LXXII

 

You were rolling up sleeves and all of a sudden the money disappeared.

 

I was an “unhappy consciousness” for the FBI.

 

Two Hegelians walk into a bar

 

To get to the other side

 

Seems we’ve arrived at this interesting paradox: you can turn your back, but you can’t turn back.

 

All present, indicative.

And accounted for.

 

Tom Joad and Fred Nietzsche walk into a bar

 

Sigmund Freud walks into a Bar Mitzvah

 

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz walks into a Bar Nun

 

R2-D2 walks into

Rachael Nexus-6’s Bot Mitzvah

 

Brother Writer: unless your poem [novel, story, play] is replete with sense-emotionality, or, more generally, pervaded with intentionality, it will slip toward artisanship merely, whether of a good, bad, or indifferent order.

 

In-tension

In-tention

 

Our logic, even after modern painting and physics have exploded the object, is one of analysis. And this drives us to distinguish unitary objects – albeit with greater difficulty given their fragmentation – in order to extract them from the undifferentiated, to reify them and render them as essences that, like Ivory Soap, we can rely upon to be at least 99.44% pure. Which, like the fabled “error” made by Islamic craftsman, allows God to retain his position as the ultimate object. Ivory Soap then being a vehicle for bringing us as close to God as possible while .56% of us remains on this plane, providing, to the joy of the soap-sellers as well as to ourselves, some material that wants cleaning.

Thus our fundamental cultural tendency, deriving from our ontological lineage, despite a century’s worth of revolutions in imagemaking and science, remains to differentiate, separate and extract (whether knowledge or some other value) out of the objects this operation has produced. Should anyone wish to argue with me concerning this foundational aspect of our way of thinking, I would merely direct her or his attention to the front page, digital or otherwise, of The New York Times, or any other organ of thought or opinion claiming, authoritatively, to represent truth through differentiation. There you will find a thousand reifications, each searching, like disjecta membra after a terrible battle – say that imagined by Henry in anticipation of Agincourt – for the bodies that will make them whole.

 

 

One thing studying Ba Gua Zhang can teach is the subtle distinction between our energy and someone else’s. Part of what makes it so effective as a martial art is that it allows one, via emptying one’s self, to sense another’s movement-intention before it has become explicit – even to them – an instant upstream of their nerves firing.

 

We call it the Hudson River, but do those molecules of water belong to the river?

 

Change as renewal.

The new as, simply, the renewed.

I read the renews today, oboy.

 

What is the sublime, the storm which overwhelms the unrepresentable object, a reaction to? A compensation for?

 

Painting, like writing, is a means by which the invisible appears, concretizes, then melts back into the fount of the undifferentiated. It draw its life from, yet never depletes, the unfathomable.

 

Vasari reports that while Giotto was still a boy, apprenticed to Cimabue, he was already so skilled that he was able to play the following trick: he painted a fly on the nose of a figure his master had painted with such realism that several times Cimabue tried to brush it away before he realized his “mistake.”

A similar, yet different, Chinese story tells of Cao Buxing making an ink dot that so resembled a fly, a passing prince tried to bat it away. How could this be, asked Fang Xun, given that the “fly” lacked any bodily details? To which came the reply: “There was yi [intention] and that is all.”

 

Sister Writer: use words to bypass everyday thought. In writing and speaking, one must always counter the tendency of words to either create phantasms, or else pool into concepts that tyrannize the mind as they become increasingly reductive, static and drained of energy. Carried to its extreme, “meaning” becomes the stalking horse for nihilism. Use writing and reading to unblock rather than to lock down.

 

Jones for the dao.

 

Balance inheres not in stasis, but flux.

 

If there is an ocean inside you, there will be tsunamis.

 

Thambos, mon amour. Amazement, wonder, stupefaction.

 

 

The nude…concealed under the guise of the natural. [Jullien, The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.]

 

Anadyomene, mon amour. She is borne

In

Upon us

 

Strong and armless

 

Plato, in Phaedrus, says that the “beautiful is ‘what is the most manifest’ in the realm of the sensible, or, even more exactly, it is what surges into manifestation.” Thus, according to Jullien, [op.cit.] the power of the nude inheres less in the (pleasure procuring) experience of unveiling-revelation, or in its harmony and correct proportions, but more in its capacity, perhaps its function, of causing “part of the visible to surge out. Out of the visible, as a fragment of the visible, and detached from the visible at the same time…

“It could be said that the nude exposes Being more completely, and that this is where its ‘beauty,’ lies.”

Anadyomene: born from the sea.

 

Rattle East, strike West.

 

Big deal on Samadhi Street.

 

And I said: what about breakfast epiphanies?

 

Simile, you’re on Candide Camera!

(A reality debased show.)

 

My nerves are shod.

 

…I should rewrite in relief what I have so far discussed in intaglio…

Jullien, …Nude, ibid.

 

We are at a dinner party two years after Lyovin has been rejected by Kitty, a dinner party arranged by Oblonski…

“You have killed a bear, I’ve been told,” said Kitty, trying assiduously to spear with her fork a slippery preserved mushroom, every little poke setting the lace quivering over her white arm. [The brilliant eye (elsewhere described by Nabokov as “cold”) always noting what his puppets are up to after he has given them the power to live.] “Are there bears on your place?” she added turning her charming little head to him and smiling. [A passage from Tolstoy, translated and with commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace and Janovich, 1981, p. 162]

It is difficult to refrain from the relief of irony, from the luxury of contempt, when surveying the mess that meek hands, obedient tentacles guided by the bloated octopus of the state, have managed to make out of that fiery, fanciful, free thing – literature. [VN, from a single, untitled leaf, numbered 18, intended, presumably, for a survey of Soviet literature, now vanished]

 

Drone ownership is the cornerstone of the American way of life.

 

Gooogle may make spectacles, but only Gogol can tailor a certain overcoat.

 

The state is, itself, a massacre.

 

Something isn’t kosher about Charlie Bar Lev.

 

Beware the too-perfect storm.

 

Is it, technically, possible that the Jihad, to name one set of “actors,” is composed of replicants?

If so, what Tyrell Corporation is producing them, and to what purpose are they being used?

Who prophets? What margin?

 

“Events,” especially those that “blow up” as spectacle, those fiery Reichstags, function to rip something dreadfully particular out of the fabric of history that is then at pains to reknit itself as best it can. Life is a web, and “events” act as ruptures, fractures, discontinuities that can, in certain cases, be fatal to a culture or cultures. Events can be invented after the fact, or lack of fact and act the same way whether they are perceived as good or bad. For examples: the birth of Jesus, Mohammed’s night journey, an archduke’s assassination.

G*d to Moses: Just take two tablets, and call me in a couple of thousand years.

 

And the age-old theater of martyrdom and sacrifice.

 

And I said: what about breakfast antiphonies?

And laid him on ye greene.

Crawl and response.