the missing thing that is completely different from everything else, but everything has a stake in it.

Sunday, March 15, 2015


recommended time for reading this post -- five minutes a day X 7 days, read on turning on your laptop and midway through the day and then on turning it off, and then just keep turning over the text in this way for a few months, unless you can take enough for the temperature to rise and the material to decompose more rapidly...


recommended day 1

I'm working on a long book in which all these thoughts are woven into the kind of material life that produced and keeps reenacting them, but I'm not sure how long it will take and whether it will work at all -- maybe it's the nature of the beast only to appear in this most raw and abstract form, and it's up to the reader to flesh out the dry bones.   

this is like gardening... or rather making compost, turning over the rotting material, over and over, inviting the worms, then set it aside for two years...


This goes against the latest idea about abstraction -- that it should bear no hidden meaning that can eventually be parsed out.  It is a simple flat play of textures and rhythms signifying nothing; "the concept is a con."  Which overlooks the fact that the concept that "the concept is a con" might be the most conniving con of all.   I merely suggest -- an infantile hypothesis worth keeping alive until the other is verified beyond a reasonable doubt --- that language and experience are lovers that quarrel, that's all, until they file for a divorce that will leave them bereft of a true love forever -- due to lack of a good marriage counselor -- because nothing in heaven or earth can satisfy the one except the other.   The initial elation of the victim escaping from the other slipped into the role of oppressor will eventually fade, and they will fly to a mutual embrace in repentance and a restored balance of power, again just a hypothesis to keep dandling until verified an imposter beyond any doubt;

you don't realize how instant result oriented writing and reading are until you start doing the real work of making language compost
but presently the vehicle of return is damaged; the parsing part of the collective brain is lain fallow, that region of the collective brain has already atrophied; and the thought required to follow this text seems to be prohibitive -- compared to the usual just desserts, find forty days fast in a cold dry desert... custom written to bore you to death -- for fierce dogs with eyes as big as saucers guard the gates of knowledge -- not to be earned in idle curiosity or for self-aggrandizement, but only for public service...
for on the underlying metaphysical construct all social forms are built, and as for driving the piles of a newborn, greener world into bedrock, if not now, when? If not us, who? Yes, you and I, the replacements. As we don't want it, we inherit the world.  It slips through the fingers of those who grasp at it and clutch it.

recommended day 2 (after brief review of day 1)


trinitarian hegelian principle on which I base everything because it's how life and language work — there’s always a this and a that, wherever there’s a world that is alive, and they compete, and/or they cooperate, and they generate novel forms; they demand conservation or they grow extinct if they cannot evolve, they may evolve to preserve themselves but at a certain point the evolved form can utterly reject the earlier form, which is no longer recognizable in the evolved form.  And art is not life; they are this

all these naturalistic metaphors reflect a minimal difference between art and life, where less is more. 



and that, but they mingle and mate at the always somewhat illicit boundaries -- as each other is to each one's own progenitor from the wrong side of the tracks...and there will be hell to pay in this love affair, we can only hope each time the hell will be a little less literally realized...

recommended day 3 (after brief review of day 2)


and all this is bigger than I am, and so I enter into this process where the process pulls me in, not by deciding where I prefer to stand in advance — though I try to negotiate or woo the form that will grab me.  In the end, I believe in the process more than I believe in my apriori prejudices and am willing to my surrender myself to it as best I can.   So if I am possessed by some mongrel caught between this and that in the process of evolution, so be it.  So said the architect of the Parthenon when then the building committee cried — what is this monster — a stone building or a wooden hut?  Arrest Socrates — this is all his fault!   It’s one thing when hacks play around with these ideas, but now you’ve refined to exquisite calibration to its context, that too a travesty against immutable classical principles indifferent to context!  How dare the sheer veil compare her mongrel discourse to the Parthenon!  Arrest this practice!




getting tired.... pace yourself...Rome was not built in a day...we were just talking, now's the time for walking.   a thousand mile journey consists in steps, one at a time...  and driving piles in bedrock is not one day's work.   Consider before retreating from this bog the necessity of arriving at the lake. Mongrel discourse doesn't come along all that often. Opportunity knocks.






dear R -- you expressed interest in communing on the subject of knowledge.  I hope you don’t mind my sharing my thoughts with the whole quixotic quintet.  I suggest it is important enough to spare time for such useless reflection.   I suggest it could serve the whole quintet at some time it least expects it.



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I was hoping not to have to go back here, but my voices demand it I play the ultimate nerd who believes in the discussion more than the result, like those earnest Jewish beatniks who hang out the Hungarian pastry shop still arguing about passages in Marx.  I feel scared and full of dread this dreadful time, not elated, this might be a good sign... 


I am working on containment in other spheres, but still I feel I need an avenue of expression for what passes through me that will not be contained, what is infinite boundless yet focused in all its parts —

recommended day 4 (after brief review of day 3) 

but knowledge remains cloudy, refuses to crystallize in myriad flakes that blanket the land in soft cold truth.  We are intrinsically wired to put out our eyes in the face of knowledge.  There is too much darkness in nature not to mention yet darker human nature.  So if I earnestly channel knowledge it is only in believing there is some level of truth — if only psychological — soul-logical -- in the kerystian narrative, the gospel tooth (versus truth, not saying it is or isn't the truth as that's not my department).  I would be lying and misleading you to traffic in any other perspective.   I stay clean this way, in my bathwater find some just some nice clean garden dirt.

recommended day 5 (after brief review of day 4)


 I guess it’s due to my pernicious doubt — i’m from show me state -- that my “faith” mainly boils down to this psychoanalysis attended by noticeable poetic and mood effects that verify the theory in application; it is no credit to me…  yet given the travesties accruing to faith without evidence or argument, I’m not relatively ashamed… without this kind of infinitely eking, empirically evident epiphany — by the way invisible like any evidence to those who do not wish to look… or even listen to the qualities of the voice that allow trust in what appears on the other side of its window — the faithful get fanatical in defensiveness.  The less they believe, the more ardently they express it.  Whereas I lack all conviction even as I’m clearly doomed to keep dragging the stone up the mountain.  or more like trying to row through the sulfuric swamp of tangled cattails.  


recommended day 6 (after brief review of day 5)


the sheer veronika a mere mirror of the Mir for instance the first performance of which I saw with the words stretched like vibrating strings across the screen…it is poetry that’s all, and yet this fence they get people to pay to whitewash between art and life does not make them good neighbors.  



Remove the whitewash and find, again the gospel tooth — in my humble opinion, based on reason and empirical evidence and a truly minimal grain of faith.  That’s what it’s not allowed to say aloud.  Every age has its prohibition -- there find truth.  Would that it were booze that was prohibited; I’d rather be a bootlegger.




In short, I believe I stand where art kerystallizes in religion because the weather affects its chemical constitution in this way, and it is unscientific (against knowledge) to deny this terrifying, yet objectively visible audible and in all ways sensible nonsense result.  Blake is my soulmate; it just keeps coming up snake eyes.  I’m not preaching the doctrine, I’m just refusing to load the dice.  first principle of any ethical approach to knowledge.

recommended day 7 (after brief review of day 6)

the dna is given, and its given being demands a proper reading.  it doesn’t want to be genetically modified (fiction), nor does it want to be reduced to a pile of dead facts



something novel is happening at the immaculate conception called life choice love sentience a program for no longer being programmed.   so poetic no human poet will dare to apply a poetic name to deoxyribonucleic acid.  it’s this non-fictional fiction that doesn’t want to keep being undermined. These minimal particles of credible faith want to add up to something. I have ants in my pants. The ants are getting antsy.  They’re sick of being in my pants.  They want to go outside and make an anthill.  The ants will not survive without an anthill.   Each kerystian is an ant dragging far more than its weight to the anthill, the ant whose torture by a bacterium the atheists love to use as evidence for the impossibleness of God.   But it was the strange impassiveness of the early Christians in the face of all manner of torture that caused the religion to take root and spread.  Not an idea of God, but only a relation between I and thou, only love joining love's ultimate source to the lover of it can arm wrestle with tortuous nature and win.  Love of thou precedes belief in thou, and nothing seen from outside of this choice appears as it does from within it.  The two places speak gibberish to one another, and if it seems otherwise, trust me -- there are far more faux amis than there are trustworthy cognates.  So some form of practice is more important than, and must precede, belief. One notices one has been practicing in order to believe.  The practice of love just happens with a big bang out of nowhere and nothing, however gradually it is noticed.  Of course one loves before one believes in the beloved as such or recognizes her effects as those of a loved one.  And a lover sings -- lie to me, I promise I'll believe, just please don't leave me.  That all these principles are dangerous in the hands of the naive cannot be doubted; that's why the sophisticated and cosmopolitan must hurry up and embrace them and clear the palace of usurpers.   













xoxoxox

v