Assemblies & Other Essays / The Suffering of Thought

Name: Assemblies & Other Essays / The Suffering of Thought
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME II: ASSEMBLIES & OTHER ESSAYS

            OR

‘THE SUFFERING OF THOUGHT’




               3

‘You don’t make a living writing poetry. You make a life.’ – Dionne Brand

THE ORGANS OF THE TEXT

I
The Suffering Dialogues
XXXIX
Assemblies
Dis
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Thus I court myself like prey

Terrible graces at your fingertips,

II.

In each life, there is something criminal.

Each night is a momentary respite into the music of solitude, a bass note, a clarinet, solidifying life and making tangible the suffering of the day… the agony of time made apparent in that which alters time, reveals the mistake of time itself… midnight, a turn.

I may yet possess my arms, my legs, my life. I bring myself into myself, like a ritual.

Mine is a life that may only be in shadow, in impersonation, in the impressions and semblances of things. I recognize myself for a moment in a reflection within a reflection, a window caught in a door.

Within each room yet another room may be experienced… perhaps a third.

The psychiatric hospital is composed entirely of bodies.

There is a looming malice which permeates every aspect of my existence: the desire to end my life. This desire may yet be channeled into different media, brought about in a death of the mind, a death of the soul, a death of the song, and the changes necessarily articulated and formulated by these deaths into new death and being-processes (which may occur exponentially, throughout time, without place, unmoored)... where I may only construct environments imaginatively to hold this greater hunger, this hunger unmatched by that of the body, truly untouchable, the last

sense… perhaps that Thanatonic essence is truly of the soul, at the root of the soul… a desire for total dissolution.

Or is it that children are laughing?

This, the ship of fools, carrying language.

Those exiled destined for passage and yet passage… an eternity without god.

In such a place, necessarily of the body and yet wandering, the body already lost, the future already lost, the present in eternal flight… where might one go? Where might one find life?

III.

I spend my weeks walking in the evenings. There, I take inventory in movement… an inventory of that which has come to be, and that which has yet to pass. That which has ended remains, leaving a trail of bodily fluid, the wetness of life apparent in the grass, the trees, the dripping of spring into the humid summer months. That which lives and dies in such rapid succession that no such knowledge could be taken from the earth, no great lesson, no book into the hereafter… gives me hope for the end of suffering. That my suffering, the suffering of life, each suffering, localized and bleeding, might be cauterized in the brief release of this breath, the next, perhaps leaving a bit of saliva, the bilious tears of Mary…

If there was a way to exercise the liver…

The witness perhaps encapsulated in the Orphic turn, the turn toward life being at once a turn toward death, a double movement. In living life I turn toward those I love, for solace, for respite… and yet, as I turn toward them, I witness their fading away, their slow descent into madness, old age, bitterness, senility --

I exorcise myself in perpetuity.

The taking of oneself into oneself, in the act of eating. This is not to mistake eating in the sense of taking nutriments into the body, but rather the taking of nutriments from the body. To consume oneself from the inside out. I take myself into myself, by way of myself, and become thrice.

The senses heightened, the atomized immediacy of each moment resides in my throat, my chest, upon my tongue. I am delocated from the very baseness of my animal body, deranged. Stumbling through alleyways, snarling, the splitting of myself speaking into mirrors, glasses, bowls… and echoing into space. Being jarred from the utmost truth of sustenance, suspended… a death mask enveloping surface, spitting and breaking.

The labor being done insistently in the name of the larger project of capital, forced labor, labor done to stave off starvation, eviction… (if these horsemen have not already come generations before and taken what little life one may attempt to possess, attempt to hold…) this suffering permeates each and every thought, burning ideas like paper. Each day is ash falling from the sky, each day is already in ruins.

Each condemned life, oscillating around the beacon of material… scavenging for sustenance, climbing a ladder of rain. A man sitting under the awning of the cafe curses under his breath, repeating the curse as it grows and reverberates in the air like a solid exaltation…

IV.

The critical case of existence in the irreducible confusion of language, brought about by the expressive need –

I cannot possibly exist between the two poles, between is and is, itself, a dichotomous current spiraling downward into the abyssal context of all words and all things. I am holding myself, breathing, practicing, and yet cannot escape the pull of gravity.

Perhaps what is left is the cumulative library, the literature an appendage where otherwise the arms and legs might fall away. That which coordinates the dialect is lost to time. The conception necessarily impossible until the relational embrace, veritably neurotic and ephemeral, foundational loss itself. The modern language as parasitic-familial, in debt to the contextual birthings of phraseologies and tautonics, primary and secondary breaks. I am necessarily that which births and has birthed, in perpetuity, that which is born and borne into language. Style as excavation.

Here, perhaps babbling. The spitting, burping, excreting organism.

Muggsy Spanier (1939-1944) Sidney Bechet (Triple Best Of) Eddie Condon (1927-1943) Ma Rainey (1928) Mississippi Sheiks (Honey Babe Let The Deal Go Down) Big Mama Thornton (Ball And Chain)

In this wanting nothing of life I am at some point lost… but not without struggle.

The worker as undesirable, the body holding the contents at once which may yet uphold the mission of capital and insurrect it to grounds. The worker as primary agent, that which functions at a level below the machine, the crank, the lever, the practical machine. As such, the body is taught as industrial. This phenomena, specific to the time of industry, has wholly possessed the body, and evoked possession as chromatic impossibility. As such, music is mechanized, art is mechanized, expression is mechanized to a series of inputs and outputs, commands of life, that is at once a breaking of

life. The subsequent fragmentation of the machine becomes a specificity beyond organism, an assemblage of organs. Children are possessed by the spirit of industry, the spirit of production, whether this be through media or other means, and as such, are broken by sociality. That which is to be desired is not oneself, but the reproduction of oneself, a project that may not be truly fulfilled without the continued production of self as singularity, self as image. Here, a break. The body as image projected outward, the necessary cognition of organism reduced to two dimensions, torn from all but the convergence captured by image. Thus, in the time of industry, we are stolen from time… perhaps for all time.

This mechanism, the mechanism of cultural reproduction, that which is a poor artifice, an attempt to convince the members of the social body that they are anything more than a use value for the machine of capital, compresses life into the slick chrome of the image of life. Without pissing, without shitting, without filth, without pain, the image passes like an unblemished mirror, at once proof of the divinity of television and proof of the worker cast out of life as it were. This machine does the work of alchemy bound to capital, which is to turn life into impossibility, to break that which is life from itself, and to convince those who consume it of the rhetorical dream which it tirelessly expels. That such a life as on television, as on film, a life of incredible strength, poetry, wealth - is possible, is made possible by that very mechanism which denies these things, strength, poetry, and wealth, through community, wandering, thought, to those laboring under it. That one might emerge out from under this boot, this oppressive force razing cities, evicting the poor, killing black people… and obtain this beatific prize.

This is the double modern use of alchemy in Faust… an alchemy at once recognized as of this world and broken from it. An alchemy appropriated by the ever growing structural-economic machine of progress for its ends - the oppression of the poor for the benefit of the rich, an

accoutrement to religion, in the sense that matter is transformed (laundered) in ‘spiritual’ disguise. The alchemy of alienation, of the isolation of the worker to specific alcove, to separation from the lives of others, of impression and expression of life shared with others, and thus, from life itself. Alienation, once achieved by capital, most apparent in spaces where people are working and housed at close proximity (namely, cities) creates a hallucinogenic effect, a notably mental, physical, emotional breaking of the human body, furthermore, the social body. Capital simultaneously assembles and disassembles society, as it condenses life physically, while alienating life in all other senses. This is the sensation of walking on a crowded street.

The ideology of religion and culture do not matter. These are tricks of the samovar smoke, floating to the ceiling and dissipating… the image emptied of historical and material value in a literal sense, the image that does not exist, has not existed, cannot exist - and yet is curated to appear, as such. This is the intersection of the culture of capital and religion, namely, the creation of the image which serves primarily to create the foundation for, secondarily, to justify the existence of the foundation of - the conditions which it brings about. If we may yet see the dead (our loved ones) in the smoke of the samovar, perhaps this tax on our souls (the loss of them, entirely) is simply the price which must be paid, our toll, our penance to the icon…

And yet it is of the essence to see these images weighed and measured against salt, against water, against soil, for they, when measured in relation to these elements, appear suspiciously weightless. We may yet weigh a meal against the radio wave, and consider justice in light of this inquiry. How much nourishment may one or the other yet provide a world without means?

And thus we are taught to speak in secret...

(CUT.)

One might find the grooves of existence, where sounds are made.

These things are of consequence in my continually emptying life. A spring slowly evaporating, a passion deteriorating… becoming ash and dust.

Pain localizes me; firmly grounds my thoughts. I am here, in this arm, for this time, contained entirely by sensation. My thoughts become sensation entirely.

Each passing faith toyed with by my curiosity, examined, found fallible, weak, impermanent, and cast aside. I ask myself this of my relationships, my studies, and my walks … is this to be laid to waste by dissatisfaction? Can a certain fatigue ever be enough? A sort of contented slumber in which desires are slowly fed… that which I cannot sustain in a childish sense (possessive) falls to the wayside, and I collapse in despair, in and out of this fever dream of life.

Perhaps all that remains is the wound… something extra- corporeal, that the body cannot possibly rehabilitate. The wound at once psycho-geographical, social, and physical… the hole that cannot be located, the blood that cannot be spilt, the life that cannot be lived. In this sense I am firmly entrenched in that which, by all practical indication, should be diagnosable, a condition that should be treatable, a condition that altogether should be. The very instability of being itself beyond any conception of the body proves this clause to be entirely false. I speak in extremes, in a wish to exert myself extremely, and thus perhaps adjudicate this case once and for all… but my capacity to exert myself as a force against myself negates any hope for such a decision. Until another day…

Perhaps to reassemble the body, to collapse entirely the viscera, the aching bacterial, and begin anew…

For if it were enough to simply make music, to paint a picture, to depict a condition with words, to compose a true environment with all that lays at my disposal… but at this point it is all to clear to me that this will never be the case. The next book, the next song, the next drawing will merely be yet another incidental ‘thing’, a coincidence of wandering, of problem solving, of hoping, of dreaming, of dying.

For to acknowledge this is almost certainly yet another death, a break from the hope of creating my life, of building something… I am almost reticent to say… to save my life. I desperately need saving. Perhaps this is my puritanical upbringing speaking.

I have transferred this hope (writing) firmly into the act of loving, the act of focusing my entirety on loving. If I can love others enough, love the world enough, perhaps it will change, perhaps I will change. Maybe I will no longer be as neurotic, self obsessed, prone to retreat.

The religious superstition beaten into me as a child acts as a hydra in my mind, perhaps as a delimiter, binding me away from true hope (marginalia: what does this even mean?). There must be the pure and the impure, the true and the false, the right and the wrong… I take these notions and reject them intellectually, but time and time again show in my actions that I am unable to fundamentally escape them.

I cannot escape the world.

VI.

‘Demon Tortures Sinner’ - Rogier van der Weyden

Focus and practice are methods of ridding myself of myself… and this is the only reason I engage in them. Disregard any notion of academic rigor, discipline, whatever nonsense is inserted in the place of this fundamental truth. I cannot trust those who attempt to assert study as something that exists anywhere beyond or above the catastrophic anxiety of having to exist.

These are the days in which I have no hope for poetry, and laugh at all I have written, with a strong desire to strike out large blocks of text. Days spent languishing, entirely hopeless, brushing my teeth, assembling meals, walking with nowhere to go. Brief flashes of what might be in love, but I am torn away from love by my coldness, my distance, my basic distrust of others. I must live alone, I must work alone… or risk falling into another. I cannot create a boundary between myself and others, so I must create a boundary between myself and others. Some seem able to do this quite easily. I struggle to see where I end and others begin, and thus perpetually become someone else, a hybrid, a cross section of that which I might claim to know and claim to have no such claim at all. By attempting to draw a boundary, I might pretend that I am capable of having relationships, capable of conducting myself with decorum, capable of being at peace with myself and the world… but this is obviously untrue.

I am so terribly relieved when I find someone to spend time with, someone who does not totally disturb my sensibility, someone whose mannerisms are entirely bearable… someone I can trust. I know trust instantly… but that is another lie. It takes me some time to see people in their faces, to know them in the only way I can. When I meet these people… it is only then that I can relax… that somehow the weight is lifted… I am no longer alone in my own mind… I can share in life.

I am afraid the horrible truth is… in my case, that life eats away at me. It is not something I could possibly own or possess… but rather, ‘my life’ is that which I am charged

with, an energy that seeks dispossession entirely, that must be released, discharged. Extremely sexual.

The desire to mythologize myself functions twofold… the desire to make myself a poetic object, and the desire to end all desiring forever… to kill myself in my work. Perhaps these two aspects are simply part of a longer symbolic chain, the chain that binds me to both the desire to live and the desire to die. I need both simultaneously, and I need both to the utmost capacity at which I can experience them without falling entirely into one or the other. This may very well be the social obsession with the orgasm… I orgasm when I am bored, so on and so forth.

Bondage, capital, and the possibility of relation… the use of people as labor-objects, and the consequences of labor-use as the terms and conditions of existence, the right to exist, within society. These structures embodied twice, in the Body-Social and the Body-Organs, processed expressively, sexually, intellectually, sensually, digestively. This is an extremely traumatic process, ongoing, unrelenting, a sort of psycho-social training… I expect my relationships to use me, I learn to be of use, I learn to survive.

…

MECHANIZATION

I. Capital harnesses the aesthetic capacity for desire.

Capital harness(es)

Machine object process takes horse and saddles it with purpose of carrying purpose, a prosthetic of purpose. The horse, existent in the culture of horses, is repurposed into the culture of horseracing. Often involves whips, chains, metal. This process is industrial, religious.

Aesthetic capacity

That organ in perception which is not derivative nor derives, a simple machine, operating within and under the physical principles that govern life - not the exclusive human world, but the culture of the earth, itself. The universe is borderless, boundaryless. Thus is aesthetic capacity. However, when this capacity is harnessed, it is directed in such a manner. This harnessing of becoming designates the perimeters of being, knowing, seeing, feeling, and otherwise.

For desire

This purposing of poetry in the aesthetic capacity for learning, wandering - is indoctrinated into a system of pseudo-want, pseudo-purpose - which is to say, an economics of wanting. This basic obfuscation of what is necessary to survive, who is allowed to survive, and why (the human category), founds the cultural economy of desiring. This economy is profitable. The earth is not. The economy of desire is also the economy of lust, greed, convenience, world (world is not earth). If something is to be desired, it is to be desired because of the value it refers onto the subject, a doubled mirroring. Thus the socialized structuring of value is necessarily dependent on the appearance of that which is desirable, and that which is not. This is survival, the ability to survive as aesthetic currency.

VII.

Sequences of pain producing a sensation of in-and-out-of- bodiness. I write to stave off the next wave, the next collapsing, like a channel. Living in fear of this inevitable return to sensation. Out of sensation, my mind is free to wander, to mimic life. Pain contains me entirely, encapsulating my existence in a small tightness, a perpetual breathlessness, an inability to travel within myself. Thus I am tied to the post of this very moment, gasping and fatigued. So often I am unable to move; so often I die here. This catastrophic time, catastrophic in the awareness that

my ability to withstand pain will only continue to wither and die as the increasing frailty of my body strikes me from myself, my project. If only I could age painlessly, I would undergo it gladly. The problems of my body compound themselves - a damaged limb, an infected organ - to the point of which pain organizes itself in relation to the pain of others. This codex is that of organic relationships between pain and painlessness, of life and lifelessness, of limb and limblessness. The inputs and outputs of these organic relations (visible and otherwise) continue to define and delimit the very potential of my existence as itself, and thus create the terms and conditions of my ability to express myself, create myself, and give shape to my ideas. Without my limbs, my mouth, the expression of bodies upon, in, and around other bodies, I am lost. I so desperately fear the inability to express myself. Even in the cultivation of this ability, my body shuts itself up. I lock myself away before my mind.

The body (whole) is a symptom. Of this I am convinced… an effect of the life-determining processes which animate the body, the choice mechanism of the brain and nervous system. I cannot catch myself, catch up to the consequences of my actions, understand loss before loss, understand time before time, and thus endlessly despair these consequences, despair the futility of my project, this project of learning as flailing, as failure, as the desperate attempt to know before knowing, to become possible in a vacuum of impossibility. The organs of the body speak for themselves like theses, the mouth, the nose, the stomach, the anus, otherwise. There is nothing before this, nothing after this, and this expression is always a death. And thus, I return, miserably, to despair and desperation. Here, I make my home - away from life.

This terrain of sensation is perhaps the only place from which I can express myself, know myself, compound myself into the text, and thus exist, live, and become a person. This expression as organ-compound, as input from the faculties of the body, strict, unforgiving, and authoritarian. The state of my body controls me, punishes me, possesses me entirely.

Through writing I attempt to possess my body; through writing I fail. I, mind… to a fault. This mind of the arm, this mind of the hand, this mind of the fingertip, dependent on a mechanization of the processes a-priori to expression to generate expression - an industrialization of praxis - in the way a painter learns to paint, a child learns to shit into a toilet, only to shit on the street once more. Here, Said on Beethoven. Beethoven as toilet trained yet refuse. Something, here. Something, there. This expression turned in on itself, perverted entirely, flayed like the Saint Bartholomew via Michelangelo.

In experiencing the violence of the body, one learns cruelty from a young age. This cruelty is externalized, spat out onto the earth and the bodies of others, or internalized, like a whip of the heart.

Here, a symb(i)ology of the body, a typology of the body, a reflexology of the body. Sign, ritual, reaction. The nervous system, to degrees, is involved.

VIII.

The transformation of the bodily process into a signifier is nothing short of the transubstantial… orality being defiled border: The mouth at once an anus, the text at once a body.

Essays: Incentivized Care, Violent Landings, Money. Maths of Wealth, Violence, Blood. Whose Pain Matters? Why? What Is The Constitution Of Pain? The State As Submission Apparatus, Bondage, Control, Power. Abolition Of Work. Anti-Work.

‘Work is the best police that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one’s eyes and

permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess... ‘ (Nietzsche)

‘The spectacle of contented subjection’ (Hartman)

Needing to control something, have control over one thing, when you can’t control anything else… you turn your body into a switch, a mechanism upon which you can simultaneously inflict harm and affirm your ability to act.

This injury has decimated my possibility. Playing music, joy, the sensation of if not emotional wholeness, physical wholeness - has left me entirely. Each morning I wake up, from increasingly vivid dreams, and remember. My entire body remembers, recalls, and a surge of pain moves into my instrument, my left arm. This arm holds everything, my creative mind, my paintbrush, my pen, my guitar, my expression. I feel as though I am cradling it, a regression of information, a regression of all of my creative ability, flooded from me, away from me. This lost time is infuriating… and the pain brings me near to tears. I wonder if I will heal, I wonder at how ungrateful I have been, to have this arm to nurture me, feed me, aid me in my expression, aid me in my existence. To have my hand and to lose it. Reminds me of Jenny’s letter to Karl. She dreams he loses his hand (?); this dream is the striking of my life from my life. I am thankful to be able to write these words, to express in tight and compressed gestures, to still have language, have words, even if I struggle to write them now. My dedication to writing and that journey remains if not intensified; knowing that now my body will only continue to decay before my eyes. I mourn this and I mourn time, I mourn love and I mourn the impossibility of remaining. These, like all things, remind me of death.

I want to expect nothing of myself… to attempt nothing, to, precisely, not think, and in this process of not thinking create thought in my body.

I am grateful to be alive.

I want to have this image of myself as a real thinker, as this real person… but I can’t shed the awkwardness of the first part of my life. I want to be serious, I want to be new.

I feel lonely and desperate. Each time someone new enters my life, I wait (always the lover, never the beloved) and wait, hoping for a call, hoping for an escape from my life. I know this isn’t the way to go about things; that love should be something else… but I don’t know what it can be to me anymore. I am closed off; I need to be removed, pulled out of myself, to give and give entirely, or be left alone. It might be the pain contributing to this kind of emotional frenzy, this frictive movement about the world… where I pray and pray for some sort of loving intimacy, some sort of knowing touch, something to assure me that I indeed exist, that I can be loved, that I can be held. Without this I am nothing. Everything else is meaningless, my work is meaningless, my body meaningless, my life. I want to be whole alone, to be bold and full of solitude… instead I am craven and embarrassingly overt. I show myself off in order to be perceived as loveable, as possessing the qualities of the beloved, as someone who deserves love. Drawing and music are the two ‘talents’ I seem to have developed in order to display my self-possession… but they are simply born from that base need to love and be loved. A cry for attention, for someone to come and care for me. I want to quit all of these things and quit myself, knowing that I am lying to myself. I know, I have a fear of being unloved.

IX.

Contemptible.

I suppose I will continue down this path for an indeterminate amount of time, until I learn yet another painful lesson; lose something else. I can’t make anyone love

me. I can’t make anything happen. These moments remind me of my total impotence in the face of life, my total inability to act. I am swept into and out of feeling, into and out of currents of change, until I am unrecognizable to myself. There is nothing to return to, and yet I still manage to find moments of calm, moments in which I may write. This, itself, a small consolation, when all else seems to be going wrong. If love is not for me, I will have books.

I am afraid to be seen as needy, to be seen as someone who wants another, who needs to eat, who needs to shit, who needs to live. I have these things, but in that having, I feel weak, vulnerable. I suppress myself entirely, only to make myself ill. This sickness is always of having, and not wanting, of wanting, and not having. Wanting to me is changing need, the insurmountable newness of life, the uncapturable newness of each and every moment, the moment that I cannot subsume or surpass, which passes over me like a wave, depriving me of breath, sensation, sound. These waves of wanting break me, turn me into a fragmented and injured animal, an animal which threatens to disavow its own life entirely. I do not need life. I do not need this world. I need myself, completely.

These moments of failure are always failures of love, of wanting to love and failing, of needing to love and failing, of needing to be seen, known, felt, and failing. The sheer possibility of love nearly shatters me. I forget to live my life, I willfully throw my life away in the face of it. I know this isn’t love. I know this is never love, and yet I hope and hope for love. I live my life for love only to discard it. There is an urgency now that was once quiet. I’m not sure why. I feel so close to feeling, yet outside of it. I want to do what is right, and oftentimes I know this path, I see it, I feel it. Love is that other world, that world which I can almost touch, that world which is here in touch but gone without it, entirely. I need entirely. I wish I wasn’t so religious.

Love makes me forget pain. Pain is so simple, primary, contained within the body. I access this pain without

intention, without anything at all. When all else is gone, this remains. Love is this relative second, this coating over life which is necessarily a communion over life, a hunching over the fire of things and breathing in smoke; (certainly of reading). Like kissing the face of death, like comfort in oblivion, like perpetually falling asleep, like knowing. I know I am terrible, I know I am desperate, I know I am wounded, and yet I still love… I still want to be loved in return. This love tears me from my work in its urgency, reorients me entirely towards touch, and breaks me from all of these minor surgeries. Music holds the space that love holds in silence. Painting holds the space that love holds in the gaze of lovers, this and nothing else. This and only this. These moments compose me entirely, I am composed of the songs of these loves, these fleeting loves, these awkward loves, loves of minutes, hours, days, and lives. I count myself among them.

I disavow everything and become free.

…

THESES: THE STATE AS SUBMISSION APPARATUS

a. The state submits human existence to boundaries of legality: formally, life/death, human/inhuman, deserving of life/death.

b. The state is death at birth, is and as of a delineation, a border which denotes that which is acceptable in terms of human behavior, expression, and life.

c. These boundaries are categories of human - racialized, sexed, gendered, classed - as cages of the ability to exist or lack thereof. Material resources, social resources, political resources are afforded/withheld therein.

d. The state imprisons human existence and the imagined (the possibility of life elsewhere), submitting life to

‘subjection’, or the human in relation to the nation- state/law, thus informing life.

e. The locus of the state’s ability to submit categorical masses of human beings consists of mechanisms that enable three functional forces: power (brute force of history, police), bondage (the tethering of the subject to state via life resources), and control (cultural/ideological systems that inform the boundaries of the real and imagined world; that reinforce capital as reality). The state engenders and enforces fetishization of object-person via identification of the individual, the subject.

I lose the majority of my ideas in the noise of life. I used to reach out to them, grasp at them as they slipped through my fingers. Lately I have been content to let them go, to let them float away. I make ceremony out of loss.

Now, in the moments where I need love, the moments of loneliness, the moments where I feel like I’m falling off the edge of myself… I write.

…

In the city there is an endless fire Gaping and red Screaming like a newborn Like a wound

There, we part Where the streets are empty and crossed Like ruins I know Like ruins

Like leaves falling

And like the leaves,

I desire endlessly.

Between and Some indeterminate safety You stand: Your hand in your hair Your hand holding life Like a child Like a point on a map Like a point From which one might write a letter Or a song

And direction is all things to that wandering endless in the light

Shrouded like the face of god Shrouded like everything I carry Alone Like a closed door Where I play with myself and die

A poor world: Here no angels There no angels Here no god And die.

I am this one river This knife Entirely This place where there is no more pain This hiding place Of dreams And only of dreams Of dreams where I am dreaming Of dreams where I am seeking Of dreams I know

Of dreams

Where I see time Where I see decay Of grapes into wine Of love into hate Of laughter into tears And dust.

That child sings to me: Happy is as the body goes And curls up to die Happy is as the body goes, As she runs away Cold and full of mischief Like a god

I am wild and mutable Like a plague Like an instrument Like a reed dancing in the sun

Like a receipt Like a deathbed Like a name.

Where life spills out into bowls I too am there Hollowed out with spoons

Made weak with meaning, And known.

And we walk hand in hand forever To and from this place Where the streets are empty Like ruins

Passing through time like strangers Passing through time like thieves

This too, a passage Of which I knew From which I know.

Your body stolen like wind There and carried off into that breaking And thus, in turn We steal into the night

Thieves like Breaking into new rhythms Thieves like Catacombs of language Riddling our bones With dirt

There I drip Again

And my tongue emerges to receive this fated blood Like an exaltation.

…

XI.

I fail at love. I lose. I lose to my total insecurity, my desperation, my fear of being alone, my falling in love with each and every person who comes along, who reaches out to me, who could possibly love me. I betray myself, I reveal myself as pathetic, small, childish, needy. I can’t imagine how people see me, and yet I certainly can. I must be empty and terrifying, someone so unbound by life, someone so desperate for connection. Whenever I form the slightest connection with someone I could love, I latch on, I become dependent, desirous, full of them, empty of myself. Life does not go on for me, other than in longing. I need the

immediacy and quickness of love, I need the deepness and darkness of tumbling into passion, the unmooring of solitude. I am afraid that I have gone too far, that I have not gone far enough… that I am too attentive, that I lack everything, that I lack what it takes to truly love. So I build myself up, I create disciplines, I try to keep myself busy… but as soon as the next lover comes around, my loneliness is only all too apparent. I disgust myself. I must appear as disgusting.

Lately all I can talk about is love. I have pushed through this time of suicide, this time where I was uncertain as to whether or not I could continue to exist, to go on… to go on to what? And emerged out into this open field, unadorned and uncertain. I am limited, at this point more so than ever before, by my body… and I can only imagine a continued enforced humanness in this tethering. My spirit attempted to escape, attempted to climb out, only to be reminded of containment. I wanted to be everything, to do everything, to live every possible life… and I still do. But I am left with this aching, to deal with this horrible aching that comes about as wanting and longing and praying in the moments where it becomes too much to bear. Is this lucidity and consciousness? Perhaps now, for the first time, I am only coming into awareness of this phenomena, where as a child I was brutish and dumb, beaten senseless by the stupidity of existence and my early years. Am I simply more attuned to this pain which has been with me since birth, or is this a new sensation entirely? A fresh wound? Certainly a combination of the two. In this attempted escape, I became acutely aware of a solid love, a touch, something that brings about acute awareness in the act of solid loving. In these times of falling apart, in these breakdowns, these fits and starts, only touch returns me to myself. Music is my longing, writing is my cataloguing, and touch is my life. I crave it like water and like desperation, am embalmed. This is my god.

I have no interest in talking about the events of my life anymore, with anyone, nonetheless to recount them here. Why bother with the grotesque toil and pain brought about

by the daily act of surviving, of having to survive? I claw at the walls of here for life elsewhere, for life by other means, by life otherwise. This world is to me endless ruins, endless night, endless struggle. I must have release, reprieve, a solid time of bliss, of total knowledge, of total delight. Why attempt to bring myself to bear? To birth myself firmly into this world? To be social, to be of this world at all? I live, I witness violence, I spit in the face of violence and thus spit in my own face. I live, I witness suffering, I witness myself. But what point must I push past in order to achieve this final respite? A ‘rational’ person would simply speak of this in terms of death (physical), but rationality is another death entirely… where physical death is perhaps preferable. I refuse this world, the rules of this world, the prisons and borders of this world. I will not live here. I will live elsewhere.

Writing has now become a last resort, a ledge, from which I hang, upon which I hold myself and other things, listed: things both dreamt and imagined. I carry my dreams and my imagined and nothing else. No material as catastrophically burdensome and impossibly light as the imagined. One’s shadow is an expensive garment. In this carrying I live in all places, become myself in many disguises, and steal away from everything and everyone. Each mask more hideous and grotesque than the last, each disillusion more heartbreaking and solidifying of this path than the last. I continue because I must, I go on because I must, I write because I must. It is a copper solace in knowing decay and the loss of time viscerally; thus I catalogue this knowing-loss. I am no longer concerned with movements, with the myopic condition of my time, of all time, and the organizations therein. I cannot see anything else other than this development; thus, perhaps it is me who has become myopic, me who as become shot through by life, riddled and dry. I feel so far away from everyone I used to know.

My blood burned and ached, so I destroyed myself. I wrenched myself from myself, beat myself in submission to

myself, scorched and burned my body until it was unrecognizable and wretched to itself… ran wild throatily until I could no longer speak, until I no longer saw life… I saw nothing. I breathed necessity, I became desire completely; then I died.

I went to and from these places, and each of them became a home. I went between lovers, and in turn, my lovers became strangers to me. I became twisted and transformed; I watched my friends die and fade away. This continued for some time. Then I turned away from the world.

I cannot bear much more of this… whatever it is.

XII.

I want to drift, float, feel the pain of my body leave, feel the pain of my life leave forever.

It is strange to think that at one point I believed knowledge could change the world. Naiveté convinced me that only if I became smart enough, articulate enough, that I could significantly alter the circumstances which dictate the terms and conditions of life around me. Now I can see how wrong I was. I thought that things could be said and done to change the course of history, but now I fail to see the difference between historical moments. I simply trace these massive currents of violence with my fingertips like the outline of a human body, sketch them, map them, explicate them, explode them, lose them, mourn them, and then die myself to them. I sacrifice myself and burn, I watch myself and burn, I do everything, I do nothing, and burn. Each effort more futile than the last if only in the compounded futility of all of the efforts of my life, stacked up like a pile of papers by which I mean to compose a sentence. A sentence which is clearly laid out before me, and laid out before each of those around me. Perhaps this is the final community, death as bondage, impotence as bondage, loss as bondage, state as bondage, love as bondage. My entire life has been

gagged and stolen; as I am certain it has been so for many others. What can one do in the face of such a life? Endure suffering for the inexplicable years leading up to the stupid moot endings of the minor times which compose each and every life? The arbitrary stoppage of a life composed of stoppages, breaks, and burnings? I hope for love but love is no safety, safety is no safety, certainty is no certainty, and life is no life when life turns its back on itself so easily, so simply. I cannot see an opening from which to emerge, from which to be birthed, from which to signal.

It is too late to write much of what I wished to write… just as I have lost songs. I must content myself with losing them, or else risk discontent. Time has taken everything from me, including this, and it will continue to do so. I give up my body, I give up my dreams, I give up my desires, I give up my life.

XIII.

I don’t care about intellect. I care about immediacy, emotion, pain, feeling, needing. Like a child. This, to me, is intelligence.

I have this idea that music has been taken from me in order to write. That I am commanded by life; that I am helpless in the face of it. I submit myself to life entirely.

I release my pain into this work like a bloodletting.

The aesthetic impulse is secondary. It is a tremor, a reminder. It is the want to want, the need to need, the touch to touch. Desire in language is primary. I want, I feel, I need. My ability and desire to arrange this primary gesture into a sequence of gestures expresses my need to order and catalogue moments as decisively meaningful/important/loveable. I find importance in obsession, in this obsessive ordering to the point at which life dissolves; I cease to exist. Removed from my life,

relieved from it, I am free to live. Obsession is my replacement for death, my substitute for suicide. When I obsess over love, over a line in a poem, over a drink, over myself, I am over myself. I am over my life, over my hopes and dreams, and I break through to them. I see myself as I really am, small, pathetic, childish, full of the need to impress others, perform myself, and prove myself as loveable and beautiful.

Some might say this is not healthy. I would reply by saying life is unhealthy.

My obsessions obscure me from life; I cloak myself in them. I wander around in the streets bearing my obsessions like wares. If I possess or hold anything whatsoever, I possess my obsessions. I wrangle them, I tie them in knots, I spin them, caress them, I berate them, I mourn them. Obsessions to me act like particles I know. They become old friends.

My stupidity is a wash. Each thing I have written is as if I did not write. My notebooks are ledgers; my moments are receipts. My accounts always balance out perfectly. To zero. I would be an excellent accountant, but a terrible businessman.

However, I do believe good writing is a maths of nothing, a maths of zeroes. A good writer comes about the work and circles it. This writer might dance with the work, pirouette, spin, maneuver, and perhaps even briefly touch the atom body of the thing. When Dostoevsky talks about the fire of life (captured in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror), he talks about this. This touch (at least in my experience) may only last for a moment, yet this moment becomes another world entirely. A good bit of writing is survival. Horizontal thinking makes these moments of over-standing and deviation to the root as the rest of life; even banal.

I am tired of my dependence on others. I nervously check, wait, wonder, obsess, desire, become bored, and desire again. This is an exhaustion, a waste of energy. I know I do

this because I do not value my life. I find my life stupid, morose, and worthless. I connect easily with people who find life stupid, morose, and worthless. However, I do believe that even in these cases people still have their hopes and dreams: they still want to be things, do things, come into things and the life of things. I can’t imagine having dreams anymore, unless they are sexual. I can contribute black humor and sardonic conversation to their world, and not much more. With these hopes and dreams come lives, and having a life is holding a life. I long to throw my life away, to throw myself into the arms of a lover and forget everything. I know this is addiction again, but I do it anyway. Life is too short not to love fiercely, to not throw life away. I throw away things that end. Relationships, expired vegetables, my own life. How can people be content with these things! To understand that loss… I can still write. Writing does not end, it is simply interrupted by death.

I notice that I have come about new relations.

I am grateful for my bad writing. I see my process. I realize now that there is nothing to be discerning about. I catalogue death, the death of moments. The aesthetic category dies with them.

Bolano: a poet who enters the state.

XIV.

Spent the morning reading. I fully intend to be as lazy as possible and do as little work as life permits.

Organization (city of bodies) as hegemony (re: Metropolis)

I am working so hard on myself and on being the best person I can be. In each moment I examine myself and the situation and myself in relation to the situation and those around me… and ask myself - is what I’m doing right? Is this the best I can do? What else can I do to make myself

better and make this situation better? It sounds so stupid to say out loud but this process is and has been changing my life. I wake up every day determined to continue this body of work, to continue working on my body, to continue studying, to continue to make my small contribution to the world. I know that I am capable of so much. I need to push myself, but also pull myself back - to create a balance that allows me to stand upright and function. I continue to renounce all things that would catch me (I call these things addictions), things that would close doors… and yet I still find happiness, fulfillment, and pleasure… increasingly, in many more moments I find myself willing and able to immerse myself in my work - in writing, thinking, playing, composing. I will not stop, I refuse! I have seen myself shut down so many times, lose so much time, lose so much life. From now on I will live completely, love completely, learn completely. I will not allow myself to get caught up in that which is not meant for me. I know now that these things - coffee, drugs, drinking, laziness - are tempting in their lifelessness, in their ability to revoke life in place of a peak or a valley. I will live life and inhabit this pain; I know that it will not leave. I will live within it, I will work with it; I will navigate in the midst of it. I feel like a traveller now, more so than ever, leaving port of my body to my body by way of my body. This is a difficulty, but this is also something sacred. I can feel my body; I make decisions in my body. My body speaks, I listen, I speak the language of my body. My body is the mouth, I am like the second stomach of the body. I am the prosthetic mouth, the metal throat or the plastic teeth. I is the diagrammatic skeleton of the body, the I wish I was body, the poor representation of the body. I know my body, I hear my body, I see my body, I commune with my body. I sit with my body and know it. I sit with my body and hear it. I sit with my body and see it. I want to hear the whispers of my body, the bold commandments of my body… and all that lies between. This is the music of living, the notes which create the scales of existence. One must be terribly sensitive to these scales; for I know now that these are the scales of justice. I will never go back to my old life. I will do the best I can to live up to all that I know I can

give to myself and the world. I will continue to try, continue to push and pull myself into balance, to right myself, to do what I can in each and every moment of my existence. I am grateful. I am grateful for life! I am grateful for this chance to live! I will. I will. I will.

My advice for writers is always to write about something that destroys you. This way you can be reborn.

In this sense writing can be made a practice of suicide. I consider myself successful if I have sat down on any given day and totally eviscerated myself, made an account of myself, and struck all that is not myself from myself from that which remains. I consider this to be one of the excellent possibilities of the process (Blake), where one might elongate the gestures of the body into another gesture, to observe this gesture gesturing, and by extension, become a sort of philosopher-physician into the body by way of this gesture, to see the gesture being made and bearing its contents; to proceed accordingly. For the body does not just hold itself, it holds time, space, memory, future, and civilization. Just as the body will die, so will the earth, the world, the time, and all things. Knowing this death is imminent and inevitable is essential for writing. This death is already dying, this death has already passed and become in its inevitability. The unavoidable passage of time creates a wobbly bridge by which one may traverse all time. The unavoidable decay and death of the body creates a bridge by which one may traverse the histories and deaths of the body. By way of this death; dying this death, one may observe the universe… and burn the world away. That which is not, burns away.

The choice is, then, to either die prematurely, or to truly live.

No one is more powerful than time. No choice is more powerful than time. No action is more powerful than time. No civilization is more powerful than time. No force is more powerful than time.

I may manipulate time, I may play with time, I may reschedule time, but my time is always now and death; my time is always at once now and to come and gone. The question becomes one of arrival and one of terminals, of trains and tunnels…

I apply pressure to the wound.

I feel pain, I locate pain, I consider pain. I consider the sources of this pain: muscular, nervous, of the mind, tendinous, tissue. I autopsy locations of content and discontent, remarking in a ledger of considerations. The various applications and processes I have accumulated up until this point (my ‘possessions’) exist as a sort of kit to bandage or incise (if necessary). Most of my life requires violent incision and self penetration. I cut myself open, reveal myself to myself, and extract various items and things that have lodged themselves in my viscerae, made themselves a home out of that body. In order to do so I must be precise, I must be careful and deliberate in my considerations; I must map my considerations onto in and from the situations of life that arise and pass ceaselessly. This leading faculty, the faculty of consideration, is that which weighs my moments, and hands this moment to the next for further examination. I consider, I enact any number of processes in conjunction with several other processes to create a succession to pain. This succession is simply a movement, a transference, simultaneously a de- and re-location of pain. Pain finds me elsewhere, otherwise, and unprepared. I triage becoming indefinitely. This, to me, is simply the condition of life. I wonder if others experience the same.

I know nothing is going to save me from this pain. I know no one can take this burden from me. So why am I so desperate to find a lover? Some comfort? Some company? Someone to lighten the load? People can’t do anything for me and yet I need them terribly. No one can change my life,

no one can change me; I am lost to the world. I can’t bear to suffer alone; yet, I suffer alone.

These moments of pure frenzy, deep dull aching, where I want to cry out, where I want to scream to no one in particular ‘I am wounded! I am here!’ … but instead I am silent, but instead I make myself small. Inside I feel defeated and worn down. I wish I didn’t scare people so much. I am too wild and too desperate to be known. I need someone to peer inside of me and tell me that I can be loved and to love me there. Instead I am loved from a distance, loved from afar. I push people away. I push people away with my actions. I want too much. Am I too harsh? Too callous? Too rough? My edges are sharp and I cut myself on them. I can only imagine what I do to the ones I love.

XV.

I don’t want to write anymore. I don’t want to live anymore. I need to learn how to survive the night. The sun sets and I feel myself entirely; my entire body aches and moans and time stretches out impossibly. I can’t seem to find an adequate answer, something to satiate the thing in the back of my head that goes, ‘How much longer? How much more can you take?’. I need an abatement. I need something to take the pain away.

XVI.

The idea of writing any sort of formal work feels so out of reach. I am here, I am crying out, I am praying, I am writing; this is all I can do. I can’t push past this first place, this place of punishing hurt, this hurt that cripples me and brings me to my knees, this hurt that tears me from the world and reminds me of that empty room which I inhabit; which I shall inhabit for all time. I talk to myself because I have no one left to talk to. I sing to myself because music is gone from my life. I cry because there is something inside

me that needs to get out. I am born and born again like a screaming baby in the dawn, raving and mad, broken by that first light and whimpering into the last hour of the sun. I survive this; yet, I am killed again by the next moment. I wish someone would let me in. I wish I would let myself in. But this door is too heavy and I can’t move it alone.

This book is a pile of chairs. It is my compilation of suffering; it is my burden entirely. I need to articulate it myself, I need to see it, I need it to be out of me. I need to spell it out and know it out and find it out myself, in order to find peace. I need to be at peace. I cast this suffering out of me; I capture it here, I freeze it here, I bottle it here. Like a bug in amber. I had a bug in amber on a necklace once; I would turn it over in my hand. Books are much less resilient. As are people. Bugs survive.

Illness.

XVIII.

I rid myself of this; I rid myself of everything. I cast it out of me; I cast it into the abyss of time, the abyss of no things. I extract this organ from my chest carefully and pierce it with a knife. It spurts pus-fluid and gasps and I am free of it. My body is riddled with organs that are not mine. I know there are things inside me that work against me like stones. Things inside of me that are not my own volition. Hydra things that multiply and overtake me. They enter my body when I am not awake, when I am not conscious. I must remain conscious and understand my condition as something that is temporary. I have an excess of machines, some of which function in coalition, some of which function to cause dysfunction. These machines live inside me and call my name when I am not busy, when I am not working, when I am not living. They take over; they live for me. I will not let them overtake me.

I used to care so deeply about failure and perfection. I sat over the last book for four years, terrified that it was imperfect, that it was wrong. I don’t give a damn about morality anymore. I am ripped open and the wound grows wider and deeper. I spill out everything and hold it in my hands like a sacrifice. I don’t have time for organization. I don’t have time for form. I can’t hold anything together long enough. It all just slips through my hands and onto the ground. I remember yesterday going out to the grocery store. I can’t believe I was alive and able to do this. It seems like an immense feat to me now. I don’t know how to store up courage. It comes and goes like a light.

I don’t care if I appear desperate. I don’t care if I look like an idiot. I can’t apologize for who I am anymore, it takes up too much time. I know I need people, I know I am need- full, to the point of bursting. I don’t know how one can be need-full. It doesn’t make sense. I am so engorged with desire that I continually drip with it. From my eyes, ears, mouth, tongue.

When I write, the pain leaves. I release into the work, feel the letters with my fingers, feel my hands with intent, feel my arms with intent, feel this movement inward outward upward and around. When I am writing I am in all directions equally; it is here I find true balance and distribute my weight evenly. It is here that I am a sense making mass; elsewhere I am full of bloated nonsense. I stumble around and cough up some hope like a good morning, and wave it away in the wind. I need this work; I know I have reached this point… where I can and want to write this book.

My early writing is laughable, my later writing is laughable… and there’s nothing in between.

My grand condition: I need everything to happen right now.

I want to share this, I want to share what is happening to me. I.

XIX.

Perhaps there is a theory of suffering. I certainly am anti- suffering… although I have learned much from it. Is there some method by which one might approach one’s suffering? Commune with it? Suffering is the true other. Suffering is inside of me but it is not me. I feel it hurting me. Why do people project suffering outward? It is easy to push pain away. It is easy to push people away. It is easy to blame other people for your pain. Each person carries their own burden, their own load, that load which is pain. Pain is a repetition, a ceaseless reminder that one exists, that one is firmly alive, that one is physical, grounded… until one begins to wish that one wasn’t alive anymore. Pain is represented culturally in expressions - expressions which allude to pain, signify pain and suffering, and yet, often, are devoid of the suffering entirely. Perhaps we want to depict ourselves without ourselves, beside ourselves. I am beside myself with pain; as such, I can see myself. Without awareness of my pain, I act stupidly, my senses blunted. Perhaps this is why I inflict pain on myself. Pain is itself a culture, a culture in which acts are committed to significantly influence and alter the courses of living. The courses of living might be described as rivers of blood. Often an injury or a wound has too much or too little blood flowing to the site; this is often the delineation between that which might be described as an ‘internal’ or ‘external’ injury. I cannot think of an experience more powerful than pain. Love is a spring breeze to pain. Pain is drowning, pain is suffocation, pain is laceration, pain is screaming. Love is a sigh, a late morning, a soft guitar. Who cares! Who cares. Who cares about pain. Who cares about other people's’ pain? Each person suffers; each person suffers alone. Pain is only pain if it is attractive, desirable. I attempt to make myself desirable in the midst of my suffering in order to receive sympathies and love. Pain is a currency; pain is an

exchange. When people speak, they are sharing their pain with words. Often this pain is cloaked with layers of meaning. At the root of all human communication is pain and isolation. The need to be understood. The need for pain to be recognized. The need for pain to be known. How can anyone ever know pain? How can I understand my own pain, nonetheless anyone else’s? Pain is possessive yet I do not have it, I do not feel it; very often, there is no cure for pain, nonetheless a diagnosis. Pain is a condition you live with. It makes its home inside you, it lives with you, for you; often, destroys you. I will not let my pain destroy me. I will grow from my pain. I will simplify my life in the face of pain, I will strip myself down until I am impossibly light and grow.

I want to create a theory of suffering and pain, how pain is at the root of all life and controls life. Pain is the ultimate restriction, the ultimate enforcer of what is and is not possible. Pain of the body, the mind, the soul, often determines and lays the ground of life before life… pain sets the terms and conditions for action and the possibility of action. I am rooted in my feeling; I am rooted in my body. If I cannot leave my bed, if I cannot leave my home, if I cannot speak, if I cannot write, I am destroyed. I have lost so much of my life mired in such a deep holding where pain is the knife and time is the pendulum; been lost to myself and the world. This pain brought me into a place which I cannot describe other than into a prison of no space and no time and no things. Where there is no removal and no return, simply abatement and purgatory. In this pain I am not thinking, I am in my body but my body is screaming and I need silence. I need silence desperately. I am searching for a way out but this prison does not exist, as it is a prison of no space. I am impossibly condensed into it; my body is crushed and terraformed to fit this cell, itself impossibly small. Pain is the experience of catastrophic impossibility… in short, the impossibility of anything at all.

Am I brought this pain to write about it? To simply know it and die? To hold it forever? I once believed I wanted

something eternal… to love forever, to live forever… I think everyone has these sensations… that something eternal could be something real. Then I was brought pain, a pain that refuses to leave. I realize my mistake.

I will emerge from this pain. This pain will leave my body.

XX.

I believe that pain is connected; that people feel pain together. Certainly no one pain is like another, but the relative network of all things seems (to me) to be knit by experiences of pain, trauma, violence, and force. If force is the motor of history, pain is that which eulogizes history, that which brings about history a second time. History is the event, pain is the event of the event, and poetry is what is left. The poets write history; the poets know and love the deep annals of pain and feeling. Perhaps I have come to love pain, to cherish it, to hold it; this is why it refuses to leave. I almost spelled the former (annals) as [anals], and this would also constellate. A cavity where the detritus of history gathers and is violently expelled. It is often an awful and humiliating experience. The poets are ridiculed and stoned. A crowd gathers.

I disject myself from myself.

When I write in theory I hide from my pain. I attempt to intellectualize it; apply my pain to idea(l)s.

I will take any aspect of my life and attempt to control it. Especially if it cannot be controlled.

Love appears to me as a logistic. I must look a certain way to be loved, I must act a certain way to be loved. A spectacle of appearances and mirrors. If I do not make the proper appearance, if I do not wear the proper disguise, I am at risk of not being loved. If I show up at the wrong time… I cannot keep up the facade. It falls apart and I am revealed

to be so needy that I threaten to ruin everything and run everyone out and away. My neediness makes me alone. My lovers seem to expect me to be strong, to want me to be strong (most likely because of the way I look)... but inside I am so broken and small that I can’t imagine I’ll ever be able to live up to their images of me. I become attached easily; I need attention. I am disgusted at myself! When I am alone and there is no one else in the picture, I survive and live relatively well. But as soon as a potential love interest comes along, I am infatuated, confused, obsessed, and prone to long nights! Why can’t I show some restraint, some ability to separate my life from love? Do I need love that badly? Do I want love that badly? I am always passing through love, looking for a place to sleep.

I don’t have images or ideas of people anymore. Images are a poor replacement for touch.

XXI.

I wake up as a soldier and a woman.

XXII.

I am writing the book that I needed as a child; I am writing the book that I needed from the people I needed. I hope that my mistakes are not repeated; I hope that through this method of observation and reflection I can observe myself, avoid that which is not myself, and release myself. I write this book as a doctor unto myself. I needed a (Deleuze) philosopher physician as a child. My parents could not become this; I could not become this. The people around me observed surfaces; became these merciless materialities. My entire life was shown to me as plastic but I contained blood and vicissitudes. I beat myself, I mutilated myself, and I lived so horrible and abrupt like a storm. I suppose I still do. But I see myself better now, I see the circumstances of the world and the small boxes of the world. Suppose we are

packing up humanity and jettisoning it off into space. Suppose we are packing up humanity to burn. I do not see much humanity. I see ruthless competition, murder justified by ‘inhumanity’, genocide, patriotism, and the borders of violent othering. I live in this stupid farce, I breathe in this life like smoke. I think about Sylvia Wynter.

My body is a blunt instrument. I am stone against stone, marked by time.

XXIII.

I am always sorting detritus. I am digging through the wastes of everything and making piles.

XXIV.

Walking on the street to get the energy out. Protest going on in the park for some sort of education. Saw a policeman on a horse on the main street observing - thought of Nietzsche.

Long conversation about borders and symbolism - symbolism as impotence. States use symbologies: flags, logos, lines, as shows of force and might. Human force and might are obscene in the face of history and the death of everything. Movements die, people die, civilizations die, worlds die. Yet something of it remains.

Met a friend of H. who was naturalized as a citizen today. He describes the process as like a graduation: occurring in a high school gymnasium in D.C., shaking hands of people who are congratulating him he has never met before in his life. I joke seriously ‘graduating to be a human being’. He came from Iraq six years ago ‘seeking asylum’. He says: ‘everywhere is fucked up.’

K: ‘if time were a commodity, it would be for the rich… the thing itself that keeps us from action - who am i, if not withholding…’ Her writing continues to astonish me.

If body cannot be, I will make my own.

I’m Gonna Lift Up A Standard For My King - Church Of God In Christ

XXV.

In my prayers I pray for healing. I also want this book to be a prayer. I pray for deliverance from sickness and pain, I pray for the end of the world; I pray for the beginning and end of the earth. I pray to learn, I pray to pray, I pray to remind myself of myself and the obligations therein. My self is a list of obligations that unfurls from my head to my feet. It is a to do list, of actions to take, of situations to make, of lives to live, of hearts I have known and loved, of loves I have loved. I take action and consult with myself; thus, I take action and know myself. In this moment of doing, I become a force unto myself. I must act, I must do, or else I will perish. I write to create existence; I write to wring myself of the demon of passivity which sits in my stomach like greed. I do not need satiation, I need the fullness of expression. I must not placate myself, I must not pacify myself. I must speak wildly and openly of these broken things, and thus truly come to life. I transform my pain into gold; I transform my suffering into gold. This gold is unusable, invaluable.

I am hit by the breadth of experience. In moments like these I wish to be out in the world, to know people, to love people, to listen to people. I feel so incredibly narrow, so limited by my perspective and ideals which shut me up within myself like a room. I live my life, I enact myself; spend days on end in near total solitude. I want to engage, I want to hear people tell their stories. Fascinated by Kollwitz drawings lately. She engages suffering. She engages trial. In

such a way that her work moves beyond depiction into recognition, into listening. These true modalities. Art is useless but if to listen and invoke listening. I share my suffering and become lighter. Suffering is shared with me and I become lighter. This meeting of air and light and lightening is often divine. I notice divinity and in noticing divinity the angels shrink away from me. I am of this moment and nothing else.

I focus myself entirely on a person speaking and notice the godliness of human beings. I give myself up to be present; in being present I become something else, someone else, somewhere else. It is as if for a moment the world is removed and the earth is revealed as something possible. The earth does not have prisons. The earth does not sell people. The earth does not. The earth is. And I am of it and with it in each and every moment in my life. The task is to remain present.

XXVI.

I am enlightened by company; I crave it. I crave the company of co-conspirators… of people who are determined into knowing; who have come about themselves and thus continually come about life, bumping up against the edge of its sharp surface and exclaim totally. I approach the atomic moment and shudder, the sun blinds me and I am lost to all things.

Pain leaves the individual with a decision. To act in light of the pain, or to act out in the face of it. To approach your own death in its great fullness and to either become what you are capable of becoming or to go to war with the sun. Many people seem to go the way of senseless war, of fighting that which is fundamental to life; fundamental to existence… and thus tend to press death forcefully into themselves like a marking. Many people appear to me to be marked with death. It is increasingly rare for me to meet those who are not. I wonder at the cost of submission -

submission to the world as it were, submission to profit, submission to empire. Of course all people are submitted to this cause, but to what extent might one resist/exist in the face of submission? The process of self making is continually fraught with that which demarcates pain as worth, and worth as the border of humanness. Functioning under a global state which makes a marketplace of pain (here from auction block culture) seems impossible unless one is submitted to a mechanization, a concretizing of becoming to identity-profit form. The slave is submitted to identity- profit form with violent force. What is a peaceful protest in the face of this? How can one peacefully protest genocide?

XXVII.

My writing returns to submission. The body submitted to the mind, the mind submitted to the body; the hierarchical and a-hierarchical dissolutions of self into ordered pairs, triplets, songs of the self. In one moment I am led by my mind; in the next I set my mind to the side and feel the currency of my body. Currency dictates movement, where individuals move, where organs move. Money dictates movement. As a substitution for the currency of the world, energy, money submits the human function (eating, sleeping, shitting) to a rigorous remodel, where the individual is diverted and converted into a religious belief in the prospect of wealth. Profit is truly unnatural and in that sense life is most certainly poor. The seductive illusions of wealth which litter contemporary culture only further this idea that the poor are simply not yet rich, not yet divine, not yet gods. The rich are simply gods of blood, gods in the sense that they will do what it takes to remain gods. Here, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Money is a sort of filthy dance which permeates my life, which reorganizes my life, which deviates and perverts my life. I do this dance for money; the Middle Passage is lined with the dead... for what? Money.

I want to eviscerate money, eviscerate value, eviscerate the senseless belief which powers value like a religion. I want to

value nothing. Life is a horizon that stretches on forever, devoid of purpose and purpose-ing. My life and the next life are each lives, lives with different meanings, different assertions, different reasons (or unreasons)... but there is nothing beyond this or that. Flatness is a form of knowledge.

In this sense intellect and the exercise of intellect, at their best, are simply a proof of worthlessness. Worthlessness beings about great worth, worth that cannot be measured.

This text came about with no reason, and it will leave with no reason.

XXVIII.

I had so much I wanted to write about before… but I lost those words in the sun.

XXIX.

I am only inspired by others. I am inspired by love, friendship, learning, a strange meeting. When I write from a place of pain, I am not inspired. Inspiration comes from outside of me, from communication in a true sense. When my body speaks to me I am commanded, I am ordered; I am known. In speaking with another, I am delivered. My pain dies. I live.

I write with unwavering hope. This is my weapon against loneliness. In writing I make everything real; make everything true. I make myself and make myself once more. If I continue to write, I live.

XXX.

I have this small window of time.

XXXI.

I ruin everything with my overzealousness. I imagine life too immensely. I want too much. I need too much. I can’t take this anymore. I am in this pain and run out of myself… I run and run and there is nowhere to go, the sun is so loud in my face and ears and I can’t get out, I can’t escape anything anymore. I want to cry. I want to shed myself of myself entirely and find a new life. I want to be calm, I want to want nothing. I am anxious, I am lonely, I want everything. I want to be loved. I can’t stop wanting to be loved. I need to eradicate this from me. I need to stop wanting to be loved. I need to stop wanting to be loved.

Everything falls from me and I am light. I bear my life like a cross and never leave. I never leave. I want to go so desperately, to cross the bridge into everything, to cross that bridge, to cross the bridge. I want to sing. I want to sing. I want to sing. Collapse into repetitions. Collapse into holding. Collapse and break and break entirely. Be nowhere now and to be nowhere infinitely. Stop everything stop time and stop infinitely. Break into particles and break into breaking. Why is life so far away from me? Why can’t I live my life? I reach out and grasp myself, I tug at the fabric of my own shirt and beg myself to stay but every time I leave. Every time I leave myself and I cry and I get on trains like leaving is all I will ever know. I sit and look through windows. I imagine life as someone else. I imagine life as beautiful. I imagine life as golden and together. Why are we so far apart? Why can’t you come back to me? Why am I so far away from you now? Everything is crushed and I cut myself on the pieces, the jagged bitter pieces of everything. The jagged bitter pieces are like tears and like me. I can’t be what anyone wants me to be anymore. I can only be this broken thing.

My life is overflowing with tears.

XXXII.

I need to leave this world. It is a visceral need, this push to leave. I am being thrust, driven into this hold from which I cannot leave, from which I cannot be removed. What is to be done now? What is to be done with this burning world and the rest of it? Nothing to be done with this burning world and the rest of it. The world screams in fits of excess and remembrance and I observe. I observe with my organs mangled and full of wind, burping, belching, excreting and falling into disrepair. I corrupt first, then world. I corrupt first, I guilty first, I condemned first. I know this and the things I know melt away and die under the heat. It is scalding, so scalding on my bones and my body and I reach out for anything but I cannot be touched. I cannot be pulled away or hidden from this fire. It files me into a sharp implement. I have been brought from the blunt object of my youth into this fire and torn and torn again, shredded and burnt, shredded and burnt. There is no hope for this world nor those in it, no saving, no time, no object, no great nothings to be known and celebrated… there is just this ceaseless fire erupting from the stomach of the machine god where we are always feeding bodies in hopes of harvest. I harvest nothing, I cull myself, I bleed myself, I know myself. I bring this empty basket back with me, I send myself down the river. I drown myself in the river and become multiple. My children swim up to me like heads and know me. They feed me and they know me. No great god, no great hope. Only fire.

I run to life screaming and furious at myself. I beat my chest and shout at my wounds. They seep green and yellow pus. I am the guardian of myself, and my chest opens to reveal the law to me. I inscribe it on my skin and exclaim at myself, exclaim at the world, exclaim at everything. Everything and everything becomes nothing in my eyes, I tell the world. The world laughs a great big belly laugh and seals the mystery away. I do not read. I do not know. I do not tell of anything, and nothing tells of me. I am unknown to the fabric, nakedness. How much longer do I wait at the gates?

I wait now boiling over, I spill out of myself, revealing everything. My words become organs and they are riddled with life.

XXXIII.

Life consists of a great many endings. Endings marked by time and songs, the times of love dying, the song of the body withering away. The screams, chirps, bellows, whispers, caresses and kisses of the tongue are acting bodies that lick the air, that push the air, that mangle the air in the expressive breath. I push this air to push myself out of myself, to bring myself into being forcefully, violently, excessively, so that I might exist unto myself and eviscerate the time of me, the passing and passing and passing that cannot be brought to a close, that cannot be fixed. I must finally pass, I must finally lose completely, I must finally stand with empty hands and press these empty hands to my face and see. I tell my loved ones quiet things and lovely things even though my life is so very loud and ugly. I wish for their lives to be beautiful. I am not beautiful, but I am delicate. I shrivel up at the touch of another; I crack and break on the inside. Even now, I am older than I appear; yet I will become much older soon. I will let time play its great trick on me, and go through the movements of my life. I sing the aria endlessly; it emerges from me as if by being pulled out by the throat. It squawks and protests like a great bird, and I transform, becoming this bundle of disorganized molecules shoved down into the recesses of existence, the muddy dark caverns of existence where things grow and breed and are born. Here I know things, and light no lamp. I am submerged entirely, feeling the viscous mass fill my lungs and my stomach like something total. I become something total. Here, I die; thus I cease to exist. I exist unto no one; thus I finally exist, for the first time.

Once I have pushed everyone away from me, once I have become far and away from life, I will finally end. My pain is of the holding, my pain is of the wanting what I do not

need; needing what I do not want. My pain is of the organism, of the being driven by driving that does not want to drive anymore. To speak of desire to me is to speak of death; this death is heavy on my tongue. It is fermented and sweet, putrid like meat and bones. Death and decay are wedded within me, kissing and fucking like a disease that refuses to leave, leaving me despondent and poor. I am so much less than this, so much less than human…

I don’t care if you leave. I still have to live with myself.

That is punishment enough.

XXXIV.

My life is not beautiful. This is why I cannot be loved. My life is hideous. I work. I walk around the city. I work. I hide away from the world. I work. I cut myself off from the pleasures of life. I do not drink. I do not smoke. I sometimes laugh. I implement discipline and will in my life to the point of which I look around and I am gone. I am seen, perhaps, but to be of this world is to partake in it. My body is here; I am elsewhere. I want to have friends. I want to do silly things. I want to laugh at myself and the world… but it seems I am only capable of seriousness and extremity. I remember myself as a child - light and curious. My curiosity has mutated into a fierce intellectualization of life, barring me from life in the intellect’s ceaseless examination of itself. This divorce is nothing less than life. I am nothing, less than life. I thought this path would bring me understanding and realization of my circumstances, but it has simply prolonged them; stretched them to cartoonish proportions. My life is outsize; I cannot fit it into my body. I store it in words and songs and catalogues. I am far away and yell to myself. I cannot see because it is dark. I know my home is close and I whisper a word to myself to comfort disembodiment. I whisper this word until the word becomes every word, all words forever. My language pared down to syllables, dots, points, lines, bare symbols mutated by the air into hapless

vibrations. They wither away under the forces that push life into boxes, down and away forever.

XXXV.

Faith comes and goes like a spark. I conject myself and fail.

The body is a vacuum of the will. Pleasure is an opiate of the will. Pain is a fire of the will.

Distruments was in my throat. This book is in my left arm.

XXXVI.

I am dying. Sing me a song…

XXXVII.

I will train myself to live completely. I break through my pain and break through into life and live impossible permanence. I commune with god and learn the terms of my life. I sit with them, tumble with them, play with them and arrange them like intricate pieces. Thus my life has fallen; thus my life shall be judged. I move from one minutiae to the next like locations, paring myself down with a knife to the utmost parts. I shear and shave my organs down into smooth stones and whittle my veins into networks. I sculpt my body with delicate attentiveness, listening to the glowing moulds bellow and creak; the tissues crack and scrape. I compose this body with wildness and delight into measures of succinct knowing. Here, in this place, time becomes my friend and witness. I conspire against the world with my body. I know of the world and how things die.

XXXVIII.

In poetry all things are possible. Beautiful poetry brings about possibility and music, reveals the earth out from under the slip of civilization. I want everyone around me to grow, to love, to learn from one another. It is possible. It is all possible. My life is dedicated and wedded thoroughly to freedom. To the liberation of all peoples and the earth, I raise my glass… which is always almost empty. It seems so simple to me sometimes, how the ideological systems of the world function to extract labor and the spirit from life… to see this and expose it and act against it is the highest order of modern life, the continued war of history against this force, this plastic force which to this day limits and poisons life… the technology and resources exist. The world is poor and rich but the earth is. All that is and was needed to sustain life is here. Tear down this world to reveal that which is and always has been. There is no need for systems of governance, control, order. There is only life.

Life just flows through my body. I let it pass through me, on its way to somewhere else.

THE SUFFERING DIALOGUES

Pain is a transmission of energy from/to/and between histories of action, inaction, reaction. Thus, one might theorize a history of pain as a history of force: embodiments of collective/collected violence acting/reacting, living/dying, knowing/unknowing this violence as it is continually inflicted and obscured, inflicted and obscured. The ‘world’ has generated yet another physical principle, an extension of force - which is the Janus transference of pain in and between bodies. These bodies, in living, moving, acting, relating, confer and refer pain onto their relative pairs; pain grows much like a splitting molecule. Pain is directed and redirected intellectually, physically, emotionally, as embodiments of trauma. Living beings carry pain, they lift it, they set it down, they caress it, they know it. Pain is a form of primary knowledge that synthesizes the physical, intellectual, and spiritual realms of cognition. One might say that pain creates a sort of metaphysical conscientiousness, a sort of embodiment that localizes the body and yet confers with the cavernous well of human spirit and trial that is all pain. Pain (desire) as the generator of seeking, knowledge, growth, life. Without pain, life becomes an inertia, a bourgeois dream. Pain is of the realm of earthliness, as it grounds the being experiencing pain in the being experiencing pain; through this grounding, a certain attention must be paid to pain. If attention is paid, receipts begin to pile up. Accounts of life and living.

I encounter pain as a sort of infinite logistics. Pain is a processing mechanism by which sensation is felt acutely, known obtusely, and expressed chaotically. Beings in pain are of this sensation and yet not products of it. Pain is a mediator between the body and life, the body and action, the body and inaction. Pain may manifest in a pseudo- singular way (beings experiencing headaches, chest pain, and the like), yet the rivers of these pains flow with incredible difference. Contextual sufferings arise and fall over time and can be mapped historically as trauma-sites;

whether these moments of affliction are considered to be physical, mental, physiological, and/or otherwise, these sufferings create topographical maps of the city-body by and in which the organs and painfully desirous of no-pain-full energies confer, create, and destroy the conditions of self- making. Without these parts, organs, pieces, of myself… I am not necessarily (limited), but I am to a certain degree delimited in my ability to say, do, act, and react to certain things and stimuli. Pain as moment arises and falls in different locales and regions of the body, as a manifestation of histories of violence. One might feel pain in the shoulder from a fall, while simultaneously feeling pain in the throat from unspeakable/unspoken language. These regions of the body as functional spheres often operate in multiple dimensions of consciousness and sensation. One part of the body occupies another while manifesting symptoms of a mental condition and containing a lymphatic mechanism that might swell due to stress or sickness. Much as the knee holds tissue, muscle, tendon, and bone, the body (as an ecosystem) counts countless spheres among it - spheres that give and take life with and without attention/knowledge/thought.

Much as the painter might paint with the mind in his or her wrist, so might the body know something. Sometimes the body knows something in the leg, the stomach, the chest, the fingers - that the self does not yet have cognition of. The body, as primary knowledge, sometimes acts without knowing of the self-mind. Yet the spirit knows of both of these things, and mediates between them.

…

The living being often suffers multiple ailments, or points, within and about the greater map of the body and its various extensions. The soul, especially, knows this ground, and acts as a sort of key to the mechanism of the body. Industrial culture understands this, that the body is a mechanism, and that this mechanism can be mechanized to carry out countless tasks: tasks that are often repetitive and

spirit-killing. One might use this knowledge to liberate oneself from the world entirely. The soul is that from which all things come and go, where life touches the body and leaves the body. This junction, or crossroads of the body and the mind, is where the pains and desires of the body and mind have their source - arising from a confluence of internal, external, and bounded/unbounded sources. The great injustices of the world (capitalism, slavery, genocide, rape) are housed here; make their living in the living being. Violence inflicted on the body and the history of the body (here, bodies before bodies before bodies) becomes housed in the living being as traumatic mechanism. One might conceive of trauma to be a form of jarring, dislocating, or relocating the body and its mechanisms. For instance: if the body process is to eat, shit, and sleep - trauma might stop the mechanism that brings about hunger (or engorge it); trauma might keep the living being from sleeping, or keep that living being asleep. In this way trauma might act as a spore or a bacterial culture. People in whom histories of trauma are bourne (often without ‘conscious’ knowledge, traumas of family histories and earth histories - trauma of past lives and living), are deeply connected to the affliction that is the history of human life from birth; additionally pick up trauma at various different sites throughout their development (parental, social, economic, and so forth). Traumas are burdens; traumas are burdens of history and historical context. They live in the body, and act upon it.

…

The connection between trauma and pain lies with the ability of the living being to function in a way that allows for self-creation, self-making, and self-growth. If, for instance, at a young age, a living being suffers a blunt force trauma to the leg, the individual’s ability to walk for the rest of his or her life may very well be in question. Trauma is often used as a weapon by institutions of social governance (read: nation states and their enforcement mechanisms) to cripple the development of children globally: by way of physical harm, emotional harm, and intellectual harm. This process

of harming is accomplished by way of military intervention into the lives of children (via drone bombings, occupations, police brutality and shootings of children, their families and loved ones), as well as the economic, social, and academic models that govern and determine the lives of children (deprivation of life resources: food, water, books, shelter, teachers, role models, places where children might gather and play, et al.) There is no greater weapon than the institution that is able to inflict pain and call this pain protection, growth, and ultimately, necessary. The state inflicts pain as both a reminder and a foundation: pain meted out by the state is that which is the judge of life (here, prisons, drone warfare, policing), while simultaneously being that which establishes the state as authoritative in said meting out of violence.

Violence, thus, can be described as event and describe event, while pain enters the world of poetics as a site of multiplicity. Identity, thus, can be described as event and describe event, while the living being enters the world of poetics as a site of multiplicity. Here, Moten: ‘do not consent to be a single being’. Violence often becomes a symbolic marker; manifests literally on the body (the yellow star, the bullet wound); violence often obliterates the body entirely, leaving only shadows. Violence inflicted on the body is, however, intradisciplinary; thus, often functions as a constant wounding under and by the hand of the state. This wounding is educational (the exclusion of histories, the whitewashing of histories, the mutilating of histories). This wounding is educational (the killing of parents and loved ones, the killing of languages, the killing of cultures, the killing of spirit). This wounding is educational (the institution of prisons, the institution of for profit culture, the institution of whiteness). These violences act as arrows into and through the body; perhaps the image of Saint Sebastian is helpful here. The body is crossed and crossed again at the site of history with these violent movements: acts, words, bullets, looks, caresses, ideologies.

The state uses this exclusive weapon, violence, as a means to inflict pain and create traumatic wounds in and of and upon the living being. These wounds function exclusively to submit the living being to the state as subject, as machine, as object to be used and discarded. The term subject should here on out refer to this perversion as such. The subjection of the living being by and under the state is carried out under these conditions of force; thus furthering the enduring legacy of brute exertion of power by those with power upon those without it. This is a perversion at the root of society and civilization (one might say life) that must be eradicated, in order for life to truly begin. For life under the state is no life, only survival (if one is so lucky) and exploitation. Once the living being is duly wounded (by the exhaustion of labor, by the loss of loved ones, by the physical toll meted out by capitalism like a beating, often a beating)...

The mechanism of enslavement of the mind, body, and will.

Here, enslavement acts as infinite violence… the trauma of enslavement does not die when the mechanism of enslavement does. The mechanism of enslavement does not die, the manner in which it functions transforms. Enslavement reterritorializes as modernity recurs. New technologies enable new traumas.

Enslavement is the grounds of the world; the ground upon which all things stand under the state. Enslavement is the history of the world. The earth is otherwise.

I imagine a world without enslavement. I imagine a world without prisons. I imagine a world without borders. I image a world without police. I imagine a world without profit.

In this imagining I become-destroyer of world; inaugurate this new being.

XXXIX.

I remedy myself, and thus remedy the world.

I often wonder if I am made for anybody or anything. Lately, it would seem as though I am not. I pass through so many doors, quiet and thinking about things. The tunnel through which I travel has endless windows lining it, like a train car. Through the windows, I can see people celebrating, kissing, loving, fighting, crying. Yet, all together. I continue my work, and go on down my path, but not without mourning this, in each moment of emptiness. I work to starve loneliness, but loneliness is a great hunger. The tunnel through which I pass curves endlessly, and reveals a bit more to me with each step, but this is simply a passing. There is nothing to be made known. The ground shakes beneath me like an interruption. I too, shake.

The perfect self will commit perfect acts with regularity. The imperfect self will commit perfect acts accidentally.

Instead of social governance, gatherings of people, ‘conspirators toward life’.

Many professors at the university are also policemen.

A true artist understands that the object itself is simply what remains.

Each moment has its own imperative. One must only listen.

One emerges from pain out into that field which is the knowledge of pain, movement.

Suffering too is a coin.

I live in uncertain zones – where gestures are made and lost.

I will whittle myself down from everything into nothing.

…

All work seems useless. I am all too aware of the circumstances that bind my writing in and to time… the end of all things. The end of the world, the end of the earth… whichever is to come first. I peel back this veil of language and look into the emptiness which is the end of history and the end of life. None of this work can save me, no matter how desperately I beg and plead. This work will die as I will. I claw, I gnash my teeth, I bear myself up against the impenetrable circumstances which are the end of all things. I am inconsolable in the face of this. What does it matter? What good can I possibly do? And yet I know I will wake up tomorrow and go on.

The people around me seem to desire endings, and often have an acute awareness of the beginnings and ends of things as some timeline of life leading towards some great truth. I cannot bear this thought; I reject it outright. I need this moment forever; to submerge myself in it totally. I need, entirely. I desire, entirely. Perhaps it is not love. One must be a monster in order to desire the infinite. The infinite is necessarily unhuman; potentially inorganic. The totality of all things never totalizes. The possibility of the expansion of this life in all directions is the endless explosion of my desire, the particles which wrap me up within myself disintegrating…

I have become hard and am slowly losing my ability to open up to the world. With each failed love, with each dead friendship, with each disillusioning encounter, I retreat further and further into myself, disavowing that which led me here… everything and everyone.

I suffer because of my desire to love and be loved. All else is trivial.

I am nothing to no one.

XL.

Education is the engine of modernity. The model of ‘learning’ and ‘knowledge’ that has been framed to young students around the world – ‘applicable’ knowledge, ‘practical’ knowledge; the ‘production’ of ideas and scholars – has engendered a process of industrial learning and religious adherence to the knowledge-form (which is commodity, the production and selection of commodity as thought-object) from which the world (rightly) will never recover. For this knowledge is a tiered one, a system of relative importance in knowing/feeling/understanding/sensing, that once adopted, is applied to every single faculty and engagement in and of life. If one arrives at the critical thinking mechanism, life becomes critical. Stop. To engage criticality is to realize the criticality of moments. There might be criticality in a shrub or a bus stop or a hat. Criticality explodes out sideways like a step into the shadows, where rote learning shoots upwards into the managerial classes like a space program.

In this determination of knowledge as practical/impractical; the task of learning as the task of laboring in global society, education is mechanized and applied with full force towards the production of the perfect student, which is to say, the student who is able to seamlessly integrate into the workforce. If knowledge and learning are submitted to the modern definition of work, knowledge and learning die a terrible and stupid death. And yet they are. The hell of this daily labor is a sort of sending up and in; the concentric circles which ripple out from this fundamental sorting of life reverberate out into the sheer possibility of life in any sorts… a creative life, a loving life, a relational life. This form of learning leads to isolation and death. For the mechanism of the mind itself to become a commodity is the greatest victory of capital, as the mind often holds the body in its embrace and (in ways far greater and more mysterious than the swiss cheese model of history and material) dictates the terms and conditions of the body in many moments.

‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed’ (Steve Biko)

Education as a form of pain giving by way of categorical constriction/restriction. The understanding of the terms and conditions of the world as applied to ‘life’. That which is arranged to be unquestionably true by those who order knowledge; in turn mete this knowledge out to children and youth (economics as capitalist economics). This prefixing of learning with law is a seamless disjunction in the masterful ouroboros which is the relationship between people and production as one. This relation becomes a rite under capital; a sacrificial one at that. I believe that many children understand this at a young age. Children see the world in every moment; perceive that which is innately.

The teacher as the purveyor of ideology, in a marketplace of ideology which stretches the world over. Here, the teacher as primary source, as that which dicates, curates, manages, and stakes a claim to the knowledge-form as form itself, as belief, as truth. The classroom, at all stages of the process of learning law and adherence to law, is the battleground in which ideology is either reinforced or put on trial.

It is no extreme assertion to call the condition of modern life one of total war, where one must fight for the simple ability of and to self-make each and every moment of one’s life. The levels of ideological violence occur everywhere from the earliest cognitive moments of one’s life (having to navigate the sea of deeply materialistic ideologies which permeate and ground the modern consciousness) to the earliest physical moments of one’s life (having one’s life taken by various state sanctioned ‘judges’, uniformed or otherwise). The war of ideology and physical war are wedded irrevocably, and more and more frequently have found themselves manifested in the nuclear standoff. This assertion of life as particular is enough to make Pascal proud. The threat of total annihilation is a fantastic enslavement model; a model which forces total compliance. If one does not

comply, one’s family is simply tortured and killed, then one is tortured and killed. If one does not comply, one’s city is simply razed from the earth. This violence is that which acts as the mediator between modernity and that time before; this violence is that which continues unabated, unchecked; this violence is that which is called ‘necessary’, that which is necessary for the ‘freedom’ and ‘protection’ of the Great World.

One might form a geneology of violence from this physically explosive point to the germ of violence as a historical passing. The germ of violence is transmitted by way of governance. The soldier of nation would simply be a soldier of himself if it were not for ideology and the forces which direct him through life like a maze or a tunnel. For some, the inclination for and movement towards patriotism is no great leap. For others, it appears to be the only option if one wishes to survive. The soldiers who take up arms for nation take up arms for an idea. The question then remains, what life is worth an idea? And another question: what life is not defined by the idea of life?

In this manner, the state binds the subject to it as a survival rite. If one wishes to survive and eat, one must submit oneself (mind, body, and soul) to the ideological rigueur of the production mechanism which powers the state using the bodies and minds of those who submit. The soul is fire. Yet this question remains of life being worth as idea. Fundamentally, one must go on, or else one ceases to go on. There must be a belief in the worth and hope of life. For some it is family, for some it is life elsewhere, for some it is the next moment…

If that which is is accepted as that which is worthy, that which makes life worth living, life is a straight line. If that which is cannot be accepted, life becomes a movement of struggle.

There is a struggle over the domain of the soul which is common to our times, the struggle over who implements the

soul, and how the soul is implemented in the world. This struggle is mystical first, material second. For soul is the movement of life, from which the sheer desperation to live emerges. If this drive is harnessed and put into shackles, that which harnesses it can manipulate an entire body. Ideology and force are those weapons which harness the soul. The body can be penetrated and beaten so brutally that the subject loses the will to live. Ideology can permeate the mind so thoroughly to the point of which the subject is convinced that the will of the state is the will to live. But violence understands that there must be a reaching or touching of this heart of life, whether by way of the hands or the brain. This violence, then, is a form of intricate and manipulative surgery, by which the subject’s body is used as a disposable experiment, as yet another laborer to power a dying star, to power a deathly civilization. The task of the state is to know the subject entirely, to run the subject through, to eviscerate the subject, and in the process, produce knowledge.

See how this process of production works.

The surgery of the soul is manifested formally in the total rape which occurs in enslavement, where one is taken entirely.

I return to slavery again and again and again.

The films El Topo and Metropolis, in coalition, say something about history.

The flow of information as violence is exacerbated by technological process. Technological process as streamlining violence. To conceive of violence as information is to understand that knowledge often leaves no trace; that knowledge sometimes knows its object entirely. Knowing is taking. I know this chair, I take its name. I know this world, I take its people. Coming into knowledge like coming into wealth. Violence as information is the constitution of history; binds the known and unknown, the written and

unwritten, the spoken and unspoken, the visible and unseen…

Dante creates a model of capital in concentric circles organized vertically through which water drips and flows and falls. Hell is a great machine. How else could such elaborate torture occur without abatement?

Who consents to move the machine? Who is coerced? Who is enslaved?

Language is a failure in light of violence. I write eulogies for everything, as my writing is after everything. My writing is after the end of the world; my writing is after myself. I write for and from dissolution, from the place of dripping, from the place of where things break apart and ruin.

I move into disorder furtively, inching my way forward in a dark place, feeling the walls with my hands, uncertain as to where the floor will fall out, or the ceiling collapse.

XLI.

Borders as physical and conceptual frameworks. Here is where knowledge begins and ends. Here is where authority begins and ends. Here is where life begins and ends. Here is where the world begins and ends. Here is where civilization begins and ends.

In doing nothing I am afflicted. In work I am afflicted. There is no respite. Choice lies somewhere between anguish and anguish.

I am a student of industry.

One must be strong enough to hate the world. Here, not a physical strength, but a fortitude and strength of the heart and soul. One must reach the point of disavowal entirely; to

strangle that which strangles life, the wretchedness of the world.

The only human trait that can be spoken of is one of sheer ruthlessness and brutal struggle for survival. This, the preservation of life, is perhaps that which one might describe as the one true rationality. I make decisions based on survival first, and ideas second. I am directed by my need to survive and create, and nothing else.

This struggle for survival is bitter and animal. The introduction of modern technologies of convenience create an environment of excellent chrome, albeit at a superficial level. Life is shined over, factoried, made metallic and complete. Technology reifies the complete body with countless appendages to validate and uphold the civil drive to progress as beautiful and righteous. The bitterness of the struggle remains in the lives of those thrown out of the city: the poets, the beggars, the indecent. The surface of life is commercial fascination; inside is the rotting flesh and churning mechanism of animality. Inside the metropolis, people are torn to shreds and used for fuel. Acknowledging this is to acknowledge the human history of cannibalism, the common practice of eating others to sustain and gain life force. Technologies streamline this process: quicker friendlier prisons, scheduling and data management applications for credit card companies, worker and student profiling by universities. With enough examination, the essential cruel winter of the human condition is revealed… but I do not think very many people wish to stare at this for very long.

Those who look for a more compassionate, more friendly world are unlikely to find it. This is at the heart of liberalism: creating a more compassionate cruelty, a more compassionate prison, a more compassionate state. Such a mission only seeks to obscure and reify the impossibility of civilization. One might ask oneself if one prefers organized or disorganized violence. Violence organized, streamlined, meted out to entire cities with the swiftness of a single

gesture from thousands of miles away… is proof of this ‘human progress’ and the power of Civilization. Hiroshima and Nagasaki cease to become places, they become events. The atomic bomb pushes time past the realm of sensation toward the death of light, the death of time. The weapons of civilization are scientific, physical, precise, and measured.

Abolition must be made to be attractive. Abolition must learn from history.

XLII.

I kiss the ground and look up. There are a thousand skies and a thousand suns, each rotating and staking arrows deep into the soil. Mirrors reflect their light. I stand up, and pull an arrow by the stalk. From the ground emerges a seed- flower. I grasp it by the throat, plucking petal by petal, and a beetle crawls out of the pod, green and radiant. It crawls onto my hand, and nestles itself into my palm, submerging itself entirely in my skin.

XLIII.

I strengthen myself physically, mentally, spiritually. I harden myself against the world. I do for myself and myself alone, and thus do for others. I act clearly, conscisely, cleanly. I am a knife to myself, and thus, a knife to the world. I listen deeply and acutely, contorting myself to sound, and thus, sound knows me. I empty myself for language, and thus, language fills me. I kill myself to this world, and thus, I am born into the earth. I submerge myself deep beneath the pressing roof of civilization, and tunnel into the earth like a mole. I find a cool warm space; there I make my home. There I know life, there I know the material body. I caress the earth, and thus caress myself. I release into myself upward, and gather myself against the storm of life. I blow this way and that, but I remain rooted. I breathe, and breathe, and breathe.

If there is new knowledge, it is refractory knowledge. A bathing in the rivers of the body and the total knowing of the body and the touching of the stones of the soul which litter the shallows. One might then know the whole of history. Cover oneself entirely with mud; emerge from the river to dry on the banks in the sun. The mud begins to crack and harden. Stand up and watch as the world falls from you.

Did you find a myth at the bottom of that lake? Did you steep yourself in the draught? That which is not water, not blood, yet fluid all the same? That untraceable unknowable life, the life that only dreams gesture toward but never touch, that life that knows seeing and laughs, that knows love and laughs, that knows dying and laughs? I drink of myself and yet I create a new mixture, a new recipe, which pleases me greatly. I dig into the fullness of my skin and open a new bottle, refreshing myself in the wound, knowing myself in the wound. I become one with the great violence of history; here I sit. I hear the hard truths of my life. I hear the hard truths of the lives of ghosts. I commune sometimes with god, and sometimes this turbine of mud and bones and salt… I shift and turn, tumultuous and bare, craning my ears towards the sun…

I need to hear myself say these things aloud.

I do what must be done, no more, and no less. Yet, I want more than what must be done, and often wish I didn’t have to do as much. Such is being human.

Money stands in for the ability to do things and sustain life.

This text is simply a curation of the thoughts, feelings, ideas, forms, concepts, relations, of and between things people and times which have convinced me that life is worth living; that I might be able to do something meaningful with the time I have left on this earth.

I am in the sludge of life, the countless bowel movements submerged and gathered into cultures of thoughts and meanings. Myself, ash, compiled and expressed in a series of codified outputs and specific knowings. The culture of life is shit. Artaud knew this. Artaud drives himself to the edge of life by way of fecality, the torrid filth of consumption and expression as a chute-process, a direct hole. I do not pursue the mind. I will let the mind be; let the mind steep in its fluid mixture. To let the mind ferment is to accrue the smoothness of being, the round stone in a river of excrement. I wash myself off in the midst of defilement, and emerge reborn.

XLIV.

The location of the subject is an intellectual process organized by the seeing-machine. The subject is marked.

If one were to create a map of beings (living and otherwise) on a piece of land, one ought to invent a consensual device.

Appendages to sense are necessary for the functioning of the modern nation state.

Sense and non-sense are established via laws of knowing. Appendages of sense are that which allow for these laws to be enforced; kept.

I do not keep law with me. I shed sense with me like a new skin. Each morning is a death.

There are many ways in which the subject may be mapped.

War and surgery are similar processes.

XLV.

Now I am tasked with killing myself again. I draw myself up, with this weakness in my body and heaviness in my soul, and strike myself from myself. I am empty again. The fatigue is a metal body with cast organs, wet, cold, and rattling endlessly in the night. I haunt myself, and in the process, I run from myself. I proceed in solitude, as in the beginning, to the end of all places, the center of my awful heart. It beats quietly while my body is in rage. My heart is distant from life, the inhabitant of some other zone, a zone of endless dawning and wer mornings, wet and warm, dull breezes and windows that must be opened. Here, we let everything in. Step inside, dinner is on the stove.

I would be by the sea, counting stones and on the doorstep of my cottage looking out onto the rocks, where a seagull sits perched with a small fish in its mouth. I would be by the sea, like a celebration, cast from city life into quietude and contemplation. I would be by the sea, my desires like water and cool, brushed back behind the ear of a new love, spitting into the air.

This body holds everything behind my back like mischief. It teases me, taunts me, knows me in places I cannot know, places where I cannot meet the body. This body laughs at me, laughs at my attempt to speak it, read it, commune with it. This body dances while I hide, away from things and low, mournful and singing of the life only my body may know. This body possesses me.

If I could just live for one moment!

I beg for life and life is withheld from me. I beg for love and love is withheld from me. Perhaps I’d do better if I stopped begging.

My life is impoverished and cannot be filled. There is no wealth to be had or to be known other than the death of suffering. And somehow, suffering refuses to die.

I beat back death and other things as the night falls.

I chip away at time like a ledger of stone. I regulate myself, pace myself, modulate myself like an instrument. I carouse myself, orbit myself, and dance myself to sleep. Time obliges me by breathing in return.

I despair, I write… there is no difference.

I simply watch as everything ends, helpless and young.

It is sad to know that all of a life’s work will add up to nothing. All of the energy exerted, the ridiculous trips, the days and nights of work, the toiling and agonizing over love and obligation… will forever be eviscerated into total balance. I sought perfection to beat death, to beat life, and everything in between. I threw myself into work to the point of breaking, and I broke entirely. I returned, humbled and broken, to life, six years older. Of this, I remember thinking to myself, all that has come of it is the loss of six years.

Love has been nothing but a waste of time.

I look at the lives of my loved ones… I see hopes, dreams, pursuits. Some desire sex, some desire achievement, some desire recognition (whatever these terms mean)… I cannot reconcile existence to this point. I want nothing to do with life other than love and isolation, solitude and books, quiet and cooking, self examination and work. I want my projects, my little things, my internal things, and nothing else. Perhaps these are pursuits, pursuits away from the world and other such externalities. I endeavor to move down and in, not up and out. In this sense, it is only natural that my loneliness continues to grow.

I must reconcile my life with that which my life brings.

Laughable revenge against time.

Obsession must be one of my adaptations to suffering. How else would I still be breathing if I did not spend an inordinate amount of time on arbitrary things? If it mattered, it would not matter. I sit and count the fingers on my hand, the stars in the sky, the days in a month, the battles in a war… and I emerge stupid and invigorated from the effort. The question of why only enters as the night goes on… I beat this back every day; it is exhausting. I went through a period of Woolf and Sexton obsession; perhaps I should return to them. Writers who beat back death with obstinate survival.

I must be occupied, or else I occupy myself; this is certainly death.

The eventual end (for now) is a consolation.

XLVI.

I go on each day and I ask myself, what hope do I have? The answer is: almost certainly none.

Much as there are socialized methods of pain-making, there are socialized methods of hope-making. Ideological commericals for a better life, a happier life, a richer life, a more fulfilling life. I will not let myself be fooled by these delusions. Life is empty, meaningless, impossibly deadly. There is no redemption from this basic knowledge. There is nothing to be obtained, nothing to be possessed, nothing to be owned. It falls through the fingers like water. The idea that there is a better life, however, motivates the better part of the world. I work for food, water, shelter, and nothing more or less than this. The culture of celebrity and wealth has much to do with this. The wealth enjoyed by those who dictate the lives of the rest of us is as literal as it is symbolic: a crushing weight by which thousands upon thousands labor for and under and die for and under. This wealth is no wealth, it is commercialized blood and remains. The only true wealth is to be found in the spirit, the fluid and ground

and fluid of life. Today, when the word economy is mentioned, it often stands in for the term, ‘prop of death- giving’. Death is as a present to the wealthy, an affirmation of their worth, an affixation. I do not hope for wealth. I hope for a painless life, and a painless death. Perhaps to some wealth means the end of pain. I know better than this. In a world without wealth, however…

I am not remiss to notice that I have already used up a good portion of what remains of my life. I do not regret this, yet I mourn this loss nonetheless. In this sense, and this sense alone, I am measured.

I am stubborn in the face of stupid reality. I want life to be different. I am disappointed. Repeat.

XLVII.

I have to let go of my attachment to the love of others. I need to need no one.

The style of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the wisdom of Lao Tzu, the melancholy of Dexter Gordon, the process of Susan Sontag, the suspicion of Bolano, the courage of Kanno Sugako, the poetics of Fred Moten, the dissent of Frederick Douglass, the mystical ingenuity of Kafka and Lispector, the genealogics of Nietzsche and DuBois, the gestures of Kathe Kollwitz, the eye of Eisenstein, the rhythm of Max Roach, the depth of Albert Ayler, the suffering of Goya, the science of Kierkegaard, and the music of myself.

To the dissolution of all movements! To death! To death!

I move in all directions in this dusk, corrupt and whole, howling like a gale and stretching my arms and legs towards the sky. I rotate and move my body… craning, peeking, seeing with my skin. In this way I come to know life.

XLVIII.

Whiteness and brutality…

The racialized maintenance of white culture (films, etc). Who is sweeping up after the production? Who is mopping the floors? Serving the food?

It is these things that go undiscussed and unaddressed in the critique of culture that enables these mechanisms of physio- ideological violence to reproduce themselves.

Pain is an impetus, a driver. Perhaps even moreso than love, lust, desire. The need to remove/revoke/return pain is the strongest impulse I have ever felt.

Perhaps it is because pain is unspeakable.

I freeze over. My entire body becomes land-marked, vast, wide, and cracking. I am a sheet, a surface, inching into the future like a child testing a shoreline of cold water. The horizon is immense, and threatens to cut me apart lengthwise. I would autopsy myself, find the imbedded spores and fragments and dig them out with a hot knife or a scissor. I scan the body, accounting for the heavy colon, the lidded eyes, the sore and tired limbs; I add the body zero.

I should learn patience before I break apart.

I will and thus continue to move, counting moments and tucking them away into books and things. If but of history, and other things, scraps, metal, faith, space, and the futility of action – of infinite things and yet bound further and further into the ultimate knowing, the particular evisceration. One wanders, praying to be known, heard, understood, sought, found… and yet death does all of these things. Patience. Death is that ceaseless mechanism bourne in the soul, that well of grief and melanchole, that which is buried beneath all forms of life, plastic and organic alike. That which is brought into being has this knowledge

grounded in the gesture toward the sun, toward survival, toward the nutriments that replenish the gourd of the body, the hollow reed of birth giving and death giving, the sounding, orienting instrument. I try, I strive, I live and grow old and weary in my chase of deathly things, moving at a clip and from yards away I spot her on her endless trail; I spot her ending and then I blink… and she is gone, in and around the bend like a spine into the fields of tall grass. I shatter where I stand, and the pieces fall like rain, from which flowers grow. I call her name, tired of my name and of all things. She does not reply. She makes a cocoon of her silence, red like the inside of a mouth and clearing away the soil and brush to reveal the great chromatic tunnel that leads from my anus into the earth. I strike the harp of my chest and bellow as I am dragged. I begin to dig into the ground with my hands as she counts off syllables in threes. I understand that I am digging a grave, but I say nothing. She nods and turns away on a clip forever. I repeat this failed image over and over again in my mind like a receiver, like a total storm. This image holds me entirely, in a clime which stretches on for miles, on and to that place where clouds gather like a gallows day. I dig and sweat, smelling my insides moaning and full of dead flesh and the desire of a lifetime sticking to the walls of my intestines. There I perish, out under a tree, with yet another failing of the sun…

XLIX.

I carry and leave like an offering. I renege and move against my front, offering the symbols of my face like a script, like a pilgrimmage to being. One never arrives. I modulate my speed, out and around the deep curves of the body. I cut myself into myself, emerging new and hot from the fire – impossibly old and yet born and bourne again into this hold. I carry and I break like a child. I hold my life like a toy, full of meaninglessness and abruption; yet I examine it playfully with my hands. It moulds and forms, collapses under pressure and weight, folds in on itself, and shakes. My arm becomes my mind and I know things. I know things deeply

and harshly like the rain. I take on the ground, inscribed on surfaces like markings; there, I mark myself in time. These markings enter my skin like dreams without waking, asleep just beneath the breaking of the water of my life. I am mustard seed in the ground; bitter and weary of the world.

This seed sprouts and forms yet another body. I enter this body of myself like chambers of organs, out and up through the anus. For a moment, I am a bird, lonesome and migratory and lost to love… knowing nothing and feeling all. That which I know is of mountains, of sleeping things, of petrified life and death as a flashing shadow. This disguise too becomes a form of knowing. This body are the clothes that fall away, organs of meaning stricken from that ledger which my body keeps. I recoil from my history with yet another body, a body of horror. A total death from which these organs take on new meanings, new skins, whole bodies of thought and action. They stumble away from that pouch in which they are kept, growing legs, arms, spitting cells from their containments. The life of the liver, and so forth.

That which the text contains is not yet this movement, but of it.

The migratory condition runs off the page like a violent world-space, breaching the hold like yet another condemnation, a hurt world, a ceaseless burning of souls like books of flesh, like the screaming divinity of the god with one thousand heads and one thousand eyes. The creation of fire is yet contained within the body, and this is where the metals are forged. House these metals in the extremity of the soul, where the blood runs weak and cold, where the ocean of the body splits into many rivers. The tributaries of this life sound like cannons, knowing fierce and abrupt in sequence, discharge and disjecting with violent force.

In this project of same words, of the repetition of a single dislocated letter, I map a psychogeography of the unknowing. I map this city as an endless fire; I map this city as it slowly burns my life and all things away, grinding my mind and body into dirt, dust, and soil. How might I break into this mass? I scheme, I connive, I thieve and I steal. I transgress meaning entirely, crossing from that place of rightdoing and wrongdoing like a bridge.

In this new place, I stutter, gulp, and regurgitate fluids. That which is inside my body has also changed, the body constituted and reconstituted in perpetual modulation. I am colonized entirely, my body entered by spirit like a gaping wound, widened and bacterialized, made matter of matter. I am mad substance by the insubstantial things, microcosms by and of thinking things, directed and directive things, generating and gyrating frictive sound-motions as I move towards the cataclysm of wholeness; that breaking apart. It is by this mechanism that I am lost; it is by this mechanism that the world is judged in ceaseless parting, in coming and going from that place. The meting out of justice like death and dying, and only life knows of these things; the futility of all things. Life flows through the body like shit, organic and full of rich substance, while the body is of stone. This is the only wealth. The body hardens as life leaves.

LI.

This psychogeography includes things both apparent and otherwise, living and otherwise, mediating the body and world-spheres. The body makes contact like a radio, chanting its hymns and prayers like furious engine, a night behind day, a bleeding distant heat which sinks the world into multiplicity. In this sense I am a deceiver, a liar unto myself and all things, the impostor of myself; for in this front, I cheat difference. I open the mechanism that resides in the basement of the soul, working like factory as it churns

and wheels a thick smoke which rises up and through the mouth like a channel. I breathe this air, refracted off the water, distilled of light.

I debt myself in thought, in action, into negation. The arm is owed, the leg is owed, moving irreducibly and accumulating insurmountable debt in a currency which is paid, yet entirely implacable. This hungry wealth of youth is a debt which rises with action, an exponential movement both in and away from massive direction, exploding like a shell, massive directionality minute and variable upon impact of body upon world upon body. The body functioning between ranges of motion and forces applied within and without the body.

The foot has its own feet, and may only walk so far away from itself. These prostheses navigate feeling with blind essence, groping desperately at the discharges of life and testing the limits of the sheer face of knowledge and understanding as held by and with the body; this knowing melts and drops and rises like smoke and fire within the earth. Thus these forms are caged and bound by yet other forms and forces, furious and active, reproduced in the activity and strictures of living beings. Life expands outward like a reaction or a virus. That the hand and foot are not detached is of the building, the bloc, the barricade. One might restrict, constrict the body further. This is dissent against life, world. I am driven to death by the world, and thus, I must die. I die a faithless death, unknown to all things; abrupt and closing. I lay siege to myself, upon myself, my body like a horse, a door, a weapon. Thus I cordon off my body like a series of violent enclosures and impacts, full of measurement like the distance between ruined life. A city, as such, becomes a history, turned over and over time with bombs and burnings, a riddling by and from that upon which falls, where the organs of life are severed and bleeding from themselves. This rubble collapses love and entirely into time with a separate death. This ruin is the terrible illness of life, of the violence of living things into delusions like mirrors and echoes in the ears and mind

like locusts entering the orifice of the mouth; the body pregnant with meaning, teeming with insect-life, chirping and infested. The culture of locusts, mass and crowding the sun, a sky-making. There is yet the horizon, the painting, and the frame. Who could know the current of murder and dreams entirely? The world touches itself and recoils in fear. Bare feet in hot mud and the numbers that mark the,. I use a name, I use a number; here I imply meaning. Meaning grows like a gorce, pressing up against time like a tree and laughing at the still numbers. I guess, and stumble. I laugh at myself, and stumble. History is bitter in the mirror of itself, as it turns in an about face towards the ruined present. To grapple with history is to contort and become otherwise, to become fallen; of many heads and bodies.

As this history of life is compiled and stricken from the records of being and not being like sediment and that which might be called culture, certain patterns are emergent in the webbing of things between things, snowfall and the leaves which pass legibility between them; woven and woven by Fate… his daughters in the sun repeating these same lines, wakeful and full of vengeful youth because they know of these things. Sing, and take what is to come from what is brought, like a basket or a bowl. Thus, one might accomplish a sort of new maths.

LII.

I accomplish a history of dying. That which might present itself as an artefact of death, a broken vessel, an opening of the skin; those deaths of the spirit and soul in the face of a broken world. These different afflictions inflictions inflections infections compose the song of death and dying as infinitude, the repetitions of solitary chords and the lives of dead and dying things bore into the ground like a massive compression of knowing… the breakings of complex forces acting on the body like polyrhythmic sites and selves. The body is thus composed of new zones, ridges, tropics, glaciers of feeling and sensation. These zones as fluxual asystems.

The body is steeped in death; made known to itself by way of the bounds and unbounds of sensation, the impacts and expacts that breach bordered selves and realms of sensation and the state of being as organization. To be ordered by states of being; to break into statelessness in the convergence of sensation as relation as map-breaking. This relation upon itself becomes the poetic event, an exposition of potential. The moment expands upward like a funnel, pushed upward and outward by the sheer wind power produced by the engine-processor through which information flows. Disjection like vomit, diarrhea, orgasm, the violent outbringing of life acting. Life inputs itself and receives itself in return in variant media(tions) of consciousness and sheer voluminous product. Ideology becomes shit.

Pain is meaning held and mediated by the body. Pain makes the body diagnostic, symptom, symbol, around which a circle is formed. I salt this circle like a threshold, a between-history, and feed it like a god-animal.

LIII.

One devalues life by living. Devaluation is like a striking, like a violent line, a quick tracing of death to death, of idea to practice. Of purity to grotesque apparition. These moments hold hands and rejoice in silence. They do not speak of anything but the between time which levitates and knows no language. This silence is the song of the body, impassioned, distemperate and uncomfortable; that which becomes struggle and movement in the attempt to lift life. Instead, life drags behind the body like Hector, perpetually leaving itself. These traces, blood, sewage, sift through life like a decomposition, like a vagrant, running off and on into the sentences that the living and dead endure alike. These states transmute themselves furiously in a binaristic code, like a light switch; reproducing itself like a cell. Death is tireless and projected into the city like the shadow of a

storm, covering the crowds of the world, this world of lovers running in the rain, seeking some impossible shelter.

To be afraid of love is the condition of modernity, to push out and away into the solitary water like a ship of fools in an isolation called humanness, the category of rape made religion, to hold in this moral code of treatment and action the ideal of a better violence (here, Enlightenment philosophy made doctrine). The order says: kill gently. The murderer who kills while asleep, while holding the battery, striking from a great distance; the somnambulist as ordered completely by social government: obedient to standards of action, conduct, ideals, and values. The modern individual is submerged entirely by the pretext of individuality, individual wealth, growth, possibility, freedom. Always at the cost of another. The isolation of a particle in an echo chamber of silence and white noise. The ideological mechanism of whiteness functions like a massive industrial noise, a purposie mechanism of taking-life tracked by the churning screams of life being taken and fed to the sacrificial machine of image, where life is reduced to time and space; resourced. This resourcing is dependent on cultural imaging, of the cultural imagining of body and being as a delimited and determined phenomenon, creating a pressing up against the glass of life, peering out into the imprisoned possibility of life, itself. In this way, modernity dreams life; observes the inanity of this pseudo-life in a state of perpetual alienation and isolation… a life manufactured by presses.

In this way, brutality proceeds like and with the development of the engine of civilization and the civilized body, itself… sleeker, quieter, yet loaded in each passing moment (exponentially) with massive power and tension, often meted out with supraimmediate indiscernibility. Each moment is of the atomic moment, of new techno-violences, a world in the making and made through extra-apocalyptic evisceration – a life beyond life beyond life into brutality both imagined and otherwise. The instruction of the atom and the molecular composition of life is the end of life; the

completion of the culture of death which is modernity. The total purposing of earth into world.

LIV.

Running from the state and killing yourself. Running from the state and killing yourself. Running from the state and killing yourself.

What does the mouth need? What does the spleen need? What does the ghost need?

a. Experience is mediated by the body. b. The body is organized by need. c. Thus the body may be manipulated and used. d. With need, necessity; the production of need as drive- action, willing. The will to live, the will to survival, the will to knowledge as the above. e. Need is presented socially as value. That which one needs incurs a cost. Food, water, shelter, books. f. Life is presented socially as value. Life is to be reproduced. g. To survive, need must be fulfilled. The drive to eat from hunger, the drive to sleep from exhaustion, the drive to death from life. h. An obfuscation/confliction of need with want is the project of state/industrial culture. i. This basic confusion of desire and drive is what powers the engine of civilization. j. Socialized value is a reorganization of need in the name of profit and use. A caste of meaning and worth: who and what is meaningful and meaningless, worthy and worthless. k. There is thus life and subjection. l. Subjection is the state practice of submerging life to purpose, the purpose of labor, the purpose of nation as reproductive mechanism. m. The assumption of purpose from the nothingness of life is manifest empire. The assumption of life as a system of value.

n. This purpose is generated under the guise of civil, social, and individual advancement, of ‘progress’ and ‘reform’. o. Thus is technological development and the race to the frontier of humannes imbedded in and that which houses the civilization-drive. p. A civilized world is an enforced world, where becoming is regulated into being (singular). q. Might technology be leveled? Devalued? Crossed? r. Technology as a crossing between spheres, boundaries, types of life. s. The use of technology as a prosthesis of the ideological method of capital (who programs the organism? For what purpose?).

LV.

I refuse to live the lives of others. I will live my life, and my life alone.

I play the game of images.

I have to live with my own pain – without deliverance, without hope.

I use my body vigorously and injure myself regularly. Otherwise I do not heal.

LVI.

The life of things consists in the frictive movement between relative beings, into and out of knowings which exist as constitutions, terms of conduct use and behavior as contracted (and expanded) between relative beings in continued interaction. This, a sort of political engagement loaded with language and law. These constitutions may be written at gunpoint, themselves violent contractions, contradictions of the relative principle. Beings being relation as a constellation that may be manufactured by processes of

power and control, subjecting beings to relation. In this sense, relation is mutable and contradictory, a coming about, a relative principle. Being regularly fall in and out of relation, abstracting social relations and idea(l)s of community and the practice of community. Relation severs (imagistically) without sentiment, without a goodbye. The death of relation is simply a death of relative seeing; relation burrows underground, forming a more-boundedness. The pressure points of relation are at the joints of the social body, at the place of the lubricated mechanism that mediates race & class relations. These points in tension are where stratified social bodies hold between spheres; move material and resources like bits of muscle and tendon.

Relation is before the contract, before the law. It might be said that being relation is before sociality and civilization. The simple-complex interconnectivity of beings in motion forming a pseudo constituitive body of movement is the existent condition of the earth; yet, there is the imposed conditionality of civilization to coat this relation with significant legislation. To create juristiction of relation is to constrict relation into categories of meaning and possibility. Thus, in the establishment of statehood, of the bounded subjectivity, relation is made contractual obligation, made racialized, made citizen. The ritual, here, is to identify the actor, the individual subject, and to isolate identity itself. The drag of relation is deemed superficial to the project (which indeed, it is, a counter), and thus devalued as a way of seeing, being, and speaking.

For relation might be best communicated in the poetic turn, in the turn toward uncertainty, instability, and the earth. The poetic turn being formally of relation, of the leaping and jumping of things, the mutable movement of life between points. Relation moves freely; one might attempt to become relation in a becoming towards liberation. One movement/moment toward the next; continually estranged from itself and others by way of a massive disorientation; away from subjection, away from pseudo-bounded selfhood and state identity.

The ritual of poetics, perhaps, is one of the last vestiges of this formation which is a sort of breaking.

LVII.

To study the law is to study language; thus, the geneology of power. Here, a symbolic chain between front-symbol and into the hand of the enforcer of the law. That which is allowed in the silence of the law, is that which legitimizes and moves the law. It might be said that the law is not of substance; it is composed of silences that legitimize its use. Thus, the law is a tool for enforcement, for the continued reification and justification of the state-making process.

It might be said that the law is a form of possibility-making. To attempt to abstract relations into a codified order is to necessarily leave gaps, openings in painting the massive organization of relation itself. This relation cannot possibily be conveyed and codified; both Rumi and the state understand this. These gaps and openings, for the state and its actors, are in fact possibilities for action and enforcement. For Rumi, this is becoming.

The law allows for violent movement. This allowance is that which serves as a reminder that law is meted out, not read aloud. These sentences of punishment are read into and on the body. Thus, the law creates a second language, a language of violence into and on the skin. This language is that which is bound in the racialization of subjectivity, the stratification of the subject as something which is seen, identified, made citizen, made criminal.

A dream where unintelligible symbols are inscribed into my skin; they bleed.

This second language is a language of massive power, because it engenders obedience and control as compulsory with threat of endless punishment. The law as creative hell.

The delimit of law, imposed on the city, on bodies, on situations, on the potential of living beings and otherwise, continually codifies life into a sort of endless repetition – noted in the 18th Brumaire. This language is not for communication, but for the meting out of punishment. Here, one might see the language of the state as a sort of pseudo-language that serves solely to legitimize violence. Therein: the orator, the propagandist, the commander.

To command language is to bid it do your bidding. Meanwhile, relation looks on and laughs. The language of the state is the language of the command. Thus, language is directed, and this direction, necessarily, is always linear. State use of language is to drive through; this mechanism is employed throughout the various organs of the state. To riddle the body with bullets, to manufacture history as a single movement, to educate children in the language of use; being useful. Use as a directive. Relation as an explosion of directionality.

One might consider relation to be an incendiary device to language, to combust language into massive meaning; thus, massive meaninglessness. The futility of language as device, as poetic instrument which might commune with relation in a brief moment of fire or knowing, is made known pathetic in the process of the communing instance. For when language touches relation, it dies. In this sense, relation is the field on which the war for language is waged, between poets and the state. The poets will always lose this war, and thus win out in the end.

The linguistic struggle is a push and pull between use and disuse in the atomistic instability which is the explosive expressive capacity, close to relation and yet a universe unto and in itself. Relation as a situation in which another situation may be created by the hands, mouths, and hearts of living beings to convey the life of things. To, a priori to language, decide the method of language, is to legislate the form in which language appears, and thus, what the

linguistic body may do, where it may turn, where it may gesture, where it may go.

LVIII.

To have the time, one must take the time. I fully intend to take the time; to do so with great and measured force.

‘Seize the Time’ - Emory Douglas

I act in full self knowledge and awareness. Here, simply, the knowledge of death and dying. The confrontation of and with death necessarily burns away doubt; thus, self. I do not doubt myself because myself does not exist. This self is nothing but the shadow of the process of becoming, a delimiting snapshot or image of this process. I have a disdain for images of people, particularly myself. How could being possibly be; subsequently, be captured? The self as a form of cultural captivity, of cordoning off the relative instability of the process of relation, articulation/inarticulation; thus confirming that boundary of which already exists and fails to exist. Selfhood and the economy of individual success/failure as a unit of measurement is that which plagues the world as a runoff- feature of capital. The production of the unit, packaging of the unit; distribution of the unit. One might then see ideas and people as sent off and in transit; motorized by this pursuit of survival as fetish-object. I must be beautiful to survive, I must embody speed to survive, I must isolate the muscles of my becoming, develop them, compound them, and engage them in the world of lifting-worlds to survive. Human being as such is a terrible translation of existence, a language developed for purpose.

Modern language as a synesthetic of economy and law. The law must be swift; heavy… the discourse of law and legislation in modernity discards even the idea of justice for the ideal of pure speed, embodied in the industrial turn toward massive production. The law as hammer embodied,

life as the doomed nail. Beckett inhabits the vehicle and presses toward the speed of light, speed of modern life. Beckett’s explosive emptiness (the contained contained, the language of the empty room) explicates/expounds the foundation of empire, as with the atomic bomb. Explosions as expressive deconstructions, razing away the projects of cities, meanings, lives, and cultural difference. What remains is the white walled room and the question of what remains.

Here, nothing is solid, everything is slippery… yet this condition itself is solid, inescapable. This is at once the mutability of time and the container of the capital object, that which must be mutable in order to retain value over time. The packaging of the ‘substance’ (which is ultimately empty, insubstantial, ‘of the world’) must explode itself and must be able to explode itself and reformulate meaning and image. The strictures of language, body, and being become formulations in and by which the object achieves a sort of rebirth, renewal, recontextualization. From history into abyss and back again, from this moment in time and space to the disjected chaos which is the moment itself, a continual jarring to and from life and death, from mappings and dislocations. Beckett’s characterizations, often dislocated from body and name, always dislocated from place as a compounded formulation of known-mass. The question of where, how, and who permeates the world until the world shrinks away into a perpetual uncertainty which throws a wrench into Weil’s crucified body, blowing it away into particular masses. Beckett’s nomads of time and space move as atoms, in every which direction at once, propelled by the fundamental, conditional flaw. There is no knowledge of them; they have no knowledge of themselves.

This condition is projected by social governance over time to justify the practice of violence, a sanctioned location; a heretical dislocation. Subjects may be dislocated at any moment in a linguistic and ideological turn; the human category fundamentally functions at the level of disavowal, exclusion. The human can only exist in juxtaposition to the

inhuman; this mutable boundary and line create the six pointed cross of language, law, and economy. Subjection is ‘achieved’ arbitrarily, and revoked arbitrarily. Life is a given and taken arbitrarily. This arbitration as a form of kinetic ruling which situates the justice system within the chaotic becoming and unbecoming of earthliness which it attempts to systematically refute. The absurdity of the idea that human arbitration and ordering might create a sort of stability of ruling (and thus measuring) life and time precedes the establishment of Western civilization.

Subjection and disjection as forms of use; of the state sifting through the trash that is existence and arbitrating apparent life to prop itself up. Behind the portrait of the state is a wall of bodies.

LIX.

I write in and of the nuclear moment, a moment which will continue on forever, a moment simultaneously of Bolano by way of Pascal; realized totally and creative of a total- immanence in the ‘ruling’ of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The use of the atom as a nature reduced to the utmost particle is simultaneously the greatest, most terrible, and final human achievement; in short, the completion of the human project (of humanization and dehumanization). To explode nature and achieve a particular reformulation of the essence of that which is to create a whole shadow, a whole destruction, is nothing short of the creation of the ultimate death formation. To weaponize the earth entirely, successful in the deployment of the nuclear bomb. Simultaneously, this bomb becomes the rule of the world; the rule of law, at the threat of use. This bomb has changed war, changed ideological transmission, changed culture, and changed technology. The speed of light, the speed of sound, the speed of death. In an abstract sense, these ‘aspects’ can be counted and numbered; but in the atomic moment (now, forever), they are constitutent of the immanence of death, the looming death like Mephisto over the Faustian city, the

new given political climate until a greater, more impossible death machine is formulated. The atomic bomb is beyond Prometheian, beyond and beneath the fire of life into the frozen Thanatonic lake; that which freezes time and existence forever, a petrification of earth into world into earth. The atomic bomb deterritorializes existence from and to shadow, leaving only shadow. The shadows on the streets, on the stairs, impressions of life. The nuclear moment as a transmission of this image forever, as the freezing of life into an infinite stillness, an infinite flash, a total camera. The atomic bomb as all seeing eye, perfect machine, perfect execution. The height of creation, simultaneously a total embodiment of Eros and Thanatos, the artist flying god.

One dies and does not speak of urgency in this political moment, one is embodied and disembodied by the urgency of the weaponization of all life and all things into a total war of and against basic existence. The illusion of modernity is rapid fire permeated at all times by this manipulation of things, continually striking life from life; continually razing the concept of humanity and inhumanity from itself, returning life to the mud, the dirt, the plasmic origin place like filthy river. The veiled beautiful like veins of knowing and unknowing.

LX.

Nuclearity becomes subject. Pascal says:

‘Man's disproportion.—[This is where our innate knowledge leads us. If it be not true, there is no truth in man; and if it be true, he finds therein great cause for humiliation, being compelled to abase himself in one way or another. And since he cannot exist without this knowledge, I wish that, before entering on deeper researches into nature, he would consider her both seriously and at leisure, that he would reflect upon himself also, and knowing what proportion there is ...] Let man then contemplate the whole

of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.’

And this is where Distruments meets this text; at this place where Pascal predicts atomic technology. For this thread is new subject; the subject of global modernity is this weapon… not citizen. One might mark white civilization manifest with the development of the atomic bomb. This weapon delivers Pascal, for nuclearity is simultaneously the greatest achievement of philosophy, science, and the arts. Nuclearity turns warfare into the perpetual moment of judgement; makes State hand of god, perfect judge, set time to sand and dust. Pascal is perverted (Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe;) and set to task…

Atom as perfect subject as whiteness: ‘It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.’ Christina Sharpe’s weather.

The weaponization of the atom as the perfection of policing, the perfection of anti-black ‘life and death enforcement’.

LXI.

Dream about being on the road like an endless dying. Here, Darwish, Ruanne and Basel, Rumi. ‘The exiles don’t look back when leaving one place of exile – for more exile lies ahead, they’ve become familiar with the circular road… After we’re gone, remember only this life.’ Douglass: ‘Own nothing!’ Rumi says, ‘Inside this new love, die.’

Life is an adornment which I carry with me from place to place. My attachments, my loving which reaches out and touches the world, leaving a trace of my spirit in that which I am at once a part of; that which is a part of me. Here, I speak from a different I, a different self which is not that one in conference with the socialized world. I strip myself of the garment of the body and jump into the green river like a diamond, like a new fish; there I frolic and bathe until the sun sets over all things. The sun sets over my life and over all life like a reminder, like a warning, like a wish. I return to the clothes of my body and put them on, and continue to wander like a child. I pass through towns, gardens, memories, dreams, and am once again swallowed by these great attachments, these landmarks that become desire and infinite in the mind, laid out and mapped like invisible cities. I too indulge myself in this loving, hollowed out like the trunk of an old tree, eaten away by time and swallowed by that which swallows again. There is a song which I sing, but I cannot remember how it goes. I nest like a bird in my body, sleep under new associates, that whisper my name and gallop across the sky like time, following the sun, following the wind, following the seasons that press on into the dusk.

What else could I take with me, to and from that carrying place? My arms are full of longing and my legs are tired. Here, I am old and unwise, toothless and laughing because I no longer bite into things. Here, I suck the marrow from spring fruits. Here, life is like bitter nectar and waiting at train stations. I check the time and that which I take with

me is light after the rain. There is no new knowing that presses me; instead I press into myself like a remark. I survive, I eat, I sleep; I perish under the stars. This jewelry like a weight which I strip from myself, a boulder which I remove from the tunnel of my own heart, emerging new and clean from the night; knowing of that old life and yet the sound of a fresh sorrow in the birds’ tongue; creeks that murder the wholeness of the land, fresh divides in language by which I parse my tongue, mapped with thirst and the longing which has travelled deep and long in my body like a virus, like an aching. What else might I take with me, to and from that carrying place?

The exile runs through the village like water; enters language like a fire. The streets are empty but for love, and the exile fills them with the sound of his prayer. Movement of exhalation like the expressed breath out beyond the body into an impossible dispersement. A meaning shattered and reconstituted in this shattering, in this displacement of life. Here, Darwish’s identity card, or lack thereof.

The exile observes the threshold, having stepped over it. Perhaps he observes the threshold, notes it, before perishing under the gates which constitute the land as legislative body. The exile to himself is a place, delocated; thus, in the company of Elijah and Death, herself. The exile as body of night, at once here and of multitudes. Running with death, the exile observes the imitation of death, born at the hands of men. Enslavement,

For it is here that men die, and in the second place that men observe death and the whole of dying, the whole history of death and dying; laugh. This field that lives untouched among the ruins of the great cities of men, the great achievements of human beings, the wasted time and the burnt meals… the long days of work and sleeping in like there was nothing to be said for greatness or religion or any of that nonsense. The body satisfies itself; work is like a child wandering the ruins, captivated by how time turns everything upside down and meaningless. This pain washed

away from the shores of being underwater, carried from itself out into the open where it disperses like a surface, entirely. Statues stand and fall, propped upright by axes, spat on, caressed like a lover and shattered; shattering into the world and carried on the back of the wind like a messenger. Hermes brings Charon everything; Charon must whether this narrow collapse. The funnel of life becomes downward, stooped and low over the pit of existence, itself sloshing around in the plasmic mud like a great beast, roaring up into the black night. The infernal city organized around suffering like a sacred symbol, the fetish object like a sacred symbol. What does this body look like? Is it beautiful? Grotesque? Is it shining? Suffering as coded into; codified by the body, organized as an action-form. One commits suffering by way of suffering. I suffer life, I suffer you, I suffer the world; thus I permit these things in my begrudging patience. I excuse the pathetic excuse of life in my time in the dream of life in another place and time entirely. I am away from here; yet present. I sell this body and this mind like fabrics, unravelling myself on the street into the sun. In this way I am like knowledge to the eye; but nothing to the soul. The heart does not permit this time; thus it exiles me to myself. I die a slow dying, a dying fitted with occasional laughter, a witness to the births and deaths of this world that fade in and out like gunfire over a radio. I witness my memories as a burning; give myself to this world as time bleeds out of me like a gutter.

LXII.

The idea of love as isolation symbolized by the impossibility of knowing made possible by the city. This is a relative distance. Carax uses dialogue as a vehicle for poetics to both bridge and press up against that gap which is the impossible distance between life and life itself, of the failure of intimacy and love in the face of the world. Love fails because it cannot be, it simply is. Alex is a failed filmmaker because he is first a dreamer; Alex is a failed lover because he is first a

dreamer. Films about love via the impossibility of love, using the cityscape as a psycho-geographical proxy of and for the simulated proximity of life. It is almost as if people were close; that there was intimacy. The city as a superficial lover, a lover who touches you briefly, then submerges. Alex maps his world out onto a wall, detailing the major events of his life as a movement around and about Paris (here, the Situationists); Paris means something to him, if not for these memories perched atop city streets like crude monuments, idols to which the passage of time circulates like a lake of experience. This map, perhaps, a sort of alienation of and from self and time, and subsequently, of Alex from those around him. For how could they possibly know? The spaces that Alex inhabits are spaces of relative friction, where Alex’s own precarious life bumps up against the precarious lives of others, creating reverberatory simultaneous possibilities of death and life, which both lead him closer to and farther away from love than ever before. The city, here, as a body being fed dreams and from the lips of lovers the sustenance of poetry which fuels the project of world making. Without poetry and dreams there is no labor, only suicide.

Carax’s dialogue lives while his characters don’t. Some wander (Alex), some are exiles of and from society, and some are impressed into the lives they lead. The poetic engagement or encounter, which is the immanent and perpetual situation of Carax’s work, is that by and through which the actors find greater meaning and greater life. It is here, and in these moments (where the rose) where the actors truly act, finding the ability to move, even in the throes of great agony and heartbreak (Alex running in the streets to Bowie). It could be said that when Alex takes himself hostage that he is already dead, dead to himself and the world; certainly dead to capital: ‘capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in- life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital. Young people still have the strength to refuse this death;

they are able to rebel against domestication. They demand to live,’ (Camatte). Frequently, Alex is simultaneously an animal and an exile, using his body to express the inexpressibility of his body, the inescapability of his body as this wound that expands and explodes outward like a dance, driving him to the absolute limit of nowhere and nothingness. This drive is the antithesis of the domestic- sociality, where life is predicated upon settling and settlement. It is precisely the unsettlement and profound dissatisfaction of and with life which propels the types in Carax, who act as atomized symbols of and for tragic modernity. Alex writes to Mireille: ‘We must talk at your place or in a café. Or in the subway, or in the park, or at my place,’. In the scene where Alex speaks with an aging, deaf man at the party where he meets Mireille: ‘You’ve forgotten how to talk. Maybe you think people aren’t worth talking to. You’re wrong. Maybe you’re afraid.’

It is this need and drive to talk, to speak, to express, to love, which is the fundamental driver, yet fundamental inability, which is the subject of Carax’s films. This drive is a climate, an atmosphere, and something which permeates all relations, both spoken and unspoken. Alex’s body is the expressive acting out of language as degradation, language as decay, language as futility – even in the face of the simulated possibility of the city. Alex’s expression is torn in his displays of physicality, bound by the atomic makeup of his body and the writhing of his organs and flesh, while simultaneously unbound by definition and definitive emotion. There is no ‘ability’ to reason with life; life takes Alex hostage and moves him through it like quick water through a tunnel, where he is guttered out into the world, onto the streets, continually disinhabited. Perhaps it is no surprise then, that Carax uses Denis Lavant over and over again, as an actor who ‘squats’ in his characters’ bodies, stretching them, contorting them, making them plastic and cartoonish. It is the bodies of Carax’s types that are over and over again degraded by time and civilization, made useful, made useless, living on the unusable bridge. Lavant’s physicality is an active and open rebellion against these

forces, as he (as Alex and otherwise) becomes an active force. But these moments are rare. Alex is, too often, a mere observer of his life and the lives of others: ‘I never tried to fulfill my best dreams… only to re-dream them.’

LXIII.

I write from wherever I am, but inhabit many places at once in my writing. I live in the beauty of my memories as a present location, as a confluence of events, occurrences, times, and places in a sort of founded world, at once of and past the moment into the disparate archives of knowing and longing which weave my life like a fine string. These moments become mobile, tunnels, and catastrophic remembrances which drop the bottom out of life into the nuanced breaking of myself into myself and the disparate pieces which move like vignettes until the death of the organs which hold them. Thus I remember viscerally, and these renewed visceral sensations like moments and the smell of hair and the taste of lips are like an open death, a death in a field, a death into fresh creation. I must feel, experience, and know these things for myself or else risk death at the hands of another. I must, if not even find love, then expound upon love, make love prescient and material; like a sculptor, cut away from love until only love remains. The difference between a sculptor and a surgeon is negligible. I write my pain out; it disappears. I write my life out; it disappears. These ideas stretch out in the sun and die like animals or religion. Whole religions die leaping into death’s arms; at the cold sensation.

LXIV.

‘The slave was considered subject only insofar as he or she was criminal(ized), wounded body or mortified’ (Hartman).

I dig deeper and deeper into this wound (myself) and roll the die of my existence, unmediated. To write is to risk chaos; to

write is to write from a position of destability, a shaking of the ground, a moving of sounding. I write and I risk loss, I live and I risk loss. In this shaking a third sound emerges, a sound of the relative popping between air and ground, between the thick density of the body and the rising heat of the soul, untracable, untractable. It is crossed out and lost to machination. These X-s inform the jointed text body; the jointed process of text making, where tautonics and textonics shift like the plates of a press; subsequent revealing occurs. In this sense, it is as much to write as to read as an unfolding, as a-mass-ing. Cruelty allows me to incise into myself without disruption, extracting salt from the ground. I innoculate myself with this salt; rub it into my skin.

To love oneself, one must be cruel.

‘Moments that seem to leave nothing behind but the… moments that seem to leave nothing behind but the… moments that seem to leave nothing behind…’ (Basel & Ruanne)

LXV.

To arrange letters in space is immanent curation.

I am terrified of death because it means the end of learning, the end of imagining, the end of dreaming. ‘I’ am happy to die, if it means I can go on learning. Perhaps I could become a machine. I must act like a machine and die like a living being? This is what I don’t understand about civilization. If I have to produce labor and material like a machine, can’t I be compensated with a machine body, outfitted with a death-resistant prosthesis? I certainly need my thesis extended. I need a movement onward and outward, away from this vulnerable body into a chamber through and by which my ideas and constellations of thought can continue to develop, rework, and rearrange themselves. If I am not here to tend them like flowers, they simply sit and die on the page. The death of the body and

the death of the self are nothing to me. But the inability to continue formulating thoughts? Devastating.

For my life is this generative process, this creative process antithetical to production, a sort of perverse production-as- observation of the productive process. I generate fear, emotions, excrement – wildly. I observe this process, mapping frameworks of probability, cause and effect, frequency, range, and so forth. A mathematics of speech, voice, pitch. Even here, in this expressive violence, there is a sort of breathy pattern, a showing of the innate possibility of machination. What would it mean to become a machine – and not merely in the fashion of machines (to put on the clothes of machinic labor, but to remain condemned to this body?) but in the entirety of machine life… and thus once and for all to approach a different framework, a new framework, one that breaks even the binary of life and death? Certainly, values and desires of the machine-being body would revolt immediately; thus, socialized ‘life’ would rapidly change. What are the erotic zones of machines? What is currency to a machine? Input this and output that. I know that it is human life that is corrupt. I am in this erotic- reproductive mode; my life is sexualized and fascinated with what is to be my fate and the fate of all things. Machine life might be one of maintenance and slowness, of a disjunction of desire into programming and reprogramming, conceptualizing and reconceptualizing. For if I make myself machine I program myself in the face of programmative pseudo-flows of work and currency that permeate the life around me. I order and discipline my life unto myself, create self law unto myself. But the very precarity of this life threatens to unravel this process, rendering it in what many consider to be a beautiful futility. I do not see this deathly pallor that accompanies my text to be beautiful. I see it as the vastly approaching end, the looming end, the end for which I cannot wait, the end for which I must act; even in the face of this action, my work will die; my brain will die. I need this transferrance to occur, to recontextualize my work in and to a mechanized body where there is not this constant concern of and for

sustenance and the scrapings of life… where I can proceed from this place of near survival to the slow journey of thought and poetics, a massive dissection of words, terms, meanings, and symbols… this project, which rightfully would take several lifetimes, is the only project worth undertaking. The struggle to map and unmap relation as meaning-concept.

To mechanize the body is necessarily to harden it. I am outfitted with new joints, chrome organs; wired with veins and neural networks. I become a massive current, a large plug, a cognitive electric. I become that which kills me, I become machine. In this becoming, my body ceases to rise and fall, to balance on that tightrope between life and death; instead, my body becomes a place of maintenance. Perhaps now I do not eat, I simply lubricate. Perhaps now I do not exercise or fear death, but spend my days reading and analyzing information, creating geneologies of poetry and thought. In the midst of this new time, I become a curator, one who takes his time to assemble thought. I do not rush clumsily through the field, knowing of my task and its urgency… instead I am cool and patient; my time is extended, my body is no longer weary, and thus, I am renewed in many ways. I am not troubled by my desires, thrown from my life into heat; instead, I am intent and focused…

Perhaps this would not be such a great life after all.

LXVI.

I am troubled today; thus I pray and fast and circle. I write without seeing, write without looking; write blindly into trouble with a spoon, stirring it about and smelling the vapours that spill out from the mess of my life. My energy and fortitude are gone, leaving me with a wrinkled husk; much older and weaker than before. I spend myself and use my currency into bankruptcy, make foolish decisions and run wild until my breath is hoarse and cold fills my lungs. I

crawl back into myself, back into bed, and sleep until it is dark outside. Only then do I get up, and write.

LXVII.

Take into yourself and go. The bird carries nothing solemnly, crying her song into the night. She calls to you: Mourn everything and release.

The thief also steals away, not just of possessions but of self. He runs until he is cornered, then crumbles into dust. He says: I evade capture; most of all, myself.

A mother cooks food for her child. The smell wafts over the table, and out the window like a ghost. The child smiles: Must this be the way of all things?

I sit down to feel myself and pray. At my side is silence. She whispers to me, as I breathe myself in: Does it not madden you to know me? I reply: You are my only knowing. She smiles: It is good that way.

A traveller walks until his feet are sore, stopping at a lone house in the woods. There is a candle in the window of the home; a man sits out front whittling away at a stick. The traveller approaches, wary. The man stretches out his hand, and says: In the snow and through the spring, I pray for you. I see now that your body is light; you pass through the sky like an arrow. I welcome you to my body; here, you may feast on what remains of my life. I give myself entirely to you. The traveller wakes up to the morning.

A woman spends her life making bowls. They sit in rows on the shelves which line her room. She takes no visitors, and refuses to sell the bowls. When asked about them, she says: They are my body.

An old man looks in the mirror. His face is loose around his skull, his skin marked and spotted with time. He grabs the mirror and kisses it gently: And thus I shall be delivered. Pull me into myself and retrieve that which organizes my spirit, neatly into parts. Extract this essence and pass me through it like the eye of a needle. In that beyond place I shall become whole, I shall become shattered. The old man smiles and closes his eyes.

A war is waged for some time over a city. A siege is laid, and the inhabitants quickly grow weary from lack of food and water. A meeting is held in the marketplace; a fight breaks out amongst the leaders of the city. They squabble over what little food is left. A little boy moves through the crowd and asks: Why should you decide? One of the leaders replies: Because we have been chosen to do so. The child is absorbed once again by the crowd.

There is a doctor who lives on the edge of a township where all of the townspeople are sick. They complain of aches and pains in their bodies, and of troubled sleep. The doctor is overwhelmed, seeing patients day in and day out. He sighs to himself: Perhaps it is the world that is ill, and not these people. They simply suffer through it.

A rain falls outside the window of an apartment in the city. Two lovers are perched upon a bed, sharing a cigarette, naked and on the verge of sleep. One of the lovers asks another: How can you kiss me so tenderly; caress me so lightly?

The other replies: It is because you are kissing yourself; caressing yourself.

I, the lover, submerged entirely into the act of loving. I, the lover, becoming mirror entirely for passion. I, the lover, in this submergence see the soft underbelly of all things, the vulnerable wellspring of the great wound which spits itself all over the earth, desperate and bleeding into the soil from which life sprouts. Out from the sex splits the earth and splits the being like a violent fissure, from which the fire of dancing caves thrums and beats like a giant heart…

An aging mother lies on her deathbed, surrounded by her loved ones. She has contracted an illness, and is slowly slipping away. Her family has gathered by her bedside, and says prayers for her life and health. She says to them: Do not pray for my life any longer. Instead, pray for my smooth death, a death which covers me like a blanket, carrying me into the air like a rising wind, a current of sound.

I do not fear death, because death is bourne within me. I am a child with his organs turned inside out, flesh made and revealed. How much longer might I move against myself?

A child chants alone in the garden. She makes a sound that cannot be discerned. The garden responds in kind.

There is a group of priests gathered around a flower. They examine it, exclaiming, throwing their hands to the sky like weeds. The flower shrinks away, back into the soil.

A philosopher sits for a long time, uncertain of what to write, how to begin to express his knowledge. He goes for a walk through the town of his youth; up into the mountains which encircle it. There, he hears a wind: Do not write, sing.

For the command ought to be the painting of letters, the sounding of syllable songs, the whistling of tunes that gutter

out through the gapes of spaces and symbols like a gym of texts, which twirl and evoke like a giving, retrieve and refuse like a taking, through which the excretion of the bowels of meaning might tumble into an explosive sound, a cataclysmic diarrhatic, a bassoon or low note, a grumbling.

A man is sold into slavery, separated from his family and his home. He travels thousands of miles, over land, over sea, chained to the mast of an ancient ship. He asks the god of the sea: What could I possibly do for these men? Why has my life been taken like this? The god of the sea does not respond. There is a scream and a groan beneath the deck of the ship. The sea stretches on past the horizon; the man passes into a dreamless sleep. Upon waking, the sea still surrounds him, but he is alone on the ship. His shackles are gone; he is wrapped in a blanket made of the skin of a giant snake. The sea breeze laps up around him; a fog settles about his face.

At the edge of a rural town sits an abandoned church. It has buckled in upon itself; vines and overgrowth have taken its roof and insides. Each day, a child wanders up the road, carrying a cup of water from the well. She steps up to the wall upon which the old cross rests, broken through with sunlight; places the cup before the cross. As the sun sets, she returns to find the cup empty. This goes on for some time.

The local police gather around a dead body. They examine it, and wonder at the cause of death. The body lies perfectly still. Do you not know me? I am you from another time. None of the officers hear this voice. The body crumbles into dust; the officers look on, astonished. For I am of a different law.

LXVIII.

For there to be no law there must necessarily also be no self.

The death of desire is the death of the self. For there to be no prisons there must necessarily also be no mind. The death of thought is the death of the mind. For there to be no government there must necessarily also be no judgement. The death of value is the death of judgement. For there to be no borders there must necessarily also be the knowledge that suffering is unending. The death of the ego is the death of suffering.

For in each of these commandments the world is abolished and life is made possible. These commandments may only be brought into the world if many beings come to these understandings. One must destroy the borders in oneself, destroy the ego attachments and desires in and of oneself, destroy the police and judge in and of oneself, destroy the thought in and of oneself, and finally, destroy in and of oneself to create.

Thus, life is brought into being.

LXIX.

This direct dis-engagement of myself from my body (reason jettisoned) is precisely that which keeps me (I keep me) at arm’s length; thus all others around me. If I am removed from this world, and this world is removed from me -

A visual bordering, the life of the envisioned/uninvisioned; the subsequent establishment of image as objective reality/unreality, representation of entirety and wholeness of existence as sight, surface, surfeit. The image as consumptive culture, easily distributed, collected, exploited.

Image as political moment of imprisonment. Racialized, colorized, passing of and through time, curated and framed as criminal, historical and otherwise. The mechanical gaze as a violent holding of space, a wrenching of life from life

into a deathly pallor, stillness. Photography as a form of deathmaking.

‘The reappearance of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school,’ (Sharpe).

Why then, might the image be the celebrated form in which modernity packages itself? This image is always a photographic image, a productive model which disperses itself via screens. Here, Berger’s qualification and quantification. There is a maths of images of surface/surfeit, contented and sold by, with, and to, the world. These images calculate worth; yet, say nothing of hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams are mechanized under worth, utilized under worth as a gateway to desiring and wanting, which, being of the world, mean buying and consuming. The photographic image is that confrontational sense, a violent opposition. It is in this way that media outlets sensationalize seeing; industrialized film makes seeing into a form of extremism which necessarily replaces thought. If the photographic image informs and encapsulates the world and the socialized understanding of what the world is and can do, the basic violence of this capturing is continually reproduced in that which is captured; that which is in the focus of the mechanical eye, namely suffering and death as spectacle. This death is and alternates between plastic and organic, between characterizations and modalities which inform death as something that is meaningful/meaningless, staged/real, pleasing/grotesque to the eye. The artful deaths of the screen and the deaths of martyrs converge in a broken contiguity which submerges suffering and death at the hands of empire into the business of spectacle-making.

The photographic image is always erotic and violent in its jarring discharge of and away from life into the realm of fantasy and unknowing. This taking of context in the immediate historicization of a closed, bordered moment (exponentially fast in the development of photographic technology), quickly kills and recontextualizes meaning, life, worth, and value into a fetish object which flattens

knowledge into a surface. This flattening quickness is the industrial stamp of deathly machines onto the already impermanence of life: that which of the assembly line, the branding, the labelling. It is thus that photography as a historical development is itself the industrial mode of production, that which covers the technological leap into modern exploitation with a newly glossy veneer.

To steal from this medium is to turn one’s back to photography. It is to refuse to reveal, to refuse to partake in the narrative making out of lives, the telling of subjection in a framing of the body. Thus, photography might be reconceptualized as an incompleteness, a soft focus, a too- closeness, a too-farness, a narrowness, a jarring unfocusedness, an undisciplinedness which admits to its failure to capture much of anything. A photograph in the abrupt history of its making, blurry and uncertain, broken and unclear, communicative of nothing other than the inability to convey. A photograph in this manner might be melancholy without the melancholic, mournful without the mourner, dead without the subject. A break from subjection in the production of cinema and the photograph is a form of refusal and dying, a refusal in the scattering of points and loci into many protic beings, belongings and unbelongings in frantic coalitions and rebellions; a dying in the jarring breaks in and of form from itself, of molecules moving in and out of focus and markings. A map swept out from under itself to reveal a binaristic code of meanings and meaninglessnesses, raised like hairs or bumps on the skin, like clumps of substance and lowered, concave like horizontal mouths or bruised earth.

The use of war photography is the use of the suffering of living beings. To propagandize death in a visceral display of violent wealth. For this wealth is the image, the currency of use is the image; the message being conveyed is the image. Thus, depicted violence is coveted, like a symbol of knowledge. To depict the violence of conflict by way of the war photograph is to display the spoils of war; that which is won in the act of going to war, the defiled bodies of the

dead. The war photograph as colonial project, much as the photograph as expose on life-otherwise. The documentary use of photography as fetish, as method of colonizing the body of the other, autopsying the body of the other by way of the lens; the erotic mission of knowing as capturing.

In this way, the dead of war are captured, catalogued, used as statements, slogans, banners, advertisements.

To kill has two meanings in a modern context: the deaths of the mind, body, soul; furthermore, the use of the mind, body, and soul (before, during, and after these deaths).

Photography as a capturing utilizes these aspects to sell products, imbue the fetish object with the auric life of the living being, and to sexualize life as something possible to consume; thus, necessary to want.

LXX.

Expression as an outlet, through which energy and life are channeled. The body as station, through which life runs, a sedimental deposit, the banks or soil of a river. Life soiled by itself, run through itself, up and out of the mouth, arms, legs, chest, skin, sex, orifice, wound, otherwise.

Music is god by way of the instrument.

To E: Have complete faith in yourself, then listen. You will hear god moving through it.

Writing from this place of mad sorrow.

An erratics of longing, stretching indeterminately.

Each day is a new life of possibility. Today I write, tomorrow I write music; yesterday, I wandered into another time.

Spend my days drinking coffee on Harrison Street and in and out of book stores, conspiring with friends, avoiding work. Avoiding work and falling in love. The falling in love makes the business of life current and somewhat bearable, but not without the awful longing that comes with such things. I wander around, have sex with new lovers, worry myself sick over the future, discipline myself, and attempt to control my life which has really just become a vast pit of debt. There is nowhere to go, no future to be found, no direction in which to move. I wake up and do what I can with the energy I have, be it writing, classes, work, and so forth. I do my best to maintain my body, to eat well and thoroughly, to exercise and stay fit enough to accomplish the tasks of the day. Beyond this basic competence, I have nothing. I continue to take my walks, and observe the slow changing of things.

We write, we read, we fuck, we tell stories, we sing and drink until dawn… we try to live in these moments that reject us, that fall away and leave us clinging to nothing… we wait and wait until we die and that’s that. It’s so incredibly simple, but so incredibly crushing to know how life will take us. No great remark, no great realization, just the continual punishment of nights and the struggle of mornings until, suddenly, the lights go out.

My friends make life a little bit easier. We go to cafes, drive until the sun sets, find mountains and vineyards and books and general stores, buy groceries and do the things of life. We talk about life differently, but live the same stupid way we have our whole lives. None of us will ever change, almost happy in the miserable stupour that is a life of habit and excerpted loneliness, yanked out of ourselves for a restaurant or two, a walk down by the movie theater, or a day at the river. I must always return to this place and remark on the silence that outlasts all things, the great gaping maw that swallows me whole with every passing departure, every friend who leaves by train, every person who must go the rest of the way alone.

What’s the use of trying to hold on to love, friendship, other people?

LXXI.

I love this futility because it reminds me that my life can be stupid, my writing can be bad, and that jokes are the stuff of life. I act without thinking, I speak without thinking; I’m this erratic history that skips over itself, repeats itself, jumps ahead and drifts.

I want to stop fighting whatever it is I’m fighting and pushing back against. I want to totally give in to life.

The world is burning all away into hell anyways, what does it matter? However many nights spent kissing and giving and taking and laughing and talking will all be wiped away in the end. What does it matter if I am in love? In the grand scheme of the world I’m just this trembling dot struggling to surface. What does it matter if I am in love?

I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to be left alone and forgotten, to let the time pass over me like the bottom of a riverbed, to just melt away and explode into silence. Paying bills, forgetting work, I am tired of life; tired of living for love, living for poetry, living for another day just to try and live all over again. I won’t spend my time wishing or waiting up, counting the minutes and checking to see if she’s called. Its just a waste of everybody’s time. I’ll be out in the city thinking about nothing and she’ll be home and that is all there is to it. Maybe a party or two, a call at night and several days of solitude and another call. I’ll answer and be in love for a couple hours and leave like my life isn’t falling apart.

I stumble from inspiration to inspiration like wet rocks.

My writing just keeps getting worse.

LXXII.

I am falling apart and that’s okay. Each day I can feel myself torn a little more apart; I become just a little harder to reach, a little harder to touch, a little harder to taste.

I become something else, this unsensational thing, this unspectacular thing, translated from this world into that which has no name, no sound, no taste, no image, no shape. I become one with this and fade away, tears streaming down my face and I am not hungry, I am not thirsty, I am not tired, I am not alive. I lose my life and reach this point, looking down upon myself, cold and alone. I chose this life, how can I regret this path? I have walked for some time now; for some time I have been away from the world, away from love. I sit under a tree in the park and wonder if I can return, if I can come back. I want to come back. I want to be held, I want to feel, I want to be known by someone, for someone to say I am theirs, something like that. I reach out and can almost touch this life; I reach out and move through this life without touching it. I watch myself live, I watch myself die; I mourn this passing in which I will never live, in which I will never die. It is just a part of me, the unfeeling part, the blunt embodiment.

I mourn being of this world.

To disappear into the backpages of history like a phonebook, like Lima and Belano, doomed to hearsay stories of failed relations, uncertain futures, bad jokes, and broken memories… until even these fade away. If one is lucky, a name or a number remains. Perhaps a book.

It is snowing and cold; I am reluctant to make it out to the café to write this morning. I stumble up to the edge of life, drunk, and beg it to move. Life refuses to budge.

Perhaps all there ever is to remember someone is love. The kind of love that seems to escape time, that is imbued in all

things but only appears ever so often in brief moments of knowing.

For of what could I ever truly know? Myself? God? This idea of life? No… it all passes through me like a hot knife, an invisible surgery by which I am always forever altered, unlike to myself, this new thing that cannot be sated, that cried out to be fed, that cried out to be loved.

In this sense, I do not expect to be known, but hope to be loved.

LXXIII.

I spent the summer drinking away everything down at the river, out by the flowering trees and on the train tracks… pretending I am not myself, pretending I have some different meaning, some different purpose, or perhaps no purpose at all. Bonfires at the ruins and long walks to the end of the city at night with a drink in my pocket. Looking for a way out and using drugs to find it because they will work, and do a good job of it too. I labored against myself and my being for so long, pushed myself away and inside, and lost so much time. Riding in the beds of pickup trucks driving out of the city as the sun set, bathing in the river like it wasn’t dirty and full of glass. Trying to find love but always falling apart and love just not fitting together right. Being alone and shutting myself off from the world; trying to figure out what in the world would make me right for love… then realizing that nothing in the world could or would do these things. Tearing away from the world and into myself.

Life until now has been odd jobs and lost time. Making money here and there, struggling with finding the future in anything, and short love affairs and long desirous periods without desire, the wanting of wanting itself, disbarred from life and real touch… just this myth of what life could be and me left so far away from this myth that the text is shot to

pieces and there is no longer even the solace of some coherent illusion. I press my face to the glass of love and see only smoke and shadows; I hear talking and laughing and warmth and red but the doubled air obscures my sense. How far? How long? How long have I missed this love and how shallow has my love been before now? I hold in myself a lonely kind of love, a love that burrows deep into itself and turns off the lights and breath of things and lives in this artificial death of the senses. Love as disorientation.

I return to my library. To have these books around me, even as my life goes to shit and my money dwindles away is some solace. I have never had friends like these… never had friends like Anne Sexton, Wynter, Nietzsche. Friends that in some way understand me deeply as they understand themselves and the earth. I read and I exhale. Out of me tumbles all of the reservation, doubt, madness. I am a reservoir of these things in life, exile to myself and the world forever. But in books a sort of relation over time is found; I am whole again. I am of these many spheres and points, some of which are submerged in the momentous breaking of life. Literature is this ocean of deathless history where books and bodies are buried in unmarked graves imprisoned by time; violent tradition.

My exile is literary. I read and I need relationships with the writers I love. Nothing else seems enough, nothing else seems as devoted, as impassioned, as frenzied, as necessary. All around me there are opportunities, lunches with friends, walks with lovers, cities of various undertakings and hopes and meanings… but each time I turn away from these things and events of living. I return to living itself as the event, the feedback loop that marks the eventual grave of the possibility of all things, all thought, all meaning, all dreams. I focus on this grave, I need this grave as a symbol. This symbol as a question. That which will take everything from me is my enemy; that which I fight and flail against to no avail. No attack, organized or unorganized, will win out. As time passes, I begin to strategize my moments. How to best use this time, how to best move with what remains.

I hold out no hope against the eventual razing of my life, but instead I will cultivate these moments stupidly, immanently, fully.

The task is not to write well, but (simply) to keep writing.

LXXIV.

Applying to jobs.

moments of drunkness and the end of trips where it feels like you almost can’t go back because there’s nowhere to go, stories about breaking into things and falling in love and realizing that you really don’t have any idea what love is after all, moments of total solitude and emptiness, books you love but never read because they hurt, phone calls that you don’t answer, letters that you never write; the words and things that remain unsaid.

LXXV.

All my love goes into writing. What does sex mean to me anymore? What can I do that doesn’t always flow everything into this? Writing has always been the most efficient means for me to give life to these things that bubble up and hurt in my body, sensations and otherwise. I direct all of my sexual energy here, and the rest just dies. I still want to live but I don’t know how anymore.

Can I be accepted for this? It almost feels like a defect at this point, an incompletion… but I know I can’t go back. This is just who I am now. It all comes back inside me and out through my hands and mouth.

I am most free when I give up on love.

LXXVI.

Now I can finally laugh at myself… now I can finally let go. Just push everything to the end of itself and off the ledge into falling; in the falling, this illusion of control dies completely. I destroy the good things in my life, all possibility, all potential, by testing these things to the brink of their existence. If they survive, they remain. If they don’t, they die. I do this to myself, my relationships, my ideas.

I burn myself away and thus give myself permission to live. I burn my attachments away and thus give myself permission to live. I burn my desires away and thus give myself permission to live. I burn my hope away and thus give myself permission to live. These, the great illusions of my life, love, safety, permanence, abolished in the understanding of the violence of life which destroys these things. I am left with my eviscerated-self, a dying body, a dying soul, an emergent death. I commune with this death, just sitting, just knowing it, bourne inside me and nothing else. I do not look towards another, I do not cry out for another. Day in and day out I get trapped by these illusions, these illusions of assistance, of somehow being able to get out of this with another person, another thing, another idea, another moment. There is absolutely no escaping what is to come; no running, no pretending, no acting, no loving, no having, no holding. I mourn this illusion and cry.

I regret everything I have ever done. I regret being a fool, regret being overzealous in love, being gluttonous in life, regret being lazy in thought. Nonetheless, time passes and I excuse my actions: these things that I do I must do out of the need to express this or that emotion, integrity and truth and so forth. I validate myself and my actions in order to preserve this lie that I’ve convinced myself of that I have some direction or some purpose that I can only preserve by listening to whatever that is that’s telling me what to do and when and whatever else, when in reality I’m stumbling blind and bleeding out all over the ground, screaming and crying and lost and hurt and desperate for something, some

change, some difference, someone to care and hold me or something… but no one ever comes.

I push people away by going too far. Send a story to E. earlier today. Not sure what I expected by just obliterating the moment and being provocative. She responded in a pretty lukewarm way and it made me wish I hadn’t sent her anything at all. I tell myself that I can’t play it cool or calm or whatever then I don’t. Maybe I can; maybe I just don’t care enough to pretend like I don’t care.

LXXVII.

It feels like every day is the end of the world now; no one around me seems to notice that everything is always falling to pieces. I’m on the verge of tears a lot lately and can’t shake this constant pain that keeps eating away at me and breaking me down into this corrupt dust. I wonder if anyone else around me feels like that and if they know how to get it to stop. I keep alienating myself from the sheer chance of something good and pushing away from everyone and everything and its killing me. The worst part is not knowing how to stop, how to finally get better, how to sort things out once and for all and be one of those normal people who smiles and goes out to movies and doesn’t love like an elephant. I need something that no one can give me, like this great deep push into loving, into breaking. I need to learn how to give it to myself or I’ll die.

I’m so totally shattered by life and it never stops. I’m trying to build myself back up but I know I’m so close to falling apart again and not coming back this time. I want to keep my promises to myself and the people I love; these promises are (in different words) to live and somehow continue living, to push off into life but I just can’t make it on board no matter how hard I try I just can’t make it. I’m not sure how to live through this pain… I’m cooking, working, doing all of this visible living but beneath these actions I’m barely hanging on to the last shred of anything, any hope, any

reason… I have never been this barren and stretched thin, to the point of which fragility means breaking into death; I do not want this trespass, yet I trespass nonetheless. The veil of life just continues to get thinner and thinner and I just watch myself die and squirm and shake and hold my aching body until it stops. I can’t get out so I just watch and wait and hold my breath until everything sinks down into the thick mud that will cook me forever into a deathless paste. I’ve stopped shouting now, I’ve stopped screaming and crying which either means I’ve finally grown up or I’ve simply stopped feeling as much anymore. I can almost let life just slip away like a cold ghost from my chest and my fingers like a breath or a word but my body is still holding on and aching and pulling like this simple machine I can’t wrench from myself, still working, still refusing to just let go, it won’t let me go. I need to get out but I’m too old and weak and this massive hood of a sun is bearing down on me to the point of which I am always sweating and seeking some permanent shelter. Everywhere is out in the rain and nowhere doesn’t help anymore, nowhere isn’t enough of a reason to keep going, but I keep going anyways into more nothingness, more meaninglessness, more tired life and tired world.

LXXVIII.

From this deep well of suffering I create myself.

All of my friends are tired and fed up with everything. We talk about moving to Paris or New York to write and find new lovers and make something out of life that isn’t just settling for something but it never comes to fruition. Its like being stuck here in the next best thing waiting for the next best thing to come along, working shitty jobs in cafes and restaurants until finally life becomes all too much and you do something ridiculous just to get out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. We’re sitting here waiting and digging and pretending that the things we do aren’t a waste of time, making songs and talking shit and walking nowhere around

the city talking to nobody and meeting lovers who really aren’t lovers at all, incomplete dreams and unfulfillment, slow rainy days that seem to last forever and doing drugs and quitting drugs and making rent as the money comes and goes like a bird.

I need intellectual growth but for me intellectual growth is sexual growth. I need to make more out of life and more of myself. The circle of friends that talked and fucked and made art and laughed and read books that was up in Massachusetts is totally gone, obliterated by time.

I care less and less about intellectual things; more about human connection and finding poetry in my relationships with people. Writing and thinking just aren’t enough anymore and I just don’t care enough about ideas. They don’t hold any weight, mass, they just float away and pop like bubbles. I need touch, I need taste, I need talk. My mind is worthless and shrivels up in solitude; on a feedback loop that just keeps fucking itself to sleep. I sit and write all day and come out of it the same person with the same problems and the same needs. One conversation with the right person, one touch from the right person, and I am out of myself and into a movement. Here: the bedroom, the café, the park, the street.

The city as a vector for possibility and found poetry. On each corner some scraps like paper from which there might be some assemblage of event like a stitch. I come to the city for possibility and to renew my hope like a vow even when the streets do nothing for me and I come home alone and more lost than ever. The sheer chance is enough even when everything is shut down and the bars are quiet and I just listen to Billie and Chet all the way back to my apartment. I want to start smoking cigarettes again and drinking and staying up until all hours but I know I can’t live that life anymore, there’s too much to lose. I can’t fall apart again. I just walk in the day now, on campus and see people I know and don’t know and maybe fall in love for a second or two and that’s enough.

There are always barricades in the street.

LXXIX.

The life I want: writing all day, writing in cafes and writing in bed and walking on the street writing in notebooks, occasionally lecturing (maybe), talking to people whose writing I enjoy about books and writing, generally avoiding other people, cultivating my library like a garden, drinking tea and some days too much coffee, cooking throughout the day, having friends over for readings and conversations and to play music and drink, river evenings, going on road trips every week or two down by some abandoned church or country road, lifting weights regularly and stretching.

The question is how to get from here to there, how to move from this place of relative futility and stupid gyration to the point of this next life. I’m spinning like a top or a dreidel around my current situation which is hanging by the white tips of my fingers on this ledge that is work and school and whatever else. I know I’m wasting time on this degree and I’ve known that for a long time. I need to clear this hurdle and get out and make life for myself, instead of living in the shadow of this idea of what my life needs to be. I demand the fullness of life and maybe this is just naivete but I demand it nonetheless and refuse to die without having become myself in the dumb dream of this world. I demand self making and self fulfillment and self realization and I demand this for myself and for those around me. I can’t let this productive system of child-making, adult-making, labor- making, citizen-making state-making eat me up and spit out my tendons and bones into a pile of chairs.

The compulsory education of children in this country is a violent ordering of consciousness and the site at which reality is established and disestablished. Without an early innoculation into the ordained ‘histories’ of this country and its iconographies (or simply, a total absence of any learning

substance whatsoever), American civilization would not be possible. Education functions under two modes: total deprivation (revoking of access to basic resources, food, water, books, heating, shelter) and total innoculation (for the managerial class: coding behavior and thought (as memorization and reaction) to fit one’s place). It is illegal to not attend school; it is illegal to not pledge allegiance to the state. It is no coincidence that this pledge is said each morning as a ritual in educational buildings around the country. These codes are enforced by fellow students, teachers, administrative faculty, and the police who mediate the grounds of the school. For the law is again compulsory: a primary submission to the means, methods, and categorical establishments of the school; a secondary pseudo-intellectual freedom. Only under these terms is something as outrageously American as ‘free speech’ to be achieved in the world of nation-states. This speech is predicated upon enforcement from all angles - social, legislative – in order to regulate this speech into that which is the unspoken legality/illegality of acceptable speech. One ought not to speak about class violence, racial violence, and so forth. There are certain unmentionable terms and actions – particularly these allegiances with those deemed unworthy of life by the American killing machine – here, the Palestinian people, here black people murdered by police (always without punish), here the Syrian people, here the Vietnamese people, here the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, here Fred Hampton, here Assata Shakur, and so forth.

To press up against these codes of unmentionality is to codify learning and language as something inherently different than the state-making method: as an exposition or as an instrumental force of and towards expositioning. For language and the unspoken, even as poetic devices, are used by the state to establish positionality and expositionality, between citizen and target, between citizen and weapon, between citizen and dead body. It is no mistake of language that certain beings and individuals are termed human beings, dead bodies. To read the texts of American history is

to read a codex, a manual of codifying and reifying the American social body at large with suprahuman extensions of justice and power, while (especially in the eyes, ears, and minds of young people) actively pressing up against and often obliterating the humanity of black, brown, and indigenous people around the world in the justification of American imperialism… with the very idea that empire is destiny.

Here, COINTELPRO targeting black bookstores.

It is thus that the body of American history is the subject, and the world is the object, the toy, the plaything, the inflicted. American history is simultaneously the wounder, the violator, the abuser, and the missionary, the human rights protector, the helping hand. For to protect human rights in the Western world is to protect the rights of the wealthy white class, while the ‘human’ termed concern falls to the wayside and is discarded by media outlets and pundits as the United States infiltrates yet another foreign government to plunder and exploit further. It is only fitting that the American government be so focused on oil – the fundamental exploitation of the earth – of drilling, of digging, of excavating history and distilling it into an alcohol that the social body guzzles like a great wine, in a permanent state of Dionysian oblivion.

LXXX.

Reading and writing amidst the rubble of the world is an act of great rebellion.

I am always mediating death inside myself and in the world. Too much one way or another and I topple over.

The critical aspect of fascist movement(s) as manufacturing life as total function, total cleanliness. The migrant, here, is the one who is always passing through the fascist world, inhabiting the human condition which is at once the

migratory condition and the condition of the earth, boundless, adaptive, of any space and any time. The world as enforced being, border patrolling. In Jacques Tati’s Playtime, the body as being and state of being is irrevocably transformed (as in Metropolis by the ‘new being’) from historical, cultural, gesturing body – to the emptied, new, shining, looming-industrial body; the body as building which houses mechanisms of profit and business function. The organ as something to be purposed; harvested. In this turning of life into total function, there is nowhere to go, nowhere to run, nowhere to move; navigate, as this profit culture permeates every person, every body, every social movement of the world which now covers the earth like a breathless plastic cover.

In Tati’s buildings, there is the horror of the city emptied of history, where life is made clean, fast, and mirror, perfectly polished glass and reflections of life where the subject is endlessly lost, endlessly confused, endlessly bounced from one surface to the next. In this sense, Tati and Beckett hold hands in a catastrophic post-war modernity, where subjection to the icon of the commodity is simultaneously an abject horror and absolutely hilarious, as characters bump into one another, occasionally incise into the economic principles which wrench them from god, and generally wait around for death to come, for a great reason to fall from the sky. Kafka is the locus of this movement, caught in the whirlwind of a rapidly accelerating culture of death worship; in The Trial punishingly depicts the fascistic project of city- making as that which is fluent in the language of business as law as business. The employ of characters as investigators, judges, apparati of the state and executors of the law becomes the sole purpose of personhood, as a full submergence of personality, dreams, thought, into the economic role of the subject. K, meanwhile, is persecuted precisely because of his wandering lawlessness – for being a person beneath a looming machine. This machine weaves the materia of life into purpose as labor as citizenship.

LXXXI.

Post state atrocity erasure of history as a ‘shame-unmaking’ (?).

Rossellini’s trilogy

We have been coerced into trading life for the manufactured surface of life.

The horror of history is simultaneously history itself and the socialized erasure of history in the name of development, innovation, and progress. The project of the city is simultaneously a history and a revision of history, an altering by cultural event, by art and action, by situation and barricade, by war and fire; yet, in, of, and after these movements there is a sort of willful forgetting, a forgetting which reorganizes these zones of conflict and creation into commodity forms of space, where housing may be developed. History is selectively chosen based on profitability, based on attractiveness. Thus life is produced and reproduced in moments in a chosen geography, in that which remains and that which is razed, bulldozed over, covered over. The city as emptied of auction block; the city as emptied of blood. This bloodless body sleek and metal over life, stainless and gleaming in the sun. The city is maintained and cleaned, antibacterialized. Bacteria, in this sense, as event, as accumulation of event and events.

The horror in history as a Westernized form is that the bottom can drop out at any time; that much as citizenship is conditional, so is history. At any time, history can be revised, officially erased, violently erased, refuted, ignored. Instead of the study of history as a foundation of life and life making, history as a taboo, a repressed past, as willfully forgotten. To forget violence is as a further violence, a further movement into the depths of atrocity and violence making, much as the modern state continually re-conceives itself as the clean bureaucratic city. The city will never be clean, but that state washes its hands like Lady Macbeth,

continuously of blood in water, continuously in a state of eradication by way of scapegoating and force. The modern state as a state of total war, total function, and total submission of personhood to the human/inhuman pseudo- dialect. There are those who spill their blood, and those who wash their hands of it before bed. This washing is a forgetting; this washing as something even possible is conceiving of violence against others as something not only permitted but something forgivable; something necessary, and thus forgiven. The state does not survive without exploitation of resources and peoples; thus, this work must be carried out by those who are willing; those who place the life of the state above the lives of others (read: immigrants, those of ‘other worlds’) and, often, their own lives.

This socialization of life as citizenship as purpose also runs as a tributary into profit; as this profit form is the idea of the state as something that can be embodied by individuals and objects. If one submits and is submitted to the state, the mythology supposes that one somehow becomes the state, much in the way of an eventual dissolution of mind, body, and spirit into the godhead. All become one; this idealized, rhetorical form of eventual-becoming is activated as a motivator for adherence to state policy and order. Ex: if these commandments are obeyed, immortality is possible as a sort of Ozymandian code. Human life becomes a stone ideal, an eventual statue, a building in of life into the state; the walls and plaques and buildings of the state body. The possibility of ‘greater life’ is presented as life in coalition with the state; in becoming a state actor, both in life and in eventual death. Schooling, income, healthcare, medial obituary. Citizenship, as healthcare, functions as a motivator due to the sheer exclusivity of belonging; thus, of access to resources. To choose and to be coerced into becoming an agent of the state is a question of belief as much as it is of practical survival. To choose and to be coerced into forgetting history is a question of belief as much as is it is of practical survival.

I absolutely despise work; I fear work more than death. Work is the ultimate form of repression. It kills the mind, body, and spirit by way of killing one’s time; submitting one to the industrial clock. I do anything to evade and avoid work: I lie, I cheat, I steal. Work mediates life; by separating one’s work from oneself (here meaning the work one does for oneself) and creating the labor category as a disjuncted/disjointed form into which one throws oneself, like a pit or a gulch or a fire, the work of the body, mind, and spirit are submitted to the vaccuum of capital – where nothing ever happens, no one ever loves, the clock never stops, and the hunger never ends. Before returning to work as a submission of myself I would rather die. I need to find something that isn’t going to push me over the edge of my life. I see people laboring on the streets, in the university, and it makes me sick. I remember my own labor, countless hours made empty cleaning floors, making academic work, serving tables, cleaning toilets, waiting in rooms, unable to write, read, think. This is one of the great horrors of life and the world to me, that peoples’ lives are time and time again submitted to a labor industry that steals away years of their lives for nothing. For exploitation, for the engine of national economy, for the sustenance of a society that fails them in perpetuity. Perhaps some enjoy their work; genuinely enjoy reporting to restaurants, custodial work, offices, vehicles, and so forth. I despise work with every cell of my body. I cannot go back; I can’t go back to cleaning toilets and serving tables and clocking in and out and the madness of business and the funneling of my life into numbers and nothingness. I wish for the collapse of this economy entirely; for the reconnection of work with life, a different work altogether. I labor: I cook, I clean, I write, I care for my loved ones, I repair, I examine, I plant, I partake, I speak, I move… but I do this for myself and myself alone. Money and the industries that move it would do well to die; civilization would do damn well to die. From these ashes perhaps something of a closeness to life could spring.

I want to abolish work forever for all people; abolish work as a category of life-gesture and behavior among peoples and

living things. The idea of work as a series of gestures and movements (increasingly mimetic, machinic) submitted to the order of a particular production process that is necessarily the sum of parts (here, the human body living being as an organ in the greater mechanized industrial body) is that which constitutes the new language of labor and working. This definition (a historical and linguistic turn by, of, and with industrialization and modern factory/city life) has made the word ‘work’ in a literal sense, practically irredeemable. What does it mean to do something for oneself that is directly connected to one’s life? I would here replace work with ‘self-making’ or ‘life-making’. Here, life as a practice, something of a direct communication between being and body and continued being and body. What do I need in this moment to survive? Here, I is something sub- individual; I something into the tributaries of life. If I need something, I beg the question of relation. How is it that I need food, water, shelter, in this moment; what does it mean, what would it take for me to obtain these necessities of life? Civilization would say: one is not inherently entitled to these things; furthermore, one is not inherently entitled to one’s life; that citizenship is conditional, that life is conditional, that food is conditional, that water is conditional – to obediance, skin color, labor; finally, total submission to the function of the state.

That life and the materials needed to sustain life (here, books and the life of the mind included) are conditional at this point in history is something of a common sense. One often says: ‘One must take what one can get,’ and ‘One must work for what one has’. But are we not at a point where survival and the sustenance of life for the peoples of earth can be fostered, created, and sustained? Is there not the technology to provide not only the means for survival, but the enjoyment of life for all peoples of the earth? The technological advancements of the past 100 years at the time of this document: automated agriculture, the internet, the telephone, artificial intelligence – all resources which could be at the disposal of those in need to create space, to create time, to create the possibility for life. Instead, they are

submitted to the current system of labor and capital in order to further exploit the labor and lives of millions of workers around the world. This term, ‘worker’, itself as a pejorative, as a delimitation of existence both farcical and true, that as long as capital exists state identity will act as a device by which to restrict and constrict the possibilities and bounds of life, where one is defined by one’s race, one’s ‘profession’, and treated accordingly. Is this not an outdated form of social organization? Is there not a different way in which living beings might live among one another without the need to dominate, exploit, steal, and cling to survival? One might start with considering oneself as so thoroughly wedded to the earth that there is no separation between oneself and the earth; thus, the living beings among it. For this ecosystem of the body does not end, it only reverberates and vibrates outward in circles of relation and thought.

LXXXII.

I can’t stop doing this work. I can’t go back to the life I used to live. I can’t go back to the emptiness, the lost time. Then it was like some death of love, like I couldn’t exist and everything was this movement of energy into a monolith I couldn’t even realize. This utter lack of visceral input or output; a stagnation of life and imagination where life became this system of data and information through which my bare sustenance took form. That I could eat, sleep, and wake up to another day, this bare survival with nothing of the mind; that my mind was taken in exchange for this survival and that this would go on interminably was enough to create this massive urgent tear which is a refusal of everything. That death of love was this feeling or sensation that persisted throughout everything, this pushing outward of a flat hard board of cement which put up against everything and let nothing in. No touch, no life, no meaning; nothing could get out. There was the mechanical action, the task at hand, pumped out with rigid effortlessness; the loss of all embodiment except for this task, which moved the limbs and animated the corpse.

At this point, one does not even despair; one ceases to cry out. Life becomes emptied of that which propels it, the blood-spirit; replaced with the cold mechanics of task- making and task-doing. One does not approach the earth, one approaches the world via a series of mirrors, screens, and transactions – in order to accomplish the basic task of survival, made impenetrable, made impossible, made into this absolute horror of chasing one’s own existence, turning one’s back to oneself and one’s life in order to give one’s body and loved ones the very basic resources that might sustain life. One never truly lives; one’s life is mediated continually by the terms and conditions of civilization which are the terms and conditions of labor and who labors when, where, and why.

LXXXIII.

I have unreasonable expectations of life and of the world.

Sharpe b/w Wynter: ‘become undisciplined.’

Loving and losing and in that space between love and loss the blues know the rest.

Life just adds up to this difference between life and death. Words, moments, images, all on this ledger, receipts of feeling.

These moments will just abandon me at the moment of death and I will be left with the salt of them, the matter but not the memory itself, as the body disintegrates into the essences that compose it; they disperse.

Writing becomes extremely difficult approaching this basic futility; it acts like a boarded up window from which light and shadow fall and compose themselves and there is almost life, but knowledge of this rescinding of all things leaves me bound in this distance which is a protective mechanism, a

distance which allows me to observe with knowledge of what is to come, which is the end of this moment, which is the end of all things and the disintegration of life into countless breaks. Always in this moment of celebration of life life comes crashing down like a ruined house, a house in which all of this detritus and the ends of existence are contained in the birth of the body, breathing and exploding within the body and without like expression. I move to action and I hesitate; I hesitate precisely of and with this encounter of the glass of life which lies beneath the generative fluid which composes the movement of life. This thick mixture of saliva, semen, discharge, piss, blood, pus, mucus, ash, compounded and jettisoned in, of, and from the body in a fashion which hates the mind, which hates the body; which disjects from these things without regard for their continued existence. I pursue discharge as a method to continue existing, but this discharge itself and in its essence is death: fecality is death, mucus is death, piss is death. I disject; death escapes me.

LXXXIV.

Pain leaves me and I am lucid.

…

My brothers and sisters are everywhere

I wake up tomorrow and there is no more police I wake up tomorrow and there is no more nation I wake up tomorrow and there is no more world

My brothers and sisters are everywhere Burning flags and storming borders like a mad dance Fleeing the scene of life Unwillingly

Ghosts are singing from the ground and the trees And when they sing they sometimes laugh and cry out:

Glory to the martyrs of Gaza! Glory to the martyrs of Algiers! Glory to the martyrs of the damned Americas!

(That bound world, that sick world, That hurt world)

And they cry out in pain, too, sometimes -

For that would-be always is dead now, And I am looking up at the night Boundless and black like a gate Away from that infernal place where tyrants drink blood forever from the mouth of the river like that first wound I know All too well

I wake up tomorrow and open a book and read aloud:

The slave ships burn and never leave that first port, Never docking, never crossing, Never becoming anything other than damned Anything other than damned to birth and quick-fire

The ghosts tell me There is a place where that Wood is slung back up into trees by time Killing even this history Drying up the sea where all that carbon of blood and love rests spitting it back Up into the air like a fist or a breath -

And I too, Laugh.

LXXXV.

No thoughts… just anger and erotics.

My life has been composed of pain. In nearly each waking moment, some ailment or disorder.

I just want this one moment forever… us at the wooden table with a carafe of wine, music playing real low and the lamps above us catching the dusk and reflecting life inside the café back… me pouring you a fresh glass and being too serious and then us laughing about nothing in particular. Life going on and you taking everything in with a great big breath. I can’t stay here, but I don’t have anywhere else left to go. Running away just stops working after awhile. Your body breaks down, your heart breaks; you go broke just chasing it all.

LXXXVI.

Being on the road is this sense of the dispossession of modern life complete… a great and impossible statelessness achieved both in prisons and bordering life…

New diseases and new tellings emergent from progress like explosions from improvised devices from storms of taking and the gradual and reluctant turn back into dust and unknowing - Outfitted grooves of land cut by sound and the death noise of flat life being made flat and clear like capturing, flat and clear like glass and I am always pressing into this surface, burning and etching into this surface paper fabric veil stretched tight and thin over my face like seeing, of which none is done, of which great zero, of which eternal ghost of seemings lingers and looms like a pulp in the atmosphere like a massive weather gold and tangled in the wind and rising in a math of crossings and being undone again and forever and of swearing to love like a rain and drumming and drumming into the night in a bare window and this candle is for my love, always new and always against time, beating up against itself and crying out bottled and breathing and crying out, that organ of language with

makes death manufactures death like a press, generative and in a downward movement like an eye like a taking and the creation mimics creation like a massive system of cruelty, like a massive knowing, like a sacrificial machine, making new bodies - Of arms and legs and deathless rhythms

Crushing and breathing totally, a total mind of consciousness and brain matter Submerged in the blood fluid owning and eating time like a leash, time like a destroying, time like a tower and coming down incomplete and unfinished into dust Into unknowing Wracked and wooden made boats and bellies Massive stomachs holding the tract A sanctified life compounded by law and lawlessness, the body unleashed into feeling like a wound, beating into song like a dislocation, a jettisoning upward into the deep myth of forgetting; the access point bleeding and disbarred like a gate like a checkpoint a closed border against time a closed border against death…

A cell breathing and expanding into multitudes, oscillating and breathing and knowing like a curse, of cursed things and cursed world, miles of unmarked graves and plantations and bloomings and blossomings of pain that does not die, pain that the trees have seen and hold

LXXXVIII.

The poetics of relation are a creative question; thus, they are a political question.

LXXXIX.

And yet we will go on finding belated uses for all the things rendered useless by their wrong time.

And I am always already buried… already in the hearse; despairing my way to dead and dying and nothingness. …

I am not sure how much longer I can keep going… I am exhausted by life, exhausted by the possibility of continuing life, of life beyond now, of pain as an extension of the past even into this next moment, even into now… and I am thrust into the future, broken and breaking and hopeless.

The revolutionary act is necessarily without institution. Dismantle the museum and open the doors to those without a place to sleep. Strip the walls of their garments to put clothes on the backs of those without clothes to wear; auction off the lot to serve free meals in the gallery. Strip the institution of the impossibility of life, and imagine… this is the true art.

XC.

Rhythms of suffering, Lorca’s Duende

What I want:

An intimate romantic relationship full of touch A friend circle full of artists and thinkers More coffee Enough money to get by and not have to worry too much To work as little as possible For bodily pain to be alleviated

XCI.

Perhaps I have made myself unlovable. It is hard enough to love nonetheless let yourself be loved and I am not entirely convinced I am capable of either of these things. The drive to express burns everything away, into a sort of reassurance bound by wordedness that never comes, into a world that

never comes in which I have cultivated myself, in which I live. I think only music and poetry can escape capital, if only for a moment. I have become far too civilized, far too contented and settled (in the voluminous sense)… too socialized into humanness. My life rationalized, cordoned off by time, neatly organized into categories of the effable and ineffable, expressible and inexpressible, labor time, pseudo labor time, and the sheer survival/surviving of time. Love is all that matters to me but somehow in this world conceiving of love as something material or clear or apparent feels impossible. All of my love has been sent up into this poem, this song, endless and bright, to the point of which from which it came and where it goes are impossibly obscured. I grapple with life in this light; hold myself, caress myself, kiss myself, in some sort of stupid animal narcissism, reckoning with the pointless desire of existence in the face of all of the crimes of the world and that which time holds. My desire eviscerates in a violent focus, as desire is wont to do. I want something impossible and I can’t get to it.

I have reason to believe my love doesn’t matter -- precisely because it never becomes anything… it never materializes, never appears, never arrives.

The classroom is also a threshold.

ASSEMBLIES

understanding the socialized definition of crime as simply actions/existences 'against' the state makes conceiving of the border between legality and illegality a surgery into the process of human making as a behavioral and bodily school- machine of violent exile

the violence of desire and the hatred of the school of beauty and purity (white social valuation of life) against that which it conceives of as dead/inhuman/grotesque/ugly is unending immediate and visceral

thinking of the specifically european speculatory science- history of the eye as a device which penetrates its object

and to conceive of inquiry and method in this way - as a method of perception making by piercing the life of another, histories of colonial violence and war as expeditions certainly have not died

the expedition as at once a brutalizing and autopsy of said brutalization, measuring body parts, accounting for customs, rectifying customs, purifying cultural languages, and stealing materials/ideas and lives

in this place where i cant write or make songs or really do anything even remotely 'serious'

seriousness as a discipline of even formal organization, where communication or expression is an 'attempt' at saying something

babbling or screaming, laughing or crying

this essay on carax and his first two films where poetics are specifically the acknowledgement of hopelessness and the

impossibility of ever really communicating or saying anything

and that acknowledgement simultaneously being a giving up on language and the generative process of language entirely

what was it

deathless rhythms

topos of violence - gestures outlining and tracing the curves of violence as something that peels back time into an infinite action, moment, gesture - of violences as reverberations, tremors, that continue to shake the earth even despite everything

'i have nothing soothing to tell you, / that's not my job, / my job is to revise and revise this bristling list, / hourly' - brand

i have reason to believe my love doesn't matter -- precisely because it never becomes anything... it never materializes, never appears, never arrives

faith is simply willful submission to the will of the ruling class

'what will be will be' is nothing more than 'let the bombs fall where they may'

re: faith - prayer is also an action

re: the idiomic 'actions speak louder than words'... actions are words and words are actions and this foundational 'paradox' informs the law as behavioral code as rigidity, conformity, and thoughtlessness

for if words are not poetic and historical events in themselves what is the rule of law; furthermore, what is the

paper which authorizes the buying and selling of land and people - but a contract of words and promises

studying law is studying language

lawlessness is also a dialect: the dialect of exiles, vagabonds, poets, and dejects

writing against the passage of time; this too is a detailing in which a body is marked, mutilated, and ultimately consecrated in a discharge of fluid meanings

a cipher of feces, spit, piss, blood, cum, marginalia -

artaud & fecundity: orality being defiled border, the transsubstantial at once a mouth and an anus

'to conceive of production'

being in dialogue w others is so important to me b/c it continually reinforces the idea of thought as something that always occurs within a community of thinkers in a climate of violence; what that entails re: an obligation to thought as something at once serious & undisciplined

what does it mean to think out loud? speech and orality and expression as gestures of inner life made outer life, the private life of the mind, heart, and soul made public... and what does that mean for thought, speech, and listening - as media(tat)ions?

simone weil was right about attention and albert ayler understood attention to be something urgent and apparent. attention as that which is paid & the ghosts keep receipts.

'the poetics no longer requires the adequacy of language, but the precise fire of language' - glissant

to consider psychogeography is to consider a composition of the mind as something at once material/neuratic; unbound by the 'actual' physical structure of the brain itself

the brain as something like a city which is necessarily many cities - in and of which the bodies of and memories of countless souls reside, perish, lie, and reconfigure themselves into new personhoods

these pathways continually rerouted and reoriented to water, desire, and dreams

disappearing a person is profitable work

there are whole industries designed around disappearing and reappearing people... the police are at the nexus of this trans-action

here fanon on the street and darren wilson describing michael brown as 'like a demon'... apparition and disapparition as legal codes of who may appear as what, where, and when at any given point and time

the migrant may not appear anywhere without consequence, the slave may not appear anywhere without consequence. language and history as tools of appearance (self making) and disappearance (in the violent withholding of resources, learning materials, life materials)

here also the disappearance of peoples by way of language and history as tools of decimation

va woolf says 'my difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.' here is an idea on the movement of history

if i am gesturing it is because i am speechless

actions and the events surrounding actions/inactions as instances and situations punishable by death stratified by

race and organized by severity of disobedience/crime against the state and its apparatuses

anyone is involved if it is convenient for said individual to be involved; anyone is guilty if it is convenient for said person to be guilty

the american legal system as a convenient justice

just like everything else in this country

liberalism: the legal system is working (correct), but not well enough

the idea that the existent justice system might somehow be refined or revised is a horrific disillusionment - doing further violence to the living and dead alike. how could you possibly make an institution which is grounded in the language & mythos of white supremacy... better?

the liberal diagnostic: something is working (prison) but it is not working (prison), but instead of attempting to imagine life without it (abolition) the assumption is that a gear is...

... out of place, and not that the entire machination is designed and founded on a basic corruption (racialized capital)

i find that stating the obvious is productive because there is always something in obviousness that has been redacted/turned/receded from pronunciation

using thinking to avoid thinking (typical)

trans world(s) might look like intratextuality and intramethodologies, a sort of 'flying' through the work

thinking a lot about hermes, the winged messenger. what does it mean for the message never to touch ground, for the

content never to settle? is the message ever delivered? meaning in flight is of many things

there's a cixous bit here and also bolano's diagram at the end of savage detectives

meaning between/against/around other meanings is a frictive dance of fluid de- and re- contextualizations of meanings in relation to other mean(in)ings

here, perhaps the productive, destructive, inclusive, and exclusive movement of cells - mating, fucking, and dying

the meaning of settled things is clear, the meaning of unsettled things is plural. sitting at the river the day after a rain drinking from a bottle

mud is a compound and a storm

theres beckett in french and then theres sun ra. translation as an economics of trans/confer-ence and translation as an abolition of economics, meaning, worlds -- in the name of creating something that might resemble these things in a certain light yet is not them nor of them

not to say that there is a stratification of worth or value between these two methods - but that there instead is a question of world making and unmaking that hangs in the balance of translation - of a willingness to stray from meaning and thus, from worldliness

to be an unworldly thinker: to be undisciplined. sharpe and brand here. perhaps contra-world, or something against prefixation altogether. not sure what this language would look like, if it would look like anything at all.

gestures that cannot be seen, existences that cannot be catalogued, gestures so impossibly vague that they pass by like apparitions in the fog, vaguely outlined, indetermined, indeterminable, wayward and fugitive

this moment: a proliferation of (a quick-massive demand for) the proliferation of digital platforms as a way of managing and organizing labor and that which labor produces

digital platforms can be quickly settled, evacuated, cordoned off, rearranged, 'guided'

here, policing as affective, immediate, and as the mediator of life. in this way, and others - nothing has changed - judgement and punishment as vehicles have simply acquired a new speed... the speed of information & this next moment as truly modern --

i think you become what you obsess about which is why i prefer to obsess about the end of the world

i like fragments as toss offs - as a sort of worthlessness that is worthless not of a valuation but of an inability to establish/inoculate the fragment with value/meaning

perhaps this is why sappho is so good - sometimes the refusal is something that occurs between time

and what could refuse possibly mean without an a priori valuation that establishes a framework of and for production?

to theorize and destroy whiteness as categorical time is to think of and through valuation as a vehicle which at once establishes the material and ideological conditions of time itself

kafka navigating the workplace at once explicates and theorizes the workplace as a condition and strategizes movement through the workplace as surviving situations & the attempt of work as a mechanism to take one's life

also good here is pessoa: to free oneself from work as life one must submit work to life forcefully. i don't think this comes

about as anything other than stealing away from that which steals.

if life is writing, thinking, acting, imagining, situating, asituating, crossing, uncrossing; exercising the intellect and the will... is establishing a framework ever useful for this work?

i think the answer is yes - because the history of abolition work (here, also a musical history, a multiple history, a creative history, jazz, blues, algiers, the americas, resistance in palestine, abolition work in literature, study, painting) is the framework and the ground...

.. in and upon which these questions are engaged and reengaged

i can't write at work because you're not supposed to write at work, et cetera.

life is always this undone inheritance... inheriting time as something that cannot be inherited yet is inherited nonetheless - made and unmade, woven and unwoven - lost in some massive fate which is swept and is sweeping away endlessly the particular existences

i love lorca's explication of duende and need it constantly - nothing short of god

brother steadfast via crawley: 'pray much for me, that i may be used as an instrument in his (god's) hand’

what does it mean to become a presence or to be in the presence of something which cannot be accounted for?

i feel like this is the locus of communication - that all communication is failed, that all expression is necessarily mediated by brokenness, that the attempt to communicate is doomed - and that this is precisely why the attempt to communicate is necessary

a lot of this thinking is through the obligation of life in the face of certain and constant death, death as something fixed, death as fixation

and thus life as something active, kinetic, unstable, always tipping over into that reservoir which is death and dying - practicing hope (kaba) in the face of hopelessness, imagining otherwise in the face of strictures on imagination (the climate of policing). life as in fits...

stops and starts

i'm not so sure that there is an obligation to anything other than an obligation to self making which is simultaneously many selves & thus indiscernible and entangled from and with the countless selves souls and ghosts which compose life

to conceive of life as possession divorced from the sheer force and energy of life moving through the body is to abstract a very basic physical principle into an understanding which is obviously mediated by capital

the breaking of flows of informations, energies, and life forces in the name of stratifying life as something fixed, inhabited, and possessed by someone, owned by someone, and thus something that can be gained and/or lost

where capital acts as a pseudo-mystical rite (dys-possession) there is an exchange of life for profit. perhaps a more accurate word for this violence is 'taking'.

the body as inhabited and disinhabited by ideological violences which create further violences. spores which possess and dispossess the soul, entangled with the very real whips and chains of state-making

histories of violence are also histories of wounding, trauma, and wound making

there is something to be said here: that the product of capital is primarily violence, but that this violence is contained, disseminated, and organized in different ways and in different containers. good liberalism reduces life to surfaces; thus, obscures this violence

by means of a display of difference as inclusion as surface/surfeit. a good liberal government gives in to the demand of and for the abolition of capital (germany, france, et al). good liberalism recognizes that integration is a profitable enterprise

the state accommodates the demand for inclusion

writing in troubled times

time is shaking like a earth-quaking-door

thresholds and gateways to further meaning, to ands and further ands, and ands which necessarily trail off into strange direction, without direction - this is the sign of good writing

in the wake of reading good writing i am always asking questions of myself and the world as it were - these questions are often 'stupid', 'pointless'

II.

none of this work is particularly ‘good’ or ‘useful’

(unhinging form as something codified, particular, specific, denoting of something and thus conferring the status of the thing onto the text-body)

the host body as something which contains multitudes and is slowly killed for it

cites as delocations and yet populous places composed of many different historical points which converse amongst themselves

in this sense maybe the reference points of the text are rather unstable(d)

the horse is saddled with a violent burden

caterwauling ghosts

III.

swallowing the abolitionist demand is the mandate of and for the state… thus no enslavement or conceit is ever abolished as long as the state survives – this demand is merely transferred/transformed into reform

from cruelty to ‘cruelty’, from brutality to ‘brutality’ – lexical turns in and by which violence is classified, codified, and framed as something reasonable or unreasonable. this is why prison reform is ‘practical’ but prison abolition ‘isn’t’.

effective governance (forceful governance) understands the need to identify the problem or point of tension, isolate and silence the point of tension, and soothe that which has formed a circle around it with compromise

this is how one might treat a tendinous injury

thus to conceive of willing as a communal process is to understand that will is generated by a sense of belonging, a sense of interconnectivity, a sense of purpose… often something as simple as a chance to live, a chance to live amongst others in a way that allows for difference, communal growth and discourse, personal development, sustenance of the body and mind… and the abolitionist demand is the end of the world by and for this entirely.

here, reagan made common rhetoric: ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’. RIP fred hampton.

the state roots out dissidents and community leaders, snuffing them out, leaving movements foundationless. this is certainly a type of violent neg(a/o)t(i)ation, as the terms and conditions of life are always at the hands of the executioner of the will of the state, not the collective wills of those laboring and dying under it.

this violence is covert and silent, paving the way for reform politics as the only ‘viable’ option.

always this question of what violence is allowed where and why, and who is allowed to commit acts of violence

IV.

getting children the educational tools and resources necessary to live and learn (free breakfasts, lunches, and dinners in schools, sleeping and living arrangements, social work, fully stocked libraries, academic support in and out of the classroom) is of the essence

this should be the highest concern of any real commune; the fact that so many black and brown children are brutalized by an education system that not only doesn’t care about them but mistreats them and uses them as disposable labor shows that we have so far to go

the fact that in the united states the ability to get an education (read: the ability to advance oneself, the opportunity to think with others in an environment that actually fosters growth, instead of beating rote knowledge and rhetoric into the minds of children) doesn’t really exist except for the managerial class, which is educated in by and for the means of manipulating the mechanisms which continue this cycle of oppression, speaks volumes about the real ideological goals of the state

what is the incentive to go to school and think with your peers when you are regularly harassed by school police, monitored by school administration and shut down by school teachers? when you are learning a history that you know is a lie structured around truth as whiteness, being brought into methodologies that discourage thought and emphasize memorization… as monolith?

there is violence of content and there is also violence of form. both of these violences are regulatory

having to study genocide as patriotism on an empty stomach in a cold room is a violence of many parts

I’m not so interested in depictions of beautiful people as images of beautiful people.

The body mediates sensation

VI.

where is the space for collaborative thinking/acting/moving/gesturing? i remember work being funneled into frameworks of individual success/failure. what would it mean to conceive of work as a larger movement irreducible to one person/thing?

in this consideration, necessarily questions of ownership and will. will moves across time and death and borders. possession of work, body, land, earth -

without collaboration as a sort of intradisciplinary context and acknowledgement that work can, does, and continues to impact people, climates, things, environments - across time and space in strange and unexpectable ways,

... it is easy to see how the individual laboring is a social context essential to and for the process of subjection

some sort of communal work that destroys the obligatory framework of subject/object, actor and acted upon... life is so much more complex than this

and an ideological framework/frame of reference that refuses to acknowledge this is rigid, immutable. difference is that relative amoebic oscillating expanding contracting breathing organism(s). the particular is parts of parts of parts

collaboration as a way of realizing collectives, gatherings, coming togethers of thoughts, influences, bodies, lives, dreams, and loves

to realize these things is to realize that time and space are not limitations to organizing... they are merely presuppositions of that order which establishes time and space as its founding principles

in many ways, land continually disobeys these 'principles' of space in time: by remembering, disjecting, regurgitating fluids of times past, becoming futures. land is also that which is contracted by capital

collections and collectives of rock, soil, sediment, and water

asystems and aprinciples of organization which continually collapse, pile up on each other, evaporate, shake, and die in the cold stillness

there is a question of organizing life and i don't think the idea of archives/archiving can quite make it there

togetherness is erotic

VII.

not sure what to do with the term 'work'

certainly a long term

perhaps there is 'work' and there is 'self making' or 'life work'

i would like to oppose 'life work' to the death work of capital

VIII.

the demand for abolition is simply the demand of and for life

abolition is in the rocks

abolition is in the air

abolition is in the soil

abolition is most certainly in the fire

the end of capital is the end of the enslavement of the earth to the world. the end of capital is necessarily the end of enslavement, the end of prisons, the end of the state, the end of policing

it must also be the end of whiteness in all forms, ideological and otherwise

there is the abolition of the systems of death production that form and formulate capital and the state, but furthermore, the ideological, social, and cultural remnants of these forms that linger on like demons in the minds of those submissive and submitted to capital

the question of consent is always here

the specter of capital is at once the ghost of the material and the ghost of the idea

(it is also in the water; i forget water often)

it is no coincidence that the cell is reformulated in the idea(l) history of the prison as a total container

for if the cell is made form, made from this mutable boundary into a bloc(k), into a solid system of the categorical containment of people made bodies, dreams made waiting -

capital in relation to mastery is the ability to utterly transform life to fit the pseudo-prosthetic purposes of the ideological system of using-life and making-death which is capital

this is again about submitting life

IX.

organizing and organization is also the directing/direction of energy and energies

this aspect of survival - membering pain and its many pre- fixations

i fixate on pain and there is a maths of pain

this maths is a sort of times tables, crossings in and upon and amongst the body

a levering/leveling of pain histories in and of which to a certain extent one can map pain as a coming and going, as a cycle/circle of leavings and returnings

loss also has its secret rhythms

maths are not always sensible

this to me is a joy of life

i do not wish to make sense of things

there is this push and pull between a need to be sensible and a playfulness which flits effortlessly between sense worlds

many of which are nonsense worlds, ineffable worlds, lost worlds - but in this sense loss is a form/method/way of knowing

if i am lost in my thinking i am lost... so be it. i content myself with this loss - and this - being of nonsense

the rote excesses of pain

pain might be made sense of making

the jarring of life from life is certainly pain; in cinematic terms, a cutting

being shaken into and out of moments of life; concerns of life and living

woundings bring about a turn inward, a turn towards some sort of new point or compound of locations in which pain resides and makes and remakes itself

chronic pain is a repetition which uses the body as a drum

here, drum as both container and maker of deep rhythmic song

i find that often pain marks time better than time itself

XI.

(aside) there is definitely a method that comes about with a limited framework

XII.

love as waiting is always trains and train stations to me

this transit like time (again, shaking like a door) conducive to solitude, reflection, and the white noise of movement

the hudson station in particular... being lulled to sleep by the clock, wooden benches, big barn doors, sitting and drawing outside on the platform

jimmie rodgers' 'waiting for a train' & son house's 'empire state express' here

this part of the ride after penn station headed north where the train traces the curves of the hudson... a vivid memory of my last cigarette behind my ear and watching the sun go down

thinking of every love before and now and to come like the only thing left in this world, some last hope, simultaneously great and pathetic, useful and entirely useless

harder to write on trains because there is already a certain music being made, a music in which you are a part vis a vis the vehicle

rodgers and house use the train as a time-keeper, as a musical instrument in and of itself

mussolini's trains always run on time

but what happens when a train isn't punctual? what happens when a train runs into the past? into the future?

some sort of misdirective slipping by which one might access new and different frames of reference, points of view.

the american rail itself as a history of dispossession and dislocation. the industry of movement (cars, trains, films) with foundations firmly laid in the soil of enslavement

'ownership of the lines today has "no relevance" to how they were built' - union pacific spokesman john bromley

just as in film we have griffith who exposes the fundamental mission statement of american cinema - to reproduce and export whiteness as aesthetic & cultural product

it is no coincidence that leaders of industry from this era are widely admired and set as an example of specifically american 'success' to young schoolchildren (griffith, ford, morgan, disney, et al)

the frontier of american industrial racism coalescing at this time of the balfour declaration,

there is something to be said here for the idiomic mussolini bit - that trains are perhaps the first modern symbol for speed - specifically vehicular, carrying bodies. germany and italy obviously take this in directions

experiences of dispossession of and from the rail: house can't ride, rodgers can't ride... 'nobody seems to want me or to lend me a helping hand / though my pocketbook is empty and my heart is full of pain'

there is this rhetoric of efficiency and national power and might that runs alongside the sheer exploitative force of the actual project of rail-making

the mussolini bit and the excerpted pacific union quote do a bit of explicating of and into the fascistic frameworks that mediate time as simultaneously an essence and a disposable object

XIII.

the passing down of imperial legacies is always a refusal of responsibility... for how this inherited power and wealth came about

the paradox at the intersection of legacy and refusal of legacy

to inherit this legacy is necessarily to inherit the material wealth and ideological repercussions of empire

i suppose this is where thinking and thought become 'optional'. one might accidentally indict oneself

XIV.

lao tzu and rumi in particular remind me that words needn't be tethered to the stupidity of modernity/modern life and the defined terms and conditions therein

a reaching into and past time for that small gem of life, which once removed, obliterates space and time as limited forces entirely

of course space and time are not gone, they have just been revealed as 'space' and 'time'

the word itself as removal

the framework of 'doing time' says a lot about the condition of modernity and life under capital

i use the term 'framework' as a gesture toward the gesture/act of painting

the american-capitalist idea that 'everyone has the same 24 hours'. 24 hours in prison is a context that most capitalists cannot even begin to imagine

nonetheless being imprisoned for a drug related 'offense', being imprisoned simply for being black, being imprisoned for being an immigrant, for 'not having papers', for walking, for breathing,

this chain of persecution, imprisonment, enslavement, and murder as organized political process litters the grounds of american history as the insides and outsides of the mythology of american 'success' and 'greatness'

here, inside and outside are also borderings - domestic and 'foreign'

the drone as mediator between subject and object

would not this violence of racialized gatekeeping be the primary terrorism?

this returns to the question of who lives and who dies and why. american life as this perpetual execution of whiteness as execution

the refrain remains - the end of capital, the end of whiteness, the end of this world-making project which has stolen so many lives, dreams, songs, and possibilities

XV.

there are two classes of crime: the theft of bread, and the theft of the lives of a village

life giving and life taking

XVI.

on vince staples’ ‘summertime ‘06’

'i tell it like it is / then how it could be'

sampling 3000 at the beginning of like it is this simultaneous bridge between past present and future histories as possibility/impossibility

inhabits at once this possible space by way of memory and articulation and the violent present --- 'heaven or hell / freedom or jail' ---

direction & choice (and lack thereof) -- 'no matter what we grow into, we never gonna escape our past'

charonic purgatory of moving through the river waters between surviving in hell and striving for heaven as something that is a material/economic condition simultaneously something he is achieving on this record as a def jam release, becoming popular, but being unable to leave the past 'behind', the things he has seen, unable to escape the conditions of racial capitalism that enclose and delimit his life and the lives around him but not entirely! subjection is not total, there is movement, movement away in music, poetry, the elucidation of life as it is, was, and will be/could be... there is something prophetic here. vince staples as a poet historian speaking to and from the conditions of his life and the relative lives around him in such a way that this historiography moves freely through kairotic time

kairotic meaning weather - and here christina sharpe - anti- blackness as the weather, climate. there is this horizontal, or lateral movement, as staples moves through space, his hometown, his memories... but there is also this gesture, this reaching, this climbing, attempt to climb through, towards

verticalities - towards heaven. again in like it is: 'i gotta be the one / to make it up to heaven / to make my momma proud (alternatively) / despite the things i've done'

i can't listen to summertime '06 and not think of in the wake

the poet-historian-prophet space which both sharpe and staples inhabit, these gestures toward memory, imagination, eulogy, and life otherwise

in what direction can/does life move in the face of planned and organized death everywhere? where is heaven? where is respite? 'whats the price on a life in this dark world?'

he has this incredible ability to condense the historical moment, the album, the climate, the weather, the atmosphere in and of which he is living - into one moment, one space, one line, one gasp.

simone weil: 'only the contemplation of our limitations and our misery puts us on a higher plane... the upward movement in us is vain (and less than vain) if it does not come from a downward movement. statera facta corporis. It is the crucified body which is a true balance, the body reduced to its point in time and space.'

XVII.

borders don't work life continually escapes categorization a lack of The word is difference a lack of The work is difference

there are poets of relation and architects of war and empire who tremble in the face of relation

bataille -- the face of truth is violent contradiction (or something along these lines)

XVIII.

is there really a 'bad' laziness

lazy thought is still thought nonetheless

something here about policing and monitoring volume of labor and force exerted and otherwise

bounding/binding thought to some sort of scale of rigor - rigor mortis

perhaps there is another way to make and consider the many accounts of life

definitions and undoings of 'economy' that escape the diffuse rhetoric of profit/loss

i certainly prefer not to work, but to laugh and share stories and make songs

XIX.

the difference between counting and listening is distance

i count echoes but hear nothing

at least that nothing is that which does not have a name

XX.

perhaps to abolish work, one must necessarily abolish the term 'work' and the cultural connotations and conditions that surround work

this would necessitate thinking through action and thinking through action differently, without a dependence on culture as it were

culture being the accumulated conditions of language as a sort of expressive (and often repressive) climate

culture as bacterial and a-state of dis-ease

for all of the extolling of the benefits of culture - is there not also culture produced for culture, culture produced for capital, culture produced for the benefit of civilization?

i am suspicious of that which is produced in the name of 'advancing civilization'

the pretense of reproduction modernized, industrialized, and internalized

also it should be noted here that sex is for death and not for reproduction

perhaps eros is a witness, but creation is between me and death

XXI.

desire takes a position

it orients itself towards something

even if that something is a vague horizon, a dream, a without

XXII.

it is perhaps the condition of the permanent atomic moment & the now-massive scale(s) of capital-isms occurrent in this moment - that one must directly oppose the suppose(d) or be absorbed by it

anti-culture, anti-politics, anti-capital

these stances (specifically these stances, among others) posit a-positionality, delocations, dislocations, refusals, breakings from, breaking away froms

...

it is easy to become a product

one must simply allow oneself to be produced

here deleuze and nietzsche - the active/reactive

...

the atomic moment is eternally productive of the conditions which produced it - which here, simply, are that of the political reactionary

this moment as a firm delineation between time and times as the moment at and of which modernity became/becomes eternally productive. the reverberations of the atom bomb as a movement beyond reproduction into the conditional future-present

atomic space-time does not track

i can't see or trace or track or map this catastrophic time - it goes past sensation into the realm of the supra-immediate. my moment is of this moment yet insofar as i can identify/sense my moment, nuclearity escapes with tremendous speed and force, obliterating and shattering even the pretense of my moment as 'mine' into particular fragments with the immense force of history condensed into a momentous explosion/expulsion

this too is an exile

this too is the fulfillment of the fasc-capital promise of speed. the atomic as of this moment is the promise of quick-death fulfilled to the utmost

the atomic bomb is life industrialized and condensed entirely into a perversion of life taking force...? the global climate of atomic death as threat, as that which submits life...

XXIII.

i have notes i need to get down between work(s)

there just isn't enough time. either exhaustion or exhaustion

...

history & ideology remains in the architecture - as a buoyant remembrance --- what is pushed to the surface by those who control and operate the block

here, particularly i am thinking of the 'federal' buildings in dc and the monuments and cemeteries of richmond

the city also remembers but this remembrance is controlled and regulated by that which the state wishes to remember

selective memory is also a curatorial framework

as much as the city is a body it is also a museum of bodies

certain deaths are shown and celebrated

...

things that tend to be considered 'worthy of thought' are also considered to be 'of use'

here, that which can be extracted to and from labor like a sieve-tunnel or an intestine of some sort

XXIV.

thinking as immanent play of and with language

language as the instrument by and through which thought flows

language is simultaneously being built and building by way of energetic mediat(at)ion(s)

it is in this way that the text is unfinished, the thought is unfinished, the lexicon is unfinished, the library is unfinished

there are new languages, new letters, new symbols - that have not yet arrived, that have not yet been named, that arise via and beneath surfaces and surfeits of meaning

perhaps not new, but different, refractory

languages like growths

something bio(t/n)ic here

language as something prosthetic-organic - that arises at once from metal and flesh, fluid and fire, the clashing incongruity of modern life and technologic breakdown

when language (a) fails, language (ab) comes about

this is not necessarily about alternatives or even failures, but utterances and stutters and stoppages by and through which language is routed and rerouted

a word becomes a syllable becomes a repetition becomes a cough or a sneeze or a glottal stop or a gutter

into which the fluids and bile of life flow and get caught up

language as life debriefing itself

in this process, i am exiled --- life convenes with life without me

i may yet say something i do not understand... for it is not 'me' saying it... and in this saying regurgitate something essential about a time past and a time to come

this essence lacks and laughs understanding

shrugging it off like water

XXV.

i repeat to myself - 'i still have to live'

; complete this rote exercise of life

somewhere in these repetitions is a knowledge and knowledge formulation

a forum or communion of knowledges in which sensibilities converse with one another

a dialogue of and between the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, throat - a chorus, a symphonics

grunts, burps, gasps, farts, exclamations, hums, hisses, and releases

perhaps this is obvious - but survival as something primary - before love, before world

this was the last thing i learned

for a long time i did everything i could to except surviving

any sort of distraction, misnomer, pseudo-body, mirror action, cybernetic recontextualization

to extract myself from myself and thus do away with myself altogether

this is a formal consideration

XVI.

i know there is a maths, but i refrain from 'doing' it

i instead listen to the maths and do in light of it

sort of a pseudo-totemic 'working around' systems

perhaps to know unspeakable systems one need not 'solve' them

there is that scientific-colonial methodology which seeks to incise to the core of meaning, to shred meaning and the ineffable into a grated symbology of words, numbers, measurements

knowing relationally instead might look something like a standing outside of oneself, a standing outside of love

here, kafka's parable 'before the law' works quite well

...

in attempting to cut a working definition of and for 'systems' i move first toward the notion of establishment

the laying of a framework or a grounds upon which certain mechanisms and apparatuses might function in dialogue with one another

jazz as a straddling of worlds... one foot in the river styx and another in the explosion of modernity

systematization as a death-works, as a funneling of life and death into increasingly smaller spaces, increments, decimals

the fitting of a head in a vice grip, the reduction of life and lives to death counts, body counts. deaths as numbers, not as lives

this method, too, makes death productive, generative of bodies

XVII.

a movement away from systems of thought necessarily gestures towards thought as immanent action

it is, at the end of the day, just a life

something organic, decaying, grotesque, and occasionally beautiful

i celebrate and remember this, yet mourn and grieve all of the things that life cannot be... particularly that impossible chrome

for all that disdain i have for 'purity' and the conception of something eternal and true -- i still wish for that sleek glory of modernity, some sort of infallibility, some sort of armament against the barrage that is everyday life

the ability to not only survive but to move past survival into some other body, some other skin, some other world,

and in this sense, become otherwise, become machine, become chromatic, become entirely sensible of and within the scales of life as some sort of greater prosthetic of god

something profound and use-able, missive and unextinguishable --- to become light

the weight of organic life is thick and blunt and soil --- so much of earth is within me that i am nothing but earth

and when i burn i am putrid and alight but not yet light, merely derivative of it

and like any other being am gone with my works and my dreams and my dialects in the next moment like a complete disappearance, remains in ash swept away into the wind and water and again into the soil

i at once despair and rejoice at this knowledge

this knowledge melts away all of my concerns which are not of this essence, like a kiln stripping away excess and uncertainty

the entirety of life, then, becomes excess and uncertainty - and i now inhabit that body of life with precision and the knife of foreknowledge

which is of what to do with that thought --- to dispose of it, not to despair or ruminate over it, but to simply let it go, and with it the concern of and which the form of the thought takes

i attempt to theorize the possible, but it is also good to know what is not possible. i have stretched my life, time and time again, to the utmost bounds of my ability to speak, act, live, breathe, feel

incurring pain like a balance --- desnos' 'o scales of feeling'

it is only justice to at once be able to think and to die

that which is made must be unmade --- love wedded to ruins

XVIII.

i am not so much concerned with this work as surviving this work

there is some mutual importance in and of the process of life as valuation and devaluation

in the prizing of certain lives (in both life in death as elevations and mournings) and the detriment of certain lives (in the pernicious murder, degradation, and taking of)

systems of valuations of life and lives as economies which fuel civilization are transmitted via the active enforcement of this code and the passive ideological codification of this code into the intimate and subtle details of life and life among others

this code is comprised and composed of absences and presences, presentations and representations, woundings and healings, openings and closings and doors of gates and access points to crucial life resources

here - healthcare, food, water, shelter, books, schooling, methods of forming and sustaining meaningful connections between self and self and self and commune

the codification of meanings and values of certain lives as human lives - specifically white lives - is coded into dominant culture violently and constantly

this is in - the news which state media chooses to cover (and the news which state media refuses to cover), the films that are broadcast and critically acknowledged, the takings that are justified, the wars that are aggrandized, and the symbols

of nation and whiteness that are continually elevated to the level of religious critical iconography

this religion - in short - is racial capital. it is no coincidence that those who are adherent benefit from these malevolent rulings

“[O]ur now immensely large-scale systemic injustices, as extended across the planet, are all themselves as law-likely and co-relatedly indispensable to the institutionalization of our now purely secular and therefore Western and Westernized liberal/neoliberal Man’s homo oeconomicus’s biocosmogonically chartering origin narrative!” – Wynter

XIX.

something figural/figurative about the body of the word, the letter

the front or the font of the text as the typeface; furthermore, the body of the word, sentence, paragraph --- as seen from a distance (or from a close proximity) as a gathering of bodies, a city-scape, a city bloc(k), a organ(ic) form

he word is also intestinal, the word is also communal among other words existing and existent in-relation-to

here, 'proximal knowledge' as a movement in and out of visual and textual knowings by way of ciphers of discern- ability

scrutinize the word; destroy it. scrutinize the self; destroy it. here, an autopsy of the text-body

language dies in stillness and certainty

where the word is known

to be

firmly

itself

XX.

the formal work of abolition may be done textu(r)ally

by and through the throughways and thresholds of thought as doors, gaps, openings - in the work of writing and thinking as a 'making space'

instead of the text as a rhetorical juris-diction, a decisiveness, the text as a proliferation of texts, possibilities. the text as a problem itself, a problem with itself

this is a text which leaves space for thought, questioning, uncertainty

this is the difference between a prison and an open door

enslavement and an open door

the abolitive text moves against juris-diction

thus also necessarily borders as decisions between legalities and illegalities of syntax, grammar, language, pronunciation

the rhetorical directives and gestures of many texts trace the contours of this boundary

this is what might be called 'being of the time'

in the sense that The time is a mediation of rhetorical forces which delimit and denote language itself as mediation as law as juris-diction

language codified deeply into the body - where one may be killed simply for being black and this too is the language of the state - an expressive violence codified into the relations of contemporary american life

one might look towards a text that simultaneously condemns this establishment as a language of punishments, prisons, and gates - while opening up a different space literally in and of the body of the text itself

there is something architectural here - the text as an occasion to explode frameworks and ruin life as it were; the text as an occasion to decimate historical cities and conditions of violence

in and from this ruination might there be room to stand, maneuver, breathe, share in difference and life?

this textual work gestures toward a different context altogether; perhaps suggests that the meeting place is within

'imagine a world without prisons' (kaba) - how might this space be expressed, imagined, so as to literally create this world without prisons as (at once) expressive potential, and in the very expression of this imagined-potential, made real?

here perhaps a turn to and from elucidation as a materialization

again, to take artaud at face-value (with perversion, of course), the text is a body; this body itself contains thresholds, multitudes, passageways, gates, blocks, barriers, fortifications against itself, the world, and death

but this text is also an outline of the history of itself; of history itself, if not simply in being of history, itself.

the text socializes, relates itself to itself, relates itself to the world

this relation occurs with or without the reader, with or without the world.

here, a complication - even when the world dies the text autopsies the world as it was; yet survives this world as a container of and for ideas, beliefs, loves, dreams

the abolitive text straddles the break between the life of prisons and the death of prisons, the life of the state and the death of the state, the life of borders and the death of borders

and in this straddling is of this world while gesturing towards another

there is a whole history of prophecy which is somewhat oxymoronic in that this world never comes; it continually dies in the still air of empire

this work continues nonetheless, even as the text at once is a practice and a process of gesturing toward difference while simultaneously eulogizing the perpetual murder of difference

perhaps it is strange to hope for the end of the world

perhaps it is strange to hope for the end of wynter's humanity as it were

this strangeness is what propels the abolitive text as something fundamentally poetic in the imaginative potential of language itself, as a place where the imagination still might imagine without the imposition of a binding categorical law

much in the way a basic comparison functions to take two things of this world, unalike at first... which become uncanny in the destabilization of worldly relation by the poet (by way of memories, dreams, reflections, imaginings)

a destabilization and destruction of the subject/object framework of relation as a colonial directive of and for life, and so forth

something acting upon something else, someone acting upon something else - the abolitive text sees the complexity of interaction (and by extension, textual, contextual interactions), where the law establishes a binaristic code of and for relation(s)

abolition is that and and and and and curiosity and questioning, that place where monk says there are no wrong notes, and b. evans says there are only wrong resolutions

the immanent decision making of jazz musics here is something that might be alluded to as a history of enacting the abolitive a-framework

monk's 'off minor' where The note is that unspeakable secret of music and life and he's dancing around the tone and suggesting it at every turn but almost laughing at the thought of ever resolving the phrase

here, one might remember that monk was arrested for disturbing the peace, additionally caught a drug charge with bud powell, lost his cabaret card (police controlled distribution of these cards)

to think of this is to think of crawley's noise church flesh

it might be said that monk destroys jazz as he is making it, that artaud destroys literature as he is making it

in both the lives of monk and artaud, there is a cost of and for dissent paid by the body even as another body comes into being

one misses the boat with artaud precisely because the boat itself is in question (the cargo, the hold-ings); monk interrogates harmony

rumi: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense

sontag rightly gestures toward artaud furiously gesturing toward the mechanism itself, the brain, the mind, the life making machine, the law making machine, the reason making machine, that which is continually tasked with justifying life and the task of continuance itself

i too, lose myself in thought and lose my thought - and content myself with this

becoming the visceral text

XXI.

theorizing abolition as immanence

here perhaps something about syntax as painting time

Francis bacon makes time figurative

perhaps his subject is at once time and the body-process as time itself

thinking here about the creative process for painting 1946

...

the composition of the contemporary moment is always uncertain

how can i be certain about the history of this moment when this moment is continually destabilized by the next?

the becoming-history of ruination --- like benjamin's angelus novus here

these histories always spilling over into one another, bleeding into the ground

violence is that basic complication

cities play out this proximal drama of life, the condensation of life, dripping of itself

these fluids also become rivers, tangents, forks, breaks from even that attempt to establish or frame a concrete libidinal flow of information or anything as a singular movement

that which peels off, slips away like a skin, or a mask

revealing an aqueduct of veins

time too is a crossing, charon is the letter x; each of these letters necessarily acquire a symbiologism by way of relation over time

the bringing about or coming about of life like the bow of a ship - this is what one might come to know as the face/front/font

the letter as a confrontation or encounter which necessarily ent(r)ails a violent remembrance

XXII.

this essay i need to write about bacterial cultures and colonization.

thought and the appearance or form in and which thought ‘takes’ is as an economic modality/model

…

capital-ism is a what-can-you-do-for-me and this is at once a murder and a suicide

a conditioning that is a field of the mind, the body, of the murdering of the soul

these conditionings, conditions, and conditionals permeate into every aspect of the social and personal relation - into and out of love

marx's gundrisse here and clr james on the use of the railroad (from 'imperialism in africa') - 'for some vague purpose known as the "opening up" of the continent...'

the continent as body, colony as a live autopsying

'they must therefore rid themselves of capitalism - for the same reason that the worker in the Western world must rid himself of capitalism, to use "capital" and not be used by it.' (james)

there is a suggestive language that james uses throughout his writings for the trotskyist press that is suggestive of psychogeographies, psychological economies of and on which (the) life of and under capital is founded

'individual frustration builds into social frustration. and social frustration is quite likely to work itself out in socially destructive as in socially constructive ways...' (in the international tradition)

there is a movement in and throughout specifically these works which acknowledges and explicates, digs economies as somethings at once material and ideological

the effervescence of capital-isms as a molecular spray, riddling materia with mythos, pathos, the stuffing of life as a composition at once apparent and allusive/elusive

james' historical knowledge is a slipping of time away from itself - bursts - ''the culminating feature of the whole experience... is as yet being held, as it were, in solution...'

the bacterial culture as something at once apparent and influential - spor-adic

that viruses and in(fl)ections alter the molecular structure of bodies; the behavior of structures, making strictures, eviscerating strictures

'and for capitalists, the organization of labor is merely a phrase for the control, the limitation, and the ultimate suppression of the rights of organized labor.' (james)

perhaps something here about preventative immunity and preventing immunity - the stricture as the body response and the response of the body to of and for conditions of control - controlling life, controlling itself, organizing itself

organs spasming in response to stimuli, in-filtration, movements into and out of the bio-matic structure of the body itself

capital, capital-isms, and desire

james again: 'the competing imperialisms want africa, first and foremost, for the sake of africa'

this too is a libidinal economy, an economy of perversion, possession, and desire

capital is a raping of land, resources, people, life, the earth

to speak of this is to necessarily speak of the culture of capital

james' frustrations as frustrations of the body, mind, soul - here marcuse's body of work on repression as something

libidinal and turning, turning in on and around erotonics and thanatonics

again: 'the culminating feature of the whole experience... is as yet being held, as it were, in solution...'

i can't help but think of the suspension of orgasm, organism, the fulfillment of being as becoming as being as becoming, this as a self fulfillment, this as a self making, this as a becoming

in this sense perhaps james is hoping and thus, hope-full

'(these developments), their full fruition has been retarded, the result must be their outburst with renewed force at some stage in the coming period,' (james)

here, simply, james is speaking of consciousness, being conscious, being as consciousness and the strictures of capital-isms as and of vice grips on the body, mind, spirit, soul

this consciousness as becoming-fluid

XXIII.

i'm just thinking about what i fundamentally want and need

and love is at the intersection of life, books and the opportunity to learn and think with and around others is between want and need, simultaneously want and need

here, barbara lynn's 'what i need is love'; really the whole you'll lose a good thing album... 'its better to have it than to need it'

the diffuse economics of capital return time and time again to slippery mutable desires like love and life and learning and fail to encompass these elements; submit them entirely to object hierarchies of worth/value

something of and about desire always escapes precisely because it is not 'purely' material

the rhetoric of purity is used time and time again in an attempt to ground and firmly establish that which is not firm; that which is not establishable

the book, the body, relations between books and bodies as histories continually escape materiality and enter into the realm of love and loving

this space of love and loving is perhaps that which by and of essence is mutable, changing, subject to fundamental changes in essence, form, otherwise

the place where even these definitions and words and ideas and reasons collapse and fold over into and onto themselves

a mapping of the frame-works of capital (to gesture again to james) necessarily includes this going beyond in the critical effort of insurrecting or razing/raising the grounds of that which razes the grounds of life - this raising to expose the workings

this mapping is at once a cognitive mapping, a mechanical mapping, an explosive mapping, and a material-historical- geographical (local) undertaking

occurring and occurrent on several planes of existence...

it is because that love escapes that this critique is possible, that this hoping and hope-filling is possible

there is and are some things that cannot be autopsied or excavated for strict use by capital-isms precisely because they cannot be purposed/named/defined/de- finated/materialized

this finishing process as always unfinished, capital as fundamentally unable to complete the mission of subjugation precisely because there is always 'life elsewhere'; this is the imprecision

... which in the strict use-value framework of labor defined by capital there is no receipt for; no mechanism for tracking/tracing/detailing

this too as a form of surveillance; language(s) of surveillance and oversight necessarily detail life as a set or series of definite trans-actions

phone calls, conversations, movements between and through spaces

hunting down obsessions which cannot be killed, captured, relegated to confinement

here is the artaud! hunting down the mechanism, the mind itself, the brain - artaud as in the fullest sense of the word - a brain surgeon

sontag writes about this in her eulogy precisely because she empathizes with him; understands this insatiability, this kind of perverse animality that turns in upon itself

what sontag truly desires is and is of herself, just as artaud's passion is ---

there is something in and to sontag's body of work as a sort of straddling of at once the very specific brand of american capital and capital itself... she intuitively slips inside the house of capital and becomes it as a process/survival ---

even while working against it this very work/labor into and of the self borders on the perfect machine

journals pt. 1 & 2 reflect an almost impossible level of production - an obsession with production as a model

this furious historiography of thought and the process of elucidating thought as a sort of accounting work that she does throughout the texts which are really a dialogue of self and of self accounting for self

this point at which responsibility for self becomes a responsibility for everything and nothing at once - 'accountability' - the elusive american politicalism

this basic thing that i think she mistakes - the responsibility for her actions as the responsibility for the entirety of history of violence and wrongdoing - and that perhaps there is something in the fire of study that might redeem history of and from itself, open up some

... possibility, some gate, some way to love, some ability to love --- the missives throughout the journals --- sontag chastising herself for her 'inability' - her inability to love, her inability to feel adequately, her inability to have energy, her inability to become human,

become anything, her inability to live, to accomplish basic tasks, to outlast the weak desirousness of the body, of the mind, of all of this life and living --- and it is precisely this lament which is of life and living; creates a massive dynamic account of life and living

somewhat paradoxically, the account of lack creating life where life is believed to not exist? creating out of a lack of life -- something approaching a final pathos in this process

sontag does what capital cannot while explicating capital - which is to say she inhabits this space that is simultaneously of the laboring body but not reducible to the laboring body as defined by capital --- because it is a work of disorder produced by one 'with the freedom

of one without official responsibility' (james)

here, the bit where sontag says something along the lines of i wanted to be everything, so i became a writer --- the ability to choose life is presumed --- sontag, graduate of chicago and berkeley, funneled through the finishing schools of white academic excellence

producing the inheritors of the american intellectual project... rarely short on money or time in which to engage with her project, which is simultaneously a story of capital success (public intellectualism and the wide acceptance afforded to her work) and of a body of work

which despite being lauded by the popular culture and dominant discourse in and around which the work was being conducted and composed, continually gestures toward a complication of the existent frameworks of capital, culture, power

“understand that the whole structure of modern American man needs re-hauling” and that if “America is the culmination of white Western civilization” then “there must be something terribly wrong with white Western civilization.”

a direct attack which was not only accepted but revered and financially rewarded by that which she was attacking

'This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what this particular..

civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet...

.. which now threatens the very existence of life itself.' --- every time i read this quote!

'notes on camp' is foundational for me in the sense that it undermines in an underhanded way (peak sontag) the very discourse of value itself by way of providing convenient and catchy cultural examples

it is no coincidence that sontag is of the rock and roll generation, there is a lot of punk in her work

the economies of her essays and writing, particularly the journals, gesture towards a generosity of time, energy, and ideas that i don't often find

it is not easy to convey something complicated in a simple and straightforward way... this is why brecht is so good and really sets a high bar for revolutionary writing

how to communicate not only the atrocities of history but perhaps create a throughway which one might traverse, pass, and survive - literature as simultaneously sustenance for the road and that which might be used as a weapon

against frameworks which withhold and destroy potential sustenances for people the world over... literature to explicate and explode frameworks

brecht the hollywoodian exile, sontag the posterchild of white academia and yet somehow so explicitly in both content and anti-formalism against whiteness

i've lost this thought, but maybe there is and was an opening --- something coogan told me - if you have the ability to open a door, do something, anything --- you'd better do it

this to me is a great way to theorize and cut to the core of obligation/responsibility/accountability

and perhaps tracks back to crawley's bit on becoming an instrument --- understanding that necessarily to be of is to be beyond any sort of definite conception of being/becoming as something that can be theorized as some sort of concrete self/life/dream/world

purpose and the moment are always changing - and this paradox of always-changingness at once propels and arrests life

i kind of pervert coogan's writing your way out into a writing my way out of my mind, which has become a dangerously liberating occupation

the writing of distruments is and was that threshold of consumptive madness

that ate away at my mind and sense of self to the point of which life became impossible by and through the sheer explication/exponentiation of life through thinking as writing as process

writing is a substance which i abuse and obsess over and punish myself with

yet it is also something i create life with and destroy world with

i am always beside writing and beside myself by way of being beside writing as a sort of fundamental exile which is of degrees of location and dislocation

i write in and of this place that is not quite of this world or of this life - and yet is of this earth and of this life entirely

again returning to this concept of straddling worlds, places, locations, states of being; in this straddling abolish the state of being as a firm bordered thing entirely

straddling as a gesture toward life elsewhere, the possibility for life elsewhere, the possibility of and toward thinking differently, behaving differently, acting differently

this too is a socialization, a socializing, but across time and history and place in different and plastic ways

plastic here meaning rubbery cartoonish substance and of a mutable stretching snapping bending, dis-organ(ic)-ized ness

plastic being made of this world but really of something else

abolition reaches across time and borders

even now with this technology

it is easy to lose this world and submerge into clarice's plasmatic mud goopy stuff of life primordial sludges

the danger of some literal subversive realization is apparent in the passion of gh

in a certain becoming one enters history entirely as a sort of out of mind out of body out of spirit experience, entirely

(at risk of repeating myself, laughing, repeating myself, laughing)

one encounters these mystics who are also abolitionists who are also mystics (and often poets)

here, 'for what its worth' - the staples singers

…

i do this work because i need to do it (there is a physicality to this need) and it is that simple

if i am intellectualizing life, it is because life is and has become unbearable

i inhabit this body and this time by way of thinking

XXIV.

dis-solution-ment as a ceasless practical problem solving method

the word itself rests on unstable ground; really doesn’t rest much at all

discontents

it is no coincidence that dis is that infernal city

prefixes suffixes and roots as historiographies of the word itself

…

to map the word is to simultaneously map and explicate time as a context

a useful exercise but often misappropriated for rote exorcism of the word under strict hierarchies of meaning and value - that which the word can be ascribed to, categorized as, bound to - that which ultimately seeks to justify the word as a historical position/definition

it is a question of what one seeks - to complicate definition and histories of meaning and worth and use, or to justify and uphold existent frameworks of definition, history, meaning, worth, and use

the fundamental binary of contemporary political life - the capitalist position, and the anticapitalist position

fred hampton: We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that

man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist.'

this position subsequently defines the entirety of language thereafter as a sort of apriori - this might also be explicated as a colonial position or an anti-colonial position

again taking this or that position informs every aspect of life

every action, decision, word, gesture, sentence, relation

the fundamental purpose of my work is to recruit abolitionists - that life might be lived differently, that maybe the police aren't necessary, that maybe the state isn't necessary, that maybe prisons aren't necessary, that maybe the world isn't necessary

this purpose propels me through my work like a life

this work also as a eulogy; perhaps this is a place where citation is transformative, is transformed

the writers and thinkers i think with and cite and reference and imagine with i try to love them with my work

trying is a place to start

XXV.

thus it might be said that taking/accepting whiteness is too a taking of a position that informs every aspect of life/perception/choice making

this is a fundamental willing - to accept the banner and mantle of whiteness as something viable/decent/acceptable/a marker of one-self - this is a choice; furthermore, a choice that many have made

to defend, uphold, and embody this framework which time and time again has proven itself to be a killing machine - killing peoples, killing cultures, killing earth

it seems as a novel idea (it isn't) to reject whiteness at its outset, at the gates of, at the border of, and fundamentally resist (again, by way of choice, will, action) the systems of inequity and production of emptied bodies that whiteness and capital in turn manufacture...

as condition, condition(s), and condition(al)-s

this rejection (if one is so accepted) is as thus a deconditioning - both of self and of the idea of self

this is the task of each and every 'white' person

it is, quite literally, a matter of life and (many) death(s)

when obligations and goals are made clear action becomes direct and directive

sebastian expelling the arrow/eros

there is an incredible energy in the channeling

learn how to organize from the state as a body exerting force

this physical principal as the true subject of history (weil)

the state cannot love

the state cannot feel

the state cannot imagine its lack

the state can only commit acts of violence (infiltration, penetration, dissemination, enforcement, the manufacturing

of emptied bodies, borders, punishments, mechanisms, conditions)

punk and jazz as political movements/moments in and around the atomic age as structural/strictural ideas and ideals enacted in the realm of life --- music too is as a situation, a frameworking of scenes/streets/interactions/dialogues/dreams/deaths

punk as minimal angular squares and jazz as a deconfiguration of shapes

here i can't help but think of hall and gramsci in dialogue about the bloc

punk and jazz being as both developments in and of and around the enforced idea(l) of the city block --- a management, a control. 'friends gone, this is for them. block done, this is for that.' (die for the earth to live, show me the body)

the block is always blocked off - this is the categorical imperative of the state as itself imperative difference in the name of destroying/de-storying difference

the tenement and project as something necessary to extract labor while simultaneously something that the state is continually attempting to eviscerate by way of policing and the vice grip of racial capitalism, murder by way of enforcer, economic hand,

thinking here of the (attempted) destruction of the city block by police in ferguson and baltimore, as well as the way that farm workers are treated in this country

the attempt to destroy essential difference as the state killing itself and the earth

this primary suicide as a condition that permeates each and every social action, inter-action, which is to say, the entirety of life under global capital-isms

the state creates economic and psycho-social conditions/frameworks/platforms by in and through which life is created, formulated, devised, arbitrated, ruled, judged

the literal governance and function of the state as a murder- suicide

XXVI.

i differentiate myself

i refuse to live like you, i refuse to die like you, i refuse to react like you - and thus, i differentiate myself, and become unto myself

in this refusal there is necessarily a movement against, an action

in this action i necessarily take action against you, a reactive force

politics is really a simple process - a distribution and redistribution of energies, forces, resources, and materials. sourcing and resourcing life --

i channel, devote, and dedicate my entire existence, a priori to existence itself, toward the end of the state, the end of whiteness, the end of capital

and i become the end of the state, the end of whiteness, and the end of capital - in the entirety of my existence, action, and negotiation of situation, circumstance, ecosystem, condition, whatever

words at a certain point become facetious even in the documentation of life

i kill these things, i cut them off at their source, i suffocate the life from them - this is the use of writing

there is something to be said for the poetics of violence but the poetics of violence speak for themselves

i am going to quote hampton and not the originator of this quote when i say again, political power flows from the barrel of a gun

when one talks about political power one is talking about forces at work in the world as motivators, will-makers, enforcers

these forces necessarily go past such useless distinctions as natural and unnatural, organic and inorganic, human and inhuman, into that which forces, enforces, and ends force itself - life force, reactive force, active force - which is to say, in short, that which stifles...

... 'revolution', ends life at work, silences speech, enforces normative behaviors, and creates rigid hierarchies of ethical and economic worth, meaning, use, and value --- structuring and stricturing life

any politics of non-violence is necessarily ignorant of this fundamental reality and is to be stolen from and discarded

one does not fight state violence and the literal proliferation of anti-blackness as the violently regulated and enforced idea-made-material-reality of and that blackness is somehow violent/violating in its very existence...

... and that this is simultaneously terms and conditions for the state to exercise and justify regular and normalized violence against blackness

to recognize the rhetorical proliferation of philosophies of justification --- the pop cultural justification of mechanisms like capital, ideas of racial superiority, --- not only platforming but actively supporting and encouraging these philosophies not only as agreeable ---

but as fundamentally INALTERABLE --- as solid complete and total truths, bound to life (eugenics and pseudo-sciences here) --- capital as the only solution, capital as innate and built in, racial hierarchies as innate and built in

are some of the most violent, insidious and cruel forces at work in the world. here, i gesture toward and indict the new york times, televised media, the washington post; the entirety of liberal media (that which is broadcast nationally, held in esteem; lauded and funded as such)

as a mass proliferation of ideology funded by state interests in order to justify state interests and distract from material state action(s)

here, ideology and proliferation of ideology as 'culture' functions double - to justify action and to obscure action

XXVII.

love shows the simplicity of life to itself

this is not a reductive simplicity

this is a relation of that-which-is to that-which-is

i'm beginning to viscerally understand that love comes from this place of ( )

whatever word placed between the above parenthetical would be stupid, useless, and a lie

love is stupid, basic, has no meaning, no purpose, no reason. something that just happens and the fallout of it is an echo

to even begin to attempt to intellectualize this process would be facetious and a waste of time

romantic love and the love i have for my family are one and the same. this is not in the sense of a perversion, but in the immediate and visceral need to act out of in and from this place of doing absolutely everything in my power to show up for someone

i can't find the categorical place to divide this love from any other love, or divide family from each and every dissenting person on this earth

i love in a stupid way - which is to say without reason, without purpose, without intention

there is nothing to do with this love other than to do it

the phrase labor of love is directly and violently opposed to the submission of labor and work to capital

which is to say that love goes into that field of which rumi speaks where there is no profit or loss, no master or slave, no exploitation, no control, no enforcement, no border

love does not leverage itself by, with, or over life

love is that which is itself. it cannot be coerced, corrupted, contained, corralled, or submitted

and this is the great key to insurrection from a place of love and loving - love is that which cannot be reduced to a value form, precisely because it cannot be defined, objectified, or purposed. if it can be transmuted into any of these forms, it is not love

love and loving from a place of negation, refusal

i can't help but think of what christina sharpe says in in the wake when she speaks of subjection never being this totality... subjection and the state can never win, because they cannot subject love. love always escapes.

her love, her love, her love just moves the text and is of this! thankful for sharpe and her loving on this earth today and all days.

there is a certain directness in and of relation that can be communicated through a fierce and violent poetics that necessarily cuts through the preposition of life into life itself

and thus cannot be purposed, cannot be used, cannot be contained

birth and death are violent processes; the violence of an orgasm, the violence of a constriction, friction, life against life,

to ignore this is also to necessarily ignore the violence of thought made action made being/body --- that in the very process of articulation there is this primary violence, this violence of life making and death making

between thought and expression --- 'some kinda love' velvets (and no kinds of love / are better than others)

the birth of an action is the death of a thought

and from stillness, emergent

the birth of an action is the death of the idea of the action, itself

and from imagination, emergent

i commune with histories of violence to learn from them and act in light of them

effective insurrection uses and learns from history (again weil, the history of force as subject) - which requires an active commitment to study, a commitment to learning and thought which fascists and reactionaries will never undertake

fascists assume the position

(this is both a command and a statement)

abolition and love are both commitments born(e) from the fire of love and the death of the world

emergent into this different place, this different method, this different way of relating, seeing, being, expressing

the contemporary and specifically 'american' fear of loss of control; this termino-logical fear

this fear conjured in, by, and of word which quite literally stops and disbars thought

'i have seen and will tell of the corruption of this world...'

(dante's damnation as poetics remains a model for this kind of work)

those who fear death do not seem to understand that capitalism has already killed all life on earth

speaking as a ghost, i work of and from a dead time - a time simultaneously past and to come

oedipus says to the sphinx: 'repetition'

life being that channel through and of which life is transmitted, that sublime discourse

i have no delusions about the impermanence and uselessness of this work

there is limited embodiment, limited time, limited language, limited life

to live, thus, to bump up against the edge of expression, the edge of life, the edge of exile

dispossession of this work, this life, and all other things

destroy the idea of self and stumble into the knowledge that self itself is as an ideological limit of and on life

moten & glissant: consent not to be a single being

in this sense one learns from suicide; idea(l-whole) becoming act(ive-parts)

abolition as the continued and continuous practice of suicide

suicide as not a final act but the act repeated ad infinitum

suicide as the methodological definition of thought

there is a fear to discuss suicide socially and as a social phenomenon because people are often pushed to suicide by way of many deaths along the way

this is an unfinished thought as anything else but i am reticent to draw a line between violence and death itself

violences as committed, as rapes, as killings of dreams, opportunities, agency, family members, legacies, languages, cultures, possibilities - as accumulated deaths - murders.

death as not a finality but as something always occurring and o-ccurrent - as the life and death of possibilities and any-given-moment(s)

taking food away from someone, taking shelter away from someone, taking someone's child, taking someone's body, taking, taking, taking

these takings as deaths of possibility, deaths of so many parts and aspects of self-making and self formation

these violences make marks, words make marks; they stick, stay, act, continue to act --- long after the perception of 'event' as singular occurrence has come and gone

to fail to see this is to miss the nuance and slow murders perfected by capital. modern violences as these extreme temporalities (climate change(s)) --- supra-instant death (the atom bomb, drone bombings,); sub-instant death (the slow killing by way of submission to capital,

submission to labor, submission to unlivable living conditions, submission to climates of anti-blackness, social alienation, exploitation, the death sentence of industrial time)

i write at work in between interruptions and tasks

work as that which interrupts writing; the urge/desire to write as that which interrupts and encounters the interruption of life

XXVIII.

jazz as the interminable condition

(or the indeterminable condition)

thinking here of mingus and evans' longer compositions, some of the wandering done on village vanguard, mingus' piano work

a kind of let me try to make this moment beautiful while i'm here

the moment as that which may be inhabited, landedness as something fundamentally dispossessed, dispossessive... for something to land it must necessarily make land

the measure of findings as groundings, landings; the realm of ships of finders/founders

mingus founds the unfounded, confounds the founded, and allows the way to be lost and found again, a stumbling onto and into life

in this sense life cannot be manufactured stricturally - and mingus understands this intuitively. the conditions might and may come about from and of which life may arise, but the idea that life is already there and may be brought about vis a vis law

is a misstep of the rhetorical frameworks of landedness/landowning. for without landedness there is no stake or claim to the possession of land - land is mutable, changing, at once of and everything

this undivided and indivisible coagulation of surfaces, organisms, existences, cohabitations

landedness as making ground as the establishment of colony and the disestablishment of earth

colony as and is necessarily 'world within', an outpost/outpast amidst into a separation, a societization

necessarily the earth becomes at once with and without society in the establishment of society

this distinction must be maintained as a cultural/linguistic framework of binaries and distinctions of with/without in order to maintain the framework of the apparatus itself

from this (tangentially perhaps) - polemic as orientation

tension between people(s) as difference

the literal-physical accumulation of feeling

tensions as unfulfillments and potentials - as minds meeting bodies meeting worlds

dominant modes of discourse frame the imagined and the ability to imagine with specific tension points as actionable/inactionable

entering into this economics of negotiation between thought and action, feeling and action, belief and action

this economics is racialized, gendered, and class coded - littered with identity markers and markings as passing/trespassing

the entirety of the modern rhetoric on and about immigration as a legal/illegal 'entering' is modulated around this chord

this chord being, quite simply, a hierarchy of desire(s) and violence(s) as acceptable/unacceptable - this violence (as a categorical violence of and unto itself) to the core of the proliferation of anti-blackness

as a climate, a consciousness, a tension which permeates every interaction and economy of action

racial capital as a pervasive mode of anti-life which has and continues to infiltrate into every mode of life and living

of course - some things escape - but what really remains of life after the colonization of all things, desires, dreams, relations

colony as a mediation which necessarily negotiates the apriori terms and conditions for interaction therein - extended courtroom, colony as world jurisdiction

such things as without colony, without capital - perhaps i am too young or too old to remember such spaces - i dont believe they exist outside of poetics and music

i am obviously wrong, but nonetheless

this tension as of between lives - life in this world of total control, total governance, total capital, and the struggle to imagine otherwise, live otherwise, live differently

in a world economy that continually attempts to snuff out difference and produce bodies

racial capital as a mediation of relation a priori - a stricture which continually defines and organizes modes of action and conduct

to consider behavior is to consider not only what people do and do not do, but what people believe they can and cannot do, and by extension, what people can and cannot do

this strictural mode continually determines lives, determines life. racial capital as death ritual as world-making

back to juris-diction.

(forceful alterations in and to the field of life in which gravity, force, movements in and out of life themselves are (supposedly, in turn) subjected to capital)

a farce of governance to believe that one can commit such acts and not face the scales of justice which necessarily

compose and decompose life far beyond the 'human' ability to mediate and control such things

there is still the empty greed of profit while the earth dies, life dies, meaning dies, love dies

meaning - privatized and monetized

...

modes of life and living as turns of phrase

thankful for every day and every moment, particularly for moments where there is space to write or spend time with a loved one

each day an opportunity and a blessing, a chance to do something that might change the terrain/climate/field/sphere as it were

when i add a lot of words it is because there are different ways to approach words and wordings; the inclination/intuition/instinct/ is to be inclusive

i want to say and to situations, and to the proliferations of possibilities and pronunciations

these spaces are openings and phrasings and modulations of pitch, tone, mood, meaning, matter

admitting to playfulness

this is how i have come about assembling texts as a sort of coming together of words, thoughts, ideas, prayers, inclinations, gestures

as modulations in of and around certain keys and scales of feeling

i think there is perhaps a difference between assembly and organization in the idea of people coming together, words coming together, thoughts coming together

to organize as to composite-organs as visceral systems of movement and action, as literal chains of meaning-making

there is something of the body as factory even in the act of shitting, pissing, eating, breathing

an assemblance or assembly as a mass gathering of particles/particulars. perhaps in the same articulate space but the method(s) of inhabiting this space is not strictured

an that organ is not submitted to a useful purpose, a distrument, a disorgan - a distension!

when relation is left to its own devices it necessarily bounces and moves and vibrates and shakes and poles/pulls chaotically

atoms and notions and particular meanings shooting off into misshapen contexts, grotesque angles, strange geometries

assembly has left shaping and perhaps is something more of a riotous gathering, or a gathering with the potential to riot, overturn, overthrow itself into chaos, scatting, scattering, disabuse

to leave meaning as community as organization behind when this method becomes circuitous (as it often does)

i do not cling to the idea(l) of community; i certainly do not cling to the idea of community out of sentiment

perhaps the more dionysian assembly as the orgasmic communal discharge of energy and dispersement... an orgiastic, momentous gathering that comes and goes

i have nothing to say for the ideal of society; certainly nothing to affirm it

i do not seek to affirm that which is an imposition of relation as obligatory

no social contact, no agreement as to the appropriate conduct, no negotiation as to the terms and conditions of existence as media(l / and) law

remedy/remedial-isms as a return to the middle

thinking as this consideration / a-situation / disposition of dis-solution-ment

dissolutionment as the consideration of alternatives - different methods, different compositions

with the acknowledgement that what works in one moment very likely will not work in the next; this mutability of life and the awareness of this mutability of life as obligation, not law

the obligation to continually consider and reconsider, balance and rebalance, the scales of existence in an attempt to approach each moment

instead of mitigating the passage of time with legislation and excuses

furthermore, legislation as an excuse not to think; not to think collectively, not to dissolution collectively, not to even attempt to approach the moment

but to instead attempt to gesture toward an immutability, a strict solid form of and for life - which does not and never will exist

social governance and order as law and lawmaking will never come close to approaching the moment; instead

attempt to abort the moment by gesturing to the contract (as the beginning/end of life)

fulfilling the contract and the moral/productive goal of the subject as subject of nation

bypassing situating moments as a relative obligation and entering into this realm of an eternal missive/directive which necessarily dictates the passage of all moments; relegates the worth or value of a moment to a subjected lineation of moments, time-narrative form

the relation between time as a standard, a synchronization of movements, and law

these relations are preventative - which is to say, designed to prevent insurrection, thought, gathering, assembly, et cetera

any sort of social (a/de-)formation that occurs away from / outside of / against the state of things

why force and adhere to constructive modes of thought and action when discursive modes are possible

not only possible but probable, accessible, and lead to new understandings and differences in and of thought and action

there is no comparable experience to learning something you didn't expect to learn in a way you didn't expect to learn it

liberating focus/attention from discipline can result in a movement away from subjection as a movement itself, a bearing down and in as opposed to a disbursement, a scattering, a molecular disjection which often forms constellations of the unexpected

i think it is important to say that industrial/manufactured/human relations are also necessarily of the sphere of relations

just as capital is of the earth in its founding, but the earth certainly is not of capital

weil and sontag on attention and soft focus, respectively

this thinking as a condensation of moments and materializations

i am writing and thinking about writing and thinking as creative-political processes of state-making, formulation, and momentous negotiations

this comes back to a (series of) question(s): how might one act in light of [this]?

there is this terrain upon and in which the political moment is acted out. insurrection is to understand this moment stricturally and manipulate it in order to bring about the demise of the political moment itself as a relational category;

enter into the field of the moment entirely. the poetic moment expands. the political moment contracts

this like vasodilations, expressions and repressions as tensions and releases of fluid and energy and breath and life, accordingly

channels by and through which informations flow and intersperse

assemblies and dischoruses (albert ayler's ghosts in real time)

the immanence of iteration, recalling, retelling, the angel of history racing and redirecting at-tensions

i return to the image of the fates weaving, the creative process of the fates as strings measured, pulled taut, and cut (short)

life is always cut short by that which is otherwise, elsewhere

and i think that in moments of life perhaps one might become aware of the discordance of discourses, the myriads of sounds, pulls, tugs, and tautonics that ghost

the text is always haunted by the spectre of what the text was, what it could be, and the slipping of history out from under the oeuvre as it is returned to particular ash and dust

the scream or the wail or the cry as dissipating echo, as fundamentally degenerative

...

desperation in love as related to a fear of loss of beauty

i must find love now or risk becoming undesirable, ugly, dead to the world

this too is the audible and visceral sensation of time as slipping/slippery, even frictive... a grating against that which receives information, time

a wearing away

knowledge of, sensation of this, productive of urgency, anxiety, insufficiency --- nothing is sufficient in the face of this loss as at once immanent and pending, nothing can prevent this loss, nothing can stop it

this question of how desperation manifests, how one might bring about desperation as something that is allowed to happen, allowed to be; perhaps in a certain form which desperation takes, open up lanes of and for hope, beauty, life even in the midst of death and dying

sensation as this distenuous mediator between impression and expression, tenses and (implicitly) senses

i do not fear repetition precisely because of this predictable violence of sensation/sensing as life and learning

the affect of certain words as sounds as sensations may well open up a further capacity to think, feel, consider and explicate that which is around the word

the word itself as limit; the atmosphere of the word as generative-possible

...

distance as difference; separation as a perceived geometry

there is a maths of fanon on the street that is at once a sensing and a being sensed, a seeing and a being seen, a difference/distance and action and violent reaction to difference/distance

blackness as a violation in and of proximity to whiteness as the pervasive-enforced mode as civilization

how can one even begin to talk about love and loving as relation and relative phenomenon without insurrecting and explicating the climate of anti-blackness in which love attempts

fear of difference as proximal

whiteness as a visual mapping which drives through the object to prove active subjectivity, a force which acts upon life, world

its maintenance is simultaneously its establishment

XXIX.

I have written these things; in light of them, I have achieved nothing, gone nowhere, fought back nothing of death, and

come no closer to peace or the realization of any sort of redemption. I keep coming closer and closer to death and this sensation permeates every aspect of my existence and being. I can’t imagine travelling much further, burning much longer, having to suffer the pain of existence and isolation for much longer. I can’t be bothered to care about anything beyond this, I can’t be stirred beyond this burning passion for and of death which stirs me into life until I collapse and return again to this night… this night like every other night, futile and long, filled with excuses, reasons, illusions, meant to justify being and life – to prop myself up into another day of witless existence. This writing came of moments, of necessity, of the sliver of hope that something might be said, something might be done, something might come of this time which comes and goes in nothingness, in emptiness, in sheer degradation. Even in this writing I have become lazy, complacent, laying down to die anywhere, to rest anywhere, to close my eyes anywhere. The sheer exhaustion of work, of maintenance, of suffering through the day under the massive hood of factory and being bled of all life, all soul, all hope for life… draws me closer and closer to the end of life. Nothing happens beyond this decay, despite all these minor acts of creation; nothing happens beyond this death of the heart, death of that will, the idea that one might live. I have nothing to say other than and beyond this sensation of desperate torture, of being flayed alive, of being torn from myself in perpetuity, of the sheer agony of the body whipping me into submission to myself. I have no interest in making this feeling ‘real’ or apparent in the text, it simply is. There is no need to dramatize or manufacture anything beyond this account; I account for myself, and myself alone.

And perhaps in love, in the act of falling in love and attempting to truly love someone, some good might come, some feeling of peace, safety, something nice. I need something nice in my life, and Erin makes me feel okay, feel normal, feel like I am living and that someone out there could care about me; maybe care enough to even love me in return. It is something so simple and so far and away from

this project; I would leave it forever and do so carelessly, to leave writing behind, to leave all of this miserable business where it stands and just leave into that love. I can’t leave. I have to live this life and I know I do, but she just makes it easier. It’s something to look forward to… to see her, to just talk about anything and look at each other. I don’t have anything to look forward to; maybe I need to bring that into my life, but I don’t know how. I don’t want anything of this world other than love. No special publications, the nonsense of appearances, any sort of living beyond cooking, breathing, maintaining. Even this work is as maintenance, as combing back the undergrowth of the body; trimming the hedges of the soul. Whatever. I’m tired of images, tired of beauty, tired of desire, tired of the burning inside me that makes me need to do these things, say these things, live out this intensity which scares people away and leaves me alone… always alone. I am always too much, too crowded with words and thoughts and ideas and things that I need to express, but they are energy first, energies made things. Even as my body falls apart I still have my words. I suppose that’s something. I’m running out of time to love, and I know it. I suppose that’s why I want to love so damn bad while I’m still here to do it. I know I can give someone something beautiful; I just want to share life… I don’t need anything in return. It just doesn’t matter enough for me to make money, to become worthy of anything. Just a little quiet would do. Away from all of this noise and pain and the need that follows me everywhere. I’m getting eaten alive by it, and I don’t know how to make it stop. I remember these last couple of years, so caught up in the sheer pain of existence that I couldn’t even see it, couldn’t even see myself suffering, couldn’t find some sort of perspective. Now I can look up, and see the pathetic struggle of just another person, just another life seeking to continue itself, to find solace in the simple pleasures of food and friends and time alone to read and write. This is something that makes me feel a little less alone, but something that also brings me to tears. I wanted so much more from life than this. I thought somehow I could work hard enough, bring myself out of myself into something else, give up everything, give

everything away, bring myself to my knees and reduce my desires to nothingness and dust and come out of it without this burden… but I was terribly wrong. I put myself through so much suffering and through all of these trials which I thought somewhere deep in the back of my mind would heal me of this condition – which is nothing more than the condition of being alive. I suppose I almost died several times along the way – of starvation, foolishness, whatever else that almost didn’t bring me to this point… but I am here. I just wish I could say it was enough to be alive, but it isn’t. I know there are other people who feel the same, and I am grateful for that, but it just isn’t enough. Learning isn’t enough, reading isn’t enough… because I know in my heart that I have done what I can do, gone as far as I can go… and that it didn’t change a damn thing about me or the world. I have given all that I have, thrown myself into abandon, attempted, and failed to the point of exhaustion of mind, body, and soul. I feel defeated and alone. I wish I was normal; I wish life made sense, and that I had a future, some life to look forward to, something that I wanted from life… but I don’t. I don’t even have enough left to get me through this night which won’t end. I’m damned to it, damned to this life and this feeling that steals me away into darkness, away from people, away from the world, into a private hell. What I wanted doesn’t matter anymore… I burnt it all away; I’m left with this prize of nothingness, suspension, the coldness of no longer having anything in common with anyone around me other than the suspicion of death. In past years, specifically during the writing of Distruments, I might have called it madness, the sensation and acts of abandon in which I was totally lost to myself and the world, the periods of fasting, withdrawal, sheer nakedness and inanity that and which colored all of my relationships, the inability to remember anything about myself or my life, the inability to function. Now, I would not hesitate to call this death. I am dead to myself and the world, so far and away from life as being with others as to be dead, as to be this specter haunting what used to be my life, my memories, my soul, my body. I hover in and around it, lament it, and watch as it slowly passes away. This is all I

have left; this is all I have left to give to the world, this slow decay and passing into nothingness. And all I can do is scream like anyone else, scream like all of the others, as life is given and taken in due and undue time. I do not pray for life or death, but to do what I can with what I have to hopefully do some good. I leave nothing to my prayers and love but simplicity anymore. I know that time is running out and there is no great meaning but the little moments that can’t be captured, that come and go as they please. I am subject to these moments, desperate and whatever else as they take me in and shut me out. I can’t control my happiness or anyone else’s… I can’t make myself happy or anyone else and I can’t predict or influence in any given moment the state of pain or feeling which comes into the world, the comings and goings of anything. It just happens. I can’t want to control these things, I can’t want to love, I can’t want. I have to stop and bring it all back inside. I need to come back inside.

XXX.

Sharing writing makes me feel good. It’s nice to be able to laugh at myself and simultaneously present something as serious but as a farce of life. I might say something about life here, but really… what of it? What does it matter, what sort of status or truth could possibly be evoked from any of this?

Every time I die and return from dying, I can’t imagine death again. This death happens, and I agonize in this death as I am burned by it… but as I am reborn into life, the memory of this death is laughable. In the time of dying, death is an all consuming fire. In the time of rebirth, death is a joke, a party favor.

These deaths are not apparent.

I have the urge to invalidate all of this work, to poke fun at it, to depricate it, to tear at any and all asserted meaning until it shatters completely.

Kafka relates the sensation of being crushed by capital

This would be the time to relate my dreams, my hopes, my futures – but I have none.

In short – it is rare that people go beyond what they feel they must do in order to survive. For some, this definition of survival is collective.

XXXI.

"Her eyes are green and shining, her dress is red. That’s the situation.” - Duras

it's something A. said in class about racialized space as a closing and opening of relative dialogue between people, bodies, idea(l)s, desires, survivings

racialized space as tensile, drawn physically. often this space is what goes left unsaid, unmentioned - by those who benefit from silence and silencing

the approach (from the little i know) that makes duras a great writer is her ability to be direct, perhaps even confrontational - not necessarily to and with people - but with situations, atmospheres, and conditions

there is a difference between being direct and being directive - namely, that writing is and becomes the knife, not that which attempts to control the knife - situations as made apparent by and through language

it is that true condition of language to itself be that which incises into life, making life, making life apparent -

here, brand: 'you do not make a living writing poetry - you make a life'

...

the explicit refusal to discuss racial capitalism in american media outlets and 'political circles' is not only a silencing of peoples' expression of the literal terror of structural violences (yet another violence), but a perpetuation of this violence as a further subordination

a willful silencing of voices and experiences. this is why the phrase 'a voice for the voiceless' will always disturb me. simply, no one should speak 'for' anyone else

representative politics in this country continue to betray the pseudo-democratic farce of representation as 'a way through' capitalism, a way to empower others through capitalism, a way to create a 'better' and 'more equal' capitalism

this rhetoric is toxic

it only adds to the idea that somehow subordination can be, will become, and already is an acceptable mode of social life and living; that somehow subjection as a framework in and through which acts of racialized terror are continually committed - is okay

normalization by way of silence is itself a discourse

...

tangentially - i keep thinking about hermes and the idea of bearing a message. this message is not necessarily possessed. what does it mean to come bearing gifts? what if there is no one there to receive the message? what does the message say? is it legible? who wrote it and why?

the dispossession of the message or the text as an artefact. to this, i say, abolish the museum, repurpose the building to house those who need a place to sleep - tonight.

the poetics of - i do not own this gift, but i come bearing it, nonetheless - to share with those who also come and bear witness to this gift, the gift which is life and the making of life as a communal process. such assemblies as becoming- poems.

we (whoever) might act out these poems as a sort of in vitro be-tray-al (re: derrida) of the sphere of capital which continues to swallow up the earth. where might we find that elsewhere? i look here to darwish; i am always looking to darwish... not for answers, but to question.

one might say that racial capital has created world. how might insurrection, abolition, and poetics create world, otherwise, elsewhere?

...

one of those mornings where the world is damned and i am exhausted

dis-order masquerading as everyday life and the walls of the city of dis itself, this america, have a forceful will, pushing and punishing outward.

(this is the order of civilization)

just as racial capital was an idea brought into and onto the earth, thus other ideas might be brought into and onto the earth; racial capital abolished from the earth, torn from culture, ideology, matter, relation... and obliterated.

the american bipartisan strategy of using the field of 'politics' (here, business) as a method of and for individual socio- economic advancement

here, politics is not a collective life, but instead a refutation of it

here, relation is as a tool (networking, exploitation, opportunity for profit, progression of self as fulfillment of personal desires, lusts, dreams, wantings) - politics as the business of regulating and turning life into a carcerality

to approach life this way is to see the earth as a resource, other people as resources; thus, open up a field of possibility as it pertains to the uses/manipulations of these resources

this definition of politics, much like the modern definition of work - i would argue - is irredeemable. to understand this is to become anti-politics, anti-work

the very historical and material uses and framings of these ideas as terms put to use to serve capital has rendered them entirely as into and of this world

the purposing of people like stakes, figurations, numbers (something modern of bacon's figurations) is this chess match in and upon which the earth is flattened, people are flattened, and made use-value-object

exploitation is simple, and this is why it is easy to engage in. much like a false idea(l) of love (marx's gundrisse here?) the machine is able to take the person-as-body at face value, to harvest meaning and worth from the sheer material actions of the body, the representation

of the body as a face - this itself the culture industry

in this context it becomes clear that all labor and marketing done for capital is of and for the culture of capital itself, reifying the mechanism of flattening, generative of the flat image which represents the body of work as violence at work

exploitative frameworks not only allow but welcome the reduction of person to body to image - because it simplifies access. dimensionality and complexity are whittled down to

essences, souls which power the machination of capital; these essences are purposed and stolen away.

the will to life made the will to capital; chaining the need to survive to working toward survival as a never ending process of in-escape. one must go deeper and deeper into capital in order to find some sense of survival as something as not constantly and perpetually endangered

by the very existence of racial capital itself. this of course, is, under the a priori assumption that capital is transcend-able by achieving the ultimate status of capital, essential whiteness, essential status, essential citizenship

this is a farce and a lie. individual advancement under capital is the ideological presumption of success under capital; this very idea of success is and has been razing the earth, enabling crimes of rape and genocide across the world, withholding such resources as a breakfast

from schoolchildren, crippling students with debt, and glorifying racialized violence around the world while demonizing life as difference. these traumas and wounds and burdenings echo and scream and do not die, do not pass. this is justice

and so damn the world for killing soul, killing love, in the establishment of borders, in the establishment of laws that justify the extermination of difference and different existences, the hegemonic violence of whiteness that never stops submitting life to itself, destroying

possibility, destroying meaning, and rendering the earth into a profit machine from which there is no escape other than toil unto death. i wish there was more hope in this work, but the work itself is hope

i need different words.

i need different wor(l)ds.

...

people severed from each other like lost limbs, lost loves, lost worlds. neglectful and hateful woundings, spites committed with laughter, the sheer thoughtlessness and lack of empathy... this possessive control... this exacting toll upon life.

for the fulfillment of lusts. for economic power and control. for social power and control. to assert dominance. to claim space, territory, land. to possess others.

the world is as a monopoly of valuation as order - this is culture as economics as control.

XXXII.

I have brought my sexual being into my work.

DIS.

i want to write a text on music as modal/model

this text would necessarily be descriptive of the frameworks in which certain musics inhabit as a aural refraction of social and economic conditions/movements/values

music as inhabiting this space of as-moment-then-gone; through recording, this krapp's last tape aspect of music and voice as haunting, as repetitious, as something projective

perhaps generative of force and forces in a way that words as a linguistic stricture cannot, a sort of oscillating frameworks --- and here is modality. monk and evans again

specifically improvisational musics and long takes as a way of interrogating moments and subjectivity in relation to moments; ultimately breaking apart the subject entirely and entering into another space

here i'm thinking of satie's piece that isn't really meant to end, and baudelaire's comments on wine:

(this is from a bit ago): Baudelaire speaks of wine as an experience that is a way of understanding (others) by way of becoming differently, and sharing in this experience… in different time.

the key here i think is this idea of different time, and time as an inhabitance and habitation which is necessarily mutable and always subject to death

becoming as a repetitious and ritualistic process which necessarily structures and is strictured by - modernity

modernity, here, as a way of timing, keeping time, keeping watch over keeping time

these methods as tracking and surveilling and cataloguing moments and movements

industrial fascistic implications apparent here

musics that perhaps formally conform to this rotary of timekeeping would be contemporary american (60s/70s- present) punk and rap music --- that which is canonized as such

and here is the tricky part - where music like the stooges (nascent punk) and tribe called quest, digable planets, pharcyde --- inhabit space and time is this inbetweenness that gestures to so many different times and sounds at once

both the stooges and tribe gesture to jazz. and jazz as the locus, or the modal chord of this inquiry.

there is a continuation of that which exists, and a cointuition

which is something else entirely

(monk's assemblies of notes around note(s)

i want my writing to be liberatory, and liberating. that's why i study jazz and histories of improvisation

as momentary thresholds in and by which one might stumble into something else entirely - some fugue rhythm, some stealing away, some gesture of remembrance made that eternal now, looping forever into the distance like an echo

dex as eulogizing over and over again... darn that dream, darn that dream, darn that dream

i'm not going to behold this inquiry to anything or anyone or any sense of obligation or responsibility or discipline other than this mourning

damn the university - a sort of forced corruption in and by which submission occurs by and through this notion of 'training'. training for the world, training for life; thus, training in and of the right things to say, the right behaviors to exhibit, the right codes of conduct to

uphold, cherish, ideate. this extends into the realm of words and wordings, responsibilities in and of the text. to make certain obligatory gestures to and toward certain contemporary liberal notions of 'respect' and 'responsibility' to the modern moment as some standard

that must be upheld, waved.

damn these things in the sense that dante damns them

to return to this idea of training as a linguistic/aural/expressive tool by which to delimit and de- note proper expressions: this is monk and evans and every musician who just can really dig sound as excavation, as process, as something dirty, imperfect, slimey, grotesque, often

frightening, absurd, and even unexpected - stuff that comes out of the walls, seepings and and out and around. here, stuart hall and the bloc, gramsci and the organic intellectuals who swerve and maneuver and survive and live to think another day,

that there is no such thing as a 'wrong' note, no wrong phrasing, no improper mechanic by which to judge the process of sound making itself ---

here i have no interest in gesturing to a canon or a cultural standard other than that which seeks to destroy canons and

cultural standards by way of making in the face of, laughing in the face of, and existing otherwise

monk and ayler studied in different ways. evans and coltrane studied in different ways. they all found this music... but my question is how to study music?

how to study music in an improper and undisciplined (sharpe) way. i never learned anything about music. sound never changed as a medium for me. it never became anything other than this total expressive outlet

this physical membrane and unbounded boundary through which life could be expressed --- through farts, yells, whispers, sighs, the sounds that fluids make, the sounds that desires make when you express them

this expression as a movement outward - and sound necessarily might accompany that movement, as a frictive wind

i want to be free even of this idea of music as good/bad sound/aurality --- and here sontag's piano dream in the benefactor

i fall into patterns of behavior and i hear myself repeating them. these patterns of behavior are not thinking... they are of acting without thought --- this as the pattern

when you hear mingus on orange was the color you can hear him thinking. you can hear the focus, the concentration, the attention, the care that is delicate and attentive to movement --- not a driving through thought as a mechanism or an apparatus for expression, necessarily,

but of a listening which is fundamentally willing to break any boundary or order in order to convene with the moment, the situation

this!!! this is what i need to remember. this is what i need to keep with me. not something material. the willingness to let go of materiality as some sort of boundary for thought/concern in and of itself. this goes along with self abolition(s) --

these artists who elevate expression to the level of convening with the atmosphere, the atmospherics of history. milton's music of the spheres here

i'm struggling to make meaning here. but i need to make meaning out of life. i need to make life beautiful while i still have time.

this is the approach, the method

musics are made out of situations. situations that are often pretty unbearable, brutal, humiliating, and sad

this does not mean the music made from brutal material realities is not joyful, hopeful, full of love

there is a transsubstantiation of containments. that which is of distruments, of crawley's bit from the preacher - to be an instrument of god, milton's violl:

'For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them'

this from areopagitica

i see no point in drawing a bound between 'books' and 'musics' as there isn't one

i need to be free of this life as worldliness... so why would i speak of this life as worldliness?

poetics is the only freedom left

i have never been more firmly convinced of that than i am in this moment

the intradisciplinary thought is as poetics. christina sharpe is the thinker here. with brand and hartman. of and in this moment

it is not enough to be alive without poetry and poetics. i extend poetics here to and from sound, text, image, taste

'taste does not seem to be the object here' - benjamin

taste as faith, as guide, as pseudo/anti-structural force in a world of structural forces founded upon violent-submissive principles

the poet does not submit to meaning, nor do they submit others to meaning

to submit to meaning is to die

to keep writing and thinking as a way through forced submission to meaning... as a way to survive

II.

writing as an agitation, a stirring up, a movement against contents 'as it were'

here perhaps that expression is necessary for life and the continuation of life as momentous

primary language is again - burps, farts, shit, piss, excrements, bodily fluids, leakages

in that languages (insofar as they can be considered 'voluntary' in the first place - where does necessity cross

expression?) can be and are often involuntary jerks and hitches and breaks of expressions in the midst of life

controlling bowel movements, controlling words, controlling the production of saliva, the flow of sensual fluids

i have this obsessive inclination to bring economics back to the body. that which is produced or excreted by the body as a sort of outputting of forces, an energetic birth... this, life forces that can only be mapped/traced/denoted in their expressive remains

even then, these mappings fail in knowing the force that is productive, as the product loses something in this process, something that might be said to be truly immeasurable, soul (?); what else?

one might say one does not have 'control' over one's own body, thoughts, actions, language under racial capital. by 'control' - not strict possession. the ability to develop one's body, mind, potential, creative impulses, linguistic impulses. to shit when you need to shit.

to sleep when you need to sleep. to eat when you need to eat. and have these resources fundamentally available to those in need, that these are basic, fundamental points of and which by life should be available to be lived for each and every individual on earth (& otherwise)

this locus of control is the locus of possession and the ability to act, direct action, and will in order to live, to imagine, to make a dream real, to make an idea real, to make life

i like spitting/splitting here - a frictive closeness which simultaneously denotes a sort of breaking of the bodies as encapsulations, molecular, productive

the modern condition: reaction

there is this inversion of survival where situations become this chaotic ahistorical field -

in a culture of willful forgetting, every moment is a blinding violence where there is no time to interrogate structures that moderate and continually modernize this violence

because in atomic time, every moment is a detonation, a razing of that which came before it

this razing, of course, is industrial, willful. in this, an (attempted) erasure of history, an (attempted) erasure of cultures, an (attempted) erasure of existences.

even now there is this movement even from the need of an individual to act as an agent/hand of the state - into automated technologies that will at once be the mechanism and the hand of violence

when an artificial intelligence commits murder, who is to blame? state technologies as movements and degrees away from indictment, responsibility, blame. this is already seen in the function of the police as an apparatus of the law out from under the yoke of the law

insofar as an embodiment of the law is concerned it is whiteness and the executors/protectors of the white will as colonial project,

(protectors also as executors)

who, in their very ability to act with total legislative agency in the name of the law, begin this supersequence (in a social sense) of transcending the dialogue of active/reactive forces at work in the world

here, i need to make nietzsche and deleuze explicit and immediate when i say that through legislation and legislative bodies overseeing violence/world, these physicalities

corrupt, degrade, decay, and disrupt themselves and one another in new and different ways

as technologies develop to allow for further penetrative and punitive measures (better surveillance, better execution, better mapping, better control), so must the forces that press back (discontents) against these pejorative organizing bodies

this is an ability, in turn, to think through, to strategize, to steal from, to break thresholds, to remove barriers to access to, to steal moments, to steal life ---

it is clear that capital-ism as an ideological and practical force at work in making the world continually steals, loots, corrupts, and manipulates: people, land, culture, life

it is also clear that this is a form of violence.

what does a politics of non-violence mean in light of this? where does violence begin and end?

drawing this line of violence will always be reductive. it will always reduce actions, inactions, and reactions to a fault line which doesn't exist, to a historical moment or series of moments which are necessarily unbound, flowing, and ruinous

capitalism is killing the earth. capitalism is killing those who live on earth. capitalism is killing itself.

this morning thankful for the opportunity and the ability to think through life and the situations of life... and thus – live

III.

essay about fame as care, fame as the ability to afford life, life being afforded to you by means of mass concern of, for, and about your life

celebrity as faith, iconography, modern religion

meaning and value as ascribed onto people by way of bodies, appearances, (re)presentations. this economy of seeing and being seen as a violence in and under the climate-conditions of racial capital

again, remembering fanon - all interactions, engagements, relations mediated by this pre-eminent sphere of capital which pre-organizes relation and possibility for relation

here, people donating to kylie jenner so she can become the youngest 'self-made' billionaire

the tiered hierarchy of values and relations is pent up in this moment

what sort of repressive dialogues are concurrent that allow for and create such circumstances?

to donate wealth to an individual who is literally already an icon of wealth - to pay homage, to pay token to a christ figure of capital

salvation as being able to not only afford life, but to become the standard by which life is measured, to that which life is afforded. in many ways these figures become peoples' reasons to live, obsessions,

when you think of wealth - do you think of money, or do you think of people who have money? what they look like, what they do, what they represent?

tiered valuations and chains of value as possessive, symbolic: capital, money, those in possession of money, those in possession of money and the standard of money (cultural, social valuation)

it is to say that capital becomes a faith of valuations: an initial, fundamental, forced belief in the mechanism as a

way into life, as a survival, which justifies the mechanism's existence, itself

racialization, incarceration, border-making --- statecraft is a terrain in and out of life, in and out of materiality --- in and out of ideas into violent projections

and it is to say that state actors often do not know much of the intricate inner workings of this mechanism -- it is simply that they willfully submit to it for personal gain

eichmann is the stock figure for this aspect: 'I obeyed. Regardless of what I was ordered to do, I would have obeyed. Certainly, I would have obeyed. I obeyed, I obeyed.' (ctd.)

'...obeyed my orders without thinking, I just did as I was told. That's where I found my - how shall I say? - my fulfillment. It made no difference what the orders were... I never killed anybody.' (fin.)

state actors and celebrities both submit to the order of capital; pay the price of obedience. emptied of themselves. filled with the ideal-projection of the industrial order

this ideal is simultaneously unattainable and the standard for all that exists under the gaze of capital

sometimes it is hard to tell the difference - both proffer and execute ideology. the professorial aspect of this, a preaching of cultural ideals, into the realms of education, 'training', professionalizations

the entirety of schooling is to become well versed in this theorem as it is applied to life with violent force, even if one is necessarily excluded or targeted by these maths from birth

this valuation is a maths (berger) which reduces life to numbers, figures, meanings which may be added, subtracted, valued, devalued, multiplied, divided

the conceit of 'nature' applied

i need to write about desirability as a continuation of itself - a wanting as an ability to continue wanting as something monetized, a coin, but also that by which these economies function and continually remodel themselves on and upon

frameworks and rhetorics of beauty, purity, perfection, idea(l)ations of life and how life might be lived as themselves monies

a whole industry of sales and marketing founded on this practice

is it not that what is desirable is so often desirable simply because it is desired by others?

here, as in other spheres of capital, a notion of false scarcity, that love is so often prized because only 'certain people' are deserving of love, 'certain people' can be loved, 'certain people' are depicted as loving, as giving love, as receiving love, as icons of love

this regressive sainthood takes life and disbars it entirely, turns situations into medial narratives which are continually abolished by the oppressive climate of enforced meaning which controls the flow of capital and life under capital

this is to say that there is no modern libidinal flow if not of and from the aqueduct

if meaning and desire can be manufactured, standardized, and enforced - where is life?

so much of this work is to not get caught up in the semantic turns of phrases and tricks of modern liberalism which attempt to abolish critique in the name of 'correctness' and this idea of rote discipline and a specific kind of 'thoroughness' as a 'doing justice'

this rhetoric is everywhere... it is tiresome; furthermore, a waste of time

and here is the place to firmly indict the academy, to indict modern intellectualism as profiteering - to speak the word of the day, turn the phrase of the day, convene as to establish the terms and conditions of the day, to establish the bounds of the day

is to do nothing more than to reproduce the conditions one claims to be attempting to critique and abolish

and here, it is simple. the idea that thought and language as gesture can and should somehow be governance, be as governance - of anything and anyone - is at the root

this is the place where nationalisms and principles go to die

in the pit of shit and language where neruda's head is submerged

rip federico garcia lorca

that governance should die, along with the state, along with systems of valuation as applied economics

that governance at once extends to and from the realm of 'pure social governance' as legislative/material force and withholdings --- into the realm of behaviors as decided margins of life, choices, decisions, actions, reactions : mediated by the ideology and cultural prosthetics

of capital

IV.

the term statecraft necessarily has mystical, extra-material implications

theorizing penal frameworks as emergences from set(s of) value judgements

these transactions, or handoffs, as spheres of influence composing and composite in the state as a handle, handler

person to person, person to place, place to picture, picture to archive, hand to hand, hand to pocket, pocket to hold

these places where things change hands, hands change places, in and out of sight as currents, currencies as movements of value and valuations through space and time

the increasingly modern effective state moderates these transactions, oversees them, handles them, archives them, as legal thresholds as crossings

this is a racialized and gendered and citizen-ed space of access and inaccess, wealth and withholding

this is a history of trade, enslavement, and that which legally may change hands, places, meanings, contexts - where, when, and how

this also sex trade, the exchange of love, the exchange of fluids, the exchange of missives, the exchange of words, the exchange of sounds, the exchange of ideas writing has not solved my problems

sometimes writing is not right-action

possibly a means to consider and weigh action

all of these survival questions go unanswered --- always something missed, always something uncalculated, always something emergent

i'm always so hard on myself and forgiving of others. i can't tolerate making a mistake but when other people make mistakes its okay. i can see other people as people but i can't

see myself as anything other than what i'm doing in the very moment i'm doing it. i become my actions

What I have encountered with people is the desire to feel powerful, the desire to feel in control. People will weaponize aspects of themselves in order to feel powerful – their ability to be obedient, their ability to conform and thus gain rewards, their sexuality, their strength of body, mind, and otherwise. These weaponizations occur across relationships, interactions, encounters in and on the streets. These weaponizations attempt to secure and cover up a basic, fundamental insecurity about a lack of worth, a lack of ability, a lack of security. The economic bottom of society is and always has dropped out, leaving an abyss of nothing, a scapegoated class, an executed class of criminality, illegality, condemned to circulate around the prisons, around the gallows, pronounced socially dead, pronounced politically dead, riddled with bullet holes and piled into piles. This fear is propellant of the engine of progress which slings modernity infinitely forward – this fear of being dropped out, this fear of becoming truly forgotten by life… this fear of being murdered, outright murder. These stratifications of persecution and crucifixions have occurred throughout history, to and of entire and arbitrarily delineated groups of people, blocked off and systematically targeted with violence. This violence upholds the basic human economy of life: desire, fulfillment, worth, food, water, shelter, love, self making. This is a question of what work is done and who does it, who is loved and who is not, who is mourned and who is not, who is legal and who is not, who survives and who does not. This question is at the root of civilization and must remain unspoken; it is forced to be remained unspoken – as the consequences, surely, would be the death of civilization itself. And this fear of loss of wealth and certainty, even as it pertains to the certainty of daily violence (and daily normalization of violence) is second only to the fear of final death itself. Some, of course, pervert this

hierarchy of terrible uncertainty, whether out of necessity once or twice removed, and stare in the face of death even as the state rears its many heads to execute the body.

This submission machine strips people of their dignity, their self worth, their ability to create self and selves and value themselves, as life is always on the table, the stakes are always life. The binary of submission or death is continually reproduced: in the school, in the prison, in the city. This submission, racialized and classed, is at once the legacy of slavery and genocide and the entirety of the European colonial mission, the movement toward the subjugation of every force at work except subjugation itself as it pertains to the desires and hungers of those exerting this violent and violating force. Walking the streets in the city is pregnant with this fear and this violence, directed at perceived others and forces that would oppose the already fragile, often de- centered self. This thinly vieled society of animality and animosity, of jealousy, of anger, of lashing out and retribution so specifically of being scorned by life, of being let down by life, of being suffocated of life, of being deprived by life. This deprivation is of food, water, shelter; also of love, connection, community, learning. These strictures act as boundaries and guiding forces in and of life, relegating interactions and relationships to the strict tight lines in and of which they are established, with predetermined racialized, gendered, classed roles and indicators which then inform how one conducts oneself, speaks oneself, and speaks of oneself to others. These violences as limitations are primary; these are violences that inform life as an education, as a learning how to navigate and survive in a climate which has merely modernized, with massive effect, the violences of the past.

This desire to feel powerful stems precisely from this lack of power; this desire to feel in control stems precisely from this lack of control. Modern life directs one’s attention and energies outward, as it must, in order to extract labor and validate the conditional society as something that is necessary, valuable. One seeks out the city, if one were to do

such a thing, in order to feel connected, in order to perhaps feel a part of something bigger than oneself… just as some might sit at a bar, go to a park, go for a walk, and so forth. This need to feel validated, desirable, wanted, a part of something – is weaponized by nationalism in a fundamental and irrevocable way. This weaponization, across nationalisms, across firmly established groups as political grounds which firmly begin and end in assertive exclusions, as organizations in the face of disorganization, continually exhibit this trait of weaponization of ideology in the face of alienation, the sensation of exile, the sensation of persecution, the sensation of solitude. To provide a sense of identity, to provide a sense of worth within a greater system of worth which validates itself by means of its establishment as something in the face of, something exclusive, something which cannot be touched, cannot be reached, cannot be heard by others… to be a part of something that others in the face of a globalized exploitative labor-system that continually others one to oneself, is essential to the reactive liberalism which captivates much of the world today.

Perhaps it is a question of where violences are directed, where introspection occurs, and if this crucial introspection occurs. This introspection that interrogates and attacks the self as a fundamental assertion; the idea that anything could be a fundamental assertion in the face of the continual fallout of life as it were, the continual disjection of the organism from itself. The need to grasp, to cling to the world, to hang on for dear life – this will not leave, regardless of whatever dissolution of economic systems and systems of valuation themselves. One continues to value life and press into life in an attempt to continue living, whether consciously or unconsciously. The inability to do so, or the decision to no longer do so, is suicide.

VI.

i have to examine why my relationships always fail, why my love always falls short

i think its because there is a lot of compensation in the way i love - out of this basic insecurity that i am fundamentally unlovable, that i am unworthy of love

probably comes from how unstable and violent things got when i was younger, the sensation that home wasn't a safe place to come home to. isolation, keeping to myself, cooking for myself, doing by myself, for myself, being by myself

i became very capable of taking care of myself, and stopped asking for help - because there was no one to ask for help

but i wanted to be able to ask for help, wanted to have calm, quiet moments, wanted to have some sense of something dependable, reliable, steady

now i have two modes in relationships - shut down, distant, and cold & overzealous, obsessive, lovesick

i either open myself up entirely to the point of near total pathos, or recede back into myself to the point of which i'm no longer there

i so desperately want to be loved, to share my love with someone else, to share whatever i make or have to give -- that i accomplish what i would if i shut down entirely

in extremes absence and presence are indiscernible like hot and cold water and often pleasure and pain

even in relationships, i alienate myself from myself and the other person by asserting myself so completely that i'm no longer a person or retreating so thoroughly that i'm no longer there

this, i am sure, is to avoid getting hurt - to avoid being told that i am not loved. i think i believed from a young age that i could somehow become lovable by becoming intelligent,

by making things, by cultivating myself to the utmost point that someone surely must be able to

.. love me, care for me. but i realize now that i have alienated myself more than ever

i left the world because it became unbearable and now i can't find my way back -- and in the world is where all the love is. its like walking past a party in the middle of the night

i can't make sense of the world and join in because i'm too far away and shut myself down for too long.

i intellectualize even this to make sense of something that i don't understand, something that i corrupt with my words and struggle with constantly

so many of my relationships have been corrupted by words

i feel something intensely, like a sensation of love, or admiration, or care, or desire - and feel, in turn, the intense need to verbalize it, to express it. so i make a song, write a letter, write or make anything

and in that continuous making and sharing i think there is this perversion of the initial event/moment/attraction... and in this making something of that love is lost, made ugly, made too explicit, too real

and so it dies

i have to be open to change, to be open to changing myself, changing my behaviors, my actions. i want so desperately to fit in and enjoy the things that the people around me do. when i find someone i enjoy

i get so excited and i ruin something good, something nice. ruining good things is something i know.

what i love about sontag is her ability to look unswervingly at herself as her actions, her thoughts, her reactions

and to analyze these aspects in a direct, almost confrontational way. she is not afraid to criticize herself (often chastising), but she is also not afraid to look at her work as something beautiful, exciting, playful - even as she is serious about her studies

she sees herself and self making as this very immediate creative process as documented in her journals. life is beautiful if not complicated, her relationships are beautiful if not complicated. with her language and her description of life she simultaneously creates and documents

this beauty as simple, everyday life, intermingled with ideas for short stories, fragments, favorite things, lists, dreams, reflections

the first time i read her journals i felt like i met a friend i desperately needed - an ambitious, intellectual friend, a friend who was not afraid to show and share her emotions with brutal honesty and with the clarity of a surgeon

i also felt this way the first time i read anne sexton - like someone finally broke this seal, this taboo, and let it be known the truth about death and of secretly wanting to die

(or not so secretly)

no one around me talked about suicide; no one around me ever talked about death as something other than this abstraction beyond heaven and hell, as something real... until i read sexton. it was like death stripped naked and apparent

every time i sit down to write i want to learn something about myself or the world

i want to ask of myself to sit here and reflect on who i am, what i am doing, what i have done, and why. how i might go about doing what i am trying to do better. how i might go about what i am trying to do differently

how i might treat the people around me better. how i might treat myself more like a person and less like a machine. how to love to the best of my ability. how to love with everything i have

and how not to shy away from love, not to shy away from life... even when it gets hard to write, to think, to live... to keep writing, thinking, living

when i am writing well i learn from my mistakes as i am making them

it is the same with life -- and often the mistakes, the slips, the misspellings - reveal something that i wouldn't have otherwise said, thought, related

i have to be okay with making mistakes, loving too hard, loving too much

VII.

the violence on the streets of richmond every day is visceral

a sort of forced ignorance in and to and from each person of the conditions of the next, the concerns of the next - except for the potential of violence enacted

people are exorcising their sheer economic desperation on the street

this sort of ritual is observable over the past couple of years; intensifying as the university tightens its grip on city center and displaces specifically black business and black life

the situation is obviously much more complex than this; particularly on campus, where submissions to training and professionalization (white supremacy maths) are occurring constantly and with increasing urgency

as different peoples are funneled through the institution ('producing STEM degrees') - different displacements and repressions and oppressions are forced and recurrent

from professors using violent and careless language to administrators and police upholding the use of violent languages and violent forces

from the numeration of student identities to the increasing economic inviability of the university itself for all except the most wealthy & financially secure,

the campus and the city center take on this thinly veiled character of violence being exerted from all sides, from all machines of producing the laboring-body with increasing regularity, including outright exercises of violence

as the campus police force grows, and the jurisdictions in which they operate expand, the literal pressure in and upon the city grows. as the university continues to uproot black cultures and people who cannot afford the steadily rising rent in and around city center,

this climate of anti-blackness as surveillance and literally as violences against the black population of richmond and city center, the black student population, the homeless in and around city center - grows and is growing to a fever pitch

the campus police regularly send out emails as alerts as to the last assault, shooting, robbery - always with the note to report 'suspicious behavior', and regularly with the promise that surveillance and patrols will increase in certain areas

this, combined with regular recruiting on campus by domestic and foreign branches of u.s. law enforcement alike

i think a good many of the students on campus are fully aware of the terms and conditions of modernity, viscerally. the pressing forces of capital closing in on life to the point of which many students are working multiple jobs while attending school, the homeless student

population continues to grow, and questions of being able to afford the next semester are continually up in the air. the precarity of even thinking of entering academia and somehow emerging with a degree is massive. somehow surviving four years of payments you can't make,

time you don't have, in the midst of a political climate in which the university is dying, america is dying, any sort of illusion of the future or having a future, being able to take care of oneself, paying off student loans, surviving in an economy where each expense is more

exorbitant than the last... creates and composes this atmosphere in which students and people are supposed to live, supposed to engage in some sort of 'civil' manner, have 'discourse', and think of some way to continue living?

when questions and criticisms of race and explicitly pertaining to race are time and time again shut down, where devil's advocate reasonings are not only viable methodologies, but expected and regular; where collective thinking is regularly discarded for the urgency of individual

success, survival, and ultimately - profit?

i find it increasingly difficult to hope for and think a way forward, a way through, a way to somehow even attempt to live collectively in any sense of the word other than in a collective misery, a collective debt, a collective dissolution

and it is precisely that the collective continually falls apart that there is this gap in which some sort of release into life might occur, into some sort of critical interrogation into the mechanisms that inform the collective as a mechanism gestured to by organs of the state in

order to corral and cordon off entire groups of people for persecution, extermination, and so forth

it is such an extreme pressure from and by capital that it is a wonder that the city is not already in ruins, already dead, already destroyed. and i suppose in many ways it already is. first come the deaths of culture, the deaths of language,

then the deaths of people, the deaths of villages, the deaths of nations, empires, worlds

it is in that systematic extermination

through and by way of organized silence, orchestrated silence, forced ignorance by way of threat of further persecution, further loss, further misery, further dispossession - that crime and criminality is something conferred upon a person, upon the body of a person at the leisure

of the state - that these cycles of death return again and again. and the organization of language as form, as responsibility, is taught in these universities; perfected, persecuted, and patrolled in the university. poetry is that opening, that threshold... but poetry in the

university is dead if not dying, at the outskirts if not exiled, et cetera

exploitation as a framework for life is not sustainable - it empties the body of life in order to fill it with death. thus, the city will die by way of total mechanisation, total alienation, total displacement... and yet there will still be those willing to enlist,

those willing to empty themselves to fortify, protect, and enforce the interests of empire and whiteness

the city as a mechanism for making-war necessarily enlists each and every inhabitant against 'the other'

there is that early nationalist document by a german officer (i am forgetting his name) which calls for each and every inhabitant of nation to dedicate themselves - in each and every action -

to the sustenance, growth, and protection of the nation

this rhetoric was applied liberally by social governances throughout europe and the then-transitional ottoman empire

this idea of obligation and duty to nation before all else, nation as self - is of course a hallmark of white suprematics and genocidal programs. nation might also refer to an abstracted idea of community which is necessarily exclusive of another abstracted idea of community --

and this exclusion as a 'pitting against'.

this abstracted community founded upon, again, something representative, some sort of mythological tie, some sort of gesture toward origin as that which binds - not action, not behavior, not gesture

the idea that communities can be formed by basic reductive groupings (representative wholes) or pittings of people against other reductive groupings is the literal precedent of history; furthermore, the history of the justification of racisms, countless violences, bloodsheds,

genocides. again, these reductive groupings not based on actions, not based on workings, working-towards- .... but instead based upon representative markers of difference

(religion, race, traits of the body, pseudo-sciences and economies of humanness)

this as a tactic used by racial capital to weaponize difference as something visible/apparent/confrontational/existent in the face of

it is still this question of how commune is formed (can it be?) where, why, by whom, and for what purpose. weaponizing other people for personal profit/gain will always be exploitative

and just because a group is formed and positions itself in a certain way/orientation - it does not mean that the image this group is presenting is not merely an image by which the processes and violences of capital continues with a certain stylistic 'disobedience'

if collective life is even possible. this moment totalizes exploitation and manipulation in a streamlined cruelty which only grows more efficient, more ever present, and more insidious in silent execution

i see it in my relationships, all even the most intimate, the longest, the closest, the shortest, in encounters with strangers - this hurt, this woundedness, this struggle to life as being endured in increasing isolation, increasing futility, increasing meaninglessness

this desperate need of and for human connection, interspersed with the increasing distrust of organization, of other people - simply by way of experience which fosters distrust - even in spaces which are supposedly made and for refuge from these regulatory forces

these learned behaviors, learned economics, which are so firmly ingrained and enforced in regulatory medias and cultures... that unlearning takes a lifetime. and even then...

i write towards a life that is not punitive.

VIII.

I would write you a simple song Where you play death like a chant Wanting, worshipping and Whispering words And in that carrying You sing:

But after together Like some dream Quick and sweet This hot sleep through love and out Onto the other side, Where you are Delirious in parks, cafes, houses of memory, Where life crosses itself and coffins are drawn from the black well Of time And with time you are That wind Tempering that which you have come to know With that which is to come

And your hair And your blanket And this spring sky of becomings dripping down like some distant star in ecstasy -

In that place which you love There, I might know something of you Of the unspoken things Of your hardened dreams

The rise and fall of your chest, this Inescapable spirit of your want, your desire Where does it go? Where does it go in the moments where you find your lover His arms outstretched on the bridge of love like some forgetting

In the moment where you forget this forever This forever, buried With your love

That in which life is embalmed Entombed and breathing For the body is always the place But you know this already, perhaps too well for your own good You exile from life Stolen from that joy which is sense And displaced into the uncertainty that comes rambling in like songs and the always Returning of this loss Of the endings of songs Covering you in bitter blues and swirling black and the only sure thing is that nothing good will ever come again!

A poet visits your bedside Like an angel or a ghost Kissing your forehead and leaving you into time

This calm sleep Like a night where you will remember Your body

A night full of grace

Where you did everything right and said what was in your heart Like a stupid gift to the world Your arms outstretched as you spin out into the expanse As it caresses your waist, your neck, your lips,

And to be loved even in this brief moment, Like a storm, Is enough.

You come to die with these moments of love Like memories,

Like fire, like fire, like fire, Like the stolen bits of some faith Some book you read and loved like it was a part of you Even as it passes through your hands.

IX.

I write letters to my lovers; all of my poetry is like this. I need to make my love real, to express it, to vocalize it… because it is through language and language alone that I exist. Touch passes, music passes, love passes, and I am left here alone with these words. I combine them, arrange them, rearrange them, compose them, decompose them… but it is never enough. My language either doesn’t go far enough or goes too far. I am either lost for words or in them; unable to express myself to my loved ones, or overexpressive to the point of annihilating life. I become different to myself. I lose another love; I try to go about my day. To take a bath, to write, to read from a book. I feel so close to breaking down, just losing my grip again and sinking back into that bottomless pit which contains all of the truths of life – the fundamental decay and decomposition of all things. I work and work at myself, chipping away at everything that isn’t part of me, that I can’t take with me; every day I carry less and less. This weight drops from my body and before too long I am nothing, burned away, into ash. It is a lie to say that death is a continuance of life. If this were so falling out of love would not exist. I need someone so badly, someone to love me for who I am, nothing more and nothing less. I become a productive object to my lovers, a distortion of myself, a toy. They play with me then drop me when they feel like it. I am always the codependent lover, the desperate lover, the needy lover. The lover who gives too much.

today i wanted to give a drawing of mine to a friend. i felt myself holding onto it, and also felt myself as this other entity, telling this part of me to let go

i try to remember to let go of the things that i am holding onto, for whatever reason - fear of fragmentation, death, feeling unknown

and that the things i am terrified of letting go of - are the things i need to let go of the most

(the pseudo)sciences of inequity

credit scores, bodily measurements

after all of the writing, songs, things i did and have done in an attempt to find meaning, make meaning --- that meaning only exists in the moment of making

it leaves; i feel empty again

i dont care about being good or right ... i care about listening to life

and hopefully by way of this listening... maybe express something of it

i have no illusions as to the futility and impossibility of this task

but it is in this that my grief becomes joyful meaning; purpose

and this is how i know of my lot in life, my task, my work given to fit this instrument

I write to emerge out from under the illusion of life into life as an expressive process. this image of myself and the world dies

and i am left with flows of meaning, trajectories of time, places unmoored and unmapped populated by and with smells, sensations, dreams, deaths, and desires

i come and go to this place, retrieve water, blood, the like

each time i leave, returning seems impossible... the arrival like a dream, like a nonoccurrence. but i arrive again and pass through as this arrival - nonetheless.

as these stations and momentary interlocutions of meanings among other meanings, distances among other distances

i can only get excited about writing as something that doesn't have a purpose, goes nowhere, and thus wanders in this place of nonexistence, between birth and death, between meaning and meaning, between completion

a work that is only finished because it remains unfinished, a word that

i need space, i need room, i need fragmentation, i need incompletion... because that is when and how things change. writing as room to change

each approach to and of the text as a mutability, as something that reads many ways, and does not privilege one method of reading or thinking over another

readings for when there is no time; readings for when there is too much time. readings for when you are feeling lonely; readings for when you can't seem to find a moment to be alone.

to know that your heartbreak doesn't matter, that it amounts to nothing

that the world goes on, that in the city night lovers find their love over and over again

the scene in boy meets girl where alex goes out walking with his headphones and watches the couple kissing on the bridge, they start spinning around and around

it is perhaps knowing that you don't have any love, and to watch other people love - to watch couples holding hands, kissing in cafes,

that some people have found safety and even solace in love - just being so cast out of that and continually failing - some fundamental incompatibility with others

that even when things are working, they aren't - this freakish disturbance of my love as something simultaneously excessive and exclusive, callous and desperate for closeness

the way i love as witnessing my love destroy itself; the more i try, the closer i get to a more fundamental self destruction

it is that this loving is something defective, something broken at the source --- and i have to recognize this, step back, and live otherwise, live for myself and not for love

i wish i had answers and i don't. going out and getting drunk isn't an answer, and neither is the outright refusal of love and the attempt to love. i can't stop trying, but i keep getting hurt worse and worse

to intellectualize this is pointless. it is so easy for me to love other people, and yet, whenever i find this love for another person - it may very well be because this other person does not love me

to be just another person lost and without love, lost and lost to love again

it's just a sadness that comes from the attempt to hold on, the attempt to make something work in the midst of a continual failure, a continual loss

and wanting something good, someone who sees you as beautiful

these simple desires cause so much pain -- and no matter how hard i try to detach myself from them... i am still so beholden to love and the desire to love and be loved

i can give everything up but this

and it causes me endless pain, precisely because i can't let go. i have to let go

it sounds stupid and simple but every time you have to come back and find that weird thing inside yourself that makes love

and keep loving from that place and get close and intimate with yourself even in the face of loss and death and the rain that keeps coming and just doesn't stop

it is that love, even displaced, even exiled, even alone - that makes life beautiful, meaningful, and ultimately - worth living

it is not that i have to keep loving, its that i can't stop loving... that i can't let up, it just keeps coming --- wave after wave after wave of this need to give, this need to be close to others, this need

it is this love that is past want, past desire, into this essential movement into life which is where action is dictated, everything after is dictated --- this propulsion, this force which moves my life into existence, moves my words, moves my body, moves my face, my voice

this love that knows deep down that nothing can be kept, nothing can be held, nothing can be possessed, that it all falls away --- but this love that keeps on loving in the face of the death of all things, the death of the world, the death of desire, the endings

that just keep folding into my life, making my past like a dream, like a specter, flying away

and it is not that i must keep loving... it is that i will keep loving. this as something certain, this as something predetermined... as something i knew even as a child.

this love as applied consciousness, as conscious action, as deliberate action, as caring action

i have to care about life as this relative experience. i know that with this caring is all of my faith, all of my joy, all of my hopes for life and living together --- bundled up in this storm of language, this ceaseless prayer that

in and out of sleep, in and out of pain - continues - burns, cries,

and resurrects itself from the ash of what was, what could have been, and becomes what is, while gesturing to what will be

this is the composition of myself in and into words, in and out of music, in and out of love

will to sing it, i will to know it, i will to live it... and thus bring my love into this world with every gesture. i have to remind myself of this. it is not just this idea of romantic love which haunts everything for me, this idea of romantic love that i have to let go of -

but this love manifest in every movement, every moment. if i remember this, i can let go of this idea that i have to have a partner to give my love to, fulfill love, consummate love with --

and instead recognize the sheer momentous nature of the act of loving as something decided which permeates all life after the conscious decision to love

the ability to express these feelings and think in light of these feelings is a blessing, something i am grateful for

i have to take care of myself and be kind to myself in order to continue this work, in order to work these texts and hopefully do something meaningful, something that might contribute to the constellations of work that i admire so much, adore so much

that there is work to be done, that there is beauty and poetry to be made and experienced, felt and related. i have to sit down with my books and remember this every day... and not let the brutality of life destroy me

i will work on myself, craft myself, and listen to the world and life around me closely and intently. perhaps i will learn something.

                              253


             POETIC LAWLESSNESS

To live with true poetic lawlessness one must first do away with the concept of truth itself.

In this sense, truth as the dictum, or root, of all attempts at bringing law, reason, and order into life.

Life is the supreme order of life, brought about in the very simple act of listening to life speak through the body.

For life itself is a language of energetics, surpassing the human attempt at expression. The body expresses itself immanently, perfectly, completely.

Assemblies & Other Essays / The Suffering of Thought

this, combined with regular recruiting on campus by domestic and foreign branches of u.s. law enforcement alike

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