Meditations

Name: Meditations
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME VI: MEDITATIONS

CONTENTS

Comprehending the Historical Moment: Jerusalem, Israel, and the Creation of God on Earth
What It Is To Be ‘Within’ Culture
The Harnessing of Menos
The Slave Ship as the Re-Productive Condition of Industrial Modernity
The First and Last Mistake
The Play of Nations; The Militarization of Consciousness
Julie Mehretu’s Cairo
The Confounded Motive
Notes on the Psychic Being
The Stone of the Law
The Erotics of Chan(c/g)e
The Play of Forces as ‘Embodiments’
The Acid of Dissolution
The Maps of Spring: Monk, Mingus, Coltrane
When You Gesture, You Are A Poet
The Music of the Light
The Philosophy That Is Greater Than Death
On The Concept of Language
The Being Without Existence
The Soul and the Form
The Black Paintings
We Are Broken And Not Even Human Because We Have Refused The Primordial Terror
The Depths of the Planetary Axes and the Useful Uselessness of Being Born
As the Death of Living Myth, We Have Instituted Ourselves
The Act of the Relinquishing of Time
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COMPREHENDING THE HISTORICAL MOMENT: JERUSALEM, ISRAEL, AND THE CREATION OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH

To comprehend the historical moment, there is also the task of comprehending the history of power - which is also the history of the world. To conceive of power, there is a rather simple formulation. Power is, without exception, force - force living and animated and moved alike. This force may be the movement of blood through the body, a bomb through the sky, a comet, or a movement of the planets in discourses. This music of force is the music of history, a violent operatics which moves the entirety of humanity - composed of dissonances and assonances and consonances both conjured by the meagre will of humans and the great will of their gods - the planets and intraplanetary bodies. There is, too, a long history of calling gods in the sky; thus, calling gods down from the sky - a process, too musical - a theophony of mankind. It is in this manner that the planetary gods, in their evocative and invocative process of historical naming, from Saturn to Ra to the dog-star Sirius, have quite literally become human.

This animation of the cosmos, as a historical process which encloses and discloses the entirety of human history, is the primary force in the manufacture/progenestation of man- made force - as this very process of naming cosmos as naming gods creates a teleology of life-meaning - a teleology which brings the lexical rules and patterns of the commune of the gods as discerned by ‘man’ down into and unto the world of ‘man’ as, too, his laws. This is the now-infamous thesis of Pope and Milton: ‘to justify the ways of God to man’. It is too, then, in accord with the creation of the god teleology, that the places on earth that man calls his own ought, too, be settled in the name of the gods - as they certainly have come to be, in a nominal sense, and in a nominal sense only. This impossibility of bringing the word of the gods (the word of the intraplanetary accords; their music, which mankind is always already within) to earth - as

this accord as music is always already shifting with the gravitas and passage of the planets in relation - is no clearer than in the manufacture of Israel and Jerusalem as ‘places on earth’. The very term Is-Ra-El is a compendium of historical god modification; in (and as) the Hebrew tradition, part of the first instance of god consolidation, or ‘god reduction’ in the historical move from polytheism to monotheism - as the planetary and cosmic gods were reduced to patriarchs, or fathers on earth - to enable and engender the abstracted creation of god as singularity. This reduction, occurrent first in the establishment of the Abrahamic tradition, is the historical moment in and at which the movement of ‘humanity’ turned away from the skies as its progenitor; into its own historical-epochal movement - as a play gesticulated, inwardly, within the sphere of its own private domain.

It is in this manner that the study at hand takes a turn to the development of cities, wherein Jerusalem may be used as an example. In the Kabbalah, Jerusalem is depicted as a city so densely filled that it is without walls. The studies of Guy Debord and Walter Benjamin depict a critical analysis, in their coming together, of the occurrence of modern cities; particularly, the modern city as an axial point - the axial point in and at which the attempt to institute the borders and bounds of the cosmogenetic made abstract play tradition of god-making folds in upon itself: ‘Where freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere image of itself… People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves’. Benjamin: ‘All intimate human relations are illuminated by the glare of an almost inhuman, piercing clarity in which they are scarcely able to survive. Due to the fact that, on the one hand, money stands devastatingly in the center of all vital interests, yet on the other, precisely this is the barrier before which almost every human relationship breaks down, in both natural and ethical relations, the sphere of unreflective trust, calmness, and health is increasingly disappearing.’ These two extracts illustrate a simultaneous process, instituted by the teleological

separation of god from gods; therein, the creation of a human order enclosed entirely within its own abstracted imagining - the monotheism of modernity, sprung from a cosmic order; instituted simultaneous with the institution of a human order which fashions itself, for the first time, entirely from itself. This process is simultaneously imagining the body, imagining the city, and imagining god - as the governing, interrelated structures of the human psyche and life. Humanity, in its ingenuity, dreaming the coming epoch, consolidated itself into the form in and at which social relations fell, modifying the cosmology to match the unfolding disaster which is and was the human condition - simultaneously modified by the movement of the cosmos and the actions of ‘men’ - actors and agents with dreams, desires, and methods of achieving dominion over space and time. In short, the very created cosmogenetic conditions of man’s development - when instituted as truths and earthly laws, created is dys-course in man as man’s consciousness of ‘himself’ and ‘his place’ in the cosmos - a dys-course which enables the very institution of law; empirical borders and bounds. The mystical theologians of the world did not forget this initial separation, which might be described as the wound which is simultaneously as and of history - the very ability to manufacture a conceptual awareness of what it means to ‘be human’ and, furthermore, where the ‘human being’ is located - both on earth, and in the cosmos. It is in this sense and manner that the power of ‘man’ is manufactured - stratified at the level of the ‘human’ as a cosmological institution of awareness as spatial-temporal - or, alternatively, false. To return to Debord: ‘The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment, the ‘ordinary life’ may prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own spatial domain’. It is in this sense that the entire creation myth of ‘humanity’ is the game at play in the world; furthermore, that this game is always already an ideological, cosmological game, perpetually veiling the earth and unveiled in a messianic understanding of history - which is the understanding of history and humanity as a concept

generated; the understanding which pierces the superficial bounds of temporality, nationality, rationality, and other such institutions of the ‘also human’. The human body, in this sense, comprises and composes the entire world - with its yardsticks and movements toward a singular mode, a singular understanding, a singular god, and a singular emperor. The words of Kaneko Fumiko at the front end of the 20th century elucidate this mode quite clearly: ‘From the start, things like countries, societies, peoples and rulers are nothing but ideas. Nevertheless, in order to bestow the rulers of these ideas with majesty, political power and holiness, there exists in this very Japan something that represents what I just wrenched out – the divine right of kings. Just as anyone born on Japanese soil is instilled with this idea, even grade school students, in order to impress upon the guileless people notions like the Emperor himself being descended from the gods, or his right to rule being something bestowed by decree of the gods, or else the Emperor being someone who controls the power of the State in order to realize the will of the gods, and thus the law is the will of the gods, they base these things in fantastic legends, vaunting and solemnly offering praise to things like a mirror, a sword and a jewel like they were given by the gods, completely deceiving them. The poor deceived people, engulfed in these absurd legends, consider things like the government and Emperor to be incredible gods beyond compare, but if the Emperor was a god himself or descended from the gods, if the people were under the protection of these gods, existing under the spirits of successive generations of these god-emperors, no Japanese soldiers should have to die in times of war…’. The creation of worldly power, elucidated by Fumiko, is the creation of a monotheistic order as the practical arrangement of human life as embodied status - or the disjuncture of human bodies and god bodies, and minor deities or, in the instance of the Hebrew tradition, patriarchs, therein. This cosmologics is always the page of the page, or that upon which the script of the human order and ‘progression’ is elucidated as the opera in which the human order is composed; written by the mapmakers of the cosmic/god order. Pascal, in his

notes, declares god to be the limit of culture; this succinct definition describes both the modern, popular conception of god and the emperor - as the creation-conference of power at the locus of cosmic and social hierarchy making as the institution of relationships of power.

Here, I hope that it is clear that the creation of power in regard to the specifically human sphere is also the creation of dominion over ‘nature’ - which in the very creation/conception of the term of ‘nature’, this fate of dominion is sealed. By abstracting ‘Man’ from ‘nature’, just as the cosmological order of the ancients delineated ‘here’ from ‘there’ vis-a-vis the perception of intraplanetary movements which influence(d) life on ‘earth’ - continues a teleological order which becomes ever more present, condensed, and desperately at odds with itself in the approach of modernity - brought forth with increasing manufactured violence in the creation of the nation-state and the tracts of the institution of the nation-state as a fully militarized border and bound - as stated in Goltz’s The Nation in Arms: to win war in the future required that ‘the great civilized nations of the present bring their military organization to ever greater perfection’; furthermore, that what was necessary in order to accomplish this was ‘the full amalgamation of military and civilian life’. In short, the very consummation of the identity of the nation as that which asserts its borders and bounds by casting out that which it is not - embodied at the level of ‘the human being’. This is nothing more or less than a sealing, or consummation, of the teleological order set out and composed as the cosmologic level of earth/cosmos, god/man, heaven/fallen, man/nature - as the stratification of life which, as accomplished, in turn composes the history of ‘man’ as progressing toward the image of himself - the very image that he generated as that which he dreamt. Much of Benjamin’s later life proceeds in the painful awareness of this fact, as the National Socialist party of German quickly harnessed the always burgeoning technologies of media and war (that which tells man of himself; that which protects man from himself) - to accomplish their ends in the rubble

of the Weimar. It is by way of harnessing; accessing, understanding this cosmological order that simultaneously backgrounds and foregrounds the human subject in his imagined trajectory that power is harnessed at the level of the perceived-divine - and this was understood quite clearly by the NS party - in the assembly of a nationalist ur-history; a process which is, of course, by no means unique to this moment in time in Germany. The ur-history is the compendium of the historical-material order which resides neatly beside the theo-genesis of ‘man’ - fixing the teleological seal of ‘man’ in upon himself and establishing, firmly, fixedly, the ‘reality’ of the historical moment as, alternately, ‘inevitable’, ‘possible’, ‘progressive’, ‘promising’, and so forth. It is precisely that the transfer of power from the cosmos to the many gods to the one god is also the transfer of power from ‘nature’ to the anthropomorphized ((natures)), to the industrialized Nature. Here, to return to Jerusalem as a sort of key to this teleological order: Jerusalem, translated literally as the ‘city of peace’, alternatively the ‘city of (the) god (of peace)’ - is founded in and as a disjunction - the bringing of god down to earth in the manner of establishing an impossible place, or a paradise which, theophonically, signifies a messianic mode of becoming as settled, landed. In the Kabbalic sense, Jerusalem is never founded; is always in the process of becoming; symbolically related to the Shekhinah (the divine presence in the feminine mode), as in exile until the erotic reunion of the son and daughter in the womb of Binah. This unity of all things is the establishment of a bond of ‘great union’, in which ‘Jerusalem shall be populated as a city without walls’; the emanation will be in great abundance, and this is called the ‘property without boundaries’’. In short, this is the dwelling in the light of god (Ra) unified in the embrace of Isis (the wife) and El (the husband) - who produce Horus, the god who, in his anthropomorphic form, returns the sky to ‘man’. The very theophoric form of Israel is a messianic state, as is the city of Jerusalem, populated by those born again into this light-consciousness.

But, as the history-for man has quite clearly shown, the institution of ‘Israel’ and ‘Jerusalem’ is and are quite possible on material terms; furthermore, on the terms of the nationalist settler-colonial order harnessed by ‘Man’ in search of his singularity. The development of the Balfour Treaty and the Mandate for Palestine, along with numerous other accords created, as in accord with Goltz’s ‘great civilized nations’ - ‘Mandate Palestine’ into the modern ‘Israel’. As Benjamin theorizes (with Susan Buck-Morss): “‘Methodological relationship between the metaphysical investigation and the historical one: a stocking turned inside out.’ The issue is not thereby resolved, and it is a question to which we will need to return”.

BORNE UPON MY SHIELD

My dead enemies Are borne upon my shield With them the whole of life: My love, my dreams, my family, my fear My world.

I turn to face the unvanquished The faces of the dead streaking my field of vision And littering the battlefield. I stand between the gates and my home A home to which I cannot return - As I am now forever changed.

My dead enemies Are borne upon my shield With them the whole of death.

My foe raises his blade Red against the sun And I raise my shield To meet his trembling hand.

In the center is the birth of life Radiant cosmos from which I come The war and peace, the bone of my bone Which I fashion into armor The armor of the dead. Even now, they rush to my aid They know that I leave to fight So that I may never fight again.

My dead enemies Are borne upon my shield With them the whole of life

WHAT IT IS TO BE ‘WITHIN’ CULTURE

To be within culture entails an ouroboratic subjection (consenting and coerced) to the cultural limit, a limit which is no more or less than god. This ‘ouroboratic subjection’, as I am terming it, is the function which knowledge performs in the hermetic seal of its creation from nothingness. The very institution of knowledge as possible is also the very institution of power as possible - as that which rises from the ruinlessness of everything: the temples, the kingdoms, the empires, the statues, the dictates, and the historical exploit of mankind. With the first institution, the institution of knowledge of the cosmos as possible, communicable; ‘come down to man’ - the condition of man, too, is dictated. It is that the Babylonian Imago Mundi, or map of the world, is parallel to the map of the cosmos which enables the creation of the world in its ekphractic reflection. To be within culture is thus - to be between the god concept (theophony) and the god manifestation (theophany) - as membered, by the pole of the cultural consciousness - to the theogenetic process of making god as making empowered the world. Here, I would be remiss to fail to mention that the creation of god is always already a membering of consciousness in a hierarchical manner in order to enable distinction/judgment at the level of cognition - between the higher and the lower, the good and the evil, the righteous and the criminal, the worthy and the unworthy. This creation of god at the conceptual level functions simultaneous and across the very historical process of the creation of man as the creation of knowledge from the ‘reflection’ of the cosmic reality which consumes the world. The sheer multiplicity of creation myths which refer to an epic swallowing; of man being swallowed and spat back out attest to this. The in-mouth and out-mouth of the cosmos is as hoops, spheres, and journeys into the deep - Inannic pathways into the deep of transformation, disjections from the cosmos into earthly incarnation, and as methods of delineation of the very depths of the cosmos themselves. When returned to the communicable plane, this system of ordering the spheres of existence manifests as the circle, or

the snake eating its own tail - symbolic simultaneously of the union of the moon’s nodes (the south and north node symbolizing the collective coming-from and coming-into), and the system-order of knowledge as returning from that which it came. In its furthest and deepest pursuit, the history of human knowledge returns to itself as the mirror from which the cosmos emerged - as conceptual reality which in turn spurred on the growth of the interpretive devices (measurement, and interpretation, itself) as necessary in order to comprehend that vastness which swallowed man whole.

For, as this attempt certainly proves, it is impossible to be ‘without’ culture - as the cultural formulation is the entirety of human history, itself a disputable and disputed highly ekphractic artefact. With the massively increasing intimacy of human cultures over the past 200 years, this reckoning of the entirety of the production of ‘human cultures’; thus, the very definition and idea of that which ‘is’ and informs this conception as ‘reality’ has approached with exponential ominence. This very coming-moment can be described as no less than a messianic moment at the level of the collective

or the realization of the collective and local falsehoods which found our most fundamental definitions of ourselves - who we are, what we do, and where we come from. This reckoning is a reckoning that destroys history in its direct encounter with the sublime, or the ur-mythoses which found ‘everything’ and the categorical disjunctures from which cultural manifestations, archetypes, and traits of the ‘human’, the ‘world’, the ‘earth’, the ‘animal’, and the ‘cosmic’ emerge; certainly not excluding the infrastructure built to reflect and, as it were, come-from these revelations in reverse. The entirety of ‘human’ existence and cultural creation might be summed up in this one verse: “‘It’ composes ‘itself’ from that which ‘it’ believes it ‘is’ (from)”. Here, the in-quotations symbolize the very dubious nature of any sort of composition, intermingled with the parenthetic from - as a together-disjuncture of that which is and that which emerges - as the simultaneous production of life, conceptual into contemporary, in the hands, eyes,
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gestures, dreams, myths, and discourses of the collective and collectives making political-reality as life practice. It is as such, with complete obviousness and esoteric meaning, that the entirety of the world is constructed as a collective dream-work; a thesising of myriad cultural conceptions of isbeingfrombeingis. It is as such that even the critic of culture, in the words of Baldwin, is ‘a cat trying to make it in the world because I’m condemned to live in the world’. Even in the total revolt against cultural and social paradigms as god-limits at the level of the global - there is also the endless confrontation of and with the constructed reality: the struggle of human cultures of and into being is also now. The cultural critic observes this process, the process of accumulating culture as knowledge - and says this:

In and as this process, is the breath. the e-spiriting of the phonic to the phanic as the giving of spirit/soul form, the expression making movement into and as the world as an apparition - the giving of the formless form to god. The content of this process is that which is mistaken as image to the imageless-image of the expressive as mode as that which is, in its literal manifestation of itself, god/self/soul/spirit/life force. It is in this sense that the messianic state (or the stateless state) is everpresent, buried under the accumulation of the detritus of itself (dead expression, or breathed breath) as perceptible 'realities' and 'worlds' of its own making. So proceeds the dream of the history of 'man' and his 'gods' as the manifest dead skeleton to and through which life force is given to impel and propel it forward. This is also civilization; that which man calls ‘the institution of god’s will on earth’, or the states and statues he carves out in his name.

I give name and language to this refusal so that it may dismember name and language forever. I live, as Benjamin, with my own life emblematic as allegory for the social reality; I proceed in the act of writing as such. And it is due to the sheer movement of man toward himself that my theory has progressed to the level of a call for a cosmic

recollection - a remembrance of the very forces and theories which assembled, at the most basic level, man’s conception of himself in relation to the cosmos as also the creation of the gods from the creation myths of the sky, water, air, and ground; the emergent measurements with which man attempts to synthesize his distance from himself. This ur- cosmologics is as (a global condition) the founding of the world; the consolidation of gods therein is the race of the founding of the world as the establishment of and for the conditions of power toward themselves - a consolidation of resources, knowledge, and meaning - to and into a single source - which is simultaneously both mouths of creation. The closest ‘mankind’ has come to this feat has been in the technological advancement of the atom bomb - the creation of a time-space singularity so immediately massive that it renders timeless shadows in the intermingling of itself with the ‘human’ form - leaving nothing but the smear of that which once was en-souled - made object reduced to utmost possible dimension while still retaining the semblance of that which it once appeared to be. It is apparent, in the shortest backward glance, what this creation of cosmologics as the creation of knowledge has done: as it has enabled wars as infinite as Krishna’s heads, emperors as endless as Krishna’s legs, genocides as thorough as the enumeration of Krishna’s arms by the master painter; plunder as vast as the distance traveled by Krishna’s legs. This is precisely the fashion in which god is created on earth - with all of the vast conviction of power which man’s god claims for himself by way of the mouth and hand of man. The puppet of the world persists in and at the hand, and given and harnessed will of man and his manufactured impoverishment - and in this manner it persists, alone.

It is in this sense that man is swallowed by his own teleological conception of himself; the creation of his own god which he has forgotten as a manner of history, and typified into that which he has fashioned himself - a timeless, conceptual being, divorced from the immanence of life; made stone. It is in this sense that the Ten Commandments of Moses are nothing less than God,

Himself - as that which makes god manifest, the arbitrated, ‘eternal’ laws which the entirety of ‘humankind’ must become. With Kristeva: ‘The abject is, for Dostoyevsky, the "object" of The Possessed: it is the aim and motive of an existence whose meaning is lost in absolute degradation because it absolutely rejected the moral limit (a social, religious, familial, and individual one) as absolute—God. Abjection then wavers between the fading away of all meaning and all humanity, burnt as by the flames of a conflagration, and the ecstasy of an ego that, having lost its Other and its objects, reaches, at the precise moment of this suicide, the height of harmony with the promised land’. The coming into messianic abjection then, is the obliteration of the cultural as a mode of existence which is determined, determinable, defined, definable - and thus definite - and thus, law. The very total refusal then: of all ideas, of all conceptions, of all images, of all ‘truths’, of all myths - as equally false, equally wrong, equally incomplete; only in the partial examination of the partial terms of these partial myths does the critic come into the most narrow, partial ‘conclusion’ - a ‘conclusion’ which Benjamin describes as the act of ‘turning a sock inside out’. As our ‘human history’ has given us, the very crusades which are fought over religious, cultural, racial, and ideological supremacy alike are nun at the cosmological level: as even our most careful and researched theorists, theologians, and scientists (if they are being honest with us) can give us nothing but constellations and poetry. It is only those who turn to knowledge as a method of obtaining power and jurisdiction who claim knowledge. It is in this way that we have lost sight of messianic understanding; in our desperation, we have turned to knowledge - knowledge which promises us certainty, safety, clarity, relief, and the end of our troubles. There is no greater analogue to the contemporary condition than the assertion that knowledge, quite literally, is king.

The very death of ideas is also the death of the life force given to these ideas - turning over and over in the mind, heart, and soul the desperate hope for the state, the desperate hope for love, the desperate hope for the dreams

of the progress of mankind (and whatever else, empire, the nation, the border, and so forth) - and in this death of illusion, a returnless return of the messianic state, the stateless state, to itself - that which, in the creation of a thesis of the state of man, partially obscured that page upon which the thesis was rendered. This remembrance might also be described as the re-ensensuation; the death of forgetting, and the remembrance of the soul as that which runs through all things; thus composing them, infinitude.

THE HARNESSING OF MENOS

As it is depicted in the Iliad, the menos is the breath-life- force energy breathed into Diomedes by Athene; the stuff that fills Agamemnon; the intermingled ‘fury’ (coupled with the ‘thought-breath’, or thumos) which Achilles wishes would rise up within him to cut off and eat Hector’s flesh. The menos is that transitory life force breath which fills, nee

animates, the characters’ bodies, drives, and desires in the Iliad; with Simone Weil, too composes the true subject of the poem - force. It is, however, the identification of this term, the breath-life-force energy, or ‘menos’, which might also be termed ‘psychic energy’ received by Diomedes from the goddess - as that which resides beneath; furthermore, as, the conceit of the figures who, too, act as forces in the struggle of the Iliad. This menos is that which, as well proven throughout the Iliad, can be harnessed (Achilles), manipulated (as it is Athene who indeed wills Diomedes forward), and pushed perilously past (the invocation of mainetai) the ability of and for self control. It is also this very life force as breathed/embodied - which, here, befits the use of the term ‘psychic energy’ - which Artaud refers to in his letter to Henri Parsot on September the 17th, 1945, during that very war-period which Weil composes her critique of the Iliad. I will not include the letter itself, nor reference it, as to reference it would leave the entire letter desiring. The letter itself is the elucidation of Artaud’s perceived self persecution as a christ figure at the level of a mass conspiracy, or ‘mass spell-casting, in which the whole world more or less participates off and on, while pretending to not be aware of it, and trying to hide from themselves the fact that they participate in it, now with their unconscious, now with their subconscious, and more and more with their full consciousness’. Artaud sees this persecution as directed at him - with the purpose of keeping him in ‘the world’, and preventing him from realizing the ideas broached in his work ‘in life’. Here, it is important to mention that to conceive of Artaud as ‘individuated’ at this moment in his life is to miss the entirety of the message of this letter,
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delivered to Parsot in knowing desperation. What Artaud describes therein, along with Homer’s depiction of menos in the Iliad, is a world level spell casting, a spell casting which we might even call war - which harnesses ‘incompetents, all functionaries of the spirit, a spirit which Catholics call the Holy Ghost and which is nothing but the anal and vaginal discharge of all the masses… for I cannot allow spell-casters recruited from all classes of society to be posted at certain points in Paris in order to influence my consciousness…’ Here, Artaud is consciousness. There is no need for the insertion of the individuated ‘my’, as for a large portion of Artaud’s waking life, he channels the collective ‘menos’ and internalizes it as his own. With Homer’s Iliad: ‘Internally it is a swelling and expansion of the stuff of thought and will, the mental energy that in the early Greek view of man is identified as - or figuratively linked to - the movement of breath and blood and bodily fluids in the breast’. It is fascinating, yet altogether unsurprising, that this definition of ‘menos’, or a linked body-breath-soul has fallen horribly out of fashion in modern times, particularly in the West. To even imply such a thing at this juncture in history would hopelessly complicate the conception of ‘man’ as a vehicle for the will of the nation; furthermore, of the economic order implied therein. What Artaud observes, viscerally; elucidates by way of a metaphorical thought-image of persecution (which he undoubtedly saw, lived, felt, breathed, embodied) is this process of making-war - at a global level; certainly in his Paris (‘The French people have forgotten because they are under a spell, that I have answered these spells with piles of bodies right in Paris’) - as, too, the process of harnessing menos at a civilizational level in order to conjure up the energy necessary for war. This has long been a practice in implicit economic terms, elucidated explicitly for a brief historical moment in Russia during the institution of the Soul Tax: ‘The soul tax (podushnaya podat ) was a capitation or poll tax levied on peasant communes and some urban inhabitants according to the number of males of all ages, as estimated by the periodic censuses (revizy ) that began in 1718. Enacted by Peter the Great by decree on January 11, 1722, the poll tax

was intended to maintain the armed forces in the peasants' vicinity. For example, the support of an infantry soldier required payments from about thirty-six "souls."’ In the most literal language possible, the life of one soldier (in terms of psychic sustenance), is equated to the lives of thirty- six civilians, or those not engaging in the direct act of war. Come the 20th century; increasing friction at a global level with industrialization and travel through and between civilizational zones (complicating already complex ideas and ideals of in-groups and out-groups) - comes a manifesto written by Goltz Pasha in 1883, called ‘The Nation in Arms’ declaring that in order for the ‘great civilized nations of the present’ to bring their militaries to full might, they must institute ‘the full amalgamation of military life and civilian life’. This means, in no short order, the entire militarization (of consciousness) of the nation. What Artaud experiences, at the subjective, psychic level, is the acute sensation of persecution as being robbed of menos (life-force-breath) in the creation of a war effort which not only spread across every inch of France, but the entirety of the world. What this harnessing does is precisely as Artaud describes - the creation of a soul level deprivation of the ability to make real one’s own life purpose; instead, redirecting the menos to the civilizational-level project of making war as making nation. It is, of course, that war and nation are not alive unless they are filled, embodied with the life forces which deploy weapons, engage in hand to hand combat, hoist flags, make speeches, and protect executive officials. As Hannah Arendt states: ‘It is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, and this support is but the continuation of the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with. … All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them’. What Arendt describes here is precisely the harnessing of the men-ic life-force-breath power, literal embodied power, of the individual - in order to empower, or give life, give breath (like Athene to Diomedes) to that which is always already encorpsed (the law, the engine of war, the tank, the court). This is, of course, also the very power

which Medusa possesses. There are myriad historical and cultural examples around this phenomenon - from the fever dream depicted in the film Metropolis of the Moloch, conspiracy theories surrounding occult practices which empower politicians and celebrities alike, and, of course, the world histories of enslavement of entire cultures in order to power the growth and development of new empires. It is as such that any such law or moral virtue may and will be made at the civilizational level in order to justify coercive means of harnessing menos, and, furthermore, to engender consent among the population of the nation/order/border/civilization to willfully give their menos to the nation project. This is, of course, the project of racism and ethno-nationalism on one end, and state propaganda and the promise of protection from ‘evil’ and ‘criminals’ and foreign bodies on the other. These two ends, of course, are the mouth and the ass of the same snake.

As termed by Ana Tsing, this work is a ‘conjuring’ of purpose - the making of a theatre whereas there was grass, trees, sand, water. This is, of course, the institution of a battlefield atop the earth - a battlefield in and at which there is a war of ideas, ideals, and borders. This might be called, in the analysis of everyday life, a ‘menic’ battlefield - populated and replete with signs and signifiers which direct the menos of the individual and the collective as the instituted language and culture. This is, of course, not unique to any one particular moment or ‘place’ in history - but acts as a sort of cross-cultural method of organizing and directing bodies to the larger generated spiritual, or empirical, purpose. Just as tipi camp circles were organized in earthly membrance of the cosmic hoop, so too are nations organized in earthly membrane of the cosmological, theo-philosophical ideas and ideals which continually attempt to engender psychic investment of the individual and of groups of people at the level of perpetual education. The cultural education, as the process of initiation into the cosmological-social body of the in-laws and in-languages of a cultural group - is that which creates the psychic grounds necessary for the institution of an investment based culture -

a culture which, as the history of all cultures - necessitates the participation of the individual at the level of belief.

‘This road is, rather, dissection [Analyse] – through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places. (See under economy of power.) Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed’.’

What Marx here so succinctly describes (in his text Grundrisse), is not only merely the superficial description of man’s relationship to machine - but of the exchange of menos, or life force-energy, which occurs when the individual invests (and is forced to invest) himself into the dead object, whether it be the cultural cosmology, the war, the institution, the building, or the machine-object. This transference, as a transference of menos, is the underpinning of all global life as made-organized - the creation of conditions of and for psychic investment of life.

THE SLAVE SHIP AS THE RE-PRODUCTIVE CONDITION OF INDUSTRIAL MODERNITY

‘The reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school.’

Christina Sharpe

With Christina Sharpe and Sylvia Wynter, this essay posits that the slave ship as diagrammatic made practical model founds and forms the economic modernity of the world as an expedited and expeditious fascism made totally material: the institution of an economic policy of ‘Man’ and ‘Not- Man’ at the level of a cosmological value - a value which strictures, structures, and striates labor over centuries in accordance with an ethnography of goodness as whiteness. This cosmology, therein, allows for the institution of such terms as ‘goods’ and ‘services’ to detail the labor-work and bodies of black, indigenous, immigrants, refugees, and forced immigrant peoples - those who are not of the ‘innate’ makeup of the nation-state of ‘Man’ to which they are conscripted as builders, harvesters, laborers, and raw material themselves.

The very economics of storage in and on the slave ship did not and do not end in the transportation of forced migrants to the slavery capitals of America - they are continued and progressed not only in the institution of slavery, but the parallel and intersecting institutions of technological modernity: factories, global war, science and eugenics, electricity, and the city. This phenomenon is perhaps most apparent in the creation of tenement cities in early 20th century New York City; in the parallel and intersecting development of the lightbulb, the radio, and the television in the sense that energy and life force are rendered, harnessed, and reproduced as made-artificial sources - embodiments and soul-lives (again) rendered and flattened to the level of dimensional objects and subjects evaluated and autopsied and monitored for maximal work output. It is in this sense

that modern slavery and the modern factory are intimately wedded - in that, in their very economic condition - they are inextricably part of the same process: of producing nation - materially, socially, economically, and ideologically. For it is the very raw material harvested put into the factory input- output generator which manufactures the technological device which transmits the status theater of the noblemen and kings of the new-modernity: the heads of private and public industry. This is also the construction of a body of ‘civilization’ - a process, not only of creating ethno-class as hierarchy of worth and value, but instrumentalized practice of this hierarchy in order to reproduce said hierarchy at the level of culture. These disciplines and industries are, themselves, aspects of the productive and reproductive machine which is the nation-state, as it stumbles into its own brutally clear definition of itself at a global level come the first World War. This definition, ref. Goltz: ‘the full amalgamation of military and civilian life’. This process, of course, was already well underway with the creation of factories and devices to further the already dreamt made conjured realities of the preceding philosophies of power and empowerment (the harnessing of ‘nature’ and ‘inferior others’ in order to progress the construction of ‘the human’ world) - a process which, being as such, was left wanting only descriptive language. These constructed industries not only act as literal productive/re-productive mechanisms, but as theaters of cultural struggle - where, blatantly, it is the human life being harnessed and the human life doing the harnessing (All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies) - theaters of cultural struggle where the exorcism of the theo-philosophically conjectured ‘lack of ‘human’ spirit’ of the ethno-classed Other is simultaneously produced as image and re-produced as made-real at the level of violent subjection. This, of course, is not a lack of spirit/soul - but a literal exhaustion of the life force and breath to the point of which this process of enslavement is consequent with perpetual murder.

Here, Simone Weil: ‘As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. Nothing separated me from it, for I had really forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue. What I went through there marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave’.

And Malcolm X: ‘I can’t remember any of my prison numbers. That seems surprising, even after the dozens years since I have been out of prison. Because your number in prison became part of you. You never heard your name, only your number. On all of your clothing, every item, was your number, stenciled. It grew stenciled on your brain. Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars – caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars. After he gets out, his mind tries to erase the experience, but he can’t. I’ve talked with numerous former convicts. It has been very interesting to me to find that all of our minds had blotted away many details of years in prison. But in every case, he will tell you that he can’t forget those bars.’

These two quotations by Weil and Malcolm X work in coalition to describe the simultaneous, history which is now process of the created, exponentially growing economic method as that which - in the creation of its institutions: plantation slavery, modern factory, modern prison(, and

here, to include modern schools as the cultural education of the education) - constructs the body of its economic process

a fascism of the everyday. And here, I describe fascism not as some abstract ideological process, but as a cogent, political-economic process which includes the production and re-production and distribution of itself as ideology. The recognition that fascism has been with us long before there was cultural language to describe it will certainly advance the dialogue at hand. Weil and Malcolm X’s soul and spirit level analysis of the effects of prison and factory lend crucial insight into the effects that the entirety of the modern economy as founded in the enslavement of black, immigrant, and indigenous peoples as necessary to construct the very bare skeleton of the possibility of such an economy (the transportation methods, the land ownership, railroads, the raw materials, the possibility of profit vis-a-vis labor exploitation) - as and at the level of a cultural death of the soul. The fever dream of the Moloch in the film Metropolis also points to this phenomenon - a happening at the level of the material but also beneath the level of the material as a process happening also at the level of psychic energy; a transference, transaction, and transformation of the life force energy of life as that which is sacrificed (coercive and consenting) to empower the dead machine-bodies and industry-bodies of the ever-’progressing’ nation-state.

It is in this manner that a critique of this process extends into and through the level of the harnessing of the earth and ‘animals’ in order to accomplish itself: the literal harnessing of the horse, oxen; the ground, insects, and ‘nature’ of the made eco-sphere plantation - an eco-system conjectured within an ecosystem. Here, the work of Ana Tsing is crucial

in that it connects the process and processes occurring at the ‘human’ level of manufacturing industrial culture (human/savage) with the too-attempted subjection of the very land from which the raw material of ‘civilization’ is harvested and upon which it is insurrected. This is, in all senses of the word, the creation of a ‘world’ atop the earth - complete with the complex ‘natural’ interrelationships of class hierarchy, scientific, ‘naturalized’ explanation of
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violent colonization of land and life; the technological mechanisms to create, innovate, and in the process of innovating - reify - this conjecture of ‘Man’. It is also as such that the work of civilization is everywhere: in the air, in the ground, in the water, and in the remembered breath. To confront this process as itself - not simply to name it, or to engage it in combat at the level of the name - it is necessary to have a parcel of understanding in regard to how it conducts and constructs itself in the manner of assuming the entirety of everyday life - permeating all aspects of life and rendering them images of itself. This awareness leads one to the understanding that, in the words of Aime Cesaire: ‘One must begin somewhere. Begin what? The only thing worth beginning: The End of the world of course’. This ‘end’ of the world is not the end of earth, nor is it the end of life. It is the end of the teleological processes instituted by the theo- philosophy of ‘Man’ (composed in and through the conjecture of ‘humanism’ as a philosophy of primary exclusion); the willful, chosen ending of this paradigm - at the level of its structures, its principles, and its words. This end is a creative-destructive process - where in the abolition and negation of these processes; the total refusal of them in light of what they have wrought - possibilities and poetics of relation and living life open up in such a manner that they could not within the regulatory bounds of ‘the world’. It is as such that myriad conceptions and lives may as such become possible - but only in the expansion of our imaginations, and our willingness to imagine together - may it be so.

To see the violence done and doing in the institution of the slave ship model is to directly confront the violence of an ontological history (which is also always already the present moment) which has deemed black life not only as less than white life, but as not life; dis-spirit, produced at the level of language by the ontology of ‘Man’ and already created as being without ‘Man’; thus, being without ‘humanity’. It is as such that these processes must be confronted in their whole movement (as events and reverberating events which structure themselves both in the psyche of the collective and

the material structures generated and gesticulated from their perpetual recurrence) - for such a thing to occur.

THE FIRST AND LAST MISTAKE

The history swallows itself with a name as it weaves a cloak of sense and consense bodies around it.

Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis model correctly views history as itself a generated conceptual limit; as Pascal terms it, no different than culture and no different than (the too historical creation of) god in that it attempts to impose its own teleos as moving-creation; as that which ‘is’.

As such, that which ‘is’ (in the manufactured, historical sense) is always already that which is created from itself (man’s image of himself), a self swallowing and disjecting which is the ouroboros of the materialized ‘world’ - a world which is only possible as a telelogical limit - of man, serving man, from man, for man. This conception is the first and last mistake in that it presupposes time and space as made apparent within itself (perpetually incomplete theses, well proven by its lacking ‘physical sciences’); the ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ which it constructs to describe its gesticulated body as ‘natural’, born from and borne in the womb which is its self conception - mistaken for and as the whole - which is only its own limited knowledge and awareness of itself from itself.

This teleology poses and posits itself as the creative and destructive beyond conception - that which is and is not and is beyond the ability of logos, precisely because logos is within it, of it; thus, also it - like Kafka’s Josef K.

It is as such that the ever expanding circle (which, insofar as it may be ‘conceptualized’, acts more as sphere within spheres, or as wheel within wheels, like angels) of is, is always already that teleologically impossible (as teleology must be able to observe purpose) is; that from which and as all ‘things’, or ‘noumena’ emerge, as it breathes, creates, destroys.

This separation (of the logos ‘is’ from that which is) is always already false, but this phenomenon (and its made-noumena) is perpetually observable in the lives, minds, and beliefs of those who, in turn, believe in ‘the world’ as such a thing - a world which, supposedly, is structured by the god idea. In the creation of this separation (as a sub-creation), everything is dead, by nature of the institution of the separating word, image, phraseology to describe the indescribable; build the unbuildable - as the ‘kingdom of god on earth’, ‘the word of god’, ‘the image of god’, and other such foundational, teleological errors.

The god idea is nothing more or less than the logos object- image of itself, structured by itself, for itself, as the contemporary limit of its knowledge - which poses as ‘understanding’. This is also the at-large cultural ‘knowledge’ which informs and establishes and turns the direction of man’s creation of himself, orienting it simultaneously always towards himself (as he is always that which is) and always away from himself as the dissolution of all concepts (in his attempt to manufacture ever more precise knowledges to determine himself as such).

Understanding, as such, is the awareness that such a process is in motion (both teleologically as culture-history and metaphysically as breath as is); furthermore, that such a disjuncted process is precisely the process of initiation at a ‘world’ collective level (elucidated and described in myths from the Minotaur to Inanna to Arjuna to Persephone and Hercules) - in which the initiate strips the cloak of the false bodies, built up over the course of and as the sediment of the history of man (the sediment which is built about the soul); the subsequent descent of the initiate into that which is ‘unseen’, or ‘invisible’; as such, into that which stands in the face of all one believes to be true (by way of the cultural education in a intra-millennial state of infancy) - which is precisely the descent into immateriality as that which houses the ‘truth’ - the ‘materiality’ which is conceived of, at large, as that which ‘is’.

It is, in a double sense, that in the creation of these Hadic myths the process of initiation is described and elucidated for the cultural awareness (made ‘real’); at the same time, denied and separated in its very ekphractic description. The process of god-image-description functions in an identical manner, in that the culture at large perceives God (here, symbolically, that which is) as ‘god’; worships his image, his icons, his symbol, his word, and so forth - and in this very process, forms and formulates (out of a-metaphysical necessity) the conceptual reality of god as embodied; as such, absorbs the perpetually misidentified is as ‘is’ as ‘known’ into its conceived world project.

It is in this sense that the mass human development resides at (and has, for some millenia), the stage of the transitional object of ‘god’ - or taking that which is to be a ‘thing’ in order to even begin to comprehend that which is. It is precisely in this manner that that which is becomes, socially, that which ‘is’ - as matter as consensus reality established at the level of symbolic language as valuation of life.

The concept of money also proceeds in this manner. To perceive the psychic energy of that which is as breath created and destroyed perpetually in the smallest moment and the largest (and throughout this arbitrary distinction) a- metaphysically is not, practically, possible; as such, the concept of money made materiality synthesizes, or provides a thesis (material) to the antithesis (immaterial) toward which the current and currency of life force energy might be ‘made’, controlled, and distributed.

The Hadic descent is then a descent beneath the definition of all ‘sensible objects’ and ‘sensible history’ and the apparent disciplines of man and world into that which resides, subterranean, as that which is - apparently buried beneath the sedimental, gesticular project of man mistaking god for himself for that which is; the cultural limit which cannot comprehend that which is without a metaphysics of understanding - which observes the world of knowledge; leaving it behind.

THE PLAY OF NATIONS; THE MILITARIZATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

It is certainly that, in the establishment of the totems of ‘human’ existence, culture, and knowledge - they have often been perilously forgotten for what they are - play of the human creative impulse. These aspects, or noumena- phenomena in their cyclical regeneration - are posited not only as realities, but as so cemented into the ground of the world seeped with iron stakes into the earth: as realities so impossibly serious and gravely true that they command and dictate the attention (as energy) of the collective at every waking moment. It is in this sense that it is imperative to remember the entirety of life and living not ‘as’ logos, but as the creative and destructive play that supersedes even the attempted establishment of logos - as that which always becomes-ruin in the wreckage of empires, dynasties, and conjured worlds fallen to the truth of their attempted establishment - the play of forces which crumbles them to their elemental root. The war over these aspects of conjured human existence is the war - time and time again - over their bounds and borders, their rules and regulations; at the level of foundational critique, whether or not their existence is at all ‘helpful’ in regard to our ability to live and interact. It is in this sense that each established dynasty acts as a play on itself, as and in a word, of its struggle to assert its identity in the midst of, quite literally, not existing except as a collectively imagined and enforced/dis-enforced idea-made- materiality. It is much the same with the attempted establishment of gods; whole religions around them. So it is that neither gods nor nations ever ‘truly’ come into being, but rather ‘exist’ as liminal spaces in and upon which assertion of being is levied; thus, ‘exist’ as in always a process of formation. Can the same not be said about the borders and bounds of the logos-god itself?

The play of nations, assuredly, must have its players. Without the institutions which create its apparence; the institutions which enforce its apparence, it would be rather

difficult to stage such an intricate imaginary. Without the belief in the play, both on behalf of the audience and the players (; furthermore, of the audience as players), such a thing could not go on. It is in this sense that the channels of and for collective energy must be established as labor-for from all facets of the ‘human’ experience (the mind, the body, the soul, the psyche, the breath) in order to create a state of captivation - which is, of course, the state itself. With Emma Goldman: ‘The state is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice’. It is like this, along with the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, where the people of Athens are compelled to sacrifice 14 young men and women at interval to ‘avenge’ the death of Minos’ son. Is this not the harness of life force energy? And for what? Vengeance? Sentimentality? ‘Freedom’? Goldman’s quote reveals something fundamental and obvious about the existence of the state (along with religion) in the establishment of these cultural forms as ‘altars’: that something must pass through them in order to animate them - otherwise they are simply dead stories, dead buildings, dead dreams, and dead psychic spaces. It is in this sense that many cultural myths from around the world - once the establishment of the very cultural fabric and foundation of great empires, now no longer exist but in the collective memory but as stories, memories, and as laughable intrigues. Why is this? It is not that they no longer hold ‘truth’, but it is precisely that the time which compelled them into supra-conscious being as dictates and cosmic truths no longer functions; by ‘time’, here, I mean spirited time - or time of belief at the level of submission. What we see, in retrospect, if we see anything at all, is the struggle and war over ideas, definitions, rationales, and manufactured ‘spaces’ of life (as ‘life’, the ideated, the imaged, the manufactured), which, practically, no longer exist to us but in ruins and memories and histories and myths. We may yet see these conjured spaces atop the land of the earth, build yet atop of them, worship them, excavate them, and even attempt to forget them - but they remain, at and in the energetic level - as forces, which continue in the hearts, minds, and souls of the people just as they did

millenia ago. This war of ideas, of ‘nations’, of ‘religions’, and of ‘gods’ - is precisely that which creates them in the compelling of force. Goldman’s quote and this elucidation of process is itself the great theatre of mankind, the struggle over that which, as elucidated in Hamlet quite clearly, does not exist. The mortal struggle, here, over illusions so grand and made-cosmic that they form the very fabric of the epic myths and imagined lives which we do, in fact, live out - in the very conjuring of belief. It is in this sense, if one looks around, there certainly are gods; there certainly are nations

and it is not difficult, in looking around, to see what they have wrought upon the lives and relations of mankind. It is the investment which conjures them; the psychic investment which makes them so real that they imprison our lives within our imaged ‘lives’, so intently and so forcefully that they create the sphere of ‘the world’ as even greater than the earth, even more ominous and looming, even more cataclysmic than ‘nature’; even more threatening than ‘death’. It is in this sense that we are used - in the very creative investment in our collectivized dream-state - used to the point of which the human life force of every individual therein (believers and ‘heretics’ alike) is harnessed toward the perpetual motion of the nation-state as the creation of everyday life. This is nothing less than a militarization of and at the level of consciousness.
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i will deliver you to the underworld like a mother drowning her child. does this empire bleed like your flesh? tell me as i press this blade between your teeth.

my soul incarnate with the fire of war i am that which was promised to you; i alone meet you on the battlefield careless sneering and bold flying no flag and approaching with no shield - knowing that i will emerge victorious before i render my first strike upon your crown. i can see it in your eyes that you know this to be true.

i will ask this last time: do you understand that i am the one who will take your life?

the fight is indeed short and here i am drawing your blood with my blade and letting it into the field where it mingles with that which is to come. this was not a battle you were prepared to fight when you imagined this day. you did not expect an adversary sculpted in the shade of war standing before you with arrows dipped in lions blood.

the torture i prepared for your body in the act of shaping mine with the defined power of focused pursuit is programmed to reduce you, blow by blow, to nothing but dispersed elements - for i am the one who has given up the world with the disgust of one who has seen its insides. there is nothing, not even life, that you could possibly take from me.

my muscles contracting, i cleave your head from your neck and drag you, dead prince, through the streets of your beloved city. the people cry out for jerusalem's walls have fallen after five thousand years war and it is what we were promised - boundless -

your deeds all piled up like gold coins in this shrouded world i melt them down with my breath and bury them in the spit of the ocean; your heart - i carve it with a serrated blade until it sputters in desperate surrender.

your repentance, beggar, is not even temptation to me. i gag at the words as they tumble from your mouth.

this, to me, is glory.

hector! look now at your end - look at it in its eyes, in its mouth - i am that which was returned to this condemned world of the living to rend your flesh forever. you keep only this pain - the pain of my hot knife pressing into your tongue.

you, dog to be eaten by dogs, i torch your money and ransack your temples because i have nothing and no god - nor do i desire such miserable things. your icons shattered and damned from memory because i have no illusions as to the power of images.

for i am the one who stands naked without the clothing which is conceptual existence. knowing this, what could your god take from me? watch him - even he flees from me on the field of battle.

what is belief to one who is like this? what is truth to one who is like this? it is like you - a swift passing shadow in the night of all things: all crumbling arms and legs.

it is like this, your kingdom

between my teeth.

i announce myself to give you fair warning; i stride out into the open as the sun sets on your unfit rule. my soul is taut, hardened, and dark with precise anger. so dark with hate that it glimmers but for a moment as it catches the last light of the last day.

look on as i render your final breath.

i will not write this way again this way of trying to convince the world of itself it is like giving a child a name

it is like a surgery of language

we find each other, terrified and wage this war of breath: you cry out in the night and hold your body.

this time, i am the aggressor.

it is still the same with us you know the same perch overlooking the night and the same embrace. do you remember? we were so scared of love then so afraid it would arrive.

this horizon of shadows where we take turns birthing children; dutifully playing our part in the death of all things. here, in this place, we take lovers to remember ourselves.

do you remember us? we looked different then.

do you remember the old city, with the old walls and the old rules? our love was the end of the old way and yet the new way still does not have words for what we are becoming. perhaps it is because we continue to mistake love for dead things.

time does not change a love such as this. such a love spins itself from nothingness and chants a song without ears.

such a love can tell us nothing.

i know this will reach you for everything else is awaiting death but not us. we are never the ones who die.

JULIE MEHRETU’S CAIRO

It is like a war, where arrows are fired, spears are flung, and bullets are shot - forming a crossed grid, or vector of force, tension, and conflict. The figures are reduced to topographical reference points, stones, sticks, shadows, and shades of these objects - pressing into the canvas and asserting themselves within space. It is as such tension is elucidated across the canvas that the viewer expects the lines of force to shatter the canvas itself, as it falls away; revealing void. Time tells itself in Mehretu’s gesture - figured in the shapes of spirals, made dimensional by archways that vibrate and reverberate like a tower of a thousand gates - with each gate revealing a deeper perspective into the structure rendered, wrought, and rent by this struggle of figures - infinitely into the illusion of the canvas. Mehretu’s perspective work lends the struggle of her characterized shapes a sense of irony in that their war of tension and force is simultaneously epic - in light of the perspectives elucidated by Mehretu - and illusory, in the very shattering of this canval space their war threatens to reveal/unveil. Mehretu’s tower of space-time, rendered in blueprint lines, is precisely the background which foregrounds the war over space-time, asserted by Mehretu’s forceful figures. Their bluntness meets and disperses, forms brutal directness and swerves to avoid imminent collision. They leave their tracks, where they have been on the topography, in the smudged boot step or the smear of blood. Their movements and collectives resemble flocks of birds, brought together in common cause and resistant - not only in light of their perceived ‘conflict’ - but, again, in light of the space-time which hosts the imaginative dimension. And yet, there is still spiritual life. In the upper quadrants of the canvas, a space emerges - as Mehretu’s tower thins in the air; the ghosts, angels, and trees and breezes receive prominence - as that which almost stands over the synthesized conflict, itself - observing the war of things. They interact on their own plane, yet intermingle with the chaos of the world below - inhabiting, too, a vectoral space which is, almost

paradoxically, emphasized before them; as the clearest manifestation of them - in their colorful assembly.

What this body of words has yet to share with the reader is that it is only an inquiry into one aspect of Mehretu’s work. To step back and attempt to observe the localities of the painting with a modicum of the awareness and attention necessary to see (and not simply ‘look’) - the painting reveals itself to be a swarm of locusts - a hive with a mind that converges and diverges in massive elements - hurricane forces and cosmic trees and magnetic repulsion and rebellion. It is also in this stepping back, attempting to give distance, that the powers of discernment in terms of strength and boldness, inner and outer spheres of the painting fade to ambiances, textures, interwoven discourses in which the words and figures become near-illegible in their assembly. Mehretu’s detail work is of the fits of the sky, the fits of the ground, the fits of the water, and fits of fire - life made elemental; alchemical in its elucidation. This is the power of Mehretu’s work as a sort of grotesque divinity - in that it depicts the forces at work in their elemental wholeness; in doing so, fleshes out, without the artifice of anthropomorphic figuration, that which is at work - in telling the true story of work. Mehretu’s blueprint model of the city, which straddles and stratifies the ‘true’ background of the canvas (the wholeground would be the death of the canvas hinted at by the colorful vector lines), are perhaps the closest the viewer gets to a recognizable sense of place and space - and here ‘recognizable’ in regard to that which is considered to be the consensus ‘locality’. What Mehretu’s work does is that it asserts the canval ‘reality’ as a disputed space, perhaps evidenced no more clearly in Mehretu’s assertion of a graffiti mark in the top right corner of the canvas (just above a building), beside which there is a death of imagined space; the canvas is left only to vector lines then obliteration at its material end. In this same hemisphere of the canvas, in the lower right hand quadrant, Mehretu reminds the viewer, also subtly, that there are figures on the ground in alignment with this vectoral (we might say cosmic, spiritual) awareness of space - in the red line which

almost acts as a metaphysical door broaching three figures at the foot of the building space - which simultaneously emerges quite abruptly (in either the beginning or the end of the painting if read horizontally), and also establishes the strongest line of perspective diving into the right-center of the painting, almost like a train leaving a station as observed from just behind (or, perhaps, ahead of) the station itself. Mehretu’s vectors converge in the right center of the canvas, in a space which should not be ‘visible’ conceptually, and yet it is - it resembles a polis, organized around a tree; it is also one of the rare moments in the painting which asserts a figural relation which is not predicated on confrontation as assertion of space. Here, the figures walk side by side, some almost holding hands, some of varying heights (perhaps parents and children); others gathered around a point, perhaps in discourse or sampling various foods. There is, amidst Mehretu’s Cairo, this messianic possibility, continually hinted at; represented at critical moments of discourse in the painting - of the ability of and for a polis of axial awareness - which is also a polis of the awareness of the force of life - how they function, how they obliterate, and how they create. It is, of course, but for a brief moment that this polis exists; furthermore, but for a brief moment that these figures exist before they dissipate into the wind of the disfigural (yet, also figural in their elemental representation) elements; engaged and interspersed in the same kinds of agreements and disagreements and unions amidst the wars of sex, consciousness, and space - which is also that ‘human’ thing that supposedly exists above and beneath it all. This is where Mehretu’s work is incisively powerful. It does not cede to a ‘humanism’, or a representative definition of the ‘human’ beyond the smudged shadow of that which might be; furthermore, the mere speculation of such a thing-as-existence deeply intermingled with the power and play of forces which simultaneously subsume, consume, create, and destruct these brief figures. It is, too, in the backgrounding of the city-prints, the same with the city of Cairo itself - the sheer attempt of these feats of architecture being acted upon by bold and intercosmic (here, interdimensional) forces which

surely, one could attempt to name, but of course - their power is that which even allows for the creation of ‘human’ language (a humbling awareness of); this includes architectures as ‘human’ languages of space. It is in and around the space of the conceived and conceiving (one might say, becoming) city of Cairo that this play of forces is elucidated; it is precisely in this play of forces that this place of Cairo, irrevocably, transforms.

she breathed the soul into me on the battlefield and yes i emerged victorious on the battlefield victorious eternally; scoffing at the pyrrhic.

i came like a lion; i came like spring into the world ignorant of poetry and ignorant of all things.

what damnation awaits me? tell me again. waste your breath. you are speaking to one who is like this:

i cannot even spell my own name. why would i even attempt to do so?

it is in this way that i came from the darkness emergent; you who see the world as carved in half know nothing of my soul all split in half and begging to be healed -

this is what i mean when i say that you should not mourn the dead. mourn the living. the not yet born have already passed through this land barren as my womb. they have seen this war of kings and laugh as they choose their new clothes.

my children are born every day and die every day gasping

staring up at the clouds staring up at nothing as i smother them with my hands. their first breaths are gorgeous and pure pure in a way that you cannot understand. pure in a way that is removed from you.

for i dug into the channels of my so called birthplace until it shattered and there, i dug out my soul. i dug out its very myth and expunged it like a fire a fire which i replaced with my own a glow which lit the walls upon which to this day i paint my destiny. my true destiny. a destiny which i determine; a destiny which is mine, alone.

what do you know of this? what do you know of breaking that which was unbroken only to understand that this breaking screams forever into your heart? i let her into my ears like a whisper. i am glad as she devours my blood.

for i have come into the mysteries like one who has lost the arms and legs and regained them beyond quantity. i have come into the mysteries like one who has been severed at the neck and regained infinite faces.

come steal this fire! come rend this fire from me. in stealing this fire you shall realize that it is infinite that it is everywhere and that it will not die. in stealing this fire, you shall steal me with it.

for i gave my body to it and was totally consumed. what to me is lost or gained? what to me is this corpse spilling over with flesh? what to me is the value of things? it is not even a drop of blood that is lost in this world.

i am in battle furious in this birth just as i was in the last. i cut through your dream: cleaving your starving dream with barely a gesture.

this sword of mine does not break. you will see it in the night just as you will see it in the day for it requires no light to do its destined work.

THE CONFOUNDED MOTIVE

It is as such that modern life finds its loci externally - in the manifest polis, in the manifest love affairs, in the manifest salt of history that has piled up - leaving the witness buried beneath its supracultural weight. These affairs of the outside are also affairs of the inside: of the heart, of the soul, of dreams, and of the imagination in confounding relation with that which is termed ‘life’, or, the ‘outside’ world. It is in this sense that the modern conception of the individual is founded, in itself, as a conception, in a fundamental alienation of life (eso) from life (exo); as such, witnesses, with each passing day, its own murder in the secondary creation of its image. If one were to come about the ruins of past lives, one’s own and others, to stroll casually amongst the wreckage, like Benjamin or Baudelaire’s flaneur, they might stumble into the entirety of sentimental life - a whole charnel house of past garments, past desires, and past attachments - many of which may yet still hold some significance in this life. This is also what it is to stumble into the greater psychic life of the collective - or the confounded lives across time and space in and upon which images, dreams, and desires are projected - forming, influencing, and contra-forming the terrain which might be called ‘man’. One need not be aware of this history on a conscious level, as it inhabits, eso and exoterically, the entirety of life, as the catalogue of all that which is, was, and will be. It is in this way that Michelet says: ‘each epoch dreams the one to follow’.

The myths of man form, themselves, a crucial loci, or a crux, as the theophony which becomes theophany. By making the forces of life manifest - as gods, words, tales, processes, progressions, procedures, the initiate coming into life may glimpse themselves, briefly, in the refractory mirror during that initiation process which is the submergence into the elemental to retrieve the soul. This purgatory process is often mistaken for some certain place, or some allegorical truth which has lost its allegory; here, the allegory being that the process occurring within is also that which is occurring

without - on scales of equal measure. The very refining process which the initiate undergoes beneath the window of the unique cultural myth-making process (the window to and beneath the stars) is also that which occurs in and of the stars themselves when they collide and detonate; as such on a cellular level, in the union and breaking apart. When the soul is torn asunder and subjected to purgation (in an alignment of kairotic time; the planetary hours) it is also that this process of transmutation renders an entirely new, or foundationally altered, conception of time and space in relation (cosmic time) - a newfound method of communion with the cosmic self. The individual self is raised up into the purgating light and shattered, revealing that immortal stone which is the cosmic self - now apparent to the individual turned initiate - as both with and without, embodied and disembodied ‘substance’. This process is equivalent to that which the historian experiences in the study of history, and the chemist in the study of mixtures - a process of clarification of the formerly murky waters in which the entirety of ‘man’s’ psychic and material lives exist as a residue. This primordial swamp, very much like the mixture Clarice Lispector describes in her novel The Passion According to G.H. is precisely that which the initiate crawls out of psychically; the grounds of the soul emergent on all fours, slithering - the primordial force of man.

In this early life, in this time before time life, man is nothing but a creature, a mixture of elements composed with wild strands - beholden to his innermost psychic dilemmas and libidinous urges - unsolvent. This is the force that rages in much of the world today, as it has throughout that which we call ‘human history’ - a wildfire of the soul subjected mercilessly to the passions; as yet uninitiated to the purgating fires of hell. It is in this way that the Christian tradition describes hell as that which comes after life, if one has not yet experienced it in this life. This purgatory process comes for each soul in due kairotic time; this is also the absurd process of demanding great change from individuals who are not yet initiates - in other words, those who have not yet descended into great change, carrying a lamp and a

knife, prepared to slay (and by slaying, I mean lifting) the dragon of the primordial self; behold this self to the purgating fire-light. This process is a surgery of the soul; a re-unionless union of synthetically separated ‘forms’ (concepts, shadows): the inside and the outside, the man and the woman, the self and the other, the light and the dark, the living and the dead. Only by way of this process, documented over countless cultural and religious traditions the globe over, may the self lift and be lifted into initiation as to the ways of the Self. It is in this way that you cannot ask anyone to understand that which is not currently understandable in this iteration of the soul-process. It is also in this way that the object of attachment for much of the world since the Babylonians and Egyptians (if not even earlier) is the god-object. This exotericization of ‘god’ in the objective form is, as mystic (and de-mystic) traditions from the Kabbalah to the Vedanta elucidate, often necessary as part of a developmental process of the soul in order to grasp the god-concept; ultimately, the dissolution of all things and all conceptual life to realize god in the life force that is endless - which is the unity of wisdom with creation.

The mistake, in short, is to project this process outwardly. This is the mistake which one makes, on the endless wheel of creation - until one is turned inward by a kairotic movement, and entirely transformed.

here i am as you left me servant of love holding my hands out to the angel of your palms.

and when we touch, we enter touch entirely.

i have tasted everything in this banquet of our love and now i push my plate away.

am i clear to you now, god? have i made enough sense to abandon myself to nonsense? you say, 'not yet' and submerge me in the waters of man once again.

all of this work i do now is for you and you alone. all of this work i do now is for the eternity of your presence. i press this work into my palms into my fingertips and feel you flowing through them, god.

i once lived as a painter, and painted pictures for you, god. in what other ways may i be of service to you? in what other ways may i be an instrument of your way?

i once lived wishing to be right. i now know that there is no right. i once lived wishing to know. i now know that there is nothing to know.

now i speak simple truths in silence.

the music of my youth is enough to remember time apart from you.

once, i flailed in darkness. i do not flail anymore. i direct my action as you stay my hand. we are so pressed together that it is impossible to distinguish us.

what are words like poetry and love to me? with you here like this entwined with my soul? i give all of myself in this gesture. i do not want anything other than you you who i am of this great and meagre portion yet no longer portioned like the illusion of the world.

when i act with you you act through me and show me the places which are not places but states of the heart which are composed of staying seals.

now i know that i am here to let them.

i have seen the battle of my soul; it is wrought in the everyday. i rise with the sun and lift the ore of it to light and lose a bit more of that which i thought was my self. so my time passes on earth.

each day i am tempted by my past that which composes my flesh which i am tempted to adore. each day it shudders and each day it shakes like a tower in the wind. each day i am in danger of stripping my self of it.

here, i am atop the battlement looking down at my language as it compounds itself infinitely.

there is this wall that i have built taller than the last wall that i built some time ago. it is by way of the use of this wall that i will become sovereign. or so i tell myself.

the king calls the jester to court to forget the war. the moon comes and soothes his ear. by what recipe was this elixir made?

in the glass which mimics the receptive qualities of the body?

when i have passed through all of these elements i see myself as i truly am: as everything excepting that through which i have passed.

i come to the gates of thebes and ask myself a simple question with a difficult answer: why have i come to this place on a pilgrimage with no end in sight? i pass through this gate or else come upon it again in another time or another place. to my deathless soul it is no matter.

so it is with my prison my cage which is hidden beneath my ribs chamber of chambers which is my heart. each day love spills from it like a chalice.

i reach into myself and grasp it in the light of the sun atop this tower that i have made for myself. the altar collapses, and i am forever done with it. the icons mean nothing.

it is in this way that the beggar dreams himself to be a king and the king dreams himself to be a beggar. the jester knows this to be true and dances the king's dreams away with the song of the night.

like abraham i destroy the symbol of god to hear the voice that is god.

i must be careful to be articulate: the idea at its root is the son of god.

i do not look for the son. i embody the light - becoming it forever.

in doing so i go beyond the boundary. in doing so, i am not mediated by his word.

do not mistake this movement for a horizon. it is soul without even the idea of confinement.

to embrace love so deeply that you go beyond holding.

as soon as i speak my speech is resolved in your language. what can i do or say in light of this?

no - i have not turned away from anything. do not bother

bribing me with that which i already am. the moon, the reeds, our love all of them gaze, longingly at the water.

you drink me in as i drink you in. who is so bold as to say that we are not in love?

here i stand and offer even my highest principles and deepest dreams to faith. this faith which is my perpetual submission to understanding - that which i am.

this faith in her eternal wisdom renders them even less than nothing.

can you see me? being lifted up by god until i am this light streaming in through the window of your eyes -

this window that is also a door.

NOTES ON THE PSYCHIC BEING

All religion is fanaticism. There is a certain point, however, at which religion ceases to exist altogether, and the spiritual, or psychic being inhabits the body directly. This is a turn away from any and all organized faith, ritual, and dogma - and into the specifically individual manner and matter - the location, here, of an arm, a leg, a head - of god. Do not mistake this for a hermetic move. What this move presents, like Kierkegaard’s Abraham, is the (re-)emergence of the individual (now ‘Z’), transformed, after the induction of the primary individual (‘A’) into the collective, universal material of culture as the limit of god. It is this process, from ‘birth’ (here, potentially many births); this equation to which the primary individual is submitted, yet unequipped with the developed psychic arms and legs necessary to defend itself from the onslaught of conscious and unconscious material projected into it and onto it and into and onto its world by the collective cultural influence as tremendous psychic weight; this material might be called language. What the returnless return of the psychic being (the angel of god) is, is the return of language to itself (the vibratory chamber) in the burning fire of initiation into life, cutting through the submergence of the psychic being into the water of the universal. It is also, in this sense, that baptism is a fitting elemental act to signify the entrance of a youth into a certain religious/cultural paradigm. The psychic being is that very spirit ‘substance’ (or, one could say, the soul which is ‘taxed’) made (attempted language) definite ‘substance’ in the process of cultural integration - or the process of submitting the primary individual to the universal. This integration process occurs, of course, in various spheres in various cultural contexts - from the ‘family’ to the ‘group’ to the ‘collective’, (and now) to the ‘global’. These spheres represent cultural bounds, or circles of influence within (and without) which one is ensconced in a world of meaning, or a language of and for the earth and the heavens. These spheres are the ethical and moral bounds of ‘god’-given language imposed and proposed from the outside upon the latent psychic being.

The psychic being emerges again (returnlessly) in its violent encounter with itself amidst and beneath the detritus of history; furthermore, is locked in an immortal battle with the factors and forces which press and pull at it from all sides. Here, time, space, language, and so forth. Benjamin’s ‘Angelus Novus’ represents this process quite well, as does Kafka’s Parable. The psychic being is submitted to the universal as a means of and to survival - subjected to languages which situate it in an impossible situation - which is to say, between two non-existences - male and female, past and present, right and wrong, god and demons. The emergence of the psychic being is also the emergence of the messianic and the emergence of the shamanic, or the healer

in regarding various traditions and traditional definitions. By way of this process of the submergence of the primary individual into the universal, the primary individual enters the stateless state of katabasis, or underworld travel, where the very concept of the individual is torn asunder and remade anew. The return to the world is, of course, anabasis - the rise after the fall. It is these initiated individuals who now, in a global sense, pose the problem of themselves to the dominant order (or as we have referred to it here, the language of the ‘universal’), in that their experience has gone beyond the bounds of that which is termed ‘possible’ and ‘real’, and they have yet emerged with psychic information which the universal does not have language for; thus, cannot submit by way of definition. It is these experiences which Plato exiles from his city; these are always the exiled poets who are beyond poetry.

It is a modern question, now, as to what these individuals (Z), or ‘initiates’ are to do in their anabatic return. The unassailed dominance of global capital and its initiatives toward the pure material have not only excluded, but systematically erased and violated cultures which hold space for the emergence and cultivation of the psychic being. The cultures of this order that do survive are submitted to the work-for-life mechanism which has inhaled the entirety of that which ‘is’. The initiatory cultures that nurture and

support the emergence of the psychic being approach nonexistence. And yet, it is precisely the cultures of this order and their initiates who are best fit to become stewards and leaders of a paradigm which, increasingly, requires intimacy at a cosmic level - with the earth, the soil, the air, the water, and the fire of the soul. These initiates do not have religious faith; it is in this sense that they have total faith. Initiates are those who lead cultures; dragging the dead weight of ideas, dogmas, and religious beliefs which impose categorical borders into the light of a possible total liberation of the soul by way of descent. Initiates do the work of descent and shine a light down the pathway. In this descent, per the myths spanning from Inanna to Orpheus, there is an abolition of everything - like Rahu swallowing the sun; the extinguishing of all principles and perceived truths - brought to ash, elemental. The individual is stripped even of their self, and shown the light of the Self, or the interwoven network of All Things And Not-Things. In this process, the individual is, returnlessly, transformed into the initiate - in the encounter with the primordial self.

how i have seen these soldiers of love assembled! hearts of devotion beating in breasts like drums - each of us so unconvinced of the war.

how i have seen them lined in rows - upright and the flaming spear of devotion poised. these thousand spears form one great weapon of god. all you warriors, painters weavers and cooks blacksmiths and mothers - how we are nationless things! how we are soldiers of god. you who listen for the quiet will.

you who would walk away from the battle before the first collision of momentous fate - do not flee! stand beside me now! do not fear that which calls your name. for we have heard these secret things - god whispering in the night all about the love which poems despair to touch.

you are angels of divine love. i have seen you sent down to earth to rend life from the mouth of stone. i have felt you by my side

in times of great need. how many times i have been on my hands and knees crying out - oh god why am i here! oh god take this pain away from my heart!

and yet here i stand with you baring my teeth in hell. i have come and gone so many times from this place tracing underworld geographies on my chest my legs my arms my neck - i am painted with it down to my veins and the blood which violently emerges from them like breath born under the great tree.

all i have known is devotion. it is in my blood. stand with me and brace yourselves! if difficulty comes we shall surmount it. if pain comes we shall tend it. if fate comes we shall welcome it. have we not held hands before as our souls passed through this place? we are not damned. we are always in love.

there have been so many battles

and so many lives and yet, still, we lie ensnared in this trap; thrown from consciousness. we are but madmen surrounded by meaning. this is what we have become to the world. they do not know our names anymore and we shout out to one another in an unwritten language.

lo - the earth is stitched back together with a metal hand. we, few, huddled as it descends. and here comes thunder! all of our gods urge us forward trembling hands stayed and hearts assuaged with this banquet of nothing. the halls are filled with the joyous cries of those who know that which awaits them with the intimacy of a lover.

this final battle comes down from the heavens and we are prepared, steeled to it. angels, stand by my side! brace with your shields. all of our history is but for this moment. why else have we lived and fought for each breath? how many times have we laid our arms down only to find our souls alight?

those of great faith doubt themselves and the courage they are given by god. arm yourselves with it and do battle!

here we stand surrounded. here we stand together this last time.

the battle rages on as we enter the fourteenth day. it is like a storm of consciousness with us - back and forth like locusts; even the land trembles with fear.

it was once that we acted out this struggle; now it is the swelling of the breast and the unnamable rising in the throat. this war became something subtle and barely controlled.

wisdom picks the pockets of the dead; watch as she wanders like a lost child among the graves. there are so many furies without names - murdered ghosts which plague our waking thoughts while the fates weave us new lives from the ashes. we are born after the battle - an after which never comes.

the generals attempt to organize their wounded and the horses buck their riders, kicking up dust. i am on foot and i have lost all sense. i am raving in the light of love - this light that makes men mad as they lock lips with death.

when a battle rages for weeks; when weeks turn into months, men begin to call out to dead gods gods of their forefathers and gods of lost lands. they stagger with blindfolds failing; revealing their scarred eyes

to the candlelight of the moon - staking out trenches and playing cards with devils.

i have been done with haunted dreams since some trickster god swallowed the sun and i slipped out from behind that gate. i saw my people pray to images and i turned away from them forever. it is from this wilderness that i rise like a rogue star up against the horizon of the city walls to call your king to battle. i have had enough of his generals, his servants, his mediating words - i wish to pit my flesh against his and end his life.

this is where the poets pause and struggle to find beautiful language for murder. i leave the page to do the killing - ripping his name from existence like that space which swallows a dying star. do you still see your emperor and his banner waving in the night sky, dreamer? for i am a weary soul; i no longer look up. i am busy wrestling this bull of my heart this bull which has gored my soul leaving me dripping wet and stuffed with rags - pouring out with song.

we come up on that outpost of longing like two naive lovers pressed up against one another at the threshold of time; gently knocking at the gatehouse door.

i touch you and wrapped up in your hot blood is the oblivion of love the doomed oblivion of it pulsing in your chest in your arms in your thighs as the sunset strikes you brilliant gold in my arms.

the life of you runs wild untapered ragged beast of your breath ragged beast of the sun god - i pray to you with kisses on your arms your chest and your neck. what symbol could serve you you who are nameless in love?

we run up to that furthest point where love does not die and yet death is certain. we are breathless and flushed, set down beside this river of longing; heads turned to starless night -

oh my love where have you gone! how desperate i am to become you in the waning moments, to wrap my love around the pillars of your soul - how desperate i am to touch you in the places where touch dare not go! there are moments when i am so beneath your skin screaming, swallowed by your breath - moments where i am hopelessly beyond language. in these moments, even silence becomes fraught with peril.

have you forgotten me oh mistress of the heart? you who are so utterly myself? speak my name so i might live!

your finger wrapped around the pleiades exposes a bright new shape to my eyes. why have we come down here like naive souls to this landlocked body entirely without sound but to love?

become like lions emboldened with strength; step into the favor of your blood.

send it to god in devotional labor dedicated to ultimate purpose.

the will alight unwavering in your commitment - raise the blood at your soul’s command.

become unshakable in your passage through the gates of peril and temptation.

come - join me in that place leave the wheel of illusion and go beyond.

come - join me among the gods: hallways colored with their depictions.

o image breaker arm of god tear down empires like time; slash canvases with your knife.

o image breaker arm of god eviscerate the illusion of selves - in the light of god cities crumble like statues in the desert.

image breaker! rend these valueless things from their pathetic game. break them at the artificer’s heart. how many machines your family has made! how many dreams they have forgotten and mistaken for god!

o image breaker do the work of god - the work that may be plainly seen by one who disdains everything for light.

THE STONE OF THE LAW

'... in de Sade you see repeatedly, polemically, conscientiously, the idea of the person as a thing, or the person as an object, of the body as a machine - and of the orgy, or the sexual encounter, as really an inventory of the possibilities of a machine or two machines, or several machines, in collaboration with each other,'

'... the possibility of the exchange or interrelationship of copulation among the most disparate kinds of objects... on a dissecting table instead of a bed... (here,) all objects are on the same plane; they are in that sense dehumanized - because our human experience is that level of our experience which makes distinctions, between human and non-human and different degrees of the human, and those humans who are near to us and real to us and those who are simply abstract to us. But on this level of consciousness, human beings become things; things can be animated, treated as human beings.'

(Sontag, On Classical Pornography [Lecture], minute 30:30 & minute 38:30).

I must begin here, with Sontag - for to begin with this excerpt (from her lecture at the 92nd Street Y) is to begin with the foundational mechanism of distinction, or judgement. Sontag (with de Sade) elucidates what judgement looks like, or the physical manifestation of said process. The encounter with ‘the other’ object, machine, manifestation, individual - is ‘an inventory of the possibilities of’. This, of course, if given psychic and philosophical space, is the process and procedure of the entirety of ‘human’ history - a process of selection, use, abuse, manipulation, harnessing, loving, and leaving - which informs, forms, and formulates the foundation of the world. It is precisely this

process as a process in and of relation, which tells the tale of the current moment, as an amalgam of the ‘past’ and an as yet unshifted formation of the ‘future’. What becomes necessary, then, is to take an inventory of encounters, in order to scry the moment.

In the exponential ‘globalization’ of the world (as the completion of ‘the world’ as cosmology as project), global cultures have come into community with one another, by ways of violence, trade, and the violent trade of human beings. It is precisely by way of exchange (exchange of values, virtues, stories, bodies, beings, resources) that the world conjecture comes into being as we currently attempt to know it. Perhaps the most relevant and still semi- conscious collective periods of massive shift in this mechanism can be said to have occurred at the turn of the 20th century, at the detonation of the atomic bomb, and in the 1980s - where the ‘threat’ of a profuse, technologically interconnected world became real.

Each of these historical moments, or periods, represents a crisis of consciousness - the turn of the century as a industrial thrust into a new, modified, and even more proficient form of capital (which produced and reproduced modified cultural ideas and ideals) which included cars, electricity, the nation-state, and world war. The detonation of the atomic bomb represents the ‘end’ of capitalism as fascist action - the production of use-less conditions for the sake of production: where life is submitted entirely to the process of modern production. Here, the devastatingly political realization of the apolitical dream of ‘art for art’s sake’, a 19th century French slogan (adopted by Poe), which, in a slightly altered form, decorates the MGM logo in its film productions: ‘ars gratia artis’. I will expand upon this more in further passages. And finally, the 1980s, where the threat of an even potentially democratic (read: massive) information age loomed large; the political retrenchments of Reagan and Thatcher attempted to reaffirm the last vestiges of a dying dream - the dream of the privileged individual.

'... the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school,'

(Sharpe, 'In the Wake', 21).

It is that the imagined conditions reproduce themselves in the continued imagining of reality; this is precisely what is at stake in an analysis of the proceedings. The most extreme manifestations of collective ‘human’ violence - the atom bomb, labor camps, slavery, and genocide - reflect back to us the underlying, or foundational principles of difference as violent separation. It is in the particular psycho-sexual mode detailed by Sontag (that of de Sade), that this violent separation occurs, exists, and does its work. Sontag describes this mode as a plane; furthermore, as a ‘level of consciousness’ which arranges life ‘on a dissecting table instead of a bed’. Deleuze includes an excerpt from one of Masoch’s contracts in his text Coldness and Cruelty:

'You shall carry out everything I ask of you, whether it is good or evil, and if I should demand that you commit a crime, you shall turn criminal to obey my will. Your honor belongs to me, as does your blood, your mind and your ability to work. Should you ever find my domination unendurable and should your chains ever become too heavy, you will be obliged to kill yourself, for I will never set you free,'

(Masoch [contract] via Deleuze, 'Coldness and Cruelty', 279).

These modes of Masoch and de Sade - are modes of cognition - modes of cognition, which in their very essence are and have become archetypal (as they represent prominently) in the archive of collective consciousness. Of course, the sadistic and the masochistic are now quite prominent terms in the modern language. However, it is a mistake to give Masoch and de Sade authorship over these modes and methods of cognition - as they certainly did not

originate the sadistic and the masochistic. No, these principles belong firmly to the collective consciousness, as they did before they were elucidated (or brought into language) in ‘the bedroom’. What the works of Masoch and de Sade complete is the articulation (and in all articulation, elevated satire) of a system or method of navigating the world - a system which is a way of seeing. It is precisely in the descriptions above that the world is viewed laterally; with equal contempt and malice: that all objects are usable, that all humans are usable; furthermore, that humans and objects are alike in possession; that all things might be possessed. To call this an ethos would be to privilege it as something carefully considered; perhaps it would be better to regard this method as absolute self interest. However, it is clear in the works of both Masoch and de Sade that this is an incredibly considered process, as both go to great lengths to construct situations which will befit and behold their desired state. This very created institution of terms and conditions resembles, with remarkable accuracy, the level of imagination and harnessed life necessary (of course, at a different scale) to assemble a civilizational/empirical state as that which is desired. The contracts of Masoch and the contracts used by the French to ‘buy’ Algerian land; the colonial Americans to ‘buy’ Native American land and execute Middle Passage ‘business’ exist in the same manner; on the same spectrum - as spectres of possible life made matereality. It is a mode and method which views and executes life as a series of transactions, elevated with increasing precision and efficiency to a total economy: an economy where ‘all society is like a market… and all [life] (personal, political, social, civic) has a market form,’ (Brown, Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein). This elevation is and occurs as the practical, the practicable; that which becomes the everyday - as its mechanizations reach from idea to material condition and return, collectively, to the idea form - forever changed as ‘truth’ of history; thus, of the present moment.

It is in this sense that these histories of brutality are never buried; rather, they loom large, as great and profuse spectres of modernity (much like Mephistopheles looming

over the town in Murnau’s Faust). It is that these events, considered and conceived by many to have firm beginnings and firm endings, exist as perpetual processes, with perpetually deferred judgements - as their influence is unending in the intra-generational psyche, as well as in the sphere of created things, or ‘the world’. Botticelli’s Divine Comedy Illustrated works to show a rather precise map of what this world looks like as, quite practically, the underworld of existence - populated with entire histories of acts; the perpetual torture of these acts in reverberatory action. This is the place where it is necessary to return to the detonation of the first atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6-9, 1945. This moment is detailed viscerally by Artaud in his letter to Henri Parsot just months after (September 17, 1945): ‘this matter is a kind of mass spell-casting in which the whole world more or less participates off and on, while pretending not to be aware of it, and trying to hide from themselves the fact that they participate in it, now with their unconscious, now with their subconscious, and more and more with their full consciousness.’ This matter is the deferential violence onto and through the other as object as vessel, as mechanism, as release valve for the charged, libidinal, erotic, psychic, life force energy of becoming. This energy is not engaged head on by the individual, but rather exerted on outside ‘objects’ and spheres as the very raw force which rises up and finds expression - without intimate engagement of the being with itself, this becoming. It is, simply, the deference of consciousness that Artaud is referring to - the safety valve being war, sexual violence, possession, control, fear, enslavement, and large scale acts of ideological institution of borders, walls, and the other as ‘violator’, ‘criminal’, ‘thief’, ‘savage’, and ‘murderer’. This story has played out from the conquerors Alexander and Ghenghis Khan (and before) to the present day, in the murder of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson - a story which is composed of, as, and through, psychic life force energy acted and enacted in the field of ‘real life’ - or the making of the world as projected upon the earth. This world making is composed of value systems, or ways of seeing, being, and

consuming - both sublimated and consciously operative (and becoming-god) - which form and found ‘the human being’ as perpetually disputed territory. Much like the institution of the state of Israel, it is a state of being which is never resolved, yet forever in process - as the attempted institutionalization of a dream being met at all sides, with other dreams, other means, other methods, and other ways of being - many of which are inherently ‘stateless’. However, the process of total subjection (we may call this, simply, ‘fascism’) succeeds continuously against all of its foes and adversaries if only because it totally subjects - everything - to its logic, its rules, its force. It is, quite succinctly, that which is entirely without laws; yet, that which institutes its laws with total conviction and with all violence necessary to institute submission. It is in this sense that the state of total subjection is synonymous with the atom bomb; furthermore, that the atom bomb is its greatest reproduction of itself - in that the atom bomb functions as it does - with an immediacy that it, previously, could only dream of.

What is necessary, in order to make the state of total subjection operative, is the film of the production/construction as that which runs as it is being made, or the appearance of ‘everyday, normal life’. This is precisely the condition Artaud refers to in his letter to Parsot, and continues to refer to with equally violent urgency throughout his life. However, it is quite difficult to define these terms, as they are perpetually expanding in a superficial way - expanding, as it were, as worldly jurisdictions. The process, however, remains the same - gaining only arms and legs - human and prosthetic, alike. It is no mistake that Oppenheimer quotes the Bhagavad Gita. The process is to make a god out of ‘human progress’; furthermore, to progress human progress to such a point where it creates a total condition of ‘self’-development (‘self’ here being the concept of the ‘human’ as distinct and distinctive). It is clear how borders function, both nationally and personally, in order to create and engender the illusion of this progress as homogeny, containment, safety, and as ‘domestic growth’ without compromise of the cell wall. The

dream is of an artificial womb which eats death. Here, the pursuit of ‘the’ singularity is the pursuit of a total life without death, total state without exile, and total law without lawlessness. In this modality, a singularity is not a unity, it is a total disjection of the other to the point of which the other ceases to exist but as a mere shadow; a rendered image of the disjecting process. This is precisely the function of the atom bomb. The violence here is both explicit and implicit; it is a violence cultivated in and from (too, the womb) of history - in the methodology of the conqueror and the conquered, the taker and the taken, the rapist and the raped. In this modality, total subjectivity exists and is harnessable by the subject - the logical conditions need only be created for it to exist. Here, the languages of law and rationality function as the left and right arm of the empirical body - a body which justifies itself by its word, a word written in blood upon stone - a stone which, then, becomes law.

Legal language, much like the language used in Masoch’s contract and in the slave trade contracts of America - is paramount to the continual deferred judgement as assertion as process of the state-body. Without this method, it holds no power. It is important to recognize that legal language does not exist simply in a legal setting - rather, it is all language which attempts to assert and argue an artificial boundary or border between this and that. The institution of legal language is a language of mediated separation; furthermore, is that which assumes the ability to ‘resolve this conflict’ - this conflict of two things which do not, fundamentally, exist but as consciousness. It is in this sense that terms like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and ‘The Middle East’ are created - as fields of jurisdiction, always already termed from the outside in, as cultural conceptions and world maps which act as definite truths; definite places; definite spaces - which can be used, raided, jettisoned, argued, and engaged in conflict. The very assertion of these definitions upon life as fluid consciousness is fundamentally violent; yet, we find ourselves immersed in them; brought to rage as we defend, reorganize, and restructure their oppressive borders. It is in

this language that modernity exists and is operative; furthermore, it is this language which restricts and reforms possibility - which is to say, a world with better prisons, a world with better borders, and a world with better rulers. The language of legality is present in an exaggerated sense in ‘courtrooms’; finds much better and more practical use in the intimate discourses of the everyday. This legal language is that which partitions, discharges, funnels, and harnesses the life force, with the threat of organized violence if the life force does not comply. It is in this sense that Nietzsche remarks, ‘work is the best police’; we return to forced labor as the most precise manifestation of this mechanism. Just as Kafka’s K sprints through the labyrinth of the law, a labyrinth which he cannot seem to enter but certainly cannot leave, forced labor functions to submit the individual so totally to the principle of subjection - the submission of the entirety of the life force to exhaustion; death; the profit of another - that the individual no longer exists to even attempt protest. This forced submission is to the subjecting organ - the organ which judges forever - perpetually violating (wounding, stabbing, penetrating) the individual with sexual, social, racial, psychic, creative - definition. The function of this state is to create the impossibility of mass self definition by instituting mass self definition. From Artaud’s letter to Parsot, continued: ‘The purpose of this spell-casting is to prevent a plan of action which I undertook years ago, which is to get out of this stinking world and to have done with this stinking world’. Artaud later modifies this sentence to having ‘done with the judgement of god’. With Artaud, Kafka’s ‘K’ is not undone by some abstract ‘god’, but rather god in Pascal’s terms: ‘potential agency endlessly deferred by worldly authority’. Continued: ‘By moving the myth of the gatekeeper to the film’s abstracted prologue, Welles places the allegory outside the text proper, where it becomes a loop as circular and repetitious as the labyrinths of the law it precedes’.

It is, in the above sense, that ‘god’ is the contract before the contract, or the cosmologically ordering and orienting force which, ‘indisputably’, as the Judge before judgement,

organizes the world a priori, away from history into myth and story - as that which is interrupted, in medias res, by the contemporary moment. It is ‘god’ which has laid the foundations for the predicament of men, not men themselves. In this abstracting turn (like Welles’ work in his adaptation of The Trial), the myth makers and propagators of culture at the level of the collective may, in turn, assemble the law from lawlessness, the righteous from righteouslessness, and the human from humanlessness. It is no mistake that the history of god is also the history of the human; the two are hopelessly intertwined. The history of god is the history of the originating, divine image - in relation to the caste systems; ideas and ideals of worth and value which spring violently into truth and existence as ‘god’s creation’. The contract, from the civilizational to the intimately sexual, is always already the contract of god’s will; god’s word, transcribed and handed down to man upon the stone tablet of the law.

there were times when all we had to live for was an illusion; even the bone readers couldn't help, game all over the ground - and all it could tell us was that the gods were angry again.

forced marches through the snow and forced marches through the desert settling lands filled with nothing where the mourning sounds echoed lands of no bread and no wine lands of no woman only the wrathful god.

there were times when all we had to live for was an illusion but it was true enough for us the love that kept us clinging to stone as wind and water swept it from our arms. even the law could not keep us from desire.

we called on the gods and they appeared in strange shapes out from the slip of the elements; we called on the gods and they mocked us howling like we howled and taking like we took - leaving us alone again only now thinner only now weaker only now closer to death.

outside the walls

the world is stillborn and silent. not the silence of the light but the silence of confounded language. the struggle of birth is infinite in the heavens; you can hear it in the sound of thunder.

I threw all of my stones at her And she would not relent. At the top of the mountain Covered in ice I sacrificed limbs To prove my love for her. The oracle Of my love Would not budge.

The chess game of it all Was already thrown away - The game we played In which I had assumed All sorts of positions. I thought I could Slip through some back door And remember her.

I possessed nothing And my body, degraded Was not beautiful. She gripped my soul But it was not there To be gripped. My clothing fell away from me and turned To sand. Her face contorted as she showed me in a dream That my love was Mere idolatry.

It was in this way that I was locked In a battle which was an illusion. For so long I attempted to define that which Could not be defined And save that which Did not exist.

I fought a war for an idea of love;

I fought a war for A wrong cause. It was by way of this understanding That I came to serve divine love.

Camael came Down to me bearing his flaming sword And bowl Down to me as I cried on the mountaintop Locked in battle with Fate, My love veiled and buckling In the midst of all of this sorcery which I had conjured - My language Obscuring my true path.

He told me, ‘Seek not here, For it cannot be found. Seek and you shall only find War. Relent, And give even your love To the causeless cause. This place shall be revealed Out from under The image. The loss you fear Is also contained Within it.’

I heard Camael. I pledged my will in a different way; In a different manner, entirely. Here, there are no commanders No judges And no separations. All of my actions are devoted to serve The love that is everywhere. My body is gone; Given to the angels.

There is no name For what I have become. I have gone beyond that which Contains.

Alexander modified my language Twisting its vowel sounds in a vise and Changing my vision. The mystics now speak in common speech In vain attempts To be understood.

All of the ghost world is gone to these people. In the modern world It has become maps and solidity. What of us shape-shifters? What of us, Sybil?

It is like the spirit has evaporated In a sickness which descends like a veil On the world Possessing men and urging them forward With the promise of power.

I have seen past and future. I have laughed At every iteration of knowledge And this process of man Coming to know His broken body By way of his Broken symbols. They no longer come to me in Covered spaces to whisper their fears And dreams in my Ear - No, Now they openly spit In my face.

The sun is nothing to seers. I have scried horrible truths with nothing Less than darkness And a dying heart.

I have seen what becomes of them In a fit of anger And the final death of the mythos Which propels them Into chaos. Tell me - What happens to those who have lost Their bones?

The modern world claims It has no need for the music of the spheres The turning of the shapes which produces Great harmonies And great discord. It is that, supposedly, Man has conquered everything But himself.

after vallejo and artaud

you do not actually want to hear the poet you want to examine and toy with his words like they are works of art which they are not.

you want the poet to dance for you but poets do not dance. fools and entertainers dance. the poet is attempting to communicate that which is without language. this act is suicide. he enters a trance of movement.

the vapid theatregoers newspaper readers and general masses are looking for a spectacle. the poet spills his blood on the stage in profound ritual; in an ancient act they cannot comprehend.

they jeer, they laugh; they turn him into a pathetic caricature of language.

their history is a history of five minutes.

it is as such that the poet is the greatest fool of all - condemned to prance up and down the boulevard in the desperate screaming act of divination

his suffering condemned, exiled, diagnosed; made ‘normal’. the poet is mentally ill; the poet is a narcissist; the poet is electroshocked institutionalized and so forth.

the pregnant suffering of ages whittled down to a joke.

this is the work of the poet today.

there is a place that i go that is known to me that is not of this world.

i go there and it is like being past a threshold where all of the things that you claim to possess no longer exist. there, they are the nothing which you perceive as ‘spirit’.

in this place that i go i am truly alone and already dead. my fate has come to pass in broad strokes and in my passage i can see how i have become, having left behind the awkwardness and poems.

there, i become like the wind a force without eyes. there, i have lost all character; even my bones are ground to dust and no longer mine. do not mistake this for a punishment. i revel in my true form.

the place that i go is not abandoned, no - it is teeming with life. it is a city without walls; it is the only place i have ever felt understood.

there i speak in utterances that are truer than language. there i have heard the true word for suffering. there is no way to translate it.

the angels of that place tell me of a pain deep inside in an organ without location and in their description of the pain they exorcise the wound.

when i go to this place, i leave nothing behind. all the baggage of my life means nothing to me. you tell me it is important and that it is who i am. it is in this way that my nights pass with you.

i will play along so that i might survive to write another line.

With words I eviscerate my opponents Idolaters, profiteers, exploitative systems: Look - I am the executioner Of all these things.

Come! Give me all of your hate and your petty jeering It does not even register As noise.

I enter the room And my whole body is a knife. My physical form is as violent as my words. I will allow you to choose The way in which You die.

I am charged with singular purpose. There are not even distractions in my language. Let the painters paint their beautiful images; Let the singers sing their beautiful songs. I am here with the purpose Of disembowelment.

I am the butcher of civilizations Unsentimental; I administer curatives with the analytical distance of one Who is either entirely empty Or entirely full With contempt.

I have no time to sit here with you And discuss your petty syntax Your obsession with language And the ways in which words connect This way and that way. Language stands in my way; I murder it with equal vitriol And disdain.

I regard nothing with admiration. You cannot stop me or stunt me with fame Wealth, pleasure The sirens of your world Do not even register As noise.

I have cultivated discernment With the ferocity and dedication of a warrior Who is also unconcerned with the wars of history. Where else does such a warrior go But to other planes of combat?

You cowards fight over Nothing.

I fight the war that you cannot see. I fight that invisible war that rains down on you the blood of centuries That rains down on you shame, guilt, pain. I fight that many headed beast which plagues your dreams The beast you are too afraid to turn and face Because you know you will be Swallowed.

my poems are pure fire. every time i write a poem i stoke this flame with life force energy. every time i write a poem i get stronger. i write a poem every day and add absolute force to the bonfire of my heart.

the engine of my body burns in ecstatic rage. it is the sun that you cannot see the sun which has buried me and my bones forever.

i look at the damned and i no longer feel pity. what sorrow do i have for the suffering of desire? those who continue to meddle with illusions after they have been struck by light do so of their own volition.

my poems are pure fire. i write a poem every day to burn up the world - to burn it all to ash. each day it rises again, more terrible; with more heads more arms and more understanding of the weapons i use to destroy it.

i am undeterred. i simply sharpen my blade with renewed ferocity.

when they go to battle cowards say - ‘the world approaches you.’ and thus take a defensive posture.

i say - ‘i approach the world.’ and run fearless headlong into the fray.

the painters are like the poets and the poets are like the painters. you are slaves painting pictures for kings and singing the songs of kings.

you are not interested in killing despots you are interested in serving them. you are the slaves of culture; slaves of the god limit. the limit which you dare not go beyond.

what! are you too afraid to go beyond the boundary; are you too afraid to seek the total liberation of the soul? do you fear the retribution of god?

i ask this question and i know the answer. you have given your throats and hands to false gods; pledged your pens and brushes to the stupid trick of power. you betray yourself in your actions; in your words.

i sit here in judgement because i am beyond your game. i see you throw your lives away and call it devotion; i see you submit your lives to an icon and call it art. the shame that you feel will remain forever in these words.

there is nothing novel about your bag of tricks; the literature of idiots has its own lineage

pigs sitting around a table digging greedily in the trough of language. you belong to an ancient industry of flatterers and sycophants.

there is no poetry in the grotesque submission to culture and its given symbols. you do not have the strength nor the creativity to stand up and challenge its reign. you laugh but you know this in your heart.

you sit in your offices and at your desks composing slave ballads which lag, pitifully, behind the revolutionary works of ages which shatter language with an axe. your indignity is the world’s shame.

your cold blood is nothing new. i have seen it before. i have read it in headlines; i read it every day in faces and eyes which know nothing but what they are told. i look upon your works with nothing but disgust.

i have wrestled with god and fired a slingshot into the eye of fate - the big and lumbering brute - i have wrestled with god and god kept the angels out of it.

even one breath convinces me of impossible things swelling my breast and giving me strength to proclaim my poems so loud that the treetops shake. poetry is a giant and i ride her through the abandoned cities like a man on his deathbed who has not yet had enough love.

i have wrestled with god with the type of conviction only god can loan the kind of conviction that is given to accidental kings and madmen musicians turned into something else by those who weave the stars when it is revealed that their music speaks to animals and spirits. i have locked hands and forearms with god as the sun rose in a place that i did not recognize beads of sweat falling from his brow and i cursed god out of my love for combat a love that he gave me.

i am not put off knowing that god is undefeated; i know and understand my role what it is to play one so filled with frenzy and passion that everyday life makes no sense that the slowness is not enough

the fury that comes with the desire to love rises in me - the fury that raises planets like boulders in the sky -

i gleefully await the destruction of these poems by time. i want to see them slashed, eviscerated, burned; scalped by iconoclasts.

i have no illusions as to the glory of poems. i have seen the work history does with language - making images and icons of life. i have seen christ and buddha transformed into dead bodies.

this is the work of evil weaving its way through the minds of men the snake that tells of right method and right work; wrapping its tendrils across and around the breast before the soul has had a chance to blossom and in blossoming do away, forever, with the falsity of judgement

i see this work and in a fit of passion i dash the stone of the law to the ground. in this act we come into the land where everything is permissible.

these poems are the flowers of my heart. i pick them and they die in my arms as symbols do. i feel no regret in this returnless death for i understand it to be the movement of all things to and from source.

in this understanding i am

without attachment. i send these poems away like love letters in hopes that the echo of their breath may help another realize that which is the birthright of all things: the divine self.

the poet must outmaneuver time and in doing so create unending space.

all of these poems come together are stones that i have thrown; i let them go with focused intention

for i have seen goliath and i aim at his teeth.

it will only matter how deeply the soul is transformed. harness your fear; become angels on earth. do the work you were born to do. united in harmonic purpose split open the world with the light of god.

the spirit is of all things seen and unseen; the strides made in your relationship with spirit are developments manifest in all things. the gesture of your arm is lifted by the divine. remember yourself!

go beyond that which you fear and find the seat of life the throne of thrones which made the body itself. do not relent in giving all of yourself to the work of each day. in doing so you return it to the light. this is the greatest possible pursuit for man and his greatest manifestation. do not fall short in your ambition! come forward with the light of god with all of your heart and declare i am that! what is there but union with god?

i have seen greatness in all of you and that greatness has shown me love for it is god’s love that pumps through the veins of all things. rise your temperature!

bring yourself to heat. live and shatter temples!

together we ride into shadow. come, wrestle in the pit of ideas. you will be challenged by voices without bodies spirits that inhabit the crevasse of the mind. they live deep in rock and stone. exile them with the violence of language. brandish the flaming sword. bear the muscle of your soul.

come into that which is yours.

you are the supreme emanation the light cross beat into your chest with fire and iron burn the broken world away! this world of separation which has cast the seat of life into shadow. go to war for your fate! who else will fight for life if not you? who else will retrieve that which the underworld holds?

watch - the angels come down from different rungs on the ladder and hold your shoulders; they chant strength into your breath embolden you with their breath

and stand around you holding arms. there is this great army. focus your attention! step into your birthright - that which is yours.

you are that - the king of kings. step upon your throne and rise. the ladder of the body still holds spirit. travel within and return prepared to do battle - armed with realization.

THE EROTICS OF CHAN(C/G)E

“I am among those who dedicate men to other things than ceaselessly increased production, who provoke them to sacred horror.” - Bataille

‘... at the drop of a hat, revealing the aleatory basis that sustains them, and can change without reason, this is, without an intelligible end…’ - Althusser

‘The solar radiance we are finally finds its nature and meaning of the sun: it is necessary for it to give, to lose itself without calculation.’ - Bataille

‘There comes a time when nothing is meaningful except surrendering to love.’ – Rumi

There is a moment at which the critical analysis explodes itself; even the hope of appealing to the world with rationality; with a critique of history, means, materia, and the organs of the universe. The struggle to find, obtain, and use knowledge as a tool to justify a movement in the face of oblivion (Bataille, on the other hand, sweeps this whole slave dialectic away from an aristocratic point of view, from that of the master gripped by his death - Baudrillard) is that which is also underwent by Nietzsche, as the individual thinker is doing no less than wrestling with god in attempts to find a method. This is also the moment at which civilization is rendered irrelevant, the discourses of the past are rendered irrelevant (if but wreckage to cling to in the tempest), and the concerns of all things - quite simply - disappear. This is the heightened state at which knowledge and non-knowledge are brought to a head, as equal tools and weapons, to be discharged against the massive forces of Fate, Time, and Space - which at each and every moment threaten to entirely collapse the individual into themselves; to swallow them whole like a whale.

It is in this sense that the phenomena of institutions as collectively organizing forces are permanently situated at a lower level of consciousness - in the separation of the lover from the beloved, the subject from the exile - the straw battlements which are ripped apart from all angles by the forces of Fate, Time, and Space. These principles, themselves, might be viewed as timeless gods, fateless gods, spaceless gods, in that their power and force transcends the attempted establishment of any and all materiality. These forces render the temporal critiques of economy, nation, and otherwise - pathetically small and hopeless. The struggle over and for human existence also resides here; for just as the ancients cowered at the eclipse of the sun and begged harvest and heat from the sun and the ruling planets with blood sacrifice and offerings - the modern complex continues the sacrificial oration with its economics of scarcity, scapegoating, and war against its always renegotiated ‘other’. The myth of the minotaur and the Moloch are perfect illustrations of this principle in action; the principle which engenders the social hierarchy of the monstrous, and that which is given to the monster so that the larger group-culture of entranced subjects might survive the onslaught of god forces. It is not that man is no longer hopeless and helpless, but it is that this hopelessness and helplessness has been displaced into and onto the veneer of social institutions and organizing forces which create a smaller theatre of god - displacing this hopelessness and helplessness onto minority groups and generated ‘slave populations’ who act out this drama of nature within and without the social circle. It is much the same with the institution of war - which cannot stop until man comes to grips with his eternal helplessness and hopelessness - which is to say, a surrender at the level of consciousness to consciousness - and thus, ceasing to displace the fear of utter oblivion and obliteration into and onto the generated ‘other’ faction; that which is separated from the subject-civilization by walls and linguistic buttresses. It is as such that the minor cosmic drama of ‘human existence’ and the simulated collision of ‘human cultures’ is ongoing - as a world sphere of simulated (and thus engendered as reality by way of

simulation) separation as the ‘discovery’ of other selves projected outward onto the paradox of the other-subject. This is done to avoid the utter obliviation of the individual- subject as conceived reality, or permanent truth of embodied consciousness. It is as such that this play of war and human struggle as separation myth must function in order to reaffirm the basic, cosmological truth-as-denial: that the major cosmic forces of Fate (that which, mythically, flies in from just outside of Saturn’s orbit), Time (Saturn), Space (that which swallows even the gods) - continue to absolutely, totally, and without distinction - obliterate the ‘human’ conception and idea/ideals.

This play, in short, has become hopelessly monotonous; in its attempt to mimic/simulate the major cosmic violence at work, falls utterly short. There is a lack of art, lack of sensibility, and lack of awareness in how these god-forces move in the perpetual human simulations/resimulations of war, genocide, ethnic hatred, caste establishment and enforcement, enslavement, and otherwise. All of these methods and mechanisms function to create/assert the human conjecture - or the philosophical hope-posing-as- truth that the ‘human being’ (an ethno-class) is possible, valuable, and can assert enough of its own force and dominance, to overcome Nature. This archetype can be clearly observed in and as the struggle of Western arts and philosophy attempting to grip that which has no handle for several centuries. However, this work as myth of separation is, of course, by no means unique to the historical development of ‘The West’ as, itself, an archetype of civilization/culture/creation-and-destruction. It is no mistake that the histories of war, enslavement, genocide, and caste are as old as ‘human’ life and history themselves; furthermore, that they exist and have existed on different scales/orders of magnitude throughout the course of ‘human progress/development’. The collision of cultures and trading of methods/mechanisms of assertion/dis- assertion as a means of organizing life and the ever expanding spheres of human contact are the technologies by and through which this ‘human’ conjecture is played out - a

la Marx’s opening lines in his 18th Brumaire - first as tragedy, second as farce, with the same characters, played by (supposedly) different actors, wearing the same costumes. The sequel and remake mechanism of modern film is utterly tied to this historical rerun-work; is of equal monotony and uselessness. So where does one turn? Althusser and Baudrillard (in his article on Bataille) turn explicitly and directly into the terror, in the form of the aleatory, the roll of the dice; chance. Althusser sees the madness of chance (and chance as madness) at work in the gestures of Artaud and Nietzsche as individuals “or elements unloosed” like a fit of god; the method of Mayakovsky’s suicide by Russian Roulette also suits this enquiry. It is that chance as a fit of madness is truly change; change in the sense that it abandons all attempts at ordering the mechanism of Fate as that which comes next, or is meant to come next. In the abandoning of reason and principle as a method of ordering life, there is also the historical abandonment of law as written language as a method of ordering life which resides in and depends on the establishment of and as stone. Here, there is a conflict of authority; a paradox simulated by the ‘human’ understanding of the function of Saturn as the god planet - or that which organizes and orders. Saturn is traditionally Kairos, but in the modern context, Saturn is referred to (superficially) as the organizing structures/rituals/foundations/buildings which compose society; civilization. The minor drama of Saturn situated by minor thinkers has of course debilitated (in ‘knowledge’ only) the course and role of Saturn in the cosmic play - to that of a bureaucratic overseer, an executive. Of course, the cosmic force of Saturn as Time swallows this pathetic organization whole as even possible; finds itself (the father) pitted against its father, Uranus, in a deeper, perpetual, knife fight - of time and the timeless - of that which is set to collapse even the greatest change, and the thief of fire which steals elements from the gods; brings them down to earth. This is also the dynamic discussed by Pope and Milton in the thesis: ‘To justify the ways of God to men’. Uranus is the poet who swallows time; Saturn is Time - which of course, attempts to swallow the poet - the whale.

The poet must outmaneuver time. The poet must, at all junctures, find a way to destroy time at the source; thus receive his fate as eternal space - that which both heaven and hell promise - as the furthest depths and the furthest heights. This is the tragic pathos of the poet - reaching for that which, of course, cannot be grasped in its lux aeterna (or eternal light, infinite wealth) - but perhaps the poet does not reach to grasp. Perhaps the poet steps into, without grasping, without arms, legs, but rays of light; lightning. This is the turn of the poet, with Bataille, toward the terror, away from the inanity of the push/pull forces of production and the attempt to assert/dispel human economies - into the hierarchie celeste - the order of angelic light. This is, of course, a practical procedure obscured by esoterics - a procedure, again, described by Bataille in his thesis on the solar economy - that which, in an analysis which necessarily goes beyond the physical conception of economy into a metaphysical obliteration of concepts in fire - too loses itself as an analytics in and to poetics - as embodied light, heat, fire. It is this procedure which retrieves that underworld stone and becomes elemental - refusing to submit to the petty bourgeois icons of Literature, Poetry, Genre, Rhetoric, Linguistics, Syntax - and other such inane and limiting rules

to go beyond the god of culture (Pascal); into true battle - into cosmic fire. The simulated god as culture is that which presumes the authority of the king of kings, the sun, in a play which absolutely belittles the true brutality of the star. In violence against culture, the poet (like Dante) absolutely destroys it - to step into higher battle - the wrestling with the cosmic forces which, in their aspects, compose god in a perpetual transformation of life and death.
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i must step into myself and rage against time. i must jump up on the stage of history and smash its floorboards digging up the blood of the ancients offering it to the sun again.

this is no performance - this is the arc of the ages which i spread open as i step into it the open canal of god from which genocides and nations of slavery tumble out like newborn babies.

draw the curtains of the night and watch the bright moon rise against the depths of space and call it love - call my kisses on your neck and the violent act love call it all love; call it all damned. i call it burning - i call it the being riddled with knives; the being robbed the being looted of everything. become stripped again of everything.

i beg you to take all of me i beg you to do so - please for i am desperate, begging, at the edge of time with my hands out for water.

call this love!

the poet rustles his papers and collapses onto the stage face drawn in and the smudges of bruises littering his chest. this wrestling with god lasts forever; i endure by calling all of my blood to me and shaking god's teeth from the jar of his mouth.

you will not understand but i am all poets of all time poets who never wrote a line poets who died as babies poets who were beggars and monks who owned nothing and died useless - i am all of these poets; thus, i am charged with killing time. i come up to his breast and stick a rusty, blunt knife between his ribs. for a moment, the wheel stops spinning the catherine wheel turned to the tank to the bullet train. who can make life of all of this torture? who but the insane the mad, so bludgeoned of reality the made mad and born mad the circumstantially mad - putting a pistol to his face and spinning the cylinder.

how many refugee cities and how many hopeless nights must be strung together on this necklace of time? how many penitents must be dragged through the streets by their severed heads on this necklace of time? where heads are strung like pearls where heads are strung like diamonds upon it worn by the king of kings his shield the bones of all things born and gone from the world.

what undefeatable beast! he does not even look as he takes my life your life - the life of all things! he returns it to him with the mindlessness of one who is truly insane.

what madness compares to the one who constructs the theatre of the insane? he who is the yard himself? look - he already has added my face to his army of faces my arm to his army of arms and my leg to his army of legs. can you not feel it? the being torn apart by oblivion?

i have raved enough in the light which grows in searing force enough for me to approach death and to kiss it with tongues to approach death and to embrace it so deeply that i become it forever.

THE PLAY OF FORCES AS ‘EMBODIMENTS’

‘Where there is nothing left to do but gather the body together, I mean

PILE UP BODIES.

It is no longer the world of the astral, it is the world of direct creation which is thus recovered beyond consciousness and the brain.’ - Artaud

The Aztec blood rite and World War II are two historical processes which incise to the core of human cosmogenetics. Each of these acts, respectively, holds an essence, or a stone of the god Ares, or - beyond embodiment - the absolute primordial violence - which is, of course, the ultimate embodiment of opposites… the supposed opposites here being ‘life’ and ‘death’, or ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’. Each of these bloodletting acts, of course, is cradled in myth- space: the second world war in the absence of cosmic myth (Bataille) replaced by secular myth (Hitler’s eugenic model with influence from the United States), and the importance of blood and blood sacrifice in the Aztec theology - as an intimate relation between the collective and the gods. There is little to no distinction here between these two historical movements, vastly different at first - but for the incredible lucidity and spiritual connection present in the Aztec mythos which we find lacking in the modern nation-state myth of capital-materiality. The need for the letting of blood, however, and the interfacing of the cosmic stories of separation and reunion; the enacted struggle of immense forces amongst the ‘human’ population - remains - with all of the supranatural force and urgency it held centuries ago.

If we proceed with Shakespeare’s thesis (all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players) in conjunction with Weil’s critical analysis of the Iliad (the true hero, the true subject… is force) - we arrive at the Aztec

thesis of blood as sacred communal element - at once of water, of fire, of earth, of air, and of the gods - that which is the medium of life force energy, not only flowing through all things, but that which was given by the gods to the sun; given by the people to the gods, and to the sun - to keep it alive by feeding it with blood - in a constant, interrelated flow state. Intertwined with this conception is the resurrection of the underworld bones by Quetzalcoatl, by the grinding up of the bones into flour by the earth goddess Cihuacoatl; the giving of Quetzalcoatl’s blood to animate and moisten the bones into human beings. This intertwined nature and supernature through blood is a cosmogenetic completion - a literal unity and union with the cosmos at all times by way of the embodiment of the force of the gods, which is also devotionally returned in and as a method of communication. The ‘most precious water’ fuels the divine labors of the gods; of course, is that which also fuels the labors of the earthly beings. The blood is the versatile fifth element, or medium, one which may be transferred via air and fire, in the burning of blood; via water and earth, in the intermingling of the blood with the soil, the river (and the larger river of blood which is the primordial unity). It is, of course, by way of rituals and the ritual imagination that this interconnection is maintained, an interconnection which is not only necessarily communal in that it is done in public, cultural acts of transmission - but also, in the mythology, a global and interspatial understanding of interconnectedness which extends into the cosmos and the cosmic.

The resemblance between the Aztec cosmology and the perpetually escalating a-mythic global violence (war) of forces to establish worldly power and sovereignty is uncanny; uncanny in the sense that the element, or aspect, of catharsis - is at work as the language of force. The primary difference is - that in the Aztec tradition it is not only the focus, or the subject, of worldly work, but that it is the entirety of all things; in the modern, global sense it is sublimated to an unconscious drive, motivator, a forgotten process without metaphysical elucidation. It is in this sense that the cosmological violence of the Aztecs is depresented

in the modern context and represented as ‘barbarism’, while political genocides are executed. Each cultural paradigm not only acknowledges bloodletting, or catharsis, as necessary - but deifies, reveres, and organizes civilization around it. The modern attempts to make the ritual sacrifice material - but the ritual sacrifice is irreducible to knowledge. Like other aspects which the modern attempts to make taboo (cannibalism, necrophilia), it does not make sense but in the most extreme conditions; even then, it is regarded with absolute disgust. The ritual sacrifice is not only unproductive in a material sense, but it also, in alignment with a cosmological duty, fails to produce material sense altogether. In the submission of life to a larger cosmological duty which flows from the veins of the gods, irreducibly, into the veins of the people - there is no materiality. Life is unbroken from its purpose. Neitzsche predicts the birth of world war when he proclaims, ‘god is dead and we have killed him’ at the turn of the 20th century - but in a larger sense than is widely interpreted. With the several century long introduction of a modern economics organized around the slave ship as and into factory; pure transportation and pure use of bodies (‘pure’ fascism), the slave ship is reproduced ‘in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school,’ (Sharpe). The modern colonial world replaces, with and by force, the cosmogenetic connection of god-earth-blood with the material institution of god as the economic organization of forces as embodied; submitted to an earthly hierarchy dedicated to the economic form as deified, capital.

What is at work here is a literalization of the gods; the bringing down of all of god’s word into worldly things; this is also the utter loss of god’s word in the legislation of communication/communion into the institution(s) of language (law, literature, the everyday contractual work) - the same contractual work which becomes history around the works of Phyllis Wheatley, the same contractual work which structures the slave trade; the same contractual work which structures the French colonial rule in Algiers and elsewhere. The force behind the transformation remains the

same - the putting-to-use of blood (the force of work). However, the kingdom of god is certainly as the world and organized upon the earth - as the creation of a redirected flow in the aqueducts of life-force as blood flow. This giving work of blood to the gods was also prominent during Elgabalus’ reign, which Artaud references - providing an esoteric quotation:

“...beneath the temple of Emesa there is a system of special sewers wherein the human blood rejoins the plasma of certain animals. Through these sewers, coiling into broiling corkscrews whose circles diminish the further they descend to the depths of the earth, the blood of those sacrificed according to the needful rites will find its way back to the geological seams, the congealed cracks of chaos. This pure blood, thinned and refined by the rituals, and rendered acceptable to the god of the underworld, splashes the groaning deities of Erebus, whose breath finally purifies it.” Artaud’s fascination with ritual sacrifice extended beyond the Aristotelian conception of catharsis into an attempt to map relation globally into and through this act and related acts. It is no mistake that much of Artaud’s work on the subject occurs in and around the time of World War II; Artaud says in a letter to Henri Parisot in (September 17, 1945) that ‘the French people have forgotten, because they are under a spell, that I have answered these spells with piles of bodies right in Paris, and that the streets where these bodies have fallen have also been closed off by the police to allow the ditch-diggers and road repairmen to collect the dead and clean up the street, but this everyone has deliberately forgotten so they can indulge in the luxury of believing that life is going on as usual, and the populations of Paris and of the earth are beginning to be terribly depleted, Henri Parisot, but all those who have lost a relative or a friend are under orders to say nothing and not to complain, in the hope that this monstrous affair can be hushed up…’ What Artaud describes here is the ritual work of World War II, at and to the level of a massive ritual- political sacrifice of millions of people for political ends. There is no more apt description of the political but the

cosmogenetic projected onto and as the ‘world’. In this description, we return to the stone of this essay - the mistaking of cosmogenetic (the massive forces of god at work in the world) for the ‘world’ - which is much akin to mistaking the wind (the voice of god) for and as something. Of course, Paris has always been dead, and America itself is a mythic conception; these nations are formed and formulated as replacement deities, or gods-on-earth, for the deeply lost myths and connectednesses of the cosmos - cosmologics since disavowed, exiled, cast out, murdered by ‘logic’. Artistotle, of course, has much to answer for on this topic; the positor of both a definite binary, a definite logic, and a definite catharsis…

The ritual sacrifice of the modern world is the political war of nations; furthermore, the disjuncted law and execution of civilians, refugees, and ‘outsiders’ by nations and their armed forces. This process is, unlike the Aztec rite, sublimated, obscured, and socially repressed - to the level of which (at any given point in time) it is outsourced ‘internationally’, hidden in ‘compounds’; away from the knowledge of the populace at large. The soul level transformation is not only hidden, but denied a relation to death at the level of the cosmogenetic completion - the flow of blood in and out of beings, bodies, embodiments. This displacement of forces, or the hiding of blood rites by states and the justification of blood rites by states under purely material terms - is a historical development with massive consequences to world populations at large; a development with the consequences of fear, loss of understanding to ‘knowledge’ and ‘lack of knowledge’, and an utter lack of intimacy with death - as it is replaced with the positivism of empty icons - none of which are filled with the meaning and purpose of that which traverses the underworld, the overworld, and the heavens. The modern world knows only the overworld; its images and ‘myths’ as Culture reflect that ‘knowledge’. Its children suffer deeply for it; die for it in the continuity of broken meaning alone.

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THE ACID OF DISSOLUTION

This I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid. – Blake

The dissolution is a process without end - a putrefaction/purification cycle with exponentially increasing density - the combustion of a sun down to the atomic and into nothingness. The dissolution circles itself, encircling and entrancing the object of its enquiry, itself, and performing entropy first. It is in this way that dissolution steps out in front of death and proclaims itself death. The method of circumventing time is getting out ahead of it or stabbing it in the back - there is no way to approach time that is not in the guise of the thief or the coward. The dissolution necessarily requires high acids to boil down the baseness of the idea - of life, of the image, of the manner and matter of things - and this boiling down of things does not cease until all things are thingless, and vice versa. This state is the stateless state, or the point at which the point becomes the globe; the cross of the sternum becomes the immortal cross of all things with nothings. It is at this point that knowledge and non-knowledge lose distinction; this, the final distinction - the intellect which simulates the border/bound of life and death with the possible and impossible, the sense and nonsense. The front facing oblivion is that of the dissolute.

It is as such that this process, when engaged with the absolute conviction of a madman or a religious fanatic - becomes a surgery of existence. The knife of enquiry is not merely a visceral operation, no - this knife insurges by removing whole bodies and whole synthesized ‘lives’ from existence. It is not enough, in dissolution, to merely critique or perform cosmetic alterations on a body - the dissolute delivers the soul from the conception of the body into

embodiment. It is in this manner and matter that dissolution is that which unwraps the gauze on the body, burns the veils of the body, and pierces the eyes of the body - in a cosmic death of the bounds and borders of conceptual existence. The implication here is Plutonic transformation; an endless coming and going from the underworlds to retrieve salutary remedies and dark medicinals by which one might transmute consciousness; allow for the healing of life in reunion of the synthetic binary. The paradox of the dissolute knife is that it severs while making whole.

Dissolution is, of course, murder. It is the violent act which surpasses the superficial murder (the act of ‘killing’) and enters into the sphere of deaths across many bodies, many incarnations - as that which brings about the sacrificial urge in the soul. Here, life is a preparation for the ultimate sacrificial act - the incarnation of the self as written; inscribed flesh. This is the absolute creation of the individual - the return of the cross to the embodied spirit; the lightning-fire of transmutation which burns away all but the bone of existence - which is then shaken, read, and reassembled in a new configuration. Dissolution is that which gives way for rebirth of that which finds conception in the different assembly.

What we discuss here is a rebirth which is not possible without the birth of flesh from spirit; the trial of the flesh burned, melted, disaffixed in purgation. This rebirth is a series of consciousness transformations vis-a-vis the encountering of material limits and laws, which in their being pressed up against the body reveal themselves to be shadows of an idea. The one who pursues dissolution is the one who pursues the light of the inner sun which banishes that which is mere shadow - to reveal that which is a limb of limbs, a mouth of mouths, an ear of ears, an eye of eyes. It is, of course, that in this murder - one murders oneself; the paradox of dissolution belies the simple fact that there is no murder and no suicide - only the projection of the purgation principle. It is in this way that there are no lovers, no events, no dreams, no journeys, no desires, no innovations, no

stories, and no myths - it is, simply, life affixed to the stone. The shadow emerges where the light has not yet been cast. In dissolution, the work is done to cast the light upon the entire world conception; thus banishing the world. In this process, the sword of life is alight; in being plunged into the stone, the nature of the stone reveals itself thusly - again by way of inner illumination.

The stone here might be called that which language reaches for and attempts to grasp, but cannot grasp by means of language. The same applies here to the concept of ‘knowledge’; furthermore, any such tool assembled by man for the purpose of knowing. It is in dissolution that the process of absolute negation is underwent (as itself, a trial) in order to discern that which can only be understood by way of understanding. It is in this sense that dissolution is a doubly ulterior mode - it is a mode that rejects the positive for the absolutely negative (and in this way becomes utterly positive); it is a mode that rejects knowledge for the absolute understanding (and in this way achieves absolute knowledge). The dissolute is, in this way, the rejection of Antigone:

‘Yes, I Antigone, the blind beggar a king, I find myself rebellious to my country finally rebel to its laws masculine, its wars imbeciles, at his proud cult of death.’

That which is dissolute is rather easy to spot for the keen eye

as it is that which not only does not participate, but it is that which does not participate with a convicted fervor - which might otherwise be described as that which possesses one whose death is imminent; it is from this place that the empty formalities of ethics, law, and reason can be quite easily done away with. The banishment of these things (the shadows of ideas) is done from a place of clarified divine law
or the conviction of the convict who cannot turn to religion, cannot turn to nation, cannot turn to the organized life which, in its organization is solute - and yet, this conviction is of one who has been to a place that does not,
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strictly speaking, ‘exist’. What do we call this place? Would not ‘god’ be a contrived term? The dissolution is always a crisis of language - as it is a crisis of communication as it is a crisis of existence; the imminent fire of creation. It is that the body exponentially decays but the soul remains! It would be simple to be content with this notion and to allow it to take course, but the dissolute does not settle - lands nor words. It is not possible for the one who is an exile of the soul to come into anything, anywhere, but for the moment of the agape scream - the open mouth which stretches the skin and bends the bones and threatens to spill the entirety of its contents to the ground. The problem remains, but the problem is no longer a question - it is the absolute, singular, fire of existence - a fire which, in each encounter with the spirit, does battle with it - and grows perilously brighter in the process.

The monks fail in this regard; they abnegate their posts (or perhaps, perfectly inhabit them), in the sense that they are contented with the absolute truth of the dissolution; at this point, cease to do battle. It is the rare two faced contemplative who burns all books equally, who disdains all words equally; who is not, in fact, in search of any obsequious truth of existence or liberated utterance - but who lives only to bathe in the fire which is life - the fire which cleanses and purifies all thought to nothing, all meaning to nothing - who does the work of god; in this sense, is one with god. That Jacob wrestles with god is precisely the process of the dissolute; this is the action of the dissolute where the monk does not enter - the gate of battle in which god asks to be killed. The myth, however, does not go far enough. It should be that Jacob kills god, and that god rises again; that god kills Jacob, and that Jacob rises again; each with increasing fervor and sharpened will to victory. This is the cosmic battle of the soul through many lifetimes; a battle which is also the collapsing of all time into a moment - the battle which is projected into all of human life.

she speaks to me in the erotic dream at the threshold of consciousness weaving herself inside and outside of me communicating her energetic directive she guides my hand telling me where to caress, where to move and how to breathe to express life.

all that she asks of me for the gift of her love is gratitude a gratitude i rise and give each morning, with the rise of the sun i come again, inside born again to my duty to her sacred word sacred in its untranslatability.

she comes to me in different faces and forms each time, making love to me and touching my astral body. she uses words i have not heard and shows me pictures i have not seen. in this showing she gifts me the underside of her eyes the subtle presences and emanations of her body. she urges me into her love - pressing me into her and guiding me ever forward into deeper dreams and deeper night. with her beckoning, i come.

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AND THE MAPS OF SPRING ALWAYS HAVE TO BE REDRAWN AGAIN, IN UNDARED FORMS

MONK, MINGUS, COLTRANE

It is that we must retrieve human meaning from the structures that establish it; that this is only possible by way of the poetics of gesture. In this poetics of gesture we are like Christ cleansing the temple; sweeping the tables of the icons of currency which are language values and declaring in different motion; different time. It is that this new breath requires a new symbology, a new mythology; a new orthology which is also the death of orthology. Each revolt of breath against entropy begs its total elucidation; an elucidation which always shatters the limit of the cultural- known as god. It is that the breath is pushed into time; forcibly inserted into that space where there was no space; certainly no space for it to exist, live, and formulate expression in the brief throes of its struggle - a struggle which is handed down through the ages.

This breath work is that which is at the frontiers of spirit - a primacy of becoming which is also indicative of the role of music; particularly the music which strives to disrupt the paradigmatic hierarchies of language - in the formulation of communicative possibility.

Everything I lived, said, or wrote - everything I loved - I considered communication.

This is what it means to come into the future, a future that is not time bound, but possibility bound, tied to the false mast of language which is perpetually mistaken for that which is possible; as the modern language is inseparable from law and law-making. Even the poets and musicians of this time argue, debate, and assume positions over the work that is being done. The music is inseparable - for it is in the trees, the war, the turning of the planets; the silence of the sleeping cat. To steal the fire of meaning is to explode - and by explode I mean go beyond - the conceptual limits of all

things; thus allow for the breath to breathe itself. There are several exemplary works of this magnitude - particularly the oeuvres of Monk, Coltrane, and Mingus. What distinguishes these poet-theorists is that in their poetry they are also painters; in their painting they are also musicians; this is the art of the ‘one who is most like himself’ (Monk), the genius.

It cannot be denied, that like Nietzsche, these three thinkers single-handedly, in their obsessive pursuit of intimate language, changed how language is and can be perceived, written, spoken, sensed, felt - at a global level. This work is a total transformation; transfiguration of the body to allow in new symbologies, different symbologies; here, embodied symbologies - hitherto unheard and unheard of syntheses of dialectical movements, passages; like Moten says regarding Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, underworld retrievals:

‘I’m always stricken—by the way he glides away from the proposed. But this gliding is rough, tossed, rolled by water, flung by waves. There’s a kind of obscurity, even a kind of madness in Trane’s glissement, his glissando. This opacity of gliding is chorographic philosophy, thinking on the move, over the edge, as exhaustive, imaginary mapping of an underworld and its baroque and broken surfaces. This ongoing, ruptural moment in the history of the philosophy of relation, “in which,” Glissant says , “we try to see how humanities transform themselves,” is more and less than the same old story. It’s torqued seriality—bent, twisted, propelled off line—is occult, impossible articulation.’

It is that Coltrane, like Mingus, is thinking through the music in the totally liberated conception of music which is one in absolute relation to oneself by way of creative, spiritual sovereignty. This, itself, is a way of theorizing history.

‘Theory wasn’t being used to pluralize, to see that there was theory everywhere you looked, and everywhere you listened. When painters paint, they are theorizing imminently in the field of paint. Sonically, when you

compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That’s still the key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every field is. Every material force can generate its own form.’ (Kodwo Eshun)

Eshun’s observation in the final line of this extract is that which is the generative thrust of the works of Mingus, Monk, and Coltrane - a nuclear thrust, the explosive entropy of incarnate life harnessed by the spirit-desire becoming. It is that the force of the music of these three agents asserted itself over and across history, over and across language; in doing so, refuses and refused to cede to the paradigmatic barriers of the time. The desire for transformation; the desire for communion with the soul - is that which abolishes all things. This stateless state of expression; becoming-instrument, does not come about without the pursuit and work of one who is devoted beyond the conception of devotion - one who is doing the work and one upon whom the work is being done. This is the actor situated at the end of history - one who is retrieving, from the depths of the soul-underworld, the map and the stone of language (the stone which is also a fire); one who is being acted upon, perpetually, by the forces of chaos

forces which might be otherwise denoted as ‘that which one cannot control’. It is no mistake that Coltrane, Mingus, and Monk - in their spiritual pursuit - are also in an elemental battle with the forces of history; the madness of the paradigm - a paradigm which sought to persecute them (and did, at least in a material sense) for the matter and manner which they incarnated. This is, in its most brutally obvious form, the inanity of history, which bore down on the genius of these three thinkers with unrelenting force.
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It is in this sense that in the music of spiritual communion, when touched and touching that which cannot be ‘said’ (or touched by knowledge), genius is liberated. We must see Coltrane, Mingus, and Monk liberated in their music - liberated beyond the politically and materially stunted and broken discourse of their time - liberated in their language as a speech-act which, when enacted after years of study and exaltation in alchemical union - becomes a bridge of sound, an invitation over to the other side, the place in which life is exalted perpetually - Rumi’s field. This place has been called Jerusalem; Said says that Beethoven is, in his latter days, in the ‘realm of spirits… isolated in the absolute’; this is the work of genius which refuses to settle for the borders and bounds of its time.

It is to sound that poets look; it is to sound that the welling up of the unexpressed begs. It begs breath, it begs the touch of understanding. I cannot discuss these three thinkers as people, nor can I discuss them as characters or attempt to shred their histories with the lack of knowledge which I have. I can only approach them as forces; from the act of listening to the expression of force which penetrates me entirely; becoming universe. The songs of these three are, themselves, unified forces of language - conversant elements orchestrated to provoke and elicit complex dialogue (the music is ‘there’, I am ‘here) - but a complex dialogue is always already total collapse. From the moment I begin to listen to Coltrane, Mingus, Monk - I am in their language. There are not words to describe this - because they refuse to use words to describe it. I am brought into the world of their embodiment; in the passage of their breath I am alight in a different manner entirely. In the creation of a personal language, not only does the genius refuse to conform to that which they are presented as ‘the standard’ or ‘the rule’ - the genius does the creative work necessary to bring about timeless space beyond that rule - stretching and breaking its bounds to the furthest extent possible. This is all that one can hope to do in this life - to afford possibility of existence, growth, language, to the furthest extent. It is in this way that

Coltrane, Mingus, and Monk provide an entirely new (and yet in that place between that which is and that which is to come) codex of underworld geographies for existence.

This is not a game of expanding language - this is a process upon which life depends - for the language must be expanded in order for life to be lived. It is that the actual sound-meanings tied to symbols must be wrought from existence; the new words must come, the fluid languages must come, the multiple persons must comes, and the language for this coming can only be elucidated by the poets embodied. There is no story but this, the coming unity which is the messianic language - the langue which allows ad infinitum, the langue which refuses to define and thus refuses definition; the langue which digs deeper into life, so deep that it is a language grounded in the soul - not in the worldly thing. If we do not see Coltrane, Mingus, and Monk as forces of creation - we do not see them. It is that Mingus is swept through with fire; Coltrane swept through with water; Monk with air - the embodied elemental composition and recomposition of life channeled by the instrument devoted to soul-work - that which, in the most literal sense, changes the world. By way of their language, we do not imagine or image them - they imagine us; transfigure us with the world of the spirit. It is almost inadequate to approach the music of these three and to designate a name to or behind their works - as it is music which flows elemental in the primordial mix of all things. The distinction of music itself is trouble; as it is also a language distinction - a distinction which implies permissibility and impounds possibility. There is a certain manner in which one speaks, and there is a certain manner in which one makes music. Just as, assuredly, in this time, there is a certain matter in which one lives. This nonsense must be done away with - for it is that which willfully obscures consciousness as that which is.

And this is where I return to their music - it is this space that we move beyond words and symbols into understanding, the process of the transmutation of language where the

composition is wrought over and in the decomposition - the unraveling of the body and the improvised piece upon the standard, or the influence of a cityscape or soundscape which envelops the composer. It is that the three are constantly penetrating and being penetrated, in a cosmic dance which is like a fire dance, a water dance, an air dance

this dance of the earth which seeks animation; the animation of lightning which casts all else in shadow - revealing the truth of that which claims to be. Coltrane’s Love Supreme, Monk’s Off Minor #4, and Mingus’ Piano Improvisations are examples of this becoming: but I cannot see the works of these three as even individual pieces, just the passage of consciousness in arcs and crescendos - to and from illumination, to and from purgation, to and from the jubilation - the passage which illuminates the entirety of the soul - not scraping up against the artificial bounds of the time, the language, the law - but fearlessly penetrating and being penetrated by that which is itself. It is on these terms that we should refuse to define the works of these three artists - artists who are also; I would argue, primarily, theorists of possibility. There is no chance in this work; there is no rolling of the dice - it is the total experience of the self and the communion with the spirit which allows for the creation and transmutation of the works of consciousness into being. It is the dogged perseverance which goes beyond all preconceived bounds, accepts all influence, and submits itself entirely to the task at hand - total spiritual liberation; the service of divine love. I battle when writing this; I do battle with the spirit of my time in order to deliver the works of these three; in order to eulogize them properly in resound.

It will only be in later times that the works of these three spiritual masters will be recognized in their full utterance; in their full works, and even then, perhaps only by a select few. The rest will trudge along; remaining in the cages of language which birthed them. There is the only hope in this

that which shatters everything. And we must acknowledge it as thus, or we have nothing. We fail in the wake of these actors in that we attempt to define them in our language,
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cage them in our words; lock them away in our time. This is not how one should regard timeless works.

“Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities […] And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.” (Wynter)

Cavafy’s Horses of Achilles - what a titan of poetry sounds like (if not but for a moment) - one who burns through the field of language, unrepentant, chasing death down with an axe. A murderer of death. He who refuses death so fervently that he becomes death, every day, in all of his actions - everything he touches sets death, so when death comes, it is a pitiful shadow of the death which he creates.

You observe that the past has created a ‘meaningful’ distinction in a material sense; you continue to assert that institutionalized distinction as all encompassing - as a manner made matter of speaking - ‘reality’, and ‘sense’. You regard the truth of life (the intersection of the spirit and the expression) as something that can be set, spoken of, and sold in material terms. Even the so-called ‘radicals’ of this time are nothing but prolapsarians - desperately trying to reconcile the exploded wound of modernity (as a paradigm which demands the absolute individuation of the spirit out from the primordial waters) in a dead language; a borrowed, patchwork lexicon of others which you believe gives you the power to confront the truth of yourself, the world; all things. It is a lack of imagination and creative daring which sets men in their perpetually renegotiated fate.

I come together in the breach The dark damp place at which the organs assemble and shatter Their individuality The breach of life where skin is flayed and turned inside out Hanging on a stick outside hell Hell that was a body, that was nothing, and now is the underworld.

How did we come into this place? The many layers of the world in which history is brought up like a bad joke Dredged up like a lost body Pushed to the front of the line and mercilessly Ridiculed

I walk to find the train I sit before the train as it passes me by The train my soul was supposed to be on before it scatters in the wind Like leaves - There is nothing great; nothing even good about it This coming and going This passage Where each of my steps is marked by death; Marked by the ruin of those who came Before.

It is like how the courts transport a prisoner To and from prisons To and from wastelands of the mind Where the juggernaut of fate stands in wait at each end Waiting for the divine punishment Which comes to me like a ladder, like a dream, like a violation I cannot feel A crime I cannot see A wound that never sees The light.

Standing in front of the clinic, waiting

Standing in front of the store, waiting Hoping for some life - to trickle out Here we are, in this storm drain of god How merciless, god How painfully merciless And all of the words like daggers - They come and go Threading the body into new Conceptions

There will come a time when I cannot write And that time is today A time where life spills over so violently that it cannot be touched Like the greatest lover, the strongest lover who takes the body Before it can be known.

In writing the worst of all poems I can hide inside it like an abandoned house Watching the light flicker in and out through broken windows With these curtains billowing in the bedroom Of all things Where I lay her down Forever -

For if I shy away from images it is because I have seen them Burn holes in my eyes and I have staggered around blind For so long Cast out into shadow and standing in front of churches in a summer thunderstorm Weeping in front of graves in a summer thunderstorm And watching the rivers overflow. Each day becoming the end Of all things.

Stagger violently with wine Stagger violently with the weight poised atop the shoulders Imperfectly balanced - amateurs of living

Amateurs of loving and making love Giving birth to alleyways in the night as the lanterns die out Playing cards in the park as the threat of another day Falls soundlessly away

What catastrophe could befall man greater Than his own fate emergent Breathing ragged like a great beast cornered Its heart raised and beading sweat down its great chest To make love to and to kill the beast are one and the same I have given sacrifices to it like wine Dribbling down its chest Dribbling down its throat and alighting the chambers of its heart

I have died in third floor apartments with nothing inside of them But this is no matter now No matter the nakedness of the soul borne and held aloft like a cross risen from the chest The agony which is laughable in the past The pain which is nothing but a line in the present Something I have dragged out and laid to rest like a bad love Like a bad joke The evil love that I bear like a rune I have drawn its sigil in paintings, the sigil of a thirstless creature So desperately thirsty that it has drunk the oceans dry Drunk the mountain streams dry And begged even the sun for water -

The myths are jubilation in common places Myths in stowaway places of the mind which come into being with the regularity of anything else The last walk through the grove of trees with the afternoon light streaming in and there is this sense of the unbreakable This sense of formidable power being discharged And the certainty of death - It does not come in a mask; it does not come in an image

It comes with the full blunt force of a blow to the back of the head There are weapons in the sun that color the night black and blue With brutal force But I cannot speak of this! I can only dance around it chanting The low nothing of words -

in giving your will to the service of god god will give you the language you need in order to emerge from any situation. in handing yourself over to god you submit your language to perpetual modification at the hands of god. you allow what needs to emerge to emerge - regardless of the method or meaning emergent. in giving yourself entirely, you give the entirety of your symbolic order to god for perpetual modification.

a language in perpetual flux is necessarily lawless but for its service to divine love; in this service to the highest law of god, obeys no worldly regime - no regime of culture, no regime of organization; no regime of coherence or organized meaning. here, there is no judgement, no right and wrong. give your language to god entirely; allow yourself to be transformed in every moment with the immediacy of god’s purpose for you in that moment. this is the poetry of the soul.

much of the modern world is without the communion of the soul with the mysteries; thus we have become merely poets, materialists, intellectuals.

you have purified me, god so that the chemicals burn me. where can i go now in this world of man made things but to you? let me stand by your side like a dutiful angel and carry out your will in every moment. for i am tired! my soul is weary of doing all of this dragging the body around. it has become nonsense to me. people tell me that this is life but i have seen their worlds, god what they make of this place the iron, the gold, the wars - all of this searching the world for that which you have bestowed within - the wisdom of your love. i am humbled and grateful for your gift and i only worry that i will not be able to do enough.

you assuage my worries and tell me that this is not the case. my life has already come and gone - it is that it was decided long before i arrived here; long before i felt you near, god.

all of this coming and going has brought me to my knees and from here i raise aloft my suffering to the sun all of my childish worry all of my childish pain because i was a child then - but now, things have changed.

i once saw the moon on a dark night and now i am inside of it inside of her churning womb where the lamp light is low and the wax drips down from her altar the altar which is my head, my chest, my bones i inside her, and she inside me - the chair of us, god is something to be seen.

the gates of time open swinging open like war letting in the lion of my love the lion that comes roaring and charging into my bedroom at all hours - and i am locked in combat with him. he shows me my desire, my desire, my desire as the screw of temptation drives me into my urge. the light hangs low over the day and i am drawn to it - the pillar of myself which is but a dream i had as a child a dream woven by the fates which cast my lot here like a die is cast, or a hammer.

it is in this way that you have poured your love inside of me and sealed it with the cooling nature of time the cooling nature which finishes my purgation the cooling nature in which i become a statue in your name, god - for these are words emergent on a page just like the words you draw into me, inscribing my body with fate. am i not like you? am i not inside of you like all things?

FRAGMENTS I. SIGN PENETRATION

sign —— signified mutual penetration but always only superficial in a specific instance.

history, myth, personal history, personal myth. the weight of the intersecting value of these places is sediment, abstracted; carried in the stone of language in an instant. the sign is what is expressed, or that which is born ‘above ground’. the sign is a poor substitute for meaning - the communicable substituted for the incommunicable.

the sign is instituted as a spoken/speaking lack - out of a primary inadequacy of language, language which is brought about in the process of creative production (justifying the word of god to men); solidified in the group process of creative reproduction (religion). this is also the process of creating new language (new bodies) for that which is as of yet ‘without language’ (without body). this might also be called the enspiriting of the sign/flesh.

it is in this way that life as itself process is an irreconcilable creative tension between that which is and that which is not (yet). the work of creative genius creates a synthesis (third, raised point) of these two poles of extremity (flesh/spirit) - in the balancing act of acuity/listening which observes that which is and that which is not (yet) as simultaneous, needing only a new language (body as in meat as in sigil) to bring down from the heavens the new sign as angel - giving the floating signified a language-form in which to act. this is also the historical process of language as perpetual expansion/introspection into the subtleties of life experience. there is also the language of war, the language of love - methods and practices which, in their conceptual incompleteness at the level of inner organization (the unity of i am), are enacted (projected) into the world to be reconciled vis-a-vis the risk of language loss (being subsumed into the other entirely - the beloved, death).

WHEN YOU GESTURE, YOU ARE A POET

At its best, the poetry is magic. At its best, I am conducting an exorcism of words, a bringing of language out of no language, a bringing of a way out of no way. It is only in the total relinquishing of the cultural limit that I arrive at this point - a total relinquishing of the ‘that which is’ principle. I must proclaim that that which is in fact has a historical, mythological, archetypal synthesis of meaning which channels far beyond the crust of the earth into the catacombs of birth and death. In this process, I am at work to liberate the pure impulse, the libidinal which lies, thinly veiled, behind the signifier-signified relationship. This libidinal is that which is truly exchanged, or the interplay of life force energies with the process of life and life-making - that which forms the real field of meaning of which language is a mere atom. The invocation of the sign is a pathetic stand-in for this process; the unending tragedy of language as that which, in its very nature, is unfulfilled.

The poetry is that which brings the libidinal life ‘above ground’, or into the world of things with its roots deep in the hidden (which is also the world of things). The poetry is an elemental collection - a stone, a flower, a body - that which requires a synesthetics of life force energies to enspirit the flesh. In this way, the poet is, and must, perform an act of magic to retrieve the stone of real life from hell; an act of magic which brings together body (sign) and spirit (signified) in a new method in order to elucidate that which was previously unsayable.

To utter the unutterable is always to utter the name of god. In doing so, this new utterance is that which goes beyond the bounds of the language-concept and penetrates ulteriority - that which is but that which is not (yet). The ulterior modes and methods of life-making are always possible, but are posited as ‘impossible’ by the legislation of culture - a legislation which, necessarily, defines the borders and bounds of the composition of life as, itself, a gesticulated organism. In this gesticulation, life is made an image of

itself. The poetry is to gaze into the libidinal - a primordial history of all things that is without time, where language weaves and is woven in and out of material; this is where the poet is - whether sitting at a desk or beneath the sun - in this place which is not necessarily anywhere ‘on earth’ insomuch as it is a place which displaces the very notion of locality by way of the vertical depth and the horizontal movement. The poet is submerged in intracultural meanings, intratextural meanings, intrahistorical meanings, and intramythological meanings - acts and intra-actions steeped in both horror and ritual - the simultaneously normal and monstrous. It is in this way that the gods are assembled; it is in this way that the gods assemble the world.

The place at which sign and signified are simultaneous is in the libidinal fluid; the blood, the disject - the pure coagulation of materia and spirit at which the form of life is pure content, and vice versa. Here, there is no interpretive space, no snag of separation; furthermore, it is this fluid which forms the language field of the body - in that the body itself is a vibrational field - a field, like the sun, of pure emanation. This is the primary language of the body, a language that is being spoken at all times - a language that, of course, is a wordless instance. For it is that the body is the sign of god; all bodies is the word of god; the world of god. This, certainly, can only be alluded to. The poetic magic is to act as an angel, or an arm of god, in that the poet (in scrying life; in the refusal of the terms given) may bring down language from the heavens to outfit spirit which otherwise is not ‘present’ or ‘visible’ to the naked eye. The poet divines the eye of eyes, in communion with the life- force which composes all things; yet is nothing - and in this work, is able to, perhaps, bring back something of the soul which has not yet found articulation. There is no sort of intellectual work here but the magic of penetrative attention

attention that penetrates life as it is penetrated by life. This is the work of the visceral communication - where language rises from within, as if churned up by supranatural vigor. The body itself as a cauldron where the forces at work in and on life converge and conduct the energetic process of
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life-making - this being the space in and at which language converges on not-language, I converges on Not-I; the synthetic occurs at the level of the everyday. This is, of course, the battle of love, which is the battle of all things - self and other, life and death, and the profusion of binary opposites which is collapsed in the intimacy of communion. What is necessary is that communion is reached; that one refuses to settle in, on, and for the superficial discourse.

In bringing out language, I must bring myself to a boil. I must channel and know my blood with the intimacy of knowledge which can only be called understanding; understand the limits and extensions of the vessel in which I conduct my work. I must understand its elemental makeup; the intricacies of the manner in which it processes itself. I am secondary to this process, but also primary - in the sense that I am not the body; I am merely the one who observes the body in action. It is in this way that the poet must allow for the pure evil and the pure good, the pure feminine and the pure masculine, the pure light and the pure dark; beyond this, to go beyond purity into further clarification - the scalding of the bones; the elemental cacophony which becomes phany in the creative expression. It rises from within and finds expression in the genitals, the mouth, the nose, the throat, the breath, the ears, and otherwise.

The primacy given to language (or to the self) is one of the great absurdities of modern life. Of course the self is already dead in language; of course we must go beyond the self and language to find the self and language as they are; to dare to create and insurrect even that which we, at the moment, perceive as the depths of truth about ourselves and our words. This daring is, of course, something few have the courage to do. It is a continual murder in the sense that all one holds dear, all one grasps at - must be expunged with the exacting yet careless hand of a surgeon. It is that from this place emerges, themselves, the new, true signs and symbols of our time - the runoff of a spiritual death which is, of course, dead the moment it hits the air; dead at the moment of exhalation. At every moment, we must refuse

our language. It is, in its very nature, never true; never good enough.

The highest language act is the creation of new language; a new language which is not only disobedient, but aware at a macro and microcosmic level of its disobedience. One cannot be truly disobedient if one does not have awareness of the law and how the law took root in the world. Without this study, disobedience is fragmented, reactive, and ineffectual. The greatest disobedience is to be able to see the world in the timeless space of that which it is at the level of concept, and to reject it outright. At this point, the point of realization, one rejects nothing. In this rejectless rejection, poetry becomes possible - for it is that the stone of all things is split open; the insides as sediment and detritus of history, laid, deflected; the work of civilizations in coagulation is seen to be like the blood. Of course, it is no coincidence that the work of civilizations can only be accomplished by the enslavement and spilling of blood. The poet does not condone or disdain history; poetry does not rail against the dead imagination which is now nothing but stone - no - the poet thieves and plunders and leaves forever for the night - the place in and at which magic may truly be done; in the solitude, in the condensation of space and time.

To bring together rogue elements and assemble them at the desk; to find the essences of these rogue elements is the magic of poetry. We must go beyond language, beyond meaning, into the cosmic birth of fire to grasp that which signs are, and from whence they came, and why. It is not enough to merely use words, we must burn them to nothing and sift the ashes for the precious stones which were slipped inside them by the mysteries at the moment of their transformative conception. In finding these stones, we find the distillations of great life - many lives, centuries of transformations; centuries of human struggle which fold over on themselves in the sign, in the wor(l)d. It is as such that these things are not simply born(e) of the mind. When interacting with the word, one is interacting with the spirit of those who have used the word; this is no less than god. It

is in this sense that poets hold responsibility - that they are becoming with the history of the soul-manifestations. It is also in this sense that we are all poets.

i must become the end of history for in becoming the end of history i liberate the symbol body forever i become it in my knowledge of the blood i - blood healer blood mistress that which runs like a river submergent through all things the coagulation of which is the death of sight

i become end of history embodied consumed with the symbol detritus of many past lives which i pass through my bowels my mouth my ears my eyes my nose.

all healing is a fixing of the blood the blood that is tempered the blood that runs too slow or is diverted to some illusion it is too many ideas of love and war which poison the hearts and eyes of men stifling the blood and littering the soul like a barrier of accumulated energy.

the cleansing of the blood may require a letting or a forced movement. i bring the symbols about necessary for this transformation.

the true healer is a murderer of the past the true healer cleanses the notion of the past with an invocation of flesh and blood.

i stir your blood to movement and strip you of your flesh in order to end your life of the past a life which you cling to with the desperation of a dying mind.

i cleanse your ears your eyes your throat the expressive ducts of the soul with the acids which i have stirred within myself these potions which i disject into your throat your ears your eyes.

i fix you to a post and strip you of the notion to draw symbols on your limbs and prepare you for the letting which is but several drops of blood into my hand which i smear on your forehead your hands your arms to animate them with the elixir of the given soul the given soul which you have forgotten in your pursuit of worldly things.

it is that the healing mechanism lies within the made sediment which circulates cleansing potentiality the made sediment shot through the stars into your invented bloodstream i raise you to anger i raise you to fear i raise you to death in order to raise you again altered beyond recognition.

it is that the soul must take in the fresh air of life and take several breaths of its own volition. forget your mouth. forget your lungs.

the purgation must be conducted at a deeper level a level at which the seed of life lies stirring in the darkness of the hidden i reach into your mouth down through your throat and stimulate the gutter of your senses the gutter which you have polluted in your pursuit of worldly things.

you - sacred you - stain of existence the slum of your body the kingdom of your body it is here that you have been stricken from it it is here that the crossroads of you has been stolen by a convict world which has submitted you to the squalor of images and surfaces. let us purgate the blood and raise the soul up and out through the mouth.

To resist is to resist articulation asserted over, on, and in the body. The cultural articulation at large is a riddling of the body as that which attempts to make universal, and thus, make stone, the life of the body. This is the violence of reproductive language – that which asserts definite order from without.

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THE MUSIC OF THE LIGHT

To read the light is to read the contemporary harmony of the planets - the current register in which they are speaking; the paths of reception which compose communicative, musical resounds. It is that a complete astrological analysis will likely remain impossible - as planetary bodies continue to be discovered. However, it is possible to scry the light by way of registering the tone, the pitch, and other such characteristics of the light at a descriptive level by way of the sense vessel - this is the manner in which true poets, painters, and musicians (who listen for the music) communicate. The current light, even now changing, is the lexical turn of the word of god; the pitch shift, the register shift, the moving tone of the spheres dependent on the astrological/astronomical aspects which formulate and compose the light as it is projected into and onto the earth- space in various articulations - depending on the time and place of the birth of the light-moment in question. This is history beyond the human concept; the imminent history of the music of the spheres, which is diligently catalogued by astrologers; too holds fascinating connections to the conjectures of human events and human affairs alike. One must engage the faculty of creative production to engage the light; shift the terms of the painterly language like the terms of the light itself shifts - refracting off the moon, aspecting the planet of Kairos (Saturn) and the planet of Promethean revolt (Uranus) - and so forth. The language must be adaptable and adept in the archetypal histories of the astrologers and poets - histories formulated to synthesize the space between the affairs of men on earth and the affairs of the gods in space - to and from which the divine music and the will of man creates perpetual discourse.

To read the light is to be in adept communication with god as the council of gods makes god from their web of energetic exchange. The communicant must empty itself of itself in order to hear, to get and be given the word - the word which is available to all at all times - the birthright of the living, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the nose, the channel

which hears and ejects itself and all things. This process of emptying is that which raises the self conception to that of: ‘I am of the music; I am the music. Thus, I must listen closely to receive my divine instruction’. The next message, the next moment, the next movement, must be engaged with the careful ear and the nimble body and mind of the devotee, one who is committed to fulfilling the purpose of their birth. There, too, is the birth chart - the moment of music which fills the heart, body, and incarnate psyche of the individual - that which creates the gapes, crevasses, and wind chambers of the instrument. For it is in this way that we are all instruments of god, assembled in such peculiar formations and given that which is rightfully ours to access our birth-purpose - but this is a thing that is lost to modern times. Instead, we are submitted at birth to conceptions which are divorced from the life purpose; the unique journey of our souls in this incarnation.

To be a student of the light is to be at once filled with the light and fascinated by it, striving to understand the esoteric meaning of the music; the music which is at once subtle and deep - immense in its formulation. It is that Saturn has a unique register; Mars, Venus - and that in their aspects, come together at all times - as all time - to gesticulate a signature that is unique in and to cosmic time - that which is at once entirely new, and a variation on and of the old. It is not that the astrological and archetypal sensibility is necessary to scry it, no, it is only necessary that one is attentive to the point of which there is no self beyond the music; the self is without concept, moving perpetually in attunement with the new time - the new time which is always emergent to those who have ears for the subtle - which is to say, those who cultivate the immense power of listening. For it is in the attunement of listening that the human being reaches its highest purpose: to comprehend in each moment what it is that is coming into us; furthermore, what it, in its birth and soul growth process, must do at any given moment. It is in this way that we mimic the light; in mimicking the light, hope to do our service to our souls, one another, and god - the music itself. For it is that in hearing

the sound of history one slowly comes to understand that the sound of history is what orchestrates the historical movements which we see and observe on the level of material; yet, this sound is that which animates a psychic urge in man that need not necessarily be brought about at the level of the literal imaging of a war, of a death, and so forth. It is that the music of each moment calls for a certain brush with the death signature, or the war signature - but that the soul calls out for this confrontation first at the level of itself. The soul need make manifest war; to the uninitiated, this means literal war. It is thus that throughout history, there often was not the possibility to make spiritual war with oneself (to wrestle with god, perhaps), or to die and be reborn again within oneself (like Christ, or the Plutonic) - but that these urges and needs at the animation of the body to the music which is the soul breathed into the body by god found itself literalized in hand to hand combat, murder, and suicide. With an understanding of the light bound in the mysteries, these forces can be brought into clear view by the inner sight of the initiate; conducted as in alchemical transformation of the inner life - productive of soul growth.

For it is the soul that calls out to be liberated; to make perfect music like Orpheus, to be channeled out through itself and its vessel in perfect music; perfect time - to rise to and through the level of the cosmic art of the gods as light - to abandon. It is in the study of the work done before us - of the careful weighing and balancing of the aspects and elements of the soul life and the life of the physical body influenced by the transiting planetary bodies - that we can come into understanding of the divine, cosmic unity of the work of the body simultaneous with the work of the planetary bodies. It is that each sphere activates a sphere in the human body; the animal body; the body earth - and that in the alighting of a conjunction, an opposition, or a square between two planetary bodies - a certain tension is introduced that pushes or pulls on an organ/string therein. This is the lyre of god - the lyre which is plucked with the dexterity of cosmic unity; a unity which animates life in every moment - on earth and elsewhere.

your poetry does not go far enough your thinking does not go far enough; it is that you take pleasure in that which i wish to kill. you are still breathing the dead life of dreams and taking in the trash of art the profaning and polluting of life by way of submission to whispers and shadows. we are at odds the two of us; thus, i am here to take your life.

the process is not altogether unfamiliar it is rather simple once you have done it enough i strip you of your clothes and flay your skin turning you inside out and disabusing you of your desires it is like that - but you do not want to have your soul shaken out gold coins tumbling out now do you?

you resist the surgery with the fear of one who believes that this death is utmost; that this death will provide you nothing but the perilous dark in which your soul will be drunk forever and out of doors. believe what you want. in this state, your words mean nothing. it is like this with fear; those who live in it - making a house out of nothing but shadows and lashing out at passersby. you who would take living in fear over death i admonish you with these sentences.

it is as such that the greatest of all murderers does not strike at the skin but rather incises the plaque around the soul - not the one who wounds with a knife but the one who removes the wound created in the life passage with the skill of a surgeon.

for it is a matter of life and death in which these words are written. why else would i write? i do not have something enjoyable for you to read. i have only the urgency of one who understands the task at hand.

you must ask yourself what it is you came here for. you are the incarnate soul. it is there - beneath all of the illusions you have ingested and believed - forgive yourself for believing in them and strip them mercilessly away. for it is that the incarnate soul was given birth and tasked with a service to others. you must find that absolute point and cultivate the service with the fervor of one who does not wish to be born again.

how many lifetimes will it take you to understand this? i am patient; i can wait. it is that you must come forward and break the veil of that which posits itself as language.

it is that all that language can provide is a cue, a response elicited by the vibratory quality of sound. my task as a poet one who listens is to find that certain resonant sound pitch it properly and return it to you, the reader.

in doing so, i may yet bring you - your body, your soul to the fever pitch of action. for that is all poets can do - all we can hope for is life. what you do with that life, well that is a discussion you must have alone.

THE PHILOSOPHY THAT IS GREATER THAN DEATH

The philosophy that is greater than death is the method which kills conception at its root. When I speak of conception, I am speaking of that which comes about as a confusion of the soul with the idea; a mistaking of the foreground for the background. The idea is simply something which arises in passage; the soul itself is the chamber through which all things flow. It is in this sense that the idea is the particle of blood; the soul itself is the intricate chamber of veins which directs the flow of blood. The cleansing of the blood is thus - a continual passage of ideas which does not settle the idea, or coagulate it within the larger stream of the soul’s passage through life. It is thus that one only has faith at the level of the soul if one is fixed on the soul itself - not the ideas emergent therein. If we are focused and attentive on continually moving the blood; we are not stuck on the notion of ‘what is this or that aspect of the blood?’, we have come into a different conception of life

a final conception - as that which depicts the whole as a interlocuting system which neither begins nor ends, or has exo or esoteric traits.

A life lived with and at the level of the primacy of the soul is a life imbued with singular purpose - to fulfill that which the soul was brought into meat for. Of course, this requires a primary faith at the level of the sense that the soul is an immortal thing of things - but this is quite easy to do if one has any degree of sensitivity toward the suffering of others, nonetheless one’s own suffering. A little reading is prescribed to begin to see that suffering and the flow of blood is nothing new. We are here, certainly, in service of the soul - as a body of it, as a mere vessel through which life flows. It is in this way that we are tasked with not perverting life - not taking it for a mere set of ideas, tenets; dead things and stones which do nothing but obscure the passage of the soul through life if they are not regularly disjected from the passage-chamber through which we perpetually take, organize, and reorganize our form. It is in this sense that we

are infinitely reborn, infinitely born again in such a way that we refuse to accept the outward appearance of things, in that the soul of souls is changing with each momentous turning of the celestial spheres - a configuring and reconfiguring of the gates of existence, being, and becoming. It is as such that the soul wishes to be attuned to the new time at every moment. Who among us wishes to fall behind; furthermore, who among us wishes to no longer be in tune; in time? We all wish to arrive with the full glory of our souls into each passing moment. We need only strike from ourselves that which we are not - the idea.

It is in this way that the popular conception of life; the interfacing of life proceeds as ‘culture’ - that which is created communally; used to identify life as such - the markers of identity which the collective uses to identify, stratify, and make regular the collective life. We may see this as it is and also see this as it is in relation to the lived life - that which makes regular the lived life. This is, of course, the struggle of the poetic genius (a poetic genius which we all have) - in relation to the collective. This is a timeless affair - as it is our attempt to reach a state of self definition (which is to say, individuation) amidst the clamour and claims of our parents, our friends, and those around us who claim - in one way or another - to ‘know’ us, or ‘see’ us ‘as we truly are’. It is in this way that a death by time is created (although, certainly, many parents and friends and well meaning bystanders mean us no harm in the superficial sense); a death which promises only the final death in that it holds the soul back from that total transformation; the ability to burn to absolute ashes in order to discover that which it truly is. Only in the burning away of all things may we do this; may we see for ourselves that which we truly are. This is not something that can be told; it is something that must be experienced - like much of life. It is in this sense that we are tasked with finding a way to do this amongst others, many of whom are terrified of even the notion of such a process; the implied violence therein.

In killing conception - which is the process of making ideas, images, and the like - we are also killing the reproductive mechanism - that which says, I have seen this or said this or known this and thus I know it. The method of killing conception is, precisely, the method of creative production; creative production is nothing more than the absolute destruction of all things at all times. It is, in this way, the total unity of the erotic and thanatonic, the masculine and the feminine, the good and the evil - as socialized, ‘separate’ impulses; in the fury of primary creation - they are unified forever. This forever is the timeless, spaceless crucifixion of time and space - the absolute point at which all is one and one is irreducible, irreconcilable; unsayable. When we arrive at this point we arrive, practically, at realization. Here, we realize that our conceptions; furthermore, the mechanism of conception is that which functions to obscure, or veil life in a series of perpetual deviations, distractions, pit stops - on that path which our soul demands in each waking moment. We are afraid to confront this path because we are afraid of ourselves; the power of the full expression of the libidinal life which shakes collective existence to the core - showing it its own painfully limited face. We must ask ourselves if we wish to continue making these turns within ourselves; these turns which, in each passing moment, deprive us of that which we were incarnated to accomplish - these turns which function to create a screen between us and life. If we no longer wish to continue this circle of actions, we are well on our way to the creation of a different life entirely - a life without conception.

The circle of conception is the circle of all art, all politics; the entire mess of duality as that which stratifies life into a series of reducible parts. The whole life is entirely political, entirely creative, entirely philosophical; entirely unified at each polar point as the third point of the triangle which is created in the action of the individual together with the soul. It is in this sense that the third point is always the point of individuation - as it requires action at the level of the individual to walk it out for and against the tension of opposites. It is in this way that we carve ourselves out like

statues against the conceptions of good and evil, right and wrong, man and woman; life and death. Life as such, in each moment, is a refusal of the terms and conditions imposed from the outside upon life - the terms and conditions reproduced at the level of the collective which are and represent language - as itself that which is limited by its own appeal. In seeking to be understood, loved, appreciated by that which is other to our soul (everything and everyone; yet, at the level of individuated unity, the soul is everything and everyone) - we are lost to the idea of that which we are supposed to be. So much of life proceeds in this way - that we submit ourselves to the idea of ourselves as created by others; that we do not rebel out of a fear of death - a death which is promised at the first deviation from the normative. And of course, this death does come.

The artful death is a death at the level of everything but the soul - which is to say, if we are skillful thieves of death, we die to ourselves and ourselves alone. To others, it appears that we have simply changed a manner of speaking, or perhaps our character has changed. But of course, this occurs on a superficial level in the passage of incarnation to disincarnation - that we come into different understandings of life. However, the master of art (and in this sense, one who has surpassed art altogether) creates a death of the self in the everyday; this is done by the absolute razing of life; the uncontrolled burning of all things and all passions within the vessel of ‘man’ - the body. It is in this way that the body is a mere cauldron, vessel, or container for a substantial transformation - a purgation of the soul. To accomplish this when it is necessary (at all times and thus in no time) is to accomplish that transformation which allows for lived life; the transformation which is the cleansing of the blood.

This is done by way of what begins as a controlled burning; as the skill of handling fire progresses, moves into an uncontrolled burning, the soul seized by timeless fire. We do this as if to say - we are the soul; in doing so, I am taking back my soul from this world which is always soulless and dead in its very conception. We do this to say that all is dead

but the life of the soul - the world, the dreams, the words - all of the things which may yet have traces of the soul, yet are not the soul. If we are to find the soul, we must understand that it is the soul alone that cannot be burnt by the fires of purgation. It is a stone of a different kind, an elemental mixture. It cannot be destroyed by that which it is. The only way in which we may enter into this process is to get past our fear of death - which is to say, get past our fear of the idea of death, which is the shadow of all shadows. It is in this way that death is the ultimate idea; the most extreme form of all ideas - in that it promises itself, and yet in its very promise is not that which it promises. The death of death is what we speak of as the final death; the death of all images and ideas. It is in this understanding alone may we get past the final, simulated bounds of birth and death, of life and death, in their linear principle - which is always, fundamentally, that of delimitation. In that we have marked out a line, we have marked out a plane of existence - regardless of how far it extends.

THE DESEXUALIZATION OF LIFE

We conduct a desexualization of life so that we might create a sensualization of life - or a movement to the primacy of sensuality; of intimacy as a holistic principle. The movement away from sexualization is a movement away from the desire to penetrate into life (or to be penetrated by life) - but toward a unity of life with itself; a mutuality of coming into relations as founded in touch, not in the desire and need for communion implicit therein. To desire always implies a separation which seeks its other - but to move past desire into total sensuality is to see this fulfillment (in communion as completion) is already being done; furthermore, the sexualization of life serves as a delimiting force and factor as to the possibilities of the whole sensual body - what it can do, where it can go, and what it can say in the act of communing with life; other ‘life forms’. It is that we do not ‘turn away’ from desire and sexuality and say ‘no more of this’, but that in turning away from these concepts and principles as fragmentary, we turn toward a wholeness of desire and sexuality - a desire without object; a sexuality without sex. How is this to be done?

It is simply in closing the separation in the mind. It is that the sexuality is of the organ; in this sense always failing to be in relation to the organic - and that the desire is of the particular body; in this sense fails to be totally embodied. Each proceeds out of the lack of the other; in this sense, each proceeds perpetually. There can be no end to the discourse of sexuality with and of itself (what is this, where is this, have I failed this in relation to?), just as there can be no end to the discourse of desire - as it is dependent on the perpetual reproduction of itself to sustain itself. This is nothing short of an enslavement of the life force energy to a generated idea/ideal of how it might be expressed. We move past these concepts in seeing them for what they are - as leashes for the libidinal impulses of life. Here, we turn to sensuality, intimacy, and touch - as moments and methods of creating and finding union in the spheres of separation which compose worldly life.

A move toward touch is a move toward the speech act as frictive, moving, and energetically generative. We may touch here, there, or everywhere - but wherever there is touch, there is generated union of the will. We say here - that the language is not enough; that we desire true intimacy beyond the image of it. We desire the fulfillment of desire as the end of desire - not a game of its perpetual reproduction. In saying this, we are demanding an end to subjectivity - as the total union of the subject and the other as generated principles; concepts. This demand is the demand to live in a sensual manner that is not severed at the waist; furthermore, is not severed at the presumed beginning/end of the body. We desire a whole body which is all and no things; in in this desiring we have put an end to desire, as we have desired that final thing - that which already is - the fulfillment of life in union with ‘the world’ - or the bounds of conceptual existence. In releasing the concept, or exploding it with our understanding of it - we proceed past the conceptual sexuality, the conceptual touch, the conceptual desire - into an immanent weaving of these historically generated principles and expressions - a deeper communion than which language will readily allow; furthermore, will admit to being possible. It is that language does not and cannot go here because it as of yet has been unable to say what it means to go to this place - because even language is abolished there, without return.

you should listen to other poets for i am no master. love has mastered me - it has laid me down and bedded me one hundred times and impregnated me with wonder. what am i but the sow of love as the planets churn beneath her feet? she who is my wife but gone from me to leave my soul in despair on nights like these.

love changes the changed you need only look at how the changed talk to god - as if he was at once lover and beloved. she lays the softest blanket down and reproaches her lover if he does not arrive. if the sun and the moon do not kiss there cannot be the morning dew! if the sun and the moon do not kiss how can there be an end to the night?

we who awake early and fix our eyes before the sun find the horizon in order to say prayer we who ask ourselves - have we, god’s oxen plowed our share of his field and then plowed until we could plow no longer until we were breathless and asleep in love’s arms like children are? who but the one who is both the lover and beloved could write this? he is in all things; we know him in his song for we are not poets or intellectuals but ordinary devotees.

i know lovers who lay mats down; others who light candles and paint church ceilings and stay up late in libraries just to catch a whisper from between the pages of god

the way somebody else heard it the way a new lover is learning how to love - for we are always new lovers here inexperienced and hoping for the best; hoping to please the beloved.

there is no great prophet but the one who implores you to seek god in this very moment. i can tell you nothing of the events to come but i do see the steep mountain that we must climb the way in which we pass through this place. the way which is often blocked by hardship and pain. old age comes quickly for us, our loved ones, and friends.

the work god does to change us is the work which begs of us realization. if today we do not wake up and understand, perhaps it is because we are not ready like the fruit that is not yet ripe and thus does not fall from the tree.

the body grows old and the soul drops it. where will it go next? it may find another body or it may move on entirely from the persuasion of the flesh. it is in this way that we make the choice of the soul with each passing day. each day is a coming of our death place; the decisions we face in the last moments of the body.

are we prepared to understand the end of material things? if we do not loosen our grip, perhaps it is because we are in the throes of a war - a war in which we find ourselves bound to the mast of fear; petrified by the choices we must make. it is in this way that the world holds us in its conception.

the prophet understands that these choices are at hand in each passing moment; in each moment we might turn to god and say, ‘enough!’ but this is only if we have truly had enough of this game and we are not merely making a pass at love.

she does not like it when one who is ingenuine in his approach comes to her making promises she knows he cannot keep. with you, my love the world has become something that burns to the touch.

this warm candle you have lit within me even now i can feel it beckoning - the chamber of your arms; the tunnel between my ribs which reaches into the fire of your lips - i found no understanding in this world but that of the unity of my soul with yours. you whisper to me and it all goes up in flames.

oracle - the city walls are barely on the horizon; i must not look back anymore. i have asked my question and you have given your answer in this strange verse the only way now is further in - to you, my love and the home of your embrace.

you, my love the inner sun, the inner moon my words scatter like constellations in your hands my song becoming like your song when i put my ear to your heart and listen. your passion is that which is truly alive in all things. what are these poems but my gratitude for your love? who am i but one with endless longing for you and you alone?

you have brought me to tears in contemplating what to do about this life - this life which divines my path like a wildfire razing the brush. is it true that it was all foretold?

if so, tell me love! for i have felt myself pushed with such force into your arms that it is like a gust of wind has taken my soul. how can i love you and remain here? how can i take a body knowing what i know now?

this must be the despair of love - the embrace which has taken my heart and yet my feet remain here, firmly on the ground. this passion for you which stole me into always leaving only these bones.

do not come and draw me out of my meditations. do not knock on my door - for i have nothing to say. in some other life you might come around and we would chat about firewood or cooking fish or the regime. in this life i have only time for looking into the eyes of wild things and pacing around the garden after a snowfall. why is it that i always get like this late in the winter? desperate for a soothing voice.

i have heard a lot of banging about out there in the world and i have gotten wind of some things happening between you and your desire. i am too busy here with this green sky and the warbling of the birds. my cats watch eagerly from the window.

the thresher of human affairs has caught my poetry in its mouth and chewed it up. that was when my soul was a child and i went about playing with lions’ teeth. we are much more daring when we are young; at that age the body is so light it is nothing to lose.

we should be so lucky! for it is that children slip in and out of rocks and clouds like new clothes. each day there is a new role to play and the gods cycle in and out of their lives like a dress rehearsal for the thunder of adolescence - the thunder of shame and the pains that begin to scar over in the heart.

178

ON THE CONCEPT OF LANGUAGE

We might ask, ‘what happens at the end of language?’

It is also that bourne in the end of language is the end of history - the end of the efficacy of the symbol-concept of ‘the world’ as potentiality; ‘reality’. The absolute language; the absolute history are that hermetically sealed room - rooms of total unity of the sign and the signified; the past and the future. Resident therein are the organs of the ruined devices; the organs which composed the hermetically sealed organism in its youth - now Language, now History (dead and named) - as, themselves, generated subjectivities (created potentialities) stratified, built, organized, reorganized, and ‘known’ across the development of themselves. It is that in the completion of language (a death, perhaps in old age or perhaps at the limit); the sign-signified unity, language itself becomes a collapsed interiority - or a total self referential space which never speaks out (of itself); thus, never expresses or ‘says’ anything. It is in this way that at the end of history there is no utterance. Such a language, like history in its end - reveals the impossibility of itself as false conception (as conceptions are always, fundamentally, false) in its end, or absolute point; an impossibility which was precisely the lie of its conception - that such instances of life could be anything but felt intimately and scattered across the cosmos with the force of pain, suffering, and love. The absolute language is an implosion-explosion; there is no articulation but the force which is a priori to the generated force-structure of coherence. It is like this with the most extreme language - language which divulges itself in the scream, in the weeping; ultimately, in the silence - the silence in which the extreme expression (void of content; thus, overflowing with content) has found its absolute form in that which might be described as a ‘shattering’ of the linguistic principle.

Here, we have gone beyond the mercantile, material notions of language into the poetic depths of language as

that which might become gesture of the soul. As with language in the practical and impractical (poetic) sense, the user accesses a field of historical, personal, and cultural meaning-conceptions in accessing the form (the word); this form as being imbued with a multiplicity of myth, spirit, and breath. It is in this way that the language function is itself a historical and historicizing process of accessing the collective (as being of individuals) human experience. The language, at its best, is a statue for that placeless place of communion between two bodies - the space that only resides in the airwaves; here, the end of language stands in for, in its ultimacy, absolute communication of life, itself - or a meaning teleologically complete as it remains within the generated subjectivity of language as a body within itself. The absolute communication is blood flowing through the veins. It is like this - that language never leaves language; certainly not to say something to the user. The disjection of itself is nothing but the life-process; delimited by the laws which it believes it must obey in order to reach ‘acceptable articulation’. The user gets a glimpse of the sedimental depths of language in the use of language as (outwardly) communicative; as language is refracted through the sedimentary levels of historical information as the perpetual deformation of the idea as given form and modified (reproduced; thus disfigured) in time. The devolution of language is implicit in its evolution. The body is firmly produced - crafted by the lips, the hands, and subjected to the rotting which is being under the sun over time.

There is, here, a death of the spirit; a loss of the creative principle in and through which the word was too created and imbued with the immediate spirit of the user as artist. In the reproduction of god, god is made image; dies. It is like this, too, for empires and nations alike. The enspiriting of the idea is lost - leaving only the floating signifier; the abstracted idea from the soul - which is subject of and subjected to common use. This is the locus of what is referred to as ‘culture’ and ‘cultural meanings of life and living’. Those who create words are, in reference to Kierkegaard, the ‘poetic geniuses’ of culture - those who,

driven inwardly, must create language beyond the existent cultural bounds and borders of the language principle itself; in doing so, quite literally go beyond the language concept - in order to retrieve the enspirited word. This process is, of course, infinite; implicit in the concept of language itself - as that which expands perpetually to accommodate new time, new life, and new breath - as it must in order to survive. The poetic genius, of course, recognizes this (the timelessness of the language concept, as it is with the concept of history) and puts an end to it by way of hermetically sealing his own language; creating a competing, equal yet opposite total subjectivity to ‘balance the scales’ of the world progenitor - Language. This is what we speak of in regard to Prometheus stealing the fire of the gods - but the poet modifies this myth; the fire is not returned to ‘humanity’ - it is returned to the breast of the poet; nurtured with the loving care of one who understands the depths of the responsibility which is the imminence of words. It is that each word conjured by the poet must be enspirited - or language has failed. This is certainly not the case for language use in the collective. In this case, the teleological seal of the poet is a seal of an ‘objectless subjectivity’ - or a subjectivity which is bound hopelessly in itself; thus is entirely unbroken in the creative production of a language which, without exaggeration or distortion, is itself. It is that the language of the poet is not aspirational; it does not work in a descriptive fashion or seek to advertise the thing or move the subject - it is the eternal subject - the subject which swallows the world - the subject which becomes the world and that which is forever beyond it, the spirit, becoming Dhul-Nun. This is certainly a spiritual language. In this objectless subjectivity - all things have died

including history and language as conceptual realities. They too reside in the room which is the objectless subjectivity.

In going beyond concepts, the use of language is dead. In this a-conceptuality of the boundless spirit, the poet is past language as the cultural limit as ‘god’ limit, as described by Pascal in his journals. This is also the place Rumi speaks of

in his poem A Great Wagon. It is also the poetic space which is described in the Kabbalah as Jerusalem. The going to this place requires the dropping of all concepts; it is often that language, love, death, history, and life are some of the final concepts to be dropped by the initiate-poet. These are some of the hardest ghosts to leave behind as they are the ghosts which perpetually define and re-define our worldly existence; validate our loves, validate our senses of self; give us purpose amidst the turmoil of that shaking door which is the passage. To leave this work behind is to leave the world behind; a world-concept which is the project of a large portion of ‘humanity’ across large swaths of space and time. The cities and kingdoms of the world can also be found in the mind. It is the primacy of the separation between man and god - which is the separation found in language - which fosters this dynamic; a dynamic which in its very conception is irresolvable. Without the healing of this engendered separation as a cultural process (of language) at the level of the soul, the work of the artificial separation continues in the creation and progenitation of the world-concept proceeds - as the induction and corruption (slow and fast alike) of ideas as they are introduced into ‘life’, or the ‘material world’. The objectless subjectivity looks at this process and laughs - as it is a process which is taking place in a picture hanging on the wall of the room of the end of concepts. It is in this way that language is perpetually dead if this impasse is not breached violently by the fire of the soul; it is in this manner that the world conception is dead but for the half-enspirited ideas conjured in the name of profit, self advancement, and the construction of temples and empires alike. The spirit barely flows through this language, as this language has constructed itself around a fundamental separation - a state of language-law which constructs the impossibility of union at the level of the soul. The concept, or the idea, is precisely this impasse.

The work of this language-concept is fulfilled in the allegory of Oedipus and the Sphinx at Thebes; the end of language is elucidated clearly. There is also the Kafka parable Before the Law, which illustrates this principle - language as the

primary and ultimate arbiter of passage; a definite (or ‘made real’) social concept which works if only to draw rapidly fading lines upon the canvas of the objectless subjectivity. It views the process of itself as firmly entrenched within itself as a lineage of human work and ‘development’, as does the historical. By working within its own framework, it is perpetually validated by its own language as that which verifies itself to and through the world-concept as method of life; method of knowing life. It is in this way that culture, history, and language are fundamentally coercive principles; acting immediately upon the freshly incarnated body. It is in this way that there is a murder of language; a murder of language at the level of the objectless-subjective, or that unity which is perpetually possible with and among all things with all things - a unity which is, of course, the end of the world, the end of language, and the end of history. It is the collapse of empires, the collapse of meaning, and the collapse of concepts - in absolute timeless, spaceless unity. The poet Bashō is collapsed here, muga, and it is of course in this spaceless space that there is Jerusalem; it is in this spaceless space that there is a unity of the soul with the soul in all things - an indefinity.

184

THE BEING WITHOUT EXISTENCE

The poet does not exist. The poet moves the energy of every moment. Words are not necessary. The poet works with consciousness - the consciousness of plants, the consciousness of animals; the consciousness of the moment. One need only recognize this in order to become a poet - which is to step into an awareness of the poetics of the situation, which themselves are pregnant with indefinite possibility. A lawless use of everything: the pen, the paper, the hand, the arm, the light. Not only not dependent on material, the poet actively moves beyond material as that which is definite, defined.

To free my pen I must write mad songs Songs of the night I went inside poetry like a scared child hiding from the world And I grew up in poetry like a scared child to whom the world no longer existed. Within poetry, I faced the beast The beast of myself large and rippling beneath my skin The beast which filled out my own words with that which we might call Truth And it pinned me to the ground beneath its feet forever Stretched out beneath its feet on the rack and being pierced by rocks Shot through by crows beaks In the neverending sun.

To free my pen I had to come up through the beast Its feet, its legs, its chest, Spreading myself across its breast like consciousness And I too, rippled like waves there Rippled like a signature which was my name written in blood-energy Written with the fervor of one whose name is erased upon the writing of it

The way that all writing is the dead blood.

And yet, there, I became spirit Enspirited in the womb of the beast and shot upward Through the crown of the beast’s vision and I entered his language I saw the power of fear and the work it does Bringing the fire down to men. I saw the lines which the characters had drawn Lines filled with shadow and impotence. In becoming the beast I loved him forever And yet I left him behind.

The poet undergoes a requisite transformation which is the purgation of the self and all things into ash; from the ash rises a fundamental unity of the soul - a soul perception in which there is no longer an object situation. From this place, the poet becomes consciousness; dipped in and imbued in the base alterating mixture which is the soul without the illusion of separation which generates the concepts of language, history, love, and so forth. The artificial boundaries obliterated at the level of awareness, the poet enters into the a-conceptual sphere, or the sphere beyond spheres of existence - being between the gods and men. There, resides the spiritualized.

Coming into spirit I was broken with No language came I into spirit and elevated into the nothingness Which too, became me. It was not that I did not exist But that I existed as everything - The moon, the stars, the birds, and the trees. How would I continue to write without words? In this place of no suffering Where everything is god?

In this place, there is a death of everything. A death of politics, a death of values, a death of meaning. These concepts do not arise; furthermore, they are permanently dead - as they have never lived. The affairs of human beings cease to exist in this space, as the veil is pulled back on life to reveal life as it truly is - energetics. The movement of life force energy as the creation and destruction of force which collapses all conceptions of time, space, and history. The poet cannot return from this place as the poet is collapsed into the greater subjectivity of that which does not artificially separate life from itself. This is also the end of all poetry. From here it becomes a question of how to move energy, how to go about moving energy; equitable distribution of energy as that which is all things. In this place, the ‘politics’ of human affairs become incredibly simple. It is that humans intervene to deprive other humans, animals, plants, spheres, and even themselves - of the necessary life force energy to generate mechanical life in the body. For this is all the body is - a mechanics divined and holding the vessel of the soul. How can the body be owned as the soul is always flowing through it like the elements which compose it are consumed and ejected? How can the body be anything other than that which belongs to everything else - a passage? It is in this way that the farce of the individual proceeds; with the total conviction of artificial separations at the level of the body and materiality - which reproduce increasingly microcosmic separations. This is, precisely, a science of life generated by and from a superficial misunderstanding of life - a misunderstanding generated in and under the ‘human’ principle.

To engage in this concept is to, time and time again, become embroiled in it to such an extent that the awareness of consciousness is directed to examine the wound that it itself has generated in a dream. It is in this way that we examine the bruise beneath the skin and wonder how it got there after a night of failed rest. The wound that is a fixation on a life that is never lived; always conceptualized; always deformed in the attempt to integrate the conception of life into the fundamental existence of life as the energetic

principle. It is in this way that the world exists as a refracted image through the water of the soul.

The poet does not create - the poet destroys. It is that the true poet has no ideas, no thoughts, no dreams, aspirations, hope - but only the awareness of consciousness being as of consciousness; a limb of it. What the poet does then is to strip the world naked; strip it bare of its clothing and even of itself to reveal the conception which creates, again, a conceptual delimitation of life in the mind. We go to the mind if only to raze the field of the seeds which were planted there; in order to descend into the seed of the soul to understand that this is the seed of all things - and we attempt to subject it to the purgatory fires of love - only to see that it cannot be burnt or destroyed, only transformed in regarding the clarity of the light of the intellect which shines down into it and upon it. If we fail to go this far, it is because we have falsely esteemed the idea of the self as that which is the representative truth of ‘who we are’ as the soul. Where can we find the image of god? Who has truly done this work? In the moment we believe we have a conception of the life force energy, it slips away - with the force and power of that which is destined in all things as life - and yet we cling to this conception as if we could. What is this but a foolishness? What is this but an ignorance?

If we desire to understand what we are at root, we undergo this process. The soul comes here eventually - weary and fed up with worldly things and the mask which life in the world entails - the whole theatre of identity, ideas, and meanings. We begin to see the stage upon which we prance about - beholden to our own self conceptions and the self conceptions of others - interwoven into an impossibility of living. We begin to want out. This is where one becomes a poet - in that in the wanting out we begin to understand that there is no choice but to go further in; that it is either this or the ending of one’s life. Surely, if we do not choose to end our lives it is because we have chosen this route before and understand its ineffectuality. We return to this world of things and are faced with the same problems. The soul does

not escape meat by running away from meat. It is only in understanding what the meat is, fundamentally, that the soul is liberated even from the conception of liberation.

To become a poet is to become in the space between god and men, the realm of the air where the dissolution of all things is apparent; yet the world is revealed as irreparably fractured. The unique task of the poet (Christ, Buddha, and other such figures and archetypes are like this) is to - in the descent of the soul - come up on an individuated language - or a generated language which is not a language but a unique understanding of the conceptual mechanism - how it works, why, from where, and where - perhaps - it is headed in the grand scheme of things. We get to the root of history, language, time, the concept, and find ourselves at the beginning of another tree - yet inverted; dug deep into the soul of the soul. And it is yet that the point between the tree of the world and the tree of heaven and hell that the soul retrieves insight into itself as that which is imbued in the creation of all things; furthermore, the creation of all conceptual realities. In this middle place, the entirety of language, history, time, and conceptual realities are revealed as powerless, perpetually changing; of course, secondary to the a priori condition which is life, which is the soul - the life force energy in flowing through, in passage. The poet finds poetry immersed in the waters of a current with a perpetual and immense force; the poet swims down to the glowing rock of poetry and attempts to dislodge it from the riverbed. In dislodging the stone, the entire riverbed is disjected into the current - revealing the sky with an immensity of stars. It is here that we find the elemental truth of life; begin to work not with concepts, but with elemental realities.

Here, there is no teacher but the intimacy of life. But, perhaps, those who have also passed through this way might help lighten the load with words, paintings, and songs which show the youthful poets that they are not alone.

there is also a day to turn against love beat black against the sky i am her murderer, the stained sheets and the sliver of the moon hung up against her walls i walk along her banks at night and utter the wordless prayer as the flowers, violently red, drop their fruit.

how many letters i wrote to you there beneath that portentous sun.

it is the beautiful life love being thrown everywhere without regard the little tragedies that lie forgotten in the gutters and lovers that end without a word. i have put on a mask for every one of you and now i sit here spinning the chamber of my fate looking for an upside down card.

i wore tall boots and sat under the streetlamp smoking low in the night and watching the fun as it came and went like a breeze in the night time coming up behind day and slitting the throat of the night.

there were so many things that did not exist that came about in my mind and tortured my soul. the traffic lights coming in from the window being thrown up against the bedroom wall.

i have done with the materialists and their love of life they are so in love with it that they would cling to the dying body. language slips away, unscathed, and by this i mean the true language the mad laughter of the soul as it absconds from the earth forever.

all of their literatures are dead. the dead arts which are nothing more than the serving of life upon a decorative platter. you eat the ears and i will eat the nose, the mouth, the eyes. you who chase after the grand profit of death have no answer for my poems.

your perfumes cannot smother the taste of rotten flesh which lingers on my tongue and has not left since i have arrived in this place the dead, silent arrival of a beggar who will always be a beggar in the world of things. i have washed up on the shores i have come in from the land of spirit i have no voice but the god that comes through me the one who turns the temple from the hands of the money changers.

i did not arrive here to propagate ideas nor did i come here to live. your idea of living is the trading of bodies the admiration of glass and gems and the devouring of everything but that which you admonish as darkness.

even when i do not have any more poetry left in me i will continue to write these poems. they are a going to war for me.

they are the place where i gather up myself in its entirety and declare, ‘this is what remains’ giving it all away to become empty again.

is this not the process of life the merciless, unending loss imbedded like a secret in all things? i say - this is also god.

the poems are the giving of an emptiness away the orchestration of an emptiness the trumpets and violin colored with the utter squalor of living.

none of it is bold and glorious none of it is the rich blue which becomes the sky. on the ground is the wretchedness; the smallness of bones.

i hold the skull in my hand, the collarbone, the sternum the broken pieces of man and they too become dust like the words i use to fashion strange bone from language. it is no armor - it is but the dying wish of one who becomes grass and soil one who has cast his lot on a tomorrow that never comes.

i have walked into the room

and many people have understood me as coming with death. it is shocking to be approached by one who has swallowed the mass of history and spat out a bloody tooth. i have walked into the room and collapsed onto the floor for having evoked the spirit, the body flies for hell.

what spell has come over the world what dark spell of a word that has lost its sound of a wandering form of a breach whereover the spirit hovers weeping for its body. it is from this place we must return bearing the torch of longing; submerging it into the cool waters of the flesh which houses the soul.

i have ruminated there some might call it rotting, the decomposition of a dead body in a hothouse where i have stewed and baked and risen like a loaf - come to this place - and eat the bread of my body which i have set at the round table. there is place enough for the world over in the city of jerusalem.

listen - all of the ancient world is dead and it has wrapped black tendrils around the heart the dead tendrils which draw life from the underside of words - the soul sucking tendrils which draw light - the materialized things which become the mortar for empires. we walk dazed around this stone palace praying to the metal gods which tower above our faces shimmering in the heat like entrances to the deathless sun.

all of modern life is prayer to the dead gods.

the ancient word is now so loud and meaningless that it is in the ears like a siren the flesh craving flesh so insistently that the bodies and organs are intermingled and tossed into piles of equal weight and measure. it is in this way that the philosophy of death paints its greatest masterpiece.

i have come down from the sky like the messenger god riding the horse called language to deliver you the map of the dead body the war map of the sun god apollo the war map constructed to alight the body. apollo? he is nothing but dead stone now, nothing but dead stone and the dead eyes which leer out from the grave.

the flowers of evil are inside of me they bloom as i reach for them like the greatness one cannot achieve in this world - the kingdom of hell is mine forever.

i alone wear the mask of hades the breadth of his emotions hardened on my thousand faces my thousand arms drenched in blood and my head adorned with a crown of skulls. upon my neck are the souls which i have forged into bright diamonds souls whose bodies i have subjected to acts without name or number.

at my feet lies the failure of man - all of his time and all of his space wasted in ignorance of his spirit. he comes to me and i claim him mercilessly - stripping him of his organs, his blood, his limbs, his mouth. he becomes my slave and his body becomes my throne.

you, living you cannot hear the screams of these dead men their cries, to you, are silence. you cannot hear their tortured plea as i submit them to my will.

the way is kept by the hound of my underworld time a signature of desperate music where past present and future shred the life of dreams. you have come to hell to retrieve something - i can tell by the way you move about me. try to hold the spirit of the beloved; watch as she is dragged into the abyss of space.

to climb out of my hole you must strip yourself of yourself. flay your skin, traveler - your cries will mingle with the rest.

you have come to retrieve the essence of yourself; i must have the world in exchange.

THE UNION OF THE FORM WITH THE SPIRIT IS THE UNION OF THE MASCULINE AND THE FEMININE, THE CREATIVE AND THE DESTRUCTIVE, AS FORCES AT WORK ON THIS PLANE OF EXISTENCE.

ONE WHO HAS DONE SO HAS HEALED THE ARTIFICIAL BREACH OF LANGUAGE; ONE WHO HAS DONE SO HAS ENDED THE HISTORY WHICH HAS NEVER BEGUN BUT IN A DREAM OF LIVING. THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF THE WORLD ARE BOURNE OF CONCEPTUAL LIFE. THE MARRIAGE OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT IS THE END OF CONCEPTUAL LIFE. IT IS THE LIVED LIFE.

IN THE UNION OF FORM AND SPIRIT IS THE TIMELESS, SPACELESS ENSOULMENT OF ALL THINGS.

No words can describe this state. I have throttled misery and blacked out the eyes of guilt My hands around her throat And I have strung up the limbs of suffering As he screamed on the rack of my brute strength. I have come through life with a knife, an axe, a bullet All of the armaments of heaven All of the armaments of history Rain down on this day - the day of my last night being slaughtered This day of the black sun coming This day of life being crushed in my fist.

My veins are pulsing as I grip the stone And I heave the world into the air with the total exertion As my body collapses beneath the word. I have walked through the halls of suffering And witnessed the genocide again It comes again softly Its feet tensing the floorboards. Today, I no longer bury my heart.

I have balanced the scales and I have severed my hands Then the rest of my arms and my legs. I have cut off my ears and removed my eyes. All that remains is this bloody stump Which is my mouth The flesh organ of my body screams and in the screaming The day and the night have become fixed and mutable in their nature. The time shakes For I have played the scale of the paradox with my breath Alighting the heavens and stirring the demons which torture the body Below.

I have come with the great war The great peace through war which is the stabbing of the heart endlessly

The mutilation of the flesh riddled with signs And the opening of the skies. Look at the world Borne upon my shield. This world that would cut out your tongue.

200

THE SOUL AND THE FORM

If you are at all serious about living, you ask yourself this fundamental question: is this (what I am doing) serving the soul, or is it serving an idea? What we are asking here is does this serve the life force energy which flows through all things, or is it serving a conception, a primary separation? When we do this we are supravening in and on the fundamental operation as that which creates all things and asking ourselves the question that is without answer; it is only without answer in that it must be asked in every moment. When we do this we are without time and without space. When we do this, we are communing with the infinite.

Here, there is a choice, a choice that is made in every moment of life - and it is a choice of life or death, whether to live, or whether not to live. In devoting our actions to the service of the soul (that which flows through all things), we are in love, in life - ensconced. When we turn away from this principle (knowingly or unknowingly), in the service of an idea, or a conception of life - we are enslaved; in service to an image - to a plastic reproduction of that which is life - the energetic soul of all things. There are no other paths down which to proceed; this is the crossroads of being and becoming. In becoming, we are moving with the stateless state - that of the soul, the city of life; in being, we are no longer moving; rather, we are entrenched in and as a state, a condition, a settled place to and through which we conduct what has now become a manner and matter of business - life, itself.

In this way we have a clear distinction between the material and spiritual axes of life. The orientation of these two spheres is irrelevant (horizontal, vertical, or otherwise) but that they convene at the crucial point - the point of this question. When we live with this question in every moment and choose to serve the soul, or divine love, we are living in our spiritual purpose. When we choose to serve an idea, we

are living in hell. It is difficult to discern the difference between these two methods/modes - in that when we are emotionally attached to an aspect of life which we see as being separate, or artificially stratified by way of an assertion of value/values, it floats to the surface, or foregrounds life. It is like the assertion of a letter, a raised mark - a primary signifier. It becomes this way in that it stops becoming. We give the idea (which is always at once ours and others’) credence; thus, life ends. It is in this way that many of us are walking around without life, outside of it; exiled from our own souls - in that we have defined ourselves, an aspect of ourselves, an aspect of our existence, the world - as something fundamentally alienated in that it is cleaved into a duality, or tripartite existence; so forth.

The cleaving of this axis into more axes is the work of the mind when encountering life. It is that the mind itself is that which, productively, manufactures the conceptual work of the world. It is like this with all ideas, images, and perceived pathways - methods of movement, methods of action, and so forth. In giving the mind primacy in life, we have given form primacy over the spirit - in that we are approaching the world, and ourselves - from the outside in. We are the observers - looking in on life, attempting to find an entrance point. This is the mechanism that religion capitalizes on - the use of the symbol as that which obscures.

However, when we are doing the work of giving the primacy of life to the soul, we have lost all foreground and background. This is at once the liberation and the trouble of this work - in that it is a continuous assertion of another way of living in the face of a world concept founded in and progressing towards a pure material vision. In doing this work, we begin to balance the scales of life in the midst of a cataclysm (which is the pure formal conception of life). There is, of course, risk here that one moves toward a total ensoulment of life - which is that work of the ascetics and monks - which leads to nothing but an early death of the physical body. What we are attempting to do here is to provide service to the soul; to divine love. Surely, the death

of the physical body shortly after realization does not give to the extent that we are capable. Each of these axes, the spiritual and the material - acts to continually beg of extremity - the extreme ensoulment, the extreme materialism - as this is the most convenient method of living in the world; being in the world. If we give ourselves entirely to either end of these axes, we have, of course, given ourselves to an idea.

We are looking to meet at the intersection of the cross, the crucial point, in order to do our most profound work as individuals which balance the scales of life force energy. In doing this, we must, at and in each passing moment, use our vessels to balance the two impulses: the spiritual/material, the life/death, the creative/destructive - and so forth. In doing this work, we are like the Janus face of life - holding two ideas at once and proceeding with them in three directions - across past, present, and future; across the middle way, the upper way, and the lower way. We are observing the influences of life in any given moment or situation, and attempting to balance the influences according to that which is in lack; that which is being overexpressed.

Such a process might look something like this.

The axial cross of spirit and matter is unified by the balancing of the two impulses (represented by the mutually receptive triangles) - fraying at the edges in the wind of space and time. It is, of course, that the will is that which balances the two impulses; held structurally at its core by the assertion of the force of the individual’s becoming. At either end of the vertical axis (here, representing spirit), there is the total transformation which forces the initiate back into and onto the middle realms/rungs of becoming. In this diagram it is clear the structural power of such a practice and process - that of the perpetual balancing of life as the form and the spirit. In this act of balancing, which might be described as the fundamental art, we are channeling into becoming - accessing the crucial space that is, itself, another dimension of existence entirely - that in our perpetual work of balancing the formal and the spiritual, we are given the transcendent language necessary to continue to understand this process. In the awareness of consciousness, we have this potential - to unify ourselves in each passing moment with the current of consciousness itself

but to do so in a way that goes beyond nature into the supra-natural. This is the power and potential of the specifically ‘human’ incarnation - in that there is the ability to create that which at once unifies itself with the larger principle of creation and yet transcends it (in this very unification), in every moment.
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THE BLACK PAINTINGS

In the Black Paintings, Goya had a singular observation: the establishment of the society as having within it the seed of its own disintegration - the inherent madness of all creation. Later, Du Bois grapples with this realization in his dealings with mid century America; his falling out with his various involvements. It is that Goya has, in the Black Paintings, the solitude of a madman (one who is within himself) observing that which is ‘going on’, or happening out in the world ad infinitum - the forces of creation and destruction as acting infinitely in and on one another - in a sort of catastrophic, erotic act. The relationship of Scholem and Benjamin proceeds much in this way - the readings and misreadings of a way out and a way in, a method and a madness. The intellectuals and the artists are consumed by this paradox - the generative and degenerative forces in ceaseless co- involvement as the creation and destruction of empires, the corrosion of the spirit’s vessel; the end of history as itself. For it is too that the history and the language had within them the seed of their demise which comes again in each passing moment - the completion of the historical and the linguistic principles in the union of impulses. For it is the interplay of these forces which composes the entirety of human history - the imbalance of these forces which is the war and the peace, the longing and the possession, the lover and the beloved. So much of the art and song and misery is of this imbalance - this being cast out of the paradise of balance in the incarnation of the world; the struggle to walk back into the soul with the exiled body in tow. It is that Tolstoy said, ‘the prison and [the] compulsory journey appeared to him the promised land’; it is in the course of this endless horizon toward which so much of the human endeavor is devoted - the expenditure of energy toward wholeness; the rectification of the catastrophe which is the incarnate loss; the loss of history - the drag of space and time on the body in and through which something is always without aggregate; something is always unaccounted for; the synthesis of the elements is incomplete if but for that which cannot be seen; the silent word, vowel, principle.

For it is that the world cannot be made whole or brought together in any regard as a concept. The master painter comes up against this agony of the canvas; the surface upon which the world is projected and conveyed - what is mastery in the face of this? What is the expression but the detritus of a mad age; a time mad with its own self possession? We turn away from the hope of bringing this about in the world - that tension which mutually propelled the works of Scholem and Benjamin - a tension of a time in which it was revealed that Jerusalem and Israel are not of this world. What then is devotion?

It is at this point that we must stop and assess the scales of the world - the attempts which we have made to assert the world. We have gone about it in every which way; circling the statue and attempting to reconfigure each of its limbs, its curvatures, its orientation. It is that we have gone about it so many times that the statue has become real. In becoming real, the struggle depicted therein is archaic and already dead; the world conception is itself no longer what the world as a moment of relation demands. In searching for it, we have lost it - burying our heads in books and ideas. In searching for it, we have forgotten it in the ideals which we believe it must have; we have instead instituted our dreams for the possibility of relation. It is in this way that our love becomes dead; is not even love. Our love is the dream of that which is; as such, attempts to take into its arms everything that is and call it by the name we have dreamt up for it. We cannot continue to proceed in this way, the way in which each epoch dreams itself up from the shards of that which remains and call this a divination of the future. If we do this, it is because we have not yet summoned up the courage in ourselves to command what remains and transfigure it into something else entirely - to bring to use these rogue elements in creating radical substance - a substance imbued with all of the imminence the moment commands of us. If we have failed to do this it is because we have failed to drop the concepts which we believe dictate life; if we have failed to do this it is because we are afraid of

what will happen when we abandon all of the ideas which have formed our self conception as world conception.

These conceptions are the mutually received dreams which are always at odds with one another - always mutually penetrative and combative; with each contact they strip each other away; yet reify one another as separate entities in doing so. It is this delusion which is at the root of the Kafka parable - the man who attempts to mediate two forces which cannot be mediated; it is in the sense that the mediator is the one who affirms them in his decisive witnessing of opposition - that they exist. It is in this way that all things exist; spirit stands apart from them - appearing to be fundamentally at odds with ‘existence’, itself. It is in this way that we have created a division of life that is at once imbued with the spirit and yet rejects the spiritual - as that which is divorced from our concerns in living; thus inhabits another sphere, a sphere we attend to in ritual and tradition alone. This is also the creation of modern society in all of its splendor - a society which affords itself the perpetual decadence which ages past could only promise; yet in doing so has called itself by the name of that which cannot exist in this world and yet composes it - that of the place of the unification of the impulses, referenced and inhabited in Rumi’s A Great Wagon. Life as a modern complex has become the gratification of materiality; if not gratification the ceaseless striving for it - a polar inversion of the striving for the fulfillment of the spirit. In the scheme of the ‘human’ as a relational sphere of consciousness, it is that we have raced from chasing the heights of one axis to another; we have seen what this has wrought - utter destruction, chaos, disgust, shame, and brutality. Our political and social movements reflect this act of chasing; this ceaseless act of attempting to establish the kingdom of god on earth; furthermore, this ceaseless act of attempting to take for ourselves that which is god, or become god in the institution of hierarchies of power and force. Perhaps only after chasing both of these axial ends to their fullest extent can we realize that neither can offer us that which we seek;

that, furthermore, the world may only be made whole in the unity and balance of these two impulses within ourselves.

FORM AND SPIRIT

i have turned to face god. i am alone.

the bomb has gone off in my mind and it has smeared the shadows on my doorstep like a palette of blacks and grays it has smeared the night in my mouth and coated me with ancient stars of the night. i have drawn the constellations everywhere and i saw the circle that you came from a circle big and bare in the night sky that gave you to my arms.

how small the love is that is gifted to us breathing in a chamber so small. i have climbed inside it to get to you and i saw you dying there and we died together in the arms of god. how many times did we die - you fell with arrows i fell sick, i was wounded it was i who loved and it was you who loved me. i was weeping and screaming wildly in my soul when they laid you in the ground.

how it is to lose everything is how it is to lose you and then it is like there is no more life on this earth. how quickly the trees grew cold and how quickly the sun grew to mock my every step. for if we did not come together, there would be no exile - you and i - i screamed for you and i broke myself into thousands of shiny glass pieces glass pieces which scattered themselves all over the world. i searched for you

and in searching for you i painted my despair on walls, on cliffsides, on the nothing which became my world - i left my love like burn marks on the skin of her broken body and how the earth cradled me like a mother. i walked all over the earth and picked up all of the broken pieces. i picked up the broken pieces for you.

how dark is the night without stars and the cold wind buries itself down in my lungs. it does not want to be found. the dark night on the hillside with my hands in the grass.

I wrote my poems to destroy the world. I wrote my poems so that there might be life. I did not have any other concerns in writing my poems. I did not sit here and think Nor did I look to make art. I sought to act with these poems. I held nothing back from it - Not my pain, not my anger, not my fury, not my despair. I sought to be a vessel To have the soul pass through me With such force.

I gave everything to these poems. To return the spirit to the flesh. I went as far as I could with my life. I will be succeeded.

I have walked among the graves Waving my path through the day without a map To the catacombs And the walls of skulls among the ruins Have provided shade from the sun. The blood from the rites in the Valley of Mexico and the Elgabalium Has flowed in the underground tunnels Through mountains and through oceans To reunite with the energetic man.

I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already From the strength of this pain. I have dug my hands in the soil at Templo Mayor And I have felt the river of the sky beneath it Beneath the soil and beneath the rock of the world.

Artaud, the hanged man, came back from Ireland Holding runes in his mouth Runes which he discharged on the unsuspecting public in Paris And attempted to broadcast on the radio. His body riddled with symbols which dug deep beneath the flesh Into the pit of the primordial fluid Which he conducted like a furious Symphony.

They put Adam on the Catherine Wheel In another time and he has not stopped spinning there Faster and faster in deranged time. The computing technology and the atom bomb have enhanced the pace at which he spins The centrifugal force ripping his limbs from the central element of his flesh. He has been there so long he has fallen in love With it.

I have trudged through a plague town with my hand over my mouth Dragging behind me what remained of my life All of the towns being plague towns and all of my life being death For ten years. I played a dirty trick on death and I won But he is coming for me From behind the hills Overlooking the sea.

I have been killed in the king’s garden as a peasant in love with the queen And I was sneaking up to her window And I have been killed as a knight in search of something sacred Which lay hidden in my chest. We did not know any better then; I built churches I was bearing children in the hot sun I saw nothing of god And I died alone.

I protested in an unheard voice The wrongs of the Crusades Outside of Jerusalem like a shepherd and I was unarmed and they killed me there And buried me beneath a pile of stones. They did not even mark my grave. I sang love songs to god and was killed by a zealot After I had sufficiently passed on my task to another, One who wrote such beautiful poetry.

None of this matters now. I have trudged through lives like walking through fire Or a bed of nails. I have raised arms against murderers, kings, conquistadors And I have ran through history like I was being chased by magic

The paintings on the black wall and the witches feasting on the flesh of courtesans Which are now all in my head and I cannot get them out I cannot make them leave. I have called on god to exorcise these forces And everywhere I look it has become war; my body has collapsed At once inward and outward For so long. The faces of god meet in the sky in a blinding light And the priests and monks have called it a prophetic vision A vision of heaven and hell entangled on the flesh of man Climbing up his breast and impregnating his mouth With language.

I took the Silk Road down to my lover’s house and kissed him on the mouth I was dressed like a man and in my rags I saw a whole nation signed away A whole nation of lovers and devotees A whole land of god’s prayer reduced to the rubble of trade and submission The light of the stars has gone and it is that they have not come back to that place. Is this why we are now so deranged? I died in a flood in the desert and I embodied contradictions. The gods fought over me like a golden apple and they tore at my flesh to reveal my core. I am painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I painted myself on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - even as I was being murdered. They sung a hymnal at my grave in every language and I was blessed by a madman Who loved opium and women alone. He laid his poems at the foot of my grave and walked away As I watched the rivers overflow. The sun was shrouded With rain.

I stood at the gates of Israel and Palestine And watched the wolves of heaven come down and I felt the tear gas in my mouth I loved the martyrs so deeply that my tears came down on the wound of history and acted as a salve. I came to bless the martyrs like an emanation in the endless war; I was there on the battlefield with Arjuna and I saw the chaos wrought by man The fires were so big and bright that you could see the dying standing atop Time. He has remembered me in flesh in his eternal judgement.

If you come to see me at Montmartre, where they bury the poets I will tell you about the liars who burned my flesh And I will tell you about the city of warriors who murdered children And the oracles who were also madmen. You will find Delphi in its own grave; the madmen are having their paintings now dissected and burned at Saint- Rémy and Rodez. You will find that the madmen are having their bodies now dissected and burned at Saint-Rémy and Rodez. Have I said enough to make this clear? The poets have painted the cosmic body and the painters have written the cosmic body as it is crucified and laid into a meaningless casket in an unmarked grave. I have pulled the skull from the grave today and heard the spirit of my father speak through it A spirit that begged the purgation of the world A world that is now in the death throes of its own vision.

Go - be with the sky. Choose something different! This animal flesh and this human flesh does not suit you Overlarge spirit Hovering above the earth, blocking the sun Lying beneath it, cradling us in your womb. This warm blood is yours and the teeth - count them They are yours. All of your jars in the ground filled with us The aspirational ones, the ones who wanted everything And those who wanted nothing Are all now in your dark womb.

There are chambers in the pyramids like there are chambers in the body That lead to certain aspects otherwise hidden In the shade of time. We have gone down there, Those of us so desperate and world weary; We have gone down there to learn something of that which composes All things Entangled in a network of infinity. The wires of today stretch out from our fingertips and from our toes and are pounded with electricity. The impulse still remains to love In the ruins of time.

We have gone down there and we have had our bodies entombed And paralyzed beneath the knife Which hangs from a thread In the mouth of hell. I have left my body and now it is eaten by the slow force of the mother Her digestive juices have drawn me back into her mouth. So it is when I wake up and stumble out of bed Already mourning some lost love. The world is sleepwalking through her days and death stands in the back

Greedily counting heads.

I have eaten lovers and I have watched the sun ride in his chariot across the sky And I cursed the gods and in this curse I was given a vision of hell Which I have extolled upon this page and sold for less than nothing on the streets I peddled it like flowers in a meadow of hell; Nobody was buying. So I walked down to the river and it was in this way that I was drowned like a body Forever.

The priests bless the dead body and I have come out from under it Like ruins. I have come out from under it and I saw the sun again And I was not grateful, I was not joyous I was hideous and deformed like you have seen me Through water Knowing something of god but not enough. You have raged against god like I have raged against god. If you deny this, you are a miserable liar like the rest. I have thrown you out of my circles I have chastised you in rooms of so called intellectuals And I have hammered treatises into your eyes. You are pagans forever Under the sun.

The fates are the vision which you have had On a hot day Somewhere between the horizon and what lies Beneath. They have beckoned to you You, the one who is so thirsty and wine drunk - They have called your name.

I long to see the world as having given up. You do not know death until you have seen the end of dreams. You may have seen death, you may have wept at the parting but you have done all this selfish weeping and yet You know nothing of it. All of you claim to know death. You claim to have bargained with him and talked to him in slow words at night And many of you have even worshipped at his feet. You, of a culture that eats flesh and spits out the broken bodies and yet You fear the shadow of your great machine. You run from its mouth; Its mouth is your own.

The engine of the moment roars loudly And you rush about forever and damn your soul. Have you not seen the night and felt the misery of solitude? And yet you have had this vision of being saved Or of some sort of golden society. This is what quickens the pulse of men - The thought of devouring the world. For it is the world that is the great fear - The fear that there is yet an aspect Unilluminated.

The masters who were court painters And the great poets who were clerks know of this; The whole time is riddled with the lie that looms large and bright in the night sky of men’s dreams A different world; a changed world. A whole world. It is in this way that the dreams of men fight their wars and animate their bodies While the soul wavers A little candlelight that is given little thought; Thus fails to grow much brighter. If you were to turn inward,

You would see this - the obstinacy of your life - Waxing, flickering But you are too busy distracting yourself with the pleasures and sufferings that come and go like a lark. Soon, the song is over And you are off to another preoccupation.

All of this you have put to work The arms of the trees in a fire And the hearts of men sweating at the hearth of civilization For the profusion of images. Even the tallest mountain of men cannot hide that it is composed of bodies; The bloodlust radiates about it. If you come close to these great buildings You can smell the dead bodies. It is a factory. But enough of this. It is like the oceans are paved with blood and the bodies of slaves and the whole world is nothing but a monument to the dead. Even the cultures that worship the dead are dying and we are left with their mere image. If you have stared long enough into it, You have gone blind And seen things.

The spirit rises and sets And she is full of the sun. You have gone up there and looked down, Leering at the miserable world of miserable men. All of the accomplishments of great men are nothing but a shopping list for death; He is all men and he ruins their bodies with his temptation, his conviction, his persistence. You have seen that Time is the outer limit of our world And that time has a body. He is a murderer like that which you have never seen; He has killed titans and gods Alike.

The dances of dead time Are now conducted without sound; We have glass buildings which pick up the song of the gods And shatter, delicately. The glass rains down on our bodies and wounds us with the quiet of a spring morning The quiet of a child crawling out from the arms of a dead mother And the astonishment of being without language. It is all silent - the passage to and from this world That you have made up with your friends That secret that you have passed on With the conviction of one who is Right.

grief is a color on my palette despair and misery too i added them in my raging, blue and gray against a darkness in my fire of suffering which was but a candle in the pit which engulfed my soul and tortured my consciousness the endless night which gripped my chest and my back and stabbed me repeatedly until i was blind and numb and i could hear voices inside of me.

writing is the only way to become great in this world and in becoming great we are worthless. i have given up everything and in the loss of that last illusion of there being something to give up i fell into myself. there is no poetry there in the purgation of the soul and beauty ceased to mean anything to me i did not find wealth in anything else but the kiss of death so deep in my lungs that it burned my core and changed me. who am i but in your language? you know nothing of me. do not attempt to write about me and do not attempt to contact me. these letters stand alone.

in my speech i became pure consciousness and shattered but in yours surely i am this person with faults, flaws, and an image. i wish it was not this way so you and i could be in relationship. i have mastered poetry and i spit on it like the rest of the arts and the literatures. i want only the truth; now that these poems are written, they are nothing. they are meaningless and they are dead. i loved a girl so deeply that i wrote these poems for her. they are not for you. they are for her and our sacred love.

the pleasures of the body are washed up. i look up at the stars and i have become death in their changing light. what is loss to me but the endless procession of these poems? they dance in ancient masks then turn down a side street. enough of them! all piled up and worthless. they take up space in my kitchen.

for i am just a regular person and i built myself up to be this lie in my poems like all arts they consume life and demand everything from it. if it has status it is a liar and it demands you to be present to witness it. now i will write these poems alone and they will not even be poems, they will be the unadulterated suffering of one who has done with the miserable shadow of all things and now stands triumphant in the death of poetry and as the death of poetry for i have written my masterpiece and it looms brightly in the night like a lantern that will not go out. this poem will assuredly be long; if you have the time to waste on it, you may read it but otherwise get out - get out of my life.

i have tired myself bathing and dressing myself up for the hated world and the idiot waltz of life has burned a hole in my shoes. i have danced for so long and now i am done with it. for money - i will do whatever god commands of me; as for life, i will worry nothing of it. it no longer exists. the cities, the lovers, the tired hands and the make believe is just all done. have you not felt this?

i have no desire to die and yet i will live apart from this world. i will find myself something far away and i will not be bothered and perhaps i will write and perhaps i will not. there is nothing to do with literature here. there are no stories to tell and there is none of this prancing about in the delusions which possess this sad world. i have played this game long enough and i have thrown my energy into a pit of miserable people, miserable souls who are desperate for something. i am not desperate for anything. i am under no illusions that this world will change and i am under no illusions that this world can provide me with anything to prevent this coming death which looms larger than all these smaller deaths that i have allowed within me. i have brought them about by channeling them into various mediums and thus have cleansed myself of myself. you would not know me on the street and you would not know me if we had spent ten years together. there is nothing mad about me and there is nothing foolish other than the fact that i spent so long on the trifles of this world that you have created and built up over centuries that convicted me of my life. there was no court and yet i cycled through the systems of the world and they taught me nothing and i learned nothing and i became a fool. do you not see this contradiction? the world made me a fool and it took me seven years to burn the books of the world and to stop pretending to be someone and to write these poems and letters and songs all of which were aspirational and equally desperate.

when this happens it is like there is no way out; you either glory in illusion and perish happily within it or beat down the walls with spirit and this is what i did. the barricades came down and i was alone in an abandoned city an empty city.

all of you suicides and all of you people who are working in misery this is not a poem, but this is more a letter written to you filled with mistakes and repetitions for i too have had it with the way things have been going and am looking for a method in which to have some life that is mine. i have known for some time that it is not in the earth or in the soil but in the element of the soul that i might come into this knowing and perhaps i have fooled myself but i believe that i may yet be there in that place. it is no jubilation and it is not a different space of anything but an intimacy a constant movement which moves me into and through different methods endlessly in search of a way to communicate this wound, this suffering, this pain of being alive and human and the limitations which ceaselessly press me up against my life and show me that i cannot go any further and thus i must retreat back down, or to the left, across the plane of my existence or down into my soul or up into the world to move the blood again. i have thought that i must remain chaste or that i must act in some upright way or to abide a code of ethics or to listen to some idea of life but i know now that this just cannot be. i cannot come to any sort of conclusion myself and life is a constant, running series of situations which in turn illuminate me and obscure my fate.

i must be content with not knowing and content with brief moments of feeling moments which charged mad poems i have long since forgotten. i fear that i am not mad anymore; furthermore, that i am entirely lucid. that i have seen the field of my madness and walked around it with the eye of someone who was not even there to live the madness rather the madness passed through this body and this skeleton and i observed it like a scientist and detailed it in a series of poems and plays. i wrote essays as i came to understand the world function and the bases of concepts. i slowly and steadily came into documents which led me to a certain point and i stand here at this point and see this point as the point i have always been on this point at which this body came into the world and i was set about a series of tasks i did not understand and still, now, do not understand. i will be this person who is brutally dumb to their fate even as the empires come and go it is like history is breathing, in and out, but the breaths are so large and wide that they are hard to see, and even more difficult to hear. all of the complex words are gone and all of the theorizing and the nonsense i participated in is gone from me. i played roles and i became what people saw in me and what i wanted to become. i built myself up and i was funneled through my belief and the belief of others to a certain point this point i have always been on. i have gone nowhere, and my studies have always reflected this going nowhere in the way they speak to themselves in a low whisper. perhaps they will resonate with you and perhaps they won't.

we have no control over history it will drag us to the conclusions which it wishes to make, and by history i mean fate.

if i have become deranged it is because i am clawing at poetry and screaming at it to move because it is the closest i have come to truth. it is true that poetry came into my life and destroyed me and left a corpse in its wake that escapes spirit from its mouth. like all dead things i am speechless but for the stone that is on my tongue and the coins that are on my eyes which tell of how i died, prostrate at the door of poetry, begging for her to make love to me one more time so i might know a little more of the truth that has come to possess my days.

i was rowed down here by charon to condemn you, the men who are raised to conviction in being possessed by the thoughts of other men, you emboldened by shadows and you standing on top of dead bodies reaching for the sun - there is nothing in it for you but hell and misery and i will condemn you in every way i am able until i go kicking and screaming to my final grave. poetry is the art of grifters and con artists who wait two thousand years to reap what they have sown; poetry is the longest harvest of all time but when the crop is ripe the harvest is so large it feels infinite; it is in this way i have listened to other poets die miserable deaths in the gutters or otherwise waste their lives as typists and sycophants. none of this is the way i wish to live and i must discharge poetry like a weapon into the world in order to exact a balance of the soul and the body. in doing so i will transcend the world. i will not be condemned to life as an intellectual nor will i do this work of the world in any capacity, with my hands, with my feet, with my eyes or with my mind - no - i will, in all of my gestures, reject even the notion of the world; the concept in my language will die. i have said it and it will be so; it is like this with all things.

i came up as a sick child and now my heart is strong and bold as a lion and i am infinite in my emotions. i have told such convincing stories to myself that i have lived one

hundred lives and i have not done much more in this life than close my eyes forever; i have felt feelings without name or number and discharged them on the page as they were and thus i have invented new languages of color. i have been told by countless critics and professors and dissociated aesthetes that my language is unintelligible and i have laughed in their collective, miserable face. my language is a body and it emerges as a body with blood vessels bursting and flowing and with electric nerves and gritted teeth. my language emerges ready to do battle and not to be shut away in some book or cage. the world does this with violent things, undomesticated things, and it is in this way that i have left the world before it can turn my poetry into a spectacle, an amusement, a caged animal.

i have seen you all to be policemen of the world, so desperate to affirm your ideals that you will create fantastic images atop your dream of life. you are so obsessed with your perfect future that you have given up life and you collectively affirm this mass murder and you see it as being righteous and you see your desires as being natural. you are perversions of history, the kind of perversions that are only possible in the wake of genocides, so caught up in pleasure that you do not care who has to die or become faceless for you to get it. this kind of sin has corrupted life in this world and has left it bathing in hot tears and yet you are so used to this happening that you cease to notice the suffering altogether except in your conversations in which you are so emboldened by your concept of justice. this hypocrisy is the driving force in the world; it is this hypocrisy which allows you to live in it without remorse and with the delusion of a clean conscience. no, you are condemned with the rest - and you, i am saying the academics, the wretched so called intellectuals - you have done nothing but glorify the mind even as the body of feeling is severed at the neck and you have gone on with this insane project. you have convinced yourselves and the children of the world of an education which glorifies murder in that it denies the brutal struggle of its birth. your work would not be so organized if you were truly staring the beast of your life in its face.

i have embraced wildness because i am living in despair and there is not one bit of my language that has ever been tamed by the world. the laws of language have never been enough and yet i need to speak this suffering into death and this is why i have turned to poetry and there is nothing in my life that escapes poems. in murdering poetry i have murdered the law and the small space which the law affords life in the realm of poetry and in doing so i have freed poetry forever and it is everywhere in my life. it is only a shadow on these pages. what i have done is cataclysmic; yet it will not be recognized until well after i die. i have no interest in being bothered. for to write poetry of any real depth requires solitude and here i mean the type of solitude that requires you to part with yourself entirely. you must go into a trance and retrieve that which is truly you from the place you have up until now refused to go within yourself. you cannot live your entire life hiding; yet, many people do. you must be honest and clear, like a reflecting pool. you must clarify your life.

i have been silenced by a force that is greater than all writing and i have been compelled to write by a force that is greater than all writing. i cannot waste my time sitting here condemning fools but what i can do is put this work down regarding the force which rips apart the flesh called god and god has ripped my flesh and made me the most imperfect thing. there is no path forward for me but i see these poems in my mind and they are alight with feeling and i have nothing else because god has stripped everything from me. so i must feel and feel so deeply as to banish all feeling forever as it rises up and out of me. there is no world but the tempest of feeling which strikes at all hours and there is no writing which will ever stop this and there is no science which will ever put an end to the madness of the world i will write because i must and for that reason alone and i will not ever see the work again as anything but dead skin which i have stripped from myself in a fervor because i am dying and without this work, surely i will die much sooner and in inopportune conditions. you must focus on the condition of your soul and understand that this condition directly corresponds to the fate that awaits you and this fate may prove to be malicious if you do not tend your soul like a young child. it must be tended like a garden. in light of this the rest of the world is just a distraction and a malleable set of circumstances circumstances which are all equally despicable and should be banished from the mind. you must drive yourself out with a whip like a slavedriver or a madman because otherwise this madness of the world will not end.

you must decide for yourself what is madness and in doing so i hope that you approach the root of the idea and pull the idea out by its roots and burn it in the imperishable flame of the self. be done with it. for you could say that i have come into this misery by choice and that i have chosen to perfect it because i have come to understand that there is nothing else all of the illusions and pleasures of the world have led me to nothing from the place which was nothing - the idiocy of my birth. i was unknowing and as time progressed i became ignorant and unknowing pregnant with the self assurance that only comes from a lack of true self. do not go this way - it only ends in tragedy and the eyes being gouged and the banishment from the city and the wandering alone forever.

i have knocked on the gates and no one has let me back in to the city of living things and thus i have come to believe that i am dead and without life. if my voice is not heard it is because i do not speak and my writing is only the language of the soul and is spoken by the soul through the hands. this cannot be taken away from me even as the damnation of the world closes its fists around my life and squeezes everything to dust. my writing has become clarified and in the clarification i can see truths and i espouse them without even being there. i have gone from them and there is a greater i at work here an i that is much less and much more than i ever was and i am glad to be banished. and yet the night is not without tears.

i have anticipated you, critics i have anticipated you crawling like rats and snakes and insects with broken wings to my work and picking apart its merits like the bones of some decomposed thing - you cannot approach my works; you cannot even come close to touching them you wretched creatures desperate for blood to suck and for loose conversation to come tumbling out of my poems like pennies you are misers of the soul. you have seen nothing of the true nature of yourself because you are afraid to turn and face the monstrous creation which is yourself so instead you poke around in the lives of others for gossip and to take on their language like a mask. well i have seen you coming in advance and i have hidden behind the door of my poems with a knife to cut your heart out of your chest. you have come to my poems expecting something to study, expecting some project to your benefit to emerge well let me tell you now that this project will destroy you and this project will leave you to be a shell of a man and it will leave you raving on the streets and desperate and you will realize that there is this star inside of your flesh that is exploding and dying. come to me and i will kill you for free and you can wave goodbye to your leisurely life of pleasurable reading and strolls and the calm evenings which pass like a lullaby of waves the life that has held your head down in water. i will pull you up by the skin on your neck and slit your throat and laugh while i do it.

cultivate detachment in the act of writing. the ‘i’ is not fixed or identified, and yet it lives and is acted upon. the poem is consciousness embodied. the poetic act is an imaginative event of consciousness - like history, occurring within it, and yet transcending it altogether in its meditation upon the conditions and forces which bring it into being as spirit- becoming-flesh.

the ‘i’ is ‘in transit’ in the sense that it is a signature of consciousness acting in time in a rapid flux. it is in this sense that the ‘i’ is less of a character or a figure and more of a moving process - called to answer both to the incarnation signature of the body and the incarnation signature of the moment. both are being composed vibrationally in flesh (in space) by the moving planetary bodies (as a song) and the individual will - as always at a crossroads.

the painters have depicted the forces at work in the world and have refused to humanize them.

the erotic energy which is currently powering society is an engine which is over flowing with libidinal fluid at all times and it is the tunnel where the soul meets the body. this over flowing is that which is making men mad and they are resorting to extreme actions and are desperately attempting to make love forever. when the erotic energy is redirected from genital expression it is abstracted and this is what is necessary to power a civilizational project or a social project of any scale.

for it is that the libidinal machine is uncontrolled and unobserved and exists as a pure driving force which convinces men to commit insane acts. men do not perceive the libidinal machine because it is who and what they are.

the forces at work in the world are whips, chains, enslavement and other such tactics of fulfilling the libido because none of them are able to express it but in the enslavement of another person. this is a failure of relationships in the face of the primacy of the libidinal mechanism which as unacknowledged and unaddressed consumes life and there is not even a person if this is so.

lust is their politics and in lusting language is merely a tool to obtain flesh. it is meaningless. we have pretended amongst ourselves that there is an organ of government that does anything other than conduct the wires of the human body and redirect human energy for the libidinal use and expression of those who own and possess other human beings. the government system is a network of human bodies as drivers and conductors of libidinal energy and this is the primary electricity which powers wars regimes and scandals.

this is what we have called a representative democracy, a libidinal program which uses words and language to instruct large groups of people and to prepare them to have libidinal

energy extracted from them and drained from their bodies. the whole society is being milked of the sovereign power of the spirit and this is what we have called normal life for some time now.

WE ARE BROKEN AND NOT EVEN HUMAN BECAUSE WE HAVE REFUSED THE PRIMORDIAL TERROR

History is the battleground of memory - it is over once it is forgotten and the experienced are gone. for there is no history - there is only the balance of libidinal forces and fear. We become history and language upon falling into the thresher which is dead time, or ‘time immemorial’. We are lost to stone, or even less than that. The ones who have understood this have gone mad because without history, language, or law for that matter - we must face the perpetual scales of the libidinal, the flesh world, and the fear that strikes when these scales are tipped - either to the flesh or to the spirit. The delicate balance is itself what is out of joint in times of war, mass fear, governmental and social upheaval - and this is to say that the delicate balance of flesh and bone and the spirit world which receives time signatures from the gods is always out of balance. The majority of individuals are not even aware of these forces - they are the forces to which they react. When we have fear, or struggle, it is not out of some human fault - no - it is that the chord of fear has struck in the cosmos and that there is the signature of fear that was built into the first humans that we still experience today. For we are still the first humans and it is in this way that our disasters are theirs, our wars are theirs, and our fears are theirs. We still live in this shroud of human affairs - a shroud of uncertainty and terror of the gods. It is found in the remnants of the shattered language of the ancients that has become modern and in the cleansed blood which has become ours; the energy which has become transfigured over time and yet remembers the experiences of old.

This is the true history of the world; it cannot be spoken of and it is meaningless to describe. We fail when we attempt to bring about dates and times and events in discussion of this principle; we may yet only resort to dead myths and the epics to even begin to elucidate the scale of this cataclysm.

What we have called rationalism in the past, along with the works of Homer, have been projects of banishing the terror by way of human agency; banishing the time immemorial by way of the concerted human effort to sculpt the chaos of time into history; sculpt the chaos of visceral expression into language. For it is that we are still deathly afraid of loss; it is this fear that lurks in the backs of the minds, throats, eyes, and ears of men; we still jump when it is that we must turn and face our fates. For it is perhaps the great illusion that we have climbed out of the dark of the primordial fear into the light of modernity and the intellect, and that we have been able to generate lineages of progress to display and prove this - and yet the terror descends again with the regularity of the shrouded sun and we can do nothing. There is no technology that can shield us from the depths of our misery and pain and suffering that we feel so deeply in our bones; bones that perhaps are not ours - bones that have felt pains and things we do not have words for because although we were there, our mouths have changed and there is not an experience in modernity equivalent to it. The only technology that would be able to accomplish this is death.

We have pretended to ourselves and pretended together in groups of acquaintances, families, and nations that this terror has, if not disappeared altogether, been managed by human progress. We have, if only perhaps because we must in order to face modern life, pushed the terror to the side and down into ourselves in the creation and execution of everyday life - the routine which has set a new pace for human affairs and engendered a great separation in human life - that of the inner life and the outer life. For it appears that human life as a force in the world has, if not stabilized, become regular; the epics and myths have vacated the world. For they have come to reside deep in the spirit of man; they have been pushed there by a manufactured life which refuses the terror of flesh existence and substitutes the manufactured terror of alienated war, alienated machinery, alienated culture, and alienated discipline. What can we call this force of being but civilization? The replacement of the energetic body, the Adam Kadmon, the libidinal electrical -

with the systematic infrastructure that regulates the bodily experience, confines it with material languages, and subtly harvests the spirit to accomplish industrial tasks. For here, and elsewhere, industrial tasks are tasks that involve the coldness of iron and steel; the air of information and knowledge.

By diverting the flow of human currency, or human life, we have diverted the flow of human experiences into devices which we have created which only have the capacity of distraction - these things that which when utilized we are not there; we are dissociated, absent; we are surgically intervened upon by them. Perhaps it is that the head is removed, or the arms, or the legs, but we are no longer whole beings; this is in no way more prominent than that we have lost the terror for fear; that we have lost the primordial breadth of emotions for the language of feeling. In indulging the capacity for distraction, we have accordingly reduced our capacity for feeling and expressing the breadth of feeling; we have lost the terror to the inner depths. For it is still there - this should not be mistaken - we have not lost the breadth of feeling which are the cosmic scales which generate and twist and turn man on a path of fate he has no knowledge of; it is not now that we are not just blind and in awe of the fates but that we are blind and dumb - believing the fates to have left us. We have forgotten Hermes and we have forgotten the vengeful gods. In this forgetting we have abandoned ourselves to the most desolate fate imaginable - a life where the soul rots forever. It is in this way that the modern world is a hell of materialism without abatement - a locale of absolute materialism in which the soul and the spirit and the psyche are treated like myths and Delphi is simply dead ruins. We have lost the gods and we have not taken it upon ourselves to translate spirit into our time - but we have contented ourselves with dead words and dead language to bear the brunt of the human experience which is the terror and the ecstasy of every moment. Instead, we have allowed the moment to die a brutal death - over and over again. This is the absolute decay of our values, our sense of humanity, and our sense of life. We have come up

against an impasse, where the religions of old have now proven to be so dead that they cannot offer us anything but sentimental solace in the face of our new and great catastrophes; we have not yet been able to come into a new mythology of life, or a new epic of experience.

For to come into this new mythology and epic would be to come into a new, spiritual understanding of the terror as an environment, as an atmosphere, as that which permeates all things with the extremity of experience. If we have not yet done this it is because we lack the expressive language or we lack the courage to face our time. There is nothing in this age that has lost the catastrophic and brutal struggle that was the days of the pagan world but it is that we have lost the connected feeling; the form in which the feeling takes - because we have become lazy and contented with dead things to describe our dead state of affairs. Unfortunately, it is quite a simple equation which describes this iteration of the world; it is that no one will take it upon themselves to do this work; furthermore, those that attempt to do so are woefully misguided as to the ills of contemporary society - we have lived life in an outward sense alone for so long that we have forgotten what is necessary to balance the two impulses. The pure materialism of the critics of this age, even the best of them, is so deeply ingrained by the language they have digested and continue to regurgitate that we consider even the most radical among us but for a moment and see that they have not penetrated very deeply at all into the true state of affairs, the terror of human existence. We can only look back to, most recently, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as the two physicians which struck this ground into the terror (or as Dostoevsky speaks of it, the evil) and have spoken rather plainly about the hopelessness bourne in the attempt to rid humanity of this evil by the institution of civil society. And yet we proceed on this task, perhaps only admiring or superficially reading these works (or ignoring them altogether), as we did before. Furthermore, we gain a renewed vigor to purify ourselves of the terror and the evil. We are so afraid of indulging it even for a moment in ourselves that we would do anything to

destroy all darkness for the light of that which we see as goodness and truth.

It is quite clear among people living in the world today just how far we have gone to one extreme of life. This could be spoken of as the Apollinian impulse; we have seen it in ancient times as the worship of the sun, and other such figures which represent the light of knowledge, truth, and the father - the positive, penetrative force into existence. What we have lost (in the illusory sense alone) is the yin, the coldness of the dark caverns of our psyche. We have replaced this inner knowledge and spatial balance with the coldness of metal and machines in our world and we have seen what this has wrought - a further ignorance; a further imbalance - these machines have not helped what ails us but allow us to move further into the accomplishing of tasks; the willful ignorance of our true internal condition. For this is always what ails us; our ailment is of the soul and without furious inquiry into this condition we are lost. We are lost to mistaking our inner wars for outer wars; we are lost to mistaking our inner violences for outer violences; we are lost to mistaking our inner imbalances as outer imbalances. For this is how the world is made. We cannot have any sort of notion of the depth and the epic nature of the terror without a balance as temporal synthesis of these elements - an alignment of the material and the spiritual to and through which the spirit may flow into the world with imminence. When we have created this we feel what is, exactly, the horror of history and the horror of language - with the absolutely shattering light which is also the depths of darkness, misery, despair, and pain. When we have aligned these forces in equal and opposite balance, they intertwine; in their union at a third point they show us the cataclysm of human existence. I am sure that it is obvious in my description of this process why we do not do this or come into this practice - it is because we are terrified of facing the terror. This is, of course, the fear of existence; the fear of what life actually is. For if we do not come into this state we have not lived; if we do not wish to come into this state, we have no intention of living. We have no intention of having

our self and world conceptions being shattered to reveal the horror that is living and is the life of the flesh, no, we have every intention of remaining in the shadows of the artificial light of our ideas; that which we believe. We have believed for so long in knowledge, truth, and the words of others that we are content with this - the unique kind of misery that comes from a total alienation from life and the glad acceptance of this total alienation in the face of that which we perceive as too great and too terrible to face - the truth of our existence - which looms over everyday life with perpetual and exponential urgency - the history and the language attest to this - the cliff of history and language which we are always but one step from falling off of into everlasting darkness, until we stop falling and understand why it is that we fall. In establishing an artificial imbalance, the crevasse in the human spirit (both individually and collectively) grows ever deeper, ever darker, ever more desperate - for with the passage of time the history which we deny in our refusal to confront it at a fundamental level (both spiritually and materially as an impoverishment of human life) grows ever more furious with us. For if we refuse to acknowledge our terrible humanity (and this is not a humanity of ideals and notions of freedom, or what have you, the nonsense of ‘Enlightenment’) - we refuse to acknowledge our history and our language of fracture, fragmentation, pain, fear, suffering, and misery bourne from this brokenness.

if i start writing poetry i am going to finish the job and murder poetry - i leave it a bloody mess on the floor with a dead heart. you cannot match my strength of will you cannot match my sheer determination in the face of the weakness of the flesh and the nothing of being human. these poems are absolute power and they revel in their meaninglessness.

you cannot match my persistence and life force energy which i bring to the task which i channel from my genitals into the poem by now it is like a reflex and writing a poem is like drawing a weapon. i have no fear of killing and i have no fear of dying in the process for i have died so many times that for me dying is like drawing a breath and i have purged the sickness of human society from my body and in doing so i have become infinite. i do not bother speaking anymore and i do not bother with language. i have channeled the darkness of my heart into these poems made of blood.

for you must have perilous faith in yourself to do great things.

POEMS ARE NOTHING BUT DEAD BODIES

THE DEPTHS OF THE PLANETARY AXES AND THE USEFUL USELESSNESS OF BEING BORN

It is in the awareness of some that we are incarnated at a specific point in time; furthermore, that this stream of time develops in coalition not only with the circulation of the planets and the cosmic bodies, but with the wills of men and creatures alike. This point of being born is decided by the Fates, the ones who weave the songs of men and of all time. It is in this way that the planets are assembled - they are strung up in the sky and respond to one another - exchanging vibratory signatures which correspond and move in symphony - in both discord and harmony alike. Each incarnate individual descends from the music of the spheres; it is this descendance from the gods which is primary - primary before even the blood of the parents. The gods have chosen for us the time and place of our birth; the way which it will proceed; the crossroads which are presented to us in each passing moment of our lives.

It is in this way that men are given the choice to listen to the gods. The signatures of the moment come down like music and interact with the music of our birth; yet, we may either sing this song or sing another song entirely. This is to say we are given the choice to pursue our own fall. For if we are fallen we have turned away from the music of the gods - it is either out of our own misunderstanding or our refusal to obey that which is both our birthright and our birthreason - and the gods feel this fallenness and we feel it within our own souls. It is the sensation of our souls having lost direction; more often than not, this fallenness can be seen as a necessary choice or movement in comparing the music of the moment with the music of the birth.

For it is that human incarnation is only so limited by the flesh and the sense perceptions, but that in the gods we are infinite; we can only hear their song through the vessel and play the song with the vessel like a woodwind instrument or even a drum; that the strings of our lives are plucked by the gas giants and the messenger gods alike; we are alit by the

war god Ares and we are beloved by the goddess Venus. It is the struggle of life to become attuned to these forces and to, in each passing moment, attempt to align ourselves with what they are saying to us, and what they are asking of us.

One of the methods to understand this is to look at cosmic time, or massive time. For to zoom out to what is so far beyond the fleeting imminence of man allows us to understand how we are this force among forces, which comes and goes like the wind, the sand, the water, the soil. For we are of that fifth element, the spirit; it flows through us like fire but it is not fire - it is the word that appears in fire. To see cosmic time, we need only look at the orientation of the planets over and across time; the axes on which they run - the signal which they convey over sheets of time. It is that the nodes of the planets move but a minute a century on the scales of cosmic time; to us, generations of life and struggle have come and gone. Even the signatures of the fastest planets remain fixed for millenia; the clock of the cosmos renders our lives mere seconds. We are superseded by cosmic time.

If we view time from a wider angle, we understand the urgency of our task on earth - as forces incarnate in a specific signature assigned to a specific soul level task on earth. There is no birth which is not a birth to serve the cosmos as the gods have seen fit; there is no birth which is not to balance the great scales of spirit and being by bringing about the body. To come into touch with this birth purpose we must unite the body and the mind under the spirit which composes each of these aspects and attempts to flow through them. It is our task, as incarnate beings, to continually purgate and cleanse the body and mind so as to allow for the spirit of the moment to flow; the spirit of the age to flow - so we might hear the word of god as the coalition of gods coming about in the turning of the spheres. For we can also see the orientation of our souls in relation to the axes of the moon which reflects that light of soul down into our world of things. It is in this way that we are and are of the soul of souls; it is in this way that the soul of souls

perpetually changes us; that our choice is to claw against this change or become that which the gods beg of us to become - ourselves; ourselves in the embodiment of the soul of the birth as it is asked to change with time - not against it. We come into mastery of time in this understanding; we willfully die to ourselves each day for god; to hear the word of god as it is brought down to earth on the beams of the moon - the structuring force of our inner selves; our wisdom, our water.

We may see from this that our lives are not ours; yet we are of that which is all things. It is in this way that the philosophy of possession and the will discharged into the world of things with desire can do us substantial ills if this will is not dropped when the gods ask us to forego it for their word - it is often (if not always) that we have this will in accordance with their word, for they desire us to experience and comprehend the dirt and dust of this world and what it becomes before we are asked to forego it and return to spirit. This is, in the practical sense, what it is to pass through this world of time as a human incarnate. When we look at the axes of the planets and the planetary bodies - the massive, cosmic time which extends beyond this iteration of the flesh tells us quite clearly that we are the forces doing the work of god; there is perhaps no greater force on this earth fit and able to do the work of god in the many required capacities than the human being - for we are equipped with the arms and legs and minds and wills that have built this world; we are that which must be willing to set our self conceptions down to step into the soul and change this world accordingly.

For this time comes in the many lives of all souls as the soul of souls - this time when the world created by men reveals itself to be a death powered by life; we are called to return to the will of the gods and participate in the creation of a world of the ceaseless flow and interplay of life - a world which is structured around the perpetually changing song of the gods. For this world could not be structured around money, profit, or human desire - but that it is called to

something higher; to and for the fulfillment of all incarnate souls around that which is their lot; their contribution to the song of the soul.

i have seen so many lost souls clinging to the shipwrecked world in a tempest desperate for a way into pleasure. i have seen them grabbing at the flesh and the mind of the earth and tearing out the hair of the earth mother and them - lamenting in tears the condition of the lost men.

they have wandered the world petrified in belief and they have wandered the world petrified in disbelief - alike and it is like the song of god is at an unreachable altitude or otherwise altogether lost. i know this because i have been a lost soul. i know this because i have spent nights ready for death and i was ready to be delivered into nothingness from the nothingness of this world. it is like this when you have heard the song of god through an instrument covered in dirt for it is that each time we are born we must dig our bodies out of the grave and polish them like precious stones. i was buried under the ground and i rise in the womb of some woman who is also the mother of the earth; i rise in her like i rise in all things to sing my brief song then to be plunged again into the waters that is mixed with soul.

it is in this way that lost souls come about staggering about in the world so wine drunk but it is not the wine of love that they are drinking. the world is shattered and they are the shattered world and it is like the world is dying to their eyes and their ears and that the scream of all time is in their mouths and ready to burst - they have lost their tongues to the mad language of things, of slanted form through which the spirit is like a broken mirror.

when we have viewed the world this way it is like all is lost because the gods have left us. others have said that we have killed them - but we have merely killed the shadow of god in the world with artificial light; it is in this way that we appear to have solved the problem of materiality; that we have instituted ourselves in the place of the gods.

for if you live among fools you begin to speak their language; it is like this in the world of things ruled by things and fools ruled by fools. the kings of our time are not the archetypal kings who looked up and heard the song of god through their eyes and played the chords on the instrument of their body, no - these kings are not just and know nothing of justice - just greed and the miserly power of a world divorced from spirit. it is in this way that they have no love for the spirit has abandoned them she has walked out of their hearts and minds with the refusal of a lover who has been scorned one too many times - she has picked up her things and left.

and so it is that they abscond with what is left of their broken lives deeper into the pit of materiality.

life is so small and it is that we need a human poetics and a human myth a truly human one one that does not attempt to make something out of life that it is not nor does it seek to elevate the human or lower the human in the celestial order.

for it is that we have arms and legs to make action and minds through which to process the force of the gods into language and hearts to love and perhaps we do not have much else than this but we must see this as enough.

we are not consumed in hellfire and we are not consumed by the light of god. we are neither sun nor moon but the entirety of the planetary elements and i am tired of seeing art, hearing art, and listening to art which has reached for madness and touched it and reached for extremity and touched it.

there must be a myth of balance on the axes which is no longer about martyrdom or suffering but about living and learning from the soul which we are and accepting ourselves for that which we are. there is no more and no less to life than this. there is none of the madness of the world in this. we must turn and face ourselves.

by looking outward, we have made a monument of the death of the soul and we have called it the world we have seen god everywhere but in ourselves and in one another and hallucinated demons at the gates of our cities.

so it is we have built the world before we have even understood the materials which compose us and the invisible material of the soul.

perhaps all of this was necessary - who is to say who is to say what is necessary to survive other than to be in survival and we have lived this way for so long. there must be another way in which to live where there is the capacity to love.

i have become too drunk off of cheap drinks and i have sat in the garden alone and then with a lover as the moon beam shuts off like the light in my bedroom window

i have sat and made love in the garden where i wrote poetry and stumbled back home in the early evening like a drunk who is in love with living like a drunk who is in love with words and the open arms of god

for i was there in the garden with the sunflowers and i smelled the vagrant sleeping on the park bench and i felt the hand of god on my eyes, covering them to show me death.

i wrote these words on the back of a napkin and sprung them from the air into the ring of words like a prizefighter. they were young and new when i sprung them and now they glisten with dew and move into new seasons of the mind.

I knew that it was over when it became too large; it ballooned Like trying to fit a giant into trousers. I was walking on both sides of the street and I was carrying in my mouth My history, bruised and loud And I could not keep it from speaking loud and making the whole world Into a stage. For I stood atop it and clamoured and shouted Against the jagged rooftops And the storm clouds shrouded with rain. The black tar roof could not hold all of the cigarettes I smoked And the wine I drank Came tumbling down the gutters.

The city is little stomachs and mouths Of bedrooms and doors And we are the children born from it Spitting out into the storm drains of history and barely swimming.

I made love for two years and then it turned out that I was A washed up poet in an oversized coat That hung down to my knees.

thats our kind of love - elemental - like it came down from the sky or flows from the trees. thats our kind of love. my feet are steeped in the soil so i can understand you the soil that speaks before language - thats our kind of love.

for we have made fire, the kind of fire that burns up living and perhaps that is our curse - for we have set the course for burning and we have burned so many nights together and apart, alike.

the candlewax drips down from our love and makes a child; it is this kind of love which stirs the ground and mixes the soil with water to form a paste deep beneath the surface where the soil breathes and speaks

it talks to us and makes our child with your nose, your face and the eyes of a poet for the earth has always needed poets. she grows them like trees - stout poets, strong poets; poets unrelenting like the wind.

for the earth needs a great love to do her work and it is it is the burning, the ceaseless burning which churns the milk of the world the milk of the breast which runs like a river into the body that we have drunk with the gleeful eyes of children - the electricity of bodies through which she has strung up her long whisper; it is not a word, it is more like a long sigh of the arms, the legs, the fingertips.

i wrote you on mad nights when i remembered our love with language and gave it a new body

the stone and marble of your lips carved into the skin of the poem and it was the blood that was dripping like candlewax which gave us the rebel daughter of poetry.

she, too, came down from the air and found the body of the word.

on this night like all nights since our first night i have loved you and i have remembered you like kisses all over the body soft kisses, biting kisses which threaten the skin and the red leather of where you have been touched. the sun of our love is a chest pressed against a chest and the transfer of the inexplicable - the wordless convulsion; the hot language.

do you remember the warm blood of love? how it tasted just beneath the surface of the skin - we who practice the artless art of living have learned these bodies from the exhalation on the ear and the whisper of a lover’s mouth pressed against the stomach

i am that proud poet who leaves a birth mark in each poem a little blemish on the blue housecoat of beauty that does not come off in the wash it is like this - a rogue stitch, an errant heartbeat, a misspelled word. the dirt of living is all over these poems and all over love the bad poets and the bad poems and their bad love litter history like vagrant bodies lost bodies of dreams which could not be recovered in the world of living things.

we who have drawn salt to the surface of the skin plowing the fields of the earth and the bruises on the knucklebone from the bedroom window.

the ultimate liberation with writing is the ability to make an educated bad decision, or a purposefully artless decision. it is in this sense that there is a unity of language that allows itself to be ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ in order to communicate something. this is the creation of a register which can simultaneously use kitsch and dissonance, as well as harmony and high language. we are looking to evoke the scales of feeling.

we are not looking for ‘poetry’ or ‘art’ - we are looking for real language with which to communicate the condition of the soul - by any means necessary. the artfulness or artlessness of the endeavor is a mere shell of the struggle.

we need a lot of kisses nonsense words and new symbols to express love. the work of poetry is making the embodied language from the rolling of the spirit in the chambers of the flesh.

let a poem be bad let it at least come close to the supreme meaning that which lies beneath the slip of the sad joke of power - the true reality. this is why the poet is not dissuaded or fearful when confronted by kings and self proclaimed gods - because they are already dust and bones in the mind of the supreme fool who holds in each hand the supreme meaning and the supreme joke.

it is the upside down fool - the fool who has traipsed through banquet halls and the halls of power and has finally removed his swollen shoes who knows this - the sad tale of men. he plays it on his horn, or his harp alone in the woods - to an audience of the gods and the spirits of the woods. the upside down fool has already seen the heights of decadence and observed decay.

what can you give such a man? one who has seen the world turn belly up. he has seen kings fall and books burned. perhaps he has even seen the end of planets.

i have taken the powder, the substance into me and spun into the wood walls and conjured sound with the embarrassment of a naive one - one who is naive but not naive enough to fail to understand what is being done in this place.

the incomplete histories which rest on our tongues and are spoken like the removal of a dagger from the inner cheek and the inner chest are extracted from the blood wound which spurts the blood of language from the source.

i have taken the liquid into me and it has swirled around in my stomach like a pit, like a barrel and transformed my mind and i have moved through the world like a ghost and i have been in and out of doors like something unsolved.

and the movement breathed new air into my lungs and in the expansion of the body the spirit slept she crawled down my spine and left her words her caress, her touch. the gesture of the spirit is endless; it is that the gesture is primary to language, primary before words.

if i have resorted to words it is because my back is against the last wall and the world has reared up on its hind legs and leered from its now nine heads leered into my skull and thrown lightning bolts into the bone reanimating the figure the first word.

the shadow of the love of the spirit pulls at my groin and my chest and my arms deeper into the world. for if i have embraced her shadow in the darkness once in the shade of a summer night where the light is thrown in off the street only in abandoned corners of the mind and the light is only upon her body and upon my body has this life made any sense in its carnality. for i will tear at the flesh and go again at my body until it is all used up and spent for death will fly into my stomach and make his home there in that place.

i have taken earth into me and it has changed my shape. i have come into a new vibration and it has thrown the world from me and it has split in two like an egg revealing the monstrous flesh and the sediment of fat which litters the meat. i have carved into life and served myself at the table i have been the bread and the wine and the flesh at the table and i have indulged in them all; i have eaten myself entirely until i struck the stone-essence which broke my teeth and scarred my mouth.

for the mechanism precedes the spirit in the mind and it stands tall and proud before the body and within it obscuring the fire from which it steals with desperation; the machine and death are alike in that they fly from the body and do the work of life. death has come into my life in a brown overcoat and he sat unseen in the train car of my life for four years and i grew into myself beneath his watch; his gaze which shaved my life down to the quick.

in walking down by the river i dredged the bodies up and observed what had happened to them the bone cut clean from the meat and polished in the sun which came down through the water and revitalized the bone. i performed experiments on the body and i drained the meat of the life blood and the vitality which is the water of the spirit - the blood - while the body was still alive and the body, in agony, told me that it was not life and in its desperation its breath was ragged and almost mute things that were barely words stumbled out of its mouth; its lips made different shapes and the body composed pictures with langauge.

for if i was drunk at the river, i was drinking white wine and i found myself tempted to climb up the steep embankment to the graveyard overlooking the water to indulge in death and the solutions in my pocket which might disembowel me entirely to reveal an essence much darker and brighter than life shades steeped in the catacombs of evil and the hateful burning of the sun. i did search for a document, the gospels of perfection but they could not be found but buried beneath a rock with wordless inscription; it was slashed with feeling, the canvas with scars but it was not broken - for the stone of essence could not be cleaved from itself. it was not fire, it was not water, it was not earth, it was not air.

for if i have stumbled into something else, it was a mistake i chose to make a dark pathway lit only by the candle of my breast - which i saw, partially obscured in the bowels of life

and i chose to pursue that path and in choosing this, i chose to accept the consequences of going elsewhere vacating the world of sight for a different method of seeing a seeing which slashed my eyes and opened my chest with a knife and what i saw there was not the meat for i cared not for the meat. perhaps i saw what i wished to see, but i saw that the soul was a charge of the body, a fiery air which pierced the body and swirled in the breath and that it was purged up out of the body and spoken where earth fell beneath it. the original man was thrown up out of the casket of the earth body and screamed the essence of the body the word which was thrown up and died in the air like a stone which eclipsed the sun, the stone which became known as the moon.

the paradox is resolved on the page as that which is written. one need only look at the page to observe being and non- being in a gestural dance of whole dialectical movement. the moment a mark is made, the dialectic is simultaneously established and resolved. in and through the act of writing, history is perpetually resolved.

to find a different kind of literacy we must throw ourselves into the difference which we are which is without language - as we are making the speech gestures and the symbolic gestures as a unity of cosmic embodiment - of the flesh and the new flesh through which spirit flows

AS THE DEATH OF LIVING MYTH, WE HAVE INSTITUTED OURSELVES

Nietzsche’s physician of culture is also a physician of the soul in the sense that the cultural condition is always the condition of the individual(s) ad infinitum. Nietzsche is the doctor of the body culture and therein is the condition of the blood cell man. The profusion of archetypes is a characterization of humanity as it imagines itself in the utero of its own conception; humanity is in humanity’s womb. It is in this sense that there is no human beings, there are only human becomings; the world is a womb of theatre which is the stage of the soul - fragmented into individual pieces in different stages of psyche development - towards individuation - which the collective undergoes when the individual undergoes it. This is the work of poetic genius and mystic work - the pressing matter of using the tools at hand, which are themselves the histories of myth as cultural totems - in order to come about individuation. This coming about is a coming around; a coming in the back door of history and culture as standards and limits for living; bludgeoning these conceptions with the stone of the soul.

It is that the soul is still attached to the myths outside of it; the culture and the language outside of it - as a method of survival in this made-world; thus it is about a belief system which is not living - as these myths are the dead myths of another time; either ruins of an age or cultivated in the aftermath of one to describe a historical development. The language standard and the limits of history are always dead. There is no imminent mythology; no living myth of the psyche - and this is precisely the task of an integrated studies of the soul - a studies which presumes no boundary and no border, and has no trouble discarding the remnants of dead time in order to make way for that order of the moment which is living.

For it is that we must know this myth intimately by way of experience and live it out in the everyday; acknowledging the primacy of the soul as that which experiences the world

and crafts it; the soul is before cognition, conception, the self, and the image. It is the witness that is whole. The greatness of poetry is the weaving of this understanding into the drama which is the developmental soul playing itself out on the battlefield, in love, in dreams. For there is the white space that is the space of the canvas, and the black cube which is the synthesized concept. We might call the black cube history as it spins and proliferates and finds appendage through time. The soul is at once the canvas, the cube, and the room in which history is painted. The room has infinite ears, eyes, mouths, hands. Perhaps it is the painter.

As the death of living myth, we have instituted ourselves. We are no longer transfigural - capable of living multiple lives, multiple stories, and in multiple imaginary garments. We have not just lost our sense of the epic, we have lost our sense of the plurality of existence. We have become stone; set in fixed identities - unable to advance the task of our souls by transforming ourselves to the essence - as the soul demands - each time it dips its feet in the River Styx. We experience the extremity of our immediate capacity to feel; the soul demands a greater death than before. We must rise to that occasion within ourselves. The soul may live itself out in the arts; it need not act out its most dangerous plays in the world of ‘the real’. This is the possibility of a significant advancement in the ‘human’ world - as the externalized wars and violences and conquerings which litter history like dead bodies unprocessed by the trash compactor which is human existence need expression; they crave expression within each one of us. There is a certain violence of the death of the animal, the death of the human, and the death of the gods which at each moment needs expression, needs processing, needs moving through - but there is not a suitable space in which to do this in such a manner as to express the archetypal substance of this movement - for in each life the human being becomes all of history. We live the history of the world in our bodies; in our language. The possibility of art is now not to do or say anything in the world, or to reach acclaim - this has always been a useless project. The possibility of art is to use art to

facilitate transformation of the individual at the level of the soul; the creation of images and situations through which the soul finds a simulated embodiment; the made-real field it must move through called becoming.

We have seen these representations historically - the connection of Virgil and Dante in the descent into hell; Charon as the one who facilitates the crossing over from the world of the living to the world of the dead - and the works of Shakespeare and Mozart’s Magic Flute - which are nothing less than the creations of new myths of the moment

myths which, due to the pathetic state of culture - have been clung to like life-rafts for hundreds of years. We must have brave artists; artists prepared to rise to the challenge to assemble orchestrations of the soul; divine, massive movements of the soul through which the audience becomes initiates - becoming within the transformation of the stage- play. For this is also history; this is the ‘real world’ which has become so stupid and dangerous and simultaneously void of meaning, void of course, void of heroic direction and sight of destiny. It is a play of purely material things - of money, of power, and of the greed for things. This, surely, has become the game of idolatry and obsession we have thrown our souls into - a pure materialism which has turned the soul into a miserable beast of burden. We are slaves to this paradigm. We are not uplifted into that which we truly are - souls who are here to move through this world and evolve to the very essence of our beingnesses. We must find this myth within ourselves through the perilous act of self initiated transformation in the death of history - a death brought about by the obliteration of whole cultures of meaning and valuation of the soul for a world of total enslavement of human beings, bodies, trees, now all called ‘resources’ - and by way of this perilous aloneness; we must become in the death of history our selves mythological; in doing so we might craft a myth of imminent, personal meaning which resurrects the journey undertaken across centuries, across cultural bodies; in doing so we might also create an entire sphere - an environment in which the soul is encouraged to make its own transit into and out of an entirely personal
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method - composed of the everyday life and confluence of influences of the individual; facilitating a transfiguration of the individual in perpetual flow of beings.

In doing so we will have ushered in a hitherto unseen paradigm, a paradigm in which each individual is effectively given the keys to imminent, personal, self transformation - a myth space in which myth proliferates via the skeleton structure of worlds past, societies past, and civilizations past. For in doing this work we must study the history of these formations, but we must also study the future - which is to say, the deepest limits of our own soul-condition in relation to the lives we lead. This is the work of the remembrance of the soul - an ensoulment of life into the body of everyday life, where the soul is charged and ennobled to create and recreate the archetypal images of the dance of life and death in perpetual interplay; the myths may yet be truly egalitarian myths - myths of personal stories of the dance of soul transformation in the depths of being stripped of life (the bowels of death) and the depths of spiritual revelation in the unveiling of secret passageways of the mind and of the heart and of history.

It is in this way that we each have a birth-logos, or a charge of the soul; this charge has been woefully lost by a history which has created a system of values and then chained itself to it like a willing Prometheus. The fulfillment of the birth- logos is that task which is the heroic task of each individual; each individual acts as the Hercules of the stars; the stars point to the divine destiny of the individual in this embodiment; the stars act as guides in this journey across the field of labors. In accomplishing, defeating, and incorporating the tasks of the soul-life into our beingnesses, we are finding the birth-logos as a language of the soul as the work of everyday; it is through and by way of this process that we come into an existence where each gesture is living with spirit; each gesture is permanently and fundamentally liberated by the regimes of history, culture, and language which attempt to assert a delineation, a boundary, an impossibility - a strictured truth/untruth upon

the soul on the basis of the conceptualized state - not only of the moment or the age, but of the entirety of ‘humanity’ as a conceptual receptacle of equal meaninglessness and equal death. For this is where we have landed, now, as a global society - into this receptacle of absolute, equal meaninglessness - into a field where the gods are accumulated capital; the heroes and demi-gods are those who have accumulated the most capital. We have, in our deep, deep misery and sadness - lost sight of the fact that we are each Hercules and we are each charged with our own unique path through the stars as to advance the fragments of our souls - fragments which all constitute the soul; this life-force consciousness which animates planets, light, and bodies alike. We must see quite clearly how deep is this despair of modern times; how thoroughly we have lost the soul in the world conception; how we worship dead paradigms in and through which the soul and spirit yet flowed. For it is the aqueducts like veins have dried up on life and now it is only called thus; in our despair we continue to ravage ourselves, our relationships, and the earth - all of which are the soul. We must see quite clearly the task of the moment - to go down into the underworld channels and retrieve the bowl of the life giving blood which is the charged water of the soul; we must bring it up within ourselves; in doing so, ennoble the possibility within others.

language, in its essence, is the expression of cultural value and values. it is an economy of sound and the representation of sound. it is meaningless and useless beyond the face which it rarely presents - the face of generative meaning through poetics and the wildness of expression which breaks the medium and form - exposing the insides of the one who is expressing; this is the creation of a true expression of the spirit. if we are still relying on the cultural language, we have failed to establish a networking of the soul through the veins of the body which might be expressed with or without the always already crumbling structure of the established language as process of making consensus life.

when we study language with the intention to reform and understand its laws, what we are doing is affirming a dead time, a dead art, and a dead method of communication - which is always failed. if we are not continually and consistently destroying the historical and cultural paradigms which constructed our world histories of violent failure, we are doing nothing but worshipping dead symbols and dead images. the letters and words and methods of conjunction themselves are dead; they are relics of a time in which they lived and breathed and served men. they are the relics of yesterday. we must find new language and even refuse the history of language in the process in order to do so. this is the jettisoning of 'the human' project and the prized cultural histories and narratives which are sanctified as tradition and truth; prized by those who fear the death of what was once known for the terror of that which is now.

this is a poetics of turning away from the worship of death to and into a living life of gestures from the body born of warm blood and feeling. even now, as i am using these tired symbols and gestures and conjunctions of language i am failing to do so, as i am lapsing back into the old language in order to communicate the urgency of this time. this is not to say that a study of the history of language and culture is useless. it will, if anything, show us how lost we are; how lost we have been to stumble drunkenly down the paths of

history to this moment - a moment of a total dearth of spirit and soul in the modern language and modern culture vacated even of the possibility of the poetics of soul transformation at the level of the individual - a language and culture directed outward into and as pure material, pure form, and the exaltation of form - over and over again, as an institutionalized technics of life. we have birthed technical painters, technical linguists, and technical life - but this life has nothing but the void image of life buried in its empty stomach.

if we have failed to rage against this paradigm which holds desperately onto the organs of its past and yet cannot acknowledge the violence of its birth, it is because we are experiencing a mental illness at the level of culture and language - an obsession of and with death; the fetishization of death; the fascination of the dead spirit encased in the amber of the form which we worship - the form of the empty symbol. in the works of kierkegaard and nietzsche, we find a total refusal to proceed down this path of sad madness; instead the two work incessantly to develop a perpetually transfigural language of the soul as it is changed by and in and as life - a new logos which does not stop moving long enough to be seen or known. it seeks deeper and deeper transformation; to move further and further into the darkness of unknowing and the unknown - sacrificing even its self conception and the ideals of its time - in the throwing of all things away to express and seek the ecstasy of a becoming language - a faith of spirit embodied sign- work. here, we are gone from the nonsense of the presupposed and we are directly embodied; embodied in the sense of total primacy given and received in and as the enfleshed word - the word which is also the body which is speaking.

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THE ACT OF THE RELINQUISHING OF TIME

For we are in time; to imagine ourselves as in time might be like this: to be standing in a river after a rainstorm, water rushing rapidly past us and there we are, cupping our hands, hugging the water - in tears as we attempt to hold onto that which comes and is gone in less than a moment. This is the entirety of human history - excepting the very few who have mastered the art of relinquishing time altogether. For to relinquish time is not only to stop this madness of attempting to hold onto the fragments of history, but of the faith necessary to give up the act of standing in the river of time; to be moved by it; the greater will.

This furious grasping may be seen in all disciplines; all aspects and elements of existence as it stands today - the attempt to claim land, claim property, accumulate capital, and affirm the house of the self against the scarcity which is the emptiness of the foreseeable future. For we have seen nothing of the future unless we have seen the past and the present to be what they are - the utter lack of history; the utter obsession with survival by way of clinging to the cultural archives of what we have termed ‘our lives’. This is a great neurosis of human existence; a neurosis which extends across the spectrum of the personal and political - a method of relation which we use in our most intimate relations and our most abstracted transactions - a method which is also the accumulation of self.

For if we are attempting to hold water we are attempting to hold onto that already past moment which, if but for a second, we found something fundamental in the stream of time - like a polished stone or a bit of hardened volcanic material - something which struck up against us which was us; it is this aspect which is assimilated into the identity of the self. For the self-making project is also the project of history in a micro-macrocosmic relationship - a way and method of shoring up the perpetual flow of time with a narrativization or networking of it; it is this very mode

which is desperate for itself, desperate for an idea, a sense, a grounding of life.

We have not yet recognized that, as a collective and as individuals, we have fundamentally lost; that in our madness which is the everyday life we are not even individuals or collectives, but sheer consciousness held together by the rapidly decaying clay of the body and the nourishment of water and light; that, in the light of time, we are already well on our way to being burst apart into elements and spirit. It is in each moment of life that this process is occurrent; yet the impulse to grasp and hold onto elemental life is as voracious as ever; it is this voraciousness which is the impulse toward survival - to survive the body; to survive the soul; to survive the meaning and feeling which stand to be absolutely eviscerated by the passage of time and the death of stars.

It is our madness which props up our everyday lives and affirms them as meaningful and necessary in the midst of this cosmic terror; the cataclysmic realization which is the collision of the absolute light and the absolute dark in each moment - the light of life and the realization of the cataclysm of utter destruction. It is this interplay of the erotic and the thanatonic which the mind grapples with in each passing moment; by way of the filter of the felt and the known, the deep feeling and the mental net which shores up and reaffirms life as possible. That which rises to the light of consciousness and descends into the plutonic element of the unconscious does so, for many, simply because it must in order to avoid a breakdown of the mechanism which sustains life; the everyday chores and duties assigned to the living body by the social and economic mechanism which polices its libidinal life-force energy. For if we have continued to grasp at time, we do so because we are perpetually failing to come into the moment; in doing so, we are moving with time and we are, in each moment, synthesizing past and future into the occasion which is the moment.

To do so we must relinquish all of our qualms, concerns, responsibilities, and concepts of life and the language through which life is lived. We must, in short, cease to exist but as consciousness; by way of consciousness come into a total encounter with, as, and of consciousness - we must become that very fifth element of consciousness; the river of stars which moves like water and burns like fire and dances like air and is like earth and yet is none of these. For if we have a concept of life we are standing in the stream of consciousness holding that concept aloft as our bodies. The concept, in its most fundamental manifestation, is the body which is asserted in the midst of time.

This concept is asserted everywhere; it must be so in order to affirm the inner logic of the social - a logic which is a society of bodies, a community of perpetual difference which is violently asserted and violently defended as holding some sort of innate truth or secret of individuality. For it is that human beings do not exist but as a category and the races of the human beings do not exist but as categories of the category, and so forth. This insane impulse can be seen in the so-called ‘scientific’ categorization of life, plants, and animals by ‘researchers’. It is so captivating that life must be defined and known down to the atom; if we fail to see this as a deep neurosis, we fail to understand what humanity has become in this moment - obsessed with knowledge as that which will, surely, keep out death.

For the desire to know is as old as the first civilizations obsessed with the stars; desperate for meaning and knowledge as being among the gods, being let into the secret of life and all things. The charge to knowledge has created entire empires of religion; spurred on such abstractions from life. In knowledge, there must be an idea; the moment there is an idea, we are no longer living. We are indulging in a separation.

The complexity of these developments is nothing less than a madness of civilization; a madness of humanity; a madness of man desperate for something beyond that which is. It is

in this way that we have built our self concept and our cities from the mud of time, mud which is washed away like the body - so quickly in the stream of time. The futility of these developments is apparent in the ruins which are now exhibits of a time past - paintings and sculptures of dead time - and yet our madness proceeds. For if we have failed to face the complete madness of our self conceptions and our world conceptions we have failed to face the essential division which consumes us and has consumed all time - the existence of someone, something, beyond us as that which is. For we are that which is, no different than the trees, the animals, the stars, the water - and in failing to understand this we have been killing ourselves for thousands of years without end.

We have sought to divide the atom and divide the land and divide the energetics which form and found life. We have looked to split the feminine and the masculine and define them and engender them to separate bodies. In doing all of this we have denied life for the categorical existence which is not existence; it is a fundamental, artificial separation of life under the microscope of ‘knowledge’. It is a possession of life by the intellect; the exhibition of an absolute inability to live. We have proceeded into conceptual life because it is convenient; because it allows us to deny our essential division by indulging the mind with the task of creating, maintaining, and developing increasing ‘more’ divisions. We do not face the primary wound because to do so would be to shatter the entirety of life as we know it; instead we face the tertiary wounds and so forth, the small incisions, and continue to inscribe the body with these incisions which pose as ‘confrontations’ of reality - but are nothing more than the desire for and indulgence in ‘realities’.

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Meditations

the candlewax drips down from our love and makes a child; it is this kind of love which stirs the ground and mixes the soil with water to form a paste deep beneath the surface where the soil breathes and speaks

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