autothanatography as practice i

long ago i realized i do not wish to think the way you think.  death is the only successful method i’ve found that provides a sufficient alternative, a kind of natural translation service into ways and structures of thought i admire.  the only method sufficiently radical, outside, playful, crafty – the one ruse life, regardless of its talents or powers, recoils from.  i crawl into death to destroy my thinking and allow death to think me.   i look at the way you think, live, write – only a few of you impress me.  all trying to follow each other.  each saying i’m in charge.  each building your life on a desperation to be recognized by a circus of the same.  you still operate according to life’s barbaric lawbook – its stultifying and petty rules which through fear and convention officially exclude death and in such ostensible exclusion diminish life.  only death is free.  only death is kind.  after years of apprenticeship – which have meant increasing self-exile from your congratulatory and cannibalistic systems – i maintain my flesh by giving everything else of me to death and so – in this sleight-of-hand that has learned from death and simulates it in that labyrinth of mirrors … that only environment death itself cannot enter other than in the briefest of moments (but this continuously):  animate flesh – survive by eavesdropping on the silences of death’s continuous and sometimes noisy transience.  i have changed citizenship.  i am of the republic of death, this world without visas or rules.  i wander among you.  i watch your antics and hear your proclamations.  you humans too scared to use the one distinctive gift of your species, your only and last gift, the one true fire, instead thinking you can depend on yourselves.  no wonder i avoid you though for the time being share your visible form – a disguise i’ve realized, a trite and amusing wardrobe.

if i am dead in the republic of the living, i can do anything but have no desire to – it is this gap – between infinity and nothing – a gap that is itself infinite, nothing, intimate, strange – that provides the most modest and efficient of energies.  recording my struggle with how to identify, harness, apply, and dispose of this energy becomes my citizenship in death, what i call an autothanatographical practice.

i seek the interstices where life and death sit down together at an unnamed table, where life’s laws and death’s disability are temporarily forgotten, and the two have become so indistinguishable that they hardly have to seek one another or define their separateness.  of course i can’t maintain such states.  i am yanked back into the prisons of life and forced into various humiliations called civilization or responsibility, the floor opens and i slip into oceans of death and have to fend off the cold, the gravity, the untaxomizable beasts, until i voluntarily accept humiliation again.  nevertheless, i seek.  and even now i find that the ocean is in the humiliations, the prison in the grave abyss, a different union of the two, a different temporary forgetting.

buddhism with its sunyata offers no more peace than daoism with its dao, christianity with its christ, judaism with its book and law, hinduism with its moksha, art with its play, business with its productivity, philosophy with its analytics, prophecy with its rage, silence with its eyes. 

i do not seek peace for peace is as illusory as justice, love, community.  they all exist, but as moments, moods, ideas, desires.  i seek death and seek it in all things, and find it – for it is always there.  most of all i seek death in myself, for, here, it is doubly at hand.  death, despite the claims of the living, offers no rest or peace to the living – for death’s oblivion obliterates all feeling.  death may be peaceful, but offers no peace; it may be kind, but offers no kindness.  it may be free, but offers no freedom.

more autothanatographical thoughts

some sunny day,

don't know where, don't know when ...

death viii

doesn’t death provide perspectives farther than asteroids and stars, nearer than super-resolved fluorescence microscopy?  isn’t it the constant immaterial material counterbalance to the human drives to build visible projections, now too vast and complex to be seen and so analyzed in fragments?  and i wonder of the reputed cleverness of the human, for it seems too often foolish to me, and to innovate without first knowing death a great imbecility no animal or god would ever do.

death dissolves hierarchical power, but can only do so through time – its chief limitation.  to overcome this limitation and yet retain death’s dissolving merits, the abolition of hierarchy and the strange equality of all things, i enter death alongside time – in art and consciousness, these alternate dimensions – and though, naturally, another limitation presents itself, the experiment i feel is worthy, and i invite others to join me and various similar experimenters housed in human form to don new forms of death – these sartorial laboratories without corporate or government sponsorship and so a new science, a physics of dream – and thus play with what otherwise appear to be sacred modes of being, these reified and ossified existences most blindly prostrate before with their very lives, and by playing see and by seeing transform.  so death is a poorly used tool and its apprenticeships and crafts hardly documented or understood.

to live a life of the imagination – of art, of creation, of possibility – without much interest in the immense and growing apparati of structures in politics, culture, knowledge, commerce, and science that dominate society is to live a life of death:  partly from the methods one must learn to use (methods borrowed from death) to circumvent society’s force, designed (inadvertently or not) to crush those who live such ways; partly because to live in such singular proximity to creation is inevitably to live likewise in singular proximity to destruction.  this relation has long been well reflected in the religious mythoi of the world’s cultures and, now, with the religious carpet pulled away, we take this mythoi into ourselves, become it.  we are shiva and orpheus, aeneas and yahweh.  let society spout wellness while it slaughters ten thousand kilometers from home; let the privileged ones argue against privilege and the diversity mongers hawk their packaged diversities … those whose home is the imagination are themselves their own abattoir and wet nurse, womb and war.

that this life given me has become a life of death – is this becoming not a co-creation between society and me:  the death in each co-creator joining to birth a new life of death?  so do not say i am responsible for the death i live.  you, you equally, live this death with me and share the birthing of its life.

i have never been better – primarily because i have never been less sure of what better does not mean.  the gap in this statement – between the first never been and the only less sure, between the first and second betters, between the possibilities of a superlative – is death.

it is true. it has come to this. and this is not unwelcome.  after all these experiences, all these humans who almost seem as one in their endless greediness, the collapse of i into distributed horror with all remittance technicized, the only thing that sustains my interest is death.  not others’ particularly, not mine especially.  but death as a mode of existence.  loss, diminishment, withdrawal.

when going one way means life and another means death, a third will be comrades of life, a third comrades of death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death and these also are a third.  why is this?  because they set too much store by life.

i have heard it said that one who excels in safeguarding its own life does not meet with plane or car crashes when travelling, nor is it touched by disease when moving through society.  there is nowhere for the plane to crash, there is nothing for the car to hit, there is no place for the disease to lodge.  why is this?  because for one who safeguards there is no realm of death.

so when a word is spoken, it dies, and so when death is lived, it goes into the grave.

at some point – the city teaches me this – i had to say:  everyone i respect … these mumbling ones … feels (so knows in their body : that knowledge) the human to be unsustainable and, so, knowing themselves to be ostensibly human, knowing the voids between this knowledge and this knowledge, stops.  this stopping is the madness and the sound, a step in a return, a protest hardly recognized in its avoiding voice, its decreation of form, its refusal of tears, its suspicion of love, its silent anger.

desolation over depression, for desolation experiences depression, as despair or death, as just another empty flower.  desolation is the soil in which sensations grow.  become desolate, and one’s garden will be vital and varied, with no care at all, but for the care of maintaining desolation … a great care.

death vii

a trick of those who combine intelligence, creativity, and an openness that resembles nothing is to – when presented with an orientation, concept, attitude, behaviour – accept the idea (orientation etc.) and simultaneously develop the idea’s opposite, its partially overlapping notions, and so on, with equanimity and equality, and through this process, when practiced regularly and so developed into a thorough discipline, such that it is embodied and has been applied to all significant aspects of thought and action, self and world re-present themselves as they are – though never directly, due to their vastness, and so their areness is nothing known in that way knowledge is now used – in their plurality, contradictoriness, offense, impossible unity.  this process, practice, this re- and representation, we could call death, for it refuses the privileges of articulate singularities, of sentient conglomerates, and lays the world-self naked and calm across the universe, almost adimensional, seemingly to the edges of the unknown margins of things

i record – how could i, who is so alive, not? – my deaths and how could i, so alive, not die endlessly?

emptiness is, precisely speaking, not emptiness – which is impossible, but a gradual and irrevocable commitment to relative withdrawal from human ascendancy.  i distance myself through relative anonymity, movement; i distance myself from religion and asceticism through art.  i distance myself from art through mysticism and eremeticism.  distance is death and by maintaining intimacy with distance, the far-near is embodied in a singularity and the experience of this embodiment – the way in which thoughts, emotions and behaviours are modified through non-committal to standard social forms and conventions – is the focus of meditation (not a particular practice but the marrow of a life) and the meditative process the subject and syntax of language

i watch myself dying and record the watching, focusing on recording with the engaged detachment i might feel in writing a commentary on a surrealistic or mystical movie – say andrei rublev, svankmajer’s alice or faust, woman in the dunes, sayat nova, persona, or satantango – i’m passionate about, knowing the passion arises in large measure due to the perfection with which the movie reveals the void-joy of existence.  i want, though with ambivalence, the writing to be drawn out, the dying to be as long as the living, combining with indistinction the love, hate, desire, and indifference i feel about any intimacy, action, idea, or feeling

i am going to be dead for a very long time and i’d like to devote my life to preparing for this

            my specialty – such as it is, for it ostensibly involves all specialties:  an impossible specialty – is the innovation and development of simulations of death, counterpoints to the otiose yet still overwhelmingly dominant and destructive dualisms of peace and war, brutality and sentimentality, life and death, master and worker, bourgeoisie and proletariat, success and failure, teacher and student

the finality of death, its singularity, is set against death’s overwhelming presence through absence – like god or consciousness, with whom death dines – as continuous and these two demarcations, fleshed by the infinite intervals between, are uncertain as to which is primarily of the imagination, which of the flesh, and so we live stretched between them; our body is the infinite intervals, our body the between

i am dead, i repeat over and over again, for months, and this saying is more living to me than saying anything like, i am alive.  it contains more freedom, more knowledge, more courage.  it permits me to wander along the infinite labyrinths of life, an unused and somewhat polished mirror

language, oh language, that which sustains and destroys me, betrays and befriends me, the far-near of technology and the bed’s abyss, thou on whom words wholly depend yet who never speaks, i hear that death is just another sound among your seemingly infinite seemings.  i do not ask you to confirm or deny this; i only utter in the manner of utterances to hear another hearing.  praise and curses.  glory and degradations.  silence and sounds.  amen

death vi

have i not zealously sought constructive vitalized non-existence for the attendant wound – a wound without which life is not life, this home and womb of words?

to be declared mentally unhealthy in the present age is analogous to being declared a heretic during the inquisition:  the standards experts move in, enforcing what and how the brain can think.   to calmly claim one’s own standards, rooted in one’s flesh rather than institutional-cultural-economic mass and privilege is a death – like all deaths, permanent, silent, solitary, operating with configurations of weakness and strength unfound in the lives of standards

not unrelated to the death of sanity is the death of class – this path of removing oneself from class and the corollary struggles.  unwilling to assume the pecuniary and productive values of the middle class, unwilling and unable to assume the privilege and sanctimoniousness of the upper, unable to assume the envy and jokes of the lower, it – regardless of how it is viewed by those in class, regardless of the degree to which it lacks the prosthetics (money, possessions, name, reputation, comfort, security) desired and sometimes possessed to some extent by those in class – experiences itself as outside of class:  at least these classes defined by currency.  it seeks in death (where else?) the manual for living in this outside

the madness with which i write and live is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of some label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final phase capitalist society. so when i use the word mad here i'm not referring to a special race of people, but the mad in me addressing the mad in you in the hope that the former mad speaks clearly or loudly enough for the latter to hear.  so too with death

to live in what might be called dreams and to die in what might be called reality in a society given to the latter is to live a life of death and die a death of life.  and if you find my nomenclature strange – if you say, well reality is all there is – … ?  doesn’t what i call the modern secular mystic aesthetic (from pessoa to woolf, from dickinson to genet) carry a culture of dreams from the slaughter of certain people of these and other lands, from old men who dreamed visions and old women who dreamed dreams, who walked with spirits and knew waking life had no superiority, carry this culture in the emptiness of their hearts through a metallic desolation, dogmatic in its faith in things and facts.  no – despite the institutionalized cries of the light and newly voiced, of the heavy established names, that they have justice, truth, power – i rest in crypts of gaseous doubt, the incessant blurring of ideas and species, of all singularities.  the world, existence, is for me and those rough ones of my tribe – spread across death like fog – hardly solid, hardly true … a question among infinite questions, a dream among infinite dreams

why would i be interested in writing in the common tongue, in writing about the tedious topics of money, sex, society – whatever arbitrary concerns and styles the day ejects and the gouged desperados conform to as if they have objective value?  the overwhelmingly vast portion of the universe is radically inhuman and at the center and margins of the human – there too the inhuman, masked and hardly masked.  so i seek languages, forms, syntaxes, dictions, that reflect the energies that dominate and circumscribe the universe and, inescapably, often surreptitiously, the human; the tools i use for such seeking i have found far more readily in death than life, in the apophatic rather than the analytic, silence rather than what we call communication.  i hardly aim for lucidity or that most puerile of objectives – to be understood.  in art – as in love – we must remember to leave any humanity we might have behind

bricks move and sing.  bricks are made of language.  we do not hear them less because they lack mouths, more because our ears are unschooled and the words in a single brick so vast as to rival a dictionary, syntactically arranged unexpectedly for our brains so trained to certain orders.  would we hear bricks with the same ease we hear humans, would our identities not be spontaneously reconfigured, the human voice returned to its place among places, the grammars of things vast and diverse, our brains as empty and fluid as clouds?

to abdicate using others’ illusions for what may be one’s own is to find oneself in force or – more rarely – energy:  each an intimacy with death, the difference being its primordial orientation to diffusion

death v

when i died first i don’t remember …

once one detects monism and begins dismantling it one experiences it everywhere (this splintered monism, this new secular religion:  the yahweh-christ in disguise – multipally:  as cyborg, victim, scholar, social media junkie, justice ngo guru, feminist, techno, eco-spiritualist, healer …), and cannot stop dismantling.  this process is death.  and then a one does not appear and this is not the one but one.

the root of the human is the inhuman and the process of entering this root to become human is what we call death.

to encounter the human by matching nature with nature – this is a death of which we speak.

just as there is no closure in love (regardless of its state and direction), so there is no closure in death.

death is only a simulation of emptiness.

death is the gap between desire and no-desire, these infinite gradations in which we live.

one of death is given to and rather than or, an and that includes many or’s, even as one authentically given to yes is one given to a yes of infinite no’s.

soft death, like art or bread, you do not forgive our clumsy love, our confused aloofness, our fated cruelty, you do not forgive.  you do not forget, for memory is hard and apportioned to life.

my life is established as a chair from which to watch my death unfold.  i do not waste it on side ventures, on frivolous things, on the pursuit of accumulations or to be watched.  i watch.

death, my true name which cannot be named

for, like death, it hides, in my brain

what i call consciousness, game

of chance and light – inane

but pointed, the same

as love’s blood’s stain?

all the same

the pain

…

the historic objects of mysticism – those perceptions that facilitated justification of death:  whatever linguistic-spiritual concatenation of god, holiness or purification, charity might have been involved – having now, along with objects (through their spectacular proliferation) died, place mysticism with no possibilities of human or self improvement, no sainthood of anything recognizable, no allegiances or alliances, no institutional affiliations however strained.  it arrives, empty, at time’s dirty threshold, still housed in horny flesh, still yearning, still hardly of this world, its not-knowing and suffering odd antidotes or absurdities to the edifices of knowledge and wellness, questioning, empty, objectless and aimless, subjectless, godless, dirty, looking, still looking, but with perception shattered, bereft even of bereftness, lacking any justification, perhaps in all this absence with opportunities to become more itself.

methods of exile and death in the technological age for those disinclined to participate in the dominant and present forms of life (liberally pervasive now across all sectors, from business to art to politics to humanitarianism to ecology to spirituality and psychology to education to law and justice to science and technology) include not only withdrawal from progress, monism, societal devouring, but also humanism and anthropocentrism.   the primary tenets of today’s religion, craftily having rebranded itself secular, are as monolithically and inquisitorially voracious, ruthless, intolerant, dogmatic, and enforced as the primary tenets of past religions, and so one who is non-conformist will likely experience death, but according to the forms of this religion, which finds blood distasteful and death impossible and martyrdom repugnant, and so exile and death and martyrdom are simulated, offset, emigrated from physicality to emotionality, from visibility to virtuality, and the one so disinclined (who refuses to climb) likewise uses simulated means to withdraw, to die.

geometrically, simulations of death can be negotiated as moving forward by turning back, mathematically as adding by subtracting, communicationally as speaking by using no words, politically as acting by not-acting, emotionally as loving by not-loving, existentially as living by dying.

death iv

living a life of death can include eremiticism, primary destruction (regardless of the direction of the destruction and degree of laundering), obsessive morbidities, unthinking citizenship, and many other forms of simulation.  these are the traditional and primitive forms and they interest us far less than the living death of the future, which includes moving from life to life within life to such an extent that the moving, never stopping, becomes death, and so one lives more in the moving, death, the between, than any supposed origin or destination – these false atlantises:  too solid dreams.  yet death, being always unknown, escapes us and so living in escape – from solidity of fact, idea, person, work, direction, dream – is to live lives of verdant death.

so cain was exiled to nod, the land of wandering, after the first death, and there built the first city, and all who live in death live in nod.

if one is given to being committed to no path – hardly one who is aimless and given to regret – and given sufficient opportunity to move among paths to discover that this noncommittal commitment is itself a path, this one has emigrated to the death that lives in life and the life that dies in death.  this no-path path distinguishes itself from other paths in that one has lived it and then discovers oneself on it, in death.

one does not die for one is dying all the time; as a corollary, one does not live, as far as life is normally defined, for one is too busy dying.

i write my death as i write my life, my death is written as my life.  autothanatography and autobiography, wholly embedded in one another, as they are written, create my flesh and eyes.

(elsewhere, a colleague in the industry of sadoo has been exploring new forms of autobiography and is soon to direct this energy and innovation toward new forms of autothanatography.  those interested in creatively and diversely writing their deaths – or simply engaged with the idea of this emerging practice – may wish to seek out that sadoo’s experiments in the ether.)

the void is my mother, death my father …

i write my death.  words open to the abyss.  how can i remember the first time death visited me and said i am life and you will write me, i will be your one and faithful lover?  

we make believe, but we also make disbelieve, and the free movement between the two is death.

violence – regardless of the degree to which it’s laundered through diffusion, institutions – frequently named love – and the naming enforced by the launderers, the priests of money and professions – calls forth violence – immediate, direct, dirty, unmediated by communication, education – and the former, the necessary moralists, call their clean violence good and the dirty violence bad, but from the perspective of death each is equal on the indifferent scale of time, and any hierarchy that might be applied collapses under the weight and the pressing of the calling forth.  so a human who might see these mutual violences as equal and wish to bypass them still cannot bypass violence, but must recreate it using the energies of death.  and is this not the function of art, and the love that is less frequently named, and a calling forth that speaks far from language’s endless abyss?

surely one of the great deaths is the embodied knowledge of how incompatible the good of one loved can be with the good of one’s self.

in the age of technology, we reflesh death.  aloof, clean, optional, with options, impossible, remotely omnipresent and omnipresently nowhere, sexy, urban, statistical, whatever, aesthetic, like cancer conquerable, easy, marketable, objectified, soft like soap, it has become unlike any death anyone has known.  so technology specializes in possibility, a kind of bastard poeticism.

the iliad and blood meridian, bookends to western culture, outline myriad ways to die.  but i, in the outline of my life, find myriad ways to die in life.  someone says, … multiple, shifting, self-contradictory identity in contrast to male ideologies.  but i am male and have died many times to know male as multiple and shifting and self-contradictory and i have died from these easy binaries and i die each day from the words you speak, that are spoken, from words …

to live without goals is to live in death and so destroy death as any kind of end.

de nerval died with his hat on.  hat is in death.

how many have been killed from hate.  hate is in death.

the billions burned and are burning and will burn.  heat is in death.

hunger, hunger, hunger

death iii

death subverts life not by being opposed to life but by becoming life’s shameful necessity.

i do not write with words, but death.  words are just the result of such writing, like spray from the water when a body falls into it.

to translate the dislocation of existence, the chaos of light, our center without gravity, the collapse of time into colour, the precision of imprecision, oneiric exactness, a drawing into nothing through light, to provide memorable views of nothing, evanescent, airy and tinted steam, to make atmosphere a style and indistinctness a method, to transfer polydimensional sensuous form to adimensional planes of words … all this requires continuous and continuously inconclusive negotiations with death.

science is the primarily reproducible textures we spread on death to allay our unsettling relations with it.  i remotely admire the reliability of science’s textures, but use old words to detour around the microscopic admiration, thereby unsettling myself into death.

i was never enamoured of life, but of the devouring that made life tumescent.  disillusioned of the devouring, tired of the great expressions that beautifully show the devouring, i begin to comfortably dwell in the ancient spaces of silence and solitude – these deaths within life that hide in the heart of eating.  does life inevitably seep in?  perhaps, but as into a sieve, for if i am a dwelling for death i am one with many holes.

to live in possibility is to live in death – initially ecstatic, as one blurs oneself on borders between actuality and dream – this ecstasy of eros – and then what seems to be a deep melancholy develops (seemingly replacing the ecstasy yet becoming apparent as another form), as one blurs oneself on borders between sensuousness and death – this ecstasy of thanatos.  and so this living is religious – the unchanging religious life, far from institutional ravages, scholarly autopsies, and populist sentimentalities and launderings, rooted in a precognitive swooning before nothing less than the universe itself, a place of union of art and religion, of creation and awe, of desert and verdancy.

death’s face is absence.  in a culture of presence – of having, seeing, touching, of having to have … – death too must be made present.  technology is the factory that inputs the raw material of death’s absence and outputs (through converting, branding, marketing, shipping, retailing) death as presence.  to avoid this commercial output, a human itself enters into absence, a challenging but not impossible journey, for which there are indirect guides and maps in certain books of past travelers (although the risks and pathways now, in technology, being so recent, are poorly attested, and present sojourners, whether successful or not (and who would even use in this context the word success?), i encourage to write travelogues, such as i am doing, regardless of how partial and flawed they might be, in the hope that the combined experiences might aid in the continuing project of updating the guides and maps of absence in ever-shifting landscapes and ever-altering modes of the production of death in life’s grim, drugged, and regulated factories.

to seek the desert in the city of oneself is to forge a shovel from the junk of one’s soul and dig up death and in the digging see visions of a shroud of communication, and so doubt all things.

to seek the desert in the city is to kill.  what does one kill?  illusions of finding lay slain like soldiers in trench warfare, some though flayed still gasping.

to seek the desert is not of those activities that merit grant applications, book or film contracts, sex club clubbing, monastic vowing, vowing, the attention of the doctored class, beliefs.  at most it grants eyes and fills them with sand.

to see death in all things is not teleological, macabre, pessimistic, gross; it is just poetic vision – as natural as rice or lightning, as strange as television.  to see oneself comprised of death is not suicidal, sick, hateful, misguided; it is just aesthetic mirroring – as clear as avocados or oceans, as cloudy as highways.