Who Be Kind To

What does early man understand by death?… if a man lives and moves, it can only be because he has a little man inside who moves him…

“The Soul As A Manikin” from The Golden Bough, James Frazer

The little man is the soul. The voodoo doll is the classic depiction of the little man, tied to the naive idea that sticking needles in the little man will result in the real person’s agony and maybe even death.

The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green colour. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks…

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

The soul is a multiplicity always, not an individual entity, as the Buyer thinks (and the Buyer-type is easily translated into contexts other than the drug market).

The soul is a collective spirit: more than not-body, the soul is the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts (no matter how little that sum adds up to). Bataille was right when he wrote Nietzsche was concerned with the whole. The Birth of Tragedy is rumination on the meaning of community in the fifth century BC Greek culture, a culture that might be considered the first bridge towards modern civilisation and a move from “early man.”

Festivals and contests were religious affairs – “the spiritualisation of enmity.” At the Greater Dionysia, actors put on masks and pretended to be immortal gods, played out the lives and deaths of their heroes and their daemons.

Behind the scenes and off-stage, sat the writer. Nietzsche valorised the solitary type, the “private thinker” as a means to the ends of man, an appeal to the little man within, rather than the mob without, and the State, the “coldest of cold monsters.. that lies when it says, ‘I, the State, am the people.’”

Community was constantly on his mind.

What was this force that freed Prometheus from his vultures and made myth the vehicle of Dionysiac wisdom? It was the Herculean force of music – which, supremely manifested in tragedy, was able to interpret myth with a new and most profound eloquence.

The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, Friedrich Nietzsche

Zarathustra came down from the mountain to speak to future generations. Upon his first attempt, all he got was a dead acrobat. But he returned again from the mountains to discourse with his brothers upon the meaning of “soul:” “Every soul is a world unto its own; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld.” This tragic aspect of self-consciousness and self-awareness, hypertrophied by modern life styles and formed by modern institutions and their collective disciplines in whole generations, was not lost on Nietzsche and still, he tried to invent a way for a people to exist together as soul.

The little man is the man(kind) within. Take the care of the self in caring for the community, the interconnectedness of life and ek-sistence in its tragic solitude(I am emale is not writing of the Internet and those half-baked ideas such as preached at Woodford folk festival, that the Internet is some kind of global Mind with the Earth as its Body, individual synapses firing randomly!).

If I want to realise totality in my consciousness, I have to relate myself to an immense, ludicrous, and painful convulsion of all of humanity. This impulse moves toward all meanings.

On Nietzsche, Georges Bataille

The passing on of wisdom to further the soul of mankind and breathe life into a new generation, “that a new kind of man has come to his bliss,” is the mission.

I am emale.

NOVA

There are worse things than death Mr Lee for example to live under the conditions your enemies will endeavour to impose. And the members of all existing organisations are at some point your enemy. You will learn where this point is if you survive. You will receive your instructions in many ways. From books, street signs, films, in some cases from agents who purport to be and may actually be members of the organisation. There is no certainty. Those who need certainty are of no interest to this department. This is in point of fact a non-organisation the aim of which is to immunise our agents against fear despair and death. We intend to break the birth-death cycle.

William S Burroughs, “the winds of time” from The Ticket That Exploded

Time is the enemy here. On the one hand, we have the sublime circle of birth-life-death seen in the concept of samsara of Eastern religions. In the West, evolutionism keeps us on the straight and narrow line of time, heading towards a thermodynamic death: NOVA.

Religion and science are the twin pillars Samson brought down in the temple that keeps the strongman’s hands tied. Religion promises an everlasting afterlife: one day you are going to die and you need to prepare for your eternal salvation in THIS life….

The problem with science as a system of valuations – supplementing a diet of humanism (the Enlightenment project) the basis for an objective production of truth, providing the fruits of scientific labour, technology in the “hard” sense, for the modern sovereign subject, the consumer – is the lack of values or goals short of self-gratification. Science has no purpose in and of itself. Science cannot measure empathy.

Science is not to be ignored. I am emale does not advocate a return to superstitious beliefs and a denial of the basic powers of reasoning. A possible “real-life” nova catastrophe would be global warming. In a worst case nova scenario, thermonuclear war would be another possible end result of this lack of empathy, of contact, of telepathic communication. Of love.

Earth is a space station and we’re here to go into space. Do I hear any questions about that?

Burroughs, “William’s Welcome (What are you here for?)” from Dead City Radio

We, as agents for causes we consciously or unconsciously represent, are thrust upon this stage of world responsibility. Burroughs’ work is intrinsically ethical – it is a concern for the whole. The shocking sexual images are depictions and lines of association connecting and framing the Garden of Delights (GOD for short).

Put into the perspective of a global destination, Burroughs charted a discourse between the epistle (routines) and science (fiction) where man may only be an insignificant part of existence as a whole. The ethics of Burroughs is not a humanism – “the great god Pan is dead, the sudden awareness that everything is alive and significant” (Burroughs, “Apocalypse” from Dead City Radio) – empathy, an intuitive knowledge, espirit de corps with nonhuman elements: the Earth, the Badger, the Lemur, space, even machines and technology.

Burroughs wrote “Pan” the modern version of the ancient Greek satyr, a symbol of man’s unity with nature through an artifice. Religion and drama were closely connected in ancient Greece. What is pure and metaphysical in men and women living in a community, is invisible and the Greeks (like any other “race”) had to give it a face, a mask and put it onto a stage, celebrated in dance and music.

Today the “great god Pan lives on in the realm of imagination… but art is spilling out of the frame and into subway graffiti – will it stop there?”

Today the war machine grows…

Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger as in a science-fiction story: we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the “unspecified enemy”; we have seen it put its counterguerrila elements into place, so that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice. Yet the very conditions that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines.

Deleuze and Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine” from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

The Art Department

When Young Sutherland asked me to procure him a commission with the nova police, I jokingly answered: “Bring in Winkhorst, technician and chemist for The Lazarus Pharmaceutical Company, and we will discuss the matter.”

“Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?”

“No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation.”

I was thinking of course that he knew nothing of the methods by which such people are brought in for interrogation – It is a precision operation – First we send out a series of agents – (usually in the guise of journalists) – to contact Winkhorst and expose him to a battery of stimulus units – The contact agents talk and record the response on all levels to the word units while a photographer takes pictures  – This material is passed along to The Art Department – Writers write “Winkhorst,” painters paint “Winkhorst,” a method actor becomes “Winkhorst,” and then “Winkhorst” will answer our questions – The processing of Winkhorst was already under way –

William Burroughs, Nova Express from “Chinese Laundry”

In a 1965 interview, Burroughs speaks of the Luce media as “a control system.  It has nothing to do with reporting.  Life/Time/Fortune is some sort of police organisation.”

The self has become the object of our own journalism.

The State must realise the distinction between the legislator and the subject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptualise their identity.  Always obey.  The more you obey, the more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself…

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus from “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – the War Machine”

“Melted a categorical no mercy for this enemy as dust and smoke sir…”  Agents for our own self-destruction, writers post their thoughts and feelings upon the Facebook/MySpace/Twitter organisations.  I am emale.  The processing of Ecko4inc is already under way.

Photo falling.  Word falling.

Nova Express is an attempt to destroy those word associations – those “lines of oxygen” – tying the free individual to the parasitic existence: Word.  “Survive! Is the name of the game.  What do I give a shit about these people?” Love and sex, for example, the algebra of need.  What men and women are driven to in the pursuit of “love.”  “Greg Ingliss” is being written, processing.  Control.  Image.  Word.

Burroughs upstages the notion of man’s immortal soul by writing himself into Nova Express as William Lee, Nova Inspector.  Plato himself was absent in the story when he wrote “Socrates” in Phaedo (Plato was ill – the story is a second-hand account of Socrates’ final hours), a dialogue concerned with the divine immortality of the human soul.

As Flaceliere wrote in his Daily Life in Greece, the Greeks did not really have any reasoned moral or ethical concepts of Goodness or Justice before Socrates or Plato.  Homer’s stories were the gospel of good living for the Greeks.  Life was a performance.  A Greek would not silently read by himself – he would read aloud or have a slave read for him.

The arts of existence were a collective process.  Even the Eleusinian mysteries did not prescribe any kind of way to live one’s life.  Life was simple.  Notions of good and evil were matters of honour, between the tribe and the individual.  The “soul” animated life.  Not only the humans but the seasons, the trees and the animals, all of life’s rich variety.  For higher forms of existence – life after death, for example – the Greeks had the comedy and tragedy of Attic drama.  Avoid hubris.  Life was tragic.  Better not to exist at all than to suffer and to fight.

Once Socrates introduced the algebra of need, the prescriptions came thick and fast.  He decided he didn’t have to take anyone’s word at face-value but the value of life could be tested, minted currency, counterfeit coinage, agenbite of inwit, the bite of a private conscience.

Make up your own mind.  Start your own Art Department.  Make up your own ideal society.  “Socrates” wasn’t looking for consensus – the Republic is a thought experiment (with a silent appeal to the political constituency, those who want to control the meaning of justice).  Plato raised the use of reason to a new level in recording his thoughts and opened up the critical faculty of reasoning.

An acute ability of Burroughs was to see the relations of power in systems of control.  Well-versed in firearms and techniques of self-defence (poisons, knives), Burroughs had no delusions about the relations of forces.  Shoot for freedom, kid. He was trying to give others a fighting chance before the whole planet blows up and goes nova:

At any given time position of recorders fixes nature of absolute need – And dictates the use of total weapons – So leave the recorders running and get your heavy metal ass in a space ship – Did it – Nothing here now but the recordings – Shut the whole thing right off – Silence – When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova machine running –

William Burroughs, Nova Express, from “Pay Colour: Clom Friday”

Caught between an apology for immoral acts committed and an accusation of the hypocrisy of the powers-that-be, that mistake “beingness” for “havingness,” William Burroughs wises up the marks.  Willy the Heavy Metal Kid.  Also known as Willy the Rat.  Also known as Inspector Lee of the Nova Police.

The great god Pan lives on in writing, in painting and in music.

Everyday Daimons

The problem of Socrates:-    The two antitheses: the tragic disposition, the Socratic disposition – measured according to the law of life… his equalisation of reason = virtue = happiness. It was with this absurdity of a doctrine of identity that he fascinated… Absolute lack of objective interest: hatred for science; the idiosyncrasy of feeling oneself as a problem. Socrates’ acoustic hallucination: morbid element. When the spirit is rich and independent it resists any preoccupation with morality. How came it that Socrates was a monomaniac in regard to morality?- In emergencies, “practical” philisophy steps at once to the fore. Morality and religion as chief interests are signs of an emergency. Nietzsche, The Will To Power notebooks (432), March-June 1888

Flaceliere finishes his Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles by devoting a chapter to Socrates. His analysis of everyday life in Greece balances the extolment of the Greeks in their culture as the birthplace of democracy, theatre, philosophy and science. The filthy alleys and unclean practices of the Athenians with little or no concept of public health, shows up the negation in a too often crystal temple to which the Greeks are paid tribute. The Dionysiac is present in this work by Flaceliere.

The testament to Socrates is the bringer of an ethic and morality to an otherwise superstitious race. But perhaps Aristophanes the comic provides the best insights into a Greek attitude. The comedy as a form of theatre enjoyed more freedom than the tragedy. For example, in The Frogs, Dionysus is portrayed as wily joker, irreverent and at times even cowardly. The scene in which he swaps his clothes with his servant for example, might well have caused an affront to pious priests of Dionysus – or won over their gratitude at a true representation of the essence of the Dionysiac.

In some ways, this book by Flaceliere is an echo of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, written in 1871 before Nietzsche took himself less “seriously.” Nietzsche was caught up in the Wagner movement at time of the writing of this book. The last dozen or so sections are devoted to Wagner and upset the flow of an argument concerning the ancient Greeks well-summarised in a line from Zarathustra: “I would not believe in a god that does not know how to dance.” The principal feature of the divine being an aspect of existence that includes the dance, frivolity, panpipes, shepherds in the country, set apart from the serious and sober discourse of the urban setting with its political intrigue at the Assembly and its “philosophising” at the Academy, men selling ideas in the marketplace.

The book complements my own understanding of the Greeks. Robert had a great passion for the Greeks and his book is not only a “corrective” of a shiny ideal picture of fifth century Greece but also a plumbing of the depths and an attempt to understand the context in which the drama is staged.  Festivals were common and were almost always religious affairs including the dramatic festival, the Greater Dionysia. Flaceliere does not accept the mask at its face value as if the Greek culture embodied or captured a beautiful ideal, but was in fact the collective work of a consciousness of one multiplicity: Athens.

The social is what transcends the individual, even in his lonely, tortured independence.

Like Apollo’s flaying of Marsyas, the society holds the individual to account and little can be done about the weight of public opinion. It is important to try however – the contest is the object in our culture as much as it was for the Greeks with their drama competitions and Olympic Games. Culture is a perpetual field of interaction. Only fools and hermits blatantly ignore and express disdain for the public sphere that at times, the words of Heidegger still ring true today: “When language enters into the public sphere, it enters into a pit of nihilism.”

If we had to oppose a discourse to the political in the public sphere, it is art that produces the statements, the symbols of a society’s collective unconscious. The painting by Ribera doesn’t “speak” to me but still affects me. Or it speaks to me of the relentless pursuit of civilisation and the daring of a musician to challenge the gods to a competition, the questioning of Apollo’s worth as a musician especially as it exists in relation to Marsyas’ own self-estimation, what Nietzsche repeatedly refers to as a “revaluation of values” or more crudely, a “will to power.” The painted outcome of Marsyas’ failure is not to inspire fear but courage I believe, to illustrate a daring in the face of hopeless odds and a terrible punishment. Marsyas had his skin flayed from his body by Apollo after he lost a musical competition with Apollo. “‘Help!’ Marsyas clamoured. ‘Why are you stripping me from myself? Never again, I promise! Playing a pipe is not worth this!’” (Ovid, Metamorphoses Book 6, 386-7)

To protest and contest what transcends the individual – an essentially “punk” attitude. Even the contest between the ineffable and language is a worthy pursuit in a modern society. Not even a society alone but down to the community, wholes within wholes, fragments and life-systems, private lives and public faces running right through the culture of the public sphere.

Socrates was one of those “punks” outside the normal run of society. OR rather he existed within it. Socrates fought in battles as a hoplite and often visited with the aristocrats as well as the common folk, according to Plato. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates disavows himself of public life and gives his reason for this in his first appearance before the public Assembly when he is on trial for corrupting the youth and for not recognising the gods of the city, Athens: an inner daemon, a supernatural or divine voice speaks to him although this voice only tells him “no” (not wholly speech)when he was about to engage in an activity the daimonic thought was wrong. Flaceliere richly situates the figure of Socrates in the context of the life Socrates loved the most – everyday Athens – to the point where Socrate was willing to die for his own private daimon.

Town and Country

The formation of the city-state in ancient Greece is one of the founding achievements in Western civillisation. The city-state was a sublimation of differences, the parts acting in concert to create a greater whole. Athens was a plurality, a city that arose from a collection of villages.
The Acropolis was the center of the building of the city. It was fundamentally organised unlike the remainder of the city.
During wartime, the inhabitants of the countryside would retreat into the city. Thucydides wrote of the heartache experienced by the country folk when they watched the invaders (the Spartans and their allies) destroying their crops. Greece was not a fertile land and the predominant crops – vines and olive trees – took years to bring to fruition. Their destruction was tragic and difficult to behold from behind the safety of the city walls.
Taken as a provocation to go out into the battlefield, Pericles addressed the people in a speech at the Assembly, to persuade the folk from giving in to the provocation:
“However well of a man may be in his private life, he will still be involved in the gereal ruin if his country is destroyed; whereas, so long as the state id secure, individuals have a much greater chance of recovering from their private misfortunes. Therefore, since a state can suppport individuals in their sufferring, but no one person by himself can bear the load that rests upon the state, is it not right for us all to rally to her defence?… For you have been so dismayed by the disaster in your homes that you are losing grip on the common safety; you are attacking me for having spoken in favour of war and yourselves for having voted for it.” (Thucydides, Book Two (60) from History of the Peloponnesian War)
Without the city-state, the temples to thier gods would not have been built. The Academy would not have been conceived. And the philosophers would still be wandering about in the desert like John the Baptist, living off wild honey and locusts. The Word would not have been invented in its written form, carved in the side of the earth’s womb. Balancing the needs between a worship of a higher ideal that required sacrifice and the necessities of a hard nature living off the land but also enjoying its abundant harvests, came the festival – the Great Dionysia, the spring festival and the staging of dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes to name the few handed down to I am emale in scraps, by chance and circumstance, representative of the power of the city-state in the hour of its revival.

Mores

Against remorse.-  I do not like this kind of cowardice toward one’s deeds… One would have to be a theologian to believe in a power that annuls guilt: we immoralists prefer not to believe in “guilt.” We hold instead that every action is of identical value at root – and that actions that turn against us may, economically considered, be nonetheless useful, generally desirable actions.    Nietzsche, The Will To Power

…Nietzsche has written what he has written. He has written that writing – and first of all his own – is not originarily subordinate to the logos and to truth. And that this subordination has come into being during an epoch whose meaning we must deconstruct.    Derrida, Of Grammatology

I am emale, caught up in the embrace of Nietzsche’s arguments. One of my old lecturers, David Massey (a man who I have the utmost respect for and consider a kindred spirit, a true “philosopher of the hammer”), warned me about Nietzsche. The more I read of his works, the more bewitched or enchanted I am emale becomes in the writing. It began with the Anti-Christ a month ago (again) and I have made fervent notes throughout my copy. I picked up the Will To Power a little while ago and the movements that led him to madness, are becoming apparent. The spectral quality of his object neither metaphysical nor physiological, is what drove him to the final resting place of his discourse where his illness finally overcame him. One could almost ecko his own words on Socrates back at him: Mr Nietzsche has been sick a long time and death or madness is the cure. In some way he is my inner daemon, much as Socrates was his inner daemon and Socrates himself had his own daemon.

What set Nietzsche apart from the others in his judgements? He wrote in the Anti-Christ, his words are free of “moralic acid.” His works were a re-evaluation of values or a will to power, extolling the eternal recurrence of the same. In other words, he only measured the value of things according to a descending or ascending scale. A physiological condition was his truth and conditions such as happiness only resulted from the happy co-ordination of forces in the body, when one acts in unity and these acts in themselves may at times also be “evil.”

I am emale came across Nietzsche for the first time in one of David Massey’s subjects at university in my undergraduate years. Nietzsche wan’t on the reading list and I found him looking for an argument outside the reading list. The subject was called “Vulnerable Identities” and was concerned with the stories of the oppressed, the weak and ill. A group that Nietzsche himself condemned many times in his writing, seeing liberal and benevolent philosophies as contradicting the natural order of things, by refusing the selection principle by which the strong should come to power and the weak should perish. The whole grew stronger.

Nietzsche’s meaning – the logos or truth – in his words, is not simple or obvious. The action was what counted for Nietzsche – action without activity, without ego, only an inspired will to power seeking its own natural advantage, an increase in well-being. He declared war on Christianity as the religion of pity, a descending form of nihilism that never came into contact with reality.

His evaluation reminds I am emale of the Divided Self Laing wrote of in his book of the same name. Dead on the outside, alive within where no-one can ever see one’s true and secret self, the living soul of the person, these sufferers of schizophrenia (in its final stages) invent whole personas for themselves and for situations designed to manage the divided self, the whole person they experience but can never reveal.

In particular, these divided selves had a fear of actions because their inner idea that their true selves were invisible and untouchable could be held to account by their actions. The primordial fear is at one with the fundamental striving for authenticity.

The parallels with Christianity should be obvious. Crucified to the flesh and alive to Christ – not citizens of this world but in a world hereafter, the eternal (eternity in the vulgar sense of the word “time”) kingdom of God where their rewards are waiting.

On The Genealogy of Morals was the first book I am emale picked up by Mr Nietzsche. The second essay on guilt, good and bad conscience and the like, caught my attention. The naive thought entered my head that if I could critique this work, I could open up a new ethic, a justice in itself. At that time I hadn’t even read Plato’s Republic, man’s first striving towards the ideal of justice-in-itself. The history of a concept in its unliving shell – the etymology of lines from “debt” to “guilt” in German – unearthed a vast way of thinking and a new respect for history and the contingency of our “eternal truths” – including Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

In the Gay Science, in an aphorism comparing those people he likes to flying fish playing on the “countless waves of laughter,” Nietzsche was led to utter the words:

Sit venia verbo.

The Deaf of Writing

A man’s spirit lives in his ears – do you understand what I’m saying? If a man hears something good, his body is suffused with joy, whereas if he hears something bad, he loses his temper.         Xerxes speaking to Pythius of Lydia, from Herodotus’ The Histories, Book Seven (39)

That everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run not only writing, but thinking too. Once spirit was God, then it became man and now it is even becoming mob.        Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, ‘Of Reading and Writing’

The story goes, as I am emale reads Herodotus’ The Histories, that when Xerxes marched his army from Persia to Hellespont to invade Greece in 480 BC, his crosshairs targeted upon Athens, he stopped at many places and his army drank whole rivers dry. People were expected to feed and water the army Herodotus numbers at 1.7 million strong, composed of Indians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Ethiopians, just to nominate a few.

When Xerxes came to Celaenae (an ancient fortress-city in Phyrygia, present day Turkey), Pythius the son of Atyus, laid on lavish feasts for Xerxes and his men, and offerred to help finance the war effort. Xerxes was amazed at his generosity and his generals told Xerxes, Pythius was the richest man in the known world after himself. Xerxes asked Pythius directly how much wealth he possessed and he replied he was seven thousand short of a full round figure of four million gold Daric staters (72 tonnes of gold?? “But it is not absolutely clear, when Herodotus is talking about eastern staters, that he is thinking in terms of the Attic scale [a stater=4 drachma or almost 18 grams]“).  Pythius offerred all this gold to the war effort. Xerxes not only refused his offer but gave him the four thousand staters to make up the difference for a round four million.

The construction of the bridge across Hellespont was destroyed by a violent storm shortly after its first completion. Xerxes was so angry he ordered the sea be branded with hot irons fired into the waters. After rebuilding the amazing pontoon bridge across the Hellespont, a solar eclipse occurred. Xerxes summoned the Magi for the meaning of this omen. The Magi, not wanting to offer any counsel against the invasion, told Xerxes the sun represented Greece and would be blotted out, signifying a victory for the Persians.

Pythius was terrified by the omen and feared the worst. He begged Xerxes to allow his eldest of five sons to stay at home and not join the expedition so he should have at least one son to nurse him in his old age. Xerxes was furious that a slave of his, one of his own possessions, should question his right to take and appropriate what he saw fit for Persia. He was risking himself and his own sons in the war – how could his slaves expect to risk any less? Xerxes renounced his offer of four thousand staters and took the remaining sum of Pythius wealth and the life of the son he especially wanted to keep at his side. “A man’s spirit lives in his ears – do you understand what I am saying?”

As soon as Xerxes had given him this answer, he ordered those of his men who were responsible for such matters to find the eldest of Pythius’ sons and to cut him in half. Then they were to place one half on the right side of the road and the other half on the left, so that the army could pass between them. Once his orders had been carried out, the army filed through [across the Hellespont].

This was the beginning steps of the Persian army across the Hellespont beyond the boundaries of the Persian Empire, that would eventually lead to the legendary battle at the pass of Thermopylae where the famous 300 Spartans would die rather than retreat; the sea battle of “blessed Salamis,” prophesised by the oracle to be either the demise or salvation of Greece “within wooden walls”; and the battle of Platea, the place where the Greeks and the Persians (and their bought Greek allies) would meet to decide the outcome of the Persian Wars: freedom for the Greeks or new slaves for the Persians.

The outcome is, of course, well-known to us now, the “inheritors of ancient morality.” The seat of civilisation – the birthplace of democracy, philosophy and drama – has its origins in this space and time as a result of this conflict, the Persian Wars. At the time, the Greeks were not only fighting for their lives, but for their freedoms and their ideals, against the tyranny of Xerxes. He was counselled against bringing such a large army across to Greece by one of his closest advisers, citing reasons of land and sea. By land, the supply lines would quickly dry up with so many men to feed and water. At sea, the size of his fleet of ships (a Greek trireme needed 180 men to row and Xerxes’ fleet numbered at 1,207 triremes) meant there was no harbour large enough to shelter his ships. In other words, Xerxes’ massive army was excessive: the size and number and ambition of his invading army were unnatural, as unnatural as the sun being blotted out from a cloudless sky in the middle of the day.

Herodotus cites other bad omens. A horse gave birth to a hare, for example. Xerxes had a dream where “he saw himself wearing a garland made out of sprigs of an olive-tree whose branches overshadowed the whole world, but then the garland disappeared from his head” (ibid. (19)). The dream portends to the famous story of an olive tree in Athens, sacred to Pallas-Athena that the very next day after the Persians chopped it down when sacking the abandoned city, started growing back. Anyway, perhaps that was Herodotus’ intention in writing of Xerxes’ dream. “Dreams are a biologic necessity” wrote William Burroughs. Xerxes paid these signs no heed, reading the writing as he, a god upon the earth, saw fit.

The defeat of Xerxes was taken as a sign of divine retribution by Herodotus for the desecration of sacred sites and temples by the Persians. He wrote of the attempt by the Persians to take Delphi, home of the oracle, being thwarted by two giants coming to life from an earthquake, driving the Persians away. Undoubtedly exaggerations and distortions of natural phenomena (the solar eclipse alluded to above, did not actually occur) but Herodotus does give a sense of the spirituality of the Greeks – the gods as ideal spectators for the human drama – that Hegel envied so much as a union of religion and State, the universal and the societal (the church being the body and bride of Christ, society being the collective body of men on earth with the State being the head) – their attention to transcendental things, of powers immanent yet divine, not least of which, the earth and nature symbolised by Demeter and Pallas-Athena and remembered in rituals of dancing and sacrifice.

What was at bottom the ultimate meaning of Trojan Wars and other such tragic terrors? There can be no doubt whatever: they were intended as festival plays for the gods; and insofar as the poet is in these matters of a more “godlike” disposition than other men, no doubt also as festival plays for the poets.        Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, “‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like” (7)

Unlike the poets (Aeschylus being a possible exception as he wrote the only Attic drama based on recent events, The Persians, and I am emale does not mean to negate the poets who do not), in writing The Histories for free men, Herodotus paid witness after the event and demonstrated a healthy respect for the power of forgetting, as well as a wish to keep the Greek dream alive by travelling and speaking to people about the Persian Wars, recording the past so that the Greeks would no longer be determined by that history, striving for truth in freedom of thought as a pre-condition for ethics, self-determination or enkrateia – to cross arms with one’s self as a model from which to begni to mould and shape relations with others.  Ultimately, it should be a peaceful notion.  The Histories begin thus:

Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus.  The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.

A present ruined and wasted in the tyrant, Xerxes, who believed a “man’s spirit lives in his ears.”  Deaf to writing, acting out of revenge for past grievances to his and his father’s pride whispered in his ears by Mardonius, Xerxes let his self-determination – the meaning of war and conflict as the nomos of Persia – be poisoned by the will of a wanton mob as the ideal spectator.   This, at least, is how I am emale reads Herodotus’ presentation.

The Block of Exchange

Yes, in my stumbling, bumbling way I was making all manner of discoveries. One of them was that one cannot hide his identity under cover of the third person, nor establish his identity solely through the use of the first person singular. Another was – not to think before a blank page. Ce n’est pas moi, le roi, c’est l’autonome. Not I, but the Father within me, in other words.         Henry Miller, Nexus

And unto the angel of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth… As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him and sup with him, and he with me. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.        The Book of Revelations 3:14-16, 19-21

Last night a friend asked me if I was working on anything, if I had anything going. I submitted a short story I call “H2O” for competition a week and a half ago and since then, the word has run dry.

The principal exercise in front of me for the past week has been another short story competition of sorts, a bin night story. Every Wednesday night – according to the original idea – I select a word from the dictionary and that word becomes the subject of a piece of writing due by the next bin night. One of my friends, a historian, and her housemate are also participating in this exercise, swapping stories for a future publication. The law of exchange was the subject of last week’s essay/short story/anecdote. I opened up Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, Kierkegaard, even a few notes I had made on Bataille, looking for some juice, some power word that will churn out the bin night essay.

Everything ended up in the refuse. Writer’s block. I was thinking too much (as is my wont) about the law of exchange. The term invoked all these eckonomic associations. I always wanted to write a piece about Deleuze and Guattari’s 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…

“From 1730 to 1735, all we hear about are vampires.”… It is always possible to try to explain these blocks of becoming by a correspondence between two relations, but to do so certainly impoverishes the phenomenon under study.

Memories of a sorcerer, memories of a dancing Spinozist, memories of a molecule – writing a block of exchange, a set of reciprocal relations like the wasp and the orchid between two entities that have nothing to do with each other as genus and species but, nonetheless, there is this excessive relationship, a kind of a love that exists between the two, a non-local, quantum phenomenon, a creative evolution irreducible to the laws of causality and motion. “Unlike history, becoming cannot be conceptualised in terms of past and future.”

And I’m reading the “father of history,” Herodotus’ The Histories, a strange exercise given the events are so far removed from the context of everyday life in Australia, one wonders why bother. The bushfires were ravaging country Victoria on Saturday on the hottest day ever recorded here and I was sitting in my room, reading Herodotus, his account of the Persian Wars and how free men gathered together under one law – the nomos – to unite against a tyrant. One day, another story on the courage of fire-fighters and volunteers, doctors and the scores of “ordinary people” who demonstrated fearlessness in the face of the bushfires, will also be written. To the north, floods ravage Queensland. The reason for these climactic changes is difficult to pinpoint – manmade or natural? The forces of law and order are in a state of moral panic: arrests have been made, lines of accountability are being reviewed. The Apocalypse has come to Australia, the four horsemen are abroad this week…

Not even the best of intentions can always govern lawful actions. Miller’s philosophy of creation, “action without activity,” is exemplarary. “I am the wandering Jew…” Miller often identifies with the Jews in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, his becoming-minoritarian. They are the ones he can speak to and exchange ideas with on literature and art, humble and otherwise innocuous looking individuals with the fire of the prophets still in their bellies, kept out the back of a corner store, or behind the drapes of a clothing store. The Jews crucified Jesus two millennium ago. The Jews have suffered bigotries and racial hatred for centuries: apartheid of the Jews during the Renaissance; systematic genocide in the gas chambers during the Holocaust, the subject of my historian friend’s lectures this semester. Today, lampooned in Arab TV sitcoms and surrounded by enemies on all sides of the nation-state, the Israeli army sends soldiers and tanks into Palestine, killing terrorists and children alike.

Wherever we used the word “memories” in the preceding pages, we were wrong to do so; we meant to say “becoming,” we were saying becoming.

To understate the matter, reading accounts of the Holocaust does not make for light reading. Those stories are incorporated into the tough, yet supple and diffuse, fabric of my friend’s becoming-woman. She advised me in regards to my writer’s block, to never write upon a blank page.  She starts with another text on the page.  Genius.

The Histories are also supple and diffuse, bringing to light the seams and lines of the ancient conflict I learnt about in a Hollywood film called 300. The block of becoming is an exchange of intensities. It is an overcoming wherein art redeems life stricken with tragedy. Art is the metaphysical activity proper to mankind, not the practice of moral entrepreneurship nor the exercise of political statesmanship, freezing intensities into proud ideas. The pain of conflict is visible on people’s faces – you can plainly read it even in the face of the Prime Minister. The story is neither a thing nor a person. The story is a relationship, an opening. Desire flows…

But, in the wise words of Aristotle, a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. The ghosts of those victims perished in the bushfires, populate an afterworld contiguous with country Victoria: Kinglake, St Andrews, Marysville, Strathewen… The ephemeral present is the fleeting self, the subject of becoming, a finite act of creation in an infinite neo-evolution, the entering of a blocked doorway opening onto an omniverse of compossibilities in the matrices of our collective and unconscious heart’s desires in all its multiplicity and becoming. A doorway of the law in Kafka’s chapter from The Trial when K. turns to the Church for relief from the interminable analysis and building of a strange case where he stands accused of crimes unknown (he has been found wanting), held to give an account by his elders before the Law. The father-priest tells him a parable of a man who came from the country seeking to know the law (published elsewhere as “Before the Law”):

Before his death all the experiences of the long years assemble in his mind to form a question which he has never yet asked the doorkeeper… “What is it that you still want to know?” asks the doorkeeper, “you are insatiable.” “Surely everyone strives to reach the law,” says the man, “how does it happen that for all these many years no one except me has ever asked for admittance?” The doorkeeper recognises that the man is at his end, and in order to reach his failing ears he raises his voice and bellows at him: “No one else could ever have been admitted here, since this entrance was intended for you alone. Now I am going to close it.”

In the Name of Troy

Agamemnon was the first to spring through and kill his man, Bienor, shepherd of his people – first him, then his fellow Oileus the charioteer: he jumped down from the chariot to face Agamemnon, but as he rushed straight for him Agamemnon stabbed him in the forehead with his sharp spear, and the heavy bronze of his helmet’s rim could not stop the spear, but it went through that and through the bone, and all his brains were spattered inside and the man brought down in his fury.  Homer, The Iliad

Not for the faint-hearted. Violent. Probably get at least an “M” rating today – for mature audiences, 15 years or older. It’s difficult to imagine the story being told to children as it must have been back in those days. Spears crashing into eyeballs and piercing brains, shattering breastbones and jaws, make an interesting contrast with the flowery language comparing waves of Danaans and Trojans to stormy rivers washing out into the sea or the wind blowing through fields of wheat.

The lists of names are a bit excessive but back the heroes had to be remembered and inspire future generations to have their names written in the epics like Achilles and Hector. The index of names at the back of my copy goes for over fifty pages. This book was to the Greeks what the Bible is to today’s Christians as a source of moral values. The idea of a book governing the spiritual values of a people was NOT a Greek idea – for the working out and evolving of their spiritual values, the Greeks had contests (the Olympics), festivals and plays (the spring festival honouring Dionysus, god of the mask, with dramas).

It’s easy to get lost in the violence and the names. All those names are as tedious as all the begats in the Bible. I read the Iliad twice before I am emale fully comprehended a unified plot at work here: the story of Achilles and Agamemnon’s conflict, the war machine versus the State apparatus, the individual and the familial.

Like all good stories, there is another side to the story, a dark reflection of the source, a double origin, and that dark sun shnies upon the Trojans. The rebellious Paris who risks his city and his family for the love of Helen – the bitch, the scheming horrible creature that I am! And the risk is well-portrayed at the micro logical level in the interconnecting fibre of individual human relations by the love Hector manifests for his family – witness the imploring plea his wife, Andromache, makes for him to stay and avoid the fighting (see Euripides’ play for the fate of Andromache).

This sacrifice augments the horror of Achilles’ actions and compounds the affect of grief in Priam’s and Achilles’ meeting of tears when Priam begs for the body of his son. The contest between the hero-warrior and the mother-country that bore him, is a violent battle in the Iliad where only the gods are victors. Achilles dies, Hector dies, Ajax commits suicide, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife’s lover upon his return and the journey back to Ithaca takes Odysseus ten years.

Unlike the film, Troy, the Iliad (which supposedly inspired the film and the writers’ did steal some tidbits from the book like the part when Hector is facing off against Achilles, asking for a diplomatic treaty to which Achilles replies there are no pacts between lions and deer) portrays Agamemnon as a warrior who gets his hands dirty. The gods are also completely missing from the modern re-telling (apart from a sentimental scene between Achilles’ mother and her son), not to mention the war only lasting two weeks when in fact it went for ten years in the Iliad. In any case, the plot in the Iliad is more concerned with honouring tradition, Fate and Necessity (not even Zeus could escape the powers of the Fates), than with a war where their names will be remembered forever (an egotistical, neo-liberal endeavour – if anything, the Iliad is tale about the hubris or excess of ego – Achilles’ pride costs him Patrokles).

In the times of the ancient Greeks, war was a terrible necessity. In modern times, there is little glory in wars fought with SMART bombs and napalm. Men and women still risk their lives for the love of country and are rightly honoured for their sacrifices. But the Archaic period was one where there was little security; war, starvation and plague posed real threats of extinction to whole communities. The vast majority of Greeks were farmers, toiling a living off the land in primary industry to produce enough food for the whole community.

That is rarely the case today in modern and developed societies. In the novel, Ulysses, Joyce already realised the ancient motif of warfare in modern societies with his pacifist, Leopold Bloom, as Odysseus. Men had to believe there was some reward for their fighting to go out and battle with a spear and a shield in a time when medical technology was next to none. To say the glory of war is still as relevant today in the Iliad as the filmmakers of Troy would have it, is ridiculous and a terrible misappropriation of the Greek tale.

But what can one expect from Hollywood, the land of rape and money where “stars become dreams and dreams become stars”?

I am emale gives the Iliad four stars.

The Body Builder

What happens between my legs is like a cold drink to me, it is just a feeling cold round stones against my back sunshine and shadow of Mexico. I know that other people think of it as something special to do with how they feel about someone else and there is a word love that means nothing to me at all. It is just a feeling between the legs, a sort of tingle.                               Burroughs, “The Dead Child,” The Wild Boys

 Silver jockstraps and glider boys… Pan parties like its 1969. The humour and irony in scenes like the Americans forces against the Wild Boys in North Africa are almost prophetic of the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. All the old favourites are here: the great Slashtobitch, the playboy A.J., Johnny – and pages upon pages of rectal mucus and “buttocks like worn ivory.” A fair romp of gay anarchy and frolicking revolution from the grassroots, the Wild Boys are also experts in guerrilla warfare and assassination. The old gardener working for the Colonel for ten years has only been biding his time until the opportunity to strike. Eighteen-inch Bowie knives (one of Burroughs’ personal favourites I take it) are strapped to springs which cut back and forth in a rapid fashion, tearing opponents to shreds. Like the gang of rollerboys skating into a line of riot police. The blood went everywhere.

The Burroughs war machine rumbles to a climax in the The Wild Boys, the first novel after the trilogy beginning with The Soft Machine. At work is the viral program, as WSB attempts to spread the Word-virus and cut lines between word and image that form the building blocks of association – the organs of the socius – in the State apparatus, substituting marriage and heterosexual love (“Mother and I would like to know”) as THE model for sexual practices in a Western society for more exotic forms of bodily communication:

The Body Builder. The monk is wrapping flesh sheets around the two skeletons. Two youths have been formed. Mouth rectum and penis sealed.                                                           “The Miracle of the Rose”

 Pure literature. To ecko Mr Nietzsche, I love those who write in blood. I am emale – the dead child – left my mother when I was five. I never experienced any sadness at this sundering of familial ties, just accepted this statement of fact as children will wisely accept what is told them before the adult habit of doubting has formed. Psychoanalysts will tell you, of course, there is a fundamental error in your programming, a repression of affect from all those years of longing for a mother in absentia. Result: adult neuroses is formed. Wising up the marks to the “afterlife” of the cure (terminable or interminable?), the Immortality con and the Garden of Delights, Burroughs cuts and ties in the lines of association (Two youths have been formed) moving back and forth from a nostalgia for the 1920’s, the decade of his birth (the penny arcades and books for boys from his youth), to a hopeful future in space travel, making pornography for an age when the tyranny by those agents of control working undercover in marriages, families, big businesses and world governments, is broken.

“A writer may find it difficult to make the reader see a scene clearly and it would seem easier to show pictures. No. The scene must be written before it is filmed. The new look in blue movies stresses story and character. This is the space age and sex movies must express the longing to escape from flesh through sex. The way out is the way through… The scene where Johnny has crabs and Mark makes him undress… Who are these boys? Where will they go? They will become astronauts playing the part of American married idiots until the moment when they take off on a Gemini expedition bound for Mars, disconnect and leave the Earth behind forever…”                                                                                                                      “A Silver Smile”

 That some people might be offended and disgusted by this writing is inevitable and the old party line levelled against Socrates will be eckoed: “He’s corrupting the minds of the youth.” (And Burroughs uses such pleasant titles for his chapters.) The overtly and oft-repeated misogynistic and militant, homosexual aesthetic being directly espoused here makes this novel a tough read for fourth wave, post-reality feminists and perspiring metrosexuals. The Wild Boys is more concerned with the politics of friendship than homosexualising the planet. Still I wouldn’t recommend this book to my mother. Definitely not for the faint-hearted ME’s but there has to be a selection principle.

In a time when so many pin their hopes on a “second life” in “cyberspace” and the “Internet revolution” to build MUD houses for “virtual communities” (every community is “virtual” IE it has a ruling idea or set of values), it’s refreshing to find Burroughs building a body without organs in writing the idea of a sexual revolution armed to the teeth (with eighteen-inch Bowie knives) back when the sixties was oozing with hippie and beat culture, slops of love going all round. Instead of working out one’s self in Second Life, it might be wiser to lift weights in the bright sunshine without, exercise and enjoy your self.

I am emale.

Running off to join the Wild Boys.