Wandering Star

God and a woman who is loved are parallel.  Bataille

It is the love for a woman that causes doubt in us.  Nietzsche

Of late, given the tumultuous state of affairs in my (ex-)love life, I am emale - being Muli’s alter-ecko -  came back to this post, on the “pedestal.”

The object I have in mind is the love object on a pedestal.  Plato dances around this pedestal in a type of madness - a good, divine madness as an aspect of the divine is discovered in the mortal being of the beloved. A memory of the divine flight of the soul up to the heavens beyond the stars in the cycle of a Platonic year.

This idea denies freedom and reflexivity in the subjectification of the beloved - a deeply ego-centric love and perhaps one born from the mirror stages of our infantile development in modern psychoanalytical terms.

I always liked Zarathustra’s appraisal of “soul”:
Every soul is a world unto its own; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld.

Even though the end of my relationship with my beloved has occupied my thoughts for the better part of my recent history, I am emale has remained resolutely silent upon the matter, closing all dialogue upon the matter.  The bad conscience (and the acts born out of this con-science, the unhappy consciousness) is the internalisation of forces.  Alone and abjective, I am being e(x)male, serving a Fn(x), unable to make the movement, overcome by gravity of internalised matter.

So the knight makes the movement, but what movement?  Does he want to forget the whole thing?  No… Only lower natures forget themselves and become something new…  There was a person who also believed he had made the movement, but time went by, the princess did something else, she married, say, a prince, and his soul lost the resilience of resignation.  He knew then that he had not made the movement correctly; for one who has infinitely resigned is enough unto himself… What the princess does cannot disturb him, it is only lower natures who have the law for their actions in someone else, the premises for their actions outside themselves.  (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling)

Kierkegaard is speaking of his broken-off marraige to Regina.  I can’t directly compare my situation to Kierkegaard - he broke off his relationship with Regina, I was broken off. But I can still follow the movements, the traces he left under the pseudonym of John the Silent One, of a faith (in this world - every soul being a world unto its own) he never had but could only admire in Abraham (who did not speak to his beloved Sarah of his intention/command to sacrifice Isaac).

One cannot help but make the sacrifice.  In economic terms, its called the opportunity cost.  I am emale. In the spiritual world - an afterworld - all things are possible.  Desire flows. Closed systems die. Socrates was a decadent type.

How to make the sacrifice is what counts.  The art of love as ekstasis (to be thrown outside one’s self or state of being) necessarily involves the rituals of sacrifice. But to avoid the barbarous acts of humankind in its infacy, attempting to mirror the gods power over life and death, playacting, fictions, become our modern means of causing pain.  But the actor never shows the pain.  He suffers to perform.  Nijinsky’s bleeding feet…

As Muli noted, the knight of faith is an actor and in the double sense of the word and in keeping the double sense of the Word open (but this is painful, this lack of unity, of wholeness), we can begin to interpret ourselves. Alone in our sufferring, what does this tragic artist communicate of himself?

Currently we take pride in this - that nothing can be understood till first of all deformed, emptied of content, by one of two mechanisms - propaganda and writing!
Like a woman, possibility makes demands, makes a person go all the way.
Strolling with art lovers through the galleries and across the polished wooden floors in the museum of possibilities, inside of us we eventually kill off whatever isn’t grossly political, confining it to sumptuous dated and labelled illusions.
Only when shame brings this home to us do we realise it.
To live out possibility to the utmost means many will have to change - taking it on as something outside of them, no longer depending on any one of them.
Nietzsche never doubted that if the possibility he recommended was going to exist, it would require community.
Desire for community was constantly on his mind.  (Bataille, On Nietzsche)

Alone, Kierkegaard sufferred. He even wrote in his diaries noone will ever know the truth of his feelings for Regina by reading these pages. He wrote Fear and Trembling in silence, under a pseudonym, leaving the tracks of his love for her in history and a testament to a new faith that every generation must renew (”faith has never existed because it has always existed”) in the interpretation of the story (”what is left out of the story of Abraham is the anguish”): the collective (un)conscious must be created (Durkheim’s functionalism is aimed at the big picture, the large object, society - but then there is the individual and somewhere in between - community).  It does not pre-exist us in the Idea or Form of Love, to be put upon a pedestal.

Spontaneous self-organisation is an ideal process in chaos theory.  But still we must make a choice - there is still sacrifice.  Otherwise we would never act.  Kierkegaard chose to let go.  Desire flows. It irrigates the wings of our souls.  Flying in dreams, rather than wading in the melancholy of loss.

Having said that, the memory of her still burns in my mind.  I’m even fanning the flames of sacrifice, acting impulsively.  I am e(x)male - I cannot let go for fear of falling (desire is not to be confused with truth).  I recognise the impulse to reach out for my beloved upon a pedestal as decline - it requires a tremendous effort, it takes a lot of work, this speculative act -  let the fear persuade before I act:

I am not sovereign being but the site of experimentation.  My body is a temple to the Law’d. The object lives in my mind, impossible to possess and grasp. Mind breathes. To grasp the love object with both hands and let go - the “I” was not made for seeing.

The world is a cell for citters to cit in.   (Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake)

I have found it necessary to speak, to open up to another or be crushed by the reality of my solitude (which is where the Real lies?).  When the two is reduced to the one, when I only see one possibility for action, then I know I haven’t made the movement.  The princess is the barre by which I have measured my movement, keeping the emptiness inside mirrored without.  My wings are clipped.  I come back to earth, imprisoned in my quantum shell, eggsistential self fallen off the wall and crushed upon the ground of reality by the forces of law and order: thus reminded of my finitude, I am writing off my losses and letting go.  If the love is true, the beloved will return in letting go though I cannot count on it.

Faith in performance requires passion, spontaneous and true.  That is the chance one takes in elevation, the lifting of the spirit, dancing with the feet of a wandering star; the individual (and God’s love) is incommensurable with reality/presence/being.

The Law’d Is My Shepherd

Et in Arcadia ego.

Even in Arcadia, there am I.

The script comes from a painting by Nicolas Poussin.

It is the tomb of Daphnis, a shepherd and inventor of pastoral poetry, a man who fell in love with a nymph. He was seduced with wine by another woman and his lover turned him into stone out of revenge, “so fierce is the indignation felt by lovers!” (Ovid, Metamorphoses).

The phrase is called a memento mori, a reminder of death lest one should get lax about actively living and forget one’s own mortality. It’s appropriate it is chiselled into the tomb of Daphnis. Shepherds led the idyllic life, lazing in the beautiful countryside, tending to their sheep and playing the panpipes. According to some myths, Pan taught the shepherds how to masturbate, as their lives were often lonely, spending many days out in the field away from the fairer sex.

The film, Babel (correctly pronounced as BAY-BEL, not BAB-BLE) makes a silent reference to this myth with the shepherd boy who shoots an American tourist masturbating when his brother tells him a bus is coming, before he makes the fatal shot. One could easily imagine Pan, the god of chaos and destruction – pandemonium – in the background as the divine author of this shooting of an American tourist that leads to the chain of events affecting people all over the world from Japan to Mexico.

Even in the tourists’ glass arcades, there is death. The tourists travel protected in their bubble of security which is shattered by Pan’s gunshot. Of course, libido plays a part in the modern re-telling – incomplete masturbation, sexual frustration, adolescent urges all come into play in the gunshot that the authorities first believe to be terrorists. Freud gives the myths and legends a modern meaning, a scientific understanding even as he sacrifices the magic of fabulation for the priesthood of psychotherapy.

The Law’d is my shepherd; I shall not want. To be whole and complete, to act freely behind the pages of a book, is the man of letters. I am emale acts not in dialectical opposition to the man of letters (I take a delight in the x) but as a supplement for my readings. Writing is remembering. One cannot be said to know anything if one cannot make a statement about it.

The danger in reading and writing, in leading the idyllic life of the scholar (and here it is most of all I am emale acts out an imitation of the philosopher King, the penultimate man of letters, not out of want nor envy, but as the Fool will parody), is to enjoy a wholeness, a solitude sufficient unto one’s self. The dangers of onanism… turning into a wanker.

I am emale invents, writes, creates and re(-)members the Law’d that listens to one’s self as an other – Et in Arcadia Ego – that activates a principle on the understanding there is nothing new under the sun, all things are vain, there is labour in all things – there is a time to be born, a time to die - the universal history of my (man of) letters in the past, marks the history of a conflict between life and language. Web logs as open systems, amenable to change, even to interpret ancient Latins sayings, seventeenth century paintings and twenty-first century films – seeking a friend across time and space. Not to discard the closed system of dialectical reasoning, the synthesis of conflict, a will to truth but to “fight the good fight.”

Conflict is not the meaning of the memento mori. It is not a universable discourse as global discipline or profundity (“every order word is a little death” (Deleuze and Guattari) we seek, statement over visibility, the letter of the law over intuition and art. It has a pastoral meaning. If by pastoral, we could steal a part of the meaning from “pastor,” not to law’d it over others but to hyperbolise a Christian meaning of the good shepherd and say:

Make a future for a people that do not yet exist – they live in the desert of the Real – and eternally recreate the living present, the gift, in Arcadia. Marriages can be divorced – what God unites in marriage, can be pulled apart – relationships fail, people fall out of love, promises are broken and then sexual frustrations go off and the oft-repeated scenes of wounded egos of lovers (so fierce is the indignation felt by lovers!) and blackcoats are played out, a politics of revenge upon one’s self or upon others – libidinal energies fired out of a gun.

Care of the self, unity and peace, is the message inscribed on the tomb of Daphnis. Peace and unity, the freedoms of a ruling class – to be a law unto one’s self: that’s nobility, even (and especially) amongst the poorest peoples on the earth; the ideal must be created, and often, fashioned with a hammer.

The Word does not sit there inert and whole, merely waiting to be followed – it must be interpreted as I am emale is an interpretation of my parents’ genes and desires even after I learn to make up my own mind and become a man – met him pike hoses, to learn to speak in one’s own proper name. Not to be held accountable, but to render an account in the eyes of the Law’d, make the gift in secret (pseudos: a fiction, a non-truth – ) and seek rewards in the kingdom of heaven, Arcadia, in the here and the now: peace on earth and good will to all men and women who speak in tongues.

Derridianity

 

Perhaps my enjoyment of Derrida (a whole three books!) relates back to an event in my life when I left the Church of God I was brought up in, throughout my adolescence. I was a willing emale of Christ, a good Christian, baptised into the Church at thirteen years of age. I partook of the weekly communion, the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine that symbolises the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. I read C.S. Lewis and I intensively studied the Bible.

But at the age of sixteen, I came down with the chickenpox. Anyone who’s ever had the chickenpox will know it comes and grows, reaching a peak of itchy sores all over the body. My case was nearly as bad as my father’s (it’s worse for adults then for children so if you’re going to get it, the younger the better). The chickenpox peaked on Christmas day. I was left home alone, contagious and itchy, while the rest of the family went to Christmas dinner. That day was the beginning of my decline in my faith in God as I knew Him.

I go to all the trouble of telling the story to illustrate my present, limited capacity for understanding the Church or the “System,” and the task of deconstruction in Derrida’s writings. I cultivated a passion for reading and writing, for understanding in my Bible studies. For all that, I did not make a conscious, rationale decision to leave the Church. My story is not a proud one; a stupid adolescent who gives up his faith because he had the chickenpox, is hardly going to win much sympathy from either side of the faith.

Undoubtedly, tied to the chickenpox being seen as a sign of God’s ‘abandoning’ me, was a whole passional complex of adolescent and hormonal urges, wanting to break free from the ascetic doctrine forbidding pre-marital sex and masturbation. Regardless of the stupidity of thought governing my decision (and everyone has a fundamental right to stupidity), by age seventeen I was dissatisfied with the interpretation of the Word indoctrinated by the Church - if God gave us minds to think, why wouldn’t we be free to interpret His Word?

That to me, is what deconstruction means, what Derrida means by the (hidden) move in privileging speech over writing, reason over passion, in the metaphysics of philosophy, and its inherent onto-theological tradition that goes all the way back to Socrates and Plato (Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics are another story). Not that you can stand wholly outside this tradition anymore than one can become the unholy Anti-Christ. No-one can be said to know a subject if one cannot speak about it.

Even Abraham had to say something to his son when Isaac asked, “Dad, where’s the sacrifice?” Of course, Kierkegaard gave himself up to language, anon, as Johannes de Silentio (”John of Silence” – John is the unnamed disciple of whom Jesus said, he will not die). And throughout Fear and Trembling it becomes obvious why Kierkegaard chooses this particular pseudonym as he protests against the “speakers” who preach about Abraham, father of faith, and the “lecturers” of the System. You cannot easily escape dialectics - man is the animal with opposable thumbs (and some people would therefore argue chimpanzees should be given human rights… but I leave that up to Peter Singer to work out).

I thunk therefore I am eckoing language is a virus (as Burroughs put it), or literature is a question without answer (as Muli Koppel posted it): the incommensurability of man’s interiority (what could otherwise be referred to (in a vulgar fashion) as the ’soul’) to the Wor(l)d.

As-lan, save me!

As Derridian as I am emale, speech seen in the history of a long errar of hyper-Christianity– Jesus is gonna be here soon! - Language is not just one problem among many.

Nothing New Down Under the Sun

To say that I am emale is a necessary fiction is not to denigrate its value. If anything, it is by virtue of the imagination, we know and strive with ourselves, against the earth and all its inhabitants, on paper, in figures, red and black. Whether we imagine the state of the world in conflict to be true or not, one must still render an account of one’s desire: decisions are reached, sacrifices are made, trespasses are forgiven as we forgive those who trespass against us.

In this manner shall ye pray.

In his mother tongue, Jesus preached to the Jews: Love your enemies… that ye may be the children of the Father which is in heaven. Translated into today’s scriptures, the Holy Word of God, it is called by some. There is no new thing under the sun. All is vanity. For better or for worse, others pay the price for our pleasures. All things are full of labour. In the third world, developing countries, half a world away, sweatshop and child slavery are the means of production. Else they would have no jobs. Eighty per cent of the earth’s resources are consumed by twenty per cent of the earth’s population.

Every body consumes. There is nothing new under the sun.

During the days of the Preacher, in the hours Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, in the moment Saul was blinded travelling the road to Damascus – Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me and my people? – the Australian aborigines were walking the land down under. They were still walking the earth when men with pale faces and black rifles came; fences were erected, planted crops and put sheep out into pasture on the hunting grounds of the indigineous population – on the grounds that all things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing - a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other. The State apparatus raped and murdered the women, grandwomen and daughters.

Progress they called it. Jesus said, suffer the little children. And they came and they took the half-caste children into institutions, taught them to read and write and the white folk were considered mad by the natives who learnt in the table of the white man’s values, the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, taught and handed down to Moses – thou shalt not kill.

If the meaning of the earth took on a different value, it was a European civillisation that drew up the tablelands known. Circumnavigating the continent, crossing its interior: Terra Nullius is there to be discovered, mapped and fenced in. Burke and Wills died of thirst a hundred metres from a water source.

The aborigines had already been there. For forty thousand years, in harmony with the earth, reciprocity of visibility and statement. Word of mouth, unwritten, the tales recorded, passed down to generations. The land writes: cave paintings. If one could only think to ask… but no one knew their language. If one cannot speak of it, can one be said to know?

For the ‘primitive’ Aborigines, the earth is no longer the same. Still the land writes. There’s no going back. Can any people’s relationship with the earth not be identified with the soul of race? Mining, its mine, the Northern Territory action will hold the indigineous population to account – the Racial Discrimination Act will not apply here, in a state of emergency - for their sins… suffer the little children. In the middle, the race continues, the walkers now running striving… there is no new thing under the sun.

The Head of State - the Logos, the metaphysical sun of being-[Australian] - will not render an account and accept Kanyini. The nomadic war machine is not a creation of the State; the State apparatus can only appropriate it. If the Federal government said “sorry” (love your enemies), the rush on land rights, the lawsuits, would add to the renumeration for sins past gone unpunished, relinquishing the centralised control of the means of violence - cases of small towns and pets poisoned, bashings… The State says “I…” the ego. Where egoes I follows. Into the Northern Territory. Coldly the State lies when it says, “I, the people…”

The “people.” The idea sits funny with us today.

There is no society.

It’s the economy, stupid.

A critique of the political eckonomy of the sign. The meaning of (self) production. At first, people’s were creators, then individuals… indeed the individual is the latest creation. The individual’s heart is the interior in a land personified. Choices made within reason, accounting and rendering indebted to the State, raised us to the nth degree. Taught us to read and write. The moral of Patrick White’s Voss – his native guide cut Voss’s head off as he lay in his tent, sick and dying - and the boy went mad.

The individual is raised to the power of the nth degree – everybody has an equal opportutunity to labour for the good life. Australia is the land of the “fair go,” the Lucky Country. Follow the yellow brick road. So says the neo-liberal ideologues. The conflict is over, the battle is won. The quarterly statement won over a season for all things. Resigned to vanity, we forget the country’s first imaginings, an ancient culture, a people(s), forty thousand years old, the Dreamtime, fenced in and, paradoxically, set free – to be held accountable.

The True Man Shows

Freedom and Equality. The founding precepts of the Western political state. They are ‘higher’ goals, primary goods towards man’s happy consciousness.

Why then, should these two concepts be interrogated? Why must they be treated with suspicion?

The alarming cacophony of interlocutors marks a territory of bodies in confusion. Everything turns to a paler shade of brown. All things being equal and free, the disciplinary mechanisms seem productive of emales - androgynous beings invested with agenda (identity politicks) - in short, a property. One’s property is a position in a hierarchy but all things being ‘free’ and ‘equal,’ its difficult to evaluate the lines forming that one may be content with.

What’s that you have there under your toga, Phaedrus?

In the continuous moments of distraction (Gap), one is ever susceptible to - even facillitated and ‘improved’ by - the grand architecture of Being, a metaphysique, constructed on the cornerstone of neo-liberalism. Hence the suspicion…

Where is the man on the moon?

Space: what you damn well have to see - belongs to the mute. The moon and the planets and the stars are mute. They do not have mouths. Modern science has formulated their being. They are no longer subjects of mythology (lycanthropy). The true man shows - the man of knowledge, the scientist, the expert wheeled out for the masses - they are inert bodies of matter. There is no need for superstition and belief to rule our solar system. Man is the inventor of himself.

A free cause on which to speak about: equality for the masses. There is no man on the moon. We put a man on the moon who (mis)spoke his script…

One small step for man; one giant step for mankind.

A black hole is a catastrophe of astrological proportions. An absolute rupture in the fabric of time and space. The violent upheaval of a soul flying along tangents off lines of straight motion to the logos of heaven, neon lights flashing. Follow the signs. Clinamen holidaying around the entropic of cancer, may fall into black holes. Invisible dangers, one must read the signs.

I owe Ascelipus a cock.  Socrates himself, has been sick a long time.  Death is now his physician. 

All I am emale. I give myself up to language. Anon.

Homeless Yuppies

Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” is the H. Y. manifesto. Go into the Old Man Hyman’s house. Language is the house of Being-[human] - all too human. Wreak havoc and destruction. Tear up the floorboards. Rip up the carpets. Flood the house. “I” is the necessary fiction. Destroy the wealth of disseminations from Mr Smith. Matriculate and create. Land on your own slave, to quote a sinister fish. Cut up the word, paste and post - just get it down on paper in writing. Get zooned, get H.Y. Dissolve the ego I swallows. Mass mentality: where egoes, I follows. Old Man Hyman is locked up out back now, listening to the sounds of his house’s destruction…

Face the book - Jesus is coming! Thank God for the Internet and weblogs - every day I’m reading and writing. The Homeless Yuppies finally allow an eckonomic means by which I can let my loved ones know what I’ve been up to, what’s on my mind. Whether or not its interesting enough for them to read, well, no drama, no harm done, its completely up to them. I couldn’t blame anyone. My life is boring, sedentary, and I read too much…
There will come a day when we will all have to stand before the mercy seat and render an account of what we’ve done with our lives, when our names will be called from the rollbook yonder on high. A man cannot serve two masters: its God or Mammon. Its easier for a camel to pass through the “I” of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.

A hyper-Christianity is what’s needed down here, down under… narrative, fabulation, empathy, inspired by the subject of human identity and changes: a life lived as a life told (Bruner).

Met A Physics

Socrates wanted to die - it was not Athens, it was he who handed himself the poison cup, who compelled Athens to hand him the poison cup… ‘Socrates is no physician,’ he said softly to himself: ‘death alone is a physician here… Socrates himself has only been a long time sick…’     Nietzsche, ‘The Problem of Socrates’ from Twilight of the Idols

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates compares Justice to the health of a body; excellence is not satisfaction but fulfilling a function to the best of one’s ability. Virtue is a quality, immanent but cultivated. Happiness is a doing word. The physician for the soul was the philosopher, the health of the (w)hole being, the wise man.

SOCRATES    :    I think its too much to call him ‘wise’, Phaedrus: only the gods deserve that label.  But it would suit him better and be more appropriate to call him a lover of wisdom, or something like that.    Plato, Phaedrus (278d)    

Nothing escapes the gravitational pull of a black (w)hole - not even light. No one has ever actually seen a black hole, only inferred their existence; like no-one has ever seen the life after death.  Yet everything dies, decomposes into atomoi… we are made from the stuff of nebulae, stars extinct.

Each and every philosopher presents a singular and stellar problem. Life and literature as a question without answer, a problem without solution, an unconscious striving (we are only conscious of the excess - man as conscious being is a conclusion) even for oak and rock (the Idea of rockness in rock - who would have thunk it?). But we shut them up - and rightly so, too: they don’t offer us anything anymore - we’re far too educated - our will to truth is too strong for all that superstition in our times: from the middle of our ages and onwards, eternity is an unreal notion. There is no time in a Newtonian physics. The Earth is no longer the centre of the infinite universe: it is the third rock from the sun and by the twenty-first century, a television sitcom import from the USA.

Die, philosophy, die.

The end of our time is death. One can never see its moment as in possess it anymore than a man can know the joys of fatherhood, I mean, as a visceral experience like a woman knows the birthing of her child.  Still, that death is mine.  Birth - I’ve forgotten -
What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns.  Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct.    Samuel Beckett

- no-one else can die for me, its all mine, the only thing I wholly possess in the end.  Even if I cannot concieve of it, comprehend its meaning, speak from experience.

Jesus is gonna be here, he’s gonna be here soon… 

There, at the limit of reason, is our end and our resource. The proper conclusion for our fabulations and ruminations - Death, the physician for Socrates - how to die the good death? Agon - to cross swords with one’s self as other. From morning until night we prepare for it - have I wasted my day? I thunk to myself,  writing the day down, keeping an account, inscribing a journal recording the events.  Steady as a rock of the ages, stedfast in my belief in a god who only knows how to dance, who knows rhythm, spacing; transport (”We’re all here to go into space”) - inner dialectic is a con(-science) but real dialogue for the pros.

Everybody dies alone.  Everybody wants to live forever.  Plato for Prozac - a time capsule.

Thought occurs in the interaction - between spaces? No, the spaces in between singularities or haecceities, the event always involves an other.  Spacing, tempo and nontempo, music and piping: the privileging of speech over writing at the limit.  Jazz music involves the spaces in between the notes. Improvisation is the key.  Spontaneity and open ’systems’ are conditions for certain kinds of life to occur: a physics, art.  The Gay Science. Unity and division as dialectics is a child’s toy…

Poor Socrates - he died from taking himself too seriously…

An Open Letter to Antigram

To Antigram,

The program? Pure Theory. In other words.

Antimatter. Mirror of the uni(-)verse. Poetry is frozen.

Abstracted. The subject under consideration has no experience to speak of.

Boxed in. Weighed up. In the laboratory. Upon a measuring apparatus.

Save your experiences for psychoanalysis, honey.

When I move, I move like a k-punk. (Eckoes of Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm.)

Language constructs the subject. The unconscious is not a box, waiting to be opened. The unconscious must be created.

The subject is class conflict embodied into the institution of schooling. The knowledge of distinction. Prestige. Good breeding. For God, Queen and cuntry. Seething beneath the organs of social reproductions. Boys reading comic books under the desk. Building a body with(out) organs. Forming young minds.

One cannot be said to know a subject if one cannot speak of it. Illustration: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. In words.

Everything else is maths and quantum mechanics. Which has its own place. Outside the Joyce of being-[human].

Education enjoys a human privilege. An organ of social reproduction. Socrates had to die for Plato to write. Transmission of values instilled into future generations. Time and discipline.

I is an other.

Don’t let this impress you! Don’t start spreading it around that I is an other – it won’t impress anyone, believe me! And what is more, it doesn’t mean anything. Because, to begin with, you have to know what an other means. The other – don’t use this term as a mouthwash.

Lacan

Speaking of experience, Jimi’s chorus…

Are you experienced,

Little girl?

Have you ever been experienced?

I have.

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with G_d and the Word was G_d. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says. This function of speech is more worth pointing out than that of ‘disguising the thought’ (more often than not indefinable) of the subject; it is no less than the function of indicating the place of the subject in the search for the true.

Lacan, Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious

To render an account in the face of being-[human].

Silencing k-punk, antimatter. Speech of your experience, reading the weblog of k-punk? The subject is set free so he can be held accountable. You riddle k-punk’s account with your own (w)holes - overarching, resentful intentions. A mousetrap. Man and his symbols.

Society matters. The masses matter.

Dreaming has a biological function. You don’t dream, you die.

For if even the tiniest portion of antimatter met matter, the results for the universal would be katastrophic.

Silencing the kat with a thought experiment. Pure. Abstract. Immaterial. Undead. After a half-life, Schrodinger’s kat is both alive and dead. The true position is a superimposition. Open the box to discover its feline intensions. The measuring apparatus decides a fate, writes the abyss. A lesson in quantum mechanics from a seminar of Jacques Lacan’s, a book too (the ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis):

The subject is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces

Signed,

Ecko.

P. S. I am emale.

Met Him Pike Hoses

 

Socrates doesn’t like Odysseus.  He doesn’t like his mendacity, the cunning, the dissimulation.  He only did what Socrates himself did: reserve the truth of his opinion until it became time to reveal himself.  The first object of training in the Republic for the Guardians of Socrates’ just society, is education: the training of the soul and the mind.  And the first aspect of their training is concerned with the morals of the pseudos – fictions or lies is the translation, depending upon the context or boundary conditions - told by Homer.

For Socrates has a serious objective in his training of the Guardians: the ideal State.  Athens needs leaders, the city-state needs a philosophy to unite and bind the disparate parts into a unified force.  IT will not do if the Guardians of the One Truth should be imitating Odysseus or his grandfather, so cleverly portrayed in The Odyssey, making a virtue out of lies.  If virtue is to be equivalent to skills, a sense of doing or an increase in the ability to perform – as he laid down in the meaning of the good and just and wise man for Thrasymachus – then there can be no room for falsehood.  Say exactly what you mean.  Do not portray the gods as liars or storytellers.  We humans who are fallen into language, lacking the divine communication, can tell lies to save someone from harm.  The lies we tell will benefit the city-state as a whole.  In other words, for economic reasons, we may invent a fiction, a pseudos.

 

So let us tell the tale of the education of our imaginary Guardians as if we had all the leisure of the traditional storyteller.

Plato, Republic

 

Homer’s epic were to the Greeks of the time what the Bible is to some cultures today.  It was a source of morals and collective values.  Ulysses is Joyce’s epic modern invention of the Odyssey.  

The book is a repetition.

 

275b: oak and rock - this was a proverbial pairing, representing anything dense and insensitive. 

Robin Waterfield, translator (a footnote in Oxford’s World Classics, Plato’s Phaedrus)

 

In any event this book was terribly daring.  A transparent sheet seperates it from madness.

James Joyce (speaking of Ulysses)

 

It is a symbol of Irish art.  The cracked looking-glass of a sevant.

Joyce, Ulysses

 

Madness is a transport.  Ulysses has been described audibly and audinarily as the “work of a pretentious wanker.  And if you like it, you’re a pretentious wanker too.” 

 

The book has a dense narrative for a modern love story.  Joyce stands accused of being insensitive to the reader, making the book difficult, to demonstrate hs own cleverness; “daring,” he called it.

 

How much of modern love is embedded with narcissism?  The chivalry of knights jousting for the hands of their beloved maidens.  How our partners “complete” us… Poldy cooks breakfast for his wife, waits on her hand and foot.  Marriages are complex – there are no easy solutions.  Henry Flower is “naughty.”  Extra-marital affairs are as old as the Greeks.

 

-           The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown’s awe. Did you see his eye?  He looked upon to lust after you.  I fear thee, ancient mariner.  O, Kinch, thou art in peril.  Get thee a breechpad.

Joyce, Ulysses

 

Well, Freud thought homosexuals were narcissists…  Leopold Bloom is the hero of the narrative.  Socrates - a seducer of young men?  “What’s that you’re hiding under your toga there, Phaedrus?”  Homo-erotic relations.  Self-same sex produces no offspring.  In the flesh.  Platonic love.  Yet that quality of Beauty, the sublime and divine, transports our selves. 

Plato for Prozac.  Exercise produces serotinin.  

Dialectic?  Exercise for the mind.

Under the influence of mind-altering substances.  Intoxication is the precondition for art to take place.  Nietzsche.

Drink: the curse of Ireland.  Bloom is a teetotaller.

There’s a touch of the artist to old Bloom.

 

Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare? just writers, poets… artists.  Dangerous to play around with the meaning of Truth, Love and Beauty.  The real and sober work of philosophy belongs to the likes of Socrates, to dialectics, division and unity. 

Beauty makes us forget ourselves.  Beauty intoxicates - like a drug (I swallow).

 

To Create is to Remember; Memory is the Basis of Everything.

 Akira Kurosawa  

 

Dangers demand immanent criteria, rules of caution - “inject caution.” (Deleuze and Guattari).  Lines of flight can turn into black holes.

Know thyself.  A boy and his desiring machines.

Nothing wants to die.  Leopold’s father committed suicide.  He drank poison.  

Suicide is a species of madness. 

Ask Romeo and Juliet.

 

The story of the Egyptian king and Thoth - a Platonic invention:

             Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering.

 

Maybe a Monad.  Substance.  A unity of body and soul, the originary division, the earth and sky, writing and speech, encapsulated into one.  According to the legend (of a map of lost origins – what does the river represent in Waterhouse?). 

A legend.  Stream of consciousness.  You could rebuild the Dublin of Joyce’s times from the pages of Ulysses.

 

Does oak and rock have soul?  A proverbial pairing. 

Active ideas?  Dense and insensitive. 

Substance.  Cause of itself.  Like God.  Free cause.  “I rock therefore I am.”  statement of a Subject. 

Who would have thunk it?

 

An independent eksistence.  Met him pike hoses.  Marion Bloom says. 

Made a cuckold out of Leopold.

Narcissus Blooms. 

Leopold perambulates.  The Odyssey of Bloom.  Metempsychosis - the transmigration of souls.  Becoming an other.  Never the soul the same. 

Self-mastery? a ruling class - the Guardians of the Republic of Ireland.  With no recourse to discourse, to the violence of the letter, Odysseus-Leopold Bloom returns home with Telemachus-Stephen Dedalus, communicated by an inner dialectic.

 

Homer’s legend was the Bible to the ancient Greeks, the instructor of morals and values.  The barre.  Plato – the Philosopher King - meant to succeed him.  For better or for worse - he succeeded - “for Christianity is Platonism for ‘the people’” (Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche).  Ironically, a religion of the Book. 

The written word.  Agenbite.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear, Jesus said.

 

-                        Yes, of course, [Haines the Englishman] said, as they went on again.  Either you believe or you don’t, isn’t it?  Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal God.  You don’t stand for that, I suppose?

-                        You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

[…]

-                        After all, I should think you are able to free yourself.  You are your own master, it seems to me.

-                        I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

-                        Italian? Haines said.

[…]

-                        The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

-                        I can quite understand that, he said calmly.  An Irishman must think like that, I daresay.  We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly.  It seems history is to blame.

Joyce, Ulysses

 

Rejoyce and be glad.  Homer met him pike hoses.

Ironing Out Plato

 Perhaps Plato thought Socrates was being ironic when he said writing was “bad.”  He wrote the story of Socrates and Phaedrus.  If Socrates was to be taken literally, would Plato have written anything?  Phaedrus begins rehearsing Lysias’ speech at the start when Socrates finds him outside the city.  Socrates says to him, “hey, what’s this you’re hiding under your toga?”  Phaedrus was hiding a written copy of Lysias’ speech, a little ashamed of himself.

I’m thinking the whole pros and cons of writing in Phaedrus, is not a question of good and evil, but of good and bad uses of writing.  Socrates wants people to make up their own minds, instead of relying solely on books for their knowledge of the world, for morals and values.  That’s why he ends up valuing a substantial (divine) philosophy over empty (terrestial) rhetoric.  I agree with Muli - Socrates does want to keep the dialogue open, not lost in our own reflections upon the book.  On the other hand, themes of reminiscence and remembering, the cycles of the soul in the quest for heaven on earth, the true, authentic self - these are all concerned with the voice within.  The question of ek-sistence versus subsistence, the ectasy of madness, intoxication, derangement of the senses: “Some of our greatest blessings come from madness.”

Perhaps the greatest protest against capitalism and consumerism comes from the perspective of the authentic life as art where one cannot be reduced to numbers, to calculability, preserving the ubiquity of one’s singular eksistence.  Ultimately, there is no medium.  Phaedrus encapsulates this strange relationship between the individual and society, where one can be lost in one’s own reflections, writing alone, making up one’s own mind but having to remain in a dialogue with society, to break mirrors… for Truth, Beauty and Love, we engage in the eternal conflict between visibilities and statements, the image and the word, writing and speech.

The critique of Echo.

Language both deprives me and frees me from my singularity, from the sense of responsibility towards my singularity.  Derrida.

There can be no recourse to discourse, hence the need for irony.  I am emale not for love of ultimate truth.  Sit venia verbo.  The joy in human unreason, the arbitrariness in feeling, seeing and hearing in the eruption of madness is the greatest danger to mankind, according to Nietzsche in the Gay Science.  The secret name, the Ren as Burroughs (re)calls it in The Western Lands, would be an “example” of that voice (written), the truth of my being-[human], inscribed upon the heart and secreted onto the page, the signified of the signifier, specifically, nominally, my proper name: Ecko, in the case of I am Emale.

Peoples were the creators at first; only later were individuals creators.  Indeed, the individual himself is still the latest creation.
Thus Spake Zarathustra.

As with the case of weblogs in general.  The Ancients, they grouped the stars into terrestial things resembled and gave them proper names, constellations of singularities.  The “barre” of eksistence lies in life as literature, pseudos, the game of the world.  With serious consequences.  The beloved is that significant other.  Tout autre est tout autre.  We scroll through weblogs, write posts, letters in communication; freely exchanging, we give up our time to participate in an eckonomy of signs.

Talking pure lit for our love of learning from books and from one another.