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.

Wandering Star

What true lovers are committed to, the consummation of their quest… thus becomes admirable [when the beloved is treated as if he (or she) were treated as a god] and a way for someone who is maddened by love, to secure the happiness of the object of his affection, if he captures him [or her].

I will describe how a captive is caught. Let’s stick to the threefold division of the soul we made at the start of this tale, with each and every soul consisting of two horse-like aspects and a third like a charioteer… So when the charioteer sees the light of his beloved’s eyes, his whole soul is suffused with a sensation of heat and he is filled with the tingling and pricking of desire. The horse that is obedient to the charioteer restrains himself from leaping on its beloved, because as always it is held back by a sense of shame. The other horse, however, stops paying any attention to the charioteer’s goad and whip; it prance and lunges forward violently, making life extremely difficult for its team-mate and for the charioteer, and compelling them to head towards the beloved and bring up the subject of the pleasures of sex. At first, these two get annoyed at being forced to behave in a way that seems dreadfully wrong, and put up some resistance, but eventually, finding no end to their troubles, they let themselves be led forward, and they passively submit to doing as they are told. And so they come close to their beloved and see the lightning-bright beauty of his [or her] face. At this sight the charioteer’s memory is taken back to the nature of true beauty, and he sees it again in place on a holy pedestal, next to self-control.        (Plato, Phaedrus)

God and a woman who is loved are parallel.    (Bataille, On Nietzsche)

It is the love for a woman that causes doubt in us.    (Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

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 these unspoken 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 still I follow his 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 to sacrifice Isaac (who did not speak to his beloved Sarah of his intention/”divine command” to sacrifice their son, Isaac). In the real world, one cannot help but make a sacrifice.  It happens every day. In economic terms, its called the opportunity cost.  But in the spiritual world – an afterworld – all things are possible.  Desire flows. Closed systems die. Plato-Socrates placing his beloved on a pedestal and making a tribute to memory, was a decadent type.

The art of love as ekstasis (to be thrown outside one’s self or state of being) necessarily involves the rituals of sacrifice. How to make the sacrifice is what counts.  But to avoid the barbarous acts of humankind in its infancy, attempting to mirror the gods’ power over life and death, play-acting, 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). 

Reality does not pre-exist us in the Idea or Form, the beloved to be put upon a pedestal. Even today stoachistic concepts like spontaneous self-organisation and light ravelling both as wave and particle, are still ideals of continual processes in a scientific theory.  But still we must make a choice – there is still sacrifice.  Otherwise we would never act.  Kierkegaard chose to let go.  Desire flows and irrigates the wings of our souls. 

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. Mind breathes invisibly. The object lives in my mind, idea of an idea, impossible to possess and grasp this object of my heart’s desire with both hands but in my “divine madness” I try: the “I” – self-possessed pro(-)noun, a world unto its own – 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 movements correctly, the sacrificial ritual. The Jewish princess is another barre by which I have measured my movement, keeping the emptiness inside mirrored without.  My wings are clipped.  I come back to earth, cracked quantum shell of my eggsistential self, fallen off the wall, broken upon the ground. And all the King’s men and all the King’s horses, couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Thus reminded of my finitude by a childhood nursery rhyme, I am emale writing off my losses and letting go.  If the love is true, the beloved will return though I cannot count upon 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 instant of decision (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.