CVII
What happens to your thinking if your categories are wrong?
What happens if you insist on maintaining separate objective and subjective realities?
What happens to the body, to humanity, to the earth, if there is only one referent – one zero longitude – around which all reality is fated to deploy? What if you identify yourself with that one referent?
What happens when the sun not only never sets on British soil, but insists on shining 24/7?
What happens to breath when there is only “inspiration”?
What to do but enter into the entrails of the still-warm Western beast. Abra-cadaver!
If you don’t believe me, consult your horror scope
To emerge into that Other in the Belly of the East and the double belly of the East-West, that bicameral house of human fermentation.
Dantian, mon amour
Two kidneys and a heart walk into a bar…
Parasol. Paragua. It all depends on the whether.
When the tide goes out, you get to see who’s wearing categories
When the rising tide lifts all boats, you can see which ones are leaking
Fig leaves and veils, both dropping away
Here’s looking at you, kidneys
Greece, once the “cradle,” now emerges as the strongest link in the chain, the one that may cause the globalist concatenation, fundamentally so weak, to rupture elsewhere. You don’t write this to F., who is Greek, and dealing with those vicissitudes every day. Instead, in response to his book on psychosis and the gaze, you offer publishing suggestions in the U.S. and try to explicate your own work:
My “thesis” comes down to this: the traditions of poetry (and by extension the novel) in the West constitute its primary means of self-reflection, the “place” where we are able to think not just “outside the box,” but beside the categories which we invented and have now, more or less imposed on the globalized world. In other words, the Novel (taken as a collective) is, or was, our hedge against total narcissism – our one non-reductive, non-psychotic zone, not completely colonized by our obsession with categories and differentiation, and by the idea that our system of thought is the only possible system of thought – all other cultures having produced non-thought, or less-than-thought.
I was looking for a “liberated” zone in the West – that “empty hub” around which things turn freely – and the novelistic tradition is the only place, really that functions as such. “Fiction,” i.e. the purposefully “untrue,” (though not mythic) narrative, thus serves as the West’s escape into reality, i.e. its shamanistic psychoanalysis – the room where it brings its unconscious into words, and learns, or at least attempts to tolerate existence – to see itself as it is.
All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)
Leaved Whitman
Folks say, metaphorically, “it just kills me…,” but, literally, they’re right.
Invisible plastic racism
Tales of the (Vol)uminous Numinous
Ne me texte pas!
Ne me tweet pas!
Ne me snapchat plus!
Every attempt to loosen the categorical grip by creating better, truer, categories simply tightens their hold, like – dare one say it? – Chinese handcuffs.
In martial arts, as in life, one always wishes to be beside the point…
A SPEECH AT THE LOST-AND-FOUND
I lost a few goddesses while moving south to north,
and also some gods while moving east to west.
I let several stars go out for good, they can’t be traced.
An island or two sank on me, they’re lost at sea.
I’m not sure exactly where I left my claws.
who’s got my fur coat, who’s living in my shell.
My siblings died the day I left for dry land
and only one small bone recalls that anniversary in me.
I’ve shed my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,
taken leave of my senses time and time again.
I’ve long since closed my third eye to all that,
washed my fins of it and shrugged my branches.
Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me
how little now remains, one first person sing., temporarily
declined in human form, just now making such a fuss
about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus.
[Wisŧawa Szymborska. Poems: New and Collected. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, trans. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1998]
The invention of individual freedom gave birth to the prison of individualism, while ever more sharply delineated categories, at a thousand and one levels, forced the monad increasingly into the isolation cell of identity. Hence, at the end of this vanishing point, no pot of gold, merely BruceCaitlynVanityJennerWhateverBonfireFair – the all-too-banal petite princesse clinging to the tip of an iceberg adrift on a warmer, every-day-less-saline sea wherein everything solid has to work overtime just to stay afloat.
Flotsam and Jennersome
Mais, nous sommes tous jetsam, hoping, to flotsam a while longer
Like drama
Like Phaeton
Reported in what passed for medical journals in the 16th century: the case of a young female swineherd who pursues an escaped pig across a wheatfield, then over a fence into open country – the two of them leaping ditches and streams. The pig’s fate goes unrecorded, but such are the rigors of the chase that the girl’s vital heat rises to the point where her vagina and ovaries transmogrify into cock and balls. A crimson beard begins to sprout upon his cheeks. Thus endowed, the newly-minted lad sets off for Paris, and, being handsome and well-mannered becomes, at length, finds his métier as a courtier to Henry II of France.
Est-ce que ce monde est sérieux?
Sí, sí hombre…
Baile, baile de nuevo…
