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This conversation took place after Jackson MacLow’s talk, “Making Poetry ‘Otherwise,’” which he delivered in the Vestry Room of St. Philip’s in the Foothills, Tucson, Arizona, on 28 January 2001. A dozen or so people from the poetry community were present, including Charles Alexander, Lisa Cooper, Dan Featherston, Rachel McCrystal, Tenney Nathanson, Dlyn Fairfax Parra, Tim Peterson, Lisa Phillips, and Frances Sjoberg. Those voices that could not be identified are indicated in the text as “Audience.”
George W. Bush had been sworn into office a week before MacLow’s visit to Tucson, and the fiasco of the 2000 presidential election was on the minds of many of those present. The discussion therefore approached not only questions about aesthetics but also some of the complex issues arising out of the poet’s relationship to social, political, and religious realities. Among other things, the generous movement of the conversation testifies to MacLow’s abiding interest in poetry’s commitment to the social sphere.
NOVEMBER 27
A collection of anecdotes that seem, in my opinion, discovered via some quasi-critifictional form, Sukenick offers some titillating mind bombs that will help any innovative fictionist get into the writing zone.
Some of my favorite morsels:
I try to write in that mental space of 30 seconds where the past claws at the future to produce what we call the present. That helps me get past the premeditated.
The readers of detective stories are looking for a certain kind of thing. So are the readers of innovative fiction. But you have to accept that there aren't many of them looking for that kind of thing.
Fictive language goes stale without the recreations of desire.
Think through stories; dream through logic.
Successful fiction fails into reality -- whatever that is. A conflation of fictions?
There is a politics implied by style that may be decisive in its acceptance or rejection. Rejection on that score is a good sign, a sign you're dealing with essential matters. E.g., Melville.
Style should maximize intelligence.
Form is merely a way of discovering content.
Fiction is things happening not things described: dynamic, not static.
Happening-- cause and effect irrelevant... unknown... unknowable...
To salvage the madness of experience from impositions of order that are rarely in your interest.
I'll say it again: use your imagination or someone will use it for you.
The invisible adds nothing - except itself.
NOVEMBER 25
One of my favorite current nonfiction writers is Joe Bageant. He’s become a cult hero among down home American dissidents who feel no kinship to Republicans or Democrats.
We established a fond acquaintance a couple years ago, even speaking on the phone a couple times, and I can attest to the fact that Joe’s as down to earth in private communication as he is in public.
Ever hear of the Scots-Irish? After reading Joe, you’ll realize you have but didn’t know it. Scots-Irish is to Americans what water is to fish. We take it for granted as something natural and necessary yet easy and invisible until it goes bad. I’m talking, of course, about American culture…our way of life.
Anyway, check out this interview he had on an Australian national TV show. Imagine if mainstream American TV personalities [except Oprah, of course] actually read the books of the authors they interviewed…NOVEMBER 23
J’Lyn Chapman, "BlazeVOX & the Post-Avant"
Joseph S. Cooper. Autobiography of a Stutterer. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Amy King. I’m the Man Who Loves You. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Jared Schickling. Aurora. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
Chapman on Jared (my emphasis added):
…the poems of Jared Schickling’s Aurora are distinguished by their parenthetical titles, titles which serve as interludes as in “(war in the street) / (or, Note To Self)” or as digressions, suggesting that the poem functions beyond or without its frame, this frame of the title being ancillary rather than constitutive. In this way, the parts might be read as a long poem, split into three parts and these “titles,” lines of the poem.
There is a bird’s-eye cohesiveness to the book in that even the visceral moments of the lyric “I” or the attentiveness to others and the banality of the everyday are situated on the earth. The title suggests a kind of cosmic order. Aurora is the dawn or the Roman goddess of the dawn, a figurative gesture at keeping time. Yet, “aurora” can also be read scientifically as the luminous phenomenon of emissions of light excited by the planet’s magnetic field. Science and poetry, cosmic order and the quotidian bear a resemblance to new science; Schickling greets such a resemblance not by expounding on order or ideas of order, as such, but by focusing on the relationship of nature and civilization as in the poem “(unnumbered)” that begins, “when I passed through a populous city”:
"tongue concealed, dissolving voice, where are these shifting riverbeds / of rainbow light, human skin and their crystal industry / what is that vague reflection of glass / and above, the steel sky glinting"
The poems have an eye toward geography, place names and places, and time, the way it is marked by human behavior as in “(lunch hour)” and “(a day at the lake).”
J’Lyn Chapman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver. She is working on a dissertation that investigates text and image in the novels of W.G. Sebald. Her own exploration of text and image can be read in the forthcoming issue of Conjunctions.
Schickling:
Congratulations. Good review for you and BlazeVox. Say hi to ----- and -----. I've printed the review out, highlighted the important parts, and will tack it up on the board at work and lecture everyone there on the nature of your poetry in relation to civilization. I'll take another copy down to the coffee shop (delivering another lecture, albeit a more intense one, focusing on Niagara County civilization and geography) and e-mail another to Scott Leffler should he want to talk about Poetry during Dialog, taking a break from the latest local political drama to consider how Aurora might improve the quality of life around here (maybe even more so than the IDA).
But seriously, it's a good review. She got it right, I think. You should send Construction [Schickling’s latest narrative poetry chapbook] to Geoffrey [Gatza, poet, chef & BV publisher]. It's better than Aurora and BlazeVox seems to be the hot place right now for new writing, however you want to label it. As Chapman said, it's a good harbor to launch from.
I have no idea what post-avant is and don't care. I'd care if I was a teacher or publisher and had to discuss and promote all this stuff in a "marketplace" context. However, right now I'm in the fortunate position of obscurity and need not worry about it. Nonetheless, even if I wasn't in the obscure stage of my quasi-sentient phase space trajectory, I would trash labels like post-avant, postmodern, etc., even post-future (although I favor that as a tag for my current work—the whole thing being something like post-futurist literary terrorism) as distractions from the reader-writer's private effort to relate to individual texts as they are in and of themselves. These labels are signifiers that tend to hide what they're attempting to signify, and fewer people get to the thing itself—the text—because they're so distracted by the label and the propaganda packaging it for consumption. If we put a red label on this cola people will think it's Coke, if we do a blue one they'll assume it's Pepsi, almost regardless of what it actually is...the placebo effect re: generic v. nongeneric labeling. People feel better when their cow is branded, and people feel best when their brand has a cow to burn. I want to terrify readers with the ramifications of all this.
It seems one of the underlying purposes of our work is the subversion of labels, logos, and all other categorizations of material objects for the purpose of their consumption by their targeted markets. Of course, we're stuck with words as weapons, but at least we're fighting fire with fire, which makes me wonder: Should we be fighting fire with fire, words with words...forms with forms? Could we fight better effecting new and different strategies? What might they be? And if you don't like the verb "fight," you can replace it with the verb "fuck" or "love." If one loves fire with fire, it seems they learn first how to become enflamed with passion, then how to build or construct that passion, then maintain it...and the sole purpose of doing so is to expand that experience of love, keep the fire going...No? It also seems that if one fucks fire with fire, one’s flaming genitals will be literally transformed into one fire, which says something about the explosion of limits and dualities, I think, and even more about the transformative value of diction in liminal writing...which seems to be an ongoing awakening at the heart of this method. What does this mean for writing? Foreplay leading to orgasm and perhaps, eventually, something new is born, and hopefully it has all its fingers and toes and five senses and is healthy enough to grow into a unique and peculiar token of a generalized type, unnamable yet named.
I'd prefer to give a million Americans nightmares for their failure to love adequately than please a couple dozen hip readers who are already doing so. But how to trick that consumptive, hateful and angry group labeled the "elite mainstream" into publishing, marketing, reading and reviewing something they don't quite get that nonetheless subverts them by tweaking their unconscious...Something that will delight Deepak Chopra then give him a nearly fatal bout of the mental flu...Something as sweet and fatal to their intellectual and spiritual paradigms as radiator fluid is to a dog's palate...thus altering on a deeper level the initial conditions for whatever cums next?
Know what I mean? How do we do it? Perhaps you could begin by using ----- and ----- as literary guinea pigs. Find out what poetry they like, why they like it, and there's your seam: their aesthetics. Being a poet, construct an IPD (improvised poetic device), plant it in that seam, then slip back "home." Pierce their nipples with a kiss, tatoo their buttocks with a quill, tag the insides of their eyelids with hermetic graffiti (Obviously, the emotion of this paragraph has fallen under the sway of Harold Jaffe, one of my favorite contemporary writers).
How might you get them to see things anew and for themselves without them being aware of the internal changes your poetry has wrought/written? It seems that liminal writing which addresses "reality" in a subliminal way might evolve "actuality"...Slay their "God," that parasitical tic sucking the spirit from their soul, and free them from it...How to live commensally within the Earthling?
Ever read the dissident Mammarian poet Jugs O'Hoolihan? I milked her for all she was worth. Poetry that's good for the bones...Inhibits osteoperosis of the mind...a real post-avant feminist love poet...someone who loves her tits the way they are. You should see her book covers. Wow.
RichardsonNovember 22 Thanksgiving
UNCLE BILL SPEAKS FOR ME:
Thanksgiving Prayer by William S. Burroughs,Gus Van Sant 1986 And a collection of free online documentaries! Just in case you have no idea who Dr. Benway is and why he’s important…
November 17
Richardson:
Good luck on the submission [I submitted Smoke to BlazeVox]. Somehow I have a good feeling about it. If you don't have anything to do some day, download "Factory Manual" from the Mobili in Mobilis series at Blazevox. It's free and you may or may not like it. I've spent the last 13 hours grading student papers. I just stopped on an F. An "academic argument" on caffeine that consisted of no thesis, no refutation of counterarguments (no argument to begin with), not a single correct in-text citation, plagiarism, and insufficient sources. Ugh. I've got four papers left and besides this one I've given only Ds and As. The As were nice surprises; one kid wrote about UN aid to Africa that is confused but nevertheless grapples admirably with large issues. His progress from an utter mess two weeks ago to a readable paper that suggests real effort is worth an A-minus. Whatever.
Schickling
My Response:
Schickling:
I'll download Factory Manual shortly.
Good students, which are students who want to learn regardless of their ability whatever it is you might be able to teach them, are a delight and what makes teaching worthwhile. It's that something extra besides the paycheck. Know what I mean? Hmmm? ;)
A Note to those Teaching the Neo-Babel Generation
(please submit to college paper with the byline Apple Hobblegrass).
Don't be afraid to raise hell about so many Ds.
Tell them they'll be Fs next time.
Rip them apart.
Be a drill sergeant. The kind that made you crap your pants and go home to mommy. This time you be the one saying "This Man's Army!" poking your thumb into your chest.
Let them know how and why they're so stupid, how the corpses will likely be stacked so high in their adulthood there won't be enough people to bury them, or enough people who can read or write to make a record of them, that the stench of death will putrefy them, that famine and disease, thirst, and well-fed resurgent vultures, crows, cockroaches, feral cats, wild dogs, coyotes, wolves and bears will chomp their way round their daisy chains, devour them cumming that is, from the endorphins of course, mindlessly and blissfully rebelling against the unarmed homo's alleged sapience, its F-rated alleged dominion, while the Earthling sweats and shivers from the hot-cold disequilibrium of her F-earning, entropic, Thanatos-driven son, "Man" sucking down its imaginary sky God's sacred fart bottled in search of some profit [prophet] that bleeds.
Implore them, oh Teacher, to go the way of Tao Buddha Kabballah, not St. Peter et al.
Incite their cosmic integrity, for they are the new Dark Age, the neo-Babel generation that can't shut up or hear anything, feel anything, taste anything beyond their virtual fictions, their prosthetic egos, their delusional realities that they mistake for the actuality they're raping, murdering and consuming, whether by proxy or not.
Tell them their Fs are more than Fs, that they are death sentences, signifying the world would have suffered less had they been aborted.
Then snicker at them and tell them they're in the wrong place, that there are plenty of seminaries and vocational and technical schools for schlepping white trash, ambitious rednecks, and downward spiraling booboisie who blame the devil for their failure, that CSU is for working class intellectuals who believe well-developed minds lead to a balanced relationship with actuality, which is that ineffable something informing and extending Life that always bites the make-believer in her ass.
And don't forget to tell them how "language" is our means of perceiving and expressing Life, and that careless misspelling is wreckless living, perhaps while explaining why "language" is in quotes, that it's essentially an inhuman thing, evolution and cognition being its coaxes, their minds being the natural mechanism that forms the esemplasy, the actuality informing reality vice versa via cognitive feedback loops.
How dare they be careless with the Holy Spirit's psychic stream! How dare they debase the mentality of the Germ!
Tell them how spelling correctly isn't as important as trying to spell correctly (and what "correctly" means, how that's situational and relative and is all about diction, which is socially fluent and aware communication that effectively spells things out by being aware of its context).
Ask them to imagine, if they can, what would have happened if their DNA had decided to somehow misspell them (maybe it did), or not care about the spelling of them (maybe it didn't; maybe their parents' bioaccumulated chemical compositions misspelled their DNA during recombination somehow, it's happening more and more).
When they spell the same way out of ignorance, that is ignoring what's actually best, it's like carelessly mispronouncing someone's name. It's not only rude, but suggests their own overwhelming, onanistic egocentrism...their perverse American individualism, the hyper-narcissism that's crippling their viability, their potential to adapt to what's lurking here ready to pounce right after now.
If they tell you you're crazy that none of these things are related, tell them about recursive symmetry across scale, string and chaos theories, etc.
Tell them they're not going to pass the course because they weren't prepared to take it.
It's not your fault, but it is your moral obligation to the world's future to hold them back as much as possible until they start making an effort to get It...
Tell them you're functioning as a bifurcation point, a choice, an enabling or disabling opportunistic obstacle, because their laziness is killing us all, that they need a boot camp to prepare them for the cosmic-biological-Gaian jihad that's about to be unleashed on them, and that if they want to feel better about their future and feed their ignorance there's a church right down the road where they can pretend to be re-born in Jesus or maybe even really discover Elvis, get all wet, sing the blues and save their immortal fucking souls, thank-you very much...human being is leaving, has left the building...on a flying saucer.
Not actually, but really.
I strongly recommend reading this to them, and then letting them know how lucky they are that you're not as much of an asshole as me, that all you want is for them to try a little harder. Stop being such mental babies. Grow up and start taking their minds seriously. For our world's sake...For their children and grandchildren's. For the sake of Chuck Richardson, who secretly loves them the way an officer might love his troops except for the fact he's a pothead. He wants them to live and get high somehow, attain the ability to read his books.
Don't be afraid to gnash your teeth, wring your hands, weep or punch someone out during this dressing down. Be vulnerable. Expose yourself. Be the poet you are. And refer to yourself always as "the poet Jared Schickling," with your eyes cast heavenward as you say it. Let them discover for themselves the true difference between high school and university. Be the cowboy you are. Have a drink and smoke first. Go nuts.
Ever read any Hiawatha Jonz? Great stuff they say.
Peace.
The Earthling-Poet-Playwright-Journalist-Critic-Essayist-Fictionist-Reader-Writer-Human-With-Eyes-Perpetually-Cast-Downard-Deadbeat-Direct Care Professional-Anti-ismist-Anarchist-Nihilst-Flowing Contradiction in Terms-Narcissist Chuck Richardson
Schickling’s Response
Richardson:
This semester's a lost cause. My students hate me for taking it all so seriously. It's partly my fault for not getting past the nuts and bolts that is this composition course. Next semester, hopefully, with some awareness of what I'm supposed to be teaching, I can show them what writing is really all about (I'll substitute Baudrillard for Pollan). And instead of a syllabus I'll use the manifesto above. No rules, just guiding lights.
Schickling
OCTOBER 28 Dear Chuck:
A bunch of poets came to read last week [at Colorado State University at Fort Collins]. The first annual Grayrock Poetry Festival. We had in the art building, with no rocks let alone gray ones. Kevin Prufer, Bhanu Kapil, Wayne Miller, Joshua Kryah, Ron Gallagher, Amy Catanzano. Kapil's stuff was gutrenching. I wished I had the book there in front of me to follow along (interestingly, she's the only one from another country--India or England, can't remember). I'm a little miffed due to the Q and A that followed. Cooperman posed the initial question, many critics have observed a kind of post-postmodern return to modernism, what do you think? Without getting into it, it seems true enough, but the poets seemed uncomfortable, skirting the question.
Bill Tremblay was there, not a prosody I particularly identify with, but the poetry can make you cry, and meeting him in person only makes it better. A large brooding man who snaps to life in an instant, who I've heard dominates any room he walks into. He knew and raised hell with all the beats. Before he retired from CSU he was known to collect students and walk into places of business shouting lines of poetry. Anyhow, as the poets were bouncing probes back at inquirers, in an ironic refusal to take part, Tremblay bursts in, "what they mean is, affect is back!" Wayne Miller, who looks like Beck but cleaner, went on some rant about how "affect" is problematic. The session went nowhere. We were left with nothing but a bunch of problematic questions.
Before it ended I had to chime in. I was one in a short line of questioners trying to rephrase the previous question for the poets so as to arrive at something they could live with and were comfortable responding to. Assuming the label post-postmodern, as in not postmodern but what comes next, is it safe to say you're interested in getting past some postmodern suspicion or paranoia that the non-human other is inaccessible (not only through language), that given our ever-present human lens we can only conceive of the world in terms of cultural productions? Whether or not the question's bullshit, I sat through four hours of obscure poetry, humor me. Tremblay's eruption: "A cogent question!" Miller's response: "I don't like the word post-postmodern because those who also don't like the word won't like my poems."
Someone tried to change the subject, a business major: "Why do all of you write?" If it was downhill before, at that moment the bottom dropped out. Groans all around. That was kind of funny.
Then we all went and got drunk. Jared Schickling
Dear Jared:
Now that sounds like a very good and productive "reading" despite your immediate exasperation with it. Your experience was a vivid one and it will stick with you.
Re: "affect" and the "post-postmodern." You got to the crux of the matter in the Q&A, I think, without realizing it. "Affect" and "postmodern" are terms as nebulous as "love."
When you need a canon of books to define a term, that term, as a symbol, is one that is rationally unmoored from actuality. They're uncanny terms in that they are intended by those who use them to describe the ineffable quality in their own work (whether that "work" is criticism, reading or writing--the "work" is always that of the reader/writer).
For me, "affect" is the emotional impact of a work of art. I prefer to work with the dictionary and go from there, so everybody has a chance of figuring out what I'm talking about. "Affective art" is a process whose most powerful effect is emotional. I think of Kerouac and Donald Hall's Without immediately. The "postmodern" is a process whose most powerful effect is intellectual. Of course, each process gives rise to the other. Affective art induces emotion that leads to postmodern thought as one deconstructs one's own emotions in relation to the art. Postmodern art produces thoughts that lead to emotions, as one feels the impact of an idea on one's psyche. The term "post-postmodern" is a feeble grasping for a description of work that doesn't fit neatly into any category. Postmodern fiction has become as much of a genre as Mystery or SciFi.
Federman and Beckett come to mind as consummate writers of both forms, making a coaxial esemplasy of postmodern affect revolving around art. Postmodern/Affect is a duality or binary or symbiosis. I see commensalism: A grapevine and ivy winding up a tree trunk as a diverse yet singular natural process.
I would posit [who the hell am I to "posit?"] a new term to describe uncategorizable literature: the affective metapostmodern [I think of Grace putting her hand to her face in the park by the river in the moment after 8P5 has dove into the water to fetch her boy from the shapeshifter or join them]. I'm sure it's already out there, but my definition, again, is more basic: Art that is an emotional deconstruction [formerly a contradiction of terms] of postmodern life...the emotional fallout of living in the post-millennial age Yeats prophesied of, in what I'm thinking these days might be the greatest single poem in the English language:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It seems to me Yeats and Federman and Beckett and those reader/writers who "work/play" like them light the way for actual literature that's fresh in these increasingly complex and emotional times.
I think it's great your squad went and got drunk afterward. It sounds like you're getting a lot from the program despite disagreeing a bit with those around you. Hell, if it's worth a shit it's gotta be contentious. No punches pulled. Get stoned. Fight like hell and love each other. Support the work.
God bless you all.
Chuck
26 From a friend:
Hey Chuck, thought this might cheer you up:
To my friend:
Well, I wish this did boost my spirits. A courageous woman. What happened to her? This kind of confrontation, as necessary as it is, is still very nauseating. It's a sad state of affairs when peaceful people must nauseate themselves by fighting power run amok.
One can only do what one can in any given situation.
Last week Federman updated his blog after a trip to Europe. There was a profile shot of a very old Jewish man in a big black fedora looking down to the ground. It was a beautiful, intriguing and haunting picture. There was no caption, just a link. I clicked on it. It was Federman! I didn't recognize him. I cried then, it was quite literally cathartic, and I'm tearing up again writing about it now. I hate being overly sentimental, but being human it’s the kind of shit that happens from time to time. I can’t help wondering if it has really been so long, in human terms, since I’d seen him? Could this man who so influenced my work—as inadequate as it is—with his youthful, anarchic spirit now look like this? Interestingly, when I checked back a couple days later, that photo had been removed.
My heart is alive with a mixture of feelings.
****
Now for an inkling of what’s been on my mind since the last update:
I’m an angry man. I don’t like that about myself. I hate being angry and that’s the problem, I think. The hate’s the problem. I think. That’s the anger.
How to stop hating that which deserves, in my thinking, hatred?
Or is it my anger breeding my hatred? Is it the chicken or the egg? I’ll never know.
One thing I do know, however, is that being hateful and angry, no matter what reason, is unwise. It means I’m insisting too much.
Being angry and hateful about anything reveals a naiveté or ignorance about nature.
Being angry and hateful about anything is like cursing God about the weather.
Who the hell am I to be angry or hateful about anything?
I’m a loving man. I like that about myself. I like being loving and that’s what’s right about me, I think. Love’s the answer. I feel. That’s happiness.
How to start loving that which doesn’t deserve my tender feelings?
Happiness breeds love or love breeds happiness? I’ll never know.
One thing I do know, however, is that being loving and happy no matter what reason is unwise. It would mean I’m not insisting enough.
Being happy and loving about everything reveals a naiveté or ignorance about nature.
Being happy and loving about nature is like thanking God for the weather.
Who the hell am I to be happy and loving about anything?
Without ignorance all thinking moves in the right direction. If no one gets credit for nothing then everyone gets credit for nothing.
It’s to our credit, and who are we?
It’s about my bravery, but who am I?
It’s about your bravery, but what are you?
My loving gets credit for this, but what is it?
Perhaps I’m insisting too much on my own wisdom, trying to be something I’m not in this situation.
Perhaps I’m resisting my emotions too much. Maybe my struggle for internal peace and harmony is exactly the reason for my hatred and anger.
I’m waging the Big Jihad.
It’s no good being angry at myself for me being my self. I am not what I want to be and never will. Be.
So what to do when the Injustice System has finally pulled me into its event horizon, sucking me toward the black hole in the center of its heart?
Resist a little. Retreat a bit. Surrender a little. Attack a bit.
Resist “justice” that’s blind to systemic injustice; resist ego, moral certainty, greed and collaboration with insupportable power…just a little.
Retreat a little bit whenever you can, surrender when you’re wrong, attack injustice precisely when you can no longer retreat and surrender is psychologically impossible. There are worse things than prison or death, like having to live with the psychic consequences of being forced to enable and further empower the American Political Economic System and its coercive ideological apparatuses.
4 Just received my copy of Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace and Activism from Howling Dog Press. Wow! What a beautiful coffee table book. It belongs in every doctor's waiting room and cafe in America. First of all, it's big--the size of a chessboard. I don't know all the marketing names for the materials used, but the cover's glossy with a high resolution sepia photograph of two contemporary hippies at a peace rally. The anthology is laid out like a scrapbook in a wonderfully schizophrenic, kaleidoscopic collage of words and images titillating peace and stimulating activism. Whitney tells me she and the other editors are starting a YouTube project and beginning, what looks like to me, a reorganization and rally of America's fervent but small peace movement. The title of the book is the name of the emerging project. By the way, Mike Palacek, the project's top editor, is a novelist who works in a group home for mentally handicapped adults. So do I. Interesting, huh?
SEPTEMBER
25
This from a good friend regarding my post of September 20 on Nature’s Ching…:
*****
Friend: Now see here, Chuck. You can’t just stand three millennia of philosophy on its head and expect me not to get dizzy even before we start down the rosy path towards the dawn. So let’s just take this slow and steady, to be sure I understand. If you can’t sew a simple laceration on a simple digit you can’t be allowed to pole-vault right into heart surgery. We will take as given words such as “I”, “opinion”, “reality”, etc., at least for now. We’ve been chewing over them for years and if they hadn’t been digested we’d all still be living in caves chasing away the mastodons with fearful farts.
Chuck: First of all, I'd say three millennia's not that long or significant relative to what I'm talking about. I'm no philosopher. I'm not "schooled." And I always felt a special affinity for the pre-Socratics, who seemed more elemental, not in a pantheistic way, but a polymorphic way, much like Freud's sexuality, as I understand it. In my opinion, much of the philosophy since Plato, and I'm talking exclusively in Western terms, is the culprit with regards to turning 4.5 billion years of evolution on its head. I don't believe the west has fully digested such terms as "I," "opinion," "reality," etc., and that's exactly why human beings in the West are evolving the way they are (Moynihan controversially suggested "speciation" may be occurring). And finally, no one's pole-vaulting into heart surgery. Perhaps the intent here is to actually lacerate the "simple" digit, a certain kind of nihilsm that allows Nature to heal the wound through natural processes...a sentient acting out of primal violence as necessity. First, the text must wound. Then it can bring about healing. I believe, when finished, the essay will be self-reflexive and coincidentally make conservatives miserable and please others who are less comfortable with the current manifestations of reality.
Friend: TO WIT: “I’ve developed” (presumably in your mind, or maybe in your imagination, or your psyche?)
Chuck: Yes. When I say "I" have developed something, "I" "mean," that is a conscious construct that has emerged via specific processes over time...
Friend: “the opinion” (ah, now “opinion” suggests your mind is the culprit; the imagination does images, the psyche sews them together)
Chuck: Right. The mind, as "I" "perceive" "it," is a fiction producing mechanism. Reality is an "opinion," emergent from psychic processes that emerge from cognitive processes, which emerge from organic processes, which emerge from chemical processes, that emerge from physical processes. Then you get to differentiated aspects of subatomic physics, or the "subreal," as opposed to the "surreal." The surreal, it seems to me, begins with an "opinion," or perception of some defamiliarized image that requires interpretation, and then works inward down to organic processes and stops. Whereas the "subreal" begins at the subatomic level and seeks out recursive symmetries outward through the dimensions, ending in a schizophrenic explosion of ego and mind...into an autopoietic "world mind."
Friend: That reality is fiction, as opposed to actuality, which is that something else, the subreal.
Chuck: More conventionally put, fiction deals with signifiers, with language, which point to signifieds, or autonomous objects, which in actuality are projecting themselves in terms of signifiers, language. Fiction, thus, begins with a writer's relationship to the subreal as s/he senses it, language is the projection of that sensibility, the attempt to evolve mind into a recursive symmetry across the scale of a multidimensional text.
Friend: (I’m not sure but I think there’s at least a PhD thesis in here somewhere, not that it gets you off the damned hook).
Chuck: Believe me, if "I" were "on the hook," I wouldn't be able to think this way.
Friend: I MAY SOUND LIKE I’M JOKING BUT I’M NOT. THE FIRST THREE LINES OF THIS EMAIL REPRESENT A REALLY MAJOR STATEMENT OF A HITHERTO NON-REGARDED AS FAR AS I KNOW FORM OF ZEITGEIST AND WHEN/IF WORKED OUT IN ANY FORM WILL CHANGE THE WAY PEOPLE THINK. I COULD OF COURSE BE WRONG, BUT I DON’T THINK I AM. What does it mean to say reality is fiction? Reality is where you sew up that finger, and let me tell you, if you do it without lidocaine it will sear your memory in a way that its reality will be undeniable. So reality is bound to memory, inexorably. Aha! But if you READ about that finger, written by someone with a sufficiently descriptive style you won’t forget that finger either. So fiction can create the memory which we have just accorded the status of a reality-memory. So I would at least say POWERFUL fiction equates with reality. See spot run doesn’t quite cut it.
Chuck: I have no argument with this. You're intuiting lines that don't exist yet, and reading between them as provocatively as you should.
Friend: But you meant something else, something deeper, something more skewed here, I just know it. I just don’t know what it is
Chuck: Neither do I, exactly. That's why I'm writing.
Friend: Well, let us proceed. Reality is NOT actuality. Now here we need to pause and ask ourselves what is intended by “actuality”? Let’s play a little Heidegger (bless his brilliant little collaborationist heart) game here. Let’s look at “actuality”. Heidegger often liked to split his words, as you know, such as understehen (so easily translated to English). Act-ualty. Real-ity is not Actual-ity. The “real” is not the “act”. Now at first glance this sounds silly. What could be more real than an act? Is the Real not the Actual by definition? I get another impression you’re thinking of something I’m not getting but I’m no slouch.
Chuck: Look to the Tao Te Ching. Also, according to my meager understanding of Heidegger, is that his concept of “being” is similar to my concept of “actuality,” it is the sentient experience of existence itself, and not some mere symbolic rendition thereof. It is the existence of the stitch stitching, not the stitching of the stitch…It seems to me this is a way of integrity, and therefore valid and philosophically adequate to human beingness, what it means to be I/we in actuality, realistically painted...composed and in-formed…
Friend: It is the intuition of actuality (there’s that word again) that provokes our fear and loathing – why? Because we intuit something fake or even dangerous about the act (or acting out) that the real does not share? (NB If you’re going to get into fear and loathing I cannot do better than to point you at HST. He’s got the corner on it.) It is the intuition of actually provokes our aesthetics of brutality.
Chuck: This anxiety revolves around cognitive dissonance like a vortex...a strange attraction pulling autonomous objects across an event horizon into a black hole...the singularity...a feedback loop or membrane between actuality and reality, fact and fiction?
Friend: SUBREAL I just don’t get. This is a lot off of three lines but I really think that if the beginning is not firmly attached to terra firma I don’t stand a bumpkiss chance in hell of appreciating what is to come. You are not easy to read, as I am. My prose puts its flowers out where everyone can reach them but you just never know where the thorns are and you are apt to get cut when you least expect it.
I will pause in my reading for now. Those three lines really have caught me. Randall seemed to understand them better. Wonders will never cease.
Chuck: It is my intention to write as simply as possible against three millennia of Western tradition, a deeply ingrained mindset, an intertia of language that's not only historical but organic. I'm doing it because somebody's got to.
*****
Comments from another friend on the same subject:
Friend: Have you looked into ecopoetry yet? i'm going at it full tilt, my term paper will be an ecopoetic reading of anna akhmatova. the whole thing's right up our alley and still a moving target. it proposes new ways of reading (it insists ecopoetics is nothing new) old poems, suggesting them to be fundamentally and always, landscapes. even language poetry. it also challenges usual ways of thinking about class, gender, identity, whatever, by seeing them as yes, social constructions, but also bio-regional constructions. in practice, the ecopoet wants to foreground landscape (broadly defined) as the driving force behind whatever's happening. it's an ecosystemic approach to writing and reading that wantd to illuminate the inhuman elements to all that is human. hell, it wants to cast the human as inhuman. i'm not sure if that's been said, but as i said, ecopoetics is a moving target.
Chuck: i looked into ecopoetics briefly but couldn't find a decent essay on a quick search. it sounds very much like what i'm thinking about, although i think there might be a big difference in our views on how much the bioregional landscape defines individual being...the difference being how they might define bioregional, what they recognize operating within it. on the one hand, i think you have a "realistic" bioregionalism, which is largely fictional and absorbed in language, or rather actually is language; then on the other hand you have an "actual" bioregionalism, which functions as the signified to the "reality's" signifier. the interstice mediating realistic and actual bioregionalism is mind, and mind is increasingly constructed via new localities thanks to technology. We perceive things from all over the world simultaneously...the clothes we wear are not from our region, the food we eat is largely from elsewhere and thus exotic, the gas we guzzle, the beverages we drink, the news we read, watch and hear, the chemicals we smell in the atmosphere were originally shipped in from elsewhere in another form, transformed here via...mind...so it would seem to me a philosophically adequate ecopoetics would have to involve cognitive science, cybernetics/prosthetics/identity, technology, and civilization as part of its "regional" matrix. I'm very uneasy, skeptical, and indeed tired of reading theory and criticism that tries to tease out the differences between "man" and "nature." An interesting ecopoetics might enter the mind of Nature via the human mind, and vice versa, each being an intended or extended realm of the other, both real, that is fictional, and actual, that is an autonomous thing in itself.
Friend: i agree with everything you said, and my sense is that the ecopoetics community would be receptive. if it ain't out there yet, then there's a niche for you. i do think, though, that even where the local is informed by the global, there's still the local, through which the global gets transformed. the product depends on where all the pertinent elements converge - it depends on the specific air of the place, how much snow they tend to get, whether it's a dry heat or a wet heat, sunny or gray, a history of coal mining or gold mining or ranching or steel production, abolition or secession. 24 It’s received rave reviews from Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte. I’d forgotten about our brief e-mail correspondence, which took place what seems like two-years ago. This is a shot out of the blue. Funny thing is I don’t even remember what my contribution is. We’ll have to wait and see. 20
I've developed the opinion that reality is fiction, as opposed to actuality, which is that something else, the subreal. It is our intuition of the actuality that provokes our fear and loathing, our need to escape into elvis and gambling, diverting the colorado for fountains and golf courses...the aesthetics of brutality. But nontheless, realities are actualities too. It's all part of nature, each representing different aspects, modes, scales, dimensions. Pasted below is an essay I'm leisurely working on along with Red Dust. I think you'll see where I'm going, you'll have heard it before, but I'm just laying everything out in as plain a language as I can muster. Trying to write off the top of my head as if I were sitting on your couch stoned out of mind, having perhaps snorted a line or two of cocaine and not being able to shut up. Hopefully it will prove a stimulating read to other writers. I anticipate it being dissed by academia since I refer to the likes of Fritjof Capra and Jim Nollman, or for using third hand information or discussing physics as if I had an inkling of what I were really talking about. I don't care about any of that. The only thing I care about is that I clarify some things with myself with regards to my own writing, allowing it to evolve and become ever wierder, more subreal, empathetically inhuman...all put down in a way an earnest undergrad could absorb if she so desired...This might be my personal "theory of everything." I’ve decided to post it as a work in progress to stimulate discussion. After all, the gist of it is fluidity, evolution, revolution, etc. So why should you the reader only receive it in a static form? Anyway, here it is (please feel free to offer feedback at chuckrichardson@wherestheomelet.com just put “blog in the subject line”): Nature’s Ching &The Tao of Evolutionary Reading/Writing Primary sources (so far) for this essay:
Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice, by Elizabeth Wright, Methuen & Co. Ltd, New York/London, 1984.
The Pleasure of the Text, by Roland Barthes, Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, New York, 1975.
S/Z: An Essay, by Barthes, translator Miller, Hill and Wang, 1974.
The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, by Fritjof Capra, Doubleday, New York, 1996.
The Tao of Physics, Capra, Bantam Books, New York, 1984.
Critifiction: Postmodern Essays, by Raymond Federman, SUNY Press, 1993.
The Science of the Mind, by Owen Flanagan, Jr., MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989.
Chaos: Making A New Science, by James Gleick, Penguin, New York, 1987.
Cultivating the Mind of Love: The Practice of Looking Deeply in the Mahayana Buddhist Tradition, by Thich Nhat Hanh, Parallax Press, Berkeley, 1996.
Valuing the Self: What we can learn from other cultures, by Dorothy Lee, Waveland Press, 1976.
Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature, by Jim Nollman, Bantam Books, New York, 1990.
The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, 1864.
Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu.
*****
I’ve had Elizabeth Wright’s Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice in my possession for about 12 years, probably having stolen it somehow, I don’t remember exactly, from the Center for Psychological Study of the Arts at SUNY Buffalo. I can’t believe it took so long to get to, but now that I have I’ve found it very interesting and useful.
Although I had read individual essays by most of the theorists Wright discusses, I had never read anything that connected their dots like Theory in Practice. And what’s more, she connects these dots in a very similar and more concrete way than my own understanding and thoughts on the subject. In particular, her analyses of Freud, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Deleuze and Guattari are analogous to my own ideas about the fictional processes of nature. The common ground among us, I think, is the perception that human reality is fiction since it is imagination which is most essential to the human mind’s adequate dealings with psychic reality and external actualities. In other words, if a human being is to exist in a world that makes sense, it must make something up that makes it make sense. My ideas about nature’s fictional processes are a hodge-podge of evolution, string and chaos theories; quantum physics; cognitive science; linguistics; deep/spiritual ecology; existentialism; and Taoism. I’m by no means an expert on any of these subjects, nor am I an –ist to any of them. I’ve only been creatively titillated by a few books and some people, and the ideas I perceived imagining them. That’s all. I’m professing nothing but my own way of approaching fiction as I have perceived it at work in nature. The ideas: Evolution The multidimensional grammar which, over time, evolves complex systems with a specific focus on the emergence and development of Life from the atom to the Eukaryote to Gaia this very minute. Evolution applies chaos theory to biology and studies the effectual narrative of randomness over time. There’s all kinds of competing theories, including Intelligent Design (which erroneously replaces randomness with God’s intent, which is analogous to a baby consciously “intending” the development of its genitalia or skin color), some of which are fascinating and others, well, less so. What the best have in common is the concept of cognitive (not necessarily conscious, yet communicative as in stimulus-response) equilibrium among autonomous functioning entities which are forming, and being formed by, the ecosystem over time. Life responds to systemic requirements, growing complexity and temporarily sustaining itself. Evolution tracks this process and its effected changes over that time. Literary texts, in that they are products of cognition, languaging being its most essential process, exist as manifestations of reading/writing and are not to be considered static as long as they are being written/read. While actively engaged by reader/writers, texts maintain a fluidity, serving as a “fluid” porous membrane between one consciousness and another, evolving a more complex we/oui—systemic cognition. String Theory Recursive symmetry across scale, which is wonderfully represented by the arabesque, is this theory’s central image (at least in my mind). Basically, string theory suggests a common mechanism (a kind of coaxial esemplasy—see Barth, Further Fridays) is at work in each dimension allowing for an apparently coherent pattern to evolve that can be perceived by the human mind. For instance, consider climate. You have a global climate that seems to operate according to chaos theory, physics and thermodynamics, etc. It manifests itself in ever-changing weather patterns emerging via various feedback loops. Then you have hemispheric, regional, local on down to microclimates, manifested by various parts of your own yard, in which some parts are shaded more, others are lower and get more moisture, etc. Each dimension, or scale, has its own feedback loops functioning to maintain equilibrium amid the chaos, and there are also feedback loops across scale as illustrated by the “butterfly effect,” where changes in the conditions of a microclimate due to the shifting variables of a butterfly flapping its wings, to the hemispheric scale of hurricanes and the global scale of altered weather patterns, which in turn has effects that trickle down to the pricker bush behind your garage. In theory, this mechanism works in each dimension to the infinite macro and infinite micro scales. Supersymmetry is the grail of string theory, addressing this vision of multidimensional feedback loops that also include quantum mechanics. The “string” is the feedback loop, fascia, membrane stitching/joining these dimensions together as they flow through time (or as time flows through them). The ultimate particle has been replaced by the image of a vibrating string whose pitch varies and harmonizes with the pitch variances and harmonizations of other strings, which ravel together forming an infinitely large string and infinitely small string harmonizing one to the other. It’s the difference between music and noise, language and gibberish. It’s a unifying theory, a titillating big picture and useful fiction. Chaos theory Complex systems arise from a simple set of initial conditions (a continuous stream of incidents emerging from a few basic rules). Again, as in string theory, weather patterns are the best known example of chaos, but it’s much more than that. The best book for laymen like me on this subject is Chaos: Making A New Science by James Gleick. An amazing illustration of this theory is Michael Barnsley’s “chaos game,” which Gleick lays out in his book.
Gleick writes how Barnsley, when considering: …the patterns generated by living organisms…turned to randomness as the basis for a new technique of modeling natural shapes…he called it “the global construction of fractals by means of iterated function systems.” When he talked about it, however, he called it the “chaos game.” To play the chaos game…You choose a starting point somewhere on [a sheet of] paper. It does not matter where. You invent two rules, a heads rule and a tails rule. A rule tells you how to take one point to another: “Move two inches to the north-east [for heads],” or “Move 25 percent closer to the center [for tails].” Now you start flipping the coin and marking points, using the heads rule when the coin comes up heads and the tails rule when it comes up tails. If you throw away the first fifty points, like a blackjack dealer burying the first few cards in a new deal, you will find the chaos game producing not a random field of dots but a shape, revealed with greater and greater sharpness as the game goes on. Barnsley’s essential insight was this: Julia sets and other fractal shapes, though properly viewed as the outcome of a deterministic process, had a second, equally valid existence as the limit of a random process. By analogy, he suggested, one could imagine a map of Great Britain drawn in chalk on the floor of a room. A surveyor with standard tools would find it complicated to measure the area of these awkward shapes, with fractal coastlines, after all. But suppose you throw grains of rice up into the air one by one, allowing them to fall randomly to the floor and counting the grains that land inside the map [think Gravity’s Rainbow, Jackson Pollack]. As time goes on, the result begins to approach the area of the shapes—as the limit of a random process. In dynamical terms, Barnsley’s shapes proved to be attractors (236-237). When I played the game, if memory serves right, after the first dozen or so coin tosses on my sheet of paper a shape began to emerge, and then every time I did it, at about the 23rd toss, the shape was completed, the point didn’t move any more, as if it had entered a black hole and the shape was actually a two-dimensional representation of the game’s phase space trajectory through an event horizon. The number “23” became the symbolic enumerator for this particular system’s strange attractor. The shapes would vary, but they would all end their shaping at 23 coin tosses. A light bulb went on. The point is you have the initial conditions, a two-sided coin and a toss, adding the element of chance or randomness. As the results are charted, you see a complex pattern leading to a singularity. This movement toward a singularity exemplifies entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. However, there is a phase in which the pattern appears to be growing more complex despite its movement toward singularity, and when you add the complexities of cognition to the picture, an equilibrium occurs for awhile before disintegrating into disequilibrium. The temporary equilibrium is maintained through feedback loops that emerge during the phase of rising complexity, when the various elements emerging from the initial conditions are interacting to form their patterns. The implications for reading/writing are that if one begins the process with a few basic rules for this “game” of random interaction in place, various meanings will arise from the text, increasing its complexity, until at some point meaning collapses into a singularity. The movement toward singularity, by the way, is provocatively called a “strange attraction,” which is analogous to black holes in the physical “dimension” and “death” within the organic aspect, which is opposed by the “life force” or desire/eros for a while, right here, right now…This strange attraction to a particular singularity is always ineffable. Quantum physics The particle-wavelength paradox and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle are the key concepts here, at least for me. The paradox is, in my opinion, best illustrated by Thich Nhat Hanh, in Cultivating the Mind of Love: The Practice of Looking Deeply in the Mahayana Buddhist Tradition: When we look at the vast ocean, we see many waves. We may describe them as high or low, big or small, vigorous or less vigorous, but these terms cannot be applied to water. From the standpoint of the wave, there is birth and there is death, but these are just signs. The wave is, at the same time, water. If we take away the water, the wave cannot be; and if we remove the waves, there will be no water. Wave is water and water is wave. They belong to different levels of being. We cannot compare the two. The words and concepts that are ascribed to the wave cannot be ascribed to the water. (110) The ocean and the wave are of the same water, but one cannot say the wave is the ocean or the ocean the wave. The wave is the particular aspect of the ocean as it is perceived by the human mind in a particular place and time; whereas the ocean is that wave’s length and pattern as it actualizes itself across space-time. We perceive one or the other according to our mode of seeing. We essentially find what we’re looking for, and we can only look according to the parameters Nature has evolved for us to look with—our mechanisms of seeing. Yet despite the fact we find what we’re looking for and only what we’re capable of perceiving, randomness makes sure that no two things we perceive are exactly alike. They share recursive symmetries in their relationships with us, but they are autonomous objects and we can never be fully certain of anything about them. Often enough, we’ll set out looking for a “particle” and end up perceiving a “wavelength.” Nothing is certain, that is, we cannot permanently freeze the meanings of what we perceive and must avoid certainty at all costs. Cognitive science The evolution of feedback loops between autonomous objects that, over time, produce ever more complex systems from which eventually emerges cognition, then awareness, and perhaps eventually at least token sentience and, maybe even a general sentience, wherein Nature is aware of Itself becoming apparent in the processes of language. One must admit that if “we” seem to be conscious beings aware of each other as separate biological entities and that together “we” are functionaries cooperatively forming, via language, an ecosystem that, on the global scale we call Nature, then Nature is Itself composing Its own awareness. This is a psychic form of recursive symmetry across scale, functioning to maintain an equilibrium/meaning amidst the perceived chaos/confusion. What might begin in the center of the sun perhaps evolves randomly into a spark of consciousness as it is pulled through existence by some strange attraction (or, perhaps, existence lured through It). Either way, reading/writing, or languaging, the very processes of fiction, are essential parts of cognitive science. In Closing the Genotype-Phenotype Gap: The New Argument, a section in a chapter called “Minds, Genes and Morals” in Owen Flanagan Jr.’s The Science of the Mind, the author describes Charles Lumsden and E.O. Wilson’s Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process as claiming to be the “grail of a unifying theory of biology and the social sciences” that proposes “to close the genotype-phenotype gap by way of the mind.” Flanagan describes their argument this way: 1. Human culture is the interactive result of all the artifacts, behavior, institutions, and ideas mentally or physically deployed by some population.
2. The “perceivable features” of the integrated cultural system are called culturegens. For example, telephones, calculus, seventeenth-century English literature, Judaism, marriage, divorce, professional wrestling, international espionage, and the space program are all culturegens.
3. During socialization the culturegens are processed by what are “loosely labeled the epigenetic rules.”
4. These epigenetic rules are “the genetically determined procedures which direct the assembly of the mind.”
5. The epigenetic rules bias their owners to choose certain culturegens over others [Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—the tension between psychic reality as fiction and external actuality].
6. Collective choices in behavior and cognition “create the culture and social fabric.”
7. “Genetic variation exists in the epigenetic rules, contributing to at least part of the variance of cognitive and behavioral traits within a population.”
8. Individuals whose choices enhance their inclusive genetic fitness transmit more genes to future generations, “and as a consequence the population as a whole tends to shift toward the epigenetic rules and the forms of cognition and behavior favored by the rules. The coevolutionary circuit [comprising the individual and culture] is thus completed.” …together [Lumsden and Wilson] support the view of the mind as being comprised of a set of genetically determined rules that favor certain interpretations of the physical world and certain social and cultural choices over others. …Primary epigenetic rules are “the more automatic processes that lead from sensory filtering to perception. Their consequences are the least subject to variation due to learning.” The secondary epigenetic rules meanwhile act on “all information displayed in the perceptual fields. They include the evaluation of perception through the process of memory, emotional response, and decision making through which individuals are predisposed to use certain culturegens instead of others.” …The primary epigenetic rules are similar to Kant’s forms of sensibility; they are the ways we necessarily construct the sensible world. Furthermore, they constrain us as much as they liberate us. (264-271) The coevolution of culture and biology is not mere fantasy. As Stephen Jay Gould points out: “We have no evidence for biological change in brain size or structure since Homo sapiens appeared in the fossil record some fifty thousand years ago…All that we have done since then—the greatest transformation in the shortest time that our planet has experienced since its crust solidified nearly four billion years ago—is the product of cultural evolution.” To this add the Santiago theory of cognition as described by Fritjof Capra in The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems: Since cognition traditionally is defined as the process of knowing, we must be able to describe it in terms of an organism’s interactions with its environment. Indeed, this is what the Santiago theory does. The specific phenomenon underlying the process of cognition is structural coupling [see coaxial esemplasy, John Barth, Further Fridays, discussing the arabesque]. As we have seen, an autopoietic system undergoes continual structural changes while preserving its weblike pattern of organization. It couples to its environment structurally, in other words, through recurrent interactions, each of which triggers structural changes in the system. The living system is autonomous, however. The environment only triggers the structural changes; it does not specify or direct them. Now, the living system not only specifies these structural changes, it also specifies which perturbations from the environment trigger them. This is the key to the Santiago theory of cognition. By specifying which perturbations from the environment trigger its changes, the system “brings forth a world,” as Maturana and Varela put it. Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. The interactions of a living system [a biological entity] with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself is a process of cognition. In the words of Maturana and Varela, “To live is to know.” (267) For myself, as wise and true as I find these words, I would substitute language for life in the above statement as an addendum or modification, not as a refutation. Therefore, I’d say grammar selects what is expressible and gives shape to the ineffable, or inexpressible, which is the experience of awareness. Cognition is the continuous bringing forth of awareness through the process of language. The cognitive interactions of a living system with its environment are linguistic interactions, and the process of languaging itself is a process of cognition. In other words, to language is to know. Linguistics First of all, I don’t think language is unique to humans. Linguistics as a field tends to focus almost solely on human communication. But what is communication, really? First and foremost, it’s a useful fiction, involving signifiers and signifieds, phenomena and symbols that represent them. Now let’s take something we don’t consider alive, like an electron. It’s an autonomous body that humans apply language to, one of its symbolic descriptors being a “negative charge.” It is called “negative” because of its perceived interaction with the contextualizing atom’s nucleus, which has a neutral but relatively “positive” charge. Of course, there are all kinds of other particles interacting to compose the particular atomic system composing our electron and nucleus. Scientists, in attempting to describe these interactions, to make sense of them and by extension themselves, apply language to what they perceive. The very fact that they’re applying language (see quantum physics) means that the atom will thus be perceived operating some kind of linguistic system to be itself, at least according to our best sense of it. Grammar is the imagined and thus usefully fictive communication rule book by which these systems maintain themselves, making their feedback loops possible. This understanding, or sensibility, however, only exists in the cognitive dimension, as one must be aware of the constant uncertainty regarding the adequacy of descriptions for what’s actually going on, as opposed to what’s really going on. What’s really going on is what we imagine, and what’s actually happening is beyond that. We evolve complex levels of diction within language by dealing with the repetitive situational randomness and complexity of our perceptions. In my opinion, the best understanding of human language is to understand its inadequacy while still appreciating the methods and dictions we develop and employ in our production of meaning, which is a recursive symmetrical part of the universal on this scale. The desire for meaning, or cognitive unity and autonomy, combined with the physical limitations of being biological entities create patterns in harmony within the universal arabesque, and the randomness involved with the perceptions of individual organisms within this context allows for fluidity and change over time…the evolution of meaning. The more that humans produce meaning in Nature by languaging, ever-honing more precise and complex descriptions of It, the more aware Nature will become of Itself, as the perception of humans communicating among humans can be imagined as Nature communicating with Itself. The deeper one’s understanding of human language, the more deeply one will understand Nature’s cognitive processes. Deep/Spiritual Ecology The belief that Earth is a living organism, that our deepest need as sentient biological entities is to cooperate with the system of Its living body, establishing feedback loops to maintain an equilibrium and context that enables opportunities for pleasurable existences from time to time. A result of our acting upon our deep-seeded desires for oneness—at-one-ment—with Nature, is an increased awareness of ourselves as natural beings, and thus Nature becomes conscious of itself, at least partly, in a human way. The apparently clear separation between humankind and Nature is made ambiguous by the randomness of individual perception, each being in reality, again, each being a useful fiction, a wet surfable wave to catch on the ocean. To perceive this, to evolve a language that allows one a complex enough sensibility to rub up against the membrane…if that ain’t “spiritual” folks, I don’t know what is, and It’s all thanks to the Earthling, Gaia…that ineffable Thing. Consider this from Jim Nollman’s Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature: "Our artists seem to have become as disaffected as the rest of us, yet they could be trying harder to reconnect [to Nature] than they are. After all, the aboriginal idea that culture is one vast poetic construct suspended in space and time, and incorporating all aspects of life within it, may still be radical to the sciences and social sciences, but not to the arts. "We need a new aesthetic of natural interconnectedness that is able to swallow up every one of us. Yet any aesthetic that actually succeeds at connecting humans to nature is going to be resisted because its driving metaphor is participation by every faction, nation and species. Thus, it must also be compelling, engaging, incredibly unifying, and gentle all at the same time—it must noster. I am you. They are us. "As noster biology may be defined as the study of interconnecting to nature, nosterart may be understood as the art of interconnecting to nature. It is an art that depicts a nature that we exist inside of, and that is simultaneously inside of us. Nosterart functions as a promotional message, an advertisement as it were, for the seventh generation. (200-201)" But there’s also a darker side. Nollman’s an angel, at least in his writing. The fact is nostering with nature can be terrifying, it’s not all a bug free picnic with your lover in the meadow. Imagination being a prerequisite for the human mind to adequately compose and confront reality necessitates the possibility that one’s perception of nature will be founded on one’s state of mind. That perception can indeed be terrifying, as the actuality of Nature as a whole is an inhuman thing, existing prior to humans and extending way beyond us in space-time. Thoreau knew this all too well: “Generally speaking a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling” (Maine Woods, 288). Existentialism The emotional fallout and alienation resulting from the individual human being’s cognitive confrontation with modern and, even more specifically, postmodern civilization. It’s the “nausea” of one who has derived deep meaning from Nature via a complex understanding of language confronted by the asininities of those in political-economic power, who seem to be forces of entropy, agents of that strange attraction toward death. It is the feeling of being Eros in an age of Thanatos. It is the human mind expressing itself… “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”…understanding that now it is up to the individual human mind, that peculiar psyche’s singular responsibility, to construct meaning from the absurd spectacle of chaotic phenomena it’s perceiving. It is the life force rubbing its queer shoulder against the forces of oppression…It’s being aware that you are alone amid all the togetherness, longing for the true togetherness of alone…It is the autonomous sensitivity of interrelatedness…a longing for the “return of the repressed.” Taoism Insist on nothing. There is the true way, the universal flow, which is described by Dharma, the grammar of the way, or Tao. The primary text of Taoism is Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, according to which following the Way, or Tao, is like “going on a cosmic trek” (Huston Smith, 132). The Way is the eternal and immanent, fluid autonomous unity of the universe from which everything emerges and eventually dissolves back into. “Te” means integrity, which signifies the quality of traits of an individual organism as it relates to the system as a whole. Te concerns itself with how well an individual is functioning within the inhuman system, whether it is aiding or hampering the system’s operation. “Ching” means scripture, or in my view, the text. Its essence is that of a texture/membrane/interstice warped by cognitive feedback loops, in which the ideas of transacting, experiencing and passing through occur. Ching also signifies the threads or “strings” that hold manuscripts and pages together in a subjective intertextuality. The Sanskrit word for Ching is “sutra,” which literally means “thread,” from which the English “suture,” “stitch” and “interstice” are derived. Among my favorite lines of the Tao Te Ching are: "The Way gives birth to them and integrity nurtures them/Matter forms them and function completes them./
For this reason,/The myriad creatures respect the Way and esteem integrity./Respect for the Way and esteem for integrity/are by no means conferred upon them/but always occur naturally. "The Way gives birth to them,/nurtures them,/rears them,/follows them,/shelters them,/toughens them,/sustains them,/protects them. "It gives birth but does not possess,/acts but does not presume,/rears but does not control.That is what is called “mysterious integrity.” (20) What it comes down to, at least for me, is that Taoism is a cognitive tool that can provide someone with an existential sensibility a means to continue surviving without “committing suicide.” I look at it as philosophical and spiritual judo against ignorance and spiritual death, allowing for a little jouissance along the trajectory of my life. So…Taoism is my philosophy and art is my religion. That is I think I should insist on nothing, which includes insisting on not insisting. I also feel God is best experienced in the creative process (God being Life, or more specifically, Universal Cognition). That said, let’s take a look at Freud, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari as presented by Wright in Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice, and see how closely they match up with some of my previously formed ideas. Sigmund Freud Freud, to my reading, seems to have believed the methods and mechanisms of the human psyche also function as the apparatus of language, allowing for new meanings to emerge in accordance with the ever-shifting energies and modalities of subconscious desire. Novel writing (in every sense of the word “novel”) operates as a type of wish fulfillment, personifying the author’s dream in the fictional form of the protagonist by a series of displacements, evolving a child’s projections in the act of play into the writer’s processes and methodology. Fiction, however, transcends mere childish wish-fulfillment and daydreaming. Freud believed the fictionist relates fantasy to time by using “an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future…pleasure…[is] connected with the dynamics of the work of art” (27-8). While the daydreamer’s fantasy succumbs to egocentric opposition, the fictionist devises strategies to transcend mere ego through writing by using the same methods the subconscious uses to subvert egoistic intent. After Freud, who focused mostly on the idea of the writer as analysand, or patient, ego-psychological criticism shifted attention or energy to the reader, or analyst’s processes and function in what has been termed the “Personally Desiring and Aspiring Reader” (62). However, here the author’s desire for wish-fulfillment is not ignored, but shared with the reader, with whom the author “colludes” to disguise the fantasy in the text’s formal properties as a kind of foreplay to overcome any shared resistance to the textures joining them. Form as foreplay works in three ways: *According to the id so guilt and anxiety can be assuaged.
*According to ego, allowing the I/eye to perceive things and thus repress what it deems unseemly.
*According to superego, allowing for the emergence of common perceivable forms that can be shared between the reader and writer, conjoining them as an abstract autonomous entity via the text as reader/writers. Freud would have used the verb “mediate” instead of the post-Freudian “conjoin.” “The uncanny” is one of the central idea’s of Freud’s approach to literature, stressing “the power of the writer to control the return of the repressed and demonstrat[ing], albeit unconsciously, how it is done: in foregrounding the uncanny effects…” (35) So, by writing/imagining a text in a manner intended to mediate between the subconscious and conscious minds, by nurturing the emergence of a text that serves as a feedback loop esemplasizing the functions of unconscious and conscious into a single entity—much like the post-Freudian ego-psychologists merging of the reader/writer—the writer allows formation of new meanings by making previously unconscious content perceivable. It is the text’s “strangeness” that attracts the reader/writer and brings them together. An interesting way of conceiving new meanings from Freud’s texts is to read them by his own methods of analysis, as many post-Freudians have done, looking for the ways “his writing reveals or conceals [his] unconscious intention” (137). According to Wright, one could summarize Freud’s contribution to literary theory by viewing “id-psychology as focusing on the return of the repressed, ego-psychology on the return of repression, and object-relations theory as uneasily trying to reconcile the two” (138). He also influenced the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Jakob Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose deconstructive readings of Freud try to show the contradictions and instigated anxieties (i.e.: cognitive dissonances) that disturb the ego’s sensibility and the way it logically categorizes the data it perceives. One important distinction between Freudian lit theory and that which followed is the way Freud categorized the data he perceived, which reveal: …a series of hierarchical oppositions: normal/pathological, sanity/insanity, real/imaginary, experience/dream, conscious/unconscious, life/death. In each case the first term was conceived as prior, a plenitude of which the second is a negation or complication. Situated on the margin of the first term, the second term designates an undesirable, dispensable deviation. Freud’s investigations deconstruct these oppositions by identifying what is at stake in our desire to repress the second term and showing that in fact each first term can be seen as a special case of the fundamentals designated by the second term, which in this process is transformed. Understanding the marginal deviant term becomes a condition of understanding the supposed prior term…These deconstructive reversals, which give pride of place to what had been thought marginal, are responsible for much of the revolutionary impact of Freudian Theory. (Culler 1983, pp. 160-161)[137-138]. Harold Bloom postulates that Freud’s writing reveals “a catastrophe theory” of the imagination by way of “The Sublime”—conquering death by being born into it. Bloom believes Freud’s texts on literature describe what occurs when a “poet/self” is born and discovers his function already filled, “the poem already written” (153). The poet/self can thus only become functional by transcending the situation to become, in and of itself, a particular aspect of the poem, adding to it rather than being redundant. According to my reading of Wright’s reading of Bloom’s reading of Freud’s writing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “The Sublime” isn’t a product of sublimation, as one might think, but of repression, since sexual energies, or the libido (in the sense of a polymorphic sexuality rather than pantheistic one, as some apparently read Freud’s primary focus on sexuality), has not lost its wishful aspects by being sated. Rather, the canny (i.e.: conscious) imagination is what makes poems. Repression is essential to writing poetry because it sets the initial conditions by which it occurs. These initial conditions, of course, are rules that take the form of “rhetorical strategies.” For the poet, writing poems is a means to relive the primal anxiety of birth, the initial unpleasure of our firs incident. This anxiety, in turn, leads to useful or what Bloom calls “enabling fictions” that result in “analysis terminable and interminable.” It is through these processes of writing and analysis that Freud overcomes the “catastrophe” of the human being’s apparent strange attraction to what it perceives as death (153-4). Roland Barthes Language as membrane: The reader/writer affect Linguistic mechanisms of desire affect reader and writer alike, according to Barthes, who sees reader cooperating with writer to produce textual meaning. What were once considered two disconnected entities are conjoined into a single reader/writer. The writer reads the text as he writes it; the reader writes as she reads. Therefore, the reader/writer is transformed into the “site of meaning,” where the two modes of the single entity work together to produce meaning from the tangled, contextualizing web/membrane/matrix of signs, which is no longer some static truth frozen into the text but a dynamic, fluid construct evolving over space-time in the thinking mind of the reader/writer (123)[think of procreative fucking—man and woman joined as one in the flesh creating new life…the most sacred aspect of traditional marriage…holy union…I am the word]. The reader/writer, as the site of meaning, functions as a linguistic membrane, or feedback loop, whereby meaning stabilizes form without freezing it, thus making pleasure possible…first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes signifier in the baby carriage… Richard Howard, in his introduction to The Pleasure of the Text, describes Barthes as outlining “an erotic poetics of reading” that examines what it is exactly that we enjoy in a text, how to speak that pleasure, that Being=Orgasm and therefore jouissance must be the pleasure of the text. Consider Barthes himself on the essence of textual pleasure, jouissance, organic bliss: "Sade: the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from certain breaks (or certain collisions): antipathetic codes (the noble and the trivial, for example) come into contact; pompous and ridiculous neologisms are created; pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models. As textual theory has it: the language is redistributed. Now, such redistribution is always achieved by cutting. Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it has been established by schooling, good usage, literature, culture), and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so. The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss." (Pleasure, 6-7) In S/Z, Barthes implicates himself with Balzac’s Sarrasine by revealing that reading, writing and criticism are all part of the same continuum, scale or dimension. The first part of the book-length “essay,” which is really more of a novel, a form of what Federman calls “critifiction,” a self-reflexive, self-conscious, self-analyzing neurosis focusing on the absented mother, the blank page being an empty womb, the words appearing there being a voice in the closet imagining Balzac’s Sarrasine, and how to read and write and seduce her. Having recently returned to this book after some years away, I noticed on the inner title page, scribbled in my own hand writing under S/Z, the first sentence written in red ink, the second in black: “Nature is, in fact, culture. And both Nature and culture, are thus absurd.” What did I mean by this and how did S/Z bring it about? What is it about the pleasure I derived from reading/writing the text that led me to the Nature/Culture:Reader/Writer construct? And, of course, what was absurd about that pleasure? Consider the connotations of this: Structurally, the existence of two supposedly different systems—denotation and connotation—enables the text to operate like a game, each system referring to the other according to the requirements of a certain illusion. Ideologically, finally, this game has the advantage of affording the classic text a certain innocence: of the two systems, denotative and connotative, one turns back on itself and indicates its own existence: the system of denotation; denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so, under this illusion it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one that seems both to establish and close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature: doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases, subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us something simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest (which comes afterwards, on top) is literature? This is why, if we want to go along with the classic text, we must keep denotation, the old deity, watchful, cunning, theatrical, foreordained to represent the collective innocence of language. (S/Z, 9) S/Z’s narrator—the “I” of the text—personifies Barthes’ attempt to sensitize the reader/writer to the composition of cultural influences going into producing the text’s meaning. He’s particularly interested in the societal inventions he views as traps for passionate beings. For Barthes, all love exhibits psychic transference on at least three levels: the imaginary where the lover deals with the missing mother, which Barthes views as a form of healthy play in which the player play’s out his lack before language restricts the possibility; the symbolic level where language castrates the lover by making his love socially acceptable and, by extension, turns the entire text into a fetish made ready for “jouissance,” or organic bliss; the critic composes the third level of transference, both as patient and analyst. At the critical level of transference, the reader/writer’s love of the text can deform or distort the text’s possible “meaning” while the unsuspecting “self” is caught up in a chain of signifiers. The writer’s game is to unconsciously entrap the narcissistic reader in a form of collusion that actively sets out to disturb the unsuspecting reader/writer’s transference into writer/reader, allowing meaning to flow beyond ideology rather than settling back into it. Jacques Derrida Post-structural psychoanalysis: text as psyche/scene of writing Many people who consider themselves “westerners,” that is they live in Europe or the Americas and adhere to a monotheistic sky god mythology that is staunchly democratic/capitalist, are ideologues whether they know it or not, are being written by the very text they think they’re reading, according to Derrida, who then goes about examining the ways they’re being composed by external power structures via deconstruction. Derrida believes the primary cause of this miscomposure [sic] is Western philosophy, which is merely an explanation or grammar for our culture’s dualistic metaphysical tradition, which devalues writing. HOW? Writing, which Derrida relates to “trace,” “differance” and “dissemination,” is a function that reveals how the text being composed subverts itself because it’s the unconscious (not language as Lacan would have it) that is the very condition or situation of language. The unconscious, being a texture of unmodified traces present in every word, actively produces meaning through memory by erasing the sign and producing differance, which in turn postpones any temporary obsession with meaning allowing for the fluidity of evolutionary processes. Derrida asks “what makes a text?” in order to subvert its power over subjects: …the subject is the subject of writing, both its product (as already written) and its producer (as rewriting the written). In describing the perceptual apparatus in terms which illustrate this double movement, “Freud performs for us the scene of writing” (Derrida 1978, p. 229) …we proceed toward a configuration of traces which can no longer be presented except by the structure and functioning of writing. (p. 200) Since the unconscious is actively producing the signifying system, or language, he believes the effects of history on experience must lead the reader/writer’s investigation outside “narrowly physicalist psychology” in recognition of the psyche as a “writing machine” (Wright, 136). Derrida’s reading of Franz Kafka’s parable Before the Law sees the law as the written text, as the writing of the text and its reading all wound into a single complex within the protagonist’s mind, who fails to exert his freedom through the law, through language, through reading/writing, through the text despite it’s being there for him. And the movement of meaning in the opposite direction suggests the protagonist is existing at a moment just previous to language, or prior to law, and hasn’t the freedom to act, pass the guardian and go through the door, simply because the actual law has yet to occur to him. He’s something of an anxious, primordial Adam. Derrida, I think, views Kafka’s parable as tragic, revealing the necessity to resist logical fixations upon signifieds. In other words, a picture of an apple is not an apple, but how many otherwise alert people when asked what it is you’re showing them when you hold up the picture will say “an apple?” By perceiving only what the signifier is signifying and not the signifier, the perceiver ignores the power structure mediating between the subject and object in the given situation. The audience forgets the photograph of the apple is mediated by the photographer, unless the photographer’s an artist and distorts the apple signifier in some way. I digress a bit, but Kafka’s protagonist perceived the gatekeeper and doorway as the law, as the text, rather than mere signifiers of the law and text. What was there to aid hindered because of the protagonist’s crisis of perception. It is this system of signifiers, these doorways and guards, that Derrida wants to discharge of their ideological power via deconstruction. He doesn’t want anyone to be Kafka’s hapless outlander before the law, but to recognize these illusions for the maya they are. Writing’s movement in this process is two-fold and oppositional, since it is the primary mode of repression but also the method by which the symbolic is subverted. Literature, that realm in which the symbolic is transformed into metaphor, where literal speech becomes figurative, is a powerful weapon against authority when wielded deconstructively against the smorgasbord of canonical texts whose meanings are presumed fixed by the culture. Reading/writing establishes the oppressed reader/writer’s means of channeling desire in terms of Freud’s polymorphic sexuality, which is really a will to power via conquest, which might be considered the theme, method and content of Derrida’s deconstruction: It is the reader/writer’s attempt to harness reality for the Self. (133-137) Therefore, text is psyche—the scene of reader/writing…literature is being. Michel Foucault Psychoanalysis as a discourse: sexuality and power According to Foucault, a type of “cultural unconscious” is subject to continuous instability and alteration, to discontinuity rather than permanence, and therefore serves as something of an unconscious archive of exclusionary rules, or grammars. This set of linguistic practices generates social and cultural activity, governed by rules that are unformulated and characteristically unrecognized by the speakers concerned. From this view, “history [is] a discourse” (Wright, 159). Foucault believes the fluidity of knowledge is motivated by a “will to power” (curiously, no one ever seems to mention Adler, only his “idea”) in the historical, public sphere. Recognizing the unavoidability of the given culture’s power matrix, Foucault analyzes how the strategies of social and political-economic power have a double effect by leading to strategies of evasion and subversion. Domination necessarily evolves the means for insurrection: “…there is no relationship of power without the means of escape and possible flight.’ (Foucault 1982, p.225) As a “discourse of power,” psychoanalysis reveals sexuality’s central importance in Western culture since the Renaissance of the sixteenth century, when with the codes of chivalry sexuality and gender became increasingly the ego’s sole signifier, and the key element to personal identity. Foucault believes sexuality has not only dominated our historical discourse of the last five centuries, but has evolved over time to dominate our institutions and customs. The era of psychoanalysis brought about what Foucault calls the “surveillance” of the body, a textualization of confessions and self-revelations of analysts and patients alike. From all this new data emerged new understandings of the power relations between the individual psyche and the external world it’s perceiving, how the body enables a sensualization of power. Foucault knows the power of witnessing a taboo being broken, the pleasure that creates in the voyeur. Literature, he believes, bears witness to the “productiveness” of this type of jouissance, this perverse pleasure, because it is only the power structures that make the taboo, make the breaking of it and the reader’s voyeurism perverse, and that the act of witnessing, of reading/writing, subverts power, dilutes it, and disassembles its structure. Most interesting, perhaps, is that Foucault, like Freud, “located sex as a strategy of power and knowledge…sexuality has become the secret which leads to the truth of man’s being, a truth not on the side of freedom, but on that of power, the authority installed in the psyche…” (159-162) So it seems “love,” or the socially acceptable forms of it in the West, according to Freud and Foucault, is an apparatus of slavery, because the power structure defines what forms of love are acceptable. Jacob Deleuze and Felix Guattari Schizoanalysis and Kafka By providing a method that zeroes in on images and motifs, situating the author as a function relating to the literary discourse system as a whole, Deleuze and Guattari, in Wright’s terms, “explod[ed] the whole oedipal apparatus” that Freud constructed, offering what they called the “schizoanalysis” of texts (162). As in Kafka’s Before the Law, some of us believe what the law, the linguistic power the law tells them that they will not marry their mother or kill their father, and think that’s what they must really have wanted [sic] if there’s a law against it. Language has made them docile. Schizoanalysis rejects the Oedipus complex since it does not recognize the self as being a singular or decent thing. “The unconscious is an orphan,” say D/G, emergent from physical processes that are inescapable from Nature’s processes, indeed, are part of Nature’s processes, needing other bodies the way other bodies need them. Desire is a “flow” of libido before language, prior to the law. Seeing that libido is fluid and able to direct itself into everchanging modes of movement, D/G focused on the general liberation of desire by constructing an unconscious using schizoanalytic methods, reconstructing a self deformed by Freudian psychoanalysis, which had characterized desire as a want or lacking of something, a “capitalist ploy” that profited from the deficiency and need of its subjects. Freud’s unconscious, according to D/G, is an ideological structure, an internalized set of power-relations being the effect of a psychic subjugation fabricated for capitalism by good old fashioned family values, and is, therefore, something to rebel against. The psychic or mental revolution begins with their idea of the subconscious being a part of the volatility that escapes language’s power constructs. It is a textured current that organic systems continuously bifurcate into objective phenomena. Literature, like schizophrenia, frees itself from the normative grammars adhering to language’s power structures, which are also referred to here as the “law.” Thus D/G say a “desire-liberating reader, a schizoanalyst, whose task it is to convert the text into a desiring-machine, or better still, into a revolutionary machine,” is necessary for oppression to be overcome and true autonomy, the liberation of desire, to be attained. Since marginal literature must always be composed using the language of the majority marginalizing it, D/G rebuff the dominion over “subjugated” and/or marginalized groups via a group–dream, national mythology and patriotic propaganda of all kinds, what Guy DeBord called “the spectacle.” D/G theorize that desire exists coincidentally in two forms: a “paranoiac transcendental law” signified by the oedipal system; and an “immanent schizo-law” shaping subconscious desire that ends up revealing the ineffable. In every situation the schizo-law is taking apart and subverting the paranoiac law, its method of writing deconstructing the systems of language, the universal control compositions. D/G long to evoke the pre-linguistic incident when one’s subconscious speculations on sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touching all aroused one’s opposition to repression in favor of the liberation of one’s desire. D/G reveal the ways that one’s narrow, oedipal investments of desire are transcended by unconscious investment in the social field of so-called “higher intensities.” Desire is essentially and primarily a social production. They too see Kafka’s work as being utterly revolutionary, since their schizoanalysis reveals Kafka’s subconscious libidinous ventures as more powerful than those provoked by the state-system. In schizoanalysis, aspiration does not link itself with token symbols of power. Desire repudiates its concluding epithet in some exacting power-machine, composed by some ideological apparatus. Eros will always find a way out. Kafka’s way out was to write. D/G’s work is “an attempt to make reading into a revolutionary political activity,” says Wright, “discovering omissions, non-sequiturs, mismatch[es] between style and purpose in texts and patients…The revolutionary writer/reader conducts experiments, trying to find a way out of the given representation…” (162-171) ... to freedom and greater autonomy, toward the absolute liberation of desire, libido, sexuality. Connecting the Dots: Recursive Symmetries Across Texts/Fleshing Out the Feedback Loops
Nature’s Ching & The Tao of Evolutionary Reading/Writing Taoism is my philosophy and art is my religion. That is I think I should insist on nothing, which includes not insisting. I feel God is best experienced in the creative process (God being Life, or more specifically, Universal Cognition). How does this fit in with the literary views of Freud, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari? NOTES SECONDARY SOURCES/FURTHER READING
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, WILL FILL IN BLANKS LATER, FOLKS…
AUGUST
28
Art is the process by which one objectifies the emotional fallout of human existence in a subjective (ie: personal) form.
Criticism is the process by which one subjectifies (ie: personalizes) art in the form of objective (ie: as in “I object,” “material,” “factual”) blowback.
Why “blowback?” Signifies breath, fire, conflict, struggle…the attempted “murder” of the “author” via reading. Writing a novel as a reader-writer is both art and criticism. The “author” is objectified and commodified. To know/slay the “author” with its own language is the reader’s intent. To mystify/revive the reader is this writer’s hope. Thus, if criticism is the best form of autobiography [Wilde], then autobiography is the best form of attempted murder. Attempted murder of whom? One’s self through the “murder” of others. What do I mean by “murder?” To “know” someone is to objectify them, rob them of their subjectivity, their private interior reality. When one claims to “know” something, one ceases to experience it, and if it can no longer experience anything from another biological entity it has psychologically killed it. The subject is dead. What do I mean by “self?” That emergent sentience from an autonomous biological entity that contains its experience and sense of being alive as distinguished from other autonomous, sentient biological entities. The subject. What, then, is “suicide?” Well, its autobiography, and it’s not something to do, really, until you’re ready to kill your career or that old self. Again, not talking in literal terms, but of a willful changing of one’s private identity to better adapt to an always changing environment. One must not cling to who one was yesterday, but kill it off and become something new today. Of course, there’s a lot of overlap, and I’m not suggesting the annihilation of memory, just an unsentimental fluidity and willingness to experience life as it is happening. What do I mean by “autobiography?” The attempted freezing, or making static, of a former fluid in the effort to squeeze private meaning about one’s self that will be objective, long-lasting and true. It is the effort to objectify past experiences to freeze one’s self long enough for a snapshot understanding. A waste of time if you ask me. What’s the point of today’s entry? That an exercise in ironic absurdity can be meaningless and ambiguous, yet fun; pleasure is the only excuse one needs for such activity. A way to pass the time in one’s mind, tickling… 24 SADE: A CHIMP AMONG BONOBOS? What’s wrong with Sade? A pathological lack of compassion (as differentiated from empathy and sympathy), meaning an utter lack of any sense of shared suffering, with too much emphasis and faith in ego and a failure to recognize the expanded implications of his espoused libertine philosophy—that the human being is an [autonomous organism/functioning organ] in a living system that is itself an organism/organ and autonomous functionary. Sade never considers what proper roles the sentient human being might play within Nature’s ever-evolving cognitive system. If man is not separate from Nature, but of Nature, what is man’s natural role in the ecosystem? Also, Sade mistakenly imbues Nature with intention, as in Nature gave man certain qualities. This, to me, seems analogous to Freudian wish fulfillment, as in Nature’s fulfilling her wish, and so is everything else, etc. God, Virtue, morality and ethics et al be damned, be tortured and screwed; which is an inaccurate view of a big picture that involves little conscious intent, per se, but a desire butting up against a not thoroughly cooperative material reality. So it’s not only possible, but indeed likely, that man can both have a natural function in producing the ecosystem’s existential experience of itself, while not being intended by anything to do so. Did anything intend for a body to evolve a brain that produces a particular type of mind within a certain framework for an individual organism’s kind of peculiar awareness, or does it just seem in hindsight as if it would have been a good idea if some original creator had thought of it (and if that was the case couldn’t that “creator” have come up with a nicer, more sentimental idea amenable to human life—why all the suffering?)? You want Van Gogh or Aaron Spelling? Sade is empty when it comes to any vision for the greater implications that libertinism might effect when put into practice within an ecosystem [however, he does have a Hobbesian view of life as brutish and short]. He never approaches the idea that every being that suffers reduces the planet’s total experience of pleasure within itself. That pain spread throughout the system creates a dis-ease that Nature does not consciously intend, and that It will react against this displeasure automatically in an effort to heal Itself. But then again, conscious intentions do not have major roles in anything that I perceive. So I think Sade is a chimpanzee among bonobos. He is what he is and everybody else is what they are, and he refuses to feel inferior or less worthy of pleasure just because he’s different. He is Ayn Rand, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Michael Jackson and Brittney Spears all in one package unleashed upon the Amish. He was notorious and spent most of his time in jail—the bonobos had no choice. The difference, I think, between Sade and France then and Cheney, Spears, et al in America now is that the latter are chimps among chimpanzees. Americans ain’t bonobos. The French are, or so it might be argued. If I were to write more about Sade I’d focus on his inhumanism from a somewhat Freudian angle, and consider what it means to derive pleasure from the pain of others, and perhaps pleasure from pain in general, as if one gets high on the endorphins released during agony and becomes addicted to it, sort of like that 90s flick Crash with Rosanna Arquette, where the people get off sexually by maiming each other in auto accidents. What are the psychic mechanisms at work here and how do they function in nature? What might cognitive evolutionary theory have to say about all this?
Also, I might look at the way Sade tries to defray responsibility for the writing of such a text by becoming an anonymous author who creates an anonymous narrator who invents Justine who becomes Therese, the narrator of most of the novel, then Justine again and who is then struck dead by lightning before attention can be paid to the anonymous narrator. The ambiguities of who really means what, the unreliability of all the narrators, with Therese being, perhaps, the most unreliable, who secretly enjoys her cruel treatment, being a masochist. What is Sade really trying to do? What is Justine, really? But these are all topics for another time. 15 From the New Yorker: Blows Against the Empire—The Return of Philip K. Dick By Adam Gopnik There’s nothing more exciting to an adolescent reader than an unknown genre writer who speaks to your condition and has something great about him…
Dick’s allegiance was not to literature but to writing and to the possibilities of writing as a form of protest and instant social satire… Dick’s early history is at once tormented, hustling, and oddly lit by the bright California sunshine of the late fifties. Born in 1928, he had a twin, a sister named Jane, who died when she was only a month old; like Elvis Presley, who also had a twin sibling who died, Dick seems to have been haunted for the rest of his life by his missing Other. He seems to have blamed his mother, unfairly, for her death, poisoning their relations. He had one of those classic, bitter American childhoods, with warring parents, and was dragged back and forth across the country. He had loved science fiction since boyhood—he later told of how at twelve he had a dream of searching in Astounding Stories for a story called “The Empire Never Ended” that would reveal the mysteries of existence—and he began writing quickie sci-fi novels for Ace in the fifties and sixties. “I love SF,” he said once. “I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It’s not just ‘What if’—it’s ‘My God; what if’—in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.” The hysteria suited him. He seems to have been a man of intellectual passion and compulsive appetite (he was married five times), the kind of guy who can’t drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe. …Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life. The gift of Dick’s craziness was to see how strong the forces of normalcy are in a society, even when what they are normalizing is objectively nuts…
“The core of my writing is not art but truth,” Dick wrote a year before he died. “Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation.” It doesn’t dilute the force of his vision to see it as a metaphor, consistent with, but crazier than, the central metaphor of his earlier work: the social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicit threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered. The future will be like the present, he had once known, and now he saw that the past was like the future, too… …normal governing might be the work of paranoids. This Nixon-era vision becomes, in the VALIS books, a metaphysical truth. “The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one,” Fat writes. …The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real—this thought today does not seem exactly crazy. The empire never ends. ***** William Gibson, Guardian Books: 'I'm really conscious, when I'm writing now, how Google-able the world is. You can no longer make up what some street in Moscow looks like because all your readers can have a look at it if they want to. That is an odd feeling. It is a genuine way that cyberspace is, to use a word from Spook Country, everting the world. It is turning itself - and us - inside out. It's where we transact so much of who we are these days.' 'In those early days of broadcast television, you were a little kid walking around and holding two realities at the same time in your head,' he says.
11
Talk about the right wing wishing for another 9/11? Today’s TPM has this: 08.11.07 -- 10:13AM // link The Philadelphia Daily News' Stu Bykofsky, one of the city's most widely-read columnists, caused a bit of a stir with his latest column, which posited a provocative idea: another 9/11-style attack to "help" America. As Bykofsky sees it, "we have forgotten who the enemy is," and the murder of thousands of Americans would help us get back on track. “America's fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater. What would sew us back together? Another 9/11 attack. “The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda. [...] “Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again? If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America's righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.” Everything about this column seems misguided -- the diagnosis of what ails America, the description of the symptoms, the proposed cure. The surprising part of this, however, is that a variety of far-right media outlets seemed to embrace Bykofsky's message. ThinkProgress noted that Drudge seemed to think highly of the piece, conservative radio host Mike Gallagher invited Bykofsky on to his show, and Fox News' John Gibson went so far as to endorse Bykofsky's thesis on the air: "I think it's going to take a lot of dead people to wake America up." For a column that pines for mass murder, this isn't the reaction I expected. --Steve Benen Also, there’s a big scare in NYC today because an alleged “web site” has warned of a truckload of radiological material set to explode somewhere. The city’s crawling with radiation detection devices, cops, national security types today. Cheney’s pushing hard for a strike on Iran because he says they’re helping the insurgents in Iraq. It seems to me the next shoe’s about to drop soon. The timing seems particularly ripe. All the ducks seem in a row. Let’s roll. Shit. It seems to me that a unified America would be the greatest force for evil ever to occupy Earth. 10 A digested summary of something I read yesterday: 1. The threat: Monopoly of force being ceded by a nominally elected democratic-republican form of government to corporations, which will eventually, through consolidation, form a board of directors who will then appoint someone to run the show. There’s now a market/industry that profits off of conflict and is not subject to international laws the same ways state soldiers are. The dream is to manage worldwide war in a way that’s profitable to those lucky few rich people who are in the right position to do so. This will eventually lead to a balkanization that pits foreign private corporate security guards dispatched by a centralized entity against local militias of fighters. Iraq is a good paradigm for what the U.S. might become. It may even be the plan. 2. The Democrats: First, Bill Clinton, 41’s buddy, signer of NAFTA, signed many executive orders paving the way for a corporate police state. The Democrats have caved repeatedly. They are cowards and willingly do the bidding of their corporate patrons. They, along with the mainstream media, kowtowed after 9/11. Is it just a coincidence that Democrats and news organizations were the entities targeted with Anthrax? Why are these “terrorist attacks” the forgotten aspect of “9/11”? Also consider the chilling effect of the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK , the untimely death of Paul Wellstone and the unprecedented number of journalists killed by U.S. forces since the start of the Iraq War, and much more. Where are the freedom fighters? 3. What’s in the works: The executive branch of government will declare Code Red [martial law] for whatever opportune reasons. You can be sure there will be more than one cause to help justify it. But the fact is the means to execute this power has been privatized. Cheney and corporations are the real power. This is about a coup by totalitarian corporate free marketeers. More than twenty executive orders have been signed since World War II that provide the architecture and plan for totalitarian corporate control of the most draconian system imaginable, waiting for an excuse to “retaliate against some known targets” both foreign and domestic (the lines between foreign and domestic are blurred by the multinational corporations pulling off the coup). 4. The GOP’s wishful thinking about another 9/11 is repeatedly betrayed by its dire warnings that the next terrorist attack will put the public firmly in their camp. Martial law might be invisible with Neighborhood Watch and church groups reporting suspicious activity to private security firms. When this happens, look for power to consolidate in the form of rampant corporate takeovers, essentially creating an absolute oligopoly of conglomerates, whose ceo’s and chairmen form a star chamber led by…Rupert Murdoch? Donald Trump? Or worse, Bill Gates? This also reflects their evolving/evolutionary “agenda” or karma. It’s the direction in which they’re obviously heading. Competition and freedom are anathema to its progress. 5. The mainstream media (MSM): The oligopolic-corporate-conglomerate parent to its childish, wage slave consumer. Both MSM and its consumers are caught up in the same self-perpetuating delusions of pursuing private happiness, public health/happiness be damned. Everybody’s in it for themselves, no enlightened self-interest. Most are curious about prices but ignorant of value…you name the subject. 6. The American public can’t perceive this situation yet because of its militarism, which has historically served it well. They’re accustomed to believing that they and the system share common interests/values, unaware of how things have changed thanks to #5 above, among other things. Our evolution in militarism parallels Rome’s in that it is a privatizing force. Everything, especially information, is privatized. In such a system, one must personally profit from knowledge. A corporate idea. The public -brainwashing, which is really a natural product of a certain type of cognitive evolution, is complete. What conservatives really want to conserve is the old karma ignorant of dharma. Liberals insist on pushing the fluidity of their dharma ignorant of their karma. Evolution reveals the futility of conservatism, maybe that’s why conservatives hate it. And liberals hate intelligent design because it reveals a bit of their hypocrisy—they want to intelligently design society while claiming such a concept has no recursive symmetry in nature, as if cognition and evolution are separate, unrelated things. Not all of this need be conscious in the minds of its actors to be true. A simple inkling in the minds of some will do. 7. Concerning one’s self with how the military, the bureaucracy and public will respond may be a misunderstanding of the steadily evolving paradigm. Incidents will allegedly occur, Code Red, complete blackout of objective information for six months (Internet is unplugged, Democracy Now!, etc.), the tentacles of new power wrap around a benighted public. Things are likely to seem to the public much as they were before, during and after…the spectacle will continue, elections will be announced, re-scheduled or continue, etc. However, as I’ve said, how these three segments of society might respond may be a misunderstanding of the new paradigm. Those groups will not “respond” or react because they will no longer exist in their old forms, but take charge and initiate action in newly evolved ways. It also must be noted that the “military” is largely “private,” as is the bureaucracy, and the so-called public is the wage slave of the new privatized system. Historically, those wage slaves were bribed to go along. Nowadays, however, they’ve been forced to become more productive, consume more, go into deeper debt creating the necessary crises for the totalitarian corporate crackdown…a private security state. The only thing for certain is that it will be chaos and the de facto power elite—those with the most to lose—will try to restore control. The conflict will be asymmetrical and long-term and will likely contribute to the falling back of the human species from its previous position “atop” the planet. Most Americans will prefer a return to order and the old spectacle, the good old days, not knowing the planes flying on time are a symptom of something bad. The illusion of symmetry will be a spectacle concealing chaos. The question is, how far can this whole thing go? How far down can our species tumble? The bigger something is, the harder it falls; or, a centipede doesn’t fall when it dies. Which will it be: one or the other, both, neither? I don’t know. I fear, however, we may have entered a rather long dark ages. “Dark” because all information, knowledge and light are going private, increasingly existing locked up inside the being in possession of it. On the other hand, and I think this is also possible, the US could balkanize, local militias may end up fighting South American corporate-employed mercenaries on the streets of Buffalo and Wichita. This is a recipe for chaos, incompetence, and a crumbling of “American civilization.” It may also set the stage for a more humane civilization governed by a form of social anarchy. The future, alas, depends on who/what is deemed most fit for survival in the ecosystem and who/what is deemed unfit. Very grim indeed. Better look to Nature for examples of appropriate anarchistic behavior geared toward survival. So now, the question is how should a somewhat Taoist intellectual-artist, one who doesn’t believe humans should insist on anything, especially non-insistence, respond or react or learn to act if such a scenario as outlined above is true, which it certainly seems to be? I think the answer for me is obvious: Do my dharma, improve my karma, practice kindness, be nonviolent, navigate the flow and, above all, keep my empathy intact and do whatever’s necessary to make sure empathy survives as a human characteristic in my place and time. This is not a simple task, considering my rage, but it’s what I deem necessary for myself if “I” want to continue existing as an ecologically aware artist and writer and become the profoundly spiritual being I long to be. Finally, I would call this approach “empathetic inhumanism.” Look to Nature with an open heart and critical mind and strive to harmonize with Its music. Peace is being peaceful with Nature. March to Gaia’s beat, not the global corporate libertarians’ anthem.
JULY
26 Tea-tabling: E.M. Forster—was a friend of Virginia Woolf, with whom he worked out some of the ground rules of literary modernism. These included the concept of 'tea-tabling' - making the substance of serious fiction the ordinary events of everyday life. .. The whole of Forster's technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down . . . there's actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones . . . It's a completely new kind of accentuation…the art of the subtle understatement. Also, emotional repression…Brit stiff upper lip and all that. Interesting that Killian chooses a modernist fiction technique to describe something Jared has done with my poetry. The poet using fiction techniques in editing the fiction writer’s poetry. But E.M. Forster? Tea-tabling? My work is not emotionally repressed or even affectively manipulative, at least not before editing. What are we to make of this subtle criticism of Killian’s? This guy really is something. Taking the time to go over my work with such a fine tooth comb in such a short amount of time and then write something insightful in his rejection letter. A rare bird indeed! I like him. I hope I can work with him in the future. Yet tea-tabling is not one of my techniques, but one of Jared’s, whose poetry seems almost ridden with it. Personally, it’s not to my taste unless a keenly experienced situation is contextualizing it, which seems to be what Mr. S— does, or tries to do. How else do we experience language as understatement? It seems to me that it would behoove every decent American citizen to engage Justine by the Marquis de Sade in a very close reading. One would be shocked at the parallels between George W. Bush’s Washington, D.C. and Sade’s Paris. Of course, Sade published Justine two years hence the French Revolution, while Washington has yet to bear witness to such horrific turmoil. Yet, one can’t help believe that revolution is definitely where things are (be)heading. Consider these quotes from Justine, and ask yourself how well they might apply to the political-economic dynamics informing contemporary American culture (at least inside the Beltway, on Wall Street, in Hollywood, Nashville, Houston, Las Vegas and Atlanta, probably Phoenix too): "If, though full of respect for social conventions…it should come to pass…that it is preferable to abandon oneself to the tide rather than to resist it? Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along with the others?" --the narrator, p. 9 "But…what right have you to expect the wealthy to relieve you if you are in no way useful to them? "…We have rid ourselves of this mania of obliging others gratuitously; it was recognized that charity’s pleasures are but sops thrown to pride, and we turned our thoughts to stronger sensations… "…We have more subjects in France than are needed…the State can easily afford to be burdened by fewer people. "…What is the good of letting those creatures live who, no longer able to count upon their parents’ aid either because they are without parents or because they are not wanted or recognized by them, henceforth are useful for nothing and simply weigh upon the State: that much surplus commodity, you see, and the market is glutted already; bastards, orphans, malformed infants should be condemned to death immediately they are pupped…[they] can have nothing but an undesirable effect upon the society they contaminate…they are like those vegetable parasites which, attaching themselves to sound plants, cause them to deteriorate by sucking up their nutritive juices. It’s a shocking outrage, these alms destined to feed scum, these most luxuriously appointed houses they have the madness to construct quite as if the human species were so rare, so precious one had to preserve it down to its last vile portion!" --Monsieur DuBourg, accosting the 14-year-old Justine who has come to him seeking charity, he wants her to be a concubine since that’s all she’s good for, pp. 21-23. "…can you conceive of gleaning happiness in the depths of tears and disgust? Dare you suspect pleasure where you see naught but loathing? "…a man who was already finding, in the very spectacle of my suffering, one further vehicle for his horrible passions!" --Justine, regarding M. DuBourg, p. 25. "But my imprecations, far from drawing the wrath of God down upon him [DuBourg], only added to his good fortune; and a week later I learned this signal libertine had just obtained a general trusteeship from the Government, which would augment his revenues by more than 500,000 pounds per annum. I was absorbed in the reflections such unexpected inconsistencies of fate inevitably give rise to when a momentary ray of hope seemed to shine in my eyes." --Justine, re: Dubourg, p. 26. "Nothing’s more normal than the desire to conserve one’s property; but what is not normal is the desire to augment it by the accession of the property of others." --the naïve Justine, speaking to her older sister about her second employer, Monsieur du Harpin, a wealthy Parisian usurer, p. 29. "The trial of an unfortunate creature who has neither influence nor protection is conducted with dispatch in a land where virtue is thought incompatible with misery, where poverty is enough to convict the accused; there, an unjust prepossession causes it to be supposed that he ought to have committed a crime did indeed commit it; sentiments are proportioned according to the guilty one’s estate; and whence gold or titles are wanting to establish his innocence, the impossibility that he be innocent then appears self-evident [footnote from Sade: “o ages yet to come! You shall no longer be witness to these horrors and infamies abounding!]." --Justine, to her sister about her travails, p. 31. Notice the parallels with Calvinism, supralapsarianism, neoconservatism, corporate libertarianism, inhumanism, prosperity theology, Ayn Rand, global free market capitalism, Wall Street, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. etc. etc. To be continued… 19 Thought of the day: We act on the structural imperatives of a vortex of runaway forces that we cannot fully articulate or understand, which must be harnessed to re-establish the connections of feedback loops to reverse or at least oppose the forces of entropy that are settling down upon us. We are the situation, I am a situation. We act to live I, I act to live We. Action is always despite the inevitable...no-thing-ness. ***** I think the above works extremely well as a thematic summary of Smoke. You could insert any character into the single person pronouns, and the cast into the first person plural pronouns (take each character, one by one, consider their narratives, the question of personal autonomy and free will in a chaotic system...the duality between chaos and entropy and the fine line separating the two, the vagueness of that line separating life and death, you and me, etc., points to a generalized no-thing-ness or immateriality, or a materiality that is completely subjected to immaterial whims...that literally make/create/produce sense. The differing trajectories of characters accounted for by fuzzy bifurcation points (the oft alluded to incidents). The fuzzy line of separation is the bifurcation point...the interstitial elements are enabling obstacles (the incidents and Tribal Agency). The fact that these bifurcation points are so fuzzy and abstract points to the weakness of arguing for the sake of ego or self. In the end, reality is as amorphous yet interactive yet singular as smoke. Smoke itself is the interstice between the burning and the disappearance, no? And thus Grace and the reader are left standing bewildered yet sensitized on the river's edge. Smoke, I think, gets stronger the more and more I think about what is actually there. And it's much easier to do now that I've removed my self-conscious editorials from the narrative. ***** A centipede dies, but never falls down. 12 Excerpt from an e-mail: ...Yes, a long time. I was thinking of dropping you a quick line when I got this. Now, of course, in light of the fact you want to know the "state of my art," I've made it a good deal longer. I hope it's stimulating and helps you with your own work if, by nothing else, being merely food or calories for the process. If not, c'est la vie. What do "I" know? (By the end of this e-mail you'll see that "I" view "I" as plural and situational). So you've taken on the big project. That's very good. Your e-mail makes perfect sense. I've felt the same way many times, always at the beginning of a project. The crap you have to take is so big, but it's slow going at first. You grunt and push and strategize, wondering why you ate what you did, what was in it that did this to you, what kind of medicines are available to relieve the pressure, the anxiety of loved ones telling you they have to go too, the smell that's grossing everyone out, the sounds of squirting explosions and splashing water, the images that go along with that, the need for toilet paper and the decimation of beloved forests, the enslavement of bovine cousins for the curative power of yogurt and it's live active cultures that will replenish your decimated intestinal track, these digressions punctuated by each actual movement of the bowel, a pleasure that makes it all worthwhile...writing is shitting and reading is the vicarious thrill of it. The page is mere toilet paper...you get the drift. Gritty reality. The state of my art is confusion. I've finished a submission cycle, and with Jared's help reading my shit I think I now really have something. S--- was gutted, I cleared away all traces of myself and left the action uncluttered. I chopped 40 percent out of the piece. Next, a chapbook of poetry called Fascia, that Jared edited. He's very very gifted. I handed him a volume of my complete poems and told him to make a chapbook. Jesus what a job. Then there's counterclockwise, short fiction which I've submitted for pulication as a chapbook. Now I've started heading back toward web publishing, gearing up possibly for a blog, writing essays that I'll submit to various places. That'll probably last through 2008, then I'll disappear again and write poetry and fiction again until I can't keep my mouth shut any longer on current events. The main thing I've learned is to get out of my own way. "I" doesn't exist. Ego is a homuncular committee of selves representing various aspects of self-interest: sexual, political, economic, superstitious, rational. This committee fluidly legislates, putting forward its most appropriate aspect for the perceived situation. It is an evolved, sentient, selfish thing. An animal. The bull of mind essence. And the means of taming it, I've discovered, is for "I" to not insist on anything and let each aspect do its thing. Writing emerges from non-insistence. More to the point, it is an egoless writing that dives deeper into the human, which is ultimately inhuman or not "I." Detachment allows one to do this without the typically ensuing horror and trauma of seeing one's self or any aspect of one's self utterly obliterated by reality. By not insisting "one" becomes indestructible, and the "texts" emerging from the "one" are beyond anything but self-criticism. All arguments against it reveal more about the disgruntled reader than the non-insistent text. Does any of that make sense? Here's some things I've written over the last six weeks or so, things I consider conversation pieces among myselves more than anything else: Random thoughts, unrandom actions: Abstract writings, which I consider non-egoistic and psychedelic (i.e.: mind altering), might propose a clearer array of interactions than materialistic-pragmatic, selfishly (i.e.: professionally) rendered writing, in that abstract/non-egoistic/psychedelic writings are more transparent to language's vital pursuit of a general scheme for the translation of significance, or distillation thereof, increasing the odds of a mind that confronts it being significantly, that is symbolically altered, with the question now being how to write an abstract/non-egoistic/psychedelic text in a mind altering idiom that is easily translated to other realities, or reading traditions for the purposes of the text's interaction with the world as a membrane between author and reader? My hypothesis is that a text which is cognizant of recursive symmetries across scale, chaos theory and what Barth calls "coaxial esemplasy" will naturally embody such an idiom. Such a text, I believe, emerges from the author's documentary impulse to reveal/express what the author perceives directly responding to the world, and his or her corollary impulse to abstraction aiming at the emotional fallout of the underlying forces erupting into reader-writer acknowledgement. Everything is viable, evolving out of thorough unavoidability. This is what we perceive happening when things are perceived the way they are perceived. This kind of writing addresses one of human kind's most fundamental problems: Its crisis of perception. To be human today is to face the challenge of producing meaning out of existence while being given too much information to succeed. Abstraction is a cognition extracting form to create form. Choose any starting point and let a new world emerge via processes-tiny shifts from initial conditions transforming everything as the reader-writer emerges into new dimensions of possible experience via reading-writing. Reveal an existential way of being an artist; writing as a form of present knowing deeply rooted in the planet's history. Be inside the word, which begins a personal thing where conceptual issues fade away. Consumerism is the new fascism, and feminine the new masculine. ***** Pathology: Being a "man"...power, violence, fear, respect...success & failure: Material, sexual, artistic...artist v. society...grief/bereavement...addiction/evolution of suicide....Cutthroat & Count Omega...Being a "woman"...receptive, meek, faithful, durable...commodified & pregnant: idealized, pure, crafty...she v. masculine...orgasm v. performance...desireless creator of life...Beatrice and Helen. Perhaps a little G---- with a dash of J----- or Z----- tossed in. ***** Use familiar cultural forms...the movement of local speech-regional language and references-to conceptual writing that is transparent enough to reveal the poetics of everyday life...cyclical prose stanzas...rasslin rings for content and form to audaciously tussle, sustaining the cyclical sequences arranged around the coaxial esemplasy of farcical tragedy and hopeless comedy revolving round the axis of wanting to be some body, experiencing something unique, living a little...evolving ambiguous/ambivalent koan-like bifurcation points where everything that rises must converge in the silent roar of the diamond wisdom...a re-mapping of relationships onto networks of desire and frustration, attention and boredom, leisure and labor, commodity and death-engaging together systematically within a distinctive politcal-economy...trying to shatter these topological networks (chains), paving the way through a poetry of discovery to authentic human being... Every story is a spatial practice, Michel de Certeau. Use proprioception to evolve philosophical imagery of beings becoming something else, grotesque still-lifes in search of their arabesque others...writing's premise is immobility, narrative is something else (Mark Amerika: To turn intersubjective derive into autopoietic collaboration...to capture the dreamworld of international culture giving birth to multiple, mixed realities.) Proprioception: What the body unconsciously does when catching a fly ball or riding a bicycle...The priority of dynamic embodied activity over isolated mental and physical regions...fingers unconsciously typing the symbols of word-sounds silently crossing the writer's mind...Charles Olson: "...from proprius-ception, one's own ception...the body itself as, by movement of its own tissues, giving the data of, depth." Experience the breathless rush through sensory landscapes. Concerned with the body and its environment...putting brain, body and world back together. The body can talk to itself without retreating elsewhere into its mind...what is it like for a brain to be embodied, a mind to be embrained? The principal activity of brains is making changes in themselves, thus demonstrating the capacity of biological cognition to adjust to new environments. The brain possesses a scaffolding where language, culture and institutions empower cognitions, which are inseparable from the external world.
The physical world is an irreducible component of brain-mind activity. The three spatial dimensions plus time-the experiential tetrad-is a byproduct of human physiology. Inhumanism is a belief in something bigger than an individual's private experience. Humanism restricts and trivializes what's really going on, it blinds us and validates our desires despite all the evidence that we are not the purpose of the universe. Inhumanism seems much more fair to the human being, putting him in his place while restoring God to hers. Being in the womb of something, we are deeper, we are more broadly embedded, than the merely human stain we mistake ourselves for smeared by our delusion across the surface of things. In fact, human seems one of our system's lesser ancillary functions, a passing color in a certain place at a particular time of day... It is patently absurd to seek a universal idiom, but I do it anyway. Perhaps "I" am it, the search for self. That is to say every reading and every writing is idiomatic to its perceived function in that specific time and place, and it is this fact that the idiom is true in every case is what makes it universal, or collective, in that types transcend their particulars from one culture, one place and time to another. Therefore, great literature is absurd, and reading-writing it is absurding...the absurd in action, a philosophical image that conveys the gist from one awareness to another...infecting the world with cognitive abstractions ad infinitum...becoming tokens of the universal each instant. The emotional fallout of thorough unavoidability...the necessity of seeking to avoid...the absurdity of... A transparent movement from idiom to concept, from idiot to genius, where the reader-writer perceives... Farcical tragedy...in other words, the attempted domination of nature by...ego. Hopeless comedy...in other words, the actual defeat of ego at the hands of...nature. Koan-like bifurcation points. Where the point is seen more for the mark it makes...the way a spear explodes into its target, scattering the elements at hand, being that equal or greater opposite reaction made variable by its position relative to all other positions...who fucking knows which way this word goes...its trajectory is relative to the relative velocity and angle of the point at its moment of impact upon the membrane from which this particular word has sprung...and then, of course, there are the numerous and variable positions of readers as they confront the text within the realms of their private experiential tetrads. What are we as humans to do with our lives? Better yet, what are we living beings to do with our humanness? And what, exactly, is that? What is "human?" Is it more a verb than a noun? A distinctive political-economy, that particular illusion to be shattered before any externally observable and/or intuitively discernible movement can take place...the imaginary system humans use to rationalize death and their killing-eating sentience, a child-like knowing that still claws...the political-economic need for Xanax, Phenobarbital, Oxycontin, Risperdal, Weed, Whiskey, Women Gone Wild, Whitney at the Brittany...cognitive dissonance, jouissance of hell and tortuous heaven with gitmo et al... Creativity being spatial practice, material yoga, phenomenal discipline...as in material phenomena seeming to move in harmony with one another, practicing spatial peace. War and everything that war involves is the opposite of creativity...war is incurious, disinterested...it would be boring if not for the boom. Grotesque still-lifes in search of their cinematique-arabesque others. In other words, that universal desire to do something, anything, even if it's wrong. Don't do nothing, never mind that would be doing the most of all. Do something to avoid doing too much. What a sensory landscape feels like...what you're feeling right now, wherever you are, in toto... The capacity of biological cognition to...consciously evolve. What have we learned today, and how does it affect our body? What effects will this knowledge cause? Our experiential tetrad is a bypodruct of our physiology. "I" wouldn't be here if it wasn't for...the germ. Language, culture and institutions are the evolving superstructures of human experience, which is a kind of autonomous cognitive tetrad (sorta like superego) rooted in the human body, in the body of the species as organism as much as the organism as species... More apparently metaphysical randomness, abstracted from: Our mental existence, which is a byproduct of our ecosystemic function and materiality that is maintained via our genes and germline. The illusion of unchanging essence occurs because of the body's ecosystemic function, which requires the illusion of continuity for the illusion to continue; that is to say conscious mental life occurs because of the evolving brain's existential function, the processes of which it is emergent from. A self-reflexive theory of mind requiring multiple coaxial esemplasies to maintain the germline's evolution...existence + time = being. An observable static self, that is to say one's immortal soul, doesn't seem to exist wherever time is married to space. Mental health is the ability to love and work. But the questions are: What is mental? What is health? What is ability? What is love? What is work? What is is? What does the definite article mean? How does a preposition like to function in light of the prior considerations, and must and always connect all these things to yet one more last and final thing? Life is essentially a cognitive coaxial esemplasy...a perceived disequilibrium maintained via cognitive feedback loops...this is evolution's motor.
Consciousness requires not a noun, but an active, transitive verb...like consciousing. Who or what matches face to name and who or what goes to the brain file that contains further propositional information? The neural network stores things in a code called neuronese...there has to be a mechanism that translates messages back and forth from neuronese to English. Who or what does the translating? It seems a bilingual homunculus is required...the mind is more of a committee than a unified whole...the homunculus works for the central committee, and is most likely a diversely populated committee itself...all psychology must address the intervening mental processes that link stimuli to response actions and thereby implicating the function of this homunculus at a particular place and time. Mind is a chiasmic membrane functioning as a bilingual homuncular committee that informs ego, which is, in a sense, the "metaphysical" cognition or emergent awareness...analyze/deconstruct the metaphorical grammars of the symbolic chiasmic membrane of the emergent awareness and you get a deeper more satisfying reality. How to create a literature, and by extension become something in the process that doesn't deny the id its proper role? Also, explain and show whether and how the creation of such literature can be accomplished without doing radical violence to the world at large and one's own material well-being. How much does it all depend on one's situation? How much does one's situation depend on you? Why does this matter so much to me? ...the projects I've been working on need a final tweak to fully tease out what's possibly being revealed. These works are extremely radical in the political sense, and I hope also quite radical, once I'm finished with them, in the literary sense. Radical meaning a modifier of a particle being emitted from the nucleus or cognitive center of human being...a fundamental re-visioning of surfaces from the inside out... ...approaching the membrane-or fascia [a Euclidean version]-from the bottom up; a spiritual submarine approaching a space beyond its contextual dampness. ...I want to present these characters as they deal with the effects/affects of the event horizon, leaving space for unobserved events to have occurred...in other words, the reader-writer-narrator is also on the event horizon...there's only a certain phase space here in which consciousness is possible, and that's what this text feels... This is also something of an analysis of free will. What is it? How much of it do we have? What kind of free will do we actually have, that we exercise daily? Is free will possible without limits upon which to frame our actions, and is free will, if it is thus framed, fundamentally a moral issue? If so, how might that issue be adequately framed in a valid context? "I" doesn't exist once you've taken it apart, closely analyzed it, and reconsidered it as a new whole...a different oneness that makes "we"-not in the royal sense but as a common bacterial pronoun-more appropriate...and nauseating. In that there seems to be five fundamentalisms evolving the human world in the 21st century, so there also seems to be five aspects informing the token individual mind: Gender, political, economic, religious/spiritual/magical and scientific/technological/rational. Every healthy human mind contains a unique, fluid proportion of each of these essential qualities. One might say they're the committee that governs the self as it passes through this world as a life. Each aspect leads the self according to the situation as it is perceived by the committee, which then appoints the proper member to take charge. The mind, or committee, recognizes it is time to pay the bills and appoints the rational aspect to lead with special assistance from the economic aspect. The religious and political aspects agree to shut up for awhile. 8
The narrator is the personified situation and the self of the text. The narrator is the mind behind the language, a fluid proportion of sex, power, greed, superstition and reason bound by a membrane—the page—a surface that interacts with others and defines the symbolic autonomy of the given space. The narrator is the translating voice between the external chaos and the internal homunculus, which then translates again the stimuli for the committee of fundamentals governing it. What actually happens, the minutiae of a text’s evolution that fosters its emergence into perceivability, is beneath both the narrator and author’s ability to venture. No matter how far they may go, the unnamable will always be receding before them. The author is just an inner or outer dimension relative to the narrator, however the particular case might be. The secret to great writing is for the author to stay out of the narrator’s way, then for the narrator to avoid the author. Of course, the two should get together whenever there’s no actual writing going on. With a total of ten separate aspects of self, or five psychic categories with two subgroups, one would think the writer would have no difficulty getting laid. The committee with two subcommittees should be able to find a suave persona somewhere in the psychic realm to represent their interests, their need to extend the germline that’s trajecting them across space-time onto the membrane… 7 In that there seems to be five fundamentalisms evolving the human world in the 21st century, so there also seems to be five aspects informing the token individual mind: Gender, political, economic, religious/spiritual/magical and scientific/technological/rational. Every healthy human mind contains a unique, fluid proportion of each of these essential qualities. One might say they’re the committee that governs the self as it passes through this world as a life. Each aspect leads the self according to the situation as it is perceived by the committee, which then appoints the proper member to take charge. The mind, or committee, recognizes it is time to pay the bills and appoints the rational aspect to lead with special assistance from the economic aspect. The religious and political aspects agree to shut up for awhile. JUNE 28 “I” doesn’t exist once you’ve taken it apart, closely analyzed it, and reconsidered it as a new whole…a different oneness that makes “we”—not in the royal sense but as a common bacterial pronoun—more appropriate…and nauseating. 16 Dream of the Red Chamber, by Tsao Hsueh-chin (1754-1760), translated by Chi-chen Wang (1958, Anchor Press/Doubleday). The first chapter reads like the beginning of a fabulist postmodern epic. An omnipotent magic stone is bored with its existence in eternity, and overhearing the conversation between a Buddhist monk and Taoist priest about the “wealth” and “luxury” of life in the “red dust,” or mortal life on earth, feels a stirring in its “earthly strain” arousing a desire to experience mortal life for itself, despite the warnings of the sages. The Buddhist monk even says: “We have here another instance of Quiescence giving way to Activity and Non-Existence yielding to Existence…Though you are endowed with some dgree of understanding, your substance needs improvement. If we take you into the world the way you are, you will be kicked about and cursed like any ordinary stumbling block. How would you like to be transformed into a substance of quality for your sojourn in the Red Dust and then be restored to your original self afterward?” the monk then transforms the stone into a “piece of pure translucent jade, oval in shape and the size of a pendant,” upon which was engraved the story of the stone itself, which is this novel, and the actual author names himself the translator. So like Cervantes, Tsao Hsueh-chin distances himself from the text’s truth or non-fictional veracity by letting the reader know that he himself is not the source of the story, and that one must take the word of the source, if not the writer, if one is to at least suspend one’s disbelief long enough to fetch the fact of the stone (i.e.: text). This also invests the text with a certain self-reflexive or self-conscious existence, aware of itself as a possible fraud but nonetheless a believer in the gist of its story. Compare this, also, to Tibetan Book of Natural Salvation (aka The Tibetan Book of the Dead). The “stone” is the soul of a “dead” person in a particular transitional phase. The “monks” are not, perhaps, what they seem to be. Despite their warnings about life in the red dust they lead the stone to the karmic wheel of life, and make sure it’s positioned well for its sojourn into the world. The magic the goddess imbued it with is the very energy driving its dharma, or sacred duty, its unique form of genius, this dream of the red chamber inscribed upon it. The stone must suffer because it can’t let go of its desire for this world. Indeed, its “strain” is integral to it, as if made of the same germ pool. Finally, the chapter hurdles to its end with the stone being born into the world in the mouth of a newborn son of a well-to-do family. This is going to be a narrative of interiors, told from the inside out, and the disconnect between conscious and unconscious will be a root of suffering. 15 More apparently metaphysical randomness, abstracted from: Our mental existence, which is a byproduct of our ecosystemic function and materiality that is maintained via our genes and germline. The illusion of unchanging essence occurs because of the body’s ecosystemic function, which requires the illusion of continuity for the illusion to continue; that is to say conscious mental life occurs because of the evolving brain’s existential function, the processes of which it is emergent from. A self-reflexive theory of mind requiring multiple coaxial esemplasies to maintain the germline’s evolution…existence + time = being. An observable static self, that is to say one’s immortal soul, doesn’t seem to exist wherever time is married to space. Mental health is the ability to love and work. But the questions are: What is mental? What is health? What is ability? What is love? What is work? What is is? What does the definite article mean? How does a preposition like to function in light of the prior considerations, and must and always connect all these things to yet one more last and final thing? Life is essentially a cognitive coaxial esemplasy…a perceived disequilibrium maintained via cognitive feedback loops…this is evolution’s motor. Consciousness requires not a noun, but an active, transitive verb…like consciousing. Who or what matches face to name and who or what goes to the brain file that contains further propositional information? The neural network stores things in a code called neuronese…there has to be a mechanism that translates messages back and forth from neuronese to English. Who or what does the translating? It seems a bilingual homunculus is required…the mind is more of a committee than a unified whole…the homunculus works for the central committee, and is most likely a diversely populated committee itself…all psychology must address the intervening mental processes that link stimuli to response actions and thereby implicating the function of this homunculus at a particular place and time. Mind is a chiasmic membrane functioning as a bilingual homuncular committee that informs ego, which is, in a sense, the “metaphysical” cognition or emergent awareness…analyze/deconstruct the metaphorical grammars of the symbolic chiasmic membrane of the emergent awareness and you get a deeper more satisfying reality. How to create a literature, and by extension become something in the process that doesn’t deny the id its proper role? Also, explain and show whether and how the creation of such literature can be accomplished without doing radical violence to the world at large and one’s own material well-being. How much does it all depend on one’s situation? How much does one’s situation depend on you? Why does this matter so much to me? 14 It is patently absurd to seek a universal idiom, but I do it anyway. Perhaps “I” am it, the search for self. That is to say every reading and every writing is idiomatic to its perceived function in that specific time and place, and it is this fact that the idiom is true in every case is what makes it universal, or collective, in that types transcend their particulars from one culture, one place and time to another. Therefore, great literature is absurd, and reading-writing it is absurding…the absurd in action, a philosophical image that conveys the gist from one awareness to another…infecting the world with cognitive abstractions ad infinitum…becoming tokens of the universal each instant. The emotional fallout of thorough unavoidability…the necessity of seeking to avoid…the absurdity of… A transparent movement from idiom to concept, from idiot to genius, where the reader-writer perceives… Farcical tragedy…in other words, the attempted domination of nature by…ego. Hopeless comedy…in other words, the actual defeat of ego at the hands of...nature. Koan-like bifurcation points. Where the point is seen more for the mark it makes…the way a spear explodes into its target, scattering the elements at hand, being that equal or greater opposite reaction made variable by its position relative to all other positions…who fucking knows which way this word goes…its trajectory is relative to the relative velocity and angle of the point at its moment of impact upon the membrane from which this particular word has sprung…and then, of course, there are the numerous and variable positions of readers as they confront the text within the realms of their private experiential tetrads. What are we as humans to do with our lives? Better yet, what are we living beings to do with our humanness? And what, exactly, is that? What is “human?” Is it more a verb than a noun? A distinctive political-economy, that particular illusion to be shattered before any externally observable and/or intuitively discernible movement can take place…the imaginary system humans use to rationalize death and their killing-eating sentience, a child-like knowing that still claws…the political-economic need for Xanax, Phenobarbital, Oxycontin, Risperdal, Weed, Whiskey, Women Gone Wild, Whitney at the Brittany…cognitive dissonance, jouissance of hell and tortuous heaven with gitmo et al… Creativity being spatial practice, material yoga, phenomenal discipline…as in material phenomena seeming to move in harmony with one another, practicing spatial peace. War and everything that war involves is the opposite of creativity…war is incurious, disinterested…it would be boring if not for the boom. Grotesque still-lifes in search of their cinematique-arabesque others. In other words, that universal desire to do something, anything, even if it’s wrong. Don’t do nothing, never mind that would be doing the most of all. Do something to avoid doing too much. What a sensory landscape feels like…what you’re feeling right now, wherever you are, in toto… The capacity of biological cognition to…consciously evolve. What have we learned today, and how does it affect our body? What effects will this knowledge cause? Our experiential tetrad is a bypodruct of our physiology. “I” wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for…the germ. Language, culture and institutions are the evolving superstructures of human experience, which is a kind of autonomous cognitive tetrad (sorta like superego) rooted in the human body, in the body of the species as organism as much as the organism as species… 12 Random thoughts, unrandom actions: Abstract writings, which I consider non-egoistic and psychedelic (i.e.: mind altering), might propose a clearer array of interactions than materialistic-pragmatic, selfishly (i.e.: professionally) rendered writing, in that abstract/non-egoistic/psychedelic writings are more transparent to language’s vital pursuit of a general scheme for the translation of significance, or distillation thereof, increasing the odds of a mind that confronts it being significantly, that is symbolically altered, with the question now being how to write an abstract/non-egoistic/psychedelic text in a mind altering idiom that is easily translated to other realities, or reading traditions for the purposes of the text’s interaction with the world as a membrane between author and reader? My hypothesis is that a text which is cognizant of recursive symmetries across scale, chaos theory and what Barth calls “coaxial esemplasy” will naturally embody such an idiom. Such a text, I believe, emerges from the author’s documentary impulse to reveal/express what the author perceives directly responding to the world, and his or her corollary impulse to abstraction aiming at the emotional fallout of the underlying forces erupting into reader-writer acknowledgement. Everything is viable, evolving out of thorough unavoidability. This is what we perceive happening when things are perceived the way they are perceived. This kind of writing addresses one of human kind’s most fundamental problems: Its crisis of perception. To be human today is to face the challenge of producing meaning out of existence while being given too much information to succeed. Abstraction is a cognition extracting form to create form. Choose any starting point and let a new world emerge via processes—tiny shifts from initial conditions transforming everything as the reader-writer emerges into new dimensions of possible experience via reading-writing. Reveal an existential way of being an artist; writing as a form of present knowing deeply rooted in the planet’s history. Be inside the word, which begins a personal thing where conceptual issues fade away. Consumerism is the new fascism, and feminine the new masculine. ***** Pathology: Being a “man”…power, violence, fear, respect…success & failure: Material, sexual, artistic…artist v. society…grief/bereavement…addiction/evolution of suicide….Cutthroat & Count Omega…Being a “woman”…receptive, meek, faithful, durable…commodified & pregnant: idealized, pure, crafty…she v. masculine…orgasm v. performance…desireless creator of life…Beatrice and Helen. Perhaps a little Grace with a dash of Jonah or Ziggy tossed in. ***** Use familiar cultural forms…the movement of local speech—regional language and references—to conceptual writing that is transparent enough to reveal the poetics of everyday life…cyclical prose stanzas…rasslin rings for content and form to audaciously tussle, sustaining the cyclical sequences arranged around the coaxial esemplasy of farcical tragedy and hopeless comedy revolving round the axis of wanting to be some body, experiencing something unique, living a little…evolving ambiguous/ambivalent koan-like bifurcation points where everything that rises must converge in the silent roar of the diamond wisdom…a re-mapping of relationships onto networks of desire and frustration, attention and boredom, leisure and labor, commodity and death—engaging together systematically within a distinctive politcal-economy…trying to shatter these topological networks (chains), paving the way through a poetry of discovery to authentic human being… Every story is a spatial practice, Michel de Certeau. Use proprioception to evolve philosophical imagery of beings becoming something else, grotesque still-lifes in search of their arabesque others…writing’s premise is immobility, narrative is something else (Mark Amerika: To turn intersubjective derive into autopoietic collaboration…to capture the dreamworld of international culture giving birth to multiple, mixed realities.) Proprioception: What the body unconsciously does when catching a fly ball or riding a bicycle…The priority of dynamic embodied activity over isolated mental and physical regions…fingers unconsciously typing the symbols of word-sounds silently crossing the writer’s mind…Charles Olson: “…from proprius-ception, one’s own ception…the body itself as, by movement of its own tissues, giving the data of, depth.” Experience the breathless rush through sensory landscapes. Concerned with the body and its environment…putting brain, body and world back together. The body can talk to itself without retreating elsewhere into its mind…what is it like for a brain to be embodied, a mind to be embrained? The principal activity of brains is making changes in themselves, thus demonstrating the capacity of biological cognition to adjust to new environments. The brain possesses a scaffolding where language, culture and institutions empower cognitions, which are inseparable from the external world. The physical world is an irreducible component of brain-mind activity. The three spatial dimensions plus time—the experiential tetrad—is a byproduct of human physiology. Inhumanism is a belief in something bigger than an individual’s private experience. Humanism restricts and trivializes what’s really going on, it blinds us and validates our desires despite all the evidence that we are not the purpose of the universe. Inhumanism seems much more fair to the human being, putting him in his place while restoring God to hers. Being in the womb of something, we are deeper, we are more broadly embedded, than the merely human stain we mistake ourselves for smeared by our delusion across the surface of things. In fact, human seems one of our system’s lesser ancillary functions, a passing color in a certain place at a particular time of day… |
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