dromos

(from an installation)



"For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the 'ancient contaminations'." Roberto Calasso

The race course has been pitched to a new level---but levels go up AND down, right? (bad case of enantiadromia: every state of development at its zenith pitches over into its opposite). But...even so... those levelings can be crossed, obliquely (there you go, loxodromic), perhaps requiring abandoned gods fitting the descriptions of Gustave Moreau as it ITSELF becomes crossed with the clonal crossings of the Island of Dr. Moreau: "Huge, pale figures, tremendous, lonely, dark and desolate, fatal, mysterious lovers condemned to titanic infamies. What will become of you? What will your destiny be? Where can you hide your fearful passions?" (But we have a plan, we, us humans, to deal with such, and this is always where we seem to wind up folks; as that great metaphysician Bela Lugosi put it in Bride of the Monster "Home? I have no Home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal; the jungle is my home. But I shall show the world that I can be it's master. I shall perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen that will conquer the world." )

Suffering from gadget disorders, the fundamentals of fetishism, we will no doubt find it hard to pass from the Thing to its outlet, to its let out-ness or even better, to the acting-out (escape even) of that Thing in itself, that bit of plastic, silicon, copper, whatever, scooting away from us (always 'scooting away' but never quite making it, the nature of the act-trying-to-get-out, can't get no traction in the rain), tending to its chores in the solar system.

It's the hardest cross-over act in the world, hanging on the edges of frayed rotting matter, looking over to the next clump zipping ahead of us, maybe into the future we think -- always brighter and shinier, yes? Atomic supermen on the march!

It's the fearful en-trance of Einstein's spukhafte fernwirkungen accusation against Niels Bohr's new quantum club, beginning to beat god about the head: 'Spooky action at a distance'-too much like some hoo doo infection, some non-locus hocus pocus (etymologically speaking, some trans-substantiation going on there, from the latin meaning: "here is the body"-now of course it means: "WHERE the heck is the body!?", just about the only thing we can get out of Freud's fort/da swollen foot dance now, the Oedipus Waltz, holding our collective familydrama breaths [in waltzology, atem pauze] in between phase-state changes.

And then, too, this, ex post facto, is what the old folks pass back and forth: "...he is surrounded by night; suddenly a bloody head juts forth here, there another white figure, and just as suddenly they disappear. One glimpses this night when one looks into the eyes of another human -- into a night which becomes frightening; here each of us is suspended confronting the night of the world." G.W.F. Hegel

the dream of exhaustion

From a project that never got projected:

Exhaustion can be a paradoxical affect. It is at one and the same time physiological and also conceptual, encompassing fatigue, depression, boredom, mania, confusion.  Marina van Zaylen believes that “exhaustion [….] has a curious way of eradicating more complex signs of weariness, one of which being the indeterminate state we call fatigue.” Perhaps that is so. However the adjective ‘curious’ may indicate a wider gyre for exhaustion as it fights–-by collapsing into a syncope—for larger beginnings rather than only individual physiologies and pathologies, although they can both indicate the beginning of resistances).  Exhaustion is about fatigue as well as elation. Anyone who has ever observed small children at play at the end of day can see the register of exhaustion switch to manic energy before collapse and sudden rehabilitative sleep. Once could perhaps even say that the unconscious is more often summoned by the collapse of exhaustion. Depression, worry, failure, violence, fatigue, mania and all the other affective eddies which exhaustion drags in its wake can lead to either a quiescent amor fati or revolution or revelation.

Nevertheless to even concentrate on exhaustion seems like a grinding propaedeutic, a waylaying and perpetual beginning of legitimate topics—which intensifies the feeling of exhaustion for all who might work in such tenebrous and infrathin margins. Various net searches only begin to draw more gloom, not because of the net’s own darkness (does it have any properly speaking?) but because it has none. Or because it is in the process of enclosure of its darkness by light, the wavering line where information becomes noise and vice versa.

                THE SECRET DREAM OF EXHAUSTION

Exhaustion exists mostly in its macerated by-productions, like when we speak of the exhaust of a car, a generator where the real work is a going forward while the exhaust/ion pushes out behind, falling into more decay, formlessness. But perhaps the ‘curious way’ of van Zaylen’s overarching concept of exhaustion, it’s inclusion of all other sites of breakdown, physical and mental, DOES function as the larger dream of the earth, an un-noticed Bataillean excess, a shapeless geochthonic  mass always escaping—and undermining—our most precious productions and predictions. Whether it be our own body’s waste material, or the negentropic outlier of our machinic culture, an uncountable and largely invisible excess, produced by exhaustion and leading to more exhaustion, piles up behind us, under us, all around us, the true aspect of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History being blown backward into the future (perhaps for the diaphanous sempiternal Realm of Angels, production and its exhaust are all the same in their effects/affects/special effects; inasmuch as they exist as bits of etheric desoeuvrement, workless, community-less forms much like exhaust itself –which we  can never own nor WANT to own, it is always our past and our future but never, not now anyway, our NOW. Much like our Coming Selves in fact, perhaps composed of nothing but exhaust and exhaustion, folded back into earth processes. But then perhaps the dream of exhaustion is not simply an emptying out, creating a husk, a shell, a semblance mimicking life/death, work/not, but a supersaturation, reversing the relations where what is valuable is the precipitate from exhaust, the non/thing which is larger than life, than work, than art, a dark matter/energy which can only be sketched in its absence, in its wish to come. Perhaps the dream of exhaust is to be equilibrated with the exhaustion of its production, stranding us again in the dark zero of the angels.)

68 steps

I have been visiting this house off and on for sixty plus years. It seems like a UFO appearing and vanishing, this internallly illuminated community of Cheathams--and an all-consuming one at that--now abducted to the nether world, just bits of engraved granite down the street scattered, nothing but sepia post cards gathered in gray matter three second vignettes flipping up and disintegrating where life size cards flip up in shooting ranges People say why mix all these modes together the theory with the banal chintz: because these are the zones that cohabit me and maybe because I don't have a lot of cute southern stories to tell no Song of the South anymore it's like I never lived here or born here but somehow being continually pushed here, uncertainty and destabilization yes but comfort no the infinite seeming divide here this disintegrating Now leaving a few pearls in the ashes of being closer to the othered, the back end, the end that falls off also into the blankness of infinity or no not even that maybe less or maybe more maybe nothing but the golden shivers of childhood, the Summer Land, the Fort/da of leave-taking and returns, building forts in the middle of the uncanny chaos we are thrown into. dogs whirling in fields of waist high grasses making their own homecoming "look what we got here, a hermaphrodite kid and his confederate yankee daddy!" uncle W. upon entering the white House on the Hill one summer after moving to the City, the summer of love actually):

from perforations 30

The Fort!

Da?

".... Infancy names the insistence, even the exigency of the

fictive or the figural in conscious life (the exigency that gives

the insistence of the primal scene).

[....] "Infancy has an irreducibly 'fabulous' dimension."

Christopher Fynsk

 

"[The infant or child] enters or is entered into, the places where

speech falters and language chokes in the throat of a political

body, where the questions of fair representation is peremptorily

dismissed or simply not addressed."

Avital Ronell

 

In the case of the hut, the child is indeed father to the man....but what of the

mother? Whenever architects write about the hut, it always begins -- and

ends -- with the primitive, that other to the place that we are always subsided

to in western culture.

 

Everything is always seen to take the path from lowest to highest, a time

scheme which allows for the piling of debris behind (or in front of,

depending on whose viewpoint you take) the angel of history.

But as a child growing up in the wilds of Mississippi, there was no past, and

the future was planned within the confines of numerous 'forts', built and then

abandoned. We were like dogs, twisting in the high grass to flatten it, a

holding place, just enough space to rest and peer over the top of the seeing but unseen. Haven't little boys (and girls? Shouldn't there be a maternal /

 but unseen. Haven't little boys (and girls? Shouldn't there be a maternal /fort

function there [

da

] also?)

always built Forts? But then aren't

Fathers always just returning from the War and just so, aren't little boys

always building forts? Isn't the fairy kingdom of the ancient ones in the

hillock always over the next rise? A fortification of the Eternal against the

depredations of the present, hedge against the closing of the porthole,

childhood is itself the gradually eroding fort-against-time, sempiternal now

hollowed out, rotted from the outside in (or is it the other way round? Those

huddled in the fort of the Red Death are sempiternally the last to know).

A childhood fort is not even yet a hut, that most minimal of adult habitat, but

is vaporous, porous to time, even as it attempts to grasp it and balance

evenly between above and below. The fabulousness of the fort or the child's

dwelling is no more than a sketch, sometimes literally chalk on pavement, a

demarcation of inside and outside. Or no more than a confabulation of

cardboard and quilt. (Indeed, it is often a point de capiton

as Jacques Lacan had it, a quilting point, or sedimentation of meanings gathered together and re-eniforced, a place for the sprouting of the fabulous and the mythic. Later, as

the fort morphs into the hut, the Freudian

fort/

da

function is perhaps more

descriptive with the dispersion of meaning that the 'da' of the other, over

there, brings into play: it is no longer a matter of circling the wagons but of

making a mark to allow entry through other thresholds, not a gathering in a

clearing but an

ecstasis, sinking in, uncannily, and not out, sublimely: the

difference between the juvenile fort and the adult hut.)

 

The fort formed a juridical outline of space and action, perhaps the first

'legal' outline that the child can establish outside the home (no wonder it's

called a fort!), the first outside force or strength (the meaning of 'fort) that

the child can muster.

Deep in the piney woods of Mississippi I built

forts, nestled in clumps of privet hedge in an

otherwise featureless plain of perpetual twilight

pine barrens, carpeted by pine needles; or bits of

lumber nailed together almost haphazardly in low

lying limbs above blackberry bogs; or scooped out

of muscadine vine rambles; cornstalks woven

together in the middle of a dry, feverishly hot corn

field and more. Some lasted a day, some weeks or

even months, a very few perches hanging

bedraggled from tree limbs after years, still.

As Giorgio Agamben notes, play transforms structures into events. (It is left

to adults to reverse that process into memorialization.) The childhood play

of de-marking space into forts, huts, and fairy circles enters into an

acceleration of time to the point of a momentary stoppage of history ... or

rather, the formation of a palimpsest of times in the guise of spaces, with

immediate forgettings.

 

Curved round into the beginning, the ghostly carapace of the fort fades into

the structure of to-come, an extemporization of the boundaries and

thresholds yet to be marked.

---

(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no

more, suppose, suppose this: the child - is he seven years old, or eight

perhaps? - standing by his window, drawing the curtain and, through

the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall

of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child's way, his play space,

he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with

clouds, grey light - pallid daylight without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely

black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had

broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore

been lost therein - so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the

vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all

nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable

feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the

child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an

endless flood of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow;

attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live

henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.

Maurice Blanchot/

The

Writing of the Disaster

---

O touseled head standing on the edge of the 'hundred year ocean' eyeing vast

expanses of twilight night stretching overhead and in front, receding to

infinity, steps on royal road fading to unseen inevitable failure...but now,

NOW! Life stretches out like a train speeding to the horizon in a Kansas

wheatfield, a limitless blinding expansion except every expansion needs an

expansion gap, an exception, a marking to set off remaindered

impossibilities: fortification, to enable impossible happiness, destined to

loop around beginning to end, from fort to coffin, both containers of

im/possibilities, delayed, defrayed, forgotten, alpha and omega of

desoeuvrement

, workless in any possible world.

---

Only Children can create a counting rhyme that opens up to

impossibility and only children can sign of it happily.

M. Blanchot / The Step Not Beyond

-----

Oh Fort! The first/last halo we will have, going from skin, to marking on

world-skin, to the halo of the debris of your worklessness pretending to be

useful, to coffin, to earth, world layered round with the bones of the dead,

ivoried interlock waiting for the last round, pretending to see everywhere

and always.

'Hence the 'halo' always indicated, in some way or

another, a change of the nature of time. It signified

the haloed individual person or place, participated

also in a category of 'time' which was different from

the one determining the natural life on earth as the

medieval mind understood it. The halo, it is true, did

not remove its bearer into the

aeternitus Dei which is

without continuity because in all times, past and

future, are present. Yet the halo removed its bearer

too: removed him, scholastically speaking, from

Tempus to aevum

, from Time to semipiternity"

Kantorowitz

, The King's Two Bodies

Oh! Halo of material circling, circling, circling, endless immemorial summer

of childhood, thin hub of light layered over the frozen waste world of

childhood's end in Spielberg's AI

AI

(all you crankheads out there moaning

about the epistemological errancy of this vision of total intelligence: go tell

your mama!) the child plays on, even as thought slows to a stop, protracted

in time's abysmal fort/da):

'Aion

is a

child

at play, playing draughts'

(

Heraclitus’ fragment B 52

: “The age (eternity /

aion

) is

the kingship of a child, playing dice (knucklebones,

draughts)”)

Night Stand

Night Stand

A student of mine commented to me that I seem to read a lot different types of books. Yeah I guess so. It's a habit started a long time ago, one that's hard to break and one that seems to ramify/expand its parameters over the years. One thing leads to another I suppose and the more 'one thing' s you read the more others there are.

1. When I was a kid my mother made me enroll in the the little Town's local library summer reading program: silver, green, blue, and gold stars depending on how many you went through. I can still remember the tiny library in the court house on the square in small-town Mississippi and the prim librarian. But I only remember three books from that whole period. The first one, oddly, was a red covered copy of Das Capital to the left of the door as you first entered (never tried to read it, hell, I would've been around eight then--guess the bright red cover stood out, dunno); the second book was the Joel Chandler Harris' Tales from Uncle Remus -- couldn't understand the dialect in there at all, was like a foreign language to me—which of course was part of my fascination with it; and third book was The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron, which my wife found a copy of recently to give me.

The book was written in 1956 and the photo of the author on the back of the dust cover could be a publicity still from 'Leave It To Beaver'. Even in 1956, the book had gone through nineteen printings and the book is still in print so god knows how many kids -- and now adults -- have read this book. And have perhaps had it lodged somehow, somewhere in the cultural unconscious. In 1985 Director Joe Dante made a sort-of version, unintended homage I'm sure, called Explorers (trashed by many critics, and for many of the reasons Colin Bennett below is often critiqued – but that’s another book/post).

The Cameron book involves two young boys making a space ship under the tutelage of one Tycho Bass, a.. 'person' who seems to be a mushroom being and who (which?) succeeds in getting the boys off the earth to explore and warn the mushroom people of the planet Basidium (orbiting invisibly fifty thousand miles above the surface) about a perhaps impending catastrophe. The book now reads like a weird propaedeutic to all of the alien harvests abductive circularities hidden conspiratorially in plain site. At any rate, reading the book fifty years later, of a sudden the world of the fifties opens and yearns pensively further down the temporal field. One doesn't have to be that much of a postmodernist to think that the remainders we have sloughed off can return as revenants to haunt us (extend that thought all the way down the historical chain and you nave plenty of material to think/be haunted by.)

"Perhaps you'll find it in your dreams, David," said Dr. Tropman, smiling down at him, "not for ten or twenty years yet, or maybe even fifty. Might be something to look forward to though." 

"Perhaps you'll find it in your dreams, David." said his mother hopefully.
"But I don't WANT to find it in my dreams," said David impatiently, "That wouldn't do at all. I don't WANT it to be a dream. I want it to be REAL!"

2. One segment of this real/dream deferral/culmination is constituted by the redoubtable Colin Bennett and his new book, An American Demonology: UFO's over the White House. I love Bennett’s mashups between ufology and postmodernism, both it’s philosophical parts and lit’s more lurid pulp aspects. This book follows the first official investigator of unidentified aerial phenomena, Colonel Ruppelt, which he began at the behest of the then nascent USAF … in 1956! You’ll note the publication date of Ms. Cameron's work above. At any rate, Bennett’s stuff is kinda like shoving Queen, 50-cent, Stockhausen, and Foucault together. I also loved his previous books: Looking for Orthon, on the odd Mr. Adamski; and the Politics of the Imagination, on Charles Fort. I started reading much of this 'outlaw' stuff many years ago (like, after 1956??) – stuff like the Donald Keyhoe book on flying saucers, Morning of the Magicians, and the ton of stuff still coming out – Bennett’s books are really the first to put the material into some perspective for me. (by which of course I mean that it accords to 'conclusions' I had already reached but had not articulated to myself. Warning: those who find they have an epistemological stick up the butt will find it shoved ever more firmly into place. (I’ve also followed Mr. Bennett's post on his web site and he’s a ferocious take-no-prisoners fighter Unfortunately he is now dead. .

From An American Demonology:

"The human mind is not a machine. It was not designed for accuracy, stability, rationality, or mechanical logic of any kind. It was built to manufacture countless transcendental options, whose 'being' and 'reality' varies along a scale from solid to vaporous. We navigate mentally by hoaxing ourselves, by creative hallucinations; we wind these things up like toys and watch them click and wheeze their faltering way to east of the sun and west of the moon. When we look into ourselves, we see that we are made up of impostures numberless, like an Eiffel Tower made of watch and clock parts."

3. Believe it or not, Mr. Bennett's work dovetails fairly neatly with W.J.T. Mitchell’s new book, What Do Pictures Want?, on contemporary art and culture. Mr. Mitchell’ is the editor of the journal Critical Enquiry, and his previous book was The Last Dinosaur, a highly entertaining and fascinating book on the culture history of the dinosaur. His thesis in this new book (chapters consisting of articles published in various places, not a problem here because they all work pretty much together), is that we have created a society of autonomous imagery. (One could perhaps say that both ways: the autonomous images have a ‘society’ of rules and interactive possibilities, as well as the society that creates and maintains them.) As he says early on, the idea that images have a social or psychological power about them is a cliché of contemporary visual culture (the return of the repressed of 'idolotry, fetishism, totemism') and that "There is no difficulty in demonstrating that the idea of the personhood of pictures (or, at a minimum, their animism) is just as alive in the modern world as it was in traditional societies. The difficulty is in knowing what to say next [....] Is is our task as cultural critics to demystify these images, to smash the modern idols, to expose the fetishes that enslave people? Is it to discriminate between true and false, healthy and sick, pur and impure, good and evil images? Are images the terrain on which political struggle should be waged, the site on which a new ethics is to be articulated?"

Well, yes and no, thinks Mitchell, and this next part is very pertinent to the views of Bennett I’ve come to see: "Images are certainly not powerless, but they are a lot weaker than we think. The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what pictures DO to what they WANT, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak. If the power of images is like the power of the weak, that may be why their desire is correspondingly strong, to make up for their actual impotence. We as critics may want pictures to be stronger than they actually are in order to give ourselves a sense of power in opposing, exposing, or praising them."

(Just as extended note here: I guess I find the Cameron and the Bennett book and the Mitchell book – in their different registers -- interesting because they cover a sort of burgeoning – although not really because it’s heritage is in phenomenology --philosophical movement sort of exemplified most recently by Graham Harman in his first book Tool-Being and unfolding further in his newest one (Guerilla Metaphysics and the Phenomenology of the Carpentry of Things) where he tries to talk about 'objects' and the "reality of entities as genuine forces to reckon with in the world, as real players exerting influence outside themselves even while hiding behind their exposed surfaces."
I realize that this seems hopelessly high-academic esoteric but it seems to be very pertinent to whatever cultural/historical/political/ethical turns that are rapidly approaching us courtesy of our machines and the desiring mechanisms of our images. It is no less about the demise of a certain sort of culture, the old humanist culture that Foucault went on about in that amazing book, The Order of Things, wherein resided the much quoted and just as much debated image at the end of the book of the 'invention of man' and this man(kind) as a figure inscribed on the sand on the edge of the ocean, soon to be washed away. These ideas are just as controversial now as they ever have been, even as we begin to live them.)

At any rate, to finish up an already lengthy—though not nearly long ENOUGH really -- review, a couple of pertinent quotes from Mitchell: "The epithet for our times, then, is not the modernist saying, ‘things fall apart,’ but an even more ominous slogan" ‘things come alive.'"

And a final one:
"We live in a time that is best described as a limbo of continually deferred expectations and anxieties. Everything is about to happen, or perhaps it has already happened without our noticing it."

soved up and left out

And speaking of abandon (which I am constantly thinking if not actually speaking) always confusing the duplex of abandonment and having to improvise but ecstatically accepting, but not fully, the bullying tone of catachresis and its logic/ law slap at hybridization, the advancing shadow of law crossing all, if not crossing out.

Another post which I can not abandon, even as it is progressivly abandoning me.
(Law is about nothing if is not the excoriation of abandonment and its relation to the various intoxications to which the soul is drawn and which the state must condemn).

Abandon

Abandon/pull-back
Leaving ahead the pulling together, the banding together leaves us in the tzum tsum, the kabbalistic Big Pullback, leaving us enough room to get our shit together, to dance the mess around w/o Big Daddy or Big Momma jammin’ on the brakes, def. Can’t get no satisfaction under those terms, when They’re around then all you got left is to blow yourself up, dig?

"If from now on being is not, if it has begun to be only its own abandonment, it is because this speaking in multiple ways is abandoned, is in abandonment, and it is abandon (which also to say openness). It so happens that 'abandon' can evoke 'abundance'" [6]. Abandoning the body politic not only means leaving behind -- or deserting -- the military foundations of politics, but it also means a radical opening of the body politic to its own abandon. When the body politic is in abandon, it opens onto notions of the common, the open, the distributed. "What is left is an irremediable scattering, a dissemination of ontological specks."
Jean-Luc Nancy in Birth to Presence


5 entries found for abandon.
A'·ban'·don tr.v. a'·ban'·doned, a'·ban'·don'·ing, a'·ban'·dons

1. To withdraw one's support or help from, especially in spite of duty, allegiance, or responsibility; desert: abandon a friend in trouble.
2. To give up by leaving or ceasing to operate or inhabit, especially as a result of danger or other impending threat: abandoned the ship.
3. To surrender one's claim to, right to, or interest in; give up entirely. See Synonyms at relinquish.
4. To cease trying to continue; desist from: abandoned the search for the missing hiker.
5. To yield (oneself) completely, as to emotion.

n.

1. Unbounded enthusiasm; exuberance.
2. A complete surrender of inhibitions.


Improvisation is never about the impossibility of avoiding risk but the necessity of entanglement with possible catastrophe (another name for risk), another form of abandonment, a non-meticulous pre-shadowing of possibilities (it has to be non-meticulous because otherwise we are constricted again by the 'bandon', by the need for the levers, for the banding, the binding to pre-existence needs, like the need to band a refrigerator to a hand truck to get it over the threshold; like the need for these words, these grammars, to bind us all in place, safe for release later on. Given the choice between catastrophe (the always untimely risk of failure, of waiting to be pushed over the edge, a point beyond where decisions can be made, a hazy fork in the road where the paths ahead have been blown up) and abandon, don't we almost always 'choose' catastrophe (even our language begins to abandon us here: how could one CHOOSE catastrophe) over a kind of willing abandonment to alternative trails and forms and grammars and notes and routes and silences and forests and cities? Even the word 'abandon' itself fractures into an electrified jelly of ordinances resisting abundance, giving over to a sort of emptiness, but then into an object/noun world of overwhelming, even sublime abundance, beyond the banding restraints of the military body politic (yes, the 'military' as a strata which would stretch through all bodies, binding and furrowing and herding and planning) and over into an open shedding, into the commons, the radically distributed, an "irremediable scattering"

To improvise, the only route through any radical open scattering of possibilities, thin, invisibly thin path stretching between catastrophic emptying and ecstatic pleasure beyond measure. O precious speck of open time, momentary threshold enduring beyond, before, behind all reasonable expectations! 'Get on the good foot': the only need for getting on the good foot, not because we have found ourselves catastrophically condemned to march to/on the good foot but because the good foot abandons itself to itself, changing even all bad foots into the good one(s). To improvise is abandoned to dance this mess around...

catastrophic

Technically as a figure of speech, catatastrophe address the final event before (or as) the final plunge downward in a tragedy. Perhaps something comes that upsets the appecart of not only the principals in the play but the audience as well somehow suffers the Fall as they spectate (well, we sort of know how that works in a society of the spectacle, where we all become spectators in some ongoing sociopolitical plunges.)

Alas, here another post from another blog of mine:
(It would be funny he tought to continue the blog in this vein, or repeated posts from  my old abandoned blogs.)

Catastrophe

"Nature is constantly straining against its chains: probing for weak points, cracks, faults, even a speck of rust. The forces at its command are of course colossal as a hurricane and as invisible as a baccilli. At either end of the scale, natural energies are capable of opening breaches that
can quickly unravel the cultural order."
Mike Davis / Dead Cities

Catastrophe works like fingerprinting techniques at a crime scene. ‘Dusting for prints’ reveals that ‘absence’ is never absolute and that both the innocent and the guilty hover around every scene of misery and disaster, occasionally one being mistaken for the other. But in the end, they are all human prints and the grief is always contained and analyzed (‘triaged’ as they say, in the early accounting that medical emergencies require), and packed away as trauma requires. Or worked out as ‘just keeping going’ requires. The military draws a cordon around the diseased area and, eventually, rebuilding commences…

But natural catastrophes (if one were sufficiently scientific and objective, every catastrophe would be seen as ‘natural’) don’t really leave fingerprints. In fact, they are more like the dusting substance itself, revealing, as Mike Davis’s quote above alludes to, latent breaches and cracks in the social order, the cracks that underlie every human endeavor but which remain muted or covered over and which all human order is devoted to maintaining.

Our cities are monuments to this octopus like quest by humans to search out every exposable facet of natural potentiality and put it to work in the service of a human motivation. (Usually these days that exploration is in the service of capital acquisition; it has becomes hard to extricate that aspect of late modern life from any other aspect of life, some are ready to tell us there is no difference anymore—and, really, never was a difference).

But while the human agenda is always to quell the urgency of the natural (one suspects that the military is merely the outgrowth of this extremely long term human trend: ‘repelling the intruder’ covers much ground). ‘Global survival’ is merely shorthand for technical competence and engineering .. that is, more, but better, levees, earthquake predicative apparatuses, mid-ocean tsumnami sensors, satellite surveillance.

The Great Missoula Flood

On TV last night there was a special about an area in Washington state called the Scablands. The topography of the area is so strange that it took a few years before scientists think they discovered what caused these weird rock formations that covered an area hundreds of miles in length. Apparently 20, 000 years ago a gigantic glacier some 23 miles wide and 500 ft or more high formed in one of the valleys during a period of extreme glaciation. They theorize that the huge wall of ice stopped up the river going through the valley and caused a lake to form bigger than two of the Great Lakes. At great pressure, the case at the bottom of this immense frozen block, the water does not freeze at its normal 32 degrees Fahrenheit but manages to stay liquid till it is 31 or 30 degrees. There it slowly begins its regime of crackdom, slowly but surely bringing down the huge mass, its very size inculcating its demise. Nevertheless, the cracks don’t signal a permanent new regime since the old conditions are still present and the mass slowly begines to form and rise again.

Catastrophe of the south

I’ve written before about the apocalyptic mindset of the southerner. I recently came across a southern artist who had concentrated his large canvases on southern disasters and it made me realize the special relationship that the south has to catastrophe, all the way from it’s founding as a center of slave activity, to floods and hurricanes, to the fighting and subsequent defeat in the civil war, to economic collapse of king cotton and so on. No wonder the peculiar mind set of the old south, the feeling of being put-upon by outsiders, and the isolation that came before that, the inferiority complex and the aggression that often accompanies that state of mind.

The final end of catastrophe is often disappearance, perhaps not even all at once that ways of life succumb and transmute or just are destroyed. In fact, it would be unusual for catastrophe to have THAT much power. More often it’s simply the power to command abandonment, a small tricking away of power.

The Relation of the Extreme(s) to the (always coming) Disaster

The radical ends (primordial and eschatological) are always far before and far after. The current cultural fascination of the extreme in all areas is perhaps in its own way a recognition of those radical possibilities, but in an immanentized version of the old transcendental, the always present possibility of being un-homed and even the courting of the uncanny through the extreme, the possibility of strtetching the human to the limit of sensation, cognition, possibility even to the point of death, the only really firm extreme that anyone will experience. (Even then it’s problematic whether it could be called an experiencing of a limit.)

crossing the Great Divide...again

I have posted this on another blog but for some reason it seems neecessary to post again. I guess because myself and my family were forced to 'migrate' to a small town for financial reasons, the same as the reason my natal family had to move from here in the first place. And of course there are differing ecologies in smallness and largeness that have casulties due to mal-adaptation. As Marx realized, changes in quantity affects regions outside shear number (even though number now seems to trump all else or, as Fredric Jameson quipped, it's easier to consider the end of the worl than the end of capitalism, which is nothing but the hegemony of that dismal mathic, economy.)

here:
Crossing the Great Divide

A recent issue of National Geographic magazine has a feature on the great animal migrations all over the world, that single-minded travel by all sorts of animals. Their travel is intense and often spectacular, braving incredible odds to reach Someplace Else.

Biologist Hugh Dingle has identified five characteristics that apply to all migrations: "they are prolonged movements that carry animals outside familiar habitats; they tend to be linear, not zigzaggy; they involve special behaviors of preparation (such as overeating) and arrival; they demand special allocations of energy; [ ....and lastly] migrating animals maintain a fervid attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside."

I began to think about the article while I was sitting at a local coffee shop recently. I looked up from my conversation and noticed that all of the small tables had a laptop whose user was also plugged into headphones. I commented to those at my table that we were the only people actually present in the room in a way, all the others had vacated to some virtual space or other.

It often seems as if the whole culture is in a migratory mood, in some great hurry to get to some unspecified Other Place. And yet there is probably no one who would own up to such a feeling of necessity or urgency (or at least any sort of ontological urgency so to speak) -- not that testifying to a mood is equivalent to actually HAVING the mood. And in fact such urgencies as migrations can hardly be considered as a mood but more like a drive, in the psychoanalytic sense of BOTH sexual urgency as well as a more generally applied meaning to the term 'drive', i.e., a 'fervid attention to the greater mission,' albeit 'attention' that defers attention from itself. Perhaps it's the sort of drive which addiction brings, trance-like almost, to connecting actions and goal, a goal which is itself a rapturous, trance state, an emptying of self and filling by some foreign (although never really THAT foreign since it is very very close, so close as to be largely invisible, occluded, most of the time; David Punter writes very rapturously, attentively, addictively to all the phenomenological pendants to this whole complex).

Of course the most visible and blatant of such such raptic transport is waht might be broadly termed the religious impulse..or maybe spiritual impulse if the term 'religious' makes you wary.
But as a pure phenomena, and as such must remain hidden, it would seem to be omnipresent in everyday life, a utopic, in a strict sense of nowhere as well as another sense of everywhere, impulse/drive which must be continually policed, both by secular and religious authorities.

Certain;y this Great Migration is not a recent one for the human species. It seems to have first started with the migration of matter to life and then to consciousness. And who is to say that is the end? or what might be next? Our immediate experience of ANYthing is just far too short to make certain judgments and even our archives have certain flaws, as we are occasionally able to see through tears and abrasions in the surface of those collected memoires of ghosts and revenants, perhaps other flows and times, perhaps NEVER to be really available to this tarnished and tangled flesh. But who knows really? This flesh is still mysterious; I love this quote from a radio broadcast in 1966 from Michel Foucault. It leaves hope of a sempiternal salvation lying in wait somewhere in the folds of our fleshy being, something beyond the bounds (and binds) of our immediate being and experience but waiting, always waiting. Perhaps this will turn out to be the reason for our machines at the end of it all.

"The prestige of utopia--to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. Untethered, invisible, protected--always transfigured. It may very well be that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body."

Jesus on Mars

Fear of big words. Love of big words. There is something off-putting in a big word for some people. For others the obsidian obdurate monumentality of such words (they hardly constitute a language they seem so singular, and even fearful in their unreadableness) are like catnip to others.

Acheiropoietos is one of those words. Strictly speaking it means an icon not made by human hand but the aspect of a divine figure coming into existence miraculously, presumably coming into existence in a blaze of glory and grace leaving a material imprint through transfinite immaterial forces. The Shroud of Turin would be such  a residue of a transfinite state. It is perhaps the numinous state to which  secular pariedolia aspires but which has been hijacked by the human propensity to see patterns. And after all, perhaps unconscious image formation shares something with the inhuman. We know (or take  it on faith that we know) that such a thing exists, that is, that at the center of the human is the blind combinatorial power of matter meshing with energy, with a dash of noise. In fact, that is life imagined scientifically. But a handless hand is too theological for most to undertake (although a 'tentacled hand' i.e. alien manipulation seems marginally more acceptable though it is basically just kicking the can on down the road) just an elision that throws the consciousness out with the bath water.

Obviously a textual abyss --as well as other sorts of falls, swoons, raptures and syncopes--opens up beneath our tentacles which no amount of word pouring can fix into place. All attempts to stabilize the event of what it is to be and know, seems to increase the oscillation. Thats why pariedolia and acheiropoietos forms an active dyad (or perhaps a Benjaminian dialectical image stabilizes for a moment until the next unsettling). thats why the banal and the generic are place holders for tthe transcendent these days, dwarves hiding in washtubs.

That dyad in a small town operates on the gyre of the graveyard and the hospital, shuttling between the genealogical pariedolia of birth and remembrance ("He looks just like uncle Norman") to the hands off faded writing on the wall and faint whispers of the biopower of the old-folks home and the hospital....perhaps the secret center  (but secret out in the open like the purloiled letter) of all small towns. And perhaps why Mississippi is such an unsettling writing state of mind: religion, remembrance and race, most of it generic and subterranean, invisible but active.

acheiropoietos and pareidolia pt 1

For some reason, I recently went though a period of seeing faces and forms everywhere: clothing piled on a lintel post became s golfer in plus fours, a pile of stuff on the floor took on landscape dimensions. Everything around me seemed to be congealing into recognizable forms of one sort or another. Cloud watching gone wild. Of course pattern recognition is something that humans do very well, even to the extent of imposing patterns when one is not there. We don't like to live in a wilderness I guess. And Hermann Rorschach thought that it could serve subject analysis well, this finding of patterns in apparently randomness, as a psychoanalytic tool for diving into the wilderness of the unconscious and giving clues to the formations of consciousness.

And now, ever since the intense scientific focus on Mars, both from Martian orbit and from ground crawlers, the Rorschachian phenomena of pareidolia, or seeing shapes, some with formidable presence, emerging from the Martian landscape. Of course this began much earlier in more primitive viewing conditions with Lowell's canals of mars and then later the face on Mars, and now with animals, figures, pieces of technology, architecture and more being seen. Obviously the phenomena is very scale-able, with increased viewing power merely increasing the extent and fine grainedness of the phenomena.  From my living room to the stars.

And then there are other instrumental set ups that try to penetrate the enigmas of consciousness, like the Turing test and even the lowly quiji board, all of which are basically one step, technologically, above the pointer stick, the foundational tool of all analysis of whatever kind, (I'm thinking now of the scene in The Blob where  a guy pokes the blob with a stick and the stuff, goes rapidly up the stick eventually killing him by completely engulfing him. Perhaps this is a good model for the inescapable workings of tech in its most primal state....and all the problematics which develop from that in regard to inside/outside, subject/object and so on: what constitutes a stick, where does it begin and end and then methodological procedures re: how is it to be grasped, where, under what conditions and then metaphysical questions to the effect of, is the brain simply a big sophisticated stick or is it somehow more than a stick...but then  back to where does the stick end, if it does, and where does it begin, if it does. In other words questions which begin to seem theological.

Which brings us to the concept of sticklessness or acheiropoietos

selling my library

The title of this post, I'm sure you know, is reference to Walter Benjamin's essay 'Unpacking My Library'. In my case this post lacks sthe luminosity of benjamin's reflections but perhaps it will retain the melanchoic reflectivity.  At any rate, it reminds me of a simililar episode where I had to sell off my 2500 item record collection. This narrative reminds me of Kafka's hunger artist. At the same time I'm parsing them out slowly as an Amazon reseller so I don't have to just basically give them away. Picking up each volume usually has a vibe or aura about it, locating it in some emotional gridwork, even if the book has not been read. At one time I tried not to buy another book until I had read the ones I had bought, but that doesn't work for obvious reasons (one being the exigencies of publishing). At some point following the skein of connections became all consuming, more even that the point of reading the book...after all how many books can one read in a lifetime, even if that is all that one does, and then one has other problems. But practically speaking there is a problem with eyesight and reading a printed book has become increasingly difficult. notwithstanding the pleasure of the heft and feel of a book. But now the problem, if one wanted to label it such and sometimes I do, is that the level of access to pdf books has becomeway beyond any sensibility of colection. I might even say that 'collecting' ebooks doesn't make much sense since all the stories about physical volumes which collectors like to extol, like provinance, age, condition, printing history, are not applicable anymore. So perhaps other facts can come into play in terms of 'collection'. But as Benjamin himself noted in another essay, collectability can't can't be determined by physical uniqueness. Perhaps aura can be disolved and reformed around immaterial 'sorting' or assemmblage...but it seems to me that it then becomes a pale substitute indeed if the pleasures of physical collections are what is being sought.

one stop shop

Is it true that the extent of our world is defined by our gestures? That the intimacy of our world is all there is? Certainly it would seem that the familiarity of our gestures is a comfort and a limitation at the same time. Discomfort with our indexical apparatus, all those semiotic shortcuts the body frames for us, the positing of the formation of signs, the way that the body's loquaciousness linguifies with the tongue. But, like a small town, it can give the impression that all that can be gestured to/at/with/against, is all there is, no other codings are possible. The formation of a gestural  'ball' or hull traffiked though the body on top of body layered strata, the circumscribed flux of energies all meet the demands of the gravity field of the body, social, private, esoteric call, arc back to the fleshy core.

But what if gestures are masks, camouflage covering over a void, a null set. The original hollow sphere would not be the first intelligent machine but the first human. No wonder then, the arduous attempts to peer beyond the veil of fleshy ardor (think that medieval drawing of the head stuck through the firmament of the earth to see the stars in their infinite wonder) and the disbelief that often results. The figurations and interactions of these hulls or husks carries their own narcotic hooks and intoxicating fervor, as well as limiting valves or governors. To go beyond leads to angels and dragons. Best to say--and stay-- in the village itself, says the local soothsayer, propheteer as he gestures hello (same gesture for goodbye).

down the middle

Why continue? He seemed irreparably damaged by the thing that pours from all the esurfaces of humaness , mostly an example of the fly in the flybottle. It seemed also true that the Law (capitalized because it is a hyper object, splitting everything down the middle, scooping out and eviscerating. The title of this bolus of words, Law, comes from a dispensationalist diagram, penciled, of the event of history and its end from baptist eyes, Law writ large in red, at the top, written by my grandfather Taylor a deacon as a 'hard shelled' Baptist, as they were called then, impermeable to everything but those windy gusts of the spirit.  But we are always midway between the very Beginning and the very End, two more hyperobjects, predefining everything for us and whether we like it or not. Afterall that's what makes them hyperobjects, things which expand over, within and beyond the kin of humanity, anchored always beyond. It's a bracing but wild thought, perhaps bracing BECAUSE wild, which blows delivered though the aegies of that thing which delivers the blows, as well as the wind--otherwise all is a morass of disonnected retinal stimulation, a patchwork of imagery. Otherwise a donkey delivering the message of the split into the Abyss. Otherwise a guy waiting mistakenly (Kafka) patiently to get through the crack in the Law (but which IS the crack) to find out only too late that he could always have just stepped though the gate. Although, and otherwise, not really. Both rope-which-is-the-Law and the crack running though all, and the Beginning and the End are all one and the same. This he thinks in the minutes between twilight starts, as the wind blows over the hillock in which the remnants of  George and Myrtle rest, waiting for a New Morning which will never come, unless it be though the venom of an Eternal Return, which draws back down to the pagan timeless and not to a grand termination of it all as the messiah ends  it and institutes a new Law...which most likely will not involve the human per se. But always this quest for a new Law, one which draws all the currency from the old account and closes it out...before opening a new one, with new percentages and ratios and new escape routes.

Accidental: Time Wars

I have written else where of the 'time wars' but in a slightly narrativized/genre induced setting. I don't know whether a small town is a good place to oversee the resulting carnage or not. No doubt a good place if one wants some distance from the embodiment of it. But lets face it, a great many folks like to rub elbows with it (i.e., catastrophe, overload, a generally super-heated environment)--otherwise there would be no cities. Perhaps in cities one has to obtain and retain a higher capacity for confusion, opacity, and the unreadable, all things which cause small towns to break out in night sweats maybe....or even better, just ignore it since it sometimes is hard to recognize.

I began to think along these lines after finding some notes I had left on the back pages of a book on Hegel (of course!) for  chapbook on unreadability:

There is no way to interrogate the unreadable even though it doesn't present a slippery surface; rather its jagged irregularity acts a catch to be pulled along the path of history. notoriously the apotheosis of sense making, and sealed off, for perhaps another time existing in a mode of opaque simultaneity, neither inside nor outside but in a state of suspension, resisting all appreciations, all aspects of forgiving, forgetting, guilt. longing, nostalghias, being neither beginning nor end yet somehow alwasy there. It is everything we wish it to be and nothing at all that we expect, know, or like (or unlike).  Unreadability shares with the disaster, the apocalpse, the catastrophe, the accidental slow grind of processes (once called gods) that we can only barely make out in the fall of dice, away from the hidden, and directly back into the hidden.
 

...in plain sight

Gradually. the yard is being covered with small whte flowers, all on stems about 3 inches tall. Their reach is all the way from Cedar lawn cemetery (which came first, their residence in the graveyard or from the front yards?) where they are packed in drifts of solid white, flecked with occasional pink to purple-ish outliers. It betokens a secondary fairy-like continuum, hidden and waiting beneath the more boisterous grasses and weeds that will follow soon. And frankly many folks would consider this elfin realm to be one of the weed family: only that it has found a way to stay, and seduce its human overseers with beauty. And the shear wonderment o it (I have momentarily stumbled over the word sheer/shear, bespeaks the constant hidden resources of language: diaphanous but leaning against a cut--which follows shortly, the blooming beauty and mystery of it notwithstanding). But for now they have escaped from their subterranean holding tank, their temporal strictures.  How much of human life has such hidden-ness but may never find its time to bloom?. Or the time scale either so narrow or so vast we can't really determine when it comes of time.

Something is always coming. And whether it can readily be seen may be immaterial front the vantage of the hidden.

'mine, all mine...but oddy yours too'

As we all grow more similar under the auspices/terror/trauma/transfigurations/the confessings  of the modern machine teleology, the differences have to be kept more undercover, unlike, say flowers, which boldly display their sameness within generic, species differences. It's hard to say whether small towns hold their differences closer, like dreams untold or whether it is something else. ...flying, transforming, fucking (depends on whether you are a Freudian at heart or a Jungian) It has been thought to be the case since industrialism and the first tinges of modern modernism flushed the country side into the great density gradients of the cities, flattening out; it has been the dogma, the country in favor of the great differences which those same cities espouse,e.g., the old saying 'you can breathe more freely in the city, that is , one can display one's differences, one's dream private dream state more boldly; I guess the differences between 'flowers' and 'weeds' become simply adventitious and hence less important it would seem.

Anyway, questions regarding the Universal vs. the Particular---

O: "I knew it, I knew it! You just can't keep away can you?" huffing indignantly he began to pace...

Well, are conclusions reached in the city different from that reached in the village? it would seem---

O : "yeah yeah I know--the conclusions are present even before the question has formally been raised ...the flower is recognized for what it is even before it blooms.."

Let me finish please. As I was saying, or about to say, there is a whole boat load of questions that arise regarding these hoary distinctions which never seem to go away but only are exacerbated. perhaps because we can't fully state them--

O: "--and once they get stated, a methodology, an epistemology, a language set, an approach, etc has already determined the answer. This is not new you know, hermeneutic circle, blah blah; fly tapped in the fly bottle, prison house of language--ARE conclusions reached in the language different from those in the void? "

Please stop interrupting me your interruptions are all too known also. Let me finish just a bit here. Mostly, maybe the ONLY thing we can do is dance that mess around, writing writing and more writing... And it would be a mistake not to realize that writing, part of the material instantiation of thought, a deep relationship to the tool, and as such it, language in a broad sense of signifying, is filled with voids, lacunae, abysses. In fact that may be it's main virtue, the differences it observes (creates?) creating a world which then forks into an almost-separate world...
See what you've done now??! you've got us off on a tangent...

O: "But here's the thing, we are NEVER off tangent since our purpose, assuming we have one, is always slippery and confounding... but as you were s[(pl)ay]ing ---"

*sign* anyway...next time maybe: the generic, genre, the particular, individuation,, the subsequen(alwaya a prequel too and the confounding of time lines, past present future) cut made in the world/law (the necessity of that fracture and the difference between 'made by hand' and the profundity of that, and that not made by human hand, the acheiropoietos, the astonishing fright we now have of that and doubt whether it can even exist (well the certainty that it can NOT exist for many.)

flower/s

This town loves flowers with a passion, even/especially indestructable silk ones, love indentured to death's subterranean roots. Perhaps the gallery will do a show called The Flower World and it will go like this:

The Flower World

See the flowers, so faithful to Earth.

We know their fate because we share it.

Were they to grieve for their wilting,

that grief would be ours to feel.

There's a lightness in things. Only we move forever burdened,

pressing ourselves into everything, obsessed by weight.

How strange and devouring our ways must seem

to those for whom life is enough.

If you could enter their dreaming and dream with them deeply,

you would come back different to a different day,

moving so easily from that common depth.

Or maybe just stay there: they would bloom and welcome you,

all those brothers and sisters tossing in the meadows,

and you would be one of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Sonnets to Orpheus II, 14

Not withstanding Rilke, the flower (or is it ‘flowers’; sometimes it seems that there can never be just one flower--although the presenting of a single red rose carries a certain density) occupies a special, but dual place in human affairs. In art the flower/s present us with a certain dialectic shall we say, inhabiting on ‘one side’ a golden transcendental romantic realm and on the other side of the fulcrum, a lesser world (or at least, more oddly, both present yet distanced) a silver world, almost universally a modernist double-speak ironic, even kitschy, a schmaltzy universe.  The good thing is that the artist does not necessarily have to choose between the place of heaviness, the place of transits, of thresholds, of initiations, births and deaths, does not have to divest herself of a light-heartedness to favor the weighty, since the flower is always patiently there on both sides of what often seems like a civilizational divide. Flowers in and of them-selves seem to be harbingers of human civilization. (Anthropologists have often remarked of dead flowers left in the graves of Neanderthals as a sign of their closeness to Homo sapiens enculturation. Writer Clifford D. Simak has even written alluringly in his novel All Flesh is Grass of an alien civilization made up of intelligent flowers, faceless and selfless but unitary, not ‘sullen slaves’ as Rilke puts it but joyful accomplices to the human project.)  Flower/s are love’s body in the making, root stem and heaven's tiara. And always a feast for the artist.

Pinelandia Gallery offers the artists love affair with the flower/s. contact the gallery at: etc

“We’re involved with flower, fruit, grapevine.

They speak more than the language of the year.

Out of the darkness a blaze of colors appears,

and one perhaps that has the jealous shine

Of the dead, those who strengthen the earth.

What do we know of the part they assume?

It’s long been their habit to marrow the loam

with their own free marrow through and through.

Now the one question: Is it done gladly?

The work of sullen slaves, does this fruit

thrust up, clenched, toward us, its masters?

Sleeping with roots, granting us only

out of their surplus this hybrid made of mute

strength and kisses — are they the masters?”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies/The Sonnets of Orpheus