongoing quest to explore identity, embodiedly, against the backdrop of the world and in the great fiction of humanity, language, unrepentedly seeing the monopolar as homo sapiens saw neanderthals, seeing the polypolar as the blinking winking stinking eye of life and art (the bipolar perhaps as a misnomer on the prickly bridge of evolution), continues plodding toward itself, in this instance by presenting this formal yet inspirational essay on doves, their physiognomies, their olfactory limitations, serendipitous tendencies, mating and scatological preferences, kinship exigencies, and other matters of interest to the general reader and Mrs. Herbert H. Caraway, daughter of Wilma Pucker of Hardin, a suburb of St. Louis.

(Mrs. Caraway advises any further readers to accept the following text as sound, interpreting any meaning that might be begotten _&/^or linger as simply more sound.)

contents

1.0 language

03. thinkinggggggggggggg

17.4 life, culture, evolutionnnn

∞ void (truth, love, doubt)))))))

11 art, arts, arting, articles, icicles, mandibles, kerplunk...…

…i

1.0 language

a student is confused by a use of ‘round’ instead of ‘around’ … as in she’ll probably come round if you leave her alone. We look up ‘round’; there are 69 definitions. How one could eternally fall into the infinite vortices of words, wells as deep as love.

to remain foraging for the language of one’s flesh in the bigbox of the socially mediated languages of money and names

… an evolutionarily dubious move, but one that society calls forth, unable to wholly squelch its origins …

and heresiarch sumli lisum luims said through the mouth of heresiarch xrcaa, one can't resent one's era without being swiftly punished by it.

didn’t heresiarch sumli lisum liums also say, hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner...

(… and this ¾ofacentury ago …)

if god is the white space around the black lines of letters, are we not the keys by which the text is typed?

are then the black lines our technology and laws, our structures and screams?

(as to the nature of the typist, is this not a question now lost in the indecipherable text of the tombstones of time’s graveyard?)

is then the poet an archaeologist in the strata of air?

writing at the end of the word—like neanderthals clawing at existence under the boot of homo sapiens—we attempt to leave behind a record of verbal extinction in forms the future might have the capacity to recognize.

the difference between word and world — el … the name of god.

word is absent god, which spoke itself out of language to place itself, in infinite fragments, in the world.

if, as rényi said with the inspiration of erdős, math is the process of transforming caffeine into formulae, isn’t poetry the process of transferring mud into breath, the spiritualized proclivity of worms?

the two full-word anagrams of funeral: flâneur and frenula

the fun to be had with this

putting the fun back in funeral: real fun

isn’t the blank page the remnant of a dawn or dusk portending a twilight without end, its waiting words an invitation to god’s forgotten diaspora?

the blank page is unfiltered unblanched unsecured light. Careers, money, what is normally called love … are inkblots on the page — craving to fill it, to be analyzed, interpreted, shutting out silence, light, buttresses against the white void … this night of the known, this page of black.

poetry is the textured compromise, mediated in the poet’s flesh, between purity and the human scream protesting it … (shakespeare’s sonnet 66, bishop’s villanelle one love, nemerov’s because you asked about the line between prose and poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow 
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

, soiled, quiet, writhing
on the foreground of the perfect page …)

19⅕ life and spherolution

the first emancipation is from one’s parents, the second from one’s children, the third from one’s self … each gets more difficult, for each is an accumulation of freedoms and freedom in its fullness simulates the spherical mass of the world …

… trauma, like tenure, is transferable …

it’s said about f2’s recent suicide: a life cut short. Not untrue. But our culture is biased (at significant cost) toward a life cut long. Hence the incomprehension, disdain, fear, in response to the daoist thought—

it is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life.

when going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades in life, three in ten will be comrades in death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death, and these also number three in ten. Why is this so? Because they set too much store by life.

[[[[other lines the well-meaning spiritual class are frequently attracted to, with spectacular sentiment—

o destroy your reputation (rumi)

o do not go gentle into that good night (d thomas)

o I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference. (frost)
o do what you love (bus shelter and taxi ads everywhere)

how long and long the list …]]]]

but as heresiarch sumli lisum liums says,

only fools, fanatics and gods can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire …

and did not heresiarch lev ray contend,

you have neither the patience that weaves long lines nor a feeling for the irregular, nor a sense of the fittest place for a thing … For you intelligence is not one thing among many. You … worship it as if it were an omnipotent beast … a man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decision, or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring Beings …. You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

did he not also say,

… politeness is organized indifference?

sex becomes easier and more difficult—easier through the portal of technology, more difficult because of the increasing distance between flesh and flesh’s prosthetics, a distance which now only technology can bridge. Technology and flesh reach for each other across an abyss, but technology initiates and consummates the deal.

isn’t this the melancholy and frenzy at the root of modern coitus?

how can acceptance and passion not be antithetical, other than through the hard-soft unity of the passion of acceptance or the acceptance of passion … these parallel and less-travelled roads?

ambivalence is always and equally present in every situation, event and person : it’s just a matter of its diameter’s extent and the number of surfaces required to contain it …

heresiarch enorjd-u^..en

wilde said that the greatest sin is being boring but i say that the greatest sin is to crucify symbols …

… yet aren’t the two the same?

… to explore life not as a question but a wound …

… the greeks entered into death backwards

we, though, are like the dreams of the christians: we don’t enter into death at all

the something in the body that’s stronger than the body, that doesn’t simply confront death without fear but somehow overcomes the fear and so death …

the attempt of physics and religion to codify this something … but doesn’t it only retain its strength as it eludes codification (the kierkegaardian dialectic)?

remaining committed to the eluding: isn’t this heraclitus’ taut bow?

you have heard it said that novelty is oblivion, but i say to you that the city is a memory of an ancient infinite loop

overheard in a restaurant—

i think of all the innocent housewives on oxycon …

it’s easy to discount teleology in a mathematical epoch, said heresiarch ullullul, but doesn’t the city indicate the truth of the human, the shape of its soul, by laying bare (though the laying bare of the city is like the laying bare of a stripper—it wears the eyes of its watchers and so, as mcluhan observed, is never naked) its contradictions—the eye of the truth of a thing?

(don’t we then see the shape of our collective desire, the barbed wire of our limits, as we explore the urban ecosystem [{our creation and space—the two remaining frontiers]}, rippled watery mirror of our dark dreams?)

aren’t such gross summaries of time, space and power like the newsbites on subway platforms, but on the platform of myth?

07. that medievalism—^thinking

07. that medievalism—^thinkin

07. that medievalism—^thinking

that ideas are dressed feelings, that feelings are chemical relations between the surface of a singularity, masking pluralities, and the surfaces of pluralities, masking singularities, that a large idea wardrobe begins to unmask both the unpresentable pluralities and the unpresentable singularities, that most prefer small wardrobes to maintain a minimal unmasking, any intimation of the inexpressible (we might be able to handle glimpses of flesh but not glimpses of spirit) … what else is there to know?

that art’s task is enlarging the wardrobe, society’s restricting it …

feelings are the truest facts, silence their truest interpretation

if we would speak, if we would attempt to draw nearer to the truth of silence in words, we would dress the feeling in an avalanche of words

as we have rejected silence for the time, as the truest voice of feeling, we must talk endlessly. Hence the rise and dominance of communication. Hence tv, facebook, twitter, texting, therapy …

the Word may have gotten weary of flesh, but words themselves, Word’s children, are young and hungry …

… isn’t the truth a decoy more deceptive than falsity?

there is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses ... the truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

heresiarch azupo

one can’t think about language, art, thought—in the way one can’t think about sex—during the act itself, without destroying or at least diminishing it.

wasn’t this heidegger’s error—in thinking about thinking during thinking, he failed thought?

isn’t this too the problem with academic and workshop’d art?

1,1,1,1 art, arts, arting, articling, icicling, suckicles, kerplunk…

aren’t words the film before the absurd certainty of our flesh and the absurd certainty of darkness, these two lights (eyes) of certainty comprising our sight, the film the spectacles we wear to shade ourselves from the two certain fires?

would not art then be the film of the film, the technology allowing us to transgress the laws, traverse the spectacle, look on flesh and darkness, and not die?

À religion, government, the academy are threatened by the future, which is to say their pasts

À co-ops, non-profits, are threatened by themselves, which is to say a barely filtered humanity

À only the business-technology conglomerate, aligned as it is with the modern sacred, strides, self-assured, through itself into the world, in pumps, on speed, suited, monumental, levitating, wise …

֟ (as to art, isn’t it threatened by what it always is and has been, its eternal nemesis and mother, the void?)

—art

o that which brings forth a preexistent wound

o that which cannot be translated into psychology or biography, politics, scholarship … which cannot be translated

o not the mirror of nature or the cosine of god or technology’s strange companion

creation is prior to consciousness

isn’t this the assumption, arrogance, the basis and breath of art, its trump against the pretenses of industry?

it is the price put on art that destroys the integrity of the art object, not the material or the creation itself

heresiarch bed.rod

if sometimes i speak of art as light and sometimes as darkness, isn’t this because it calls from a black noon and a blinding midnight which to me, human, of muted flashing neon, birthing blurs in the gloaming, are identical twins of passion, as extreme cold and extreme heat both push the body into similar states of oblivion?

can’s tago mago still a perfect musical incarnation of an exuberant descent into and ascent from hell, a kind of largely alinguistic shakespeare

aren’t all carnivorous orgies and divine lunacies contained in aumgn, the album’s otherworldy centerpiece, which magically fuses atavism and futurism?

its anticlimactic close, bring me coffee or tea, softly imperative, comforting, like its title, like fortinbras at the end of hamlet—

—ah yes, recognizable melodies, rhythms … society, order, those living and necessary sleeps …

we could taxonomize the arts, not according to the standard divisions (literature, film, dance, architecture, etc.), which are blurred and blurring anyway, but according to the vague spaces from which they emerge, corresponding vaguely to vague functions they fulfill: the social-ritual arts, the political arts, the craft arts, the absurdist arts, the arts of the void, the subversive arts, the arts of resistance, the mob&savage arts, the academic arts … each with their gods, proclivities, demons, traps, circumscriptions ...

doesn’t this taxonomic difference emerge from the same space as differences between substantive and functional perspectives of religion (family, politics—any cultural expression and its visible and institutional manifestations)?

we know, from theory—the reflection of others and ourselves—and practice—our own experience in others’ creation and our own, in creation itself (to the extent we can enter it without combusting), this immersion blending with mysticism (any difference being the particular relation established with combustion)—that art, in its experience as art, establishes an unsettled relationship with ‘normal’ life. This knowledge co-exists with the knowledge of another ‘art,’ which quantitatively overwhelms, the reproducible (the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction), the socially-generated and generative, the socially affirmative and cohesive, which we acknowledge as legitimate, which we also affirm, but require quotations for, due to the relative ease of its relation with ‘normal’ life, even its comfortable function of support and furtherance of such life.

this doesn’t interest us, other than as a dinner party or casual fuck: its degree of engagement, even exhilaration, varies (and, yes!, how it can exhilarate—this marker’s insight on banality—not of arendt’s evil but of dissipating normalcy), its occasional necessity—insofar as it re-bares necessity and so at least circuitously reaffirms transience and truth—neither irrelevant, tangential nor trite—not uninstructive.

what interests us is the art (or arts) which emerge from a troubled relationship with ‘normal’ life. what interests us is that which displaces quotations—i.e. the surreal, the displaced—from ‘art’ to ‘normal.’ This displacement, this replacement, is our curiosity.

(certainly not trouble itself is sought, as the trite, as those who seek trouble, would have it, but a transmigration of quotations, this movement of markers …)

∞ 0

the judgments directed at us—in their diversity, subtlety, severity, comedy—are always gifts: not primarily in their truth, which soon collapses into the vaster truth of the void of contradiction, but in their energy. Most judgments, however, are simply transformed into judgments: a simian efficiency. But their energy potential is greater: they are capable of aesthetic fission.

isn’t this another way of stating the adage, the pen is mightier than the sword?

we don’t seek love, as we say and feel, but the same unnamable thing art seeks—a kind of geometry of god, the architectures of dreams …

it’s not god that interests me, it’s the artifice of god

not the city but the incarnated idea of the city

not love but the question of love

not art but its circumstances and crib

not i but the void of i

heresiarch asbermo

how many times have i undressed truth in the closets of night and found it to be a heap of clothes on the floor?

… how we all want to stain the stained world …

but in a world so stained, stain upon stain, oil upon oil, isn’t the absence of a stain the more beautiful—and even in a paradoxical sense the more noticeable—mark?

to not reject, but set aside, narrative, the novel, stories, as the primary aesthetic or epistemological form of telling (outside of science) is to displace oneself in what might be described as a non-form (or, perhaps, more authentically, a form yet without form). We might also call this poetry, if by poetry we mean not received (defined) forms but the quest to fish unborn shapes from the void—these shapes having their only appearance as the perception of a feeling of a silent seeking, which seems to reflect the displacement of the self, the mirroring of the human and the void

so the novel is not rejected—as evil, irrelevant (but, oh!, so relevant!), passé, expected, tired, explored …

didn’t both borges &jabes more or less say—the novel … everyone’s doing it, why would i?

aesthetically, hasn’t the novel become like the sonnet in the nineteenth century … awaiting an aesthetic holocaust?

epistemologically, hasn’t it become like catholicism in valencia in 1502?

what compels me has always been not primarily the stories we construct to explain, recreate, justify and cohere our lives, but the architectures of the stories’ creation. I could call these architectures poetry—in the way that poetry preceded the novel in the artform called literature—but i would rather (rather, because i aim for a spiritual-linguistic precision) call them geometry … the geometry of creation. If people wonder why stories don’t dominate my aesthetics and psyche, it is because the shapes of the emergence of the stories are those that joust in my consciousness. I recognize the necessity (in the sense of the existential given) of narrative, society, money, ‘traditional’ work and family … but it is not the appearance of these necessities that is my task; instead, it is the processes by which they appear, the translation of these processes into the shapes of language.

to confess a certain mutual incomprehension between the story-focused and geometry-focused, a quantitative imbalance, is almost unnecessary to state. But it must be confessed. This certain mutual incomprehension is itself a shape, perhaps one that holds a key to language.

might there not be a relation between this exploration of shape i attempt to describe and the root tasks and obsessions of modern mathematics and physics? The very large and the very small interest me—that which circumscribe and ground—and the corpulent middle only to the extent that its flesh at times clarifies the circumscriptions and ground.

the void is not black but light

the void blinds us so we seek the blackness of the blotted page

don’t we desire—flappingly, subversively, resistingly, sometimes torn like spider legs in the hands of certain boys—to keep the page as blank as possible, to give words a place, living space, to land, breathe, choked and mobbed as they are in the claustrophobic communication of the world?

what is this attempt called from the known?

whimsy, delusion, insanity, psychosis, all manner of dysfunction?

and from the cloud of unknowing?

freedom, truth, love, poetry?

and heresiarch gladioozer said, do not the unknowing and known feed on each other like lovers in a condemned building?

doesn’t night’s maw open to a throated vertigo promising an aesthetic feast foreign to the day? Isn’t this why we leap before we look?

and heresiarch edanu said, yes, and the first surprise is that the maw’s promise is fulfilled. The second is that the meat for the feasting includes the one who leaps.

but those of the night are given to it as a baby to the breast, though the tits be deliquescent and the milk the stuff of sewers

the void is not more real than its orbiting masks, night not truer than day.

don’t they take turns exposing each other, as lovers in the discovery and decline of their love?

this place where love and art kiss, bound by that contract between void and mask, signed in a bloodless cloister in the monastery of dust

we plunk the yinyang on mugs, tshirts, workshop logos, pc backgrounds, as if the union of night and day were something other than that which has the power to combust worlds

—now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds—

as if it weren’t the stretched and stretching diameter of our confused and dying souls

the difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madperson has only one.

heresiarch nazeeliolo

…i

i experience little difference between my past extroverted life and this present one: both have attempted to translate into language the inner necessity—and the feeling of the energy of this translation remains constant, regardless of the environment in which it takes place.

in the way that no matter where you travel in the world, humans are humans and you are you? asked heresiarch wilminina;

yes, i answered, but with this difference:

having had to become more than i expect to myself, i became it, and in the becoming asked the question of identity (not what or who [or, horror!, why] am i?—those questions of adolescence, but the question of creation), of the form of formlessness, the question of a dream divided against itself.

in the vast worlds of injustice, your act, arising from cruelty’s sectors but without its claws, is so petty as to be invisible.

the simulation of seeming, the seeming of simulation …

i remember you

indifferent to my caresses

crawled into the tent of your sleep

your breasts like soft moons

as if we hadn’t just clawed

each other to another death

light, open spaces, the absence of linguistic pollution become more essential to me. But what to do in toronto—half of its life dark, enclosed, mobbed with disruptions to thought, this half beginning?

vonnegut's harrison bergeron

can i begin to experience this lightless-closed-clamoring half as a necessary darkness, an impetus, a spawning ground, for greater light and silence, not those of the sun and desert but of the soul stretched on the weightless horror of itself?

a nice thing about having led an absurd life is that everything begins to make sense—not just absurdity, which has made sense for some time, but even sense.

i wish to speak of the Bain as a lover, known, unknown, fuckedup, worn, juvenile, dense, awkward, edgy, utopian, opaque, multifarious, sticky, corpulent, miasmic, impossible, (can we say it? … ) … beautiful, hated, prehistoric, craving, brittle, shimmering, broken, volcanic, ovine, turgid, … … …

but how can i, having been a pilgrim to the temple of adjectives and sat under the silence of their liquid teachings?

here i am,

friend of the spaces between minutes

of the darkness in the darkness

not much knowing if the future is the past or failure is success

wandering from stool to stool as if it meant something

full of blinks and stinks and the western wind

there i am,

in the bathtub with my penis on

confusing it somewhat with the light in the bedroom

counting to 81 in the manner of another century

my mind a casino of bears and playlists

discounting the darkness as if it were a friend

and not much has happened since (heraclitus or mencius or aeschylus or)

except that maybe what was said has been forgotten

i am far more your creation than mine; i am a mosaic of yous … yet in our primitive justices, we coalesce responsibility onto the singular, simply because it’s visible and so easy (in the manner of visible and psychic diversity). If humanity survives and evolves, won’t it look back at our present laws and attitudes in the same way we look at the aztecs or nazis—scapegoating the other to avoid our fears, the renaming of this scapegoating a primary social project?

15.10.13

stately, droop the hollow dicks in yellow plunder

thanks to lewis carroll (chapter six of looking glass), virginia woolf (her lecture in the bbc series words fail me) and mitzi hanover (her recent rhetorical analysis)

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TYLENOL 500, A GERUND, AND GLORY

at the café, in that part of the patio the sun had found, near the cracked flowerpot that held nothing, around the wobbly table, its ceramic top chipped and worn so that its pattern of herbs and weeds was barely discernible, sat a Tylenol 500, a gerund, and glory, each sipping a caffeinated beverage, as was their custom, together, to make the transition from sleep to consciousness more palatable. The Tylenol 500 preferred a naked bold venti half-caf no-foam non-fat vanilla soy latte, with a shot of white chocolate and four pumps peppermint, the gerund the remainings of drippings, which some might in certain moods call something resembling a turkish coffee, and glory a double short americano, which is called a danny devito at this café.

the three friends were conversing, as they tended to do, about the general and specific decline of language, how it was succumbing to the binary and barbaric protocols of technology (something robots would have invented! just look at texting!), precipitating the obvious moral, intellectual, and spiritual decline that presently inflicts all sentient and insentient beings, threatening to debilitate them and the planet to the point of absolute inertia or apocalypse or both. They agreed on little but on this they agreed, as if they were one mind and one of the kind given far more to homogeneity than contradiction.

look, said the Tylenol 500, as we all know, if we set aside various primitivisms such as fire and the wheel, writing was the first technology and it should have remained the only one of any significance. The advent of the printing press, which forcefully spewed its seed through the centuries to beget the Internet, has ultimately usurped the alphabet and all its natural attributes—thought, freedom, love, courage, nobility, art and even God. Progress may seem like progress but if those to whom it seems so are in fact themselves regressions, what sort of authenticity does such a judgment have?

without doubt, said the gerund. I remember when i was vacationing on the italian riviera, in ventimiglia as i recall, an unusually attractive woman approached me and, wearing only impeccable english, asked whether i might do her laundry. Those certainly were the days.

surely, said glory, our collective melancholy shall lead to a point at which language turns back on itself and humans are reduced to acronyms and emoticons little different than the grunts and yelps we attribute to our distant ancestors. Machines will assume the regulation and enforcement of words, much in the same way the french government does today, and we will all speak—or probably transact—the same language, we will all be understood, but that language will be utterly without vitality and that understanding wholly without love.

indubitably, said the gerund. It wasn’t long ago when, as portugal’s ambassador to ceylon, i was hiking up pidurutalagala, thinking of eggs and love in proportionate semblance, when three nuns of little reputation and even fewer textiles swooped from behind some burning shrubbery and questioned whether i was capable of action. Before i knew it—how time disintegrates in the face of such memories!—all four of us were …

… but, said the Tylenol 500, this has already happened! The turning point was 1889, the place was turin, the great tongue of humankind became cancerous, and we tipped over the precipice of decadence on our spiritual toboggans, accelerating ever since toward those ragged boulders of linguistic doom awaiting us in the inevitable valley. True, we sit here, sipping our distinguished beverages, our overworked smartphones at our sides, our syntactic configurations not in wretched disrepair, filled with the glory of our own discourse even as we argue, quite rightly, that glory itself has fallen and language stumbles to its inglorious and imminent death at the non-existent hands of our creation. Although we once thought that we would one day be glorified—without stain or blemish, purified by the light of words, the enlightenment of reason through language—we now realize that despite all these accoutrements (here the gerund waved its appendages around the table), we will instead be stripped of the glory we have only imagined and be left as we were—dumb beasts, mindless, striving only after sex and food and domination. For glory has become not what we thought it would become—a shining star for humanity and the entire cosmos—but what it was always destined to be—a worm, a bug, in an infinite loop in a closed system in a cold metal cube in forgotten space.

the sun had by now moved on to other things, the caffeinated beverages of the friends were nearing their drunken close, the table wobbled as was its tendency, and the cracked flowerpot held nothing. But glory neither twitched nor recoiled for glory was not glory but just a word.

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, 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—and 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 its pet.

8.9.13

minnie downed to baton rouge, waffling about love

little ditties ‘bout god (or somethin

g) [maybe] {uh} : — : — : — :

isn’t god the image of ourselves that we shatter upon, becoming not whole or healed but uncountable pieces of glass under an electric sun?

we gather ourselves into transient unities through wisps of language, ineffable reflections of our fragmentation.

god is a word i use to describe the chasm in words, the chasm between desire and desire.

death stabs us. This stabbing while we continue living i call god.

it isn’t so much god we miss in a secular age but the shadows truth once cast, protecting us from perpetual light.

if misery is a butterfly, is god a caterpillar?

wouldn’t god, though, be a sanctuary for those with wings in a flat and gravity-bound world?

i once thought that god, grounded as it seemed to be in darkness, would spell the sacred word at the end of time. But i saw in a dream that time, unlike humanity, is eternal and we are the sacred word which cannot spell itself.

little, said god one day under the bonsai tree it favoured, is born from tears and blood, even as little is born from their absence.

and the bonsai tree withered upon god’s speaking these words and god was silent.

if god must pitch its tent in a poet for poetry to exist and god is dead, do we not write from a residence of death and a throne of dust?

but hasn’t language always been dust’s tongue and poetry its bloody pen?

the golden irides of god are dimly visible in the smog of our souls, through the gutted monsters of our wounds.

            as we spot them (staring at what? surely not us! staring at staring itself?), a certain death is inevitable (who does not seek this death in the act of gutting? in slaying the hungry heads of those wounds?): we cannot help but become the blurred reflection of those thousand eyes.
                        the endless deaths in life: with each one added, life and death begin to resemble each other, like a dog and its human. (but which is which?) (with each addition of death, divisions are subtracted …)
                                    heresiarch ramarooroo said, from death’s perspective, all of life is a failure. And i said, yes. But isn’t it equally true that from death’s perspective, all of life is a success? (and doesn’t, ^now, ^{the golden flappy
now}, ^{tolle’s cheap
toll}, chuang tzu’s butterfly poke its pesky head over language’s cliffs, laughing like a banshee munching avocados on a teetertotter on a raft in the Pacific?)
                                                (and from life’s perspective [from those perspectives] what is life? might it be language precariously stuffed into human form? and when humanity ends there still may be life but …)

might god be the amorphousness in the eye of each word, making the hebrew scribes right: the holy name cannot be written? It would be english’s crassness—our requirement to express subtlety in syntactic convolutions, the directness we claim in our grammar, the mask of honesty we demand in our art and our love—to plunk the shapeless shape in a clunky one-syllable word, with a hint of its essence in the vowel at its hollow center.

isn’t my melancholy that art, like god or time, has no end, no goal, no definition, no f ^ac ^e … only a fluidity polluted (flowered?) with past ends?

one must speak of god (if one must speak of god) in ways that barely resemble ways that resemble. (and who would be so mad to speak of god unless one must?)

although there are other claimants, we prefer the gods who crouch at the edges of thoroughfares, drooling a bit perhaps, though not infrequently from caprice, day-old french fries in a paper bag, sartorial holes worn comfortably, quarreling with death as if the quarrel were a lover, dreaming of a night of love to down the horny world, seeing themselves not as saviors or losers or members of the virtuous merchant class or artists (those usurpers!), not particularly seeing themselves, humming off-tune tunes, not having had a martini in seven weeks or bermuda … these gods of smells and dirty fingernails, those claimants no more true than others, yet more true through our preferring.

i use god in the way you use waffle or project or agent or fuck me—not in any final sense or sense existing outside of what presently is inside, but in the sense of picnics and candy floss and rhino poop. God is simply the empty set of words that impossibly claims to hold the infinity of other empty sets.

the endless compelling compulsive exhausting irrevocable exuberant leaping need for the tongue to move in the mouth, celebrating sound, feeling itself wiggle, wiggling, wiggled, in that cavity buttressed by carnivorous teeth and salacious lips, madly, softly, sweetly, bleeding, reaching through the void for the clanging stars … this need … isn’t it god?

which is greater—language or god? heresiarch wollenmatova asked one woolly bedtime as gramma tucked her in to hums of bygone nights. Language, gramma spontaneously answered. No, god, she corrected herself. No no, that’s incorrect, it’s surely language. No, forgive me, it’s god. Language—i remember, i got the answer wrong, it was #98—is it, i know now. But … i can’t forget that moment in the backseat of the chevy … without a doubt, god is right. And so it went until heresiarch wollenmatova fell asleep and gramma died from the exhaustion of indecision, sucked into the gyres of memory.
            and love? you (& paul & aldous) ask, from a perch of posited perennialism. Love, said heresiarch munchawuffle, i have heard it said that love is but one of the trillion children spawned by language and god, wee hindu-ish divinities wobbling it out in the living dictionary of life.
                        love! said will burr-brrrrrr and his wiffles. Love is a meme stuck on the forehead of my self-proclaimed integration and enlightenment, a plank in the eye of my transpersonal taxonomies.
                                    love, said the kamut flakes, is an emo orgy on a bed of blooming almond milk, the jets we fly to paradise.
                                                love, said sappho and sade, that salad of limbs and eyes …
                                                            love, said aristophabooble, that cloven sphere …
                                                                   love, said Love, as it may have always had, which makes it maybe just like us,—…: dunno what i am.

god is every word in every past, present and future language. Not just every word, but every object and concept that that word points to, every textual and oral discourse (thought and feeling) about that word, the object(s) and concept(s) it points to. Not just these, but the end-to-end experiences of that word. For example, god includes the word ‘potato,’ the object potato (in all its varieties and states), all words and concepts (ontological, scientific, theological etc.), thoughts and feelings about potatoes, and the actual lived experience of modifying, growing, marketing, selling, preparing, cooking, using, wasting potatoes in all possible circumstances, with all possible methods, in all possible states. Until the human has entered into each word in all languages this way, entered until each word has collapsed under its own weight and become the night below all words, it does not know god. This radical limit to knowing we might call the humility we resist in order to sidestep reality’s confinement, the humility we must resist in order to speak at all.

if god was absence before it died, does it not become after its death not amortized absence but the absence of absence, which is not presence (which would immediately destroy us) but something more problematic—the lack of lack, the silence of silence?
            god becomes the copy of itself—itself by definition itself copying (god bless you please, mr. benjamin)
                        in dying, god expands its infinity, takes on more of eternity. God always gains through death. We always lose. But in god’s dyings (which are endless), we become more distant from our center, requiring more substances (things, noises, images, movements, orgasms, money) to bridge ourselves, attempting to compensate for god’s expanding infinities through prosthetic innovation, to which society must increasingly devote itself; this activity inevitably becoming the sacred (the task of compensating for the absence of absence: the perpetual sacred). [the three sacreds: the above task of compensation, the task of detouring around the above task, the task of bridging compensating and detouring]
                                    it is humanity’s inefficient energy to transform the divine losses we are granted into processes we are compelled to call gains.
                                                isn’t this compulsion the cooperative task between heaven and earth, that old alliance (to refer to heraclitus) between delight and mud?
                                                            (daodejing xlii: thus a thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to …)

the body is the way that gets in the way

the body is the way and the body gets in the way

the body is the way that gets in the way of the body, in the body of the way

the body is the way of the body of the way

heresiarch ramarooroo

god i take to be the inexplicable incommunicable infinite resource i draw from to attempt to describe the quantumly human (what feels at times like a siege of twinkies).

grey is the god of the city, who slips on its vomit in the back of taxis, who leaps before trains from a pedestal of pills, who rides elevators, prime past prime, until light itself snaps and the god forgets its names.
            grey is the god of the city, who has forgotten the energy of unconsummated desire, the fomenting pit of silence, who races up the steps of the future without faltering or looking back at the pillar of love.
                        grey is the god of the city, grey and pricked and sated and beautiful and doomed.

it has long been known that god is a failed alchemist and we its confused apprentices.

the urban streets are god’s neurons, its intersections its synapses. We inhabit the divine cranium to explore our resilience in new environments, to explore new explorings, to trace circumferences on night’s unblinking canvas (the arctic, everest, the congo were nothing next to this critically acclaimed [and popular!!!] choreography of the unseen and seen!). The visions of the Apocalypse are fulfilled, and we stumble along heaven’s alleys and boulevards (where the sun is no longer necessary! finally!), not (of course) according to anyone’s expectations, as is the nature of visions, wily to the squiggles in their vast and microscopic core.
            this mind incarnate we inhabit:

our collective flesh turned inside out and hammered into shapes of certain dreams?
the essence of a substance of a shadow ^{(dream’s definition?)} shoved through time’s leathery funnel, splatting architectures on the shaved and antiseptic earth?
our lusty tongues, strung out on themselves, drooling patterns we barely understand, the woven spit of history?
the imago of a race neither won nor lost and maybe hardly run?

doesn’t god wait for me in darkness, less like a lover, somewhat like a corpse, more like a word dropped into a bottomless desert well?

what drives us to god? The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy and small-mindedness and the arrogance that pretends it’s not, the cruelty and aggressiveness at the heart of the good, the greed that disguises itself as cooperation and the cooperation that disguises itself as greed, … what drives us away? The bricks of knowledge, the mockery of consciousness, betrayal, envy …
and of these other things: tenderness, understanding, friendship, care, forgiveness … do they not drive us to the human … or, rather, do they not drive?
those who would call the driving evil or ignorant or otiose or tired but gladly accept its effects (planes, trains, automobiles, yoga, to name just a few) … what do we call them? might we call them unjust?

texting is a bridge from god to nothingness, from the nothingness of god to the nothingness of god … god, simply, was insufficient as a bridge (at least it learns on its śūnyatā designer couch!); we need aids: two thousand years ago it gave us Christ the Word, now it gives us texting—the ultimate instant communion, oh bouncy host!

one doesn’t oppose society and god (other than in that particular way, the scrubless plain on which things legitimately confront one another in the joy and desolations of themselves), one doesn’t unite them either (other than in that other particular way, on the supersonic planes of the air show of ourselves). But one can perhaps, in some geometric spinozean vertiginous calm, listen faintly to a dialogue between them, not without meaning not dissimilar to the feeling of glimpsing a silent mob under a night clear rural sky.

haiku on the trans-siberian at three a.m.

dazed, god speeds down the

miles of its deadlines, which it

would confuse with visions but

for the treasure in

its impermanent lantern

like virginia, with her waves and rocks, i refuse to watch art kneel before psychology, vision before analysis, enthusiasm before pragmatism, spirit before money. This refusal i could call god.
(you call my divisions false, my refusal puerile, my methods dubious? Do i not also? [But what shall we call the calling?] I appeal, in part, in the broken pitch, from the whispers of stone, to the uncarved block of the dao, lay my oily fingers on its surfaces, cling to muddled images of murkiness and turning back and vacancy and the ancestors of beginnings—the project of the unnaming of names, beyond death’s caress, life’s claws.)