writing vii

language wants to escape itself, even as we want to escape ourselves. language’s means is silence, ours technology. but silence and technology are bound similarly to language and the human.

even as i cannot consider the human an expert commentator on itself – but only one voice among many, hardly privileged because it tends to be perceived to be located on some inside and the inside perceived to possess in some sense superior perception – so i cannot consider myself an expert commentator on myself. yet we – and i – cannot help comment. the gap between this cannot consider and cannot help is a charter of writing. yet most writing comes from the cannot help.

when we say the external world doesn’t exist – or that it exists solely or primarily as a function of imagination – we point to maps of spaces of writing. for writing re-enters voids not to create worlds about which it is debated whether they are illusory or real but to create spaces that might point to maps, so making any discussion of existence and non-existence, their locus or non-locus, moot.

we don’t have to create another world, through politics or technology. that other world is here, already, in language – all we have to do is enter it, although the policies and procedures for immigration are never explicit and always morphing.

do i write in privacy and loneliness? i enter privacy and loneliness – or at least the porches of the cottages of their names. then writing happens. writing is the odd breath of souls loosened in the unsegmented world.

writing! a dialogue with mirrors’ mute flat infinity.

to trek through writing’s dense empty forests, the only respites deserts and carnivals, is to become so used to nomadic minimalism and survivalist ingenuities that i confuse life and those techniques required to navigate writing’s environment.

writing is violence, but a violence so processed by violence violence destroys itself and only writing remains.

nothing here, he says, after having purchased an excursion package to writing. but writing is a selective mute.

writing? an empty boat on a river, unmoored, drifting, unseen, in which time may have ridden once, its traces smelly, like a deep navel never cleaned?

writing subverts itself. so that in the end – though there is no end – it gives up itself. what is left? a useless acquiescent subversion? questions of the methodologies of giving up? atonal memories? convalescence? palliation? a wellness that refuses its name? these are questions of death, of the root of the religious quest, where neither spirit’s presence nor absence can claim ascendancy and its mutability presents itself in objectifications, its mockery in reifications, its incommunicability in subjectifications. am i not seduced by writing as its voids are passable simulations of death and so hold the eternally lost key to life?

writing vi

with few exceptions, i have preferred writing that has emerged from places of exile, horror, estrangement, despair, anger, darkness, confusion, transgression – these shadows of culture, these dumpsters of health. so to write the first step i knew was to travel to these spaces and make them my home. writing would then happen, a product of this environment, as much as wellness is a product of capitalistic society.

writing is a cold love, but it is a love. and its coldness can feel like a welcome from the unreliable heat of what is normally called love. never familiar, it’s familiar. never intimate or reassuring, a dark companion.

these many languages of writing. journalism, scholarship, business, politics, technology, philosophy, mysticism, criticism, affection, lust, play, speculation, whimsy, … isn’t each a celestial object, artificial satellite, bound by gravity, electromagnetism.

i don’t want to write until i write well – i want to write until i can’t distinguish well and sick. the whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful yet this is only the ugly, the whole world recognizes the good as the good yet this is only the bad.

thought is primarily oneiric not rational; its rationality is valid but secondary, posterior in time and being to dream. writing translates the dream of thought to language; communication articulates thought’s reason.

writing is death. the only death remaining us in this age of virtualized death. writing is death because it replaces the body with itself and kills the operations of the human in the body. it teaches nothing, aims for nothing, loves nothing, advocates nothing. its selfishness and selflessness are vast – the former in that it doesn’t care for others, the latter in that it doesn’t care for itself. writing is not itself. it is the dead other that has taken over as host of the human. so zombies and immanence assume popular and intellectual consciousness. but writing is the mother of zombies, the father of immanence. it eats through the world at the speed of words. first and last technology, it surrounds the fat societal middle from within and without and consumes it until all that’s left of society is air. so there is air disguised as society and writing disguised as nothing and here we are in the consummation of love. this consummation doesn’t care for the causes of liberation – whether gendered, sexed, raced, classed, specied – for in it these causes have been completed in an age so primitive its memory is only available in dream.

only the dead write and only the dead read. books are the means of communication between the dead and the dead.

no longer is there writing on the wall. the wall isn’t there, broken by dreams of unity. writing is written on the air … yet the question remains the same: who would there be to interpret the words, and what power shall die tonight to be replaced by another face in the parade?

writing isn’t about names, but about the indistinguishability of names and the unnamed.

literature has taken the burden of assuming the vestiges of nature – a realism heaped on humanity’s urban shoulders. the exorcistic spasms of surrealism and dada have been forgotten and nature’s contingencies have flooded the aesthetic realm of words.

to write about the body offends the body, which is what such writing, intentionally or unintentionally, aims for – to reproduce the offense it has suffered. writing writes from the destroyed body, aiming to reproduce beings inviolate.

writing v

if i choose to develop, nurture, contrive sorrow – and not just sorrow, but any emotion or state that interests me, that fulfills an orientation (and which emotion or state would not at various points?) – i am not some neowerther, a schopenhauerean pessimist, a christian, for i neither mourn nor leap, and laughter is as much part of the palette as any other colour of the heart. if i at times might seem to favour sorrow over laughter, or some sensation over another, might it be for no other reason than as a sociopsychic autocorrection. the world in its amusements, volitions, and absurdities can be wearisome and i at least must wonder, viscerally, if its diet is imbalanced. we are all tiny experiments in an infinite laboratory.

who would not, in this age of relentless will and forced happiness, desire to use sorrow and anonymity as materials, as simulations and play, as contentments and travels.

i have been to india 19 or 21 times, each visit a mockery of the previous ones. so i have stopped going and remain in the provincial land of my birth. for mockery led me to the end of my heart and there i found an absence i perhaps had been seeking. while i had been writing for decades, only then could i write.

by the time one realizes that one is on a path and what that path has been named and the dialogues about that path from those who have walked it and those who haven’t and those who have been found broken by its sides or those who take a tourist interest in it and travel over it in helicopters and that that path is – like all other paths – engaging in a dialogue with all these in their various manners and knowledges – and has any experience worth noting … one is not only nearly dead but in a very real sense has died and so the human dialogue of paths is a conversation among the dead. in this way writing is little different than any other road.

a confusion (but there are many) of writing in an age when writing has lost its meaning through an excess of meaning, through an excess of proliferation, through abuses of familiarity (these common violations) is that it is easy and common for those of all paths to write about their paths and thus consider themselves writers. and so, inevitably, they must be considered. but when these writers are encountered and they clearly have walked a path or more but have hardly set a foot on the path of writing – its terrain, struggles, deaths, false ecstasies, predators, roadside inns, flora, and so on (there is no need necessarily to demonstrate any ability to articulate these experiences conceptually, analytically, but they need to be demonstrated somehow, certainly minimally in the writing itself, however subtly) – what then, other than confusion?

writing is an art of having things fall apart in realms of the unscene.

it is easy to write. all you have to do is decide not to run. not to run, and to disbelieve in time.

when you become disillusioned with disillusionment what remains is illusion but through the lens of disillusionment, and this renewed illusion is a ground of writing.

one becomes what one writes; if one does not write (other than in the ubiquitous purposive or transactional sense in which everyone writes, to accomplish something outside of writing) one becomes what others write.

writing iv

i do not write, i say.  i live, i void, maybe i create, i say and am said. these glyphs you see are not writing, they are no signs – signs are lost; these are dead shards shed from the unknowing of my pupils – empty, yet use does not drain them; dark, imageless images. 

see the rabbit cross the monkeysection against the violent lights. the coops shall miss their bunnies, the scars shall not rain. who may abide the day of its hopping, and who shall stand on a shibboleth? for we are like an orphic liar. i say uh 3 2 1 0 -1 …

give me darlings some rough petunias

give me sweets a bakêd ass

i shall nibble on thine titties

thou shalt dine on lentil gas

we were then and now were once we

who can tell the paths of ways

when you’re in my ebenezer

on that rubber leopold chaise

here’s the end – it’s spanked and heaving

like a sunset on a dump

let’s go forth and juice an altar

with the ancient rump’n’hump

but. in and through and by and outsie

aren’t what they were supposed to used to be

bakeries are now just laundries

you and i are they and we

so : that is it and it is this

what is come is just to go

where’s the outhouse when i need it

got a load i gotta blow

writing is this a moon in desolations of a solstice sparring with a sun across a court of bottomless sky writing is this i in shitheaps of i snorting happiness from flammable bhutan writing is this an arrow in a rabbit and that rabbit yet undead and its suffering ours and those sorrow-stricken shall win writing is this nothing and sums of nothing and doktor nothing and mayo nothing and nothing of nothing to nothing denothinged donne and undone, dung

in the old debates about the moon and the sun – these now branded and reproducible – it was sometimes agreed that the moon by itself was more beautiful but the sun with its starting and closing effects could surpass the moon. the movement of writing away from these debates into the techniques of branding and reproduction is an evolution and, like all evolutions, beyond, except in detached sectors of moments of time, judgment. writing about writing traces the movements. writing about writing about writing traces the traces.

despite appearances, writing like time is not linear – or at least linearity is a dimension of writing, only gross cultural bias advocating its supremacy or exclusivity. writing is circular, enfolded, interstitial, linear, turned and returned, urned, stationary, punctiliar, holographic, hollow, abyssal, gyral, tessellated, meandering, waved, foaming, cracked, fractal. i long for a species desirous and capable of living in time – and so language – its attributes equal and plodded and explorable.

in an end that is not an end, one cannot help specializing. and if i have been specialized in the art of not-writing through an excess of generalizing and if this art is necessarily obscure …

writing, if i am going to write in writing – which is to write in i and i in writing – and not in money or its extensive families, is a disaster.

to speak of writing in this age when everyone writes might be as it was speaking of god in that age when everyone believed. a disaster then, a disaster now. who would dare it? no one. yet there are those who, despite any obvious desires or gifts, are placed in that daring – which to them is no daring but a necessary sorrow. these are the no ones of writing and once of god, strange duende in atimed sorrow. 

writing iii

letting go, if it actually is letting go, is letting go of nothing – that is, to truly let go, there are no objects to one’s letting go. one simply lets go. such is the path of writing.

immense vats of writing exist. and now large tracts of writing about writing. writing in voids is to write about writing about writing, paralleling writing about god (goding about god) in the middle ages, that ostensible birth (rebirth) of mysticism …

writing has seen itself and – vain, treacherous, and promiscuous beauty – cannot help but explore and proclaim its wonders. to write about writing about writing, then – could it not mean adding not simply another mirror, in which writing begins to blur into what it is not, and – then – endless mirrors, from which writing dies, but shattering these, down to the very first, through which writing lives but, again, without knowing itself?

i do not analyze when i write. i don't proclaim, persuade, entice, deride, construct, praise, deconstruct, inform. i write. that is all. writing to be writing is as free from object or plan as breathing. when i am dead i no longer breathe. when i am dead i no longer write. the two are the same statement. writing is simply breath made visible; in writing language appears in the cold air-voids of consciousness, brief memory-vapours – beyond consolation – of our having been in the realms of sensuous wandering.

writing begins with death. only the dead write. what do the living know that they could share any wisdom with us? the living are fuel for the chthonic industries of art, the living are writing’s pens.

gods are in words as they once were in trees and rivers. i do not know much about words; but i think that river is a strong brown word.

all writing is trying to do – at least any writing aside from that necessary to transact, gather, propagate – is nurture and develop a language of the unconscious.

            prosaically we can say the spaces of these nurturings and developings are spaces of madness. but this is the sort of madness that is of the free discipline of sufis, poets, mystics – creators in voided wedges of civilization.

what writer cannot help but to keep running hard if it is not to be overtaken by the hungry languages of fact?

once we are writing about writing about writing we are not only no longer writing about writing – we are not even writing.

to write i forget, forget that i can remember. this is not to negate that i have memories but rather to affirm that i am memory and to write is to give myself so fully over to my being memory that there is direct sublimation between that being and this writing. in this process – a movement between gas and plasma: the solidity of memories of expectation, convention forgotten; the liquidity of memories of hopes and despairs set aside – i write, and history, time, i, ambition, death have become words on the democratic stage of words, a script forming as i am abdicated to giving.

once everyone is a writer – a consequence of literacy’s ostensible success and corollary re-oralization of culture – literature has to find new paths of sensation, untried ways of ecstasy and pain, to prepare voids for words. to give oneself over to writing now means refusing identification as a writer, this substantive – dried, shrivelled – hiding in the catacombs of soul, yet in love with language, melancholic with the fleshy knowledge of unrequitedness, stumbling in metallic undergrounds seeking ancestors of the names of dead fires in ashed genealogies.

writing ii

writing is prayer. i am self-effaced before the infinite, confronted with the injustice of myself, slowed to the speed of waiting. writing is waiting – for the uncontrollable moments when syzygies come to presence and words appear. but when i talk, i think, act, when i will, desire – all these are waiting.

writing is vision made flesh made air.

in maintaining writing as one’s life, language loses its power, even its primacy as vehicle, and writing itself becomes less the orientation of one’s life than placing oneself in a space in which writing might find one. as this space is always shifting – writing likes to play hide and seek – i become more familiar with lostness, homelessness, separation than with writing, seeking to be found.

one can of course simply sit and write, but then it’s a career, an occupation, a means …

so writing becomes something else, and this something else becomes the nothing that is.

i wanted to write serenely, capriciously, peacefully, comfortably, from the broad plateau of middle class pleasures and scholarly privilege. but instead i was manufactured to write in struggle, discomfort, offense, disregard. every environment needs its labourers.

a certain kind of writing simulates a nomadic life on earth – wandering from place to place scavenging for words. how could i write a novel, anything resembling what is typically called a book, with such a lifestyle? my forms reflect vagaries, uncertainties, impoverishments. i write in fragments, with few things complete, in vulgarities and ugliness – this is the milieu in which i scavenge.

i know i am now writing because to place myself in spaces of writing is to place myself in spaces of obliterated pain.

when we achieve our goals they become beyond us. i strove for 20 years to become solitary, desolate, hapless … now – these states having become me – i see, like all non-trivial goals, they’re unachievable. like community, love, justice, they occur, but in moments, and i had them as much 20 years ago as i do now; the only difference is that now i know i have them in the manner of not-having, and that they aren’t goals.

bodies are not living and text dead, text is not the corpse of a living body any more than a body is the corpse of a text. my text is my body and my body a breath of unknown words.

if i should live in vision and poetry rather than analysis and politics, have i removed myself from the world more than a president or scholar? no. or rather i have removed myself differently and engage differently. in writing i breathe my body’s far-near.

it’s not that i write or am written. the movement from the active to passive necessitates its return and circularity. if there were a mode that expressed agency and non-agency, volition and waiting, activity and passivity and the absence and subversion of both, it might be that mode that is writing in the i. yet not just in. here too a circularity.

i am innocent in writing. all guilt i leave behind in the world. my body becomes pure, like air before consciousness, and text eats me, in desire and love. eating and purity are briefly one.

no longer do i believe that writing is a technology. writing is a god that has lost its way.

in writing i amputate myself in love and grow new limbs, i generously behead myself and – there! – new brains.

this violence to myself is not something i do alone but is an active collaboration with the world. i call it violence but this is a necessary mask, for what it is hides behind every name.

writing

what do i ask from writing?

in this age of language rather than that age of god, the writer loses itself in fragments of writing rather than fragments of the godhead. language offers this modern losing and this offering is what i ask.

as before, there are the sprawling apparati of the age – the priests and penitents of yesterday, the communicators and analysts of tomorrow – but the writer sidesteps these intermediaries, required to experience the age not from the outside with its sparkling accoutrements but the inside with its desolations and solitudes. the appeals of success, while inevitably puncta of struggle, omnipresent and voracious, mean, little, and the writer confronts the whiteness of the virtualized page like a sand city without horizon or sky, from the simulated cave of its nothingness.

nothing compels me to do or be anything and i remain undefined. nevertheless, in the necessary accumulations of time, society’s trade, i grow in definition, a definition primarily negating. this growing gap between remaining in undefinition and accumulating negative definition is an experience of writing.

i remain in poverty. poverty of knowledge, circumstance, time, flesh. then i experience the absence of words that have never found themselves, tundras of freedom.

having once found hallucination in externals (food, drugs, sex, activity, money, status), using them as fuel for language, now i migrate to internals (silence, pain, tedium, anonymity, poverty). each is sufficient, for language is indifferent to its sustenance and simply requires fuel. only we in our immaturity experience them as different.

i didn’t realize it at the time but it was around 49 that i began to die. i die slowly, like a cloud. there are so many births in death. and in each death, a new word.

humanity has never particularly impressed me and so i’ve blindly sought humanity’s margins – primarily in art, occasionally in people. not those misanthropically bitter or ruefully accepting people – while on the margins wanting to be in the middle: buying lottery tickets, grumbling about politicians – not the marginalized but those whose homes are margins, for whom margins are centers, for whom there is no issue, person, or structure that is a particular problem but only the order of existence.

so i’ve always made a fool of myself in conventional society, not simply because the seriousness and criminality of it are foolish to me and to conform to it requires acting foolishly, but as a technique to auto-exile – to seek spaces where foolishness and convention can experience alternative and emerging choreographies.

living away from the tumbling crowds all there is is body; its language deconstructs the city.

i don’t distinguish between experiences. loss i call loss and gain gain but gaining always involves losing and losing gaining – everything is equal when it comes to language, this subversive and transpolitical democracy.

as i become incapable of language – either through death or those many deaths when language is absent – language remains, and i am but one of its myriad lovers whom it embraces and ignores for synaptic time. who am i to complain of my situation – is it different from others, equally subject to brevity and vicissitude? that i am a rabbit in language’s claws? if i am limited and cowardly … of course i am limited and cowardly. we are all woven from such things.

i go to excess and past to get diseased, to debase myself, to feel pain, for then i can write about beauty. when i am whirling and stuffing myself with desirable things, there’s only sickness to write about. i write about what i am not for what i am is already here.