For I Am

Name: For I Am
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME VII: FOR I AM DEAD TO THE WORLD AND I HAVE WRITTEN THESE SONGS

             OR

     ‘DAMNED TO WRITING’




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CONTENTS

Towards a Modern Myth of Force
This Is What Remains
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Heraclitus
A Revitalization of the Humanities
The Industrial Academy of Knowledge Re-Production
The Transformation of Consciousness
The Physics of Thought
The Logos of Disenchantment
The Story of Penelope and Odysseus
The Transformation of consciousness By Fire
Some New Poems
The Will
The End of Philosophy
Aufheben & Hieros Gamos: The Poet Who Has Come Into Spirit
The Aesthetic Genius
Shedding Bodies: a Real Model of Time
The Ecstatic in Contemplation
Poetic Genius: Listening for the Right Word
The Immanent Revelation of Being Through Becoming
What is the Absolute, Fiery Meaning!
These Things Affected with the Soul
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I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.

               - Vincent van Gogh




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TOWARDS A MODERN MYTH OF FORCE: JULIE MEHRETU’S ETHOS AND THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE GODS

I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place. - Mehretu

When we get down to the soul of things we are in the inverted world, the world which is the roots of the world; from which sprung the methods of growing, owning, and knowing. It is incredibly simple once we have returned to the world of force; we have come back from the world of living things, formed life; defined life. In this place we can see and feel love flying around; we can see hate hovering in the clouds; lighting becomes the dirge of fate - and the music of life is into instruments of force, instruments of propelled force and compelled force - force delivered into the ear like breath and force imbued in an apple, a tree, the flesh, the bone. The lightning of life, in this place, has permeated all things and revealed them as no things - and yet, as composed of different consciousness.

For there is the necessity of different consciousness, yet with consciousness being one. If there were not the consciousness of trees, the consciousness of cats, the consciousness of painters; the consciousness of farmers - the ecosystem of life would collapse under the weight of imbalance. For the

forces imbuing different consciousness are a cosmic scale; a weighing of the scales occurs in every moment; every moment seeks balance. Of course, if we look at the course of human ‘life’ across time - this statement appears ridiculous. But it is that there is a task, spanning across time and space - an accord that goes beyond earth into the music of the greater spheres, the planets, and into the multiple galactic neighborhoods that construct the ever expanding universe of existence - it is that we are agents of force working and moving into perpetual balances - balances in ourselves, of ourselves, in relation to one another, and relation to the cosmos. These scales, of course, are the same scale.

For a modern myth of force is precisely this - an understanding imbued with the knowledge of past centuries

an understanding as to how the human concept came into being as a personification of force; a conception that works in simultaneous tandem with the conception of the gods as cosmic agents of force. For we have Saturn, Time, Death, Ouranos, Prometheus, Lightning, Zeus; the archetypal movements across time and space abound in describing these change-agents as they function and flow through human life and death into the life of all things - the greater engines which power the life functions. For we are certainly imbued with god; our union with god is a union with the force which is demanded of us in any given moment in accord with our destiny, our fates. For there has been an industrial age spanning over two hundred years where the accomplishment of anything became as against nature; we have gone from revelation to survival and back again for centuries upon that period. This has been a period of the distinguishing of the human being; furthermore, a period in which the human being has been tasked with knowing itself in all of its capacity and potential as an energetic body of force - complete with limitations; abilities to do great harm and great healing work alike to other energetic bodies; the earth and cosmos themselves. For it is that the human being is imbued with the power of the gods; the power of the force of all things - and this is what it is to be of divinity; to
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achieve consciousness of the divinity flowing through all things.

The necessity of different consciousness has been known for some time; we have seen animal spirits, human spirits, and the great art of the theatre masks of the Balinese; crossed spirits as seen in the Egyptian myths, Lord Garuda, and the god system of the Greeks. These systems should not be made out to be anything other than what they are - a way of conceptualizing the movements of force through life as different aspects, or moments, on the scales of existence. For, in the creation of the human being, we have called ourselves gods and forces by different names; we have become half of that which we are - like Hercules - half of that which is meant to be full; reunited with the gods, the forces of life in all of our wholeness with it. This is, of course, the path of the initiate; the twelve labors of Hercules are the movement across the skies, across the scales of being; in order to, ultimately, come into a different way altogether

a union with the gods; the death of conceptual existence in ultimate union with force. For we have need to see the gods before this point; we have a need to have the notion; to feel them, to have a sense of affirmation in the material - as we come into world-understanding, which is also understanding of the conceptual mechanism. For there would not be a conceptual mechanism if it was not necessary in order to reach higher orders of understanding.

Today, if we were to have such a style of myth as the ancients, it would have to accommodate the knowledges and wisdoms that have come about over the course of the last several hundred years - many of which have found us stumbling down pathways of even more confusion, even more desperation; even more divorcedness from living in- force. For if we have attempted to discover the nature of force, we have attempted to discover the nature of ourselves from the outside in; attempting to penetrate that essence which is impenetrable because it is all things and no things. If we learn anything in this life; anything that might come close to soul knowledge, it is that we are composed of

illusions, images, and conceptions - and that all we can do in life is to strip ourselves of these things. What else is there in this world but more illusions? More instrumentalizations of force to glorify the material, the consumptive, the exponential growth of artificial systems in the midst of the paradox of material decay and universal expansion. We have seen the time of the absurdists just preceding this time; it is clear what has emerged from the work of the absurdists: the blatant disabuse of any and all meaning amidst the proliferation of meaning as a method of accumulating life, possessing life, and owning life. We have come outside of ourselves to purchase the corpse of living; we have been exiled from love, our hearts, our souls in this process. The modern myth of force must, necessarily, entail a coming into the embodied knowledges; turning to face the terror which is our destiny, our work: the coming into communion with the soul, the stone that holds all time and all space - within us. To burrow inward, for many, is an inconceivable terror - filled with wrongs and shame and sin - for to burrow inward is to begin the confrontation with ourselves then with our self conception; to do this is to willfully murder the lives we have made and to be faced with the raw force of living; to be faced with that which we are and that which we are capable of and that which compels us. This is, quite simply, coming into our power.

For, like Heraclitus and Mehretu, it is horrible to come into the realization that all things are in flux; that ‘war is the father of all’. We would have loved the idea of peace, the ideal of rest, the ideal of a beginning and an end, the ideal of a man and a woman to suppose the perfect duality, the perfect extremities. But this is a fallen world of things; Prometheus has brought down the fire of life force to the world of men; it is our task as Hercules to release that which the fire has become (Prometheus himself); to return the spirit to itself. For if we have experienced form and obliterated form we have gone to war with ourselves and we have killed ourselves in the most absolute manner; we have obliterated the conception as all self conception and we have died forever in a way more thorough than the death of

the body. In this way we have ceased to see ourselves as real and we have ceased to see ‘others’ and ‘the world’ as but a work of dreams; a dream which, in the establishment of the concept, is no longer living. If we are not en-forced with and about soul and moving through the soul where all things are soul and thus all things are no things, we are not living; we are divorced from life; we are in separation.

It is in this way that we have seen even the gods disappear and we have been enshrouded in the darkness as it encroaches on all human consciousness; the darkness of doubt, uncertainty, and the sure death of the self that approaches in all things - we are perpetually reminded of the emptiness of material even in the glorification of it; the incompletion of always wanting and needing more of that which promises fulfillment but could never deliver fulfillment - as it is merely a dimension, an aspect, of the consciousness; it is in this way that we have been about picking up shards and fragments of the refractory mirror of the soul and we have stared through them unseeing. We have gone mad with the unseeing and we have gone to war with the war that is within us because we have not yet been able to turn inward and see this war of feeling; this war of forces which clash deadly within us and destroy us in each passing moment - if we have turned to face this we have died forever and will die forever. We must be prepared to do this work in order to truly live. For that refractory mirror will continue to shatter; this time assures us - it will become sand, dust, wind.

there is always that seat at the table that we have saved for the blind justice of heine: the blind justice that lives nowhere the blind horse justice who bangs the gavel of his hooves against the earth flying into the night.

for i have composed the song of the nation, the song lorelei and it cannot be sung with my mouth in my words.

this black song fled across the border on a blind horse.

i have passed off the memory of it all like a blanket to a pair of sisters on a fireless night and the new states that loom with knives toss and churn like dark water in my mind - the dark water of that half moon light where he crossed the river: the river that was also a border.

all of the graves of the dead jews are in our candles tonight and it is that the prayer is breathed into remembrance and the prayer is a silencer attached to the roof of my mouth.

we know now that mandelstam was a hanged man and akhmatova loved him and she loved the fool mayakovsky and they both loved her and the way she saw the world and became it. if there has ever been a family of poets it has been them;

we are still speaking today to stave off the pendulum as it swings time over our huddled mass - mayakovsky is sleeping on the couch; this is the work of poetry.

what we know today is that mayakovsky became a lion son and mandelstam is still eating out of the garbage and akhmatova alone knows what happened to the two of them. but mayakovsky is dead mandelstam is dead and akhmatova is dead.

THIS IS WHAT REMAINS

I am with Mayakovsky and he is writing 150,000,000 on Akhmatova’s couch. The couch is worn through with the impression of figures; the couch is like language when Mayakovsky declaims to the room, ‘150,000,000 is the name of the creator of this poem. The bullet is its rhythm.’ We all present understand that this is a significant moment, not only in our own small private worlds, but in the course of history itself. Akhmatova will remember this moment when she writes Requiem; she remembers her black dress as she descends deeper and deeper into hell. Mayakovsky is dead now and what used to be a revolution of language is just an absolute pit; there is no ability to differentiate anything - it just all flows into a ceaseless violence. Akhmatova mourns the 100,000,000. What happened to the last 50,000,000? How did Mayakovsky’s voice get so large? Mandelstam slept on that couch too; to speculate whether or not they were lovers would be gossip in the face of the way she fought to keep him away from his fate; it was like putting a threadbare leash on a dog of poetry. She is standing in the stream of history and its almost like she is immortal in the sense that she is watching her loved ones die and float by her, their bodies left by spirit and limp, buoyant in the stream. She says, ‘Madness with its wings Has covered half my soul It feeds me fiery wine And lures me into the abyss.’ Who can relate to this state? Her husband is dead, her son is in prison and her body is being torn apart by the regime. When do we get to this point of language when you have to speak, when it is not even speaking, it is expression of some ghastly struggle that seeks to escape through breath? This is what despair and grief become and take form about in language - they become figured; we can talk about figuration on the page or we can talk about figuration in the breath. You can see it clearly in the winter air, in the dark with a light cast on the shadow of the voice, of the breath. Chekhov understood the significance of smoke; that thing that rises back up to the heavens, the samovar smoke, the spirit spiralling upward, however you want to conceptualize it.

Mayakovsky was a dog of poetry too, a fierce junkyard dog of poetry who was all about murdering history, about the end of history once and for all - throwing the whole damned thing off the boat of modernity; the boat that is burning itself as it moves into the folds of time. I mean this is raving madness, a raving madness that possesses him that is obviously life; Akhmatova and Mandelstam recognize this. Mandelstam says, simply, ‘Mayakovsky has absolutely no business impoverishing himself’. But for Mandelstam, history is not born or dead and it extends like a massive groan throughout the great expanse of time; there is no history to throw off the boat of modernity. Mayakovsky is a warrior and Mandelstam is a strategist but both are dead when Akhmatova’s time comes. Her black dress turns into a robe with a hood and she is walking among the graves with a candle; she is mourning even the idea of revolution and she has seen what Mayakovsky’s eagerness and the regime which deified his works brought the world, brought her, brought her loved ones, brought the two she eulogizes out of the 100,000,000 - she has brought the words back down to earth; the earth is covered in blood in some sort of cleansing rite and all she can do is put words down about it. Who is to say that this is not the most noble pursuit; without these words which, censured (like Mandelstam’s) - if they had not survived what would we know of this pain that found language through the vessel that was Akhmatova, the vessel that was her song? They sang the poems at Stray Dog Cafe, that the stone of Russian poetry is song; we should all know this by now; the pursuit of the song is greater than all things. It is the song that rises to the ceiling like samovar smoke; it is the song that rises and becomes an eagle then a phoenix risen from the ashes of the misery and comes into the sky and the stars like a different sun - a song of a new sun. Akhmatova undergoes a transformation in Requiem; she comes into the dark star in her chest and the star explodes and the sky is now not black but blue and gold; it is animated in a dark light provided by the black sun - but what solace is this? She says that she is inconsolable even as she is illuminated and has put words to the crime, one of the

most unspeakably big crimes of history. ‘Can you describe this?’ She can. Mayakovsky can too; the two of them are bookends to this play called the imagination which ran across the expanse which was the 20th century in the region which they called home; it ran back past Pushkin and thrust itself even now into this moment - but the way we know about it, we know about it through language, literature, and the innovations wrought by the hands therein which struggled to reconcile the dreams and desires of poetry with the momentum which swept art away and left in their hands the work of the world. It is the moment, here, in the tarot deck, of responsibility - from Judgement to The World; it is like a death of poetry. You can see the entirety of the tarot archetypal movement like a procession through time in this period of Russian history; the procession is a procession of soul transformation playing out in real time across hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of people. Mayakovsky throws himself, and I mean thrusts himself - into the mix of the historical moment and demands to be heard and this demand is for a revolution of consciousness, a revolution of the imagination and a wildness which - even as it was lionized by the state - went far beyond the state and Trotsky knew this. The imagination is never purely useful; neither could there ever be such a society. You can see the struggle to institute an inhumanity; this struggle necessitates mass extermination of life. You cannot institute a pure society without mass death. Akhmatova is there for this death; she is our historian of it in the sense that she gives us a whole world - the despair, the trial, the private moments; Petrograd, ‘Everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold out. The wing of black death has flashed, Everything has been devoured by starving anguish, Why then, is it so bright?’

The black sun is over Russia as it is over the entire world for a period of what we could call fifty years from the start of the century or we could call it eternity - who is to say when this transformation ends? The world is true to the Black Paintings of Goya and the world is true to the darkness of Rembrandt and perhaps also the darkness of Caravaggio.

What we are talking about here is black light, the black light that illuminates the world which is the explosion of the star of the soul as it transforms and shatters into a sky - van Gogh’s Starry Night is in Akhmatova’s words: ‘And what kind of invisible glow Drove us out of our minds before dawn?’ This poem is written just months after Artaud’s letter to Henri Parsot, a letter that declaims a condition of spellbinding amongst the French people; of course we have the Heine’s Lorelei - the boatman who is captivated by the moon; the mountain of affairs which will, as and with the waves, devour him and his boat. The boatman might as well be Mayakovsky, a man pulled apart by a sense of responsibility not only to the immensity of imagination and feeling which was his genius and to the people of the world:

Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed. The Milky Way streams silver through the night. I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams I have no cause to wake or trouble you. And, as they say, the incident is closed. Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind. Now you and I are quits. Why bother then To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts. Behold what quiet settles on the world. Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars. In hours like these, one rises to address The ages, history, and all creation.

Mayakovsky and Akhmatova are the same voice of consciousness differentiated, barely. We might argue about what a body really constitutes, and whatever kind of separation there is between bodies. I am sure we will disagree; there is no use in me bringing this up with the people of the world anymore. The two have the same task, which is the task of all life - to transform at the heart of the soul and to bear witness and perhaps leave a map of the inner stars; by which Heine’s boatman might navigate, and next time, not get so lost in the looking up of it all.

A GREAT THINKER AND WRITER TREATS ALL THOUGHTS AND WRITINGS WITH EQUAL DISDAIN, DISGUST, AND IRREVERENCE - BECAUSE A GREAT THINKER AND WRITER HAS CONSIDERED MORE CONCEPTS AND WRITTEN MORE BODIES THAN THE OTHERS CAN EVEN BEGIN TO CONTEMPLATE (IN MOVEMENTS) AND BY WAY OF THIS PROCESS HAS INVALIDATED ALL OF THEM, LIKE THE REST OF LIFE, WITH AND AS EQUAL OBLIVION, FIRE, AND LOSS. WHAT STANDS AND STANDS ALONE AMIDST THE BURNING AND CONDEMNATION IS THE ACT OF WRITING AND THINKING - THE ACT WHICH PERSISTS WITH A FERVOR EVEN AS THE PAST WORKS AND CONCEPTS ARE EVISCERATED BY THEIR EQUAL UNTRUTH AS NOW-BODIES WITH EYES EMPTY OF SPIRIT.

HEIDEGGER, NIETZSCHE, HERACLITUS

Every ounce of joy, heart, and happiness is burned away as it is felt, experienced. What else is there but to turn away from it entirely - the becoming - into the stone of being, the soul, absolute consciousness? What is there but turning away from the illusion of change into the changelessness of Being? This is the coldness that stands on the mountainside overlooking the razing of the forest of living things. It is in this way that one watches what one thought was one’s life being absolutely burned away - and one can do nothing about it - for what is being burned away is the illusion of that which is. The burning is all. This is also the fire that burns books, bodies; the fire that even in the depths of water runs over stone. We could also call this the air that runs over sand and the hand that runs over the body of the beloved.

Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Heraclitus are three heads of this same body of consciousness, the fiery thing, gesturing toward and being as the same problem which is the only real problem of philosophy - the problem of change; Being in the face of becoming. We must ask ourselves, is there the illusion of change or is there only perpetual change? Is this consciousness? The concept of Maya is helpful here; we have talked about the canvas and the blank page and the words upon the page which move Consciousness as consciousnesses, and yet Consciousness is not altered beyond the elements and forces which compose and decompose within it. It is Vishvarupa - the thousand arms, the thousand heads, the thousand gods, the thousand forces

the everchanging and yet all encompassing changeless. For the book and the painting, themselves (being the compendium of pages and the activated canvas), are in a room of fire - a kind of fire that cannot be doused with water, nor can it be supplemented or altered with a foreign substance. The fire of consciousness is the fire composed of all things and the no thing of the spirit; we stand and face this fire as within it and of it - regardless of whether or not we have come to understand it as it is; thus dispensed with the rest of the pleasantries of life to face our fate. It is in this
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way that Heraclitus ‘raised the curtain on this greatest of all dramas’ (Nietzsche), the curtain which has nothing to do with humanity, the concept of humans, or, really, any idea or concept whatsoever emergent from the mouths of men about the ideals and ethics and morals of living. It is that Heraclitus’ forces are in constant struggle; at perpetual war with themselves and one another - a war which is also peace in that it is all there is, always; furthermore, all there isn’t - as these forces are at work in the spirit and soul as powers of transformation; manifest accordingly in both the outer world as one ceaseless stream of burnings.

‘The world is the game Zeus plays… of the fire with itself. This is the only sense in which the one is at the same time the many.’

Nietzsche then Heidegger came into the works of Heraclitus and saw that the work of philosophy was already done. What Heraclitus has done is reduce the world and the self and the movements therein to their absolute, irreducible foundation - the fire of consciousness. Heraclitus, in a radical act, strips mankind from mankind and the gods from the gods and shows the fire as that which bonds man and god as the force which has composed all things and no things. We must be sure to refer to this fire as the fire of consciousness; in doing so, we give ‘fire’ more agency to move, act, and exist than the always already limited lexicon of culture at large. The language used to conjure this moving fixture is of the essence; this is where Nietzsche comes into play and inherits the task of Heraclitus - the task becomes diagnosis and diagnostics as to the condition and delusions of contemporary man; the order of stripping away the images which man has attached himself to in order to reveal the truth of the time being - Heraclitus’ fire - and Nietzsche, in alignment with his studies as a young man, turns to language and the manner in which it structures and informs life in order to do so: ‘Whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them; and it may be necessary for humanity’s growth for it to develop only in parts… that the inferior humans who make up a

majority of us are only preliminaries, or preparatory attempts whose concerted play allows a whole human being to appear here and there like a military boundary marker showing the extent of humanity’s advance,’ (The Will to Power). Nietzsche really does nothing past Heraclitus, as there is nothing to be done past Heraclitus. He is initiated into the mysteries like a sage or a mystic - the philosophy is ended and murdered in Heraclitus’ work as living life. Nietzsche creates a cultural analysis regarding this pure fact of Heraclitus’ work, complementing it, as a living poetics of that which dances in the fire. For who could draw fire before fire changes shape; who could describe the fire of consciousness which consumes all things but in a failed poetic shape - which too burns accordingly? Nietzsche is a beautiful failure, but a true one - one who has done the work of realization with Heraclitus and thus soars and dances and despairs as a free man; freed from the absurdities of human society. Nietzsche has come into Being; become a whole human being - he is no longer ‘human’, nor is he an animal or a ‘thing’; he is one with Being - and as such his exile and earliness is perennial. For when will there be an entire society of incarnate beings willing to confront the terror of being burned without end and yet not burned at all? Who will understand this movement in all of its playful nuance and truly theatrical despair? This is the work of consciousness as itself; stripped of all of its illusions, markers, and playthings - Nietzsche has walked away from the table, as Heraclitus has - the weeping philosophers. Thought dances naked in tears and smiles through them - as it burns through the page.

This is where Heidegger is juxtaposed to Nietzsche and Heraclitus - in that he certainly does not walk away from the table; in the mode of the truly analytical philosopher, he attempts to create dialogue with Nietzsche in order to bring about Nietzsche’s thought as ghost in new language and thus go beyond Nietzsche. He does not become a disciple of Nietzsche’s (in the manner of Bataille) - rather, he seeks to know the character of consciousness: ‘For anyone who at the end of Western philosophy can and must still question

philosophically, the decisive question is no longer merely, “What basic character do beings manifest?” but “What is this ‘Being’ itself?” The decisive question is that of “the meaning of Being”, not merely that of the Being of beings’. For with Nietzsche, we understand that in the works of Heraclitus, philosophy is closed before it even began as a historical development of tail chasing conceptual truths - and yet, it is ignorance of the sayings of Heraclitus that the world of human affairs and philosophy prattles on, failing to face the terror of Being as the fire of consciousness. Heidegger, being a great mind, like Nietzsche, seeks to do something truthful - and in doing so, he is forced to get incredibly creative in order to advance the works of Nietzsche and Heraclitus - which, in their genius, are not only already complete, but true in being without time or space. Heraclitus is the philosopher of truth; Nietzsche is the madman poet spreading the good word by way of works in light of truth. Heidegger observes the impoverished space of modernity, just like Nietzsche and Heraclitus, and admonishes it: ‘What is proffered today as ontology has nothing to do with the question of Being proper; it is a very learned and very astute analysis of transmitted concepts which plays them off, one against the other’. He too, like Nietzsche and the solitary Heraclitus, sees the failure to address the fire.

“War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.” (Heraclitus)

For Being, as we see in the cultural time of Heidegger, is certainly a disputed space, replete (as is all of history) with conceptions (all of which are misconceptions), hierarchies (all of which are human), and supposed celestial ‘truths’ put to authoritative and imaginative form to describe a modern society composed by and for human use and desire. The human conception and the life emergent from it is a screen of playful fire - but the images projected therein and upon that screen do not change the pure consciousness resident beneath them; as them in trans-figurations - dressed as beggars, kings, oceans, and cats. It is in this sense that the

play of forces conforms to the desired life; the world of desires is nothing more or less than fragmented consciousness pitted against fragmented consciousness - as each half-being searches for wholeness in a world of broken things. But, of course, it is only in the dream of separation that there is anything but the fire of consciousness. Heraclitus, in his simple and thorough truth, goes beyond the needs and wants of the human world and thus shatters it in his realization which is also the realization of Weil as she confronts the Iliad - the terrible (and yet terribly banal) truth that all human conceptions and turns are but a play of consciousness; the play of pseudo-beings and forces and acts within the oneness of Being. It is that the nature of eternal war can be no better described than Vishvarupa.

Nietzsche’s remarks on Heraclitus in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks are indicative of his understanding as empathy toward Heraclitus’ eternally tragic plight; they are, at once, a figuration of both Heraclitus and Nietzsche: ‘Nonetheless Heraclitus has not escaped the “barren minds”; already the Stoics re-interpreted him on a shallow level, dragging down his basically esthetic perception of cosmic play to signify a vulgar consideration for the world’s useful ends, especially those which benefit the human race. His physics became, in their hands, a crude optimism with the continual invitation to Tom, Dick and Harry to plaudite amici.’ In due time, we see the cult of Nietzsche emergent across modernity; perhaps no more clearly and prominently than in Nazi Germany - with Heidegger being the preeminent philosopher of his time and place, a philosopher who charges himself and is charged with Nietzsche’s specifically German legacy in his ability to correspond with genius - as genius, albeit of a different kind. Heidegger has no interest in submitting to Nietzsche; rather, he is like a vulture picking about Nietzsche, interrogating him for movements and moments which might propel the consciousness into future - that which is beyond the current- limit.

Nietzsche and Heidegger are with an overarching difference

a difference which enables Heidegger’s idiocy in the public sphere of things. It is also this difference that enables and perpetuates Heidegger’s first mistake - that there is a character in, as, and of Being (beyond Heraclitus’ fire or Vishvarupa). The difference is that Nietzsche is a surgeon of culture; Heidegger is a surgeon of metaphysics - and it is in this way that Heidegger misses much of what the poet Nietzsche understands in his ability and perpetual breaking of language and culture bounds to reveal yet another glimpse of fire, the fire which he has learned is true from Heraclitus. Nietzsche is the surgeon of culture who opens the pseudo-figure of man to reveal the brutal truth of the dis-figured corpse - the fire of the soul composing a cross on the plane of things and down from the red heavens and up from the black soil.

There has perhaps been no more succinct analysis of history and time than in the words of Mandelstam: ‘the past has not even been born yet’. Here, we move quite clearly (and in a sense politically, in terms of what a conception of history means for the present moment) against Heidegger: ‘Within the horizon of time the projection of a meaning of Being in general can be accomplished.’ The idea of Being as time and the insurrection into the ‘final preliminary question’ as the ‘basic character of anything insofar as it is’ for Heidegger is possible within time; this is to say that the human being fire can come about the true nature of Beingness as the fire of consciousness in some more fundamental, analytical way (Being of knowing) than understanding. Mandelstam stands in the face of this bold statement by Heidegger; in his return volley, he declares that there has not even been a beginning of time; as such no time has passed. Mandelstam is with Heraclitus in this sense; even with Benjamin - in that the concept of history and a coming about of knowing via time is questionable at best. For Heidegger’s knowledge of being is pitted against the kind of understanding Nietzsche and Heraclitus beg (in a rather simple manner) in the following description of the fire of consciousness by Dostoevsky:

‘A big fire at night always produces an exciting and exhilarating effect; this explains the attraction of fireworks; but in the case of fireworks, the graceful and regular shape of the flames and the complete immunity from danger produce a light and playful effect comparable to the effect of a glass of champagne. A real fire is quite another matter: there the horror and a certain sense of personal danger, combined with the well-known exhilarating effect of a fire at night, produce in the spectator (not, of course, in one whose house has burnt down) a certain shock to the brain and, as it were, a challenge to his own destructive instincts, which, alas, lie buried in the soul of even the meekest and most domesticated official of the lowest grade. This grim sensation is almost always delightful. "I really don't know if it is possible to watch a fire without some enjoyment." There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is nothing earthly. I don't mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his earthly semblance can't endure it. He has to undergo a physical change or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable. It is as though you suddenly apprehended all nature and suddenly said: "Yes, it is true— it is good." [. . .] What is so terrifying about it is that it is so terribly clear and such gladness. If it went on for more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I am ready to give my life for them, for it's worth it. To be able to endure it for ten seconds, you would have to undergo a physical change.’

This description is of Being engulfing being, like Jonah in the whale - in an experience which transforms the consciousness of being within Being as Consciousness. It is at once a playful illusion and a torturous experience - witnessed gleefully until it is burning away the flesh with visceral sensation. This is a transformative experience of the soul; this is a method which itself eviscerates time and space in its conceptless hellfire; yet Heidegger expects to be able to come about knowledge of this fire - to come into a logical

understanding of the transcendent logos function of Logos itself as Heraclitus’ fire which is simultaneously many and one: ‘Although logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own; The way upward and the way downward are the same.’ These two Heraclitus fragments are included in Eliot’s Four Quartets; it is of urgency and importance that we discuss the intersection (or the meeting place) of the poet and the philosopher in terms of coming about the burning Logos function as it transforms the (perceived, then perished) individual being/body of consciousness; the being of Being - subsumed. It is no surprise that Heidegger is drawn to Nietzsche, as analysts are often drawn to poets, and vice versa - as poles of method, approach, attack. Nietzsche is not, fundamentally, a philosopher, but a poet consumed by the fire of consciousness - just like Heraclitus, van Gogh, and Artaud. Nietzsche and Heraclitus are both without philosophy in the transcendent function of poetics - the towering, transformative method of language creation at the level of the soul and spirit. What good is analytics or knowledge in the face of understanding? An understanding which embraces and is embraced by the loving arms of death and the fires of eternity until they are one? This is a musical movement, not a movement of enumerating or autopsying consciousness; it is the channeling of the fire which plays the vertical and horizontal scales of all things (as called by Heraclitus); in channeling this fire, the Being is brought about in infinite manners, methods, and ‘truths’. There are many eyes, like angels. Heidegger is a genius who is lost in the conception of modern, ‘Western’ philosophy but in his return to Nietzsche as the one who ‘destroys the received approach’ in the history of ontology - by ‘offering a different view’ - a different view which is a synthesis of poetics, play, and analytics. We might also call Heraclitus’ works of speaking fire ‘play’, in the Sphinx like riddling of the opening which is the many heads, arms, and legs through poetic language - through which one might come into the essences; this is as much an art as it is a dance of being within Being. It is a balancing of the body and the soul, the spirit and the form, the Dionysian and the Apollinian.

Nietzsche’s study of the Greeks is his desire to be among them in a substantial way, a way that is not imitation or sentimentality - but a desire to do the work that Heraclitus does - a stripping away which is also a fundamental creation. To be among truth as to be in Being, utterly - with mind, body, and soul in the awareness of understanding. Heidegger's question of Being as time is a question which, as he states is ‘the one single innermost matter that is common to Western philosophy’; it is precisely in this statement that he misses the entirety of Nietzsche’s thought; for that matter, the essence of Heraclitus’ as described by Nietzsche in the formerly mentioned Philosophy of the Tragic Age. Nietzsche and Heraclitus are not of this tradition; furthermore, Heraclitus stands alone with cold eyes viewing the conceptual distinctions of man which Heidegger continually evisces and poses as fundamental problems and questions; furthermore, poses them as unaddressed by Nietzsche. This is not Nietzsche’s concern, nor is it Heraclitus’ - as it is a concern of that conceptual vehicle which is philosophy; it is in this sense that Heidegger is finally more of that which seeks to systematize consciousness as itself something ‘knowable’, or penetrable. This is a mistake that can only be made in the conceptualization of consciousness - for in the experience of pure consciousness, nothing else; furthermore, nothing exists.

Heraclitus has shown both being and time to be eviscerated in the fire of consciousness which burns all changing and unchanging forever; burns in the perpetual warfare and struggle of manifest and unmanifest forces alike - all of which are of the fire. Nietzsche seeks, in a rather humanist and compassionate manner, to bring about understanding of that which is in his time; he is not after ‘original thought’ or some sort of progression of narrative or method or innovation upon or of established ideas - but to strip the time of itself. He wishes for a culture of the naked truth; he does not want to be alone in his understanding of it. Nietzsche acts to bring about understanding; this is his motive - and it is deeply noble. Of course, Nietzsche realized that this task was all but impossible: ‘Intimacy with

great thinking is unbearable… I seek to make appeal to whom I can communicate such thinking without bringing about their deaths,’ (On Nietzsche). Heidegger claims to wish to hear and to hear Nietzsche, but I doubt that he ever did, or that he was even capable of doing so. His method and language betray that which is not of poets - it is of philosopher-mathematicians. It is in the simple matter that Heidegger is not a poet that he fails to grasp Nietzsche; it is in the simple matter that Nietzsche is a poet that he grasps Heraclitus. Heraclitus is cold and weeping in the rain that is also a fire because he is a poet who has come into understanding, just as Nietzsche falls and falls in the agony and blissful fire of realization:

‘Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time…’ (Nietzsche)

And of course, ironically, we come back into Heidegger’s question, the question which is also the despair of understanding in Nietzsche and Heraclitus. The whole being is the being of fire, the being of pure consciousness who is without illusions and images; the being who has become into absolute Being who is perpetually stripped of them even as they attempt to return to his body. He is continually cast out of truth and understanding; he understands this to be truth and understanding. Consciousness razes him absolutely; he in turn rejoices and despairs at this terrible truth. He wrestles within it as fire forever.

It is in this way that Nietzsche’s madman is equally as understood in the moment of his writing as he is now; as is Heraclitus - this truth Being as timelessness which purgates time; Being which purgates being, perpetually - is brought

to bear in the sheer passage of ‘time’ which has revealed the eternal return of the limitations which are the ‘human being’; ‘the human culture’ - the glacial transformation which is the slow turn and churn of consciousness within Consciousness, the transformation of each shard of the soul; the failure of great minds to do much of anything in light of this other than find, in turn, perpetual misunderstanding - even among other great minds (here, Nietzsche and Heidegger; whereas Nietzsche hears the essence of Heraclitus) - because of a failure of listening, a failure of relation, a failure of fear; this is always a failure of poetry in the face of the terror. For poetry is naked and burning; the language and culture of masses of men is to turn away from poetry in the name of a discernible truth, a systematized ‘living’; an assured conceptual lineage of ‘history’, ‘time’, ‘being’, ‘movement’, and so forth. For many, it is preferable to turn away from the unimaginable; the unknowable. Perhaps even Bataille, a lesser mind by his own admittance, understands Nietzsche more than Heidegger in his desire to submit as a disciple: ‘It doesn’t transcend us like the gods (the sacred city), nor is it like the soul’s afterlife; it is in the immanence of “humanity-attached”. We have returned to the primacy of force and embodying force and the disembodiment of force as the passage of the fire to and from figuration - at once many and one, at once true and illusory. Vishvarupa. We have returned to a physics which always fails to achieve metaphysics because it refuses to leave the being for Being - in recognition that the being is Being; that the timelessness of the fire of consciousness is precisely that which constitutes all time; obliterating it in the process. The desire of Heidegger to ‘fulfill’ Nietzsche’s thought is the failure of an analyst to see; furthermore do a poet’s work, just as it is a failure to observe a completion of thought (a death of the idea) in the obliteration of concepts as active fire already done by Heraclitus in the pre-Socratic era - a view of the terror as the terror as within the terror as it is unfolding forever. This is the poetic action; this is the scene set by Heraclitus; the bravery of Nietzsche. For one must be brave to face the terror and become it. It makes one brave, powerful, and dead. Heidegger’s work in the face of

Nietzsche and Heraclitus strikes the ear and the eye as disingenuous - in the sense that it seeks and proclaims the emergence of a new movement, a new idea, in the manner, matter, and mode of the squabbles of philosophers and poets over the contested ground (always) which is Being. It is not the Being-Consciousness Heidegger is to be in, it is the Being-Consciousness Heidegger wishes to consume. Heidegger and his contemporaries (and furthermore, Heidegger’s analysis of Nietzsche) proceed like Homer and Hesiod - but in that Heidegger seeks to be the philosopher of mid-century Germany; the new Western Philosopher - the absolute beyond the absolute of Nietzsche, the one who has gone beyond it forever. It is in this sense that he (in his desire for Being) misses the essence of Nietzsche and Heraclitus - which is itself the being done with the concept of the world - which is always a being done with a desire for it. Heraclitus, perhaps even more so than Nietzsche, is hostile even to his own thought; he discards it regularly in the understanding that it is equal fire; that the intuitive contemplation is that alone which truly moves. The moment thought becomes an idea, it is over.

‘And that space is just like time… that each thing exists through and for another like it, which is to say through and for an equally relative one… whomever finds himself directly looking at it must at once move on to the Heraclitan conclusion and say that the whole nature of reality lies simply in its acts and that for it there exists no other sort of being,’ (Nietzsche).

Heidegger seeks to solve a problem which - intuited by Heraclitus and ceded by Nietzsche back to Heraclitus - simply does not exist but in the mind of Heidegger and the minds of those who (in equal ignorance) are ensconced in the delusion of conceptual existence. The nature of concepts is division, wound, and incompletion. It is a perceived separation of consciousness brought about by way of the creation, pursuit, and desire for ideas. We have brought this up previously in regard to Nietzsche’s perception of a fragmented humanity; it is quite clear in light of this inquiry

and, of course, the historical record, that Heidegger certainly was not a whole human being; the divide of consciousness from Consciousness (being from Being) was not yet broken down. The pursuit of knowledge continues until it is ceded to understanding. The hubris of Heidegger is to dare assert that Nietzsche had not predicted him and his question. It is the hubris of an analytical philosopher attempting surgical dialogue with a poet, one who has written songs as a Prince who is Free-as-a-Bird. The two have nothing in common but a brief incarnation and an approximate birthplace. The surgeon cannot find the soul in the organs of the poet - they are all just spleen and liver and intestine - whereas for the poet they are the flute, the drum, the dance of fire. Nietzsche was within Being, as Being. Why would he need to know its character? Such is the life of the fool who has traversed the deck.

‘Whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them; and it may be necessary for humanity’s growth for it to develop only in parts… that the inferior humans who make up a majority of us are only preliminaries, or preparatory attempts whose concerted play allows a whole human being to appear here and there like a military boundary marker showing the extent of humanity’s advance,’ (The Will to Power)

A REVITALIZATION OF THE HUMANITIES

‘The man who makes the finest mixture of gymnastic with music and brings them to his soul in the most proper measure is the one whom we would most correctly say that he is the most perfectly musical and well harmonized.’ (Socrates)

Education has forgotten the blood. We have moved into a paradigm of pure thought, as evisced by the development of increasingly ‘modern’ philosophies; modern in the sense that they place primacy on the function of machine as mind. The proliferation of memory exercises, ‘knowledge’, and other forms of information and living and being as concepts that reside above the neck has created an inequitable society down to the body. For it is the brain that is given primacy in this supra-modern world - not the mind of the arm, the mind of the leg, the mind of the hand. If we have failed to come into the mind of the body, we have failed to come into the body of the soul, and the soul of the mind. There must be a practice of unification; without understanding the painterly, poetic implications of bodily gesture; without the being-in-tune with the body, we are not ensconced in Being. This is precisely the fallacious nature of the chase of fulfillment; the desperate looking outside of the body for a solution to the problems of being, consciousness, feeling, and suffering; it is that we have instituted this paradigm of the mind at a social, becoming-global scale - a scale which not only reifies but celebrates this imbalance. For there has been a project of reclamation for feeling and ‘affect’ in recent years in an attempt to rehabilitate the body. We must view it this way, as an artificial separation of the mind, body, and spirit - the mind which is given ultimacy, the body which is a consequence, and the spirit which is nonexistent until proven existent - or simply an abstract, unreachable concept, or ideal.

For in forgetting the blood we forget that fluid which unifies and animates the body, pulses to and through the working mind, and is itself the amniotic fluid of the soul. There are, of course, the remarks of Plato and Socrates on the matter; we have forgotten the very foundation of our educational roots - roots which have begged the balancing of physical training with ‘cultivating the mind’ and exercising ‘the intellect in study’. For, with Plato, we understand that these motions, movements, and mechanisms are merely forceful elements of the whole of life-force; we utilize and instrumentalize them like Hermes balancing the scales of being. For in achieving great music, we come into Being - as great music is only great in the sense that it is unified with that which is; it is come down from the air; snatched from the bird’s mouth, buoyant upon the bird’s wings, concealed in the cat’s purr. For Plato describes the education of the being like an instrument: ‘to bring the two elements (body and mind) into tune with one another by adjusting the tension of each to the right pitch’. We see this again with Socrates in the opening extract; the allusion to the music of being rings prominent. Here, we are not talking about music in the most literal sense - but a music of the soul in tune with itself ringing out harmoniously through the body and circulating through the mind. It is the balanced blood.

For we do have the impulses - the animal, the ‘man’, and the soul - entangled in a trinity of and as Being within. It is quite easy to send one or the other of these elements into exile without the proper training; with fear, with shame, with guilt. We might even disavow one of these elements in disgust - deeming it lower, or unreachably high. If we have come into this manner of regarding the wholeness of being, we have cut ourselves off from our limbs; they will turn blue and we will be forced to leave the body. The urgency of this task of unity in and of the body as being within and as Being is ultimately a unity which cultivates an artful state of survival as Being accessible to itself, its own tools, its own scales - of being. The education given to and received (without much say in the matter or choice) by children today is an education of murder; it is an education of the

murder of the possibility of the soul by way of rote memorization and the dagger of consensus language twisted into the stomach of the child. It is that the genius of children is a born unity of these aspects; this unity and balance must be continually achieved, harmonized, struck again and again in the greater chords of Being. The modern education is an education of pure, abstracted knowledge - knowledge which does nothing more or less than force the child into the conceptual existence; alienating them, perhaps for a lifetime, from the soulful body; the scales of Being.

This is the shame of our society; a shame which must be mourned and acted upon. For to continue in this manner is to condemn our children to become like us - to become shattered by a world which we perpetuate in adherence and in adherence alone. For we have called life what, surely, it ‘is’, and forced our children into this world of things and condemned their spirit in the process. This is not a fostering of the soul of children; it is a slow murder of the soul of children by way of a conviction of the intellect; a force- feeding of the substanceless knowledge. And it is that we do not have teachers to teach in this embodied way - because our teachers, too, have been alienated by this paradigm of pure thought and pure reason. The violence of this work cannot be understated; as it is an intergenerational work - a work which has created a world where no one alive knows of what it is like to bring the soul into measure with the body and the mind but with concerted self exertion, but with the tireless process which is the finding of a method alone - without the help of a society which knows of and prizes these things. For this education does not birth philosopher-kings like David, it births the violence of ignorance and separation - which is then perpetuated in all things. We must see this violence clearly, as a violence done to children who become ‘adults’ in this world; ones who are not able to foster the earth and the Beingness of life because they have absolutely no understanding or awareness of what this Beingness is in relation to their own bodies; they have only knowledge and philosophies of reason or divorced ‘truth’ to apply to the problems of the world and the

problems of living. But it is this divorce that is, precisely, the only problem of existence; it is a problem created by the category of ‘man’.

We now have this unique opportunity, an opportunity never before present in the history of this ‘species’ - which is the opportunity to integrate, at a societal level, the informations of both the ancients and our global contemporaries - in order to turn to Beingness in a conscious manner; where we are consciously aware of the forces which compose and enflesh the soul; we work with these forces in order to achieve balance and music within ourselves, and thus, within the world we create with our actions and gestures. The great painters know of this; the great poets know of this; they are only great because they have become one with Being in their whole bodies listening; their whole minds listening endlessly to the word of the soul which whispers in the blood of all things. But, even with all of the knowledge of the world at hand, there must be a turn to the deep, inner listening of which all of us are capable. This is the voice that speaks through all things; including ‘our’ voices - the things we think, say, and do are all distorted projections of the voice of Being. If we clean our instrument, our distortions disappear; we are scrying the Beingness clearly in all of its potential - the torturous burning, the tickling, the caress of the fire - the fire that licks and eviscerates the skin. For the fire of consciousness has the capacity to achieve all of this and we may yet survive the force of life as it scalds our bones if we are in tune with the action being performed in and upon it - a perpetual purgation of being into Being. This is also what is called ‘becoming’.

THE INDUSTRIAL ACADEMY OF KNOWLEDGE RE-PRODUCTION

There is nowhere else for thinkers to go today but deeper into the academy. As one descends into the hell which is the institution of knowledge, the understanding comes about - that the academy has been dead for some time now. It functions now, alone, as a machine which turns out like objects, like methods; pure ‘products’ of thought. The turn of Heidegger is not a turn, it is a logical continuation of the work of the academy. If our institutions at root are economically fascist (the speed of perpetually industrialized re-production above all and as life), our minds and lives are certainly fascistic. We have the sad paradox today that fascism is talked about with disgust and refusal and yet each one of us lives within a totally fascistic paradigm - where life has been absolutely submitted to the production of bodies. To deny this is to deny the world as it stands; as a product of a series of philosophies descending from the Greek mode which have become increasingly perverted and broken with time - toward a total systematization of life, being, and becoming.

To go into the academy as one who thinks is the end of thinking. It is the continuation of, from youth, the rote memorization; most importantly, the forceful structuring of thinking as manipulated process and manipulated product. All of the academy is fractured in this manner and matter as an institution which has requisite deliverables to the social order in order to prove itself as producing that which it promises - individuals prepared to contribute to the social order - which is always already an economic order; a cultural order of ‘values’. It is clear what is valued; it is the appearance of knowledge, the appearance of intellect; this is what circulates in the academy like a poison - the ‘knowledge’ form taken to absolute extremes; to the point of which it is abstracted from all life. This is the same metaphysics which impregnates the sciences and the humanities, the same metaphysics which is the corpse of

thought. This corpse is the death of ingenuity and innovation in critical thought; perhaps it is like this because, although many wish to achieve great thought, very few are actually capable of shattering the screen of consensus thought, consensus reality, and consensus language. The academy deifies the perpetual lapse into regularity and dull product production because it must; because the mass of ‘thinkers’ in today’s world - just as it was in the worlds of Nietzsche and Heraclitus - are absolutely both incapable and refuse to break themselves, break language; break into soul. The distinctions as disciplines are clear: there are the poets (devalued), the philosophers, the mathematicians, the physicists; so forth - each shut into their silos of technical study, technical meaning, and technical truth. The specialization of knowledge is a doubled death of thought - in the sense that knowledge is the death of understanding; specialization is the death of openness to the unknown; the unexpected.

All of this should make it very clear that there is no trust possible in and of the academy; the death of thinking is the death of even the possibility of life - if we have shut ourselves up in the tower of knowledge and the pursuit of mastery of form and technics we are dead and producing death. What is the point of living in the face of this movement? And perhaps it is like Nietzsche says, that there is a necessary fragmentedness to the vast majority of humanity and humans; that like Nietzsche’s madman, the time is not yet. The problems which are observed by the so called ‘thinkers’ of our society are much deeper than evisced as figures; if we have failed to go beyond this, we have not truly thought. We have merely preoccupied ourselves with the games and play of language and numbers. We have not actually addressed the pressing question of the fire of consciousness; the fire of existence which, in each moment, burns everything away. We have turned away from this in chosen and blind ignorance alike; the consequences are the monumental violence of the everyday. We cannot, in this sense, discern truth in anything - because we are incapable of experiencing truth within and as ourselves. In the abstracting of thought

as ‘knowledge’, we have condemned ourselves to and into looking ‘without’ for truth and knowledge as divorced understanding - as if such a thing was possible. This is the perpetual, ever deeper alienation of the sciences and the humanities at this point in time. We have gone so deep into the without.

The pursuit of pure form as a product of the intellect is the job of the academy today. It is the primary task of a fascist order to do so - to continue to produce blanket form which is the enforced appearance of spirit until spirit, too, conforms to the enforced order. It is in this sense that we have entirely ceased to truly study - to let the soul and mind flow into the page and the work and in doing so perhaps uncover the essences of what makes us who and what we are

no, this is gone from the world. Replaced has been this inanity of ‘creative writing’ and the scene of literature; the ‘academic paper’ and the scene of the institution of proffered and conferred knowledge. For these are nothing but scenes, cliques of like thought and like action; cliques which gather and convene and pretend to discourse over their consensus realities. This is nothing more or less than a willful and glad ignorance to the fury of living and being encouraged by ‘friends’, colleagues, and the institution of education itself.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

‘And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other.’ (Beckett)

The substantial transformation of self as spirit is the transformation of humanity. But of course, this is not the only way that ‘humanity’, or the language of Being - is transformed. The only way to understand (and this is not ‘to know’) history is to live out history in your body; the history which is the history of all civilizations, all empires, all life. It is: birth, decadence, cleansing, rebirth in changed form. We have seen this in Carthage, we have seen this in Rome; we have seen this in Berlin; we have seen this in Russia. What is done in the act of war (which for Heraclitus, is unending) is the transformation of the soul of humanity at the level of language - a razing and a creation from and in the violence which is the creation of a new field of speech and being. This new field is the field of new weapons, new methods, and new proximity to the terrible truth of human affairs; Heraclitus has already said this - that the fire of consciousness burns forever; the pyre of humanity is in it; it takes the illusory lick of flame to form the figure; the lick of flame is up and smoke and gone again in the endless night of the stars.

For it is not noble to have great ideas. It is noble, however, to bring Consciousness into the moment with language; to bring Being into being and to serve as a humble messenger. The greatest art of humans is to be a carrier pigeon for the new forces and new ways of Being as among beings as it is brought down in light and shade from the planetary configurations. The only way to do this is to cleanse oneself of oneself; to become instrument. This process itself is a foundational transformation of the soul as becoming utterly

in contact with Consciousness, or total awareness; in doing so, being in contact with Being - the terror of existence enumerated in an as yet unsurpassed manner by Heraclitus

as he as done so in the purest form: that of spiritual fire. In becoming instrument, we balance the two forces of being - the Erotic and the Thanatonic - the life and the death, the farthest and the nearest, the past and the future, the man and the woman - within us; we are that which balances the scales like Hermes. When we balance the scales, we receive the divine capacity to listen; in listening, we understand. We hear the murmurs of the body and when we do in this state, they are like the soul; they are like history, they are like the world. The past and future become of the moment. This is the timelessness of poetic philosophy.

To proceed in the historical march of time and ‘humanity’ toward itself would be to continue down a lineage of perpetual abstraction - from the embodied physics of Consciousness detailed by Heraclitus to the metaphysics of modernity in Heidegger. The creation of metaphysics as a field is the loss of embodied language over time; this is the perpetual abstraction of the ensouled world of the Greeks; the world of ‘philosophy’ - as it died when the Greek age became ruins. And yet humanity is rather attached to this form of ‘philosophy’ - this method of moving words for new insights, insights which were embodied and now are disembodied in the form of intellectual ideas and academic discourses. This is what we see in Heidegger; particularly in his studies of Heraclitus and Nietzsche as thinkers who are thinking as living into the body as a unity of mind-body- soul; this is the genuine approach of the Greek philosophical age. It is not an interpretation of the word; it is the word as itself a unity; a one as many. Thinking for Heidegger is a highly intellectual work; it can be seen in the hypocrisy of his Heraclitus studies - the intellectual manner of overburdening thought and words with analytical meaning in a highly academic, specialized setting - while he describes Heraclitus rolling the bones with children in the temple of Artemis. The two have nothing in common but Heidegger’s aspiration toward Heraclitus’ legacy - the legacy and lineage

of what he has found accumulated in history like a dead body, the human legacy of ‘Western Philosophy’ - which is nothing more than an arbitrary category of thought perpetually perverted by its own self absorption. This is what we call ‘metaphysics’.

So we are at this place, this intersection of the body and the spirit - the spirit that aspires upward and despairs downward; the body which walks the plane of mortal things. Our task is this task of balancing - to understand and know the impulses within ourselves; throughout time, to walk the deserts and ecstasies of these axes - as this is the only way we can truly know these poles - as the only true knowledge is understanding. This is not some haughty, intellectual practice conducted among only the rich, or the initiated - no, what is required is the sharpening and honing of one’s skills and instruments - all of which are ultimately listening - and the cleaning of one’s instrument - the body-mind - in order to hear the word of the spirit as clearly as possible. What else can we do in this life? This space is a balancing of the tools that we have available to us at this moment in time; perhaps there will be more to come in some future time - but all I have seen is this corpse and this soul; each begs to be walked. When we have seen that the king and the beggar are both illusory figures composed of fire which burns the bone clean; when we have seen that the heavens and the hells are merely inversions of the other (without morality), we will have come into an understanding of ourselves as soul; as Being, as a lick of Consciousness - a briefly figured flame which will be out in smoke. When we have come to know this; when we have come into awareness, we will know what we must do.

THE PHYSICS OF THOUGHT

‘This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th [15] century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.’ (Beckett)

The thought must be lifted and thrown into word - like a discus. This requires considerable force. This is the movement from that which-is-to-be into being. What is behind the word? Subtracting the decadence of the many, there is but the force which compels and propels the word into existence. It is the force which raises the world; the force which obliterates the concept with the thrust of the will, the thrust of that which moves the inner life into living. Heraclitus is a philosopher of physics - the consciousness which moves life. Heidegger is a philosopher of metaphysics

that which has abstracted the consciousness which moves life into conceptual reality. It is clear the dangers of this process; for to elevate life into the conceptual sphere is to move the lived life into the realm of ideas - and yet this is precisely what happens to language over time. It is conquered, it is violated, it is murdered, it is replaced with new rulership, new meaning, new spirit. And yet, so often, the word or the root of the word remains.

The root of the word, in short, is consciousness itself. It is The Word emergent in all words and The Being emergent in all beings. It is the effervescent flow of the soul, the cool waters of the ground which is also a blazing fire; the extent of the cold and dead and the warm and pulsing blood. For this is the energetic exchange which occurs in all living things; enacted upon dead things, intermingled with the living soil; the living soul. If we wish to live in truth, and not merely live in the illusion of manipulatable language (as it is

but a clay or a mud to life), we must see that language is nothing but mud - or as Artaud puts it: ‘All writing is pigshit’.

For when we have devalued all things as mere appearances, we are the consciousness which turns to face itself (Consciousness); we see ourselves as in the womb of Consciousness; furthermore as Consciousness - we no longer exist but as mere wills and forces within that which is all forces and all wills. Here, with Beckett:

‘His [Vico’s] treatment of the origin of language proceeds along similar lines. Here again he rejected the materialistic and transcendental views: the one declaring that language was nothing but a polite and conventional symbolism; the other, in desperation, describing it as a gift from the Gods. As before, Vico is the rationalist, aware of the natural and inevitable growth of language. In its first dumb form, language was gesture. If a man wanted to say ‘sea’, he pointed to the sea. With the spread of animism this gesture was replaced by the word: ‘Neptune’. He directs our attention to the fact that every need of life, natural, moral and economic, has its verbal expression in one or other of the 30,000 Greek divinities. This is Homer’s ‘language of the Gods’. Its evolution through poetry to a highly civilized vehicle, rich in abstract and technical terms, was as little fortuitous as the evolution of society itself. Words have their progressions as well as social phases.’

The gods, for the Greeks, are the words, or figures, of the forces of life which move and make the realm of beings in Being. This mud of consciousness (or alternately, the lick of fire which assumes a brief shape) is perpetually collapsed back into elemental substance (including the element of Consciousness - which holds and yet is beyond the water, fire, earth, and air of materiality). To live in truth is to see these forces as and under the perpetual fulcrum which is the swinging pendulum of existence - the Time which is so massive that it is timeless; timeless in that it is ceaselessly itself; ceaselessly whole; ceaselessly complete. For what do

we call the distinctions of our time but the changes we observe therein? The turn of the moon, the death of an age; the aging of the body - and so forth. That which is truly timeless and spaceless is that which is both Space and Time and Being - Consciousness itself.

For once we have seen the elements in ceaseless burning within and as the licking fire of Consciousness, we are seeing ourselves and our lives in the flames and it is that we are both doomed and pure force. We are doomed to transfigure into smoke; we are doomed to become clean bone. So why do we not do this while we are alive? If we transfigure ourselves; die as concepts to ourselves, we may yet come into understanding of that which we truly are - pure Consciousness; in being pure consciousness, pure force. For it is this which moves the world of things (body) and the world of no things (spirit). To channel this, to cleanse ourselves for it; to become it is to become one with Consciousness; to become aware of ourselves not only as the lick of flame, but as the timeless, spaceless fire which burns through and consumes even the cosmos. For it is that the earth and the stars are not divided; nor are the body and soul; nor is one life from the next. In the death of our idea, we become that which we are; that which is indivisible; in the death of our dream, we wake up to the illusion of that dream which was being apart. Consciousness begs that we return from our created wound, the wound which is conception. In doing so, we enable ourselves to inhabit and become that which is the eternal source of all power, will, and force - pure Consciousness, ourselves.

my words are muscle - they are not just talk - these are not just concepts or ideas on a page that are half realized in symbols, no - these words are muscle and are backed up by muscle. they are backed up by the sheer power of my will, the will which i have channeled into the body to sculpt it into rock. these words are an extension of that body. they will grapple with you and they will emerge victorious, like this body. they will break you, like this body. they have violently come into being and they have achieved violent birth by the power of will. here i am, upon this page - bursting with feeling. here i am, at war with all things.

all glory be to god.

THE LOGOS OF DISENCHANTMENT

‘Tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’ (Macbeth)

I will lay it out quite simply. The only justice on this, earth, is physical force exerted by spirit through the body to lift matter of equal existence. The only truth is that spirit and body are two forces of consciousness acting as in and through each other - the interpenetratives; the two extremes

the two extremes, which, in their interpenetration - are one as and in the large womb of consciousness.

Hamlet is the hanged man on the cross of spirit and matter; Hamlet is a modern man in the sense that he bears witness to the divorce of spirit and matter in the grave and in the ghost. He is the one who must reconstitute the myth of man and find new meaning in the rubble of disillusion and dissolution which is the skepticism of the mind wrought from the body; the spirit wrought from substance by ‘rationalisms’.

‘I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confin'd to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg'd away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fretful porcupine. But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!’ (Hamlet)

For Hamlet and his father’s spirit - in the passage of the spirit’s word through Hamlet like a whisper of blood is the union of the two souls that are one; the living ghost of Hamlet and the dis-encorpsed spirit of Hamlet’s father. The will is vengeance and duty and the lack of will is skepticism as to what the vengeance and duty could possibly bring about on an earthly plane where humanity has yet proved much more, in Hamlet’s eyes, than a ‘quintessence of dust’. For it is that Earth is the stage upon which this mad play is come about; like Arjuna, Hamlet struggles to find the logos of disenchantment. For earth is incubating Hamlet and his father’s body and Ophelia’s body and the genius Yorick’s body; ‘that skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once… Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment?’ Hamlet goes on to ask if even Alexander ‘looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth’ and Horatio confirms. The clean bone. The tragedy of Hamlet is clear from the outset; with even less heroic possibility and ‘truth’ as in the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna finds will in the word of Krishna - here there is no word to assuage or confirm the warrior but the mortal ghost of his father which compels him. Here even the possibility of god is an apparition of formerly embodied force; perhaps this is god; perhaps it does not matter. And this is precisely the conundrum Hamlet faces throughout the entirety of the text.

For Hamlet’s failure is a failure to matter; a failure to come into the world of matter and earth with the conviction of one who is born to live. For we can understand the physical reality of the body quite easily - as we have seen it time and time again; Hamlet is ‘consoled’ of this by Claudius at the outset of the play. It is the riddle of the Sphinx, the four

human institutions - the only true ones - ‘a good clap, a fore wedding, a bad wake, tell hell’s well’ (Vico), or in simpler terms: birth, decadence, transfiguration, rebirth. For the four institutions cycle in perpetuity, either pestilence or purpose. Either regard would be nothing more or less than a regard. The human progression is a jointed wheel which shudders and stops and hitches and gets stuck in ditches of consciousness. It is a broken wheel, fie, a broken wheel on a broken road filled with holes. It is a leaky hole on a leaky road. The despairing of Hamlet and Macbeth in the opening quotation is a despairing in the face of that truth which humanity is; there can be no denying that this perpetual transformation is undergone at the level of the individual consciousness and the collective consciousness alike. One need only take a bare look at oneself and the so- called developments of this world.

We would do well to count Heraclitus in with Hamlet and Macbeth as yet another being of the disenchanted; namely, one who is well aware into despairing understanding as to Being and the enchantment of humanity with itself; that the world is its own plaything, its own stage, its own daydream - an illusion of waking replete with knowledge and trouble and shiny things. For when Malcolm and Macduff come for Macbeth and the witches’ prophecy is fulfilled there is nothing left to do but despair - as, in the most difficult way (a certain death at the hands of Malcolm’s legion), Macbeth’s role is complete. For the truth of Macbeth and Hamlet as characterizations is precisely that - that they are figurations of consciousness, filled (or in Hamlet’s case, ambivalent) with force - force that is the spirit in passage through the matter-body; the earth of things. It is no mistake that in both movements the supranatural figures prominently as and at the crux of willing - the disembodied force which communicates the timeless truth to the embodied force - the timeless truth that is the perpetually coming world of embodiments and disembodiments of figurations of consciousness. For Macbeth it is the coming into power (an illusion); for Hamlet it is the figure burning in the fire of consciousness (equally an illusion - but one that

comes quite close to the truth). For it is that in Hamlet the truth that Hamlet’s father does not dare speak to flesh and blood is a refractory truth which dispels the existence of flesh and blood entirely - that the ‘foul crimes’ of his day, along with he, Hamlet, and the whole of his kingdom - are nothing more than licks in the flame of consciousness; flames which are, themselves, burned away by that which they are into nothing but that which they are - the perpetually transfigured fire of consciousness - which takes and breaks apparition like the very vision of Hamlet’s father and the vision which comes to Macbeth and Banquo by way of the witches.

It is that these very visions are the truest movements and moments of the tales of Hamlet and Macbeth - in that they penetrate before the materiality into the paradoxical unborderedness of materiality and immateriality, spirit and embodiment. It is in this way that they compel Hamlet and Macbeth like destiny, fate, truth beyond truth, reason beyond reason; this is what we speak of when we speak of the logos of disenchantment - a reason beneath reason which, assuredly, in all cases is incomplete, unknowing, of the flesh and blood.

‘He [Vico] directs our attention to the fact that every need of life, natural, moral and economic, has its verbal expression in one or the other of the 30,000 Greek divinities. This is Homer’s ‘language of the gods’.’ (Beckett)

The difficulty here is to speak of a logos of disenchantment without disenchanting it altogether - in implying that incomplete logos (which is always of disenchantment) is ‘madness’ in its incompletion. For to say this is surely to put an end to the entire movement of the thing; to condemn life to death; so forth. For the development of language is both necessity (in the trade of materiality) and necessity (in the union within and as balance of the spiritual and material axes); it would be more accurate to say that Hamlet is holding two skulls at all times; weighing the two ideas - the only two ideas - spirit and materiality, or ‘being’ and ‘non-

being’ - all of which, ultimately, are of and within Being proper. For the two skulls are one; the skull being the entrance and exit point into each of the primary dualities, otherwise conceptualized in simple fashion as ‘life’ and ‘death’. It really matters-not how these figures are conceptualized, bordered, stratified - as we see, again, at the outset of Hamlet’s tale - how quickly this systematized duality is disrupted by a vision confirmed by the senses of multiple people; thus ‘assuredly true’. This is how fragile the human systems of knowledge and confirmation are, present even in the historical movement of language; the movements of orality into and through writing as manners and matters of attestation. They are, even as concepts considered primary, perpetually destabilized in and as knowledge-forms - which are equal nothings. Beckett exhibits in his essay, Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, how even the word of ‘law’ is transformed in time and space:

‘Words have their progressions as well as social phases. ‘Forest-cabin-village-city-academy’ is one rough [10] progression. Another: ‘mountain-plain-riverbank’. And every word expands with psychological inevitability. Take the Latin word: ‘Lex’.

Lex = Crop of acorns.
Ilex = Tree that produces acorns.
Legere = To gather.
Aquilex = He that gathers the waters.
Lex = Gathering together of peoples, public assembly.
Lex = Law.
Legere = To gather together letters into a word, to read.’

The shifting, mutable nature of human affairs for Hamlet is assured and sealed up in the very fate of the embodied consciousness; his obsession with being and non-being are righteous obsessions in and as the only question and problem of philosophy. What we are looking for here is assurance that all is not in vain but also truth. And perhaps the assurance is not possible without acceptance of the ‘terrible’ - which is nothing more than the perpetual destabilization of that which was once considered ‘stable’, or

‘safe’ - which is otherwise to say the proven transgression of the existing linguistic, knowledge-truth of being. Any such transgression is proof of incompletion; proof of dys- synthesis; a wound, or break, between ‘being’ and ‘non- being’ as being-without-Being as consciousness-without- Consciousness of and as itself. For this is perhaps the greatest and only play of human affairs - a self-asserted divorce between things; between the spirit and the body as the earth and the cosmos as primary wound of division; thus, of divisive affairs which are the aspirational consciousness - archetypally exemplified and characterized in the movement of Macbeth as a figure of consciousness characterized. For we do not view our own lives in this manner - as discharged forces with flesh to do certain work (destined work, in all of our cases, as forces compelled by that which is only understanding and never [as is common] ‘knowledge’-proper) - we view ourselves as firm realities unto ourselves - private truths and certain things. It is in this way that we are lost in death; we are stripped of ourselves perpetually as that which we have conceived. It is also this way with ideas, empires, loves: as they proceed in the ceaseless dirge which are the four seasons of Being.

THE STORY OF PENELOPE AND ODYSSEUS

The story of Penelope and Odysseus is a story of the play of forces, the play of language, and the play of fate as they revolve in and around the works and duties of incarnate beings. For it is that both Penelope and Odysseus - as the masculine and the feminine impulse - have work to do before they are able to reunite in the world of things. It is in this way that Odysseus goes to fulfill the principle of Mars for twenty years in the Trojan War and Penelope remains to fulfill the Venusian principle in their separation - in which she encounters 108 suitors. For it is that, upon the precipice of their reunion (the two souls that are one), Odysseus comes disguised as a beggar and is tasked with that which (again, by Penelope’s wisdom) only Odysseus can accomplish.

Notably, the two goddesses involved in this process are Athena and Artemis. Athena - the goddess of counsel and illumination; the Sophic wisdom; Artemis - the goddess of the bow which Odysseus the beggar is tasked to string to prove that he is indeed Odysseus the king; the goddess of the spiritual chastity which is the divine love of the two souls as one. It is through this weaving of the impulse(s) that Odysseus and Penelope are guided together and apart and together in changed form (again), as themselves manifest embodied impulses and forces of the masculine and feminine; the penetrative and the receptive (which in receiving, also penetrates). Athena is turned ‘to the boundary’; toward the invisible string upon the bow of impulse upon which Artemis does her forcible work; turned toward the dictation of the (from darkness to light) illumination of that which she whispers into the ears of men as truth beyond their ability to conceive of truth. Heraclitus is the philosopher of this process and phenomenon, which can only be spoken of as divine knowledge; divine oration - together with the work of the oracles.

Penelope prays for death at the hand of Artemis and her bow; so to die ‘With Odysseus in my mind’s eye’; 'so that, seeing Odysseus, I might also go under the hateful earth’ (Book 20). This movement is a double movement - it is not death that Penelope prays for, it is transfiguration and transformation - like that very change Odysseus has undergone in his movement; literalized in his disguise, moving from a king to a beggar and back again. To be transformed or transfigured is to traverse a plane in order to come into higher understanding in the knowingness unto and of the plane. In this case, we are speaking of, as we often are, of the movement of consciousness through human affairs - weaved as if with a needle; strung as if with an arrow, tuned as if to a lyre. Penelope cultivates, most notably, the principle of discernment - the very two headed (Janus, Gemini) principle of Athene herself; Odysseus does so as well by way of the integration of the mind, body, and spirit in his journey to and through Calypso for seven years. What is notable here is the manner in which these two spiritual journeys as impulses through the other (interpenetrative) are undertaken; each in a different manner. Penelope remains in the castle (the body) and goes deeper into it by way of the spiritual introspection (the act of weaving as self contained); Odysseus ventures out into the abyss of the world; displaying and moving through the ‘active’, or penetrative impulse. It is also worth noting here that the bow Odysseus is tasked to string once belonged to Eurytus the archer, grandson of the twin of Artemis - Apollo. For what we are discussing here is two embodiments, two incarnations which are one bound by a common thread which is being of the same soul - the unity of the heart and soul which is a wedding in and of the feeling, homophrosýnē.

For Odysseus must shoot the arrow through twelve axe heads (the twelve labors of Hercules; the twelve signs) and Penelope must discern through 108 suitors (108/12=9, the nine Greek muses, Leto’s days and nights of labor for Apollo; nine days for an anvil to fall from heaven to earth; nine more from earth to Tartarus). Of course, twelve is into

three and four and nine is into three and three - which is the power of the Three Witches in Macbeth. Each impulse is corresponding with a shape of sides; an elemental manifest which is the blueprint of form in its divine, molecular irreducibility. The function Artemis and Athene perform here is the function which is the linguistic figuration of the two impulses as active forms as ‘higher powers’ - Athene being the wisdom and Artemis being the arrow - two of (ultimately the womb that is all things as of Consciousness is ‘feminine’ or receptive, giving birth to, holding, Sophic) the goddesses who show, in their function throughout the text and Greek life (as linguistic symbols as figures as archetypes) the movement of the two impulses as weaving and woven inextricably into one another as the ensoulment of all things.

It is necessary for this journey to be undergone by both Penelope and Odysseus as to embody (and thus, become aware of) these forces as that which composes all life; particularly, of course, their union as two souls who are one. The very homophrosýnē of their union is testament to the two headedness of their same body - the Gemini principle (or, alternately Janus ‘faced’ principle) which is the two impulses within and as that which composes the ever- shifting scales of the soul - both personal and collective. This very union is described and imaged in and as the marital bed:

‘‘Does this mean I must marry a beggar now?" she asked. "I am no beggar," he said, "but Odysseus, your husband." Penelope did not recognise him, for he had left her soon after their marriage 20 years before. "Odysseus, my husband," she said, embracing him. "Please forgive me for not recognising you, for it has been 20 years since I last saw you and you are much changed. It is a balmy night, so let us take our marital bed, the one you built with your own hands, and put it under the stars." "That is a wonderful idea," said Odysseus, "but the bed I built can never be moved for it is built around the trunk of a deep-rooted olive tree." Now at last Penelope knew he really was Odysseus:

the secret of the bed's immovability was known to only two people.’’ The advisory powers of Athena and the bowstring of Artemis as that which is the plane of the impulses - the bow and the arrow - is manifest again in the building of the bed (the masculine) and the trunk of the deep-rooted olive tree (the feminine). This rooting, is, of course, that very divine feminine impulse which holds Odysseus to the mast amid temptation; brings him out of Calypso into the call for home. Here, we see that the very task of Penelope, although couched within the ‘placedness’ of the castle, or of ‘home’ is the cultivation of the masculine - the weaving and unweaving of the shroud of Laertes - the creative. For it is that within Penelope there is the undertaking of the mastery of the penetrative; within Odysseus there is the undertaking of the mastery of wisdom - even as their outer journeys themselves reflect a paradoxical movement. It is the mastery of these energies within oneself as a balancing of the two forces as that which ensouls and moves through all things which is the task of the two souls who are one - for this is the marriage within the marriage which is the true union of soul.

The Transformation of consciousness by Fire: The Non- Existence of All Things, Including the Insanity of Man’s ‘Wor(l)d’

All things are exchanged for fire and fire for all things. - Heraclitus

The world is nothing. At best it is only a hideous caricature, a shadow of Reality. I do not see that what you call progress in the world is other than the multiplication of desires. This earth will always remain the same. - Vivekananda

Beat on the drum and blow the fife And kiss the vivandière, my boy. Fear nothing - that’s the whole of life, Its deepest truth, its soundest joy. Beat reveille, and with a blast Arouse all men to valiant strife. Waken the world; and then, at last March on… That is the whole of life. - Heine

Either these systems are within us and permeate our being to the point of supporting life itself (and if this is the case, what use are books?), or they do not permeate us and therefore do not have the capacity to support life (and in this case what does their disappearance matter?). – Artaud

There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is nothing earthly. I don't mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his earthly semblance can't endure it. He has to undergo a physical change or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable. It is as though you suddenly apprehended all nature and suddenly said: "Yes, it is true— it is good." [. . .] What is so terrifying about it is that it is so terribly clear and such gladness. If it went on for more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I am ready to give my life for them, for it's worth it. To be able to endure it for ten seconds, you would have to undergo a physical change. - Kristeva b/w Dostoevsky

I. I Spit Loudly and With Evidence and Thus, Truly

It is still surprising today (although I should be quite used to it by now) to hear ‘scholars’ and so-called learned people talk of that which they have called ‘knowledge’. This knowledge is, of course, something (supposedly) gleaned from that whole of all things and no-things which is often called Consciousness - a something gleaned which is pulled from that which is and become language, become en- formed - inserted into a framework and body-structural mechanism which is the creation of the knowing thing. Surely, this ‘knowledge’ comes from man’s conviction that he, too, certainly ‘exists’. The human being has called this created happening ‘language’ - that which is spoken with coherence; by coherence, I mean that through which meaning sticks like-sound together. For the process of knowledge making cannot be separated from language making - whether this be the carving out of a ‘new’ piece of land called empire or home, the carving of and into the physical body as primary existence or alteration, or the use of a physical body to carve into a stone (the hand, the implement, the symbol, the stone). All of these methods of meaning making and language making are also, in the most primordial sense, acts of writing - of consciousness carving into Consciousness - the sky, the earth, the sea, the fire. For our so-called knowledge is what is left of history (never fire, but always fire); what remains: broken stones and inscriptions, tombs, books, decomposing bodies of the flesh of man and the stricken flesh of the earth. This is the work of self mutilation without end - of madmen among madmen, defacing the flesh, defacing the page of tree-skin and animal skin, defacing the forests and rock-faces of the earth with their world-making, language-making. All of this madness among men is, too, manifest form(s) of Consciousness as consciousnesses; with the philosopher Heraclitus, works of ‘the ever-living fire’ which is the entire cosmos as Vishvarupa, or the cosmic body of all things and no things (with all the arms and limbs of man and animal alike thrown upon its chest) - for it is always in a changing state, and yet it remains changeless - as the Being of beings,

the Consciousness of consciousnesses, the Form of forms, the Spirit of spirits - the whole. It is the fire in which the flame of man rises and dances and dies - as a new flame licks the sky.

Today in the universities, we have scholars, technicians, and academics - all under their grand official names and titles, arguing over this or that form proper that this consciousness takes; when, how, and for what purpose; squabbling over the newest findings, the truest observations, and the grandest theories. This is the project of ‘human life’ in the modern world - a dull play composed of death (in the posturing game of so called ‘great intelligences’ ensconced in their great temples of knowledge, utterly blind to the oblivion of their words) arguing over dead bodies (the shit, ruins, fragments, and remains of dead men, dead time, and dead notions - all of which fall before that which is, life). I will introduce the term here of ‘the empty phrase’ to categorize this movement (with Rudolph Steiner in his lecture cycle Becoming the Archangel Michael’s Companions). What this term signifies is the body emptied of spirit, the form emptied of content, the word emptied of understanding of the total oblivion of the word and the impossibility of its ‘true’ use. It is in this sense that the empty phrase dominates lecture halls and the speech of these disciplinarian institutions of ‘knowledge’ - as the empty phrase can be described no more succinctly than as ‘knowledge’ itself: as that which claims to exist, but evisces its burning unto spirit by way of the sheer march of time. Here, we have Kairos, the lord over man, who at each moment gives way for man to recognize his true reflection in the pool of all time - but a lick of heated dance. For the dominance of the empty phrase among men is economic fascism - in that the form, the use, the material, is all that exists. It is the glorification of surfaces, incomplete histories, incomplete methods, incomplete conceptions which exist as consensus realities among men - for these men are also incomplete men. They, as they must, rely on ideas, beliefs, and images of god - turned away from that cruel, dark Janus face of Kairotic time; they take Chronos to be the extent of

truth; in doing so, engage the shadowplay of things dancing, projected by fire upon the wall of their vision.

It is in this way that we, today, discuss dead time, dead language, and the relics of history - in a fashion which betrays our shallow and superficial age (for when has humanity ever ceased to be shallow and superficial?) - a fashion which glories in technics, laws, and principles by which it might come to terms with the ceaseless violence of Heraclitus’ fire which composes our time and all Time - which is but an eternal moment. We do this, perhaps because we must - in order to exist with the pretension that we are something, anything that is not damned to the fire which rages eternally. (This damnation, of course, is only perceived as such in that the one who has not understood that all is lost to all time perceives that there is yet something left to lose; clings to this something with all the might of his spirit and flesh). In our continued ignorance to time, language, and history as conceptual realities created by the human hand and the human mind as artificial, half- light - we elevate them to the level of truth among ourselves and create the damnation of our souls in this world we have made atop the earth - souls cast out of the entirety of life, or else imprisoned within religious institutions or sold to the highest bidder by way of our flesh economies. This is the profit of our time, the profit of those who have used language and knowledge as (conceptual realities made ‘reality; ‘knowledges’) implements to elevate ourselves to a position of illusory power over ‘other’ forms of consciousness (again, an illusion of separation) whereby we might suppose ourselves to be able to ascertain or discern anything about Consciousness, or the work done therein. This is the incredible hubris of the human being. It proclaims itself an expert regarding that which it is only a fragment of; this very formation of ‘language’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘history’ tells the half tale of the half man, desperate to understand that which does not come to light by a collection of death. The modern man is like Eris on the battlefield, picking about dead bodies.

II. The Overlarge Infant Babbles and Screams in the Yard with Other Overlarge Infants Who are Also Babbling and Screaming and Thus, the Overlarge Infant is Surely Right

To go into the semantics of the development of the English language is a ridiculous endeavor, an endeavor which, with each step into the broken histories assembled by professors and scholars who are ‘thinkers’ in job title and job title alone

we see the very brokenness of the half-man and the shattered world of his own making manifest in mere fragments. The broken bits of regal French, legal Latin; the common speech of Old English, and onward into the myriad spiralling manifestations of forms of ‘English’ which are nothing if not bastard children of a bastard father. Samuel Beckett speaks of this process of ‘language making’ in his essay-work Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.:

‘His (Vico’s) treatment of the origin of language proceeds along similar lines. Here again he rejected the materialistic and transcendental views: the one declaring that language was nothing but a polite and conventional symbolism; the other, in desperation, describing it as a gift from the Gods. As before, Vico is the rationalist, aware of the natural and inevitable growth of language. In its first dumb form, language was gesture. If a man wanted to say ‘sea’, he pointed to the sea. With the spread of animism this gesture was replaced by the word: ‘Neptune’. He directs our attention to the fact that every need of life, natural, moral and economic, has its verbal expression in one or other of the 30,000 Greek divinities. This is Homer’s ‘language of the Gods’. Its evolution through poetry to a highly civilized vehicle, rich in abstract and technical terms, was as little fortuitous as the evolution of society itself. Words have their progressions as well as social phases. ‘Forest-cabin-village- city-academy’ is one rough [10] progression. Another: ‘mountain-plain-riverbank’. And every word expands with psychological inevitability. Take the Latin word: ‘Lex’.

Lex = Crop of acorns.
Ilex = Tree that produces acorns.
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Legere = To gather.
Aquilex = He that gathers the waters.
Lex = Gathering together of peoples, public assembly.
Lex = Law.
Legere = To gather together letters into a word, to read.

The root of any word whatsoever can be traced back to some pre-lingual symbol. This early inability to abstract the general from the particular produced the Type-names. It is the child’s mind over again,’ (Beckett, Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.).

Beckett makes it quite clear (in his wisdom which is a modern Sophic wisdom like that of Heraclitus) that there is nothing here to ‘know’ or ‘study’, other than the infantile desperation of common people searching for a common language in order to elucidate, manufacture; create, common understanding over time. This understanding is, of course, a bastard, and nothing more or less than common; disfigured; deeply deformed and altogether unintelligible. It signifies the broken consciousness of a collective procession through the hills of time, exiles all, by way of the mad symbols which are carved into the flesh of it and left like tokens dropped upon the ground of the earth. This is the entirety of the world of man - from the skyscrapers and pyramids to the cave paintings and books imbued with the spirits of men desperate to understand their place in the cosmos. The language among men is broken precisely because of its inclusivity; it allows everything in, it is an open door, and it is broken into and its icons are shattered time and time again like the ground-language is Carthage or Jerusalem. This, too, can be seen quite clearly in the ‘development’ of the English language - a happening which is not Chronos bound. It is eternally corrupted in all directions as a social process, a timeless network of half signs executed by half beings (this is, certainly, no narrative of ‘progress’). Thus it truly belongs to everyone and no one; it is a useless and cracked and yet utterly used and abused thing. The common language is a language of ceaseless rape, just as the rape of the land which is the Earth is

without end. It is continually raped of meaning, disabused of meaning, appropriated by force, reappropriated by force, and declared capitol. It is also like this with human beings as a category jurisdicted by mere licks of flame among mere licks of flame. They do not exist enough to be anything other than dumb infants, bewildered youths, self-assured ‘men’; finally, ruined empires of the idea unto themselves. Friedrich Nietzsche declares: ‘The majority of people are a fragmentary exclusive image of what humanity is; you have to add them up to get humanity. In this sense, whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them; it may be necessary for humanity’s growth for it to develop only in parts. It is a crucial matter therefore to see that what is at stake is always the idea of producing a synthetic humanity and that the inferior humans who make up a majority of us are only preliminaries, or preparatory attempts whose concerted play allows a whole human being to appear here and there like a military boundary marker showing the extent of humanity’s advance,’ (Bataille, On Nietzsche). There has been no better description of the development of ‘language’ or ‘knowledge’ (interchangeable) over time. This is what these half-men share; this is what makes up ‘humanity’ as a group of lost souls convicted of their sovereign being; convicted of their belief in that which they have made to life. For it is first within and as the ‘human being’ that these conceptions take root, a primary conception from which the conceptions of human knowledge, meaning, and purpose spread like branches of a tree from that which was formerly a seed of seeds - the background of Consciousness upon which the human consciousness and its delusions are projected like stage props and actors. It is that the vast majority of ‘human beings’ depend on these forms in order to maintain their socially accepted madness; to not descend into an uncontrolled dive into that lucidity of the soul which breaks all men, as all men are weak. However, the inferior men take their final shelter in that which is of others; the whole men take no shelter; they observe the eternal dancing of the flames. For to take shelter in the world-concept is the necessary cowardice of inferior beings. They make their homes in

language; they make their homes in convenient laws, systems, beliefs, and concepts - because they must. Because they cannot make their homes within their souls. This is the essence of religion. With Charles Baudelaire:

‘Like all my friends I have tried more than once to lock myself up within a system in order to preach there at my ease. But a system is a kind of damnation which forces one to a perpetual recantation; it is always necessary to be inventing a new one, and the drudgery involved is a cruel punishment.

And my system was always beautiful, spacious, vast, convenient, neat, and above all, water-tight; at least so it seemed to me. But always a spontaneous, unexpected product of universal vitality would come to give the lie to my childish and superannuated wisdom— that lamentable child of Utopia! It was no good shifting or stretching my criterion— it always lagged behind universal person, and never stopped chasing after multiform and multi- colored beauty as it moved in the infinite spirals of life. Condemned unremittingly to the humiliation of a new conversion, I took a great decision.

To escape from the horror of these philosophical apostasies, I haughtily resigned myself to modesty; I became content to feel; I returned to seek refuge in impeccable naïveté,’ (Baudelaire, for the Exposition Universelle 1855).

What Baudelaire, Beckett, Vico, Nietzsche, and Heraclitus have in common is that they are not slaves of the common sense. They have refused this procession of ignorance. And what I mean by this is they are not slaves of the world- concept in which all people are slaves and all things are slaves to ‘knowledge’, to ‘language’, and to conceptions of themselves and the world as separated and thus devaluated. This is the game which they have denounced entirely; in doing so, have come into consciousness with Consciousness. This is a primary struggle; a struggle of individuation by and through which an individual method is demanded and

developed de rigeur with life. What they are is in an active struggle against ‘god’, like Jacob, a struggle against the very limit which Pascal proposes in his papers as a limit of culture and culture alone. It is that image of Christ, or the image of Buddha, or the language itself as a history of brokenness, incompletion, inability, and fragmentation of human consciousness from Consciousness. There must be an icon for these people which stands in place of that which these conceptions represent - union of spirit and form within oneself as Consciousness. For if there was wholeness, there would be silence. This would be the end of history, the end of language, and the death of concepts. This language is only needed for trade, argument, conviction, and the artifice of literature. We are, here, of course talking about, and using the language to talk about, the English language and those who use it for whatever means. It is a language that has seen and undergone perpetual transformations in the world, just like a human body undergoing physical transformation and the spiritual body undergoing transformations of consciousness before finally becoming enthroned in awareness of (c)onsciousness as Consciousness. The English language, then, as that which has experienced the detonation of the atomic bomb, multiple plagues and pestilences, as well as conquests which formally and functionally altered its face - is still nothing but a child, a changing thing unaware of its changelessness; obsessively developing rules, roles, and regulations for itself which it believes will bring it into wholeness. It proceeds in this fashion as it must - as, a priori, a common language (as well as a common sense or a common society) cannot become individuated and thus together with Consciousness. It is meaningless to refer to the language by its name; as it is as deaf and dumb as the rest. It searches to signify with broken symbols; even its breath cannot reach the floor where its inscriptions lie. For, finally, what all of its symbols represent upon the page is a brokenness - a separation from the silent whole which utters itself and assembles its Being forever in Kairotic time as bodies and breaths of that which resides therein. For the individuated language in its enthronement in Consciousness is nothing but this - the doing away with

all language concepts, games, borders, and boundaries - in primary communion with that in which these conceptual realities reside: the play of forces within the fire of Consciousness.

For to speak of the ‘language’ we are speaking through it to touch ‘history’, to touch moments of desperation, starvation, decrepitude, illness, and the grinding away of flesh and bones beneath the stone of Time - a stone we could call god

in the sky and buried in the flesh of beings. To speak of the language we are speaking through Consciousness into language; as such, there is incompletion. For it is not even ‘English’ as a whole being as the name artifices - rather, it is a Frankenstein of dialects and forms, just like the ‘English nations and colonies’, and all artificial things composed by man to justify the ways of God (Milton, Pope) to the unlearned, the unknowing, the ignorant, the savages. It is, in this sense, an economy of power. These worldly things cannot be anything greater than that. It is a language which has escaped breaths in last moments during plague years; it is a language which orchestrated (by way of the treachery possibly therein) the great colonies of the English empire; it is a language which became poetic through Shakespeare’s mouth(s) and the mouths of peasants who died alone, penniless, and forgotten. It is the language of slave dealings conducted in the American South; it is the language of black music and it is not the language of black music. For we are fools to speak of ‘English’ as anything other than the fragments of fragments, the shards of ground up glass which pierce our eyes, bleed us, and make us dumb. It is a desperate foray into speech; a foray which is always failed by that which the language must evisce - the human condition, the suffering, the ecstasy of which language is a muted color:

Pull out his eyes, Apologise Pull out his eyes, Apologise Pull out his eyes, Apologise.

III. The Idiot Pig Grunts and Groans, But is Published and Thus, the Idiot Pig is Saved

Beckett’s writings on Joyce go like this: ‘This writing that you find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture, with all the inevitable clarity of the old inarticulation. Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear,’ (Beckett, Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.) Joyce does not write in any language; it would be dull and idiocy to suggest otherwise. Joyce writes with the embodied force of consciousness; moving through consciousness with the freedom of one who sees language as utterly useless as everything else in this world. It does not have form, it does not have technics, it does not have laws. It squeals and screams and flails like a pig in a trough or a pig under the blade, because that is all language really is. It is pigshit smeared on a wall, like Artaud says; it is the bastard children of the bastard child of language alone who glorify it

the slaves to common senses. These are the literate and the illiterate alike, the righteous and the indignant alike, the beggars and the kings alike - all of whom are, ultimately, fools of Consciousness. For when Shakespeare says, ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’, he is closest to Heraclitus in that the stage is aflame and the players are aflame and the audience is aflame, and yet no one is yelling ‘FIRE’. Instead, they are desperately at work within the burning, dutifully playing their roles, glorying in the dance of the flames - as the world and the page are burnt up like the wick of a candle. This is the movement of consciousness beneath the play of language. For it is only the player who cannot and does not observe language and history as conceptual realities who deifies and defines them; as such, the player is merely a player - and never a whole human being. It is upon the stage of language which he dances, upon the stage of history which he dances, upon the stage of the common sense which he dances; never in the
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terrible face of Consciousness - the eternal moment at which the appearance of the play falls away to flames.

Artaud says about the plague: ‘Beneath such a scourge, all social forms disintegrate. Order collapses. He observes every infringement of morality, every psychological disaster; he hears his body fluids murmuring within him; tom, failing in a dizzying collapse of tissue, his organs grow heavy and gradually turn to carbon. But is it too late to avert the scourge? Even destroyed, even annihilated, organically pulverized and consumed to his very marrow, he knows we do not die in our dreams, that our will operates even in absurdity, even in the negation of possibility, even in the transmutation of the lies from which truth can be remade,’ (Artaud, 15). ‘In men and women alike,’ the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, ‘at the beginning of the malady [The Black Death], certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits…waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils,’ (Boccaccio, The Decameron). To return to the Beckettian observation of an earlier passage, ‘every word expands with psychological inevitability’. For what is language but the pestilence and war of all time? What is it but the exoteric desperation of the human organism, clawing for reunification with Consciousness; yet returned forever to the half-life of the conceptual form in which he has hedged all of his bets? For if the being lives in language or in history, he lives within and beneath the umbrella of the apparatus itself; he catastrophically remains partially conscious, being within an imagined body. The rose garden belongs to those who love the roses, alone.

Here we must ask - what is ‘the language’ truly for? To whom does the city belong? The ceaselessly shifting borders and bounds of elucidated conceptions articulated for the benefit of the user, the conqueror, the one who has mastered the form? For what else do these masters become court painters, or poets of the state? Those who use the language with conviction make everything possible and

nothing possible by the sheer force of will. The English language, then, is also nuclear weapons, colonization by arms, the enforced borders of the state; the genocides and broken promises which clear land by blood. We might also say it is this, or that it is the everyday language of chores and sleeping and cooking or whatever else. However, I am sure that you will not dispute me when I say that the language is not mine; it is certainly not yours. I must look elsewhere to find myself.

IV. Death is Everywhere and My Mouth is Pregnant With it, But My Eyes Are Stitched Shut, So I Have Seen Nothing of It. At Least, Do Not Disrupt the Regular Movement of My Bowels!!

For now it is to describe every plague as all plagues and every war as all wars and every dead body as all dead bodies. What is the use of counting? What is the use of using this language to attempt to distinguish suffering and violence into pockets of true happening? What is the use of this idiocy of accumulating meanings to discharge against the inevitability of death, the inevitability of waking up tomorrow dead and the oblivion of the body? It is only the hearty who take up this account of life; it is only the hearty who turn and face the immortal suffering and struggle buoyant in the screaming words of poets and beneath the false calm which is the surface of language discharged by liars, convenience, and in common speech. For when we are above and beneath the English language we are at once above and beneath the need for articulation; we are beyond the need for being understood - as we are in the agonies and the ecstasies. The English language is the imagined tool which straddles the boundary between the conceptual realities demanded by the vast majority as a manner of clinging to the life raft of real things and that future-beyond where the poets and whole human beings reside: for they are whole only in their facing up to the true task of language

that one must make this thing themselves and do away with the commonly disabused everythings. This that I am detailing is the true history of the English language - this
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history written by screams writ in the air of the dead and dying and scrawled on the bodies of the burned and burning, of the new-born flesh and the flesh as it is wretched from this mortal coil of flesh. The cosmic language is the movement of all things; with Simone Weil, the true subject of history is force - the utterly inhuman; perhaps, like Beckett’s account of the Greek gods, the truly human in that it has done away with all of this play of self conception and existence. It is, truly, this unaccountable which runs through it. And yet, we use this language form and the safety of its categorical separations, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’; the concepts which allow for a distinction between the inarticulate scream and the professor at the pulpit - to create the fundamental alienation which is life observed from a distance. The common language is used as such: to create a common space - which in that very creation, is an artificial one. It is the creation of a surface through which the scourging light of the truth may be refracted; thus redirected. The direct encounter is only done by facing up to the mad face of Consciousness which burns away all things. In doing so, the language dies, the history dies, the conceptual realities as convenient self and common deceit die. We are faced with the silence composed of the screams of the dead, the discharge of lovers, the march of the exiles, the babbling of the organs, the vibration of the planets. For here, to speak is to lie. Here, language is nothing but a shroud. It is safe for these historians and thinkers of the academy to scrutinize the Black Plague and the wars and conquests (now, of course, past) precisely because there is no risk in doing so. They lose nothing, and gain the prestige of all of this - worldly things. This is what it means to study language and to study history in the modern world. They do not dare approach the spirit of language - for in doing so, they will be forced to account for their self-deceptions (which are always also deceptions of others). It is like this when the world over is enslaved to form - they do not dare turn about and face the agony of the spirit which presses up against the page. In order to do so, one must go beneath and beyond the veil things - and into the red throes of Consciousness which course through them and compose.

Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus is a well used image to describe this movement of history - but we will here apply it to language - as equal conceptual ‘reality’:

‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress,’ (Benjamin, On the Concept of History).

Here, we are with the poet Mandelstam, who declares, ‘the past has not even been born yet’ in Word and Culture (1921). We are simultaneously immersed in a transcendent view of time - a time at once here and everywhere - at once past and future, here and there - a messianic view which Benjamin (as a rogue Kabbalist) shares with Kafka. Here, we are also at one with language and thus language ceases to exist but as the momentous exclamation of life; the English language and the petty trials of scholars itching toward a lineage are absolutely shattered. With Benjamin, we approach a true language in the sense that it is lawless but in the one law (All things are exchanged for fire and fire for all things); timeless but in the one time, Kairos. In one paragraph (; furthermore, within the larger text of On the Concept of History) the disciplines of language study and history study are eviscerated. All of these professors without homes (Benjamin, too, was declared too ‘alive’ for the academy). For to see these forms as they truly are (from being-thing into timeless fire) is to scry past the conception of them as categorical objects and phenomena (as existent; separate) into and through the fire of Consciousness; the visceral obliteration of all things by Time as that which they are (revealed as) licks of flame for a moment and then smoke

and ash and flame once more. The conquests and violences done to the (supposed) body of language, the body of flesh, the body of the earth, and the body of the ‘nation’ reveal this to us in time, time and time again - if we are not altogether and absolutely infatuated with our own ignorance and self importance. With Heraclitus again, ‘War is the father of all things’. For it requires incredible violence to truly write; incredible violence done to one’s own self; the absolute obliteration of the self concept and world concept (as two that are as one) in order to come into Being (enthroned, even as Maya circles about the seat of consciousnessNowConsciousness) - the obliteration which is done in that selfsame purgation of death - that which utterly, physically transforms the vehicle. This is truly writing. This is truly language; language disabused of the meaningless conceptual borders and ‘realities’ which constitute ‘English’, ‘German’, and other such totems of common ‘knowledge’. It is not ‘literature’, or academic nonsense. We have seen this violent work present in the aforementioned actors, writers, and thinkers referenced above - those who have peeled back the eyelids of the common ‘humanity’ and the language thereof and pierced the flesh of the common, shallow half-humanity to reveal it as a mask for the screaming inhumanity which is the soft underbelly; truly human. It is the dark language of oblivion and the one who encounters the already-lostness of all things, including himself, who comes into language. To speak of the existence of common language is to speak commonly of common things; this kind of speech deserves no attention and no mind because it is of no mind but the mind of the half-being mass. The ones who speak like this are miserably ignorant to the work being done; the ones who speak like this are slaves to the culture boundaries of that which is supposedly known, supposedly said, and supposedly true. This action, too, this dark action of the mouth of oblivion stitched onto man may be seen in the Black Paintings of Goya. It may be seen in the screaming popes and mangled fleshes of Bacon; it may be seen in that ‘savage economy’ of the masters gestured to by Beckett in his essay-work. It is a method altogether disgusted and

disillusioned with the world of the ‘living’ (read: common half-humans); their toys, their convictions, their games, their mutual hostilities, their self importance, their conquerings, their petty chess pieces which are their bodies, their words, their beliefs, their truths. It is a method that has had enough, or, with Artaud, a method that has done with the judgement of God - a God which is nothing more or less than the mutual illusions imposed and established arbitrarily by other people under the guise of ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’; finally, ‘language’. For this is what it is with language: the sad, pathetic, ridiculous farce of an assemblage of characters, meanings, breaths, and inscribed lines which are desperate to do the impossible - to bring the sad tale of ‘human existence’ anywhere but from that place where it resides - in and of the eternal fire. Surely, it is easier to indulge, with the rest of the world, the dreams, beliefs and hopes that exist, like the language concept, as uncertain images in the smoke for the child-mind to fixate upon. So it is with ‘language’, ‘history’, ‘justice’ and the rest. I have not yet heard anything about them other than half-ideas, half- images, and half-dreams.

V. Finally, The Dunce is Suicided by Society. Polite Applause is Requested from the Audience of Gentlemen

To be done with this common movement (a cultural, linguistic, and social one) is to truly live; to become an individual - it is to disabuse language (as the society of the concept itself) and to violate language to the absolute extent. It is to mangle the flesh of language and to suffocate articulation and to slash at the canvas of coherence. Oscar Wilde depicts this movement at the end of his masterwork The Picture of Dorian Gray:

‘He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life,

and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it. There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its agony…’ (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: Chapter 20).

The end of Dorian Gray is both in text and in character; the role of Dorian Gray is up in the piercing scream which shatters the canvas of that which takes on the life and that which is the body from which the life has been taken. It is the end of language as a mutual exorcism of self and world. For here, this is really all we have to talk about. I could pretend to you and the rest of your world that these human ‘developments’ and the ‘great progress’ of man has been an enlightening - but instead I would only ask you to take a look at the world. There is no pride in the English language. There is no pride in man other than that of a beast impressed by the violence he has wrought on the world, the scars which he has impressed on flesh, soil, soul, books - and yet they go on living, staggering into the ‘future’. It is out of desire that one looks into the tea leaves and proclaims meaning, or scries the planets and proclaims peace or famine. It is the same with all language and conceptual meaning emergent from its symbol-totems. To go beyond it, we must break it; bring that concept to its knees which has enshrined itself in the place of consciousness; proclaimed itself steward of Being.

It is like this, too, with ‘history’. For we have the argument over land, the argument over the sanctity of the language (The English Language, and what have you), the birth and death of flesh and the rise and fall of empires; it is clear to one who has even glanced at the movement of these perpetually shifting grounds over time that they are dictated by force and use of force alone. This being the force of the human hand, the force of the militia, the force of human birth, the friction of intercourse; the force of the planetary movements as and in Time. There is no ‘kind’ ownership of the land or of the language - it is taken, used, enforced, and sculpted: first and foremost in courts of law and power and at the hands of armed conquerors. There is, of course, the

‘kind’ history, the ‘kind’ ethics, and the ‘kind’ dream of the (assuredly) ‘well meaning’ idealists (the ignorant) - and this kind dream notably excludes and condemns bloodshed for the illusion of a certain historical peace, or grand vision of a peace to come. This is the convenient outlook of the vast majority - those who would censor life into meaning. It is like this with language and the act of reading - the uneducated and the overeducated alike hope for a reconciliation of the symbol and that which is signified - man. This is nothing less than a desire for the union of the consciousness of man with Consciousness aeterna. The illusion is that such a union can be constituted in, by, and through language - as a tool predicated in and by the act of disjunction - the breath from the mouth, the hand to the page, flesh to flesh. It is a pernicious illusion - like knowledge and history - that the accumulation of gestures might lead to a liberation from gesture altogether. With the idea(l) of history comes, necessarily (with Hegel), the end of history. All conceptual realities end as they began - as smoke of the mind. For if I have written language here, it is only to get out of writing language in order to speak Consciousness in the perfect silence of obliterated language; for if I have written or said anything it is out of that which forces me to write - an obligation which has cornered me in the world and forced me to spit words from my ignorant mouth - as ignorant as the rest. This is the fate of all speech, all language, all human kept time - beat with a drum, timed electric. Each time I speak, I make a fool of myself; it is like this with all language. Consciousness cannot be enthroned in that which it is not; it cannot take root in that which is not the imminent embodiment of the spirit-body - it cannot be painted, it cannot be spoken, it cannot be writ. It exists beyond human conception; it exists as reality beyond all conceptual reality. It is in this way that Consciousness is utterly inhuman, and the utterly human Language. For to signify ‘language’ and its developments I can again provide another analog; it is no clearer than in Botticelli’s Divine Comedy Illustrated. There, we see the entirety of human history buried in the soil but also the sediment of the wor(l)d itself; the work done to move the word in time by the force

of human will and other such unpredictable and lawless affairs of Consciousness at work in its dance through the sky, ether, water, and earth. The Promethean spirit-being marches down into flesh and digs caverns among itself and calls them cities of the mind, cities of the earth; surgeries of rogue consciousness into and about the silence - this is the wor(l)d. It is the work of things toward themselves, brought about in and as ‘the world’ - and then they are heard no more. Language, history, knowledge alike: ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

Here, I refuse to speak of these conceptual realities beyond their inane names because they do not exist but as spectres of half-human desires and dreams. I will not play the game of calling this or that plague or war or movement as started or finished; rather I will gesture to these movements as reverberations or resounds which are only cries which shake the earth and the cosmos. I will not play this game of history or of language or knowledge in the sense that I will not participate in affirming their existences by way of that which I write and have writ - these consensus values and consensus acknowledgements of borders and limits of consciousness and being. It is a game of true insanity; collective insanity - for the only true insanity is the belief in conceptual realities. The common language perpetually produces, reproduces (and through reproduction, perpetually reaffirms) this work of ‘human’ existence beyond pure fire evisced by, in, and through Time. For what this perniciously common belief (in the human) demands is the end of life - the end of life in that it is no longer lived in union of the mind, body, and spirit with Consciousness - as it is partitioned into parcels of land, parcels of language, parcels of flesh, and parcels of meaning. To do any more or less than this that I have done is to participate in, and thus condone, common ignorance among the commonly ignorant.

People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man… because a man’s soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It’s only a matter of removing from this divine spark everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn’t gold. – Tolstoy

this world dream is held up by sticks and twigs and twine and here i am squatting beneath the circus tent of the firmament with my pants around my ankles; the gasping mustard gas lungs of the earth and being harassed by shellshocked alley kids collecting dog skulls and selling plastic water bottles in the sun. the fates weave this beautiful thing in which i will lay my lot of flesh like it is not separate from eternity.

however, do not disturb me now for i am collecting the last words from the mustard gas lungs of the earth and dropping them in the jar of these poems like pennies. what will their mother think of these letters that i am burning and churning in the furnace of my soul? they will never read them, the mothers. they have fled this place like bombed out shadows on the doorstep of a new season, a cold season, a breathless season.

this world is held up by a ghetto prince, shirtless in the summer heat his fingers in the mouth of some girl from the tenements who is lounging in a well-worn blouse fresh off the clothesline a seamstress who loved him even though he could not read or write. this world is held up by the shadow of 7,846,000,000 dreams and robbed by a blind man with a gun to his own head in the house of the blind which also serves as a bank and a storehouse; he took everything - a blind man who deals cards and plays chess with death: a fool, a hanged man, a magician - a blind man gambler who has flipped the stolen art of the world like a counterfeit magritte. he runs around gap toothed and naked; he plays dice in the temples; he warms himself by the blacksmith’s fire. he is a man and nothing more or less than this.

in the fire i saw war men laughing and carving up the world with steak knives under a bare bulb, matchstick napoleons whose lives burned up like it was a dry season - suicided or hung to riotous applause - huddled around the bunker table dealing cards and smoking pipes while the ceiling of the stars shook: one a pig mouthed man with eye bandages, another a mustachioed man with a peg leg and a third with an officer’s hat over his eyes and stitched up fingers - whores of the old god that is the empire; whores of the new god that is the nation -

i saw them stick their cocks in the earth during blood wars and the beast of their ships and aircraft ate up the seas and skies; ran them out of life and killed the fish and birds and their bodies filled up the rivers and canals - stopping up the undrinkable water their bodies lying dead in the fields, their bodies lying dead in the city streets, their bodies lying dead in mass graves. the earth, she drinks their blood. her children drink their blood. the planets came together; the scheming gods screamed with their contorted mouths and those screams mingled with the horns of the war men and the stampeding sound of the death march of the dead across the barren plains of america. all is silent with them now - all of this not even paper, not even dreams. it is a song told by a mouth full of dirt to the ghost lover with no body. the plains are quiet but for the wind and the horns lie rusted and disabused - without players. at the end of the world dream the mothers lived off food stamps and sold their kids across borders and oceans and their bodies are being used for experiments - their bodies are being sterilized, dissected, and subjected to different levels of light, heat, radiation, and electricity.

the word is pregnant with men who died in the womb; men who did not even speak; men who died with their mouths shut like tombs -

for the new ghetto is the mouth.

righteous readers, redeemers, truth tellers - i approach your crowd with knife drawn like how i approached the outskirts of paris in the dark with smoke coming up over the hills and the shadow of my memory burning below. i do not trust you, not one bit. it is only the gravediggers who behold the true reality. for alexander became dust, the buddha became dust; the woman down the street who baked seed bread for the neighborhood children became dust. we bit down on the matzo and became dust. elijah passed the whispering skull down through me and lit the hallway of my ribs with sacred candles and i have registered the foreign words that come chattering from its yellow teeth like storms of consciousness. i write them as a slave to god. i have done with the world.

so go down now to the ghetto, reader, that one where the lone window opens up against a brick wall - go down now and say your nonsense prayer. go and spit your prayer of hope to the bottom of the atlantic ocean with the slave ships and the unsold dead or spread them thin like ashes on the barren camp ground where there is no light. go down to the river and wash the wounds on your hands and feet clean - you damned and blind - for the fire of consciousness still burns in the hearts of men and in the heart of the earth like all things - beneath the shroud of oblivion.

for if you have demanded illusions like me like charging into war or sleeping on the bed of a lover who is there in your mind, and in your mind alone it is because the illusion is erotic and saves you from the grace of boredom. you have called on all the drama of the tempest all of this one act play of your bedroom window and the inner voices which command fire, thunder, and rain; you have braved the elements and charged into what is human only now to be a drop of consciousness. it is but a puddle of such drops as you that is your true self and in such a puddle drops cannot be distinguished.

it is this one act play where nothing has happened but the revolutions of suffering wracked upon the wheel of the mind - charging about the earth and proclaiming it world, charging about the body and proclaiming it self. here you spin upon the ladder of the damned things immersed in your chosen denial.

you, king of the flesh, have built pyramids like funeral pyres on this night of the earth; you, queen of the flesh, have leaned down to kiss king lazarus awake and alive as the moon eclipses the sun... arise! look upon your works! arise! pity of small dreams stitched together and lashed by time; revealed to be nothing but the madness, pure madness, the madness which sends one up out of bed on a winter’s morning or into town for something, anything other than this - the absolute reality of the moment without passage - the moment that goes nowhere, does nothing, and projects all things from its bosom:

the breast of eternal time, the god who collects the faces of men and wears them all for sport.

all apparitions, boiling blood, all dancing favors of the gods.

here, it watches madness run perched upon the page - the great vulture of all time mouth smothered with the meat of the used-to-be. are you not but a fingernail on this behemoth? an armpit hair or a louse?

i have sat in silence and heard no music but the planet clock hammer striking blows down upon the backs of humanity it rings like the blacksmith’s iron; it rings like the anvil of the gods casting time down on creatures of the flesh.

i have heard it ringing and have come to understand that this is what constitutes silence the breath of the universe as it expands and contracts - all birth and all death held in the black lungs of space pregnant with the primordial man who blunders along on all fours slowly suicided by the drag of force as it comes, creeping - disguised as time like a knife across the esophagus

for if i have exhumed the body of the universe and i have opened up the chest of the god with a thousand heads and a thousand eyes i have seen the hands and arms and legs of all of you torn off the chest and thrown in its body cavity like a mass grave. it is this memorial for loss which grows evermore and decays with each passing hour as the sun drags its burden across the sky - this trash heap of bodies burned by time.

i have not been born. there has been this consciousness thrown into body shaking its nerves and coursing the blood about meat. this consciousness has jarred the flesh to perform the will of Consciousness itself which discharged my form into materiality like an atom in a storm or a gust of wind.

it is in this way that i have washed up here tasked with meeting hermes on the eclipse night of the sun; tasked with making love to athene while she whispers the secret of my birthlessness into my ear - fleeting ear, fleeting nose, fleeting mouth - the mask of an actor who has taken shape in this greater play of wills cast about like die on the table of the gods - this planet of beings that walk about on hands and feet and talk of great dreams as the body dies.

for there is the will like the hungry child and the will like a nuclear weapon, one rendered shadow and memory by the other; in this violent symphony of organs the blood and the flesh course like an endless river through becoming - taking on many forms and destinies.

none of this dream of life remains; all of these so called people fade into ash and the smoke of the soul - wafting up into the rafters of the night sky all of this kingdom is touched and evaporated beneath the crushing weight of the sun, the moon, the stars. who is the man who has truly told time? for it is that man is the sundial of his own life; a sundial which turns by the power of the stars, turns and turns away forever into the dust of nothingness.

and so the dream has gone -

as consciousness takes form, dream and dream again into the breath of the child, the youth, the man, the waning moon and the glass that has lost all reflection - the dead moon night. the procession to the grave is not for dying, but for the exhalation of the soul returned to air and being. all of these actors so equally convinced of their staying power and immortality amongst the other faceless things. they have joined together on the stage to raise the stakes of life to impossible heights.

for life has always been this low, humbled thing; it knows nothing of exaltation and award. life has been toiling over the midday field with hat brim low over his sweating brow; seeding and enlightening his harvest of nutriments. all things go the way of the moon, you see, in these greater and lesser cycles of being where - if the reflection is just right - man might see something of himself in the scrying pool. if the light hits the water of his soul by way of the opened instrument man becomes nothing like man at all.

he has taken on another form, a form so much less than the tale of anything told by folk. he has become exactly the moon, exactly the wheat stalk, exactly the jasmine; exactly the dove and the caterpillar - which is to say, truly living and not apart from life. he has remarked upon separation with the doffing of his cap from his cart, carrying a few belongings as he draws away from the old town of human beings. he has played their game, traded among them, and finally, been broken open by the stars.

these men are artists of the soul; you call upon them, you call upon the stars - you call upon the donkey towing goods down the canal; you call upon the brush which hides enslaved men; you call upon the low tide which laps up island beaches; you call upon the mass graves of dead dogs and dead men. they are saints of no religion; they are not martyred for other men because they have left mankind altogether.

saturn and uranus have encountered one another in the sky and the sun remarks upon them, sweeping his rays across the child eater and the one who was dismembered by his son. they are related, of yore, yes - as they are now - as i write this manuscript. we, here, earthbound things catch wind of this celestial becoming as the moon passes through, traveling fast through the town in which saturn and uranus have met again for war. the man who has left the world behind embraces the moon and feels her like a lover - her embraces her motion so deeply that he has no need for desire. indeed, he has become the moon.

akephalos

these poems are sprung from my mouth by the violence of time. for if i am anything, even after all of this being razed by time i am an exile aware of my exile towing my body over the black hills, towing my body over the black hills of the flesh, over the black hills of the ocean, over the black hills of the sky - with a mad guitarist who strums as if to break open the earth. i have been tortured into this dance; my limbs obey and swing bone across the dirt and i dance, i dance as i must, with mad delight this dance of death blazes through the moment with my pain my pain that is etched into my skin, my pain that is etched into these poems, my pain that is etched into the dirt.

yes, for all of this i am glad.

all of these bodies compounded within me are but a grave mound all but a pile of exhausted things from which my soul has extracted materiality, extracted flesh and bone - all of this i have come into but for a moment then abandoned - all of these deathless things are the exhaust of the soul; the exhaust of suffering.

for if the soul is brought down to earth, it is brought down to do the work of the material plane; the work of it being wrenched from all things and into separation. i have called the body, this, i have called lovers, this, i have called my dreams of the world, this, Incompletions. spit of language, spit of sound, spit of images

which has swirled about my mind like a cauldron and held this consciousness in its mass like an infant. i am this lost word, this spinning sphere, lost from the pull of the gods.

i give all that i can; all that i can muster in these poems the total exertion of my physical body the total force of my soul that has been chased by these delusions of the mind like a sinner tortured by demons will burned into paper; will burned into flesh. for all of this is beyond nature, all of this is the bastard screams from the rack and conjured black magick of the mouth. the magicks of the soul move the mouth like a device. for now i move the mouth because i must, i grunt, i groan, i snarl and snuff like a pig i grunt and groan and twist the mouth about and wring these syllables into existence; i bewitch them with the force of my throat and larynx these wretched sounds -

i have stood in the yard of the lunatics; i have stood in the yard of the asylum and heard her children screaming from the barred windows and i have understood this to be the true language, i have understood this to be the truest reason. they march about in the yard chained to one another in a circle that churns like a ceaseless gear a gear broken from the world and thrumming with the mad chant like a vibratory generator; the live wire of the flesh threatens to spin the barbed wire fences into nonexistence. i came from this place because there was nowhere else to go and it was thus that i was mad; that i was dragged through life like the body of hector by a ceaseless urge a desperate urge that brought blows about my heart like a sledgehammer against my chest;

an electric machine which beat my heart into a frenzy and threw me up from the mud like the shadow of a man and now i am among you, desperate and mad and without reason but the screaming but the regimented meals, the hours of being under watch, the mad spirit in the flesh which stretches and contorts its face - for the whole body and its taut skin is the grinning face that does not fail to grin in the face of its fate which hovers in the air before it, grinning back out of the abyss of that which returns again and again to claim it from the flesh. it is this mad face that is on their flags; yes, this madness is sanity in this world, this madness is on the badges of the police officers and the military, this madness is on the legal documents and the ledgers which document the sold human beings, the slave human beings, the caged human beings this face is the blood stained cloth laid on the flesh like a veil as if to cover the violence; this face is the everyday word.

for i have heard words used for the sake of the word being used; i have heard words used to seal caskets and i have heard words used to execute children and dismember the body of violence like forgetting. for if these arms and legs and heads are gone and the flesh is stripped away it is all meat; it is all consumed and done away with by the stomach acid, the insects, the carrion, the scavenger worm of the earth who has come up on the body of all this pathetic and mad human struggle and swallowed it whole with incredible churning juices in its mouth that have dissolved all of this sad talking all of this sad talking from the mouths of those who have turned their backs to that which is the fate of all things. do you not now see this despair of language? this instrument that i use like the body that has been hollowed out of all things and raped of meaning this language that is like the earth, this language that is like a child - debased and dug up

again and again from an unmarked grave and animated with new parts, new flesh, and new desire - this wheel has turned deeper than infinity and into the core of the earth where the hermaphroditic genitals of adam kadmon are submerged, in the heat of the core of the earth and his feet are now in the pleiades and his head is gone to the starless black.

there is no myth now that can return the child there is no myth now that can return the head of adam and there is no myth now that can take the rape of language and the rape of the earth and twist back up the body and seal the tomb of the flesh - the myth cannot do this stitch work; only the fates can weave the soul into flesh, only the fates show us through the glass of time how the flesh breaks, how the heart breaks, how the soul is rent into sweet song even as it is pried from the flesh like a diseased organ; all of this taking and loss has compounded into precisely that which is truly human. it is in this way that man is finally exalted in his brokenness, finally now completely shattered; finally now completely returned to spirit like hercules sprung prometheus from the prison of the earth and hercules could not come about prometheus without first digging into the world; digging into the earth his fingernails scraping the flesh of the earth, the dirt flesh of the earth and even as hercules, all men - even as hercules kneels he is exalted and the sun has burned even hercules away.

who is to say that this is not a great joy? other have shied away in horror; other have shied away in shame. i have put my knees to the earth and given all that i had the madness to presume in this world

to presume that anything in this world might be taken unto myself.

i transcend you with my song

man, not even ape i rise above you and give meaning to life on earth

miserable wretched, huddled mass in the fury of your imagined god

i engage the force of the universe steel upon my back steel upon my mouth -

i have called upon the mad fury of the sun and the calamitous black of the moon to sculpt the oblivion star of the night in my chest.

in the eclipse of man, in the death of his abused language which burns upon the pyre of the flesh i stand on the edge of consciousness the sea-cliff's edge looking down upon the waters below.

the first men, the first burning things they have clawed at fear they have clawed at the coming night with all the terror of dreaming; i have seen the desperation in their eyes, the coins upon their unopened eyes and the fire, the searing flesh becoming smoke.

this is their legacy: mad genocides, meaningless genocides and the meaningless words that come - brief swallows

of extermination. nightfall, nightfall, nightfall, nightfall. you come again to claim their empty souls.

tell me, what is the meaning of man! man who is shattered and reborn even today and today rises like a starving refugee released from the catch of Time's slip; cast down from the heavens a falling man, a suicided man an exiled man, naked, headless man bearing man in the daylight cradle like a runt, a starry child made in Time’s image an effigy of clay shot from the earth’s womb; baked in the collapsing starlight returned to the predictable night left to die in the cold, alone in the cold solemn night bodiless night and the expanse -

tell me, what is the meaning of man who rises and sets like the sun? this life of man a gone candle this life of man even so soft as spring rain?

i tell you, the meaning of man is to die and die absolutely: to die a black death while the heart still beats.

i was born under black eclipse to suffocate the rising sun to strike man from his books like an apocalypse of sound i came to render the genius of man rubble - to reveal the genius of man unbound

wandering bombed out city of the mind.

for when man is ruins and truly ruins and he is lost unto everything man gains himself entirely as he retrieves his organs from the black nothing of the final reality the existence beyond man. for when he steps into that place he is no longer man - he is transformed.

you - leave the dead body behind; you - leave the dead mind, and away from this place! gone from this drunken speech which has made fools of us both. gone from this lack of sense and find the body - find the true body - the essential language of the soul.

the world of men is cruelty and violence. you stay because it fulfills your desire or otherwise because you are convicted this flesh - the jailer of your life, come away from the gates of the mouth and let us fly, wicked and eternal in our wickedness,

for in that final nonexistence the soul is at one and simultaneous. here is the moment of all moments; the Time ablaze with absolute meaning. come into this moment, take my hand - and come down into the flesh, truly circuitous caverns of the flesh pits of the flesh

and we shall retrieve that which you are.

for it is not this, dreamer. it is not this world and these things which you touch with your fingertips and these things that you hold in your palms. it breathes deeper, towing the ancient sea hard and fast in the pit of the lungs the soul is a ferryman of the red waves of coursing blood; deeper down and in we shall go.

now is the time to see inside of the body and by this i mean to truly see inside the body; that which resides within the flesh like a master's created language which holds the soul like a key within abyssal chambers of being. for the body, too, is a secret word an utterance of sound and sound alone; the body cannot be written.

the poets rage for the hidden genius of the body and grapple with it on this plane to wring secrets from its mouth like a dishrag. in the deposits of the body are the raw ore which must be brought to temperature and sculpted the hot metal of the body rent by the blacksmith of the soul.

it is in this way that the rune of the body is shorn stripped down from the ash of that which is naught and remains, irrevocable stone - without element and impenetrable by force. it is the true city, the great empire that cannot be done away with by the sands of time or war. a thousand great armies cannot unseat consciousness from its true throne.

for if i have brought my body up to trembling ecstasy and i have felt the mad suicides

course up through my chest and wring my neck with desperate hands i have played the scales of feeling, not with my tongue but with the instrument of the flesh. i have felt the heaven resident in the depths of the frozen lake of the cratered hell of the body and i have pulled the sword from the lake and cleansed the blade in the fires of agony and used this blade to cleave the head of desire from the neck of meat. now this sword moves against thought and is, itself fiery being.

the steel is the cord that holds the trembling flesh upright - that which gives one the courage to stand and the wisdom to kneel in accord with Time’s demand. it is the coil that springs up and alights the temple of the mind and descends into the depths of the flesh to draw up water from the well of the primordial consciousness the well that flows with blood and being. there is no idea that can approach this, the fundamental reality.

i move the poetry into the fold of my own intimate being. damn these old poets and their tales of sorrow! enough of all that, enough of all that noise. the age of the poets is dead; it has burned down like a wick and wax down to the table of the world - the table that spins madly, entranced by the whirling fruit of the gods.

come into the fold, song! breed with me, dance hard and fast to my hip; come into me, that place where all else is abandoned. come dance this dagger dance this dance of brutality.

for it is in the flesh that all things are born. i do not need concepts to stomp this dead rhythm nor do i lean on tombstones, no dirge, no lament: for i am regretless like i had not lived; i am regretless and without birth.

this is the truth of all your so-called love born sorrows; this is the truth of your pocket miseries and your crumbling empires of waste - there is no human creature and your world is a pit of dreamers; your world is a grave. i do not write love poems. i do not write marches. i do not write but stampede into time, madrushing into life with the full force of the blood - do not write, exist! for i have seen the body pulled in all directions and the iron spike and the chapel doors and the end of holy places.

i implore you, madness! lusty cousin of history all your red chested glory of youth and the banging of the gavel knife into the wooden block of being slashing away at your sallowed, sunken flesh

time has turned the tables on your precious love and she has eaten your fingers, your hands, your arms and at last your precious lungs. see her tongue, her footprints upon your chest! all your desire - come down from that dream! empty the barrel of wine out onto the street - this playhouse where your lover performs inexhaustible surgeries. come feel the draft from the shutters - a new dawn has risen - a terrible inhumanity.

for i am the mad poet, indeed but mad in the most lucid ways. i have called upon madness and i have commanded these things to the bloodbeats - all wounded, all you players, dance under this bloodthirsty dagger! dance upon your grave! the sportive killer awaits in this hall the sportive killer of time; i come, i dance, i dance, i dance! who can move this way but the mad ones? who have done the road of exile, done it all in so far into the concentric circles of the flesh. you - come about the stage and see this trapped way, this incarnate way now come, and do not bury the agony. this world is woven with threads like buried agonies - whole lives submerged in boredoms and bullfight afternoons - whole nights of longing, green liquor and the conversation of liars. swing, pendulum, swing! it is the slow murder of human affairs; a useless agon’s song.

do not go this way - i implore you -

for the water is dark and deep from whence i came and yet, few travel there. the worldly observe the fool as he returns from the ageless place, resurrected from the mud of the body - now a true poet, wearing the inverted fool’s face; they observe from the fold of this dead time: from beyond the veil of sight. in the times of war and religion we went without; now we must go within.

you are that old prophet and that young woman - Wisdom; you will die in the rose garden Mother! Mother! they will kill me there, in the rose garden where the old man strikes his wooden cane upon the frozen ground!

come into her and exchange your eyes for true vision, true sight sight of the hands that have become the eyes sight of the mouth that has become the slip of consciousness; there athena whispers through white curtains on this, island of shadow on this - cave of darkness night where the planets weave the being incarnate forever impenetrably changed. go down and ask her to send you a sweet song of poetry down through your veins and perhaps she will oblige then send you on your way.

go - journey! do not wait any longer; do not waste your life on stories of the living - do not wait on another moon. take up the mast and tie yourself to it absolutely; take up the sword and ask for a true vision of being - delivered unto the quiver of your body. it must be done, even if you are mad;

even if all is lost. go! do not succumb to these pleasant miseries - these days that pass like blows and blights; these days that slip away like thieves between eternal nights! this body must be moved and changed form again; there isn’t time to waste. you must sculpt the sun with your hands inside your chest: take up this wet clay and utter the true words which shake the senses into movement -

you must truly find the utterance of the soul.

for your dance is the fire dance and the deeps of song where the elements are bridged: the fire caverns of water; the floods of air, the earth’s same maiden language. the soul is that crucial element the element of the compounds. it is the essence which you have bourne and bourne again on this promised journey between bodies like outposts of suffering. so dance! and beat the drum, she’ll play the griefstruck fifer’s sound together, you call the seed of man - ‘awaken - up, poor dreamer! arise! up from the ground!’

the everyman

the everyman, he strives for wealth and power and fame the everyman - he does not understand the will - life’s only game.

in his agitated pursuit to come into other things, he loses his own way of being like a bird might lose its wings.

a man without his song is like every man before - he grovels over silly things and frets before death’s door.

the everyman, he runs from rage to glad elation - he is the sole subject; he is submitted entirely to sensation.

for the stars build the seas above - in their impassioned trance the chickens cluck and the buds bloom onward! the everyman comes to pass.

for the chief trait of the everyman is that he knows something of life you can pick him out in a crowd, his voice is loud; he’s buttoned down the everyman is always right.

perhaps he has studied the books of man perhaps he has not at all - but you can spot the everyman by his obsessed and fleeting call.

he calls out to the spotless life

to fulfill all his waking dreams he sits and waits, anticipates his mind a simple screen -

for upon the glass of the mind his entire world projects revolving around the everyman his life but a fleeting speck.

see the everyman run and chase down every dream but when death comes knocking, the everyman begs and he pleads:

‘there was not enough time to be human after all!’ death laughs a throaty laugh and says, ‘alas - you were never born, never born at all.’

the everyman dreams the human, dreams the world, dreams the call - of man to man and other man mere shadows that dance upon the wall.

and so the play of his life draws to curtain - on this, his final night the tossed off myth of the everyman burns small, but it burns bright.

for the everyman is spun by greater wills and greater fate - pushed from mud to man and back again a blade of grass is the everyman’s true estate

he views the world as something conquered, or to be seen and yet the everyman claws at the painted walls of his constructed dream.

the being of all beings of which man is merely one feels the everyman bursting at the seams; then nothing - all is said and all is done.

the soliloquy of the everyman is short and bittersweet - the idiot stands upon the stage and doffs his cap to the stars his movement - all complete.

the carousel has run up to the last of the lightbulbs fizzing out; all of the brigadiers who were harassing the prize-man have run off with the local girls to neck out by the abandoned gold mine. the sea of my life has crashed up on the pier and rattled the wood of my desire, i would hide there from the sun or else collect seashells and smooth stones from the matted seaweed hair of the mother who has loved me and let me go - the mother who has set me off into the blue-black else to match wits with a whirlpool, an angry god, or other women who claim to love me like she used to do.

why else would i be despondent if not for this failed attempt at life? i came through and rolled the dice with the few coins i was born into - and i gambled my legacy away on a bum hand. i was shuffled out of the table room of the heavens and out into the mess hall of god’s green earth - with the rest of you losers, cheaters and opium addicts.

oh, i am the type to snatch the pipe from your mouth; to paint the sky blue to get into your bedroom, or else tell you lies you already know - hustlers of desire all, born to early graves - loiterers outside shops and diners asking for girls’ names! for if i can sleep here tonight, surely i’ll be able to tell you a story of a love gone wrong, or else a man who sailed into the back pages of a newspaper for some two bit deed - like cheating a hospital out of back-payments or skipping town on his wife. this is the way that life goes, all - miseries, coitus, then the predictable disaster of old age, or else some other bad way out.

so do not blame me now if i smoke the pipe or otherwise play the fool! if i commit myself a drunken mess and forget my name, or even forget my role in this silly little game.

for i am played up and out of life - it is all smashed up like a car wreck or driftwood. see that i do not get a splinter when i stagger back into my body is all! some change or perhaps a smoke? i won’t be here for long.

let me tell you a story about quick love, or the methadone clinic down the street, or staggering out of your apartment into the sun yet again - and growing tired of what the world’s got to offer. when even pleasure has gotten old, what is there to do? read the lines on your palm, a rider deck, the planets of today - all rolled out like marbles by a drooling baby? i’ll laugh and tell you something good that the fates told me

really it was just the barber down the street complaining about a hangover, but, ultimately, he’s glad that he got laid. isn’t that a gas! we’ll keep it simple out here with life and love for awhile - i’m out at the liquor store with t debating which bottle to buy, and i’m so drunk it's getting hard to see.

isn’t all that enough for you - all that rolled up into one life? if i’ve counted up all the moments they take up all the fingers on my hands and all the toes on my feet, and maybe a couple of pages in this notebook. i’ve got the same two pairs of pants and i’m wearing these same white undershirts with holes in the sides. i haven’t gone anywhere but in my mind! but what a restless journey that’s been. i’d rather call it quits to some starlight tavern and pick fights with the gods. this world is full of misinterpretation.

i’ve taken everything as a sign and i’ve been played by my own language like a whore. if i took all the romps in bed and all the poems and stuck them together on a park bench they’d call the cops. perhaps it's better to be alone!

so call the war heroes back, and the ironworkers and that beautiful provincial girl with the red hair and close up the late night grocers but let me buy some beer first - call them all up and i’ll throw away my life of song - i’ve already forgotten how to play the guitar, and i’ve forgotten the impish passion that flows up from the feet and i’ve forgotten my aspirations and dreams. ah - books! paintings! what of them? what has life afforded me but mad blows and a few dollars here and there to wring my life out in a bar or alone at my writing desk?

it is a joke to be a poet, or anything else even a man to sit around and watch the myths pop up now and again like hiccups of the universe - odysseus on the corner, athena in my bed, and the hydra in my heart, i’d rather now just not read and shut up my mind like a forgotten chasm or else that abandoned gold mine. sweet forgetting! i’ve soured on it all - like cheap wine in an alleyway and the same old pair of lips - the same old pair of eyes that scour me from the black sky and the salt shaker of dying stars. leave me alone there! i yell at the rest of the drunks, my old lovers, players, the lot of them splitting powders in the bathroom and rushing about making plans for life - they don’t even hear me, all wrapped up in the leaving. i’m gone - the night like a cloak, despairing a little.

it comes and goes like a sunday rain - looking out from an apartment that isn’t yours, unhappy, and unable to make a great change in your life. there’s the clothes that need washing, the papers that need organizing, and of course, the lack of money. i could ask where the poetry’s gone - but i just don’t believe i ever found it - not for one moment. the poems walked out on me too; i sprung them from the air and they found their typeface and sneered up at me from the page. it's like that - youth.

for if i’ve left the gold mine behind, the days at the river - getting drunk there too, or else being a layabout what else is there? beyond the asylum and making love you could go out and get blown to bits in some meaningless war or settle into some domestic daydream and just forgo the whole living altogether. i can’t do a half assed job of it, living it would be like a botched suicide or leaving out the part where it all goes bad. children like that part of the story the best - if it doesn’t go bad, how can it get right in the end? well, i’ve taken so many blows to the head, chest, and mouth - i’m like caesar without the power, without the drama, and certainly without the name. there’s no great downfall when you never left the inhumanity of it all - i never came out of the disbelief - certainly not long enough to pretend it all exists.

THE WILL

The Will is but a cosmic (total) force comprised of forces, Consciousness comprised of consciousnesses; Being comprised of beings. It is in this sense that the Will is the entirety of the equation of force, including that of energy and spirit. As such, it is incalculable.

It is that the Will, as these forces therein as Force, is simultaneously humankind and the force which transmutes human nature from within and without - unbound. It is in this way that the body is, itself, a marker of the ‘end’ of the physical and the ‘beginning’ of the spiritual - and this is a transition on energetic terms and energy alone.

The forces exerted in and throughout and upon the body- container pressurize, heat, cool, and transform the Being and the beings therein, the Will and the wills therein; the Consciousness and the consciousnesses therein. This is to say that, practically, the only work of the human being in the Existence at large is to change consciousness; this consciousness is changed whether the human being enacts the individual will or otherwise.

It is in this way that the Will and Consciousness are utterly inhuman; yet are compounds with ‘the human’ as it were, or cosmic man. The depiction of Vishvarupa in the Bhagavad Gita approaches this phenomenon, but yet, the heads, arms, and legs of the universal form of Krishna contain all animals, all creatures, all plant life; furthermore, all energetic existence. This is to say, absolutely everything - visible and invisible to the human eye, alike.

In this mode of Consciousness, value and meaning are utterly and absolutely levelled. Consciousness is the final paradox; the ultimate reality - in the sense that it perpetually exists, and yet is perpetually transformed by Force over Time. Here, Time means simply, the movement of forces across and through space - happening perpetually,

concurrently; without a remotely conceivable (read, ‘human’) ‘beginning’, ‘end’, or delineable causality.

It is in this way that all events in the universe are un- sourceable, and yet, they utterly transform Being and Consciousness without end - perhaps with some delay regarding the speed of information as it traverses the stars; the earth, otherwise.

The ancients understood this principle quite clearly, and devoted significant time and energy (‘civilization’) in order to come into better and more advanced communion with the happenings of the cosmos at large; these happenings brought down to earth by fixed stars, energetic spaces (like the Sacred Hoop of the Lakota); the paths of the Sun and the moon about earth and the stars. These cosmic energies, both within the earth as dormant, swirling, explosive and implosive vibrations (volcanoes, earthquakes, and so forth) - and entering this body-container from space - hold energy capable of transforming the human being entirely.

Here, we must ask if there has ever been a human being, or just this meat sack, or incarnation that has been brutally sculpted by the passage of Time; yet unknown forces of Will and Consciousness (both ‘man-made’, like war; cosmic, invisible) - which perpetually batter man about in the tempest of all things - creating him, with his own individual will (however small), from the ceaseless ashes of what was.

The root of all things we perceive as ‘human’, ‘self’, or ‘in the world’ is this cosmic movement of forces with and through the earth and its elements - heating and cooling them, swirling them; whipping them into a riotous frenzy; calming them like a current, or the waves of the sea. It is like this, too, with the human and the emotions and the feeling of the human. The human reaction, as well as the human inspiration - are subject to, and due from, these cosmic happenings which man has mistakenly sifted into his own narratives and histories. Man sees and knows nothing of this

beyond his limited vision, which peeks out from behind the fury of his ever-changing consciousness.

Therefore, when we speak of ‘the human being’ it is best to do so out of the awareness and acknowledgement that the human being does not exist but as for a moment, a mere container which holds a spark of consciousness, a flame which is stewed and cultivated within the flesh to a fervor and transfigured - with, without, and beyond the body. Even the ‘man’ we have determined cannot be said to be the same man of ten years ago - as the very body and bounds of his conscious awareness have shifted drastically: both due to the technological advancements shot out from his hands, feet, and mind, as well as the situations man finds himself in (situations that he must utterly change in order to adapt himself to; thus leave the cloak of ‘the former’ man) due to the changed world, changed earth, and changed cosmos.

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THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

There is, of course, like in all things - the end of philosophy. What this entails is the end of the thought; furthermore, the necessity for the continuation of thought in order to discern the cosmic order - or the manner and matter in which things are arranged and existent (or otherwise) in Being. The end of philosophy is the end of movement; the return to understanding as being in Being without the possibility of movement. It is a returning home, in which there is no longer homelessness. This position is a place of gladness - like Odysseus after his twenty years at sea and the subsequent proofs which reunite him with Penelope. This place of home is the place of being enthroned in Being - indistinguishable. It is in this way that the beggar and Siddhartha are indistinguishable; in this way that the beggar and Heraclitus are indistinguishable. For it is that it is all bums and fools gathered on this earth - some more convicted of their purpose than others; this is necessarily so. Like the philosopher, all of these beings have that task of coming about Being by way of their respective tasks; like Hercules, we go about our lives to, always, return.

The task of the philosopher is the task of the artist who has only himself for a character (Novalis), which is to say that the philosopher stands atop the pedestal of humanity and fashions himself out of himself - and this fragment by Novalis helps us understand our own respective positions in the cosmos. For we are all engaged in this philosophical task of journeying through being to return to Being in such a fashion that we might understand our beingness and the relation of this limb of spirit to the whole; to, in this sense, understand the body of Being. The vision of Vishvarupa is given to Arjuna upon the battlefield of his life and he understands his task; even if this task is going to war with all things, incarnate. For it is this being human that is only a step in the process of the cultivation of the consciousness; the philosophical journey shows us this step unfolding in real time - the dance of Being and Becoming.

I can only understand this dance by coming into embodiment; this is not the same as inhabiting ‘the body’ proper - but rather, the incorporation of the physical, the intellectual, the spiritual - into a body of works - which is to say, the actions of the being by way of and as Becoming. For all of these actions are contributive; ultimately, these actions cannot be into Being, but rather unto Being by way of this being coming into Becoming. There is that last step up at the gates of Being which can only be accomplished by way of the relinquishing of all things; the shattering of the chalice, or the cup which holds even the soul. It is in this way that the philosophy must, at last, go mad through itself

like Nietzsche, Artaud, and van Gogh have gone; they have gone by way of the final madness into Being.

‘He who has once understood that in madness alone lies man’s completion, is thus led to make a clear choice not between madness and reason, but between the lie of ‘a nightmare of justifiable snores’, and the will to self-mastery and victory,’ (Bataille).

This is how it goes for all, fools born into this world and climbing through it until they reach the world concept itself

which is also, at last, the self concept. Like Siddhartha, like Hercules, the philosopher has accumulated the embodied understanding by way of the task of weighing death in one hand and consciousness in the other - and must relinquish this embodied understanding at the door of days, or the end of all things and their ceaseless procession into eternal return and becoming. For to confront Being is to confront the end of changing time (the conceptual reality determined) and, ultimately, the end of even becoming as the condition of perpetual changedness. It requires a shattering; a shattering unto the completion of man enthroned in Being - an entire inhumanity which incorporates the limited humanity of the enspirited vessel of the human body. The final movement of Becoming is that in which becoming yields to that which becomes - the eternal Being. The Adam Kadmon of man is, at last, changeless and yet his body also
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processes change. There is nothing to know about this entrance which is also an exit but that incorporation which is also a dis-encorporation - a total loss of that which ‘was’ which is also the enthronement of the spirit within Being as momentous whole. What flesh thing would not go mad there? For the flesh is like an infant of Being - it knows little of and yet is of. It is in this way that we are children until we are children no longer.

For the fool who has returned truly to his foolishness is like a poet who has woken up from the dream of his being a poet, or a philosopher who has woken up from the dream of his being a philosopher. The role is gone and along with it is the entirety of the work. However, the changedness remains

as a road traveled; a life lived, a process undergone by way of the furious desire unto Being. What can poetry or philosophy do but lead the being up the steps to face the vision of Being? Is this not what we demand of our arts? For no state or medium can accomplish this but the one who demands it out of life. Otherwise life can be lived in any sort of way; in the company of things, in the company of affairs, and in the company of collectively determined realities. It can be lived in the comfort of the accepted truths which compose this world. It is the demand of the philosopher (who, ultimately, is the poet who demands) that elevates the life-journey to one of enthronement in consciousness; one that comes to each moment in the possibility of being totally, irrevocably changed. This process is, of course, a rolling of the die of life, splayed out on the table; risking madness and death and everything - coins which reveal themselves (and us) to be nothing but glistening stars before the grand face of Being. I risk madness just like I risk a summer’s day. For what is madness but a summer’s day? What is madness but the whirling of the sun? This is the work of philosophy; it is a medium which is barely written and often lived - a medium which demands the transformation of consciousness within the vessel of the flesh. The philosopher demands this of his own life and inspires others to demand it of their own.
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The great hopelessness of living Is a drifting ocean night The deep swirls; One can do nothing But stare into the bowl of life.

All of man is trapped within it - The great beast that has eaten the stars. The beast churns and churns his clay; Unto being man is discharged.

Where can man go but within himself? Within the darks and deeps To the sails of this forsaken night; To become oarsmen without sleep! Mankind is but this - a ferryman of the night; He sails between the domains Where day becomes from shadow Alight.

For if the one who mans the mast Upon a full moon’s night Sees the light crest into shade He has, at last, gone into sight. But if the one who mans the mast Upon a dead moon’s night Climbs down from the nest and greets the deep He sleeps forevermore In heavenly delight.

It is a tune no man can capture; A tune he can only say As man’s breath fades into the mountain - smoke Colored blue and black and gray. The oarsman partakes in water; He alone knows the way - The way all Being keeps: It is a way kept freely Yet bound by that which is. There, man flirts with his immortal soul -

His true-natured bliss.

The one who sails alone Sails on forevermore - With sea in all direction And no hope - no hope for shore. There is no mass, or die cast That will draw him back To the world of things For there, in the infinitude, man grows his spirit’s wings. Unable to touch earth; Condemned to sea and sky, Man’s heart burns and burns - And further he shall fly, Til he reaches fata morgana - Where the sea meets the sky; There he will find a vision of himself A vision of being denied. In the true face of man Dwells the earth, the sea and sky; The ether which colors his blood Draws him deeper still - Deeper into the night.

For what can man do in this world? But chase the endless dreams Drawn to him in discourse; Painted upon his fiery scene - He dreams and dreams and dreams And fails to touch his sight; He falls into himself: Into the endless night.

For all the pleasures in the world could but prove Man’s apparition to time: He dances among the shadows His dream to meaning Denied! Where can man go, where can he live, where can he hide? As his world crumbles about him - all to ruins, all to pride.

What of man now? But an imagined, wicked thing - A vessel through which the soul will move, condemned to spin and sing Among the world of birds, the world of sea, the world of sky

The vision of man ruined; His dream to life, denied.

For when the sea of living has all dried up Through desert he will ride All wrapped up in rags; All he owns beside. He stumbles upon a ruined city; upon its gates inscribed: ‘The word lies down in stone to rest, Down in stone at last.’

The infant manned the rudder; The child was held fast - The man looks out for promised land; The soul becomes the pass Between the whirling of the deeps And the sky that whispers to the spirit of man Charging him about his grave - From sea to soil and back again: He wanders, Calling out salvation’s name.

But what good will salvation do When the gods have used him up? The infinitude comes calling; She calls to take his cup - Despoiling him of blood - she scatters his soul about the stars Her foot upon his corpse She proves to him the fleeting world - His fleeting prison’s bars. For all sentence is up; the gates of the law have shuttered fast The decision has been made - Up in smoke, he has been cast.

So what of man? What of him? This nonexistent thing - So convinced of himself - He frets until he sings. Where can this poor man go? This nothing, moaning thing? So convinced of his fleeting suffering He frets until he sings.

Look upon the inscription! Where the artist stepped and laughed - It is writ upon all mankind: ‘The word lies down at last.’

Wracked

What does it matter to be a poet When the infernal screams? The wisdom of Sophia Brings the poet to his knees She whispers ever-sweet Of man’s unending plight Then takes her wings, Abandoning him Unto the endless night.

She stands about as he purgates With the old prophet in tow His philosophies rattled out As she dances down below, Holding his head upon a silver plate – The king of kings’ show.

Come unto the godhead, Come one, come all indeed - The words dispelled like bodies; Souls sunken into trees. For if man has left his mark He has left his mark beneath the ground - The forests gather inward; Word dissipates to sound.

For this is what Sophia has told me; Her wisdom I merely convey - The poet is not once a free man; The poet is always a slave. He dutifully scribes the passions As they have writ him - Fierce and bold; They writhe about his body And depose once tale is told. It is like this with the daemon, Of the poet, of the man

The dance of death manipulates his tongue And fathers his desperate hand.

He is wracked upon the wheel The poet - like all the rest - But with some sight below He warns us of the coming test: It is to come in days, Or centuries for some - That which pits us up against our fate, The soul’s face must be sung. For it is in terror That we face the primordial scene - Man’s flailing in the midst Of tempest and calamity. How many men claimed themselves, One to one and whole alone Who were then claimed by the mouth of Death - Made throat, arm, and knucklebone? Let their lament go on; The world turns like so - The lover must take the poet’s hand And go on down below.

Like Hercules the lover charges Through task and task replete Chasing song, red-faced and strong While it sings a nightingale’s beat. Hymns to the night all - they proceed, Marching about the stage Til the poet’s grand soliloquy Then all go on their way.

Now watch Salome dance! How she keeps her precious time; Her hips sway and her lips Are touched with wine. Who now is to say That the poet is not drunk, just like the fool? When the poet plays the commanded song

He is without peer or rule.

A poet is a jester, a drunk, a beggar What can he offer man? But a story to ease the sufferings Placed into his trembling hand. But perhaps there is more to the poet More than meets the eye - For some of us have gone below And returned with uncertain prize.

Hallo! Here’s a poem Shot out from the chute of the mouth; A pretty little rhyme, A song and dance - Sent from above the neck.

Hallo! You poets out there Writing your ballads of love and shame and regret - Laughable poems all! You drunks in the corner, Reaching for the jar.

If the poetry does not demand all of man What good does it do? Glad that it pleases your palate; Gives the galley attitude!

All that raucous show In the bars and saloons, The slabs of entertainment For the officers, for the whores Run on, play the man! Play to the world’s song - All glad lies true with belief - Then who could prove them wrong?

Ah - but man could be transformed! What of that purpose, once seen? No, None of that! He returns to his pleasant dream.

For the work of the poet requires sweat; Iron and blood - The work of the poet requires utter destruction; The work of building all that’s good. All that effort? Not for me!

For the culture makes a convenient play;

There is place enough for you and you - I stand on one man’s chest and another Stands upon me too. Some coin for me; perhaps, if you’re lucky, Some coin for you too.

For without a coin, what fun could be had? What women would come to sing and dance; How could the beer run flat? Alas, there’s work here for highwaymen too - Work here among the many Who really are the few.

For I am the broker - The one with deals to be sold. Man? What of him? Tell him to come and pay in gold! The poet sits here, a remainder, To lament the purpose lost - But I pay no stock in these fools, As I have found my sauce! The poet about the cauldron, Cultivating tender brew - Come and have a taste… Just kidding! None for you; none for you!

For this age has missed out on poetry As the next is aught to do - Too busy out and chasing The next pleasure; the next wretched ghoul. Spectres all - wave farewell into the night! Until we next meet; I hope forever until that point. For I am tired of these quarrelsome creatures Men all and to a point - They do what other men have done, then out! Boring falsity they appoint.

Now the poet has divulged into very simple rhyme To talk to children such as you

Since you cannot understand the complexities That the poet elucidates in his brew. The subtlety of flavor Is lost to man, buffoon - So now I will serve you, simply A two ingredient stew!

The poet owns a tavern With a door that's trampled down Drunkards all about; Barmaids sleeping on the ground. A house of ill-repute, That’s what poetry has become - It says nothing of man But, merely, what's on his tongue! Spit it out! Spit it out, all of you - Write it down on a piece of paper Or sing it for a coin or two. An industry of whores, all singing in endless fugue - Bring them all on, bring them out; I’ll spit on all one hundred and two! All lined up to play balderdash With what's left of the poet’s name - They ridicule the position; Debase it all the same!

For if I am to call you poets, I am to call you fools - Literary illiterates, With common attitudes! You have gone on all about Hawking words like they are cards If I played my hand, you’d understand Absolutely nothing at all!

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AUFHEBEN & HIEROS GAMOS: THE POET WHO HAS COME INTO SPIRIT OR YEATS, HOLDERLIN, AND THE MOON

‘The system was basically one of opposites, where these two triangles… where one is moving in absolute counter rotation to the other, where one - in the words of Heraclitus

“lives the other’s death and dies the other’s life”; so as one gets wider the other gets smaller…’ - William Irwin Thompson

‘The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.’ - Carl Jung

‘Love, the new moon, grows slowly, stage by stage; We should progress like that, deliberately, with patience. I hear the new moon whispering, “Impatient fool!” It is only step by step you climb to the roof. Be a seasoned cook, let the pot boil little by little; a stew cooked in mad haste tastes terrible.’ - Rumi

‘But in the concept of the unity of the One, such that, among the harmoniously united, one as well as the other is present in the point of opposition and union, and this IN THIS POINT THE SPIRIT IS FEELABLE IN ITS INFINITY.’ - Friedrich Holderlin

‘That quarter where all thought is done Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?’ - W.B. Yeats

‘Even at the level of a love relationship what is implied is a surrender of two personal egos to the inspiration of transcendent feelings which are essentially impersonal. Love expresses itself through the lovers, for real Love is a cosmic undifferentiated principle of power which simply focuses itself within the “souls” of human beings who reflect its light… Man strives hard to achieve great things through daring adventures, but a moment comes when all that really matters is to present a calm mind upon which a supernal light may be reflected.’ - Dane Rudhyar

‘Aside I turn to the holy, mysterious, unspeakable Night.’ - Novalis

This essay will be rather difficult to write, as it requires an absolution of words in the paradoxical union of their flesh and their spirit. It is the dance of the moon and sun - whereupon they shine total illumination or the total light of the black star of darkness - the eclipse of the sun and the eclipse of the moon upon that path which is the gyrating transformation of all things by way of the turning of the celestial spheres called Becoming. This dance of Being and Becoming is, of course, eviscable to man only by way of the everdeepening intensity of feeling exposed to the poet, or the one who is bled through by consciousness as it turns and turns itself - like a screw or Yeats’ stair - down into the flesh and up into the cosmos. Of course, this dance is never more apparent to man and his like than in the act of shared sex, or the consummation of love between two lovers; the shared expression of intimacy which threatens the mutual elimination of two individuals to make way for the wedded whole. It is in this dance of the sex, when engaged to the fullness of the trance like state at which individual being is gone from the act and replaced wholly with a sort of permeated, or dual made unified consciousness in action - that we might speak of a sort of Becoming which evisces the being-individual from his roots and into Being as a collected unity of primordial and personal, historical and mythological modes.

This work can be described never so clearly as the unity of the opposites - the sun and the moon, the masculine and the feminine, the light and the dark, the blackness and the whiteness - a unity of interpenetrative impulses - which at the height of their interpenetration are indistinguishable. This is what Yeats would call the dawning of a new mythological age, or a new archetypal era in which new symbols, new myths, and new meanings are evisced to man in a paradigmatic shift of consciousness which turns about the perpetual absolution of history and language - the oblivion afforded to each new birth - which maintains yet a primordial stream of memory of that dreamed age from

whence it was dreamt. This obliteration, again and again, is a sort of deathness which has been worked around the world in the charting and mythologization of moon phases; the sort of action and physical work that the moon phases do about consciousness on this earth - even in the most literal sense of working with the waters. Coming again into the quarters - itself an archetypal number as discussed in the myth of the sphinx and in the four directions of the Lakota - this seeding, or birth of consciousness (here, we say ‘the new moon’; even the solar eclipse), the first quarter or waxing, the full moon, or illumination of consciousness (at its extremity, even the lunar eclipse); the second quarter or waning; returned to seeding of the consciousness. This rapid movement of the moon phase - of which there are technically twelve (again, of three and four - of the square and triangle within the concentric circles of infinitude) - divide up the year of man; too, with the sphinx, the years of his life - and too, with Yeats and the esoteric theorists of Time - the ages of man proper. This sort of realization occurs with Yeats, as it does with Holderlin - as and in a deeply esoteric, internal process which is the poesis of each man in relation to an ever expanding relationship of awareness as to the turning of the gears of the cosmos - out from his respective, local condition (the Celtic and German mytho-political space of his era, proper) - into a historical awareness of this, his place in history (what Simone Weil would call statera facta corporis); through and simultaneously eso and exoterically, into and out of consciousness into the paradox, the divided and split world of the collective consciousness and unconsciousness by and through which man is formulated - both as his conception of himself, his histories, his languages; his points of relation; as his primordial river of soul through which consciousness emerges in a brief fire (with Dostoevsky) in moments of terrible beauty - moments which threaten to destroy the incarnate form altogether. It is this delicate dance of body and spirit, soul and form, which is done about by Holderlin in his essay When the poet is once in command of the spirit…, whereby Holderlin theorizes about that same movement Hegel terms ‘aufheben’, of the sublimation of the

interpenetrative impulses, or the ultimate crossing, of union, of Yeats’ black and white triangles in a perfect balance - as that which composes his Unity of Being. Here, nothing more than a cross of Being and Becoming - of the flesh and the soul of eternity.

II.

This is a groove, or a striking of the bell of the gears through and for which Yeats uses the phases of the moon to deduce a perpetual transformation of man by her influence: ‘When, if the tale’s true, / The Pestle of the moon / That pounds up all anew / Brings me to birth again… Of golden king and silver lady, / Bellowing up and bellowing round, / Till toes mastered a sweet measure’; concentrically concurrent in the massive Time of the turning of the larger cosmic gears which - from the point of view of the incarnate being, flesh-bound under the material sway of earth - too act as fantastic clocks ticking a time of inconceivable breadth for one who is born to die in a century’s time - albeit time enough to see the sway of great change both on the earth as the world; in man’s own history; in his own soul - if he proceeds down that inward way. This cosmic realization, for Yeats, is concurrent with his own intimate spellbinding of self with other into Being; one induced by and with the automatic writings of his wife, Georgiani Hyde-Lees. It is almost as if there has been a pact of the soul between the two of them - to open up the limits of each part into the unbounded Promethean fire of the wholeness of Being. Of course, this happening comes about concurrent with massive historical-political change in Yeats’ Ireland; his ‘world’; on the scale of the earth itself - in the time of Easter, 1916 and the striking of the first World War which resounded about the planet - too a calamitous alteriority become unity. It is as if Yeats’ self and his world/other are plunged into a simultaneous eclipse evisced by a darkness of forces at work greater than the both of them - both earthly and ‘rational’; intraspatial and ‘up from below’. In this way, it is like the magma of the collective night has emerged with

a fury out into the collective day - an eruption which is also a conjunctiva, or a merging-togetherness of the spheres. This is a sort of friction which, too, can only be described as a sort of war or primordial violence where the spirit meets the body; an immanent, incarnal action and reaction where, with Holderlin:

‘The harmoniously opposed moods meet, that therefore just in the very strongest contrast, in the contrast between the first idealic and second artificially reflected moon, in the most material opposition (which lies between the harmoniously united spirit and life, meeting in the mid- point, and present in the mid-point) that just in this, the most material opposition, which is opposed to itself (in relation to the point of union towards which it strives) in the conflicting progressive acts of the spirit, if they only emerge from the reciprocal character of the harmoniously opposed moods, that just there the most infinite represents itself at its most feelable, most negative-positive and hyperbolically, so that through this contrast between the representation of the infinite in the conflicting striving toward the point and its meeting in the point the simultaneous intimacy and differentiation of the harmoniously opposed living feeling lying at the ground is replaced and at the same time is represented more clearly by the free consciousness, and in a more developed shape, more generally, as an own world according to its form, as a world in the world, and so as the voice of the eternal to the eternal.’

The difficulty of Holderlin’s Where the poet… is the difficulty of one attempting to sculpt a new language - the language of the artist (a new historical phenomenon itself), atop the pedestal of what Novalis has called ‘the human being’. This difficulty is to, for Holderlin, be done with words - and yet is absolutely limited by the German language which is sprung from the collective history and judicial method of selecting language as that-which-is from and to speech. Holderlin’s gestures must go beyond god (that which Pascal calls the limit of a given culture), into, by and through a battle with god-himself as the spirit of Holderlin, the spirit of man, the

daemon of the poet which he wrangles like Jacob into a command of the spirit, a Unity of Being - a center which, with Yeats, cannot hold. Holderlin, of course, goes rhythmically mad - gone to rationality and the world of men (who mock him), and yet his poesis remains as a spirited breath; Yeats’ mystical dilemma collapses under its own conjured weight in his poem A Dialogue of Self and Soul:

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

   The finished man among his enemies?—
  How in the name of Heaven can he escape
       That defiling and disfigured shape
         The mirror of malicious eyes
        Casts upon his eyes until at last
   He thinks that shape must be his shape?
       And what's the good of an escape
    If honour find him in the wintry blast?

         I am content to live it all again
        And yet again, if it be life to pitch
   Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
       A blind man battering blind men;
      Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
             The folly that man does
            Or must suffer, if he woos
    A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

      I am content to follow to its source
     Every event in action or in thought;
    Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
       When such as I cast out remorse
   So great a sweetness flows into the breast

                           137


        We must laugh and we must sing,
          We are blest by everything,
        Everything we look upon is blest.


                           III.

We get, at the end of it with Yeats, a big ‘what of it?’ - a Being (unified within/without) returned from the abyss of his own below (or Inannic journey) which is also the below of all man, all history, all language - the death of his concepts collapsed in the eclipse of self which is also, characteristically, a vision - a journey into sight which comes about itself by way of the quarter-phases (‘My Soul. Such fullness that in a quarter overflows’; so-forth throughout) - a journey into sight which is also a journey of Yeats’ incarnation into and out of time - a sort of gyre unto himself which has struck an absolute point and lived to ‘forgive’ himself the lot - the lot which is also his. This is the journey of one who has dug the ditch of his own grave like Shakespeare’s gravediggers and has lost all his worldly pretense along with it; dug so deep that he dug past his grave down into the annals of history and out of the ass of history into Time itself; has such wound up the gyres high and low so tight that the depths of the world became the immortal stars upon which the face of man is painted. He has forgotten himself and remembered himself in his return to the world - coming about an Ireland post-revolution which is utterly un-revolutionized (what use does Ireland have for its calamitous poets of the soul? Exiles, all); a world born again for a brief moment after the first World War, petrified, machinic; coming-about another submergence into another terrible night which in which Artaud makes his mad and urgent prophecies - a night which is the daughter of Heraclitus’ War - father of all things.

For if War is the father of all things, war is the sun, the light, the spirit; we must return to Holderlin to finish the sentence: ‘The harmoniously opposed moods meet, that therefore just in the very strongest contrast, in the contrast between the

first idealic and second artificially reflected moon…’ - then the image of War, or ‘War’ is the mother - the imaged War is the moon; their dance is a dance of eso and exoteric sight; the insight and exsight which move from the seeds of conflict (birth which is also a death) and back again to the illumination of conflict (death which is also a birth). The relation is inverse but not converse, meaning that the reflection of War is (with Holderlin) an artificing of that which is. It is in this way too that there are men of Man, histories of Time, beings of Being, spheres of Sphere; creations of Creation. The moon, here, is death; the illusion of the feminine (or the earth, the absolute body) as receiving, the penetrated - when the feminine is equally penetrative, eviscing, if not absolutely War itself as the Becoming of Being. The moon phases of earth, then, like for the ancients - are too the fire of the night, just as the sun is of the day; a fire of the night that upon extinguishing shows man the terror; the true darkness of his immortal Being. It is in the black light of the solar eclipse that all man is murdered; it is in this, the heights of the war, that a new life is seeded; of course, this means a new struggle. The visual marker for this violent period of absolute Becoming (too, then, also absolute Being) is The Raising of Lazarus by Caravaggio:

‘The grave digger is lifting him up and supporting his body at an angle with a knee under his hip and an arm behind his shoulder blades. His hand touches the body of Lazarus quite near the heart. Is he waiting to feel a heart beat? Martha, the sister of Lazarus, holds his head close to hers. Is she listening for his breath? One of Lazarus’ arms seems to reach up to the light whilst the other falls down towards a skull lying on the ground… In fact, this painting looks more like deposition or an entombment than the raising of a dead man to life. The shroud held beneath the body of Lazarus recalls “The Entombment of Christ” which Caravaggio had painted for the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, especially the detail of the hand supporting the side nearest the heart. The closeness of the heads of Lazarus and Martha recalls so many depictions of Mary and Jesus in which she holds him

in death, their faces pressed together, their lips close as if they shared a common breath… But here an overarching darkness extends across the whole top half of the canvas. Where another artist would have placed a celestial scene, an angel or a saint, there is only darkness. Only the extended hand of Christ counters the stark reality of death. The visual link with Christ in “The Call of Matthew” might be deliberate. Many of the Church Fathers would have understood the raising of Lazarus to also be about the forgiveness of sins. The dead Lazarus was like someone still living but weighed down by sin. As at the command of Christ, the tax collector Matthew left a life of sin behind him, so too at Christ’s command Lazarus left the tomb and death behind him.’ (St. Albert’s Catholic Chaplaincy, Edinburgh)

Of course, Lazarus appears crucified; Christ raises him; certainly Caravaggio’s personal history unfolds accordingly. He is spread in the four directions - Christ on his prone left; Martha on his prone right; his hands twisting like upon a wheel up toward the corridor of light from beyond Christ’s raised right hand and down toward the skull in the dirt. It would be convenient for St. Alberts’ Martha to fail to engage in any ‘forbidden’ intimacies with the as-of-now fallen Lazarus, but she appears (to my eyes) with her eyes and mouth to be approaching Lazarus’ lips. The fallen Lazarus approaches ‘conjunctiva’, where the meeting at the mouth of Martha and Lazarus is but the eclipse of the fallen sun behind the veil of the moon - the veil which births the sun anew in the flash of mere moments. Their meeting is at the heart of the cross - or at the cross of the sternum - where the Promethean lightning comes down into the burning effigy of now-Being. Here, Christ is a symbol of what is at work. The light out from beyond his figure comes even at the wholeness of the black sun - a conjunctiva of black light unleashed out in all directions. From this dance emerges new man; a new age with him.

                         140


I reach out to touch the blind face of spirit
          Breathless face of spirit
             Mask in the night;
   I go and do this with a tender hand -
       The hand that is at once hers
               And my own.

  That hovers - like a mask in the dark!
  Men - the children that fear her fever,

The fever that shakes the earth with the laughter of suffering; She laughs and convulses as man trudges about His feet stung by the hot coals Of his own life.

For if I have flung the cloak away of my own life There is not even a body that is mine; The face that I reach out and touch in the night Is forever my own.

142

THE AESTHETIC GENIUS

‘… and the philosopher is close to the artist, but has only himself for a character.’ - Novalis

For the aesthetic genius, there is no choice but to engage in ecstatic contemplation. The contemplation is elucidated and immediately forgotten, as is the ecstasy which wavers and dies at the end of the work of genius. For the work of genius always receives end; the one who contemplates is again thrust out into the world of men, the world of objects, the world - and this thrusting out is an eternal, or perpetual casting out which is also a return to the idiocy and absurdity of human existence. For the aesthetic genius, the movement into and through ecstatic contemplation is absolutely pure; this purity comes about as a manner (not a matter) of total absolution of the aesthetic genius within the aesthetic ideal as process. This is, without other words, becoming the tree, becoming the earth, becoming the wind, becoming the alteriority which at once is the artist’s daemon and his antiscion. The diametric opposition of the artist’s self and the world are synthesized in the moment of aesthetic genius, which is also an eternally novel poesis - a creative act which transcends both being and time as contemporary movements - into a thrust which approaches and jettisons itself off the precipice of human knowledge, human affairs, human beliefs; in an apocalyptic sense - the entirety of the human being as it were and was before the movement of aesthetic genius into life.

II.

It is in this way that the aesthetic genius fights for his life infinitely, again and again returning to the battlement of god (the cultural limit; his own physical and metaphysical limit), and wages war with that which is the existent boundary of not only his affairs, but of human affairs at large. The aesthetic genius, by way of a massive sense of history (beyond ‘human history’ into Time; aeons), is thus

the vanguard and the rearguard of all contemporary human affairs; satirizes them with a biting and desperate tongue - a tongue which is also the need to transcend them and the human condition with infinite permanence - a state which can only come about in ecstatic contemplation. It is by way of this paradox that the aesthetic genius is continually thrust into the production and reproduction of works which have no meaning to him beyond the necessity which brings them about; thrusts them into time and space with a certain end, into yet another beginning. The aesthetic genius’ salvation is also his perpetual torture and agony, in the sense that he is again and again upon the wheel of his own pathetic human existence - and yet, by way of the genius which allows for him to reach ecstatic contemplation, gifted with sight into the beyondlessness - a beyondlessness which trivializes human affairs endlessly. This is to be, in contemplation, without time and space and grasping that which is; to be eventually returned to the crumbling city of the mind, the body, and other people. The aesthetic genius is only a genius when engaged in ecstatic contemplation, otherwise he is equally useless, equally parasitic, and equally inhuman as the rest.

III.

It is in this way that minor salvation is the salvation of man; furthermore, that the aesthetic genius represents the ultimate threshold of human affairs - as being beyond human; into a situation which might be called a perpetual self-murder and refashioning, or remembrance of the flesh by way of a process of purgation - or the fires of ecstasy which crumble the entire being to ash in the face of the greater Being; reanimated again like a doll or a corpse to face another reckoning with god, which again pushes him, and the edge of human affairs, further and further into the abyssal forest of consciousness - a consciousness collected, generated, and regenerated for some unknown, obscene cause - too, the cause of all mankind. IV.

The aesthetic genius’ torture might be compared to the Catherine wheel, or the rack - in the sense that the aesthetic genius’ being itself is stretched beyond its physical (temporal, spatial) limitations in ecstatic contemplation - a contemplation which returns again and again as his only salvation in an otherwise barren and trivial existence - the selfsame existence which has been simultaneously created and obliterated in each ecstatic journey. Here, the aesthetic genius’ torture is the torture of a pendulum which is also a spectrum, a paradoxical oscillation between absolute meaning enthroned in Being; utter disjection into the exile of being. This swinging of the pendulum is Becoming; the coming and going from the holy land which is the only salvation of being human in the wretchedness of the flesh and the workings of the worlds therein. The aesthetic genius then, in his knowledge of the journey to and from Being and being by way of Becoming, serves as the utmost representative of the human condition as it were; as a consolation, is able to offer others insight into the cataclysmic nothing of the world which humans have built to serve the flesh and the flesh alone.

Then, the aesthetic genius knows something of the spirit that the priests and monks do not. This process of ecstatic contemplation for him is not a denial, or a turning away from the world - no, the aesthetic genius laughs in the face of this concept; even the possibility of such a thing - for he has come and gone from the light of Being and the dark of being so many times that he is like Charon; he has come to know the dead and dying like he is Charon and has ferried all human history and language to its grave. The world concept and the self no longer exist for the aesthetic genius; there is no dilemma or paradox other than being sent as a messenger, over and over again to and from suffering, in order to do his destined work which is ordained by the agony of his ongoing existence. It is this agony that at once forces him into ecstatic contemplation; draws him away from himself to the utmost point - where the aesthetic

genius no longer exists in any way other than as within Being: his true state. This is the being within ecstatic contemplation.

VI.

It is of the essence to understand that, in the elevation of the aesthetic genius into Being, the aesthetic genius’ agony, as well as his ecstasy - is of all time, all space; all being as Being. This is precisely what informs and composes the particular nature of the aesthetic genius. What this mode does is to become the river of fire which is the primordial flesh of all man flowing endlessly in and as the foundation of consciousness; a consciousness at once inextricably a part of his time and a part of Time itself, as the daemonic eternal moment and the flash of history as it evisces new time, new place, and new being. The aesthetic genius is submerged in this fiery water unto drowning and emerges with a scrap of paper, or otherwise an oration or a gesture - which says something of the eternal present. This work of archaeology is also a tunneling into the annals of man - into the ground of his consciousness which is also hell, the submerged contents and detritus of Time which have become, even in man’s attempts to create himself, create language, and create history - unspoken; perhaps unspeakable. The aesthetic genius finds a method where there otherwise is none; brings himself into Being and in doing so raises up the entirety of humanity.

VII.

In saying this, the aesthetic genius does not exist. The aesthetic genius, socially, is not permitted to exist; to be in the condition of aesthetic genius is to be utterly exiled and homeless in and around the affairs of the world. To come to and from the unspeakable places of the psyche of man in Time (which is to say, archetypal Man) - is to be covered in the taboo mud of buried clay from which the world of humankind has ‘emerged’, disowning its own true, primordial filth - that which, of course, is its only hope for

meaningful life. It is in this sense that the world of humans is not even alive because it has disavowed the primordial terror - its daemonic presence made silent absence. For the aesthetic genius is irrevocably of the Night; the absolute, shattering darkness which has also shattered his individuated being and psyche (as, formerly, the artist) entirely and without return. In this shattering, the aesthetic genius enters his new historical role as the ferryman of consciousness; a role which has otherwise been inhabited by madmen, poets, and prophets of other times.

VIII.

To accomplish this task, the aesthetic genius need only be aware of that which is all that remains of himself - his perpetually oscillating disposition - again and again raised from the grave like Lazarus to the task of his being, as a mere shuttle or messenger of and for Being to the world of men. It is, of course, a task without respite; a job like all the rest, but one that allows the aesthetic genius crucial insight into his own condition as one hopelessly and endlessly attuned to the Becoming consciousness unto (perhaps?) the total collapse of his corporeality. It is as a matter of service to man as his inability to do much else that the aesthetic genius’ work is ordained and done on this earth.

SHEDDING BODIES: A REAL MODEL OF TIME; THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE SOUL

           ‘My father’s house has many rooms.’

A real model of Time might be seen as a chain of suns; an interconnected network of suns - interconnected by a single ray which is also a choice point, or a chosen pathway which leads into another locus, nexus, or station of choice points - a sun. An example of this phenomenon is depicted above. In this sense, not only is Time nonlinear, but it consists of shed bodies - or choice points, loci, or stations in and upon which ‘decisions’ made at a soul level (or the level of the collective of ‘things/no-things’) result in the abandoned flesh of ‘the past’. This is the creation of an impossible history - a history of impossible decisions, impossible movements; impossible moments - furnished only by incompletions, lost desires, lost lives. These suns are also both micro and macrocosmic - massive stars and molecules, bound and binding proteins - themselves representative of the form of life which one might call being and Being, or the struggle to Existence, proper, as the momentous occasion in and through which all things are born. Coming into the moment, then, is the burgeoning sun reaching toward the bottom of the page, the

deformed and demented growth of a new sun; a sun which in its very process of Becoming has not only not yet evisced itself (as a body), but it has also not evisced the entirety of its potentialities. These rays around the body of the sun extend as light pathways, meaning possible energetic pathways for incarnation of the next moment; the further immanence stretching into time and space - which, too, begs for elucidation.

This real model of Time also mimics the movement of Consciousness through Becoming as it were, the very Consciousness (Being, itself) and choice points as modes of possible direction for Consciousness to unravel as, too, incarnate in the human being/body. Each moment presents Consciousness - (in human form) as in writing, speech, and action - absolute possibility in the elucidation, or lack thereof, of its perennial multiplicity. The egotism and individuality so contemporary to ‘human’ culture, however, hopelessly stunts Consciousness but to one model of being - ‘itself’ as ‘the human being’, informed by conceptions of self which are always equally limited by the individual and collective capacity for conceiving of being in and as Being - or, by ‘culture’. The aesthetic genius sheds bodies like they are nothing (which they are but mere shells which form and sculpt Consciousness as Consciousness desires); in doing so, the aesthetic genius lives life close to the passage of Time. In being close to Time, one is close to god. However, in this environment, action is of the essence in order to evisce more choice points; thus, ‘grow’ Consciousness by way of Becoming; by way of exposing Consciousness to more and more circumstances and situations which require and demand discernment amidst the chaos which is also the Becoming of each immanent moment as the bodies of former moments in which Time has taken form pile up within and as the ‘history’ of Consciousness therein. This is also to say that the present is eternally deformed, eternally complete; eternally dumb - as it has not yet fully evisced itself of itself; it Becomes within Being and yet is not enthroned in Being but reaches out from Being into infinitude. The present moment inhabits the edge of

Consciousness and itself rides the explosion of Being to the far reaches of the deep darkness of the immanent; the threshold, gate, or door of being; as such, perpetually revolutionizes Consciousness. Whether or not this revolution is an ‘evolution’ is a pointless question - but rather, it might be described as an involution - that which reflects upon Being like a flash of light upon a mirror in a dark room - which in turn illuminates lost things, aspects of Being hitherto unseen, or forgotten. In this complication of sight which is also an insight, Being becomes more of itself; more conscious of that which it is. The present moment remembers Being; this is precisely the work of Becoming done in and as Consciousness.

This is to conceive of Time as, itself, a living organism which makes sound; moves through space in order to elucidate Space as the as-of-yet limit of Consciousness. The lost moments, the lost rays of light which were also possibilities of and for ‘life’ as the apparent or incarnate ‘thing’ are not lost to Being, but rather become the energetic information that is exhausted, or ‘blackened’ to aether. This dead information is too manifest in the ground as the dormant, yet reconstructed information of human flesh, animal flesh, plant matter: soil. The grinding down of this energetic information is much like being brought against the grinding stone of Time; a stone which, in its gear powered, massive machinic rotation, grinds energetic information to dust - dust which is then reincorporated into Being as and in a changed form. This perpetual reincorporation is the elemental existence of all things - water, fire, earth, and air - a reincorporation which is also a recomposition of and from base elements. However, Time is that Moloch powered by the fires of the soul (a-element, or without element as Being from whence all elemental powers emerge) - which incorporates and reincorporates matter and manner. Here is the problem of how Time (or the soul) is powered; this is where the paradox of involution comes into play. Much like the dream of Metropolis, the engine of Time is powered by the dead bodies of its former lives; composed by the soil of its very former decomposition; with Michelet, ‘Each epoch

dreams the one to follow’ - however, Time does not dream the immanent, it swallows itself in order to Become the immanent itself as changed-being; yet Being all the same. This hermetic movement is the ouroboratic passage of all that which human beings observe as ‘time’ and ‘history’ on earth - the eternal return of all things: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language,’ (Marx, The 18th Brumaire). However, Marx being occupied with the world of men and their conjured history limits appearance, or recurrence to twice - ‘first as tragedy, second as farce’. This is patently false; furthermore, limits recurrence to a value judgement. Time appears eternally again as itself, wearing the reconstructed clothes of its dead bodies, much like a Frankenstein endlessly risen from the depths of Botticelli’s psychic yet all-too-physical Hell of the dirt and dust of shed bodies, empires, and stars - an eternal recurrence which promises a re-ordered constitution from the emergent light of new order and the emergent shade of prima materia. The insanity of all things is their deformed time.

What is promised in Being immanent is the light emergent from the dying star of the present moment - a light which has been absolutely stripped of corporeality; a light pregnant with total energetic potentiality. As much as the prima materia (the clay of the elements) may be constructed and reconstructed from itself, the primordial mud of Being’s storehouse of flesh and blood, the light emergent and shed from the death of the sun of the now-past is that which carries soul to the present moment and enspirits the as of yet

unspoken, as of yet unelucidated, as of yet unformed (and thus, still-deformed) moment of the present. It is that, much like Frankenstein’s monster, the flesh is assembled and reorganized and yet the Promethean lightning of animation has not yet struck the body; thus the dream of the coming epoch awaits the coming of soul to form. It is, too, like this with the act of writing; the work of painting - in that the flesh awaits the ensoulment of form vis a vis the lightning of aesthetic genius; the soul’s passionate fire which animates new time. The inhabiting of the edge of Time as the present moment is where the aesthetic genius lives - purely and absolutely at the edge of that which is into that which is immanent, new Time; a new sun combust and the paradox of the dying light emergent from its combustion which sparks the flesh of the new body.

154

    THE ECSTATIC IN CONTEMPLATION

The ecstatic in contemplation is most like the madman in the sense that he inhabits madness entirely; the ecstatic is more mad than the madman because the madness of the madman is incomplete Time (as time) and incomplete Being (as being). Wholly enthroned in Being, the ecstatic no longer exists; the ecstatic is nothing to the world; nothing to himself but that transformed inextricably into Being by way of the contemplative Becoming. With Plotinus, the ecstatic is the culmination of human possibility in the Promethean reunion with Being; the aesthetic genius cultivates (or otherwise has come about) this ability to come into the fold of Being vis-a-vis the aesthetic practice.

The ecstatic in contemplation beholds and becomes the human limit in his transacting consciousness, a consciousness which moves across the break of being and Being (the individuated consciousness and the collective consciousness) and becomes enthroned in Being vis-a-vis this crossing of the river of Being and Becoming. This movement is a movement of consciousness visualized as a Charonic movement for the purposes of being understood. What the ecstatic returns with, the scrap of paper or the icon, is moved (or inferred) into and onto the aesthetic object as the now-completed body of work which holds memory of the movement into Being-consciousness. This is, precisely, the value and meaning in and of ‘art objects’ beyond their contrived commodity value. This value goes beyond human conception into the possibility of expanding the human conception beyond its preconceived bound- border-notion.

This kind of ecstatic contemplation as a mad aesthetic practice exposes the one who does this work to an a- temporal and a-spatial sense of Being; a sense of being that is, precisely, depersonalized to the point of which it no longer ‘exists’ unto itself except as itself. This is a sense of Being stripped of ‘being’ - or of the whole network of

consciousness denied its loci in the artificial subject (the ‘self’), or in regarding the artificial object of itself (the ‘other’, or ‘world’). This movement is ‘the camel through the eye of the needle’ as it were, or the metaphysical movement of consciousness through that which otherwise could not be physically ‘penetrated’, or done by the body. The consciousness, thusly, must strip itself of its garments, or the clothing of the body and the ‘world’ conception (with it, the self conception - as the spectral opposition) - which is to say, everything larger than that which is the ‘nothing’ of consciousness - without flesh, without mind. This movement may be seen in the myth of Inanna.

This is the madness of which we speak when we speak of the ecstatic in contemplation - the one who has stripped himself of himself in order to become that which he is: pure, absolute consciousness. Even the imaging of the great poet Dante does not do this movement justice - as he remains, with Virgil, corporeally intact; the poet by name. Rather, the poet who has done this work has no name left to speak of; nor the conception of poetry from and with which to communicate this simultaneous descent (insight) and ascent (exsight) into consciousness - nor language or historical context but of the others who have made this movement - the others who are also him. Here, Dante and Virgil are but apparitions in the glowing coals of consciousness; too, visions in the dying of the sun. This absolute loss is precisely what stirs the aesthetic genius to novel method, novel language, novel methodology, and the (too; now) absolute necessity of formulating a new cosmology of communion with the divine.

For this divine is neither good nor evil, right nor wrong; it simply ‘is’. Nietzsche goes here in his philosophical works and finds himself abolished, along with all of the values and virtues of his culture and age. Here, the aesthetic genius is also the shaman of history, the mystic - but now socially and historically liberated by the death of all meaning and truth proper in the immediate coming of a technologically interconnected earth. The fall of civilizations and empires

proper, simultaneous with the rise of a global empire of technology, leaves the aesthetic genius with a brief window where the structuring myth of the past civilization is all but dead. This is the brutal liberation, however brief, necessary for the aesthetic genius to come back from the land of the dead which is also the land of the dematerialized - to articulate the new myth of his vision of consciousness - a new myth which is not beholden to any paradigmatic strictures or limitations (religious).

For now there is no shaman, no mystic, no poet; no tradition through which this ecstatic communion must be filtered to the common body at large; in this death of venue, the ecstatic rages truly mad. With the democratization of publication, the accessibility of the internet (through which publication may be done by oneself), and the death of both organized religion and the fall of world governments (barely holding onto their nationalistic conceptions) - the ecstatic in contemplation, or aesthetic genius, receives his message at the fallen gates of the law - or it is to say that Benjamin’s Angelus Novus no longer looks back at the ruins of the past, but stands now in the midst of them as the eternal present thrusts itself out of the black immanence of Time like the true face of Spirit; the masks of Consciousness stripped away

from Christ, to Dante, to the Buddha - to reveal the bare face, the absolutely inhuman and multiple face of Consciousness.

The closest humankind has come to visualizing this phenomenon is the manifestation of Krishna as Vishvarupa, a voluminous multiplicity that shatters dimensional perception and exceeds the limits of human seeing and knowing - and yet Arjuna has a vision of this, his universal form. Arjuna, like the poets and mystics before and after him becomes the ecstatic contemplative; in his very apperception of Vishvarupa, himself also becomes the aesthetic genius in his return from ecstasy bearing the gift to mankind which becomes him and through him - The Bhagavad Gita. The Western Philosophical tradition (itself articulated at its birth in the Greek) here crosses the Vedic,

Buddhic, and Eastern Philosophical traditions in the aesthetic-ecstatic contemplations of Being which evisce themselves through the great masterworks of the Tibetan monks, Goya, Shantideva, and Heraclitus. Of course, none of these texts of works evisces ‘absolute consciousness’ as it were (as the aesthetic object itself is but the glowing memory of Consciousness and the ecstatic encounter) - but rather, they are like the heads, arms, and legs of Krishna’s universal form - knife like clarities of apperception which apprehend Consciousness in mid-leap which becomes a mutual absorption in the fold of Being - the being within Being and the Being within being unto an indistinguishable union; then a return from above or below ground to the ground replete with the splendor and riches of the imbued aesthetic object - an object which always speaks beyond the being.

This poem is word of mouth under the stars; What should I say about lost love or transcendence? How can the mind climb the dark ladder of the soul?

It is the words painted on her mouth, or the spring blooming - The dripping parataxis. So what was it that we have said? Over drinks and talking about philosophy, In the hot garden of the body.

For if the words have raised us out of our bodies To observe the earth’s favorite color; They have raised us to observe her great womb bursting at the flesh And delivering us unto birth From cold dreaming - Gesticulation.

I have lain among the poppy fields, Smelled the dead bodies beneath them And in the hearth of winter which was my own body I consumed my flesh until I was full, entirely full - And nothing remained of the body that was mine Coiled up among the poppy fields.

In the poet’s dark room, Covered in curtains and heavy with smoke All objects are lost; Caught in the flashing light of the moon In a bedroom mirror All objects are lost - Hallucinated in the human passage; Wandering these candlelit hallways of eternity.

Come, spring! Father lies still, serene Unexhumed. Mother - readjust the locks! And the corridor of the sun alights

Upon the edge of the seasons Into time, without history This wet body slips from the folds of the earth.

Spirit into form - Rise from the earth, bud breaking soil; Come into me.

I agonize with the highest calling, This calling that is poetry. For what else remains when all the factories and empires are to dust and ruin? This calling that is poetry. If I am all gone there is still this sound, This bird sound and the siren song of my heart - This poem. I will sing it here, in this park, perched up on the wooden bench among the white orchids Or else on the ground and given up to the stars Like the beggar I am.

What else can I prove to the world but this song? Soldered hard and slivered out of my breast like a half moon, Almost arrived then bursting like a flower from my mouth - I will sing it here, In this alleyway night In the rain that falls everywhere - The blood and the spit and The solitudes.

Even here, on this earth My soul is lonely and crowded with rain. Here, on this earth My soul begs in platitudes. It begs for healing and it begs for friendship; Even here, on this earth I am woefully incomplete.

What do you call such a free thing Other than a songbird?

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POETIC GENIUS: LISTENING FOR THE RIGHT WORD OR THE PARATACTIC SITUATION

Here, the poet is receptive [to] being; this is to say that while all human beings are ‘men’ in the penetrative sense in relation to the earth, all poets are women. The poet proceeds thus: as the one who does not write the poem, but who merely transmits the will of Athene - or poesis proper - the will of the gods upon the encounter of the page, the stone, the earth-surface. Here, an expansion of the terms of poetry to being-writ upon earth-surface (or ground), is an expansion of the process of poesis to include (and never leaving) the creative conjuring of situations, affairs, nations, empires, and lifetimes.

Here, the poet Beckett is notable in his creative use of the dramatic situation to, in turn, situate the entire historyless history of mankind as a poesis which is also an exploration, explication, or uncovering of possibility - much like the work of the playwright Shakespeare before him. However, notable in Beckett’s work is the unlevening of language which proceeds much in the way of a perennial parataxis; a poetic language which is never elevated to the level of syntaxis. This linguistic refusal is too present conceptually in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a refusal or even recognition of the limitations of language to ever construct anything beyond itself which does not immediately prolapse the being into a state of separate aestheticization of itself and it's now- evisced supposed ‘conditions’. This state of would be alienation by way of syntaxis, or the establishment of a meaning chain (or meaning-qua-being) is then, also, the establishment of a god/world complex too without the being-self - a primary and a priori separation of language from itself (sign from signified) which, Beckett argues, precedes and proceeds as historically simultaneous - like an ignition - the rapidly evolving cultural conditions which turn

the many-the(i)os of the paratactic Greek philosophos in and through the screw of monotheisms as linguistic terms.

So, who is this being-writing; who is this being-writing who is also the being-writ? Why has he torn himself from himself so violently into an aestheticized god? The man connected to the gods, then, (who is now merely the poet) - has become, like Holderlin and Beckett, the one who dances the marionette of man across the stage and bemoans the condition of even the theios-aner apparently dried up and the hope of a supremely connected Adam Kadmon buried deep in the ground. But it is precisely at, in, and upon this ground that the poet scratches to come about something that is history but that history cannot tell; in scratching at the ground, the ground is released from the compacted density of being-buried into the surroundings of the poet who is also digging for bones to roll. It is all miraculous chance for the poet: ‘Mouth: .... out ... into this world ... this world ... tiny little thing ... before its time ... in a godfor– ... what?’ (Beckett, Not I); this miraculous chance, with the vast majority of Beckett, is born with all of the caustic force of the earth pushing the clay of man up through the mouth of her womb like an explosion of her inner fluids. The language of the poet is also born this way - in an upward and outward thrust (the mouth speaks, the hand flies, the voice box leaps); the poet leaps out of himself in an impossible act which is also the creation of the being known as the poet - or the one who has created being from the raw materials of the flesh. It is like this with Beckett’s Not I; that the master of language is illiterate, dumb; again and again struck dumb by the lightning which throws him hither and thither, in each direction - like a puppet whose mouth shudders and spits; his limbs orchestrated by a death dance thrown into his senses by the gods.

I will not return too much here to Beckett’s early critical essay on Joyce, but the essay itself is crucial to understanding the rhetorical moves Beckett makes to come into a language enthroned in the Kadmonic body - or the divine man whose language-sign is his body; it is the body

here which forms the shapes and signs which are absolute signifiers - or signifiers which sign themselves and nothing else. To come into perfect language and perfect understanding, Beckett himself becomes paratactic, or subjected to the lightning which is the Promethean spirit- becoming-ground-becoming-spirit; the simultaneity of which, with Joyce, comes with all the suddenness of a ‘spiritual manifestation’ which cannot be manufactured aesthetically. This manifestation, more accurately (; in line with Beckett’s critical essay), comes as an apparition, which is also the ghost of man which haunts his own body, like Hamlet’s father (or, Hamlet’s spirit) haunts his flesh - both compelling him and leaving him to stand where he was - struck dumb and dumber still for his deliberation and inability to come into the spirit-body which would also compel him beyond decision and indecision - into a state of perpetual discernment.

Here, the discernment is travelling between langue and parole - the prison and the promised land (with Tolstoy) which is also the edge of consciousness into the babbling depths of the subconscious, which too languages in screams and shudders. This edge is the edge the master walks without risk of falling into madness (like the poet Transtromer), if only because the master has been there before and already fallen into madness. The master poet has already emerged from hel with the scrap of paper which is also a map of the dark terrain therein; by way of this map comes and becomes again with a lantern light which illuminates yet another structural aspect of the skeleton and organ system which is also the body and the being - yet disapparent. Again, this is also man; as the poet does this digging he formulates himself atop the pedestal of his promised humanity - greater, more, further than man in that he sculpts himself from the deeper stone (not the clay of flesh) which is the emergence of spirit entwined with matter; soul entwined with form.

In this act of poesis which is also a perpetual parataxis, the poet’s being is (with Being) absolutely without value and all

woven with the same string which moves through all things as life force energy. The whole of the poet is moved with spirit; in this way the act and process of poesis is imbued with the menos of great spiritual life (godliness; essential breath of the gods breathed into the being) - and yet - not the poem. The poem is like the body in the casket, the shed memory of the spirit which became the flesh for a moment and transformed it absolutely. Here, we must ask - what is the purpose of writing poetry that is not already said and done in the poesis? The writing of poetry is only the preliminary process which prepares the body and the being for a state of philosophic poesis - or a unity of the impulses (the paratactic and the syntactic; the soul and the form) - which is itself the state of greater wisdom, the only true, whole state of philosophic contemplation. There is the mutual acculturation of philosophy and poetry as vehicles of and for thought and development of thought as a meeting of the physic and the meta-physic - the grounds upon which the spirit and body might converse; in this mutual acculturation the spirit leads, as in a dance - insurrection the grounds deeper and deeper into the realm of the spirit - wherein the body follows like Orpheus and Eurydice.

Here, poetry and poesis are of primary importance to philosophy - as they are vehicles of the spirit spilling over into the act of writing which pushes language beyond itself. Without the poetic impulse, philosophy remains in a sphere of pure divorce - the equally dead and void bodies of the syntactic physical and the syntactic metaphysical. It is by and from the travel upon this edge of consciousness which is perpetually expanded by the mutual and interpenetrative work of philosophy and poetry that the being becomes.

This process of becoming through the discourse of the philosophic and the poetic is the process of creating a language body which is indistinguishable from that which it signifies, the soul, or the enspirited secret of the body. Much like the runic and hieroglyphic cultures of the Viking and the ancient Egyptian, the enspirited symbol becomes threefold - itself, the word; the emanation of the word. The

outward appearance of the symbol, then, is never purely aesthetic or approaches aesthetic concerns - as it inhabits itself entirely. There cannot be an aesthetic concern if there is nothing beyond, outside, or voyeuristic in language. This might also be called an ecstatic becoming of language which is not limited to a duality of interpretation (neither purely this nor that), but instead inhabits the realm of the visual, the textual, and the ‘whisper’ which is the inner ground of the soul speaking directly and impermeably through the outer carved ground of the writ.

This is not to say that this kind of poesis has yet been achieved, or may ever be achieved but in moments of unity between the act of speech and the structuring forces of the flesh and the forceful subterrain of language-signs which are at once of this world and beyond its reach but in explosive utterances of birth. It is precisely in the perpetually immanent possibility of a new language vis-a-vis poesis followed by the philosophical examigination, however, that this terrain of possible impossibility exists forever in consciousness. It is easy to mistake this terrain as something physical-unknown; not as something yet unborn from the inner depths of the vessel and chamber of the body which holds new potentialities of the soul becoming expressed sign. This mistake is always the mistake of the syntactic first approaching thought and failing to give way to the paratactic nature of poesis which is the act of listening, or absolute stillness; quiet reception to the word that has not yet been spoken which is the word-as-sign-as-being which has not yet found ensouled form. It is that this floating sign lies already signified in each moment as the possibility of speech-to-becoming; in and through this speech the poesis which is the transformation of the being may yet be realized. It is, alone, the artifice and pride of the syntactic (when placed primarily before the submitting parataxis of poesis) which blocks this movement from possibility.

To lead with language is to lead with the terms and conditions laid and established a priori from the outset of philosophical exegesis which is also always the exploration

of the terms and conditions of being and becoming. Here, to ‘know’ history and language and man are the absolute end of this process; it is precisely these conceptual realities which disbar philosophos from its partner, poesis - and in this act of willful disbarment by way of knowledge, strike man, again and again, dumb to himself - he who is also. It is only by way of emptying the thinking vessel of these thoughts that are already formed as notions calcified like stones in the thinking body that the thought may actually flow, free and clear like a mountain stream which - again - comes down from the spirit striking into the body of man like lightning into rock, enlivening it into becoming again - the becoming which is the ensoulment of the meat. The work of parataxis here is the death of valuation, time and time again, a death which allows the thought to flow free and unjudged in its necessary pathways to and from itself - carrying water, carrying fire, carrying the essence of man to and from the temple which is the earthly thing; into the air and soul which moves the eternal hallways of the spirit as man travels among them - with the lantern of poesis in one hand and the skull of philosophos in the other. The very movement of poesis without abbreviation (as in the ‘writing poetry’, ends) is the equal contemplation and a-valuation of the interpenetrative methods - as one enables the other ad- infinitum.

Here, there is no struggle but of man against himself; man against the conceptual realities constructed by himself - ‘history’, ‘language’, ‘time’ (not Time); ‘being’ (not Being) - the notions which hold man to his self image which is grafted into and onto his every thought - like Prometheus chained to the rock. This rock, once grasped and established

becomes the a priori foundation which is also then ‘truth’ for man’s actions, thoughts, dreams, desires, and senses of himself and the world as correlated, co-relating, and co- realities - conjured and brought about by the imagined synthesis which we also call ‘man’. The creation of the symbol and the word and the subsequent establishment of them is their death; the calcification of poesis into langue; the speech which becomes law. This is the history of
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humanity at large - a history which is composed of the perpetual construction and reconstruction of Erotic power and Erotic submission by way of the Thanatonic - the simple yet essential cycles of the construction of empires, beings, dreams, purposes, and desires - and the extinguishing of the apparitions of man and his wealth of conjurings by Time. It is that Time does the work that the concept of time cannot (nor can it imagine as syncrete by flesh); it is that Being does the work that the concept of being cannot (nor can it imagine as syncrete by flesh). In this way, precisely, poesis acts as Prometheus - to and from the emanation and the ecstasy: from Time and from Being; to Time and to Being - as transmissions writ by the hand of the gods who are also the aesthetic ideals into and upon the flesh of the earth.

Man has no say here; nor has man had any say in the process of life as becoming through Being but in the dream of his own hubris and false power. There is only, here, the possibility of the whole enthronement primarily in the feminine impulse which is the receiving poesis which is also the open state of listening which creates expression as a bearing and birth of new language by way of the vessel of the flesh which hears the word of the soul and figures it into being. Here, the vessel of the body is the receptive, the spirit which comes into it is penetrative; the birth of ensouled form is neuter and yet quickly takes form as born penetrative into and onto the earth as terrain as receiving the body. This very process is a movement to and through the interpenetratives - an immanent transfiguration of the word to and through archetypal spheres of being and becoming which possess essential attributes and (im- )materialities. This is to say that the poet, too, is transfigured by way of poesis many times; the poet too appears and disappears; the poet too becomes the impulses and is thrust to and fro from them like a ship in a tempest; the horizon which is the new language represents this process - a fata morgana of possibility: the apparition of the ensouled body, the touch of the air and the water which is the flesh and the ground, and yet the deeps of the soul which swirl beneath

the wet body and above the wet body hovering about the black night and the stars. It is that the fata morgana cannot be reached and yet exists and does not by way of the process of poesis which ascertains the siren of the unmade; the unmaking of that which is in the distortion of the furthest point of being-conscious of itself.

The complexity of this process is precisely in that it may be spoken of as a process of change and transformation of the being vis-a-vis conjured language which too is conjured being as a brief encounter which springs the face of spirit into the air as, too, an apparition of sight - or the vision of poetry - but that this vision is gone even as it arrives; leaves Hamlet in an even further predicament of having to consider the now-destabilized physical grounds of his being- in-the-world which have been shaken by a meta-physical encounter which is also an encounter with the face of the spirit emergent from just beyond the outer bounds of consciousness. This is to say, he encounters his father in the forest which is beyond the cultivated mind; that Dante passes through the gates of hell and in this passage comes into and through (in his return) the palace of naught where all is naught: ‘Through me is the way to the city of woe, Through me is the way to eternal pain, Through me is the way to a lost people. Justice moved my great Creator / Divine Power made me, the Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love. Before me, nothing else was created / nothing, but the eternal and I last eternally. Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ The hope that is abandoned - in other words - is the conceptual ‘realities’ of the world, being, time, and history - ‘realities’ which are, as the poet observes - naught but placeholders of knowledge, syntactic knowledge which stands forever incomplete before the poetic understanding as receptive parataxis in, to, and through becoming.

It is to and from this place of naught which poesis travels - and this is to say that poesis is the Charonic endeavor to and from the naught of materiality and the equal naught of immateriality which structure the life of the living thing and,

too, give endless and great possibility to the process of poesis as that which conjures the life of the being immanently - consciously and unconsciously alike. Again, the poet does not exist but as and through poesis as the river of life which is that which flows through the interpenetrative impulses; moving between them as seamless life as the materialization and dematerialization of all things and no things - again to the zero point - or the absolute decompression (which is also an absolute compression) of the horizon which springs the fata morgana from its breast as a vision. Here, Yeats’ cosmology is helpful as one of the only examples of a true and deep poesis which is also a metaphysical restructuring of the physical world by way of the creation of a consummate poetic worldview which is also a philosophy and a practice of being in the world as the world; thus, a soldering of being - a unity of self and world in and under the poetic practice of becoming ensouled. It is deeply irrelevant whether Yeats’ theory is ‘right’ or ‘true’ - but that in the very creation of the poetic theory of being the poet creates himself as being imbued in and with poesis; this very self creation is the creation of an entire ensouled being which is from and with the flesh which is Yeats the man; yet entirely greater than the sum of Yeats’ parts, organs, bones, all. The work of constructing the poetic man from the dust of the flesh is the work of bringing together the incarnate being with the soul of life; the unification of the poet with Adam Kadmon, or the divine man. This is to say that the master poet is not merely a theios-aner, but is ensconced in Being and not even ‘man’. He has gone through his humanity and taken account of it and become through his very humanness ‘returned to the gods’.

This becoming through humanness by way of poesis returned to the gods as being enthroned in Being is the work of poesis which, upon shaking utterance, evisces perpetual further ground of consciousness which is the land of Being thrown into light and shadow by the understanding of man and the artifice of his knowledge which convicts him of his place within himself (himself and ‘the world’). It is in this way, that with Novalis’ analog of the poet fashioning himself

atop his humanity that the poet is now at once greater than human in the metaphysical sense; yet utterly flesh unto the physical - how could the incarnate poet be anything else other than this flesh crumbling about himself, the poet, the persistent soul? And yet the poet has mounted his flesh and carved a sign into the air which remains as a song of being; a song unto Being which is expressed unto the infinitude to and from which his bodies fall about him and into the wind and ground. This is to say that the poet is an eternal principle and represents the best of and among mankind as that which solders himself into being from the disparate parts which compose the human flesh in its passage through becoming as the enacted will which perpetually moves into the fold of itself; in doing so, becomes more of itself and loses its partiality to emanation pure (as the manifestation of Promethean fire); in this perpetual loss as living gains, by strength of will and courage to venture into the veiled lands of poesis - a true vision of himself as ecstasies which return him to the aesthetic ideal of all humanity - becoming Being, raised ecstatic into the shaking flesh of Adam Kadmon. For this is to say that the highest ideal of poetry is not to merely tell of the aesthetic ideal in the writing of poetry, but in the writing of poetry which is the creation of the life of the self to inhabit the aesthetic ideal proper; in doing so, move the entirety of humankind past the previous borders and bounds of itself as that which is, was, and into that which will always be.

This is the imperative of poetry as also the imperative of Being, proper, by way of becoming which by burning itself through itself produces a perpetual excess of itself which can only also be called exhausted matter; how Artaud speaks of van Gogh burning through canvas bodies and too how Artaud burns through paper bodies it is like this for the poetic genius: he burns in tune and inextricably together with that burning of Being which is becoming; that very becoming which becomes himself and changes his form perpetually like a very fire through his flesh which necessitates absolutely changing his life. Here, the term ‘aesthetic ideal’ is strikingly meaningless; it only serves to

speak previously of that which can only be spoken of now as absolutely now.

I have seen the tragedy of my love and laughed in its face; I have seen the failure of my life and laughed there too. I have been the fool on a journey through the deck; In an endless race, I returned and began again - From zero to one and two.

THE IMMANENT REVELATION OF BEING THROUGH BECOMING

‘I only observe the appearance and disappearance of beingness.’ – Nisargadatta Maharaj

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.’ – Linji Yixuan

            ‘The I is another’ – Arthur Rimbaud

‘We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.’ – Albert Einstein

‘Space-time-causation, or name-and-form, is what is called Maya.’ - Vivekananda

I. EPIPHONY AND EPIPHANY

Being into speech without meaning; speech as the being of the being - the very existence of being. The mouth here is the emergence of being, or the ontological emergence of that which is into the that which was of speech-making as an action performed in space; thus, made-real phenomenological object-figure-form of speech. A priori to speech, the being is within beingness absolutely; in the speech act, being appears to be separate from the beingness which has borne its term.

The speech does not come with the desire nor the need to speak, but being emerges from itself as form uncovered; that which always already was into ‘isness’ as an ontological condition of becoming evisced from itself as that which it has now-consumed. The being turns again towards itself in the stomach of now and becomes reconfigured in the churning fluids which consume that what-was.

Making ‘real’ speech as an ontological act which tells the story of being, always half conscious in enacting itself - is the inevitable movement of being into and through the mouth which is the appearance of being and the disappearance of being as phenomenological affair. The perpetual act of being sprung from the becoming mouth is the rolling time; it is in this manner that the epiphonic existence is, and is alone.

The epiphonic is always in direct frictive contact with being as the becoming-sound of being transactive in, through, and across physical form. The very rolling act is the living time which animates the ‘beingness’ of being which, phenomenologically, is the body - but, absolutely, is the entirety of the appearance and disappearance as act of being through becoming sound. It is at the cusp of this coming and going that the phenomenological state of ‘beingness’ is apprehended.

To be in the epiphonic state is the being; in this state is the entire residence of being as a body at once passed in and out of the phenomenological. It is at the fold that this mass of thing called the being-as-form emerges by way of the mouth making frictive sound; it is at the fold that this mass of thing again emerges and in this emergence act of becoming is also not yet phenomenologically sound. This is to say that being forever has two faces; the obscured face is always the epiphonic, whereas the epiphanic forms the entirety of the phenomenological affair called self and world.

The epiphonic is then the speech of the being absolutely as gesture which does not take form and yet takes sound which is unsound; destabilized at all sides. It is in this way that the epiphonic cannot be known; exists only as the absolutely epistemologically unsound face of being as that which composes the epiphonic vision and yet cannot be grasped by the sight which grasps and thus ‘knows’. The epiphonic is utterly sensational and yet encompasses the entirety of the sense experiences to the point of which they do not exist but as a singular happening from which the body and the sense organs are thrust into the light face of being which is the epiphanic birth of the human being unto flesh and form. It is in this way that the phonic essence of man is eternally obscure from sight and yet unconcealed.

Being uncovers itself as a shaking of the grounds which are at once the epiphonic air and the epiphanic earth. The flesh is simultaneously given to the senses and revoked.

For this phonic essence is the spirit body of man that is the word of man spoken truly as being always on the precipice of being spoken; thus, at the meeting place of the phonic and phanic faces of being. The word is light bearing and yet emergent from the something that is naught but sound, or heard as being on the way into phenomenality. In this way the phonic essence is that which composes the form and figure of speech by way of imbuing it with spiritude.

II. THE ONTIC NATURE OF POESIS AS UNCOVERING BY WAY OF SOUND

By uncovering being by sounding out the word of being the being becomes known; into, through, and upon the grounds of knowing as epiphanic; the phanic figure of man emergent from the phonic soil of the as-yet-unspoken; here the speech act evisces being through the tunnel of the mouth. The sounding out the word of is the carving of being from itself as in being as in being in another time. This process of epiphonic sounding as a state is the state of perpetual poesis in and through which being finds formal ground in the epiphonic-made-epiphanic sculpture carved with the found- langue of the speech act through phonia into flesh. The flesh is the found-language of being which is the light face of being called the apprehensive image. The carving of being into and through (another) time is the syncretic process of being composing itself immanently as a perpetual and mutual transference of spirit-substance to and from the light face and dark face of being as the apparition and dis- apparition of being through and as the states of phonia and phania - states which are simultaneous and yet of (in the case of phonia in relation to the apparent phanic) ulterior density.

The phonic promises phania in the to-coming of the phanic coming-again of being phenomenal; the phonic promises this by way of the eternal return of the speech act; the disjecting of substance-qua-spirit through the channel which is the becoming-canal of being into phenomenality. The coming of this substance is again spirit into flesh by way of the pneumenal. The very speech act of force into flesh is the erotic action which moves the sphere of being as phonic disappearing and phanic appearing. This is to say that each of these seemingly ulterior to the other states is at once mutually interpenetrative and simultaneously born from the one and bearing the other. Here, the phanic is the receptive ground through which the penetrative phonic takes and makes root into the phanic phenomenal world of things. It is

the phonic which imbues the thing with its thingness; the apparition of the individual being with its beingness - and yet - both are inextricably composite of and from being at large.

III. ANTISCION: AGAINST THAT WHAT MAKES EQUALLY SHADOW

The use of literate and illiterate symbols to describe being are being inscribed. Their intelligibility, however it is so, does not reorient this being in any way as their being is intelligible already as being within it. The mergence of the phanic and the phonic is the place where significance is suffocated and only sign remains; here, sing like an unceasing repetitious chant. This is, truly, the significant poesis of human life enthroned in the greater Being in that it is swallowed by that which it is by way of the breath which is also the spirit, ur-menos. Hence it only becomes within itself and thus, perpetually, becomes itself only. In this sense, the entirety of being is absolutely erotic and only performs thanatosis within it in the sense that it is endlessly and entirely generative, even if not generative of ‘new material’ - in the sense that the phenomenal lacks temporality. Thanatos is an act of absolute creation of being, with the character of eros) in relation to itself as darkened and obscured antiscion - which is always itself thrown back, again, in time. This shaking or jarring is what creates birth - it is the grasping of itself that propels being deeper into itself as understanding.

In the same way, the aesthetic genius proceeds creating endless bodies which are also something of the soul yet not entirely of them. The daemon of the time is also within them - a daemon which is aetheric in that it is all of the time embodied in an absolute aesthetic point which is the archetypal manifestation of particular history within the works of genius like a germinating seed. This is precisely the importance of the flesh as being in ground. It is precisely

that being is enfleshed to know of itself; in that conjured flesh the being is conscious of itself in simulated contact with ‘the other’ as of it but artificially separated from it. This contact with materiality as phenomenon is the generative contact of being from itself disguised as other. This principle is realized in the frictive contact of love as the interpenetrative impulses being mutually created in their immanent opposition. It is this contact which reveals being to itself. It is that the feminine, the earth, the body, the phanic – receives the masculine, the spirit, the prana, the phonic. In this reception of the whisper of the spirit into form, Being is phenomenally born as being; again into the shadow of the night of the flesh where Being receives itself once more into the disapparence. In this way, the uncovering of being of itself phenomenologically is equally received as a recovering upon the extinguishing of the sphere of the phenomenological (as light leaves); returning the spirit to itself absolutely – devoid of the artificial separation which gave it in a vision unto itself.

The scion and antiscion of being then are in this perpetual dance of bodiment and exbodiment as states, masks, and positions in and through which being introduces and reintroduces itself as a parapetual becoming. This exchange is met by the aesthetic genius at the midpoint between the polarities of the spirit and the flesh – where the spirit is emanant and the flesh is ecstatic – or at the precise point in where and of mutual reception takes place. This place of mutual reception is the becoming phanic of the phonic and the becoming phonic of the phanic – the absolute symbolic point which is the horizon of being contra-acting itself. This contraction is the theatre of being as the absurdity of – in the furthest point of itself - becoming something else. It is in this way that being breathes itself into alteriority. This perpetual exchange is the intercourse of apparance and disapparance as manner and matter of being becoming something else unto itself as a mask to that which is as that which ‘is not’ – and yet, (p)neumenally – is that which is as that which ‘is not’. It is that being plays other to itself.

IV. NOT I

In that being-plays-each-other is the paradox of being as comedy and tragedy – each of which is equally being-unto- itself in an interpenetrative dance of feeling (as, agony to ecstasy and back again) which requires the mask of being and non-being in order for being-to-come-into alterior conception of itself beyond the teleological contraception of being which ‘is’ by way of the syntactical. For to be-coming is to be between two places of perpetual yet absolute (un- )arrival (as both going from and coming into being – as spirit and form, self and other, the comedy and tragedy which are at one and yet ‘is’ apart); at the absolute point of the interpenetration of the place of the phonic and the phanic each is born to itself as existence proper. For being to know itself and know of itself it must have the mask upon its dark face in order to see and thus understand that the mask itself is the play of existence and the dark face of spirit itself is that which is absistent from that which ‘is’ (playfully); as that which, pneumenologically, absolutely is and is upon the precipice that is becoming-conscious, or ‘uncovered’ or ‘found’ by the phenomenological ‘other’. In this pneumenological ‘standing-apart’, the spirit gains its form in the symbolic as emanant only in and upon the mutual recognition of itself in and as the phenomenological; this recognition occurs simultaneous in both conceptual spheres of being (which in truth, are both absolutely ‘being’ and ‘non-being’) as equal, opposite, and meeting in the middle of their disputed feeling and yet absolute territory of itself created by and for itself-to-knowing. This very theatre is the invocation of that which is marked as the division of being and non-being as the absolute point of contra(c/s)t: light and dark, life and death. For this theatre to exist for being- becoming-conscious-of-itself is also the entirety of the phenomenological ‘world’ as that which is ‘observable’ and the essential ‘hiddenness’ of the pneumenological ‘self’ from it. The interpenetration of the two bears being unto itself as becoming spirit into form into spirit with memory of the touch of form. This is how being becomes more - (of) itself.

Phenomenologically, the stakes rise in this dance of being and non-being in correspondence with the physical principles of force and mass-in-space as time events that produce timeless signatures (unions and intimate splittings) which are also of being as in the supernova and black hole events. Lower stakes events of force and production of and through mass-interactions-in-space might be seen as human sexual intercourse or the movement of a bird. Pneumenologically, however, these are all absolute moments of being-becoming-itself by way of the phenomenal encounter which uncovers the neumenological out from behind the veil of that which ‘is’ – expositing the beingness of that which is, phenomenologically, ‘not-being’; yet, absolutely is and entirely knows itself as being of itself and yet itself entirely in these moments of ecstatic union again which is also the point of absolute separation. These moments of contact of being with itself from itself are the moments of being-productive and thus becoming more of itself as absolute and expanding upon this becoming. It is then that ‘beingness’ is not altered in this movement, yet the entirety of being is reoriented unto a new horizon which is also the yet-encounter of itself in and of a changed form. The ‘newness’ of this being-coming-horizon is the newness of the changed form as differance; the expansion of the paradox of phenomenological ‘being’ and pneumenological ‘non-being’ into an affair of multiplicities which is also the creation of space and time as accounting and counting (phenomenological-‘happening’)-bodies, incarnations, excarnations, of the being-unity-in-phenomenological- incident. It is in this way that Being happens unto, into, and within (as being and non-being encountering one another) itself absolutely.

V. BEING OF THE BREATH

I become them (feelings) as masks. In this way, I become them absolutely; I am lost unto myself, that which is also. The sound takes a body as a word; a manner made matter

of speaking. The color of the thought and feeling imbued in the phenomenal ‘object’ (being-of-sound). It (Being) creates itself in its image [phonic!phanic], but it (being) does not become its image; rather, the phanic apparition becomes as of it, as it, and the face in the water of it. The absolute point of Being is then in the intersection of these three points or faces of Being-becoming-being, where the spirit touches the flesh with a ghostly hand. This is the moment of the poet becoming-as-poesis; the ecstasy of the aesthetic genius in becoming absolutely enthroned.

VI. BEING MISTAKEN FOR BEING

: A perpetual misapprehension of that which is (Being, both- as pneumenal and phenomenal) for that which ‘is’ phenomenologically - the creation of a primary separation by way of the distinction as categorical of phenomenological and pneumenological - when both are simultaneously becoming and thus absolutely indistinguishable - nonexistent as essences. Only the essential ‘beingness’ as that which is is ‘present’ - as the sphere in and through which the scion and antiscion evisce their dance of mutual distinction as interpenetration and separation - in and through which one is perpetually mistaken for the other until both are self-realized as that which is (the other) - being, and composite, that which informs being of its beingness. It is in the exact conjunction (interpenetration) and the exact opposition (separation) that this happening as dance is most pronounced - the absolute darkness and the absolute illumination of the matter and manner at hand. It is in this way that although the door between the pneumenal and phenomenal appears closed, it is in fact always open and perpetually informing being of and through itself by way of becoming-realized by way of changing form(s). It is in this way that we also call ‘night’ and ‘day’. Being, then, is the greatest poet who is also an actor - in among his own play of becoming-realized as forever a Hamlet unto himself - forever tipping the scales of

the spirit and the flesh into inequality with brief moments of scionic unity in the absolute point between the two interpenetratives which is embodiment as the word-sign that is, utterly, itself. The word-sign that is breathed into being with and as memory as (re-)membrance of breath. In that the word remembers itself as prana or menos it is true unto being. In that the word remembers itself as the play of spirit and form it is true unto being. In this sense, the word is being as-itself-realized.

you are being guided to love - artless love. enough of you have been living before; into the ceaseless now.

drop the manufactured thing, these screams of hate and self flagellation that have been against your mind and beating the door down to your heart. leave them like old clothes on the road to elsewhere, vagabond with a clean soul - you are now and nothing can stop this lifeblood flowing through you, lifeblood which is allthing and nothing - lifeblood which is you, creature - from which you have conjured your imagined wound, like a sorcerer or a dreamer.

all of this pain and sorrow - what of it now? dewdrops on the grass of your love; caught endlessly in the sun like a fish in a net - you are, dreamer - remove the mind like a glove and let it dangle out in the air; the horizon sun is all. wouldn’t you, go inside the body! the cavern is embrace and you have dug so deep that you have hit yourself in the chest and thus become alive. strike! and strike again! these gold mines of pain are melted into jagged light; shiftless light - and you are risen through the body in the ecstasy of poetry.

dreamer! do not look back, do not turn back toward the night from which you have drawn and wrestled upon your bed, your nightstand, the mat on the floor. all tangled up in this imagined self and the ceaseless fear of its emergence. what will you be now? a goat? a cymbal?

it is all on the ground and sparkling like diamonds - rubies even. the untouchable faith, gold, and becoming everything. here comes the moon, empty and full like your breath, dreamer, lover, run ragged in your own throat by fear - banish him! he has grown old in your flesh and has brandished his cane - knocking at the gates of your soul.

for it will come again, in a changed form - like a beggar, or a king, or a remembrance: unwanted and yet striking your flesh into that mad dance which sends you tumbling back down from the tower of yourself - for it will come again, disguised as love - as all wanting. know him and be free, dreamer. know his face - and out with it. know him and be free.

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WHAT IS THE ABSOLUTE, FIERY MEANING!

"Le poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu'il peut à sa guise être lui-même et autrui [The poet possesses this incomparable privilege, namely that he is able at will to be himself and others]." – Charles Baudelaire

It is by way of the feeling that the poet is submerged into the poesis which is the collective feeling, which expands within and about his body as an atmospheric pressure – which in his body and as his body is all bodies – as being remembered upon the cross of all matter, or upon the chest of the Universal Form of Krishna like a fiery brand. The poet is stamped with the exile of the soul; the exile of the soul is nothing more than being cast out into the wretched materiality. It is in this way that the poet becomes material, and by way of this becoming material, becomes materiality itself. The poet, in this way, is absolutely pre-infantile; even more childish than the youngest of the children in that the poet has not even been born and with a furious stubbornness refuses to be born into that which the rest of you call, ‘the wor(l)d’. The exegenesis of the poet, proper, is here, in the refuse which is also the refusal to be birth as ‘the wor(l)d’. The poet is born from this fundamental exile which is the perpetual unarrival of the spirit to the work of the world which is the settling of the word into itself as content and as such become-contentment. The poet, by way of this refusal, exists everywhere and nowhere – and thus can only be superficially exiled by the managers and bureaucrats of the world proper because he does not even exist there but as a physical symbol devoid of meaning. The fire of the poet always exists hovering above and below and about the materiality – an aura which colors the world proper ‘with’ meaning, and yet does not become the world proper.

It is also this way with the poet’s body – a pure corpse from birth which the poet does not ever come into in such a way as to be deceived by the fundamental essence of form as that

which is ethereal – and in this sense destined to return to the poet in a more true way than that which it appears to be phenomenologically. The poet’s spirit, still, hovers above the word, reticent to give it true impregnation with the pneumena of the spirit; in this reticence and reluctance the word does not emerge but with and as spiritude, or the being of the state of; the thing which shines down and about in emanance from this place which is where the poet, too, is enthroned in the greater being of being-en-spirit. It is, too, in this fashion which the poet takes on the firebrand of all colors of the existence as a palette to which he takes his toothbrush and paints his mouth – a pure and absolute painting which is continually appropriative of the swatches and swaths of materiality for the purpose of being-imbued- with-spirit. The existence of the poet’s bodies are also these pages, these sense-tenses, the hand which is at once ghastly and apparent. For that the poet does not really live in the world, the poet is a witch, a sorcerer, a conjurer and also from his conjuring, a conjured thing called the self of the poet.

He does not exist for long enough but into the poem; leapt and leaped into the poem like a brief moment for the body to live, and truly live – and thus be cast aglow in the bronze of meaning which is the possibility of all life; life in all directions and for all purposes and thus exploded into -. Surely, the body cannot hold this impulse but in the unsustainable parataxing physical exertion of being- through-spirit which surely gets the poet nowhere but sideways like a crab. And yet, it is precisely the being-born impulse of the poet – like Baudelaire, being set up by fate – to continually return to this place and yet slash with mad colors into the canvas of life; in this way thus creating the new, perpetually modern canvas of life which the wellspring of the soul is speaking into by way of the poet’s mouth, painted with this season of man. His desperation of feeling, refracted into the body of the poem, becomes a mask of feeling from the poet undivorcible from that taking of a physical body itself into this ‘wor(l)d’ called ‘life’. The end of the poem is also a return to the silence of being; a truer death in the

sense that it is drawn by the poet from himself and to himself by the dictates of the spirit – not done in and about by the forces of the material body and the embodiments which cast this apparatus of the ‘wor(l)d’, an apparatus which the poet always views, like himself and his masks of feeling, with suspicion and falsity.

The poet’s very primary suspicion towards ‘himself’ as a birth into being-in-the-world is a primary suspicion which always already has returned the poet to himself truly, in that he is being stripped of meaning which is the clothes of language, or also the flesh of the body; the world of being- and-becoming-a-‘thing’. This primary suspicion is of the being spit out into the mess of incarnation – plagued by the very finitude which betrays itself to the infinitude, or spiritude of poetry – the very thing which the poet was born to do. In taking on the task of poetry, the very body and the gestures and noises and worlds emitted by the body as conjured things from it become figures upon the screen before the stars which is the true body of the poet – the very universal flesh of being itself as being-perpetually-between- worlds – between spirit and form, between the ethereum and the ethereal. The dark chambers of the poet mimic the infinite which is not even the womb, but that which lay forever before it and forever after the decay of the false progeny of the mother – the son of which who is forever and again spirit.

This is truly the state of poesis, in that it is inhabited in the most impossible sense which is also the most true sense – the perpetual unbirth of the poet to himself as the perpetual unbirth of the poet as wor(l)d which also allows him infinite access to the spiritude as a state of being-between and thus forever without language. This being-forever-without- language is also a being without existence – as there is no true emergence of the body-sign proper except a perpetual exegenesis of ‘poetry’ or ‘bodies’ as forms, symbols, transmissions, which do not even ever arrive – they are documented flesh upon the precipice of arrival; thus, arrive forever and alive.

192

THESE THINGS AFFECTED WITH THE SOUL

             ET ON M’A CRU! - Baudelaire

What is it that is healing? What is healing is to understand and embody that what is being. What is required here is the allowance of all things to be expressed as and in the channel of being as becoming. This express movement is that which is expelled, propelled, and impelled by the body of the soul (alight; abreath) through the form it has taken into and as enaction of the will of the soul. By expressing, being becomes itself; by way of this expression, the being has found itself a body, a mechanism, a matter through which to become absolutely that which it is, a dictum of the spirit fulfilled in word-form.

For the essence of a dictum is a pronouncement made formal; in this formal pronouncement the becoming gains authority as being within itself made formal. It is in this way that manners of the flesh and page are becoming; their becoming is evisced by way of and through the spirit into form as changed-flesh, changed-page, changed-being. This perpetual development and discourse only occurs by way of the collusion of materiality with spiritude; the becoming- whisper which finds and abandons form ad infinitum.

What is precisely the healing of becoming as allowance is that the spirit demands the ensoulment and leaving of forms. This movement of spirit to and from evisced developments is precisely that which occurs through and as the channel of time (becoming) but is not history. It is the very concept of history that is a compound of the disjecta of this time-happening compounded in the body-flesh (of earth, of page, of figure); that is the very thing called history, or time, which becomes that thing of remembrance of that which was perpetually into the now-becoming chamber of the body. This amovement which is also a teleology becomes that which conforms the becoming-chamber into that which

confounds the immanent dialogue of the spirit and the form by the remembrance of that which was.

This very remembrance is that which forms the entirety of the ‘world’ and ‘self’ concepts. With this remembrance is the entirety of that which was phenomenally compounded into that which is neither wholly the dictate of the spirit or the word of the flesh - but is rather lodged in the chamber of becoming as a calcification. This is what it means to have a ‘concept’ of being. In having this concept of being, the immanent word of the spirit is filtered through the distorted chamber of becoming as that which is being rewor(l)ded by that which ‘is’. How can one becoming into one’s true being when one’s true being has already been evisced and stands like stone before them?

To embody that what is being is to fully become that which is and thus to never fully exist. The being emerges in brief moments of emanence (earthly) and ecstasy (enspirited); yet is never cast as anything that has ‘happened’ or ‘exists’ beyond a perpetual unfoldment. This is precisely the problem with and of ‘language’ and ‘history’ and ‘self’ and ‘world’ as supposed forms of true-being, or things that have already come to exist in some manner and as such have, by way of their true unfoldment - law beyond law - stone form in the face of perpetual unfoldment and disillusionment. Here, to be disillusioned is to be unveiled from ‘oneself’ into becoming. This unveiling is, of course, the absolute death of all not(h)ions as already non-existent false senses of embodiment. These notions as forms of calcified transits - dead form not even half ensouled sitting between the communion of the spirit and the form. It is in this way that the dictum of the momentous cannot be received; the existent form cannot leave and the coming spirit cannot arrive.

It is in this way that epochs proceed endlessly; the majority of the lives of ‘individuals’ too proceed - as teleologically bound to that which has been told to become already in a certain way. This is, certainly, the death before life. What is

required here, again, is a removal of these conceptual calcifications - calcifications which, in turn, prevent the clear flow which is living today as being asks one to become. It is imperative because one must be able to hear these dictates in order to move in right action which is also the immanence of discernment; there is no ability to discern if one is being spoken against from without as that which has become-into the chambers of becoming as a spectre - a spectre which haunts becoming through a veil which changes the word of the moment through itself as that which presupposes itself, a priori, as that which ‘is’; thus, cannot be supplanted as the thing-in-existence absolutely.

For if the being already exists, like the world or the word, it cannot become as it desires to become; it cannot fulfill its destiny, or fated movement as in and through itself like music through an instrument. Human beings, then, become distruments to themselves, or thrown sound back and out through the epochs of history and harm which have disabused them of themselves - ensouled form - into mere images of themselves as this being-human. It is, of course, this image and this image alone which is disputed, fought over, and possessed and dispossessed in the world at large - as itself, being the ‘thing-which-is’ standing, the false figure and false arbiter, of being and becoming among human beings - apparitions who have become quite good at this creation and recreation of the being-human world - with its laws as concepts looming large as paved roads into and out of empirical favor.

For it is the function of belief to power these principles and concepts which stand here and pretend to stop becoming as this time and all time - a grand play which has swept over and all mankind - that play which is this being-one-thing. The poets know of this untruth, as they are into the realm of spirits and thus have become spirits and the underground tributaries of feeling like brief masks. The poet lives a thousand lives before the sun sets. It is this belief of this one life as absolutely phenomenological - which is to say, absolutely materiality - and this belief as the guiding dictate

(which too absorbs religion as the phenomenologically controlled allowance of the pneumenological as organized song and prayer) of ‘man’ that has created the world as word and true self. This is, of course, the creation of a sphere which is attempted to be apart from being; as such, develops contradictory principles and laws to establish itself (language) where only the rule of perpetual becoming governs the ground upon which it has attempted to build its cities and factories. This world of ‘man’, by way of this artifice-work, becomes that which wages war (too, a war of polarities and scions) against - not only the mutuality of the becoming-process, but also, with extremity, against the domain and dominion of the spirit which is that which ensouls and leaves the flesh. In ignorance of the movement of spirit to and from this world of things, the ‘thingness’, or beingness, of things is lost to man; as such, he is lost to himself as but a corpse with a given name.

Man’s creation of the world (as anti-scion to ‘himself’) is also, absolutely and exactly, man’s creation of himself by way of negativity. All that is himself is not the world; all that is the world is not himself. It is also this way with the delineated binaries of his conceptual reality: man and woman, right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark. He wages this war as within himself (as being) first; in the waging of this war, he wages war on living - for nothing can live as if separate from the becoming of spirit and form - the process which is at once two, one, and none. For this is the veil which obscures man from his true nature - at one with and as the becoming-process - the simulated creation of separation which occurs within him as the memory of the living and the dead - a memory that is at once historical, ‘personal’, and archetypal.

The memory of man to himself as his self concept is constructed over and through time by other men, by way of his experience over and through time in interaction with other men and their constructions (which are also themselves), and the wellspring of life which runs like a babbling brook through each man which is the whisper of

his life which is at once the whisper of all life - the primordial essence which tells the story of man in each moment on a wheel of trial without abatement. Man is at once the epochs before him, the conception of himself as constructed by others, and every man who has ever lived. Not once, except in poetry, is he truly himself. And here, we strike at the root of what it is to be healing being by giving being absolute permission to embody itself; to wear itself as a spirit clothed in the jewels of that which it offers itself. The poetic formulation is the alchemical dressing of the individual by way of creating the individual absolutely; in this absolute creation, the creation of a land where everything is permissible; as such, the creation of being as being desires to take flesh and form - the embodiment of spiritude with the right word. Here, the right word is nothing more or less than what being asks of itself in the moment; the right word is simultaneous with the right action. The two cannot be divorced. It is in this way that man imbues himself with himself by way of and through poetry - by the membrane of the fiery breath of the soul taking form by its chosen parts: it picks through the sounds, the tastes of the man, the desires of the man, the books of the man, the loves, the touches, all by being given free reign into the treasure troves which are the deepest alcoves of the man’s ever-changing soul. The man must hold nothing back in poetry (as it is in and all life); in doing so, he frees himself from himself - he goes beyond his self conception; he goes beyond the false apparatus of ‘being-human’ into being absolutely as the process of poetic creation. This is the creation that is true, in the sense that it holds authority absolutely within itself, a stubborn authority that refuses all rule of law and principle asserted from without itself - that which is constructed by other men as incomplete. For the lawless are the ones who have abandoned everything but the immanent poetry of the moment; as such, the lawless are the ones who are truly lawful.

This is what it is to be healing; it is nothing more than obeying the law of oneself absolutely; in this obeyance, one is doing away with the false garments of the not-self which

are the calcifications of incomplete language - it is in this way that all calcifications are limitations of the flow of being to and from becomings. They would not be calcifications if they did not impose limitations on the possibilities of the poetic self formation; rather, they would be taking their ecstatic leave back into the fold of spiritude - to be utterly spun away.

today is an antique and if you ask me today what possesses me atop the hill in the silence of the black graves i will shudder and proclaim, ‘the terror, the primordial terror - it has got me around the ankles like mud.’

you will come to these poems and not understand the malaise of one who has seen man - naked and in a rage - in a room full of goons like a moon with stars or prostrate over a whore’s bed with his talon gripped into some green meat.

this sadness - is not to be remedied by any books, or looking away nor by the dirty poet of paris, sitting under bridges, or that bitch of my life - barking up my leg and pissing away time.

it will not abate but by the writing of these poems - by the conjuring of hard subjects that here i call being, thrown my body here, called being - the head of a corpse or an arm.

it is the conjured state which i sat and foretold among the headstones, hearing the rushing waters of her ecstasy, earthen beating among my eardrums my head buried in her chest and the flowers, shorn and dead upon the ground still lilting with hidden agonies.

this sadness will not be fucked away, nor finished with a drink or a dagger - this sadness is nothing more than the mad soliloquy before the ambush - out from behind a forest of trees, trees which are also versions of myself that conspire against me.

come! stab me to death in the agora, or else leave me to this shallow grave which i have marked with years - this time of the flesh that has left me at last to myself; this self which is spit in and burned. this self which has become a vase for complaint; a pure countenance of ashes.

for i have mixed the potion of my spirit and my flesh and confused the two so deeply that they are one; now! what use is left for this humanity -

to me this thing that stands before my abandon, proud, taut, defiant, and will not let me pass. these endless hours at the watchpost of my body, leering out the gates of its eyes; the empty pain.

this sadness will not succumb to death - no, it lingers like a melancholy swamp, a crow or demon upon my mouth or else upon my body like a stone - this sadness is like the realization that the mad green organ of sin is within the body and there alone holds the gravity of man! the mad gravity which has jilted him to himself and the earth and drags him across the desert of his life like ball and chain.

for i have unveiled the human cause out from behind the sepulchre, rolling back the stone which sealed the tomb and i have breathed the rotten air, the stench of man’s decay and his endless fate. what can you say to me now? you dandies and aggressors - what can you say to the one who has been driven mad by these beating symphonies of time, with endless blows to the nose of his soul? the weight and measure of man is naught; his mad scream warbles into grateful laughter. he has sloughed off his face and become the true mask of blood - siphoned around his flesh and pumped meaningless about his mouth. the madman moves endlessly; he becomes like lightning, or thunder.

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For I Am

What of man now? But an imagined, wicked thing - A vessel through which the soul will move, condemned to spin and sing Among the world of birds, the world of sea, the world of sky

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