Everything A Waiting Midnight / Coming Into the Bone

Name: Everything A Waiting Midnight / Coming Into the Bone
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME III: EVERYTHING A WAITING MIDNIGHT

          OR

‘COMING INTO THE BONE’




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‘I gaze upon my body frightened from afar…’ M. Darwish

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For Want of a Better World
Everything A Waiting Midnight
Poems of Hate
Move Away From the Ego and Do Not Be Born Again
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FOR WANT OF A BETTER WORLD

And succeeding this, becomes the horror of the outer depths of the world – the shame of advertisement, the pernicious flogging of markets on the backs of those shipping souls, salt, and cotton endlessly on this iterative journey – tasked with cataloguing the bones of vessels which line the Atlantic. And what of the currency which propels this mission? The flat marker of life which in turn labors, works to build the only true nation – the nation of the international rich – from asses the blood of poetry flows.

What incorrigible life could possibly be made of and from this degradation? This wearing away of the stone of the human soul to a sorry pebble; the accumulated miseries of these debts – at once apparent and obscure corruption – which rapidly decay the flesh at the rate of profit? No – it is only to turn away entirely from this perverse development, the flashing loud wagons, the oppressive light, the billowing smoke, and the entirety of the production which is world – into the collapsed realm, the realm of entire faithlessness, that place which is a dearth, that place which is not-world.

It is that Dante imagined hell in the torture of sameness as a doubled torture, that the pain inflicted on the body, mind, and soul would forever be that same pain in correspondence with that crime – which, in effect, destroys the very principle which propels time ‘forward’. It is also that Poe imagined the torturous hole of the Pendulum to be a dearth of sense – of light, of touch, of place. It is in such a fashion that the contemporary soul experiences a life of total industrialization – where the violence of speed has superceded all sense.

It is perhaps to indict the perversity in the project of directionality, or the sheer rhetorical possibility of movement itself. It is not conceived (by the project of liberal minds) that the animal thrashes uncontrollably in the cage of psyche, but rather that the animal can be organized,

assembled, into a rashly termed ‘civilized being’ – with sociable instincts, prepared to contribute to the project of the human. If only it were so! To see the massive flood of existence neatly narrativized into the ideological conjecture of human development, the furthering of humanity and the projects of knowledge and nation – is certainly, then, to forego all sense (history) in the name of hope (liberalism).

To want for a better world is to necessarily admit that a better world does not already exist; furthermore, that there must be some sort of total revolution of consciousness among the vitriolic adherent by which something might then come about. I do not place my faith in such a development.

I too, loved you then And this was before the wars of our time became our wars, The ceaseless speeding of trains carrying bodies and the cages Tall barbed and snarling like dogs Metal escaping into the soul like smoke,

There were years of examinations, Of carefully hung measurements and plaster casts, Compositions of heads and genitalia, Mutilated by birth and experimentation – time as the great and brutal whip Screams captured on field recording devices and analyzed by doctors as to make it known That this was the sterilized daughter, or the deformed young boy who played by the river As night fell and shadow took his place

You loved like a child and died as one, In the brief moment that

We lit candles and deliberated over strategy in an ugly room Frail and bare Into the dawn And the fruit of our mission, laughable Was stolen literature and the pitiful document Of our fracture Leaving and Knowing well that there was nothing in it, not us, not even love Only pity and selfishness.

I often ask myself now That you have passed into another life entirely, Why And laugh and drink myself into idiocy, And stumble and curse and cry, Because it is to dream of prisons and die, then to awake, In and out of factory, in and out of myth, in and out of thought and the mind without abatement,

Which curses itself, which curses life, which plagues the soul with speech.

Perhaps it is that to pretend with love, Is to turn the body into a toy, To yank and pull and gasp and produce fluid: It was Artaud who said that culture is shit… and I write to you from a train in the north, A long and streaming letter, full of stopgaps and musings and wanderings, Because I too am like this train, exiled and condemned like Charon, To ferry meaning to and from itself.

And it took the death of organization, the crying over unmarked graves, the blood That I cannot bury The blood that I cannot leave

For me to realize that the cause is always lost, And that the poetry is always already dead, for this is where we mark the grave, And this is where we mourn the youth which never came to pass, The youth we were promised and died

And now I am damned to silence, Damned to the passing through and the open moments and the punishment of revisiting your name like a ghost, Damned to the hours of corpulent thought, amounting to nothing more than a petulant, filthy gasp, And I do not write anymore for this reason, because my hope has died

If I cannot love, Perhaps I can write wildly, slashing away at myself Until only self remains.

Everything A Waiting Midnight

In the early years of my life, I spent my time attending the petty and moralizing concerns of my superiors, which is to say, those of the time before me. Much of youth, I came to understand, is a war of ignorance against history; composed of manifold ignorances, willed, and born. I saw, through the firmament of my youth, the stubbornness of authority, pressing itself up against life, and declaring itself the victor. One complete memory of my childhood consists of sitting in a classroom, with a small, red faced woman, brought to anger by her students’ stubborn resistance to Latin (this was a class of small children, ages seven and eight). She stood in front of the rows of desks, standing shorter even than some, yelling at the inability of a young boy to string together this dead language. Do you not see the frivolity and sadness of this moment? I sat there, in wonder and fear, and even now recollect this cruel irony: that the entirety of modern life exists in order to preserve that which was - the dominant order of things. My youth acted as an acid on this notion, which eventually collapsed into mental infirmity and derangement (this shall be discussed later).

I began to see history take shape primarily in the demeanor and perspective of my parents, civil, state workers - patient, yet deeply neurotic. Wounded, perhaps permanently, by the aggravating neglect of their caretakers before them, they proceeded to bring life into this world. I saw my birth as unending - as the moment of birth extends ad infinitum, resounding like a horn, a scream; multiplying with the countless other cries of infants clawing their way from the womb. To this day, I am still born - into shadow, into my solitude. But now, to return to the topic at hand.

I came, through this rotting education, into the care of the university, subsisting on my debt to society. I strode into every bank possible, emptying my pockets and calling on my

credit to avoid work. If my early days in school taught me anything, it was to avoid the gaze of those in charge, and to do all that was possible in order to do nothing. I quickly figured out that the economy in which I was embroiled was organized under debt as a submissive principle. This world of things, itself, acts as a sort of hell - constricting the individual to repetitious action in order to survive. This action, in short, is an input and output of the body-at-large, whether it be the flesh, or the factory of civilization, which churns out the miserable, alienated, human being. I quickly learned that what I ate, I shat back out into my hand, only to eat it once more; furthermore, that which I said, gestured, and wrote - returned to me with a quickness unmatched by any technology. I turned toward myself, and disavowed this so called humanity, stripped myself of association from it, and, in turn, lost my sanity.

II.

This loss of sanity was not from illness, nor was it from some accident which jarred my senses into disorder. Rather, it came directly from knowledge, which is to say, a certain point at which my mind turned against my life, poisoning it, seeping into my soul. I cannot as of yet say that thought, if wiped from the world and made abstract, is good or evil; yet, I can say for certain that thought in this world leads the individual to commit horrible acts, indecent acts, in order to survive. That which I once thought to be true, a world of virtue, decent human beings, thinking and compassionate creatures, was at some point dashed in laughter by the force which is the inevitable knowledge of history. I was raised on this lie, poisoned by it twice, both in its birth in my heart and soul, and its death. To cultivate an illusion, much as I did, became like a garden of ideas, which I nurtured and exposed myself to - desperate to become as good as this goodness I dreamt.

This leads me to the heart of the illusion of the heart itself, love. If one might look towards the forced march of the

oppressed throughout history, marked by the whip of the joyous victor, one might see the truth of power as manifested in every moment of animal existence: that one seeks to submit the other. And, as such, the great, towering cities man has built for himself reflect this glorious truth - while politicians and bankers celebrate their myriad takings, the poor and working mass clean their houses, build their financial districts, staff their restaurants, and clean their shit. And this is why I mean to bring up education first - that instilling in the minds of youth that knowledge is possible in such an environment is the first transgression, the first crime. In this world of senseless murder, which, generation after generation, retells this tale of power - can any such knowledge be told? I know that I am mistaken, but all I see is the horror of force: the rape and brutality of animals searching to justify their sense of dignity and superiority in a world which does not care; a world which crumbles under their weight.

I saw this brutality, first, at home and again, in school. My education came as a pestilence. My sister, from her birth, was terribly ill, and prone to lashing out in fits of violence, rage, and sadness. Her condition was rooted in the nervous system, afflicting her brain, which in turn influenced her actions. She would break out, without warning, into murderous rages, in which she would brandish knives, and scream countless epithets. I do say to this - that it was hard not to laugh in such moments. To see such a well meaning young girl, struggling within herself, threaten to murder her family in the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon - then recede into a placated slumber, became something of a regularity. To counter this sad mistake of life with a rather malicious one, I saw the violence of young boys apparent in my adolescence. There may be no greater wellspring of hatred than in the minds and actions of miseducated young men - many gifted with the blunt instrument of physicality before its time. These young men (too injured by some past violence I’m sure), acted out the many wars of sexuality and desire which litter the past like unmarked graves. Told and

untold, the violence of birth and the confused adolescence of the human being - to me, does not seem to change.

III.

The reader might now ask, why am I telling this story? I say, first and foremost, that I tell it for myself. Before my collapse into infirm mind, I saw the end of the world in its birth - as a futile, squirming, hungry infant - begging to be fed, jealous of its peers, possessive of its playthings, and manipulated by its caretakers. I saw this world as a world imitated in each person, and in each creation of life as yet another bringing- into-world - as the systems of education, sewage, sex-as-rite, and government - which dictate and channel this sad narrative of birth and death. I beg a continual recognition of the human being as salacious animal, obsessed with carnality, and yet, by way of tradition, shamed into a sterile and clothed world of desire made symbol; this symbol turned into the currency by and through which the world runs.

I have spent many hours rummaging through my things for money by which to justify my existence, and have found none. I wander the city streets at all hours - my eyes begging for - what I am, day in and day out convinced - might be the last vestige of connection, the last thread linking my soul to anothers’... and find only disappointment. It is no mistake to say that modernity is only the moment in which one realizes that one is modern; furthermore, that one is without any tether by which to grasp this modernity, as its largesse proceeds it.

I found myself, as time passed, more and more accustomed to crime. I began to reach into the pockets of others without fear or shame, taking without fear or shame; rejoicing in my taking. I saw the world as a perpetrator of meaningless advancement, a peddler of technologies which would further life without life, expand knowledge without knowledge, and manufacture feeling without feeling. I saw

this world and I spat on it with the mind of a pervert, the body of a murderer, the soul of an exile, and the heart of everyone else around me. I found myself, with each passing day, more in common with the mountainous piles of food waste, excrement, and runoff which are chased out of the city with a stuck-up nose and a befouled eye. I found myself used, objectified, and cast out - even by those whom I believed I loved, those whom I believed loved me. In this continued and laughable degradation, I found myself more in common with other human beings than I ever believed possible.

For if there is one thing that differentiates human beings from other animals, it is their inability to treat others with true dignity and kindness. For we pretend - that things like money, social status - the games of civilization - cover up and mask the truth of life: which is that brute force controls every aspect of existence. Just as the flood or drought plagues human and animal alike, so does the strong take from the weak. The physical strength of the body, mind, and will are replicated in these prosthetics of life: so that just as one accrues wealth, one may pretend, in and under the terms and conditions of a civilized world - to have power over another. And perhaps the worst bit of it, is that these conditions are not only accepted, but turned into virtue. There is, as yet, no amount of money which can truly protect one animal from the knife or bullet of another.

IV.

I came into these realizations at the death of my idea of love, simultaneous with my realization of my own cruelty. I treated the one I loved with exceptional coldness, a coldness which I did not know I possessed. I showed myself to be, at my root, sinful, transgressive, and hateful. This malice precedes each and every human characteristic. To love is to be dependent because one is weak, or to seek acknowledgment because one is prideful, or to seek reflection because one is vain. To strive is to seek success

because one has failed, to seek virtue because one is not virtuous, to seek wealth because one is impoverished. In each action, as it is assured by the laws which press upon the bodies of earthly things, there is another that presses back. I did not find any innocence here - not in the carnal appetite, not in the will to power, not in the struggle to survive. It should be known that the pursuit of these things, the pursuit of earthly things, is forever marred by the desire of and for the body - the desire for the glory and satisfaction of the individual above all else.

It is this greed which emboldens cruelty, which makes it great and fashionable in the face of meagre survival, which convinces itself of itself enough to go to war with another, to murder another, to rape another, and to establish itself as master of another. And certainly, it is this force which rules the world.

By way of this knowledge, I became a criminal and an advocate for crime. I saw the rules which this civilization composed - rules which justified the imprisonment of children, the execution of thinkers, the murder of those who refused to conform to its rule - and rejected them. I saw these rules as the foundation of my education, as the assertion of the authority of one person over another in the form of the teacher, the police officer, and the parent… and rejected them. And in this rejection, I found a small crevice, a hole in which I curled up, devoid of light, sound, and meaning - and in this hole I found freedom as the illusion of freedom being possible. To this day, I have found no notion of freedom short of the eventual death, and even then, perhaps my soul may remain in chains… for the first cruelty is to be cast out of nonexistence and into the world - which certainly, in my case, was deserved.

I saw my fellow human beings punished, each in their own way - my mother by her insatiable need to work herself into the grave, my father by the loss of his father before him to drinking and poverty, my brother by the loss of his parents, and my sister by her illness. I found solace only in silence; in

my inability to be with others, I found myself, a damaged child, singing in a room alone. I believe to struggle with consciousness is to struggle with punishment; the desire to punish oneself and others for this primary disorder. The civilization is itself sculpted by and borne around this whip as an organizing force, where punishment is internally and externally directed, crossed by the bedroom. I found my greatest and most profane pleasures here, where I could press my hands around the throat of another, bind and gag them, and be at the verge of suffocating life - and yet refrain. To many, this may sound like a violent act, and yet it purged me of violence. I came to find sex as the stage in which people wear many masks, the stage around which those around me danced, flitted, and paraded around - filled with the sanctifying fear of the social law. I was taught at a young age, partially due to the scars religion left on my parents, that the sex organs were a forbidden place. I found this difficult to comprehend - that there were parts of the body and soul that were sacred and pure, and others that were unspeakable. This, to me, became the primary fissure of life - until I came to believe that my body itself was profane, and my soul alone was sacred. This belief, enforced by the rigid world of appearances, acts as the artificial boundary between pornography and the law. For there is no place, no courtroom nor prison, no school nor home, where the carnal urge escapes.

It is this desire, to control another as an object, totally, as an erotic object, that structured my idea of romantic love. I saw, all around me, marriages dictated by tradition, children raised by tradition, and classrooms organized by tradition. These conveyances, to me, became clear as expressions of value. It was valuable to be able to exercise control over another with money, prestige, and political power; as such, others pursued these things senselessly, or with the sheer drive of vengeance for not having. The sheer ability to do this was the gateway to enabling all sorts of

erotic perversions of control: criminalization, forced poverty and starvation, imprisonment, beatings by police protecting the property of the rich, invasions of foreign countries, and threats of war. The world appeared to me as a stratified mass of power and struggle over power, where power was met with power on various fields of sociality - much like a sport - where television gleefully looked on. I asked how love could exist in such a world, a world in which these values permeate every mind, every border, every being - by the sheer force of enforcing survival as obedience. I received no answer.

The only solution, in witnessing these occurrences (many of which are only briefly enumerated here), was to turn away from the world. I saw these expressions of values bound to the soul, suffocating it and making this suffocation normal… and I refused to subject my soul to the same punishment. I vowed to keep my soul locked away, and to exact any act which this world exacted upon me in return. I would steal, I would lie, I would cheat, and furthermore, I would refuse to submit, or feel shame in my survival amidst the ruin of my dreams. In this sense, I lost everything. I lost my closest friends, I became a stranger to my family, money and worldly things became meaningless to me; I wandered without end. I submitted myself only to the extremes of my desires: month long fasts and engorged meals, sexual abstinence for years on end, and total carnal indulgence. I slept and I did not sleep. I did not laugh, and I did not cry. All of my sensation was directed toward God. And I broke entirely.

VI.

It was at this point of breaking that I realized the truth which would set me free from the idea of myself: it was that I did not exist. Furthermore, that my life did not, and could not ever matter - simply because it did not exist. My consciousness, the shaming and stupidly pervasive force which it is, had convinced me, by way of certain ‘civilizing’

forces, that I had a name, a purpose, a reason to live - and all other sorts of petty human philosophizing over the pointless, abrupt, and short moment which is this one lifetime. I had dreams of being a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a writer - all of which I accomplished in my own twisted way, only to realize they meant nothing; furthermore, in that they meant nothing - that I had failed. I wanted desperately to create meaning, and all I had to do was to examine history in order to realize that there was none. There are two moments in and at which history becomes a turning point in the life of an individual: first when one has no idea that history exists, and second, when one realizes the entirety of history. Both of these are bodily experiences, which decimate the body with the condensed fire and speed of everything, at all times. It is at these moments one makes a choice, consciously or unconsciously

to mourn, or celebrate history as unending violence. Some choose to partake in this parade of burnings and bodies, joyously carving their names alongside the rest, who have been struck from this earth just the same… and some choose to turn away from this violence, insofar as it is possible. This, in so many words, is the struggle of the forces of good and evil in man, ongoing insofar as man continues to exist.

I wished, after my descent into madness, to become saintlike. Not insofar as the saints are glorified - this was part of my past dream as becoming an artist. I sought fame, without realizing that such a thing was impossible; a mirage. Upon the shattering of my dreams, I wished to renounce everything; first and foremost, the world. And thus I went about it. I shut myself away, only emerging to eat and to study, for the occasional walk; I worked and wrote in the privacy of my room. I exercised my body, my mind, and my soul without attachment, although constantly embattled by the desire to attach myself to pleasure and pain - and denounced myself repeatedly. And yet, I found no solace. I found that in my continued existence, I would continue to suffer. However, I had changed entirely. I regularly disregarded myself, took no heed to vanity, and ignored

greed. Did this make me a better person? Perhaps to one looking in from the outside. I, however, held the entirety of my history within me, aging rapidly, fearfully, and without climax.

It was in these slow and laughably self-regarding times that I took a lover, many times. It was, again, perhaps in the act of loving without the idea of love that I found the furthest extent of compassion and kindness on the earth - in the willful giving and taking of oneself and another. This, to me, appeared like the realization of a sacrament; this, to me, was part of sainthood. How could one be a saint without attending to each aspect of existence? I of course knew and know nothing of such a thing. I indulged because I wished to indulge, I took because I wished to take, and I ate because I wished to eat. My actions to me become a deluge of the past, taking on new names and contexts as I spew them like bile from my present and out into the field of my memory. Even there, in the place where I am supposed to know, I am supposed to see myself, my life, the same rules apply. I act as a thief even to myself.

VII.

In my vanity, I indulged in bouts of reflection, primarily regarding these lovers, who passed in and out of my life with irregularity, and with different emotion. I prized erotic sensation first, above all else… above intellect, god, and reason. I chose sex over food, I chose sex over honor, and I chose sex over any other form of wealth was put before me. I found passion to be located firmly in the desire to fuck and breed (even in the illusion of breeding), and this alone brought me solace in a world I otherwise despised and disregarded. I groomed myself, fed myself, bathed myself - if only to be sexually presentable, to sell myself sexually. It may not be apparent at first, but the entirety of business is the business of sex - the buying and selling of sex, the prostituting of the body, mind, and other miscellaneous organs of existence. It is as such that nothing cannot be sold

not the blood, not pleasure, not the heart itself. In this selling, one must be selective or risk death, and vice versa. I have seen in countless, seemingly innocuous environments of commerce - death by commerce. Trade slips into the soul like a lubricated hand or a surgeon’s knife, taking under the cover of darkness that which cannot be replaced, bought, or sold - that which cannot be seen, or spoken of. It is that sex is perhaps closest to the soul in that having sex with one that you love entirely is nothing short of total fulfillment, in the sensation of mutual penetration, the mixed violation of souls. I crave nothing else of this world; thus, I have never been a saint… but this is just a name, and another title for dead men.

How callously, after bouts of sensuality, passion, and shared kisses - have I discarded lovers? I discarded lovers like friends, like strangers, like trash, like nothing - with barely a word, barely a gesture, and never a tear. I did not see my passion ruled by the lover, I saw the lover as swept up into the storm of my passion, and cast out just as quickly. This love did not come about from a sacred bond, nor a devotion

but from a carnal desire, which too can be fulfilled. It is much like how a child loves a parent - for a brief moment the child is dependent on the parent, but even as this moment passes, the child may realize this love for what it is - physical and material dependence on the other for survival. I suckled on my mother’s breast, spent my father’s money, and for what? Can I say that I ever loved one upon whom I was dependent for survival? I saw this not as love, but as a sort of bound development - where I was given because I could not take for myself… a pity. For I am still just as pathetic as I was as an infant, yet now baring the carefully cultivated ability to survive by my own measures.

I saw my parents work constantly as a child - as they were raised in poverty, and quickly understood the virtue of working hard (which is no virtue at all, merely survival). They took to a life of obedience, a regular position, providing me with material comforts as a child. I was fed, I was given shelter, and I was schooled in a manner befitting

my stature as the child of two state employees. Bewildered by life for much of my childhood, I was thrust into myself at the tender age of sixteen by this primary awareness: that I was resentful of my birth. I was a quiet child, observing life from a distance, even from within my own body. I looked down upon myself, and chastised myself for every misdeed. I was my own god and my own judge, weak in my inability to punish and discipline myself, yet conscious of my continued suffering nonetheless. I could not move past the initial block of my impotence as being a child, yet was firmly aware of my wrongdoing, of my foolhardiness, and of the idiocy of my lack of experience. This inability was exacerbated by the way I was treated by others, as an object meant to be fondled, played with, and fed. Youth, to me, was defined primarily by this discord, coinciding with the meaningless brutality of the children around me towards one another. It is to say that children do not change, they just become emboldened.

VIII.

I learned early on from this treatment as socialization, not to trust any force outside of myself. In this manner I placed no faith in matters of the heart, nor of family or kinship. This became a tenet of renunciation. It must be said that this renunciation is no renunciation of goodwill or purity, but of disgust and betrayal - of and from the sensation that life itself is a mistake, a disappointment. If not from this foundational belief, of life as a meaningless stain on the blanket of time which in time will smother this text and all others - I would be dead. I found myself, unable to speak, unable to breathe, in hospital, faced with this decision at the age of twenty. I had spent the first portion of this year of my youth writing what would come to be my first book, which amounted to near utter nonsense. I spent days naked in my room, writing and doing nothing else but staring out the window. I would walk at night, talking to no one, observing the city. This time introduced me to the profound isolation which would become the rest of my life.

It is that human beings and animals learn from experience, not from the text. Even as I write these sentences now, I understand the futility borne within them like death itself, that they too will amount to nothing other than meaningless drivel, discarded with the rest, and condemned to oblivion. And perhaps this is where my sense of urgency emerges - from the total paradox of stupidity in the face of oblivion - where nothing can be said or done to surpass what amounts to this certain fate of death, dust, and silence. I speak because I find that I must in order to prevent from killing myself - nothing more and nothing less than that. I wander, I eat, I seethe, I perish. I see each morning and each night as the bookends of my life, and I continue in this fashion until the final morning; the final night.

For what is it to acquire the world? I look to the revolving door of commodities, trends, fashions, and new iterations of gold that have come in and out of my life like lovers - and what do they amount to? I see those with massive wealth chasing shadows which they mistake for themselves, which they mistake for love; which they mistake for power. The only power is the awareness that power does not exist. The only meaning of life is that life is meaningless. To understand these essential paradoxes in one’s body is a gift only experience can provide; it allows for life to begin and unfurl in the total awareness of death. I have nothing of my lovers but my memory of them; nothing of my dreams but the loss of them. I leave as I arrived - empty handed and screaming.

IX.

For a time, I went away to study. I spent some time in the Northeast, where the weather astonished me. I could breathe, and each season was like a spell. I wrote often, and experienced what I considered to be something monumental - connection. I associated with those who thought about the things that I thought about, read the

things I wanted to read, and wanted to be artists, writers, romantics. I arrived at the impressionable age of sixteen, and succeeded to immerse myself in what I thought was to be forever - yet lasted just a year.

It was for this year and this year alone that I felt alive, that there was the possibility of my dreams. I am grateful to have had this, and yet it tortures me to have experienced even the hint of fulfillment. I have come close, in isolated moments, to this sensation; they too perish like fire - as quickly as they came. To have come close to such things is to know them as intimately as one might know death - for to experience fulfillment is to die, as such things are not possible. To have such a thing would be to stop time entirely. I must now accept that I am just as improbably alive as these moments are dead. To get to this point, one must desecrate the notion of sentiment, of fond memory, of the attachment to memory. So often I find myself gravitating towards the reconsideration of pleasure and beauty through the mind’s eye as indulgence, and find myself neglecting the moment. No more!

I follow in the footsteps of those before me: of impotence and of the struggle against that which I will eventually succumb. I wish to elevate myself above my station - which is always the attempt to make oneself immortal. The desire to accumulate material, influence, and power is the desire to extend oneself beyond oneself, into many. I cannot turn a blind eye to this aspect of myself, the part of me which clamours for recognition, pouts in the face of obscurity, and gleefully rejoices when acknowledged. It is precisely these aspects of the material self, which if left unrecognized, wreak havoc on the soul and the lives of others. It is, deep down, the awareness that the life of the body is lowly and pitiful, decaying and brief, that unleashes a world of fearful struggle upon the delicate balance of life beyond the individual. This internal struggle against the meaningless terror of passing

through life into death is the same struggle that builds empires, razes cities, and lashes out violently against others. To understand this principle of life is to succumb to it, to lament it, to mourn death before dying; to eventually give up on the dream of life altogether.

Perhaps I am writing this text as a means of reaching out to another who feels similarly, across space and time. I feel that life means nothing, and yet treasure it dearly. I have a haughty disdain for the world, yet find myself living entirely within it. I wish to be a better person, and yet regularly find myself succumbing to sin, gluttony, and boredom. It is that I cannot escape myself; in the writing of this text pit love against sin, time against dreams, and death against nothingness. I cannot parse out these principal forces of life in any real or meaningful way; yet I feel them arbitrarily crash up against the shores of my soul and my fate. I drift through them, a dreamer amidst yet another dream, catastrophically large, lulling me to sleep in its wave from pain to abyss and back again. I render myself as a sculpture in the text, carving away at my imperfections and insecurities leaving only the body as a wound against the horizon, a blank background at which I leave myself and my work time and time again. I return here to mourn, to scratch away at my skin, to pick at my past, and to pray for something, some future, something better than this. For in the entirety of this life I have experienced nothing if not total ineptitude, clumsiness in literature, love, and all things. I balance precariously between this life and the next, rendering each moment as catastrophic; yet each moment passes in near silence. I speak only to myself, even when speaking with others.

Each person holds to their identity like an icon. I hold mine as nonexistent, along with the rest of the icons of the world. I cannot yet see myself clearly enough to be firmly anything; yet, I criticize all that I am not. I believe this is part of the inability to physically become what the soul already is - a part of everything. This constant becoming - of the body reaching toward the soul - is cosmically that which is the

universe, and the entirety of history - a story of futility, in the inability of life to speak to that which it is composed of. One might gesture towards this composition through science or music, but this gesture may yet only brush up against the already complete expression of life in the entirety of itself. To believe you are something is to create a bound of self manifested in relation to world where there is none. This myth of individuality, uniqueness, and specificity is an essential component to creating and maintaining a market of free individuals consuming freely. To participate in this market, one must believe not only in the importance of the market in and for sustaining life (and the importance of ‘human’ life, as it were), but in the importance of one’s own life in relation to the market. This is the success of culture and advertisement, where everything is catered to the individual, and the individual is always you. This text owes a debt to that myth in its unshakable bondage to it. I write from this place, the place of self creation as narrative making as the forcible justification of life to capital. To assemble a text that is many parts and many elements, fundamentally, exists as a claim justifying itself to itself, and itself to the world. I assert this text as a text against the world - where, in fact, in its sheer existence, is an affirmation of the existence of the world as it were. This text is a testament to a modernity which has sculpted me, and many.

XI.

To write is to submit an icon of time. All that one might do in a text is to bring about the spirit of the age in a word or two. To do any more is artifice, and to do any less is artifice. I find myself deeply attracted to literature that expresses life, and furthermore, alludes to the secrets of life; the taboo strangeness of experience. To accomplish this as a writer is to reveal, in detailed simplicity, life to itself and those who experience it - in language. One must not succeed or shortchange life in this denotation - but use words in their fullness, as one might fill a cup to the brim - not a drop

more, or less. To accomplish this deserves no praise - but the work becomes in need of examination, perhaps by some desperate heart. For to read a book in my time is to admit a sort of desperation and urgency; to appeal to a time past, in a form past, for some solace that one cannot find with the availing tools of the present. I submit that this form remains contemporary, albeit with some much needed changes. The modern novel might be written from the nonexistent ‘I’, the perspective of the total individual, yet slowly sheering away at the I until the reader and author are synthesized in a simultaneous process of translation. This translation is nothing short of the translation of life. The task of the writer in modernity is to cut away at all of the excess, flagrant luxury of the text - and present the reader with life as a conferred experience.

For it is certain that the myth of the individual must not only die, it must change in death. This myth, once shattered, will either coalesce into a pool of indiscernible madness - or change forms, developing into a concept of greater unity: the unity of the soul of life which flows through all things. The modern consciousness is mired in the concept of the individual as existent; all modern economies obey this principle of self-servitude. However, this concept of the self as individual is a gross misinterpretation: the individual is merely the vessel for the self, which does not exist on the plane of the physical world. I introduce the physical world in this text as a means for myself and others to latch on and release, just the same. This is an exercise that must be repeated within the self ad infinitum, for as long as one remains in this mode of existence. When I embody this plane, I notice a marked change in my manner.

For it is that each of these voices acts as a character; unabridged by notions of embodiment. I, myself exist as the declarative statement, bold and vicious; the self does not partake. It is in this sense that the notion of the individual is collapsed within each person - that the voice takes on many forms and apparitions, depending on circumstance,

condition, and situation. I have seen people transform in the added consideration of a friend, the subtraction of a lover, the formation of a family, the death of a community - in ways that render them unrecognizable to the world (here, myself included). It is clear to me that by and through situations, people are formed, broken, and formed once more. There is no firm definition behind the assertion of oneself, beyond the desire to assert such things as an anchor, or tether, to world.

XII.

I can no longer distract myself with the things of the world. No film, no book, no pleasure can bring me to the point of escape from that which I have found. I am indifferent to this knowledge - although sometimes I am angered by it, saddened by it, made buoyant by it - but it has left me with no place to leave… precisely because it has left me with no place to stay. Without individuality, without home, I am left to wander entirely without definition. I have nowhere to return to, precisely because I came from nowhere. I live only in the act of writing, and entomb myself in the remains of this act. I allude briefly to moments of personal history if only to inform the realization that this personal history brought me to. I attempt to write a novel if only to confirm my suspicions that I cannot. Instead, what remains is a drawn out plea, a plea written like one who is dead begging the living. I ask that you degrade your own life, stripping away the pretense of yourself. I ask that you question your morals, stripping away the pretenses of goodness and righteousness that you claim to embody. I ask that you listen to the self, and make no claim to the possession of such a thing. What can be accomplished in such a task is the burning away of the socialization of the self; the humanization of the animal. In such a process, the values and virtues of civilization may well be realized to be illusions.

I inscribe this plea if only because it is the last of that which I am able to write, the essence of that which I attempt to communicate. I do not wish to command nor issue direction, but simply to appeal to that which lies beyond the idea of ‘I’, ‘mine’, and ‘your’. These rhetorical devices, if not simply convenient, create an insidious boundary, or border, between one life and another. Manufacturing this discernibility of life allows for life to be made ordered, valued, and arranged. It is from this difficulty that the culture of discipline is created - the bending of one to the will of another. It to this form by which culture itself (in its myriad forms) is bent by economy - or that which dictates survival. From these chained submissions, springs value.

XIII.

To insurrect the grounds of these philosophies made actions proves the human-animal ability to change seemingly massive conditions by seemingly small conscious action. Each of these systems of value enforcement and commodity trade is rooted in belief - in belief in concepts like the individual, the child, the authority figure, human nature, morality, and virtue. To establish these beliefs in and at the foundation of civilization is to simultaneously create a culture (ecosystem) of and for these beliefs to exist as material conditions, and to gather people together under these conditions to worship the icons of civilization who uphold these values. I journey through them like a wounded soldier, slashing away at them with the terrible grace of one who knows that their destruction is not of my time.

And yet, I feel as though I am a child. I know now that it is not the world I cannot bear, but those who inhabit it. I relegate myself to my room, writing, reading, and bearing what remains of my time like a sentence. I do not understand the concept of freedom in this world – a world where self obsession and the brutality of subjugation as a game of power enforce life. I use the term game because, at the root, I do believe it to be a sort of sick

game, or joke, that those who can force on those who cannot. I see myself as being pulled by two poles: the rich pay in boredom for that which the poor pay in blood. I cannot state it with any more malevolent simplicity. The two great crimes of wealth come first in the taking, and second in the malicious enforcing of wealth. When I walk on the streets of the city, I watch the tragedy of law enforcement as subjective mechanism: the arrest of the homeless, drug users; forced removal of the poor as rent prices rise. The rich laze in this environment; they own the streets upon which there is no space for others to exist, crowding out all possible life. I see this occurring in line with the technologization of speed in the modern world – creating a fascism which can act with increasing force, due to these expedited methods of surveilance and enforcement of law. I leave my room and am at risk of weeping; breaking down into this total despair that I have been avoiding – if not due to exposure to that which I know to be true. I look into the eyes of those dressed in beautiful clothes, strolling the boutiques, lazing in the expensive restaurants… and I see the malice of boredom. I look into the eyes of the beggars and children on the streets, and I see the pain of hope. It is nothing short of a privilege that one can afford to not hope to survive; furthermore, an indicator of a kind of submerged fulfillment which I all too often see perverted into the violence of ability. I see a modern culture that not only celebrates, but promotes the exorcism of pain, humiliation, anger – out onto the other. This projection is the creation of racial hatred, hatred of the poor – as dehumanization. I realize that I am stating the painfully obvious…

XIV.

The crux of this issue remains in the creation and dissemination of currency as arbiter of value – both ideological and in the firm material of paper, flesh, and otherwise. In the digitization of institutions such as credit and debit, this suture becomes with increasing difficulty – to

regard the border between the ideological and material manifestations of currency as system of structuring and enforcing reality – is challenging. This technological turn comes too with the practical continued industrialization of the means of producing this reality – a reality in which the raw materials are outsourced, the factories are outsourced, the labor is outsourced, and produced with total rhetorical disregard. These conditions, in which life is always lived elsewhere, too breed total alienation, the sense of lack of control, meaninglessness. To not only have to negotiate the dissociation of life from life by the means of paper currency, but furthermore, by a second reality enforced digitally – is to balance scales on three planes of regulation – all of which communicate the same essential message: one must work to survive if one does not possess capital. This work has too extended into the digital realm, connected at extremity with digital sex work, and other forms of bodily exploitation and use vis a vis the internet. The means of producing and reproducing capital as value embodiment have, by virtue of their drive to total purity in synthesis of ideological and material embodiment – altogether created other climates and spheres in which the same values of discipline may be replicated and embodied by other means.

In this sense, there is no freedom in a ‘globalized’ world, just as there was none in a ‘localized’ one – if not only a stronger illusion of freedom as possible, where, in fact, this very notion of possibility is enforced by the political realities which allowed for such a movement to take place. This is to say that the entirety of the world, as constituted by itself, is controlled by those who constitute it. There is no democracy to the creation and proliferation of ideology as becoming-political-reality – for if one examines the means by which content is created and enforced as flowing through channels and streams of information as popular (information as allowed by government), it becomes clear that value is not only created as discipline, but furthermore, that it is enforced through discipline. To examine discipline as a term as itself a channel for civilizations of control to

enact politics aesthetically and culturally – is to press into the fabric which composes modernity.

XV.

I argue that discipline, above any other political, aesthetic, or cultural consideration – is that which composes the modality of governance as a mechanism by which societies are organized as hierarchies of value and worth. That the physical principle of discipline is the transfer of force from a mass moving at and from a speed and distance, into, onto, and about another mass – which otherwise is incapable, or unwilling – to match this transfer of force. There are, immediately, locally, the implications of sexuality and violence bound up in this equation. In the stripping away of that which might be conceived of as modern technologies; the stripping away of the streams and channels of diversion of human energy into enforced labor and digitized disembodiment – there is that which is left as the immediate embodiment, and the faculties of this immediate embodiment. The sutures of power function to add appendages, or prostheses, to this always decaying body in the form of instruments as weaponry (military technologies, economies of wealth creation and enforcement). It is then to say that to exist in a culture which structures life as discipline, is to live in and under the total weaponization of everything – of life, of dreams, of family, of art, of love. At root, the human body, the animal body, that which seeks embodiment, living/dead/and otherwise – is instrumentalized to fulfill discipline as method, or process of civilization. The beating heart of governance as the synthesis of private and public interest affirms and guides this process, as and at the dis/juncture of power.

The need to protect and affirm one’s identity in and under this climate is obvious and apparent – because one’s identity is at once one’s identity in and under the state, and one’s sense of self – which is subjugated by the enforcement of state identification and record (or lack thereof) as an

indicator of that which is human, and that which is otherwise. It is not only that (in and under this process) identity is manufactured as a singularity (this form itself as an enforcement of singularity), but that identity and embodiment are then turned into symbols of self, humanity, worth, and value. It is the process of civilization which turns the body into a signifier, denoted by capital possessed, dispossessed, embodied, and disembodied.

The locus of the body is essential to this process because it distills that which is deeply human – this is to say, that which is possible in, about, and by the ‘human’ body at any given point in time – and that which is technologized by human beings and human systems which continually regenerate and reaffirm the human as value. However, the desire to possess, dominate, sexually violate, humiliate, and destroy that which one despises, reviles, and otherwise – does not leave these increasingly technlogized systems; nor does it breed out of hyper-industrialization. Instead, one finds oneself within a truly liberal order – one which declares and upholds technological ‘progress’ as proof of the ‘progress’ of humanity as civilizational project. The desperate lie of goodness and growth as in linear correspondence and development with time and technologization is the crime of liberalism – as, itself, fascism with a ‘kind’ face.

To open up the world to the values of capital is to globalize the principle that money buys ability – the ability, first and foremost, to transgress anything and anyone - at will. The continually exposed and disposed evidences of sex trafficking, rape, and enslavement at the hands of the rich and powerful across national borders – in networks of co- operation – are literalizations of this process in action. For the desires to dominate, subjugate, and forcibly take are not merely taught:

'No ant-heap... no abolition of poverty, no organization, will save humanity from... transgression. It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness that evil lies deeper in

human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose, that no social structure will eliminate evil, that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that sin arise(s) from the soul itself; finally that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there cannot be either physicians or final judges.' - Dostoevsky

XVI.

To insurrect to the root of cruelty is to lose the ability to theorize politics, and to begin to question the foundations of animality. I experience the urge to violence frequently; particularly the violence of sexual control. To be in total possession of my sexual partner, to come up against the edge of death with my sexual partner. This push to the edge of carnality into mortality perhaps has more to do with the pervasive valuation of life as anything beyond violent, brief, and sexually meaningless. Cultures of meaning-making as life and living – from work as virtue, to families, to the arts, to the formation of communities and friendships (which do not primarily exist for the fulfillment and engagement of sexuality and sex acts) – continually crop up as methods of disabusing life of itself; life as a waste of time, and time to waste. The frictive movement of life between boredom and fear of death or violent action (the sex act, driving a car, eating) is constant and unabating – as the animal oscillates from periods of rest (albeit unsettling rest) and labor either for the fulfillment of oneself, or (always increasingly) the fulfillment of another. These actions themselves might in turn be ordered, or put into place – as actions which either prolong life or disabuse it of itself; furthermore, as actions which project this process onto others. The concept of violence against the self and violence against the other are inextricably fused to this dichotomy.

XVII.

In the sexual act, along with the acts of rape and murder – human beings and animals come the closest to the border of these life prolonging and life disabusing acts – exemplified obviously in these acts being effected onto the body of another. To examine these acts, in coalition with acts like suicide and self mutilation – is to examine violence in its most direct and immediate form. The acts of suicide and self mutilation defy the drive to life itself, and thus might be conceived of as truly, deeply, and foundationally – irrational. There are certainly conditions in which rape and murder in the pursuit of pleasure, power, control, and wealth are materially rational. In the act of suicide, the soul attempts to disabuse itself of life – which apparently, and materially – consist of mind, body, and world.

The manner in which this violence – the violence of life and having to live – is directed – is crucial to insurrecting the connection between the creation of political and material realities, and the imagination of these realities. In the same way as violent sexual fantasies are imagined as taboo and transgressive by civilization as a force of cultural normalization, these actions are enabled by civilization by way of the accumulation of currency as power. Furthermore, the criminalization of sexual acts like homosexuality, and gender acts like transsexuality – which operate by way of local consent by social law - create and inform the locus of power as total dictation of life – above and beyond any agreement between two individuals. This collectivization of life is the same collectivization, or consolidation of power and resources, which creates and continually reaffirms the conditions of enslavement, racism, and class imprisonment.

To see the consensual act of and between two individuals in direct opposition with the act of force (of one individual against another) – structures a relational dialectic of consent and coercion by material and/or ideological means. This coercion includes ideological repression by state organs and

actors, and enforced, physical oppression by state organs and actors. Again, this collectivization of coercion is the same means by which the murder of one individual is sanctioned, if not celebrated – while the murder of another is mourned, and punished. This also applies to the sexual act.

XVIII.

At the essence of rape and murder; perhaps what makes these acts so appalling, is that they are non-consensual violations of the person – not only violating the physical, but the mental, and spiritual essence of the individual by way of the physical. There is, however, a difference between rape, murder, and enslavement – which too classes them as mechanisms of brutality – whether or not the human being in question remains alive ‘after’ the completion of the act. I do not believe that there is an ‘after’ of any of these acts, as they live on as primary and foundational violations of selfhood. Murder, certainly, is the death of the body, while rape is the use of the body for a sexual purpose (after which the body is discarded), and enslavement is the mechanism of harnessing the body for sexual and ‘practical’ purposes for an extended period of time. However, what unifies these acts is the unleashing of force necessary to accomplish these tasks – the subjugation of another human being. The massive wooden ships which sailed the Middle Passage, overflowing with human cargo; the process of rape and murder – the use of force by one body to take possession of another body.

"The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to." – Weil

And this is how poets love: with cruel distance.

America has no hand with which to see your tears But two bloody stumps, swollen in wood Her limbs cast by the water where her prisoners lay They too swollen; soaking in mud

Her bloated face in violent heat; Turned away in a pitiless sigh As she casts the iron corpse of fate - Down from a shivering sky

And in her withering age, she swallows and screams For more flesh to fill her gouty hand, As she shovels the whole of her children into her mouth Charged by Saturn's command

She feeds to stoke the furnace Of the fires which fuel the world Where those charged to pay the debt of life Under mortal coil do unfurl

Now what plea could possibly be heard Amidst the chaos of civilization she has come to wreak The cries of hunger and pain swallowed in silent void Where shit and dirt do streak The cloth at which she lays their flesh To feast in carnivorous joy Hogs and the faces of men alike Litter her corpulent breast as she eats her fill Glasses of sweet wine mixed with the souls of those Formerly in her employ

And yet she pushes away her plate For this game is too aching to keep - The souls of men are tiresome; they struggle and they speak

And thus they are discarded Like some unpleasant fling The mothers and children of the world Cast out of the city's sling in order to hold The aching weight of her fading breath -

An arrhythmic and tremulous thing The body of a python filled; Masked with hydra's head

She struggles to her chamber Gassy and dismayed For now she has no arms nor legs With which to torture that which she has won And for her torture is but play

She has won the nothing of the world By treachery and machines - And as she lays down upon her dying bed She swallows and she screams.

i had no ambition but to love but 'i' had never lived 'i' just being this name given to me by a jester-god banging his fists on the kitchen table like a child

and that 'i' died inside me like an aborted breath smothered by the hand of the trees, of the air, and all that exists before breath

so i travelled for some time lost in the woods of my mouth all castrated tongues and noise the war drum of my organs begging to survive

first, i wrote from a place of desire: from wanting to be known, wanting to be loved, wanting to be seen, and wanting to be heard. then, i did not know that i could not be loved. furthermore, i did not know that 'i' did not exist.

once i found out that 'i' did not exist, i wrote from a place of despair. i wrote from a place of mourning 'my' self, from a place of pining for that illusion which i had come to believe. it was not that i had stopped believing; but that i could not stop believing, for fear of the loss of everything.

after i stopped believing, i wrote from a place of no longer: no longer against, no longer existent, no longer mourning, no longer in search of liberation, no longer struggling against bondage. i wrote, if only, to return to the place which i was, and 'i' was not; for that place has neither come nor gone - but in my struggle, i was blind to it.

now, i write with the grace of the meaninglessness of writing, the fortitude of hopelessness, and the beautiful stupidity of that which fades before it could ever be inscribed. within the chance of writing, there is palpable infinity.

it is not enough to refer to this or that thing this or that love but for the disavowal of symbols altogether and as such this letter to you ends abruptly and without witness as the days fail and that delicate allusion of my body collapses beneath the weight of time and other things

and now i do observe in the light which is the absence of that which one might call that which is this regular composition woven into the fabric of eternity like a covering, like a chair, like a veil, like eternity and look how i lapse into metaphor! chasing after my tail like a dog for all tails of beings are the tails of gods tracing patterns of passage as rocks in the water of this, time for it is nothing short of a great joy to be regular; you were there, asleep, all along an inimitable fire burning in the vestiges of your soul; the room alight without your knowledge for, now, we all must be without knowledge

once you saw yourself as a god, as a demon as liberated, as bound and flung yourself down onto the rocks (that which you were) perishing for quite some time for these are the vagabonds of the soul, and this is where the vagabonds of the soul lay before they ceased to exist, entirely

for the vagabonds of the soul must die -

all these bodies are that and the careless love of saints does not matter to us now (nor does romantic love)

all that matters is dancing and the illumination of rooms. you stomp your foot in time and existence becomes laughable is it for this that we must pay? the creditors say that we are in debt and governors say that we are ungovernable but we laugh at them, too covered in the elements of life so thoroughly that it appears they are adorned in jewels for they are; such wealth cannot be easily mistaken.

let us take from them everything for we know that this everything is nothing to the one who knows such things.

i am not a poet of illusion there are no beautiful words within me no fantastic, blinding images only despair and the toil of everyday life. this is not to say there is not poetry in everyday life, no - but that the poetry is belied by suffering and those who stand on street corners saying to no one in particular ‘i had no ambition but to love’ life goes on...

those who feel that blinding rage at death the catalytic, seething hole which pounds against the brain and pulses against the far reaches of the extremities - aching to merge again with the earth are not wrong one should feel rage at death and then die, willingly for if one is not able to prostrate oneself before god - there is no cure or remedy for that illness.

do not be concerned with striking at the root of that which is common for that which is common is also commonly understood, commonly shared, and perfect in its regularity. for it is that things like bread and the sun approach god - ubiquitous in their existence, for now.

for soon, the world will cease to exist entirely - and this is something that - at first - is to be lamented. there is an initial sadness at separation and loss, stemming from the illusion of attachment the warm breath of a lover, the taste of good food, the loving words of a mother - but at the heart of these embodiments there is nothing but disembodiment. for if one is to acknowledge the existence of the world, one must also acknowledge that this existence is founded on nonexistence.

do not seek to see. instead walk this path without vision, without hope; for without hope, one may also be without fear - and in turn, existence and nonexistence may become one, for all things are in intercourse perpetually. if that which does not exist perishes, this death will create a great friction cutting at the ears of even ghosts, and shaking the hollows of the body for one cannot possibly know that true god - the simultaneous birth and death the fluid which seeps from the flesh, and the apparent contradiction therein.

for soon, the world will cease to exist entirely - if it has not already perished. if this song of the always nothingness cannot be heard, it certainly cannot be transcribed - for it breaches sound and speech in its total contradiction.

for even the flow of blood is powered by this mechanism the sheer forces of lust and desire, which strike a breaking backbeat against the walls of civilization - the armies of the flesh, hunger - civilization! this too, is of nonexistence built up into the chorus of a silent scream from one pole of the world to the next and this reverberation is the ground.

(for there was a murder by the river there, once. it was forgotten.)

there is no use in attempting to save this world, to do this or that in it, or amongst it - for it is a mere concept, a common knowledge less common than one might expect - for it is rather difficult to know of that which does not exist

like asking a lover why they love, or a poet what a poem means. if it is true, it is meaningless.

there are not enough bottles of wine in the world to become this drunk, nor are there enough songs to sing which might furrow away this despair. i have had enough of the idea of the world, and the ideas of the people in it - themselves desperate for themselves; pissing away god.

MOVE AWAY FROM THE EGO AND DO NOT BE BORN AGAIN

i was born into a world without myself; like many who came before me i was disjected into a wilderness of desire, where i loved and lost forever in the cyclical immanence of forgetting.

there was no punishment for the crime of my coming and going from life - other than that agony of repeated movement, which was handed down like a lashing from the throne of myself, down upon the back of someone else and someone else again, as i was reborn perpetually into unknowing -

as someone who was not possessed - as someone who was not myself.

for to be possessed is not to be held by the spirit, but rather to be convinced of the illusion of possession. in such a world, dispossession is that which is left to beggars and refugees. it was this conviction of beholding which blinded me to my true condition.

it was a city of the mind, not a city of sight a city of a thousand invisible bodies - in which i was held captive and questioned by police of my own conjuring; sentenced by the judiciaries of my own law; bound until, finally, i was put down by the executioner of that invisible city, the executioner who wielded my own hand, and wore my own face.

in a dream, i built the world which i sought so desperately to destroy;

in turn, i composed the actor who wandered among the ruins of it, along with the appearance of all things which cloaked and troubled that figuration.

into the world of the senses i went; there, i was cast out from being. in my pleasurable submission to the appearance of life, i did not truly live.

for i mistook life to be that which one is born into and dies out of, like the perseverance of a flame, or the illusion that the sun has gone - when it has merely turned beneath the horizon - a place of one into another; a place of perpetual loss.

in my procession through the elemental world, the churnings of the sea (which held the fluid of my organs) - too churned my organs, throwing me from the body in pain. i writhed in agony, beating the body, cursing the body, and finally, these churnings (which were only the struggle of my mind) exhausted the body entirely. as i journeyed through the night, i lost consciousness; in this perceived loss, i washed up on the shore of myself. it was this enemy i ceaselessly fought, the enemy of that which is built upon nothingness by a mind which does not recognize that which it is - a mind which is no different than the body; no different than all appearance and disappearance - where composition and decomposition are merely ideas, gathered into a scene, pertaining to the conceptualized existence of the body as an entity, separate from something else.

no, my love did not have a name nor a face then - i did not see or know. rather, it was that which the poet speaks of when he speaks of palestine, or the light of the moon, or the breath of a lover - for breath is that which reveals becoming when drawn out and cast upon the night sky. as a youth i heard its echoes; i searched for it, desperately without avail.

for there is no deeper love than the realization that there is not love, nor is there soul, nor mind, nor body, nor that pleasure promised by the countless men who trade in worldly things. no wealth can achieve this love of no love at all, nor is there a skill that can be learned to surpass it - it simply is

dumb as a rock, naive as an infant; terrible as a storm. for we know these things by that which they are called; futhermore, by the repute of their names among our peers.

it is as such that the self concept is fashioned - by way of a mutual conviction of the imagination, a contractual attachment between the unaware mind and that which the unaware mind sees as beyond it, or other to it. the idea that there is anything other than mind is false; this idea enables the illusion of world to be 'born', although we know that processes such as birth and death are unreal conceptions.

for this 'mind' is merely the medium of reality; in its unaware state, it desperately seeks a code by and through which to bring about the experience of itself - in order to examine and understand life.

the aware mind witnesses itself and laughs. it does not conceive of birth nor does it conceive of death. it does not conceive of pain nor does it conceive of pleasure. it does not feel bondage nor does it feel liberation. it does not find meaning in conception, nor does it take conception seriously.

what is there to be said of what is not? what dance is there to be performed? what great show of that art of living must be put on, in order to appease the gods, lovers, or family? it is into this state of exhaustion which the ego throws itself, whirling and delighting in its appearance, yet blind to the futility of its dance. what is the point of worldly accomplishment? when there is no world to be found; when that which is found crumbles like dust before the eyes, before the hands it is such that the head could be severed at the neck, the limbs at their roots, and the organs removed from the body - and yet the spirit could remain, unjarred!

this is the great art.

this is a drawing of the body of the soul. it does not have arms, nor does it have legs. it is artless; perfect in its artlessness.

the body of the soul, to some may appear as a wrathful demon, or many wrathful demons - but we know that there is no such thing as images.

the body of the soul is disembodied, decapitated and disemboweled from figuration. the body of the body is emptied, leaving the light of awareness to itself.

why does the traveler lament? he wanders the unlit plane praising that lamp which he is without. what is that lamp? that lamp is the knowledge that the unlit plane exists only for its existence to cease - as a bridge for that which is to become aware of itself; for that which is not to reconcile itself with that which is, in a true union of form and formlessness.

why does the traveler lament? he does not see that which is not, for his eye is not trained properly. he grasps at the shadow of his mind; he is tortured by the spiraling thought and the past deed. he cannot outlive his actions; thus he laments.

if only he would ask, 'why is it that i cannot see that which is, but that which is not apparent?' for in reply he would hear, 'the eye of the eye is that which sees what is existent, but disapparent.' for the learned understand that this is not a riddle, merely a call from beyond the sensational.

do not examine the flesh without understanding that the beatific aspects of the flesh do not come from the flesh as it adorns the body, graceful like a coat or a garment - but that the flesh is that which houses that which houses the soul, and that this container is not that which is the traveler.

it is in this way that cats are of divinity and consciousness (when one is not conscious of consciousness) functions as a mechanism of deception when left unattended by awareness.

the mind is fertile, and may be influenced in many ways; by many hands at that.

of these hymns, the dead chant; the particles which compose everything and nothing become it.

it is in this sense that one may hear the prayers of the dead - they do not rise from the earth no, they hum from beyond-space like a chorus, or a fever.

these notes, embodied as they are by vibration, in a tangible symphony do not emerge from one such notable mouth to be lauded or spoken of.

to move away from the world of images is to no longer take the world at its word for who would believe a deceiver? one who tears at and renders asunder the senses, stripping them bare with time; proving them fallible, and untrue. no, to move away from the world of images is to no longer take the sensorium at its word; to question the symbolic language of experience, the passions who take the form and names of lovers. if one is called away from such a place, it is not a siren call, no, but a call of the self to itself, a telegram regarding some pressing matter which cannot be spoken of right now, yet is occurring at this very moment. to be called away from things is to be called to examine them; it is in this fashion that distance becomes an awareness of the body; cognition becomes the dialogue of the soul with itself.

i write this missive in the hope that you will learn to die before death for that which does not exist has only the cruelty of illusion to offer be clear of it now; out with the body! out with the senses! out with the forgetting, sleep of life! into the knowledge that eats forgetting, that knowledge which prevents the passed soul from crawling back into some permeant womb

for here, life has prolapsed itself; this illusion of beyond has created us: this you of which i speak and the foolish dance which we proceed. to be born into this world is not to be born, nor is it to be of the world - but rather to be exposed to the appearance of severance, and the experiential suffering of the flesh, organs, and mind. i would not wish this birth upon you, the soul, but it is only through this birth that we learn such things as this.

to redeem life, one must realize that it is not life that has led us to this point, but the compounded illusion which has convinced you and i that these are our bodies, that these are our minds, our senses, and, ultimately, our nothingness -

all that which comes before knowledge; the lamp cloaked by the opaque black veil of that which one calls knowledge, but reveals itself to be only that which one thinks one knows.

for you and i have lived in this world for some time; we have loved, eaten, rejoiced, and drank wine.

together, we have felt suffering; in this suffering came to know that we inhabit the same body; that we spill the same blood. the uninitiated spill that blood for sport, not realizing that they drain themselves and kill the soul. for you and i, this malice cannot go on; this bloodsport must cease for our souls, and through this obscured path toward knowledge we travel, weary, and in search of rest.

i write this missive in the hope that you will learn to die before death for that which does not exist has only the cruelty of illusion to offer -- be clear of it now.

all of these many moments which have piled up like salt atop our laps all of these moments are of that with which we must part to come to an understanding, you and i of different castes, of different lives, of different beings - knowing that we are of that fundamentally same essence - the essence of a chair, or an apple, or a field in which a great poet, long ago, compelled us to meet and discuss the affairs of our lives; ultimately, what lies beyond them.

for it is that phenomenon - that which lies beyond - it is that which is of great interest to us, you and i, being of that which seeks after itself. i use the metaphor again of the dog chasing after its tail - only in order to appeal to the futility of our engagement, as scientists, thinkers, and spectators of the soul - not to mock the artlessness of this endeavor.

yet, we are artless, you and i, lost to our inability to understand ourselves, let alone one another. if we had the armaments, we would certainly war. instead, we use our love as an excuse to rebuke one another with words, spite, and hate - hate! which is so easily conjured - particularly when one considers the one she loves.

but we are weak; without language with which we might communicate the storm of passion which torments and confounds our bodies and our souls. this passion is merely the life of the soul, crying out for release!

as dogs chasing their tails, we do not yet understand that

language is not necessary to grant the soul presence in our lives; that divinity merely requires the understanding that none of this is necessary, yet we struggle and lament nonetheless! and tell ourselves that this is what it means to be human. if only we knew how wrong we were, you and i!

we did not take notice of the time, for it was that we sat so as to know one another and we became that which was both of us. it was not a long time, nor was it brief - this time that we were alive in the world.

we did not take notice of the time, for it was that the time ceased to exist in our awareness; the ages and days of strife and war passed us by without resistance we, like two rocks, obstructing the passage of water; the water laughs.

to cure this weakness of mind (as mind is that which obstructs knowledge), each is prescribed a medicine in accordance with the digestive ability. some may be prescribed goat's milk, others chocolate, others - fasting and prayer. for there is no easy way to this end, which is the curing of the spirit of the world.

it is like this:

to feed the gross body salt, and store it away to prove the corpse nature of this body.
to lash the hands and feet, so that the sense-world experiences pain but that the spirit remains undisturbed.
to be thrown into darkness, but to realize that there is also a witness to the darkness one has found.

each of these measures may act as a way; now step through the bodies as one who contemplates the transience of the soul through this world, aged; apparent as the seasons: each conceding the former, that which it was not.

death to the world of images! death to the celebration of the desirous, apparent world. death to the decadence of painting. death to the spectacle of cinema. death to the erotics of photography. death to the culture of the flesh.

life to the flesh of the flesh! the blood of the blood, the eye of the eye, the mouth of the mouth, the mind of the mind, and that which lies beyond the false paradise of the many planes of artifice!

who knows how many times we have been reborn into love, falling in and out of it faster than the beat of the hummingbird's wing. you and i were married once, under garlands of white flowers in the springtime it was as such; look what we have made: for the branch and the flower come together to make the garland; it is the garland alone which breaks or sustains through the ceremony of life.

who knows how many times we have lived together, making children and making love - for in those lives we had a say as to our fate: as smiths, as merry-makers, as common men. but now, this is not our fate. this love travels a different path: through bramble and traversing steep rock, proclaiming its destiny like a child - for we are children again, you and i, holding this lamp as it casts a long shadow over our chests; the steady, shallow breathing of a fever passes over us... but do not fret! this fever is merely the passion of life; it is brief.

it was from this thing that made us children that in turn we made children with; as they aged - we aged with them. we became less able to make love, and came to fear the day at which we would be separated; thrown from this mortal coil into the sheer abyss. our children grew old. it was this fear that changed our love; in this life we became lovers of a different kind.

Everything A Waiting Midnight / Coming Into the Bone

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