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jan 4 2003
“And though Val would never say that this street of houses on
which you find youself will make you what you are, what you do make of
yourself has got to be made here.”
John Crowley, Demonomania
I think about writing this journal more
than I actually write it now. Riding around something occurs to me, then
in the shower, always when I’m doing other things. It’s become
like a soundtrack, running along side. And then when i sit down to write...blank.
or sitting and fidgeting in front of (or on), like this is basically.
Long pauses.
Perhaps it’s the case that most people, shorn of work loads and various
have-tos, not having any need to run the flag up to see who salutes, maybe
we digress to an idle. No need, no speed. It’s seems very true then
that trauma, angst, etc., can act as very powerful internal engines. I
would go so far as to say that those who achieve the most are among the
most unhappy, and not because success doesn’t bring happiness but
because it’s a place that they can’t get to. Any culture that
was worth it’s salt would want, then, to put various onerous burdens
on at least some segments of its populace. It wouldn’t do this ‘intentionally’
but structurally. Once a certain type of society, culture, polis comes
into existence it finds ways to extend it’s existence, places to
put various thorns under the saddle, various unhappinesses that spur us
to escape them. nobody’s at fault and the more that one attempts
to eradicate those itches -- why, the more pronounced the rash in other
areas! And the biggest spur being the money/tech nexus...everybody wants
the shiniest blivet/gadget/whatsis they can get. or the biggest. or the
fastest. or the sleekest. or most bulbous. It’s an endless hook in
the mouth, on the end of an apparently endless supply of string in an
increasingly turbulent stream. When one is nineteen it can be exhilerating,
like war itself, which, at fifty is dubious at best. The hormones, the
quickening, is not there, and neither is the faith that it will turn out
all right in the end. The ‘end’ at nineteen and at fifty have
quite different valences and powers. And it is most assuredly not a two-way
street, which all the education in the world can’t address or correct.
(Except perhaps through the delayed effects of genetic tech).
Perhaps that’s why my interest in religion AND spirituality has been
on the increase, the age effect (my, that’s way too simple). One
would like to call it allied with ‘wisdom’ but that in itself
is a dubious quality these days, a quality which seems to be deetermined
by which particular system one finds oneself in. And then as soon as one
can make that pull-back, that bracketing, the possibility of it slips
away again: wisdom has to be the cumulative effect of a system of knowledge
that, like physicists’ attempts to find the most simple formula that
will explain everything, can be put ‘in a nutshell’. And that
is a systematic accumulation of knowledge that education presents and
the asystematic accumulation that aging presents to one. They both have
their ‘wisdoms’ but it is sometimes difficult to fathom their
cross-connections.
Religions/spiritualities seem to posit one Wisdom, the one best way for
humans to move through life and consciousness. (and here I include religion
along with spirituality. People, including myself once upon a time, but
especially baby boomers, would often say “oh yes, I believe in spirituality
but I don’t get along with religion.” However I’m beginning
to see/thing that they are inseparable. Every idea of what constitutes
‘spirit’ as an occult quality that is necessary for human fructification
entails, or will eventually entain, a ‘church’ that will carry
out the ramifications of those views. Once has to include science here.
I don’t know if it can be said whether that is bad or good but it
certainly seems inevitable once any idea of a socius is introduced. Even
if it becomes an inoperative one. I’m referencing Agamben and Nancy
here without going any further. ‘Inoperability’ must STILL include
those mixtures of singularity/generality even if the inclination by the
above (as is mine) is to move it to the singular. In fact, it is inperable
BECAUSE of the mix of the two.) However, I persist in thinking that tech
utterly confuses those ratios and is always attempting to make one-way
streets into two-way thorough fares. Wisdom, with a capital letter, can
only operate in one-way streets and fairly narrow ones at that. The business
of religion (as opposed to ‘the spirit’) is to create those
constrictions and vectors.
------
I’m still very interested in the idea of ‘counter-histories’
(and counter-ontologies, which would have to be a correlary of that I
suppose. Maybe even ‘nihilism’ would fit in there, although
i don’t find that very satisfactory. Perhaps nihilism could act as
a counter- but it seems more often used as a tool of counter-projects.
But as regards existence itself, it would act as a foil maybe. But even
the anti-particle in physics is presumed to be part of an coherent (?)
anti-universe which only attains its potency (into mutual destruction)
when it comes into contact with its other...until then it is only potentiality.
Which is perahps the most potent counter of all.
---
jan 6
“An awful slippage or instability had just lately come over things...”
John Crowley
In terms of the ‘feltness’ of counterhistories, the phenomenology
of it, I’ve started reading the work of John Crowley. There is a
kind of tuning there (stimmung as the germans say) which amounts to the
phenomena of hair raising on the back of the neck, except linguistically
pronounced in some poetic shimmer. Truth is, we are always in the midst
of slippage and instability which a highly technized society is involved
with in often times odd ways. Technology is often seen as combating slipperiness
and the unstable, increasing comfort and control. Things (or even non-things)
that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck aren’t conducive
to control.
Frankly I’ve come to wonder at my own overwhelming interest in such,
which has been with me for as long as I can remember. My sojourn with
LG boosted that interest and hung it around my neck (perhaps albatross
like) but it didn’t create it. (Although I do believe that much is
tied in with sexual energies, since the essence of these phenomena is
a shimmering at the threshold.)
-----
After coming back from a walk it’s apparently that there are two
Great Objects which seem to act as almost complete blocks to ANYkind of
shimmering veil of . . . whatever. One is the automobile. There is nothing
more destructive of any sort of delicacy of thought, phenomena, or feeling
than the car. It’s a thug of an object: all-consuming, distracting,
innervating, It’s at the forefront of the destruction of almost everything.
And the fact is that a large part of us and in large numbers like that
destruction. Nevertheless if I cold name the single most corrosive agent
in western technical civilization it would be the car. And in fact I would
submit it as the single most defining agent of our culture, not the least
of which is a certain peculiar sort of visible invisibility. That is,
everybody knows the destruction it wracks, the lives it takes (and not
just on the freeway) but it is apparently a sacrificail economy we are
willing to deal in but without putting it in those terms,
ok, I know I’ve gone on about this before. but the point this time
is the sort of ontological blast that the thing gives, a restless keening
heard all thoughout the land that pushes out everything but movement and
raw power -- and all based on petroleum.
The Other Gigantic Object which has shrunk to a potent invisibility is
television.
Sometimes under the influence of TV the walls just start to caving in
(mostly late at night), there’s no room for my brain, hopeless claustraphobia.
All of which thins out the bloodstream of life, makes everything seem
flattened, etiolated, like the hallucinatory flatness of the szhizophrenic
I once read about. Intensity has to pass for depth, as does loudness,
terror, horror and even that takes on a flattened melodramatic tone when
it’s repeated over and over. Then we fall into a sinkhole of despair
when someting horrific really does happen to us, unable to make sense
of it and having a surfeit of sense made of it, both clumped inot one
stinking ball of nausea. The weirdness of mdern life: overload and underload
at the same time.
---
I was immediately attrached to the Crowley novel quoted above. It takes
place in autumn. Some of my favorite books take place then or at least
have that autumnal feel, a sense of things closing up, of enclosure, of
desperate things about to happen, while heat is draining out of other
things. A time of fogs and rains, light becoming crisper through tattered
tea-stain color leaves just before the drop in the final cold.
jan 7
Speaking of autumnal; I went to see “About Schmidt” with jack
nicolson . Went to an afternoon matinee, audience mostly composed of those
in their sixities it seemed, like Schmidt. I guess they wanted to see
Nicholson playe themselves. Some guy behind cackled almost continuously,
occasionally breaking out in phlegmatic coughing, splats of it around
the audience.
Evidently the criticism of the movie (salon.com eg) is that it makes fun
of middle america. Evidently whoever wrote that has never BEEN in middle
america. And if that is supposed to be sensitive for ‘middle america’
--- oh boy, something is drastically wrong. maybe people have criticized
because it feels TOO close not and not that it has any ideological ax
to grind. But it does make a certain way of being in america seem hollow
and flat. But in truth it comes nowhere NEAR an ‘expose’ of
the flatness and absurdity of contemporary civilization. And besides what
does any ‘critique’ mounted by a movie mean anyway!!?? It’s
just a movie, soon to be relegated to the DVD specials on late night tv
and jack nicholson revivals on AMC.
---
“Mysticism, under the (re)constructive figuration of the symbol,
wants to connect with that which it recognizes as being distant.”
Gil Anidjar / Mourning Mysticism in “Our Place In Al-Andalus”
After my family moved to Georgia from Mississippi, I remember that I found
a radio station in Atlanta when I was in the ninth grade that mesmerized
me. It was WERD, a black gospel station during the day but around sundown,
they would play jazz, mostly Blue Note stuff: Donald Byrd (oh my god I
used to love Christo Redentor), Lee Morgan (remember Sidewinder?), Lou
Donaldson, Miles Davis, early Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, herbie Hancock
(around the time of Watermelon Man and Empyrean Isles), Dave Brubeck Quartet,
Grant Green, Dexter Gordon, Cannonball Adderly, Dexter Gordon (is there
anything more elegant than the Gordon album One Flight Up?), Count Basie,
the incomparable Wayne Shorter, Billy Eckstein, Bill Evans, Kenny Burrell
--- and on and on and on. I would put the station on as I go older and
got access to a car in high school and just ride aroundin the afternoon
listening unbelivable as the the sound pured, twisted, oozed, chunked,
smoked out of the car radio ... the whole world seemed to be tuning up
to it then, an incomprehensible maelstrom of incredible beauty that, and
here was the kicker, seemed to be made up, or improvised on the spot but
that yet twisted and twined together in seeming impossible, or at the
very least, telepathic forms. It was like some form of sonic ectoplasm
to me, beckoning to some void of which it was the last remaining wisps
or vestiges of any recognizable human reality. Yes, it had a quality of
the divine in it, a spark that only needed movement and twilight (and
probably my age) to make glow with an almost supernatural brillance. I
cruised through those deep southern summers in a state of ecstasy sometimes
that was almost unbearable. It all felt like some distant bells calling
to me, some siren song, yes, luring me to the rocks, since i know now
that jazz is (or was) a tough music, taking a toll on many of its practicioners.
At any rate, ‘jazz’ remained a very mysterious thing to me,
(yes, I would say even mystical) for many years. It seemed to embody both
translucency and opaqueness in varying measures, always seeming to be
more than itself, an allograph of music, entirely unlike my reaction to
rock. It definitely had Benjamin’s air of aura about it: a whiff
of distance within the closeness, a feeling that it couldn’t be encompassed
or that it was just beyond one’s grasp -- but oh what a step that
last step would be, i thought! vistas of infinity opening up.
jan 8
If jazz had the feeling of allography about it, then my current interest
in ‘jewish mysticism’ feels somewhat that way also. (One dictionary
has it that allography -- as opposed to autograph -- is the writing of
another’s signature. Taken in one way, it can be an imposture, in
another it implies a plurality. In any regards there is an opening up
to another aspect. It also refers “to the changes that can be made
to letters and words that make them into images without at the same time
alteringtheir alphabetic identity”. James Elkins gives the example
of a palindrome that reads the same left to right, right to left and up
and down, so that gesturally one follows the cross when one reads it.
There is a stepping from one regime to another while still remaining in
the one. In a way there is a dual vision. I was very fascinated for a
time by those digital 3-D noise diagrams, wherein an image pops unexpected
from a field of noise. All that is required is an adjustment -- or really,
de-adjustment, since the eyes have to unfocus slightly -- and from one
image comes another. The first time it happened it was almost like an
audible pop in my brain. It is easy to see how one could move easily to
a state of para-noia, or literally the mind beside itself, a condition
of removal where the flow is reversed and everything that is ‘out
there’ wants to get back inside and the whole world becomes a glyph
alluding to that fact, with its own rules of encryption. In fact, that
world of paranois encryption has now been officially created and given
the name stegography, or hiding data inside other data. A while back there
was the scare that islamic terrorists were using stegography -- also called
steganography -- to encrypt messages in pornography. This guy Newman wrote
a book on that incomprehensible text, the Voynich manuscript and he came
down to concluding, quite madly, that the writer of the apparently untranslatable
text had encoded even more information in the way that the brushstrokes
worked the letters. The opaque density of the Voynich drove hime over
the edge bled over into the nearest artifact, the constituiono f the letters
themselves ... which is really not that from from certain kabalistic concerns.
One thing that differentiates people is the degree to which the world
can be shown to have depth, and to some degree that’s the mark of
what constitutes the difference between the traditionalist and the modernist.
Although it would seem that modernity is creating its own form of impacted
depth or encrypted matter -- surely a good working definition of occultism.
Once the process starts, the creation of elites, readers, hermeneuts of
the secrets is not far behind, in fact is here now but distributed throughout
the population somewhat unlike the old occult elites and hierophanies.)
So at any rate, perhaps it’s the ‘rhetoric of sadness’
operative in, e.g., the work of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin (I
started reading the former because of the latter), that Anidjar alludes
to, the ‘distance’ in the works which lead to a kind of insoluable
melancholy that hooks me, a homesickness of the mind (ie, philosophy)
that repels and ancors me in some kind of void: “It is therefore
not only that the abyss, the gap, is the occasion, the place, and occurrence
of language (allegory or symbol) but also that the distance must be asserted,
integrated, and most importantly, resolved within language...”
Mourning Mysticism, Anidjar.
There is always that inchoate distance
that beckons, the same sort of distance or origination that I had about
where a horn line was coming from or where words come from even as we
speak them, write them and are unable to catch them in their origination.
The MORE modern take on that origination is that it is a mechanical function
that spins it out, a purely ‘material event’ but an event of
a fairly pecular idea of materiality.
(I’ve started reading Alain Badiou and have become fascinated with
his account of the eruptive event [hence his book on saint paul] and the
situatedness of the event on the edge of the ‘void’ or the region
where indiscernment and chaotic organization can allow new developments,
inventiveness, and innovations to develop or “that part of the situation
where for literally fundamental reasons the prevailing forms of discernment
and recognition cease to have any significant purchase.” ‘Truth’
and ‘the subject then follow necessarily from such a circumstance
[from a net article by Peter
Hallward] The little book of his on ethics has made me much more interested
that did his book on Deleuze. The Clamor of Being seemed too polemical
without knowing exactly where Badiou was coming from...guess I should
go back and read it again, and certainly the book on Saint Paul when it
comes out, which is several months.)
jan. 10
under post modern, or at least poststructuralist thinking, perhaps the
autograph doesn’t truly exist but rather in a certain sense it is
ALWAYS a forgery, an allograph, a document of embedded multiplicities
whose contcatenations always halt in the same place, at the same crossings
of effects. Here at least is where such interventions coincide with some
modern psychological research (small surprise there - same episteme):
two recent books reported on by the New York Times discuss and dismiss
the idea of the human ‘will’ as a preexisting construct, that
in fact it a retroactive construction instantly built out of bundles of
intentions widely scattered and brought together.. All of these investigations
act as if phenomemology did not exist, or, at best would be a sort of
occult science dealing with occult qualitities such as ‘personality’
and ‘perception’ and that the only true place that such phenomena
could happen would be between the pages of a book. Another naim in the
coffin of the lived world and propaedeuctic to a world where the dead
have equal say.
jan 14
coincidence
I was watching late night TV last ight and mostly just flipping through
channels. On one station an old Doris Day techniicolor thriller from the
fifties was on. She went into an elevator, the elevator stopped, we hear
steps, she starts screaming, a man’s shadow appears, she screams
even harder and then the man drops down from the top trapdoor to rescue
her. I switch channels and there is an even older Doris Day flick on,
another detective thriller, black and white, noir-ish almost: Doris Day
is about to get into an elevator, she notices that it is already in use
and coming up to her, she panics, turns and runs down the stairs, just
as she makes it to the stairs, the elevator door opens and two guys step
out who are apparently detectives. The two juxtapostions were like negative
coincidences of each other even down to the film stock.
this happens sometimes in real life and
one gets the stangest feeling, like there is momentarily the intersection
of two realities, never being clear which is the show of which.
jan 17
going to G.H.’s memorial at the C. today.
For some reason the artnews list has become quite active lately. which
is good but a little tiring. The responses that I make have to be pitched
just right, writing wise. Too generalized/theoretical and people starting
switching off -- or just not following it with no desire to post follow
ups.and too personal and who cares about that either. hmmm..
I’ve just finished up RELIGION AFTER RELIGION, a book on the careers
of Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade. I frankly found the tone of the book often
exasperating, always defending the historical enterprise from the depredations
of those who would try to derail the academic approach. And the aforementioned
practioners at least gave lip service to going beyond academia. At any
rate, much food for thought in the book esp. concerning left vs right
hand paths and the idea of counterhistories ---which is complicated but
has a lot to do with transgressing ala Bataille, Sabbatai Zevi, etc...
some quotes later.
jan 20
having rouble sleeping all night long. I get up anywhere from 3:30 to
6 often and can’t get back to sleep...bits and pieces of cultural
flatsam and jetsam clog my head, shanai twain’s gonna get me over
and over, then i start seeing the video then i start doing a critique
of it, some black and white movie i just saw before I went to bed crowding
into my field of vision, shanai twain still providing the soundtrack for
marching nazis overlaid with the last eyedrum event, a conversation on
local art invoking some scene from four years ago, then a list of books
I want to read, then worry about money, some Black Sabbath song inexplicably
gving ‘gonna get cha good’ a drubbing while a quote from the
introduction to a book on Bataille I read at the bookstore earlier pops
into my head I start deep breathing counting backward from a hundred ozzie
osborne colliding with some of my own internal scars and wounds and fantasies
again for the umpteenth time just tonight then actively pushing those
thoughts away momentarily drifting almost almost into some prelude to
sleep before the heat comes up or has stayed up and it’s getting
unbearably hot the sheets are suffocating me my head is beginning to itch
at random spots on my head the itch on my arm is coming back until i finally
succumb and stumble into the other room and turn the tv on to at least
momentarily drown out the cacophony inside my head. I occasionally think
to myself: THIS is how addictions start.
----
Right, Left, and the Uncanniness of the Middle All of Which Move Together
“The alterity that is the sacred takes on [....] tow forms, defining
a powerful polarity: at the one hand, a pure noble, elevated, life-giving
form (the ‘right’ sacred); on the other, an impure, vile, degraded,
and dangerous form (the ‘left’ sacred).”
from Saints of the Impossible, Bataille and Weil
it also corresponds of course to the Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian
forms.
read the first chapter of the Surya book on bataille, set it aside until
I finish the Badiou.
----
Heidegger’s Uncanny
“Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, relates at one place (Nicomachean
Ethics, Z7, 1141b 7ff.) the basic conception determing the Greek view
on the essence of the thinker: ‘It is said they (the thinkers) indeed
know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult,
and hence in general ‘demonic’ -- but also useless, for they
are not seeking what is, according to straightforward popular opinion,
good for man.’
...
“The thesis quoted from Aristotle says the thinkers know [greek wd]
‘ the demonic.’ But how are ‘the philosophers,’ those
harmless eccentrics who occupy themselves with ‘abstract’ matters,
supposed to have a knowledge of ‘the demonic’? [greek wd] is
used here as an all encompassing word for what is, from the point of view
of the ordinary busy man, ‘excessive,’ ‘astounding,’
and at the same time ‘difficult.’ On the contrary, what is current,
what a man is doing and what he pursues, is for the most part, without
difficulty for him because he can always find, going from one being to
the next, a way of escape from difficulty and an explanation. The many
and the all too many pursue only the beings that are current; for them,
these are real, if not precisely ‘the’ reality. But in mentioning
‘reality,’ the throng attests that, besides what is currently
real, it has something else in view, which, to be sure, it does not clearly
see. The essence of the [greek wd], the ‘many,’ does not consist
in their number and mass, but in the way ‘the many’ comport
themselves toward beings. They could never be busy with beings wihout
having Being in view. Thus ‘the many’ see Being and yet do not
see it. But because they always have Being in view, although not its focus,
and only deal with, and calculate, and organize, beings, they ever find
their way within beings and are there ‘at home’ and in their
element. Within the limits of beings, of the real, of the ‘facts,’
so highly acclaimed, everything is normal and ordinary.”
“But where, on the contrary, Being comes into focus, there the extraordinary
announces itself, the excessive that strays ‘beyond’ the ordinary,
that which is not to be explained by explanations on the basis of beings.
This is the uncanny, literally understood and not in the otherwise sense
according to which it rather means the immense and what has never yet
been. For the uncanny, correctly understood, is neither immense nor tiny,
since it is not to be measured at all with the measure of a so-called
‘standard.’ The uncanny is also not what has never yet been
present; it is what comes into presence always already and in advance
prior to all ‘uncanninesses.’
the uncanny, as the Being that shines into everything ordinary. i.e.,
into beings, and that in its shining often grazes beings like the shadow
of a cloud silently passing. has nothing in common wit he monstrous or
the alarming. The uncanny is the simple, the insignificant, ungraspable
by the fangs of the will, withdrawing itsefl from all artifices of calculation,
because it surpases alll planning. .... The astounding is for the Greeks
the simple the insignificant, Being itself. the astounding, visible in
the astonishing, is the uncanny, and it pertains so immediately to the
ordinary that it can never be explained on the basis of the ordinary.”
from Parmenides, section entitled ‘Hidden counter-essence,’
by Martin Heidegger. This whole section is interesting but I don’t
feel like quoting the whole section. He also makes explicit the connection
between the uncanny and the daimonic. Both would be ‘middle ranges,’
but almost extremes within the middle of the banal, the everyday.
jan 22
I recently read a description of the christmas holidays in a novel where
each christmas was described as being like the one. That’s the nature
of ritual in societies that still have true ritual. They all overlap each
other until the First True People (or gods I guess) started the whole
thing in motion, all movement within the event back to the Original True
Event that powers the whole transtemporal structure. I’m reminded
also of the demonstrations of the possibilities of faster than light travel
by using black holes and worm tubes to bend space and time. The demonstration
used a piece of paper folded on itself, then a pencil punching through
where the paper touched. Voila! instant travel from one side of the paper/universe
to the other. Only memory does that now (was it ever different?) and in
conjunction with language, punching a hole in space/time to take us back
(and some would even contend, forward) usually to the similar golden age
of, not the gods, but childhood. The whole structure there is similar
to trauma also (and the hidden trailer clause of the uncanny), the bend
and the flow, the mutability of
jan 28
The next improv session will feature the ouija board and the i ching as
autonomous agents at the beginning of the program to set the tone and
title of the event. It seems obvious that improvisation owes a large amount
(if not everything) to the sort of reliance on automatism that divining
devices rely on. One could even go so far as to allow fo a bit of metaphysical
opening there, for some sort of Jungian oversoul or connectivity that
could be something more covert that more prosaic forms of communication.
... or maybe just mackenna's 'machine' at the end of time pulling us closer
but alwasy totally disguised as history....or your aunt, uncle, brother
or yr great grand parents or your DNA...
jan 30
Almost everyday I pass the spot where my father was killed.
The flourescent orange marks have long worn off,
spray painted on the MacAdam to designate the dispostion of the various
pieces of metal flung off and attidtues of the two opposing vehicles.
For awhile I tried to avoid going that way, but it’s the shortest
distance between here and there. And it’s seldom that I don’t
think the event when I pass the intersection ...and I pass it a lot.
For awhile when the orange marks were still visible there was this feeling
of, well, this doesn[t really capture it, of shame or embarassment. maybe
that’s not it. Maybe it’s the sense of one’s tragedy laid
out like performance cues for anyone to assume, but everybody passing
ove it with , really, only a vague idea of what the marks were indicating,
assuming they even saw them. And then after while they don’t see
them even subliminally because they become washed away. And then after
awhile I can only think about the palimpsest of tragic marks and wounds,
laid over and washed away, laid over and washed away, this way and that,
washed away over huge swatches of the paper that constitutes the world
-- except also cut, slashed, wadded up and flattened out and written on
again and again repeatedly, vague memory strokes even fading ..but still
leaving trajectories even if the originating mark can’t be traced.
(abandonment, geneology, homelessness, homesickness, out of mind, out
of body, refugee, exile, opening onto the vastness of the open itself...)
every time i go past the spot it’s like another page, or sort like
the same page, turning over on itself, some weird topological figure that
can’t be understood, only understood as BEING a topology, a vast
fold that only reveal a part of itself --a and yet that every part of
it is like every other part, flat but jutting out of sight. Who knows?
Maybe incribing figures in adjoining regions, each invisible to the other.
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