"Perhaps thinking itself must inevitably
turn to subterfuge when confronted with the aporia of time...
[....] The first step toward reversing philosophy's foreclosure of the other
is to think the otherness of time."
Ned Lukacher / Time-Fetishes: The Secret History
of Eternal Recurrence
"Unless I happen to become the vehicle of an unknown
force, which I then clumsily help to take shape, I cannot read, or write,
or even think. This vacuum is terrifying. I fill it up as best I can,
as one sings in the dark. Besides my medium-like stupidity effects an air
of intelligence which makes my blunders pass for subtle cunning, and my
sleepwalker's stumbling for the agility of an acrobat."
Jean Cocteau
August 28,1999
It's probably useless to continue any sort of semiotics of media--there
are plenty of such readings and they seem mostly to constitute an academicism
which rapidly revolves into parodies of themselves. In fact there is something
disheartening about it all; what is accomplished by it? (although much the
same can be said of almost everything)....
That being said, I happened to be watching Saturday morning television and
on the Disney channel of all things. There was an computer animated intro
or filler between shows with a sound track. We move into a large, complicated
city and the song recites the days of the week, our view point moving into
various businesses, the work days of a busy city, going over the roof tops,
etc., very flashy and well done. For Thursday and Friday they go into a
science fiction gothic factory space, the factory begins to transform like
a Japanese manbot or carbot, turning increasingly fanciful...we see a HUT
in a little grass field for the Saturday insignia...then back to the factory
and we see they have combined both scenes, the hut is on a spire on top
of the factory that is being pushed higher and higher by the mutational
fantasia down below, as playful vehicles begin to move on Saturn-like rings
around the whole mushrooming skyrocketing assembly, all of the energies
of the work week geared for one purpose, for this hut release on Saturday.
It had the feeling in a way of a cabinet of curios, something held aloft
to keep sacrosanct--and by the same token inaccessible, incredible efforts
directed to a very simple ideal, one basically unchanged by all the machination
all around it and even made quixotic the more one thinks about it. The hut
is like some sort of simple locket held by an ornate chain around one's
neck, holding something precious...unfortunately, it has been rusted shut
and all one can do is devise stronger and fancier chains to hold it as it
is passed along from one hand to another.
Unfortunately at a certain point no one is certain what it contains or if
it contains anything.
8.22
Let's face it: a (public) life has `importance' for us only if it has climbed
to the top of the demographic pyramid (by whatever means) or is somehow
rutting around beneath the base of it. Standing the pyramid on it's head
-- as the net tends to do with its pornographic/conspiratorial rhizome --
doesn't change the hierarchical configuration all that much. yet. ...might
make for a precarious balancing act..HELLO!??
8.23
I couldn't sleep around two in the last morning last night so I go up and
clicked around the cable. Sometimes I play a Breton-esque game where I try
to catch wards or sentence parts from different channels.
But last night I came across this guy Bob Larson (heh, easy to get him confused
with the cartoonist--or one of Gary's characters anyway) who is a TV preacher
with a twist. His big interest apparently is the occult and the demonic.
I remember coming across one of his shows (that time he was affecting some
kind of radio announcer drag, with headphones draped over his shoulders,
sitting in front of a mike in a control room) trying to convince us that
UFOs were spawn of the devil, Satan's minions come as scouting parties in
advance of the millennium, come to grab some souls ahead of time.
Well, his new thing is public exorcisms evidently. He showed a church in
Alaska that he `performed' in and a few minutes into his spiel, a commotion
breaks out in the audience, and some kid with braces on his teeth who is
`possessed by the devil' comes forward, all hunched up, sort of huffing
his words in a growl as Larson escorts him to the front. The boy's father
is hastily summoned who, while seeming slightly bemused, participates in
the exorcism. In the course of the thirty minute show, we go through the
whole narrative of postulation, discovery, confrontation, overcoming, and
deliverance and salvation. I couldn't tell whether the whole thing was staged
or whether the boy was somehow `ventriloquized' by Larson; certainly there
was staging involved, of however disingenuous or unconscious fashion.
It will be interesting to see the fate of this Larson approach for the TV
preachers. Gone are the days when folks simply recited their devotion to
Christ and hopes of redemption. Now, in the times of `routine' serial killers,
high school killings and so on, what is required is for the devil to manifest
himself in the midst of the believers own sanctuary! and to be overcome
of course... Perhaps one day the parishioners won't be so lucky; I wonder
what kind of times THAT will be reflective of...
-----
From some notes I found (among other disturbing things, like a book made,
given to me, by a certain person, with photos. I opened it then slammed
it shut. I thought I had burned everything...I have to resign myself that
there is no release from this...no release not seeing her, no release seeing
her);:
some startled grace
a calling
on the sly
everything revolves
on
ice hinges
turning melting
freezing
stuck, slanted grief
warmed
to passing touch
then
slid
from
grace to grave
gravity's halo.
-------------
The first hint of autumn today, rain for the first time in a month, cool,
overcast. I have things I should be doing, things I should be thinking....but
the office cleanup and...discoveries I made, have made me both listless
and restless. I can't even manage to pull a moral out of anything. I wrote
this in an email last night to someone:
we live in a deadly metallic universe, contradictory, mean and cruel yet
exhilirating at the same time, a Nietzschean world in fact, frenzied dancing
on the precipice as the fiddler plays harder and faster, driving us all
into delirium:
"We are for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging
desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction
of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless
forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of
the exuberant fertility of the universal will.
...in spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as
individuals, but as the ONE living being, with whose creative joy we are
united."
F. Nietzsche
I had planned to write more tonight but I was up till 3 last night and up
early this morning..feeling very un-productive and tired...I think all this
writing about L. is starting to have an affect (sic) on me...it
used to be that I got up thinking about her and went to bed obsessing about
her, getting up in cold sweats thinking thinking thinking ... RIDICULOUS!!
really, give me a fuckin' break cheatham.
sorry. flashbacks...lots of people got it lots worse than me, I got it easy
really (like all yr losses for example)...stuff, people break off in you
and it/they festers and forms cavities and you can't get the shit out (whether
its mothers or L. or P. or daddies or nieces or That One Special Time or
That One or That Beach or That Smell, That Nipple, That Rose, That Road,
That Fuck, That Front Door...gag gag gag
sorry...I'll try to be a little more civil next time, just feeling
very tired tonight...'loose and hard to swallow' as Bowie sez..
rob
we're possessed by other people in one way or another. I came across this
quote rummaging around this morning which I'm using for my .sig now:
"In truth, we are potentially or actually hallucinating people
during the greater part of our lives."
from a book on the Freud/Fliess correspondence.
poor reader. are you getting as fatigued as me?
--------
Eleven p.m.
after a more or less worthless day, I decided to do some design work. Took
a break to walk around the block. I feel like the neither-hot-nor-cold weather:
I'm neither happy nor sad, neither this nor that, a sort of mote floating
along the small brick middle class ranch houses. No lights on to speak of,
even at eleven o'clock. Almost a full moon, will be tomorrow I guess. I
feel tonight like that figure head on a prow of a ship, the earth ship you
remember from my childhood fantasy, moving scud like through the scuds and
remnants of the twentieth century. Even though I'm not this, I'm not that...I'm
still at the breaking wave of life. And I always will be as long as I'm
alive. No one is farther along than me and never will be; we are each on
the prow of our own ship facing always into the wind (well, it does die
down occasionally). No matter what, at this time and under this moon---this
is the breaking wave (and the only one) of time (what was it that program
on the discovery of longitude said? "As long as you know the time,
you're not lost." One would like to think that as long as you are alive,
in some respects you have a rough estimate of, if not THE, at least time
in its most fundamental sense. But of course that would mean we are never
lost, a thought which requires a rather large leap of faith. But I can see
a certain truth in that. It's the place that religion is born. But also
panic attacks. And Cartesian grids. And malevolent gods...
But then isn't that sometimes the problem? We ARE time, no matter how you
slice it. When I die time stops and I'm not only lost I'm NOT...
But as long as I AM ... why, yes, I'm at the crest of the wave...even if
it does feel awfully tattered and unstable ...
When I was a kid I had a terrible cold which turned into a mild form of
pneumonia. I would have terrible gushes of phlegm which I could hardly swallow.
One day I COULDN'T swallow and had a terrible panic attack, gasping for
breath, running around the house, banging into doors, wildly trying to breathe.
When my mother finally took me to the doctor, he told her not to worry,
that if I did pass out, I would relax, my throat would lose it's constriction
and I would start breathing again.
I guess that's why we have booze. Passing out thought is a hard way to get
a modicum of relaxation and surcease from pain.
8.27
I've been doing a little graphic work lately with some clip art books. When
I find an image or part of an image I want to use I put a piece of card
stock behind the page and then use an Exacto knife to cut out the image.
I cam back the next day to the couch where I was working and found an enigmatic
piece I didn't remember cutting out. It was a small piece, about the size
of a nickel, a line drawing of the heads of two women, joined sort of at
the hair area, one flowing in a slightly different direction from the other.
The cutting seemed pretty precise around the whole small piece, following
the indentations and curves of the heads and hair of the two women, looking
somewhat like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle except with an intact image.
Except that I didn't cut it out. On the back of the piece, was just a random
section of another piece of line art, indecipherable even. When I first
sat down the next day and saw it, I thought that perhaps I had inadvertently
cut through to a second page, maybe forgetting my backing card stock. That,
however, seems improbable given the preciseness with which the image is
traced/cut.
So, there is sort of an enigma: was the piece cut by happenstance, by accident,
and such that I forgot or was unconscious of the deed? Or by some other,
un-named because unknowable, process, a process of miraculation that operates,
or hides, solely in the realm of the banal commonplaces of everyday life,
some miracle-making machinery that lurks in the interstices of the ordinary,
revealing to us things we already know, manifesting objects that masquerade
as the detritus of the first order reality which we daily navigate. Strangely
enough they would be apports which would immerse us MORE fully into the
time stream, rather than having the effect of lifting us out, almost like
tab stops on a word program, tacking us into place more solidly, even our
miracles rounding themselves almost immediately back into the home space,
spending almost no conceptual time between the stars or in the `ether'.
Well, that's a disturbing thought. Even our latter-day `miracles' would
act to hem us into the fabric of `nowness'. Only a slight misplacement,
or ever-so-slight change of features, which would then pose itself as a
temporal gap, or memory loss, piece of forgetfulness, to a pragmatic age:
the only way that `the miraculous' can survive, by inching itself through
the clutter, the flotsam and jetsam, of our constructed world (itself of
a fairly miraculous nature if you think about it hard enough), some cartoon
character running from pillar to post, occasionally taking the shape of
a mis-sewn teletubbie, laying forgotten on the carpet of the factory floor.
There, in the occasional odd mispronunciation of matter, would be the only
place that a certain `depth' of time (what used to be called `eternity')
could hide, biding it's time ... or, on the other hand, perhaps in the final
stages of decay, if we can even think in TERMS of eternity decaying into
the rag tag assortments in the cut-out bins of western technical culture.
Then it would have been quite a trip from the great world-forming prophesies
and miracles (of which we are the final fruiting) of the early Egyptians,
Jews, Christians, and Greeks, to the `bellowing miracle' of Schreber, to
a forgotten slip of paper, a misplaced accent so to speak.
Perhaps (if I could indulge in a bit of extreme speculation---and if I can't
do it in my own millennial journal then where??!) perhaps such a slight
fluttering at the edges of the world (like walking though an autumn forest
floor, slight movement of leaves all around, myriad hidden life forms underneath)
is indicative of that pregnant moment in the Great Turning of the hourglass
of the world that doctrines of the Eternal Return speak of, a moment of
pause and stillness (this could be an extended moment of course, extended
even over many years). The fluttering gradually changes to shaking, as the
grains of temporal sand begin to run back through, then to great guffaws
of laughter, sheets of cosmic jest rain down, slipping back into some predawn
world, where only a slight rustle of matter is heard/felt (maybe only the
joining and stripping of DNA at some point), grinding against its neighbor
before the necessary temporal heat is generated to thaw the Great Cycle
again. Over and over and over.
Such thinking at least has the therapeutic value of seeing the immediacy
of contemporary human values as so much dross. Therapeutic in that it takes
some of the burden off of one (OK then, me) to have the `right' ego. But
of course maybe that's simply another ploy of the Great Turning, especially
when it's demographically magnified...
(As a side note, I am reading Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal
Recurrence --hence the opening quotes for September -- and just found something
apropos to the above : "There have always been two `countertimes':
the resistant, aporetic character of true (or absolute) time, and philosophy's
attempt to pass off its prosthetic replacement for the thing-in-itself."
This occulted other stream I suppose is what I often refer to as `Egyptian'
-- a misuse no doubt just as severe as those who would wish to demonize
that particular tributary. But it seems that we have few choices in the
matter at this late date. Certain philosophers attempt to hold those gates
open or at least bring attention to those `hinge' mechanisms (thinking of
Derrida specifically here)...but that is misunderstood just as often also..)
-------
Many, many people feel deprived now (I'm speaking of the extended `now'
of modernism), and often it is phrased as a deprivation of justice (there
are some many objects around now being manufactured, new ones and those
left over from the previous cycle of manufacture that one doesn't hear as
much about that kind of deprivation anymore--just as often a kind of suspicion
of those objects, and the `miracles' and incongruities they induce in their
surroundings.
And in a way, that deprivation is a disappearance of one of those `time-fetishes'
that Lukacher spoke of, or the feeling that `time is out of joint' as Hamlet
speaks of it. Without going too far into the Heideggerean analysis it derives
from, I'd like to take the chance that this won't make any sense but at
least give this extended quote from Lukacher who in turn quotes Derrida,
on the collision of the concepts of justice and time; I guess decon's answer
to that in-justice (deprivation)/time equation is to attempt to hold both
of them open:
"The task of thinking the irreducibility of anachrony, of the necessity
that it be named, and the impossibility (at least for now) of knowing the
referent of that name become for Derrida synonymous with thinking the meaning
of justice: `Does not justice as relation the other suppose...the irreducible
excess of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, - some `out of joint'
dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking
evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is
no calculable insurance, would alonte be able to do justice or to render
justice to the other as other' (Spectres of Marx). The first step toward
reversing philosphy's foreclosure of the other is to think the otherness
of time."
Which seems impossible...or when it does come close, drives one to vertiginous
paroxysms as in Nietzsche's fallings into meditations on the Eternal Return.
8.30
We love our preconceptions. We can't live without them really. It would
be hard to live in the turmoil of freshly turned soil everyday., of having
to set up mental house every time we had to deal with a problem.
And yet that is what seems increasingly being asked of us by a culture which
is speeding up. After all, the whole fetish of the cyborg is of a creature
that is capable of plugging into any situation, assessing it, then finding
the right `plug-in' which will deal with it. Any kind of filter `pre-set'
(such as a `self' or a `personality') slows down the relay time between
problem and solution. (that's why it will be interesting to see what happens
to `advertising'. Advertisements come increasingly to seem interface-like
much like the human personality they are designed to lock into. Adverts
have traditional narrative structures, even if they are only very compact
and concise codings or perhaps part of a narrative which is then filled
in by the consumer, like codons in a DNA string.
The question is whether it is a NECESSARY interface. One can make a respectable
argument that a `personality' (of some sort) is a necessary surface for
consciousness to negotiate the boundary between inside/outside more effectively
and to produce higher-order units, i.e., society, culture and civilization.
(critics of the necessity of personality -- individuation really -- might
claim that the social insects do not find the need for such an apparatus;
however there is a vicious hermeneutic circle here since it would be very
difficult to prove that social insects -- bees, ants, etc. -- don't have
some version of individuation to which we are not privy, or perhaps even
that different hives have different `personalities'...)
And one could make the argument that advertising is a necessary interface
between the economic apparatus and the individual or identity group, acting
as simultaneously a notification service and feedback loop. The question
is, how necessary is the seduction aspect of its semiotic? The net acts
to bring many of these questions into bold relief, shortly before it acts
to change them/confound them/detour them...The most salient image for the
way the net operates is the old game of choosing by grabbing a baseball
bat, then the other side grabs it above the first hand, then the other person
grabs it, alternating till the top of the bat is reached and the person
who is able to grab and hold it then gets to make the call..it's just that
in the case of the net, its a very long handle...
------
Here's the social for many people today. (As Derrida says, it makes the
US of A the, ahem, natural ground for deconstruction...America IS deconstruction.
but the people who would proffer the following inchoately held views would
be the first to condemn many aspects of any formal `theory' of such ---such
suspicion being another aspect of post-struc.).)..these comments are the
result of several encounters recently:
let's get rid of truth...cause otherwise there are lies
let's get rid of beauty...cause then the ugly appears.
let's get rid of money..then everyone will have some.
let's get rid of the best...cause the worse always accompanies it.
let's get rid of god...since the devil rides on those coattails.
let's take away everything from everybody, then I'll have something...
but, really, at bottom: let's get rid of a `you' and that will give `me'
more room to move....
This of course is the expanded self discourse except given over to the discourse
of social agency, and hence disguising its nihilistic aspect....instead
of using objects/money to expand our self, we simply use other people. sometimes
it works out and sometimes it doesn't. (and by working, I mean that both
parties get to nihilistically expand their selves, both the server and the
served.)
9.8
Working in the `material world' today, trying to prepare a piece to donate
to an art auction for my favorite gallery...nevertheless very tiresome,
frustrating, and extremely annoying to deal with recalcitrant THINGS. I
get very impatient and my attempts to `center' don't work very well when
I'm attempting to wrestle a 100 pound piece into place.
An any rate. I went to Mississippi this labor day weekend to visit the folks;
herewith the tale, before, during and after:
i-20 shotguns out of Atlanta directly west into Birmingham, then squiggles
a bit before both barrels shoot west again, past Cuba, past Moscow and then
skirting Meridian
Mississippi. My destination for labor day, just to get out of town for a
few days, is my families `ancestral shack' in Philadelphia MS. At Meridian
the exit for state highway 19 in the bedraggled tail end of town (never
mind that most of the town looks bedraggled), shunts me off the main path
a bit then shoots me west again for thirty miles, the road transducing from
the continental 90 mph express to the local four lane then stopping down
to the standard southern 2 lane blacktop, past piney woods, logging trucks
and small isolated houses -- hell, just six miles outside of Meridian there
is a sign notifying you of such -- but no shops, no billboards, just country
side till you cross over a hill and there it is.
The thin wire of highway 19 finally connects with Philadelphia and just
a couple of miles over from my mother's parents' farm, now long dead both
them and the farm; a mile or two from my parents house, then through town
and eight more miles down highway 16 to the Silver Star Casino, the memory
of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman only dimly recalled over the ker-chink
of quarters droppin' to poppa.
As I'm just a few miles outside of town, dropping past scenery that has
dropped past for years, I think how amazing it is -- and agonizing -- to
be FROM SOMEWHERE! It's a simple thing but it's staggering when I really
think about it and the thought quickly ramifies, as I consider that I was
conceived and born here, under some approximation of these stars and electromagnetic
flux, born here into a solid, but rapidly dwindling point, like a micro
black hole, ungraspable yet also inescapable from its tidal forces. I feel
like I'm flashing between poles trying to make sense of this, what often
seems to be of no consequence to folks, simple fact.
You go in the casino now and it's like being in any big city, every ethnicity
sitting as close as possible to the slots. Prejudice no longer rules but
Chance and Capital do, as befits the coming Quantum Society. Even more than
with industrial society, with chance operations you see what seems to be
a perfect fit, the Casino and the Lottery being the coming forms that will
organize culture, the Society of Gaming. When I was a kid I always thought
that gambling was either a James Bond type deal, whipping around Monte Carlo
in a tux after just having lost/won a bundle or hanging out at the pool
hall, hustling for nickeles and dimes. Heck, maybe that's what it WAS thirty
years. If so, no more: it's now firmly integrated into the educational establishment
first at a base level, that is, the state lottery funds many educational
initiatives, just as casinos are powering many Indian reservations now (in
Philadelphia the casino is on Chata property)--and in Philadelphia itself
it's the only night life/entertainment/bar scene/fancy restaurant for many
miles around. In fact, it's still a shock to me to see it sitting there,
like some drag queen at the county fair -- of course never mind that s/he's
missing a few teeth. Adds a bit of that Flannery O'Conner charm I suppose.
(Speaking of which, I was thumbing through a book of her essays recently
and in one she was complaining about the lack of `southern writers' at a
conference on/of southern writers, much like a conference of Jewish writers
I saw on c-span recently where they were commenting on the same phenomena,
that the idea of a specifically Jewish thematic among younger writers seemed
to be falling by the wayside. How could it be otherwise? All regional cultures
are disappearing, that's not a particularly new phenomena. I certainly feel
the pull of a certain `southernness' but in the past I've been mostly appalled
at that centripetal force -- and at the centripetal force that all `identity
writing' represents...I guess one could legitimately ask whether or not
ALL writing is not some form of identity writing.. Certainly deconstruction
is a constant twining around that problematic--and, just like a vine, requires
those structures in order to operate [though it does seem to me that `deconstruction
fantasizes' about the disappearance of those structures -- and therein lie
very deep political waters, because it does seem to me that decon. subtends
the in-human and the non-human, a problematic that the liberal as well as
the conservative would like to go away ... However it's NOT going to go
away because deconstruction, thy name is Technology, written with an uncanny
quill -- or perhaps a laser.])
And also the combinatoric is allied with coding, DNA being a good example.
But that's for another time.
----------------
So sometimes I can't decide (and is it as simple a thing as a decision?),
honestly I can't Ms. O'Connor, whether it's a good thing to be FROM SOMEWHERE
--what we take to be a blatant inevitability -- or to be a creature from
Nowhere, an aim that techno/net/cyber culture seems to shot for. (of course
we know that UTOPIA means `nowhere').
I guess the idea is that if you are form somewhere there's always baggage,
the past, an anchor slowing you down, slowing down the final arrival of
the Quantum State, when the entire population will be quivering in an uncertain
start (if nothing else because of Speed), like that cat in Schrodinger's
box, uncertain of it's life or death.
I remember Artaud struck delirious by the mystic rock masses climbing out
of the Mexican landscape and his speculations on their eldritch effects
on the natives, the landscape itself somehow being that ungraspable but
inescapable `fact', spitting us out and somehow pulling us back... (all
of which is germane to speculations on the Eternal Return and Nietzsche)...It
would seem however that the machine is immune to the imprecations of the
landscape, mystic or otherwise--and if the eternal return does not somehow
reside in the landscape (after all, Nietzsche even at Sils Maria, Heidegger
with his grecian temple, me with my buzzing locust in late summer -- good
company I keep, eh? --, the pyramids, still whispering to us all over the
world [again?] -- then ...where? (of course we do have an `internal landscape',
it's called deoxyribonucleic acid.)
-----
There would be times in the past when, as I approached the town, the air
would be saturated with images, vignettes, stories, reflectiing dimly off
the mist on my eyes, bits and pieces of a past snapping past, disturbing
only in their vivacity, occluding almost the roadway...doesn't matter the
contents, banal summer's eve, tumbling past childhood incidents, no remembered
abductions by little gray aliens, no recalled sexual assaults by deranged
or drunken relatives, no terrible bends in the fabric of space and time
whch now twist me around, mobius-like, to reface myself and confront my
attackers, no sense of necessary vengence, a wrathful victimology curling
round and supporting my accusations.
But...I do know now the obsessiveness that such events can bring, the traumatic
re-entrances into one's psychic life that it can stage, the delaying tactics,
obfuscations, and damages such events can cause, both in the body politic
and the individual. But in an odd way there a comfort in such looped events,
continually shuttling from present to past, to present, over and over and
again, with not only no desire to forget and forgive but an active desire
to remember and avenge --- but with no possibility of that redress really.
How can one redress the grievances of the past? Eternal returns within eternal
returns, wheels within wheels -- and like illness there can be a comfort
in that, a weave over a central abyss of the nothing we have constructed
our lives over the `top' of (I scare quote it because the strands of the
weave itself are made of that `nothing'; constructed of nothing but the
difference between b and p as the linguists say), the furious and torturous
shuttling of the loom of trauma (and maybe Schopenhauer had it right, that
there is something of the nature of a bruise simply in being conscious,
even without any extra added grievance and that some are more sensitive
to that condition, the so called artistic or poetic sensibility).
Consciousness has to have a certain dammed-up quality, a stoppage and buildup
of life's pulsions and flows for it to begin to become an `it', a difference
from the rest of the world, a knot tied in the world which somehow knows
it's a knot -- and consequently knows it is a not also; perhaps consciousness
can be likened to that knot in the shoulders when, under stress, we hold
our selves as if in reaction to a coming blow .... after a while the knowledge
that we have shoulders phosphoresces into vivid existence and shortly after
that, the pain virtually detaches the shoulder from our body -- or with
one wishing it could be so detached.
I don't think that one can come to turns with the pain of another's existence
until one has grappled with the terms of one's own painful being in the
world....in fact since apparently a good deal of human pain is CAUSED by
the pain of others who find it necessary to work out their pain upon the
body of another (the marquis de Sade would be appropriate here), that would
seem to be always a necessary first step. And it could be that even `do-gooders'
work out their pain on the body of another, at least in terms of these internal
dynamics (from whence comes, perhaps, the old saying to the effect that
some of the greatest evils come from those attempting to do good). It certainly
seems structurally all to be part of the same phenomena, of some sort of
strange unavowed reciprocity.
And there is this also; there is a kind of drama in evil don't you think?
A narrative arc that `good' seems to lack and a depth and intensity that
good seems to miss out on. Evil (and hence trauma) appeals to a Spectacular
Age (which, let's admit it, is every age that the human as we know it has
been involved in).
But it does seem true that an age of global electronic representational
apparatuses does seem to ramify such effects, to increase certain tensions
and intensities, slaking our appetite and increasing it at the same time
(for example, there seems to be a diminution in the possibilities of global
conflict and an increase in smaller scale tensions, down to the individual
level; the decline of war and the rise of really violent video games...)
The thing that most complicates the Socratic maxim to `know thyself' is
the human love of the theatrical, the poetic and the lie. And for that matter
love itself.
-----
9.12
A brief interlude here at, what? about 5 in the morning is it? A simple
question really: is there anything more stupid than a man around a pretty
woman? Is there anything more fucked up? All of a sudden judgment goes out
the window, any kind of reasonable assessment of a situation becomes completely
skewed....
love?
Ha!! what a weird concept...
sex? even weirder...
and then, this morning (and before this damn NIGHT which is now almost DAY)
this dream as I was waking up: A phone call left on my message machine;
it's L. I can recognize her very distinctive voice, seductive, alluring...I
don't know hat she's saying but there is another female voice on the line,
both laughing, more like taunting... is there anything more torturous than
some women.... or anything more... more...torturously DELICIOUS.
I suspect this is all I want to write for September....
sigh...I'm tired of the Old Kingdom...when does the New Kingdom begin??! |