miasma: end/starts yet again

This is nominally the second volume in the Mississippi series (LAW: eschatology), consisting of folds, pleats, involutions, moving from etiolated personal history to the metaphysical and theoretical, back to the aesthetic mass folded and creased forward and backward, generated by the first person conceit and then third person. And not only can this volume be considered as 'art damaged' but that theory and internet damaged as well. Some might say that it has left nothing but then we know the pleasure of such shredded desuetude since these are the forms a great many live in today, the personal (and anarchic) preceding it at one time and succeeding it at other time, a question of agency always being the fall guy. Perhaps the precinct of rational thought must of necessity be left alongside the road, unable to enter those shining towers and institutions(the inhabitants less and less available while becoming more and more visible; that is about to change no doubt). In which case all writing can amount to no more that kitsch, blemishes and stains on the way 'forward', curios from a last forgotten stage, the ragged decentered edges and camps of modernity and postmodernity, constituting inscrutable opacities, understandable as nothing but exclusions from aggregations of large data pools, any hermeneutic giving way to archivization and display. In such a real the thing which perdures is not biography but life as writing, the screenplay within the play, the signals within the smoke. This also is where Law resides, fitfully prophetic and looking backward, beautiful--and fearfully unbroken in its own primal reserve--much in fact like the subjective itself. Law, like Capital, vast,  cold, and indifferent: false infinite of H. G. Wells' Martians, struck low at the end by the activation of homo sapiens auto immune system. bodily memory and archive emerging much like the uncanny also held in reserve. running over broken ground running toward milky ways galaxies revered in the 'old home place' memory being the biggest false infinite false because memory always closes the circuitry at the end looking backward from the past not the future nothing but a Mobius strip itself, no, himself, always finding the same place over and over again, twisted, foiled, refrigerated: poor man's infinity...right after the latest movie that is. The Last Things and the first things maybe the same things? the fusions within all poetry...

G-

gravid gravitas gravity grave
all beset with heaviness sunken below probeheads, loads of gravel, beyond purchase
salamanders increase alchemically underfoot
Beings of Fire unquench-able balls rolling around the living room floor/tilted, subject to gravitywave
settling in one corner where I sat hunched round the AC hanging on the window, sweat blown,
not serious enough to be impressed by the gravity of the sit.u.a.sun. hitman in a stroll through  moonlight gravely festering in constant memory, grave the only constant... another view: always gravid, full not empty no matter what yr theory says

screams in the night

“Because it is himself that the Southerner is writing about, not about his environment: who has, figuratively speaking, taken the artist in him in one hand and his milieu in the other and thrust the one into the other like a clawing and spitting cat into a croker sack. And he writes. [....] That cold intellect which can write with calm and complete detachment and gusto of its contemporary scene is not among us; I do not believe there lives the Southern writer who can say without lying that writing is any fun to him. Perhaps we do not want it to be.”
William Faulkner, intro to The Sound and the Fury 

Once upon a time, feeling the vague pinch of mortality, I gave my father paper and pen and asked if he would record family recollections. Much time went by wherein he finally scribbled a few pages. Starting out in a factual manner, it descended into a furious telling of wrongs done to him by various brothers and sisters (counting eight all together) and resentments approaching a biblical scale, frightening in the condemnations. The calm diagesis and hermeneutic of the progressive airing (e.g., public radio's audio story board) of grievances had no place in this old testament landscape. Writing did not act as some cathartic release but rather was lava like in its heat and subsequent hardening when exposed. There was no artifice here but rather the raw, unmediated ding an sich of genealogical defenestration. And that was the end of that experiment. Perhaps Ortega Y Gasset got it wrong: much of the time, the past repeats not because we have forgotten it but because we remember.


  

frayed poetics

yes I don't want to get out of the way, from falling upward while gliding sideways, away from  tentacular embraces, seething sidewalk skids, awaken from way back when, yes, like a child again but not.
evidence all around of Niagra Falls, Memphis, New Orleans, all the while ratcheting high up in the air, tops of trees, aunts and uncles circling, new motif of ruin and wrack ancient waterways pose underneath Mozelle and Bennie all the others making a supernatural circuit like a child again but not  

We take the old pink 57 chevy out to indian mounds get invaded by bugs from hell while our brethren push from below  forming helmets of colliding clouds  Meanwhile the others scurry around in the dark edges of the campfire, delux furnishings cob web cabin yes bugs light up tippy tree tops; they make the entire circuit from below to above for your fandom, your incomprehension, your guilt amen hosannahs forever and again emerging from the salt flats for your wounds little gilt picture frames to sit on the piano: law of the family.

surface glow

The iridescence and perfection of a soap bubble is due in part to the surface tension of the surface; if the torsion changes even minutely the structure will pop. If one's receptors were set correctly, the fairy screams might be heard as the shards tinkle away.

The End...again and again and...

 Perhaps Law (whatever it is)--other than the title of a very long Stephen King frightfest novel--stretches from, and overlaps with, all beginnings as well as all endings, as a frightening threshold which is empty and holds no one back from entering or leaving....and yet is unable do either, like Kafka's man from the country: "Nothing—and certainly not the refusal of the doorkeeper—prevents the man from the country from passing through the door of the Law if not the fact that this door is already open and that the Law prescribes nothing. " and " [....] Cacciari, even more decisively, underlines the fact that the power of the Law lies precisely in the impossibility of entering into what is already open, of reaching the place where one already is: “How can we hope to ‘open’ if the door is already open? How can we hope to enter-the-open [entrare-l’aperto]? In the open, there is, things are there, one does not enter there. . . . We can enter only there where we can open. The already-open [il già-aperto] immobilizes. The man from the country cannot enter, because entering into what is already open is ontologically impossible” (Icone, p. 69). Seen from this perspective, Kafka’s legend presents the pure form in which law affirms itself with the greatest force precisely at the point in which it no longer prescribes anything—which is to say, as pure ban." and ' The open door destined only for him includes him in excluding him and excludes him in including him. And this is precisely the summit and the root of every law." (Agamben, Homo Sacer)

And thus we come to every moment being both open and closed:

"Already in St. Paul and St. John there is a tendency to conceive of the End as happening at every moment; this is the moment when the modern concept of crisis was born~St. John puns on the Greek word, which means both 'judgment' and 'separation.' Increasingly the present as 'time-between' came to mean not the time between one's moment arid the parousia, but between one's moment and one's death. This throws the weight of 'End-feeling' on to the moment, the crisis, but also on to the sacraments. 'In the sacramental church,' says Bultmann, 'eschatology is not abandoned but is neutralized in so far as the powers of the beyond are already working in the present.' No longer imminent, the End is immanent. So that it is not merely the remnant of time that has eschatological import; the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life, have it also, as a benefaction from the End, now immanent. History and eschatology, as Collingwood observed, are then the same thing. Butterfield calls 'every instant... eschatological'; Bultmann says that 'in every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awake it.'"
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

The attempt to redirect history from totality End-determined: techne's imperative seems to be solely NOW (a matter simply of more data acquisition (The Resurrection will no doubt come from this haecceity before any sort of Beyondness; "step by step slowly I turned"). The Ride is easier if one can maintain position at the top of the wave of transition/acquisition.  The view is perhaps more grand also (Truth or Falsity is not that germane, more a matter of consonance). "The notion of an End-dominated age of transition has passed into out conscious, and modified our attitudes to historical pattern."

"[....] eschatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present in every moment, the types always relevant."
Kermode

"We project ourselves--a small, humble, elect perhaps--past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle"

Who this 'we'? what is the nature of this projection? Who are able to 'envisage ontologies of alterity beyond the confines of the historical present?'
Kermode