Disclaimer: I do not advocate for the use of pharmaceutical alteration of consciousness in the sense of being some banal literal proponent of "Drug Culture." I am saying that we as a society are addicted to the pharmacy of the word itself. The title I am using here is an amplification of Derrida's (1983) discussion of "Plato's Pharmacy" in his book Dissemination. I am contemplating the implication of saying "all is medicine." My teacher Arwind Vasavada once said to me "all is poison; it depends how you use it!" So beware! Be wary of the parts of us that are already addicted to the media spectacle and our comfortable sense of self, your comfortable "fundamentalisms" of any kind (including scientific/atheistic): you are addicts! This is not a diatribe against usage per se, but for the sudden infusion of difference, which acts both as a poison and as a pharmacy: it can create health, or yet another black hole of addiction as well. Be wary!
Memory and Medicine: The purpose of medicine is to quicken the sense.
But in the quickening rush of the senses what is immortal is most easily forgotten, we mortals forget by following the ecstasy of thought down 10-million miles into the bottom of the ocean, but there all thought is obliterated.
Ergo the tradition of the scribe: the Egyptian Book of the Dead being just one such example. The scribe runs into the realm of the dead and through the tablet, the papyrus, the hidden inscription of an amulet from the moment he was found there, he enters into the realm of the dead. What do we bring back? A song? A sculpted ideogram of some dazzling mystery to secret to breathe? Too sacred to be imagined?
Derrida (Johnson, 1981) writes at length on Thoth as the Pharmaceutician, doctor and surgeon: the active ingredient in the Osiris Mysteries of death and rebirth. Thoth is the father of all scribes, and thus father of Ani. The principle effect of Ani is rememberance, and supplement as a way of gaining a map toward the treasures of the unconscious. As Thoth sutures (and "sutras") so does the scar hold the memory of the wound in a specific and creative way. It is not a matter of simply healing things up. It is a matter of the creative scar that is left when the wounding takes place. I will quote Derrida at length:
As the God of Language and Linguistic difference Thoth can become the god of the creative word
[c.f. Derrida's note #18 attributed to S. Sauneron, p.123: "The initial god had only to speak to create; and the beings and things evoked were born through his voice." I add additionally that this begs the question of the later Christian doctrine in the gospel of John: "en arche en ho logos."]
...only by metonymic substitution, by historical displacement, and sometimes by violent subversion.
This type of substitution puts Thoth in Ra's place as the moon takes the place of the sun. The god of writing thus supplies the place of Ra, supplementing him and supplanting him in his absence and essential disappearance. Such is the origin of the moon as supplement to the sun, of night light as supplement to daylight. And writing as the supplement of speech. "One day while Ra was in the sky, he said: 'Bring me Thoth,' and Thoth was straighway brought to him. The Majesty of this god said to Thoth: 'Be in the sky in my place, while I shine over the blessed lower regions... you are in my place, my replacement, and you will be called thus: Thoth, he who replaces Ra.' Then all sorts of things sprang up thatks to the play of Ra's words. The said to Thoth: 'I will cause you to embrace (ionh) the two skies with your beauty and your rays' - and thus the moon (ioh) was born. Later, alluding to the fact that Thoth, as Ra's replacement, occupies a somewhat subordinate position: 'I will cause you to send (hob) greater ones than yourself - and thus was born the Ibis (hib), the bird of Thoth."
This process of substitution, which thus functions as a pure play of traces or supplements or, again, operates within the order of the pure signifier which no reality, no absolutely external reference, no transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound, or control; this substitution, which could be judged "mad" since it can go on infinitely in the element of the linguistic permutation of substitutes, of substitutes for substitutes; this unleashed chain is nevertheless not lacking in violence. One would not have understood anything of this "linguistic" "immanence" if one saw it as the peaceful millieu of a merely fictional war, an inoffensive word play, in contrast to the raging polemos in "reality."
[please note the importance of the "polemos," or state of war, as comparable to Deleuze and Guattari's "War Machine" that opposes the regulation of flows of desire by the "state apparatus"- polemos opposes the state... and principally through the line of pure, intensity, radical poetry, obeying a "code of conduct" or nomos without being safely inscribed within the logos. Derrida here is taking the logos in an entirely different, radicalized direction...]
Derrida continues:
It is not in any reality foreign to the "play of words" that Thoth also frequently participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne. He helps the sons do away with the father, the brothers do away with the brother who has become king. Nout, cursed by Ra, no longer disposed of a single date, a single day of the calendar on which she could give birth. Ra had blocked from her all time, all the days and periods there were for bringing a child into the world. Thoth, who also had the power of calculation over the institution of the calendar and the march of time, added five epagomenic days. This supplementary time enabled Nout to produce five children: Haroeris, Seth, Isis, Nephtys and Osiris, who would later become king in the place of his father Geb. During the reign of Osiris (the sun-king), Thoth, who was also his brother, "initiated men into arts and letters," and "created heiroglyphic writing to enable them to fix their thoughts."
[Note here that the issue of "fixing" relates to the question of Memory, which is more of a Heideggerian question: Memory is akin to the muses Mnemosune and to the issue of truth as a-letheia, not forgetting of the ab-grund, the "abyss" or as derrida might add, its furtive supplement.]
But later, he participates in the plot led by Seth, Osiris' jealous brother. The famous legend of the death of Osiris is well known: tricked to being shut up into a trunk the size of his body, he is dismembered, and his fourteen parts are scattered to the winds. After many complications, he is found and reassembled by his wife Isis, all except for the phallus, which has been swallowed by the Oxyrhynchus fish. This does not prevent Thoth from acting with the cleverest and most oblivious opportunism. Isis, transformed into a vulture, lies on the corpse of Osiris. In that position she engenders Horus, "the-child-with-the-finger-in-his-mouth," who will attack his father's murderer. The latter, Seth, tears out Horus' eye while Horus rips off Seth's testicles. When Horus gets his eye back, he offers it to his father - and this eye is also the moon: Thoth if you will - and the eye brings Osiris back to life and potency.
[At this point the most potent question to be asked for me remains focused on the issue of whether we as humans have any part to play in the immortal agitations of the "gods." Their struggle is immortal. However we, like the scribe Ani are definitely mortal. Nevertheless there is an aspect which compells me to continue to search for some manner in which the soul will set forth in its small canoe into the universe, the vision of moving into the ocean of heaven of lights and all the stars... to behold the starry firmament and remain in wonder... is this the one moment we have at eternity? -Not to speak of the gnawing need in each mortal being to somehow attain some soul level of immortality, through dreams, through research and analysis (what Edward Edinger called the last inflation of the soul, and possibly that which creeps into analysis itself, the denial of one's, "ownmost" and very personal mortality)] Derrida goes on to write on the methods of the physician to the gods, perhaps alluding to the process of doctoring of mortal men as well:
In the course of the fight, Thoth separates the combatants and, in the role of god-doctor-pharmacist-magician, sews up [suture...sutra] their wounds and heals them of their mutillation. Later, when the eye and the testicles are back in place, a trial is held during which Thoth turns on Seth whose accomplice he had nevertheless once been, and confirms as true the words of Osiris. (pp. 89-90)
"Words have got me the wound, and will get me well, if you believe it." (Jim Morrison, who probably slipped into the quiet, overly soft yoni of a heroin overdose: opium for Orpheus endlessly gone in search of Eurydice in the realm of the dead: Haides).
But memory is forgotten. when we step into the realm of the dead, which is also the realm of immortal images whe must step into the river lethe. The river of forgetfulness is also the river of flux--- hule, eternal turning, seething transformation which forgets itself.
But the Medicament of words creates, saves or salts in memory
William S. Burroughs seems to believe that writing itself is an intoxicant and a drug. And there is a portion of writing that is nothing more than a text-- a textile or a covering--- a simulation or a dissimulation--- a pretending of what is there that is not covered in the apocalypse. Writing is a form of illusion--- supplement and deferral.
Derrida, writing of Plato writes of the connection of Logos and Pharmakon.
But this writing itself seems aenemic, somehow as pallid as the empty page. Perhaps I am unfair to Derrida right now, after all I owe him so much.
Is language the fundamental forgetting of what was said?
"'What is your truth?
"'-What lacerates me.
"'And your salvation?
"'-Forgetting what I have said."
(Edmond Jabes, "The Book of Questions")
Here oblivion seems like a form of mercy.
Jean Luc Nancy utters his battle cry in "Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative": that (as a paraphrase) "what we search for, what we need the most, is Truth not consolation." and Dunya Mikhail writes/speaks on NPR:
For Mikhail, writing about war is not necessarily a way to heal wounds, she says.
"On the contrary, it keeps [them] open forever," Mikhail adds. "Poems are like X-rays. It makes you see the wound and understand it."
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11762755 )
The wound then occupies a double exposure-- it rests in the shadow of the medicament. Every medicament was fostered by the originary wakefulness or stumbling block or a wound or rupture. Waking up is fine, but we struggle through the wound that also draws us back into the unconscious, a syphon or an abyss retracting infinitely into some black ground that is unknowable.
A friend of mine is participating in the step program of AA-- A Fearless Moral Inventory..... a relentless self-inventory. An exhaustive self-inventory. And I keep thinking about the capacity of words to intoxicate: This is a problem. My friend is a poet. In writing his inventory he must avoid becoming intoxicated with language or the relentless spiral of his own self-laceration. What he reminds me to do is somehow remember some part of myself through the contorted shape of his own sobriety... something about protection of what is vulnerable in him and by extension in each of us. We keep speaking about the literal and metaphor. In our discussion metaphor is a savior, because we see our sociopathic tendencies laid out before us: his is to drink, mine is to participate in my own unspeakable nature. So far I have been able to avoid literalizing my own horror, but he is in a program because he has admitted his powerlessness over his urge to drink. Finally enough drinking tends to localize the psychopathic into a self-destructive cycle: well rather than abusing others he simply just drank.... He is on his way to becoming something vulnerable-- perhaps that is our goal in this life... to obtain the greatest vulnerability
Enough!
These few words are enough!
If not these words then this breath...
If not this breath then this opening
To the life we have refused again and again
Until now-
Until now.
(David Whyte)
And if we open to life we will become vulnerable. At this point the vulnerability of letting go of words to life is another moment... but what is life but the green gathering of life in the sun? Is there a hidden serpent of sentimentalism in this leave-taking of words, to say they were "enough!" There are times when one has to say that what is said is enough... but in this the case is not closed--- the stress is on the opening to the buzzing blooming life that has always existed, that is in a sense mute... to be protected as the one who does not speak to prosecute or defend--- as soul itself--- the vulnerability of "opening to the life we have refused again and again... until now, until now."
James Hillman wrote in his introduction to "Suicide and the Soul" that suicide is the ****literalization of the death instinct, and goes on to suggest that literalism is suicidal, perhaps even that literalism is suicide (but only if taken literally).
And then comes this restless mastication of poetry, something to draw one back in from the toil of recovery.... "some human beings are recovering from alcoholism while still others are becomming addicted to their alcoholism" (a paraphrase of a news release I have written about previously, wherein a newscaster
"Words to hypnotize
Words to mezmerize
Words to make my mouth exercise
Words all fail the magic prize
Nothing I can say when I'm in your thighs."
(Violent Femmes)
In this sense words fail miserably to produce anything other than self deception. But the Violent Femmes are really nigredo poets: their reality sears and corrodes (the melting away of apparent surfaces) born from some sewage in Milwaukee it is the best of American Pop that European Aesthete consciousness can neither entirely encompass nor can it ignore them. They revel in the scum at the bottom of the barrel. But bless them, I don't think that they are poets of health! I do not think there was ever dawn in the summertime that spoke to them. Their music is all ground up cigarette butts and spilled beer. But the value of this is their grounding horror.
There is a whole slew of Wittgensteinian epodes that ensue: "whereof one cannot speak one should remain silent."
wherein we come to our internet discomfort of: what is all this babble that ensues in countless and seemingly meaningless web-logs that signify only what they mean to signify.
To remain like water in water without the turning. Followed by the turning, which is the techne-- or technology of the text itself--- beyond the meaningless one-ness of homogeneity technology invents a play and a wound.
When exposed to the pharmakon I am exposed to the intensification of images (as metaphor allows). But I forget, and thus ask the page itself to remember. The page remembers even as it uncontrolably disseminates, proliferates meaning. Later I (which "I?") return to the page and transform it further... and it transforms me: or it further transforms that locus of experience I attributed as temporarily "myself" or "me" that was changing anyway.... As an externalized text it becomes once again other, something else, other than the force one originally took in placing fingers to keyboard or pen to page.
According to David Ulansey: initiation comes when the wound is somehow left open--- the circumcision remains open keeping one initiated into the fundamental suffering of the wound. The wound is horrible, kept in the source of the genitals--- in the root of pleasure is a literal interdict of civilization: here too is suffering.
To be initiated is to experience the fundamental flux of the universe: what was a child is killed and in its place is an adult man, and so on. The shaman takes the experience of initiation to its furthest reaches.
By this for the shaman the wound is deepest, and the essential hermaphroditism of the wound is in the process of being expressed or accomplished. Primitive initiantion systems work with wounds, laceration, circumcision and scarring as intentional wound. This is still a fetish approach in terms of "deviant" western sexuality that seeks to eroticize piercing or scarification
Medicine acts in two manners: (1) it "heals" wounds that are too terrible for life to endure or (2) it wakes us up to the possibility of our life: it is an intentional wounding or ripping open of the veil of sleep (if the doors of perception were cleansed... writes Blake).
I am one for lengthy analysis. I do not believe that when we attend to the process of therapizing that we should rip open any veils. It denies the dance of veils. And the civilized human being allows the careful dance of the Anima without abusive disection of the movement, down to the formaldehyde cadaver... that never was the dance!
The laboratory agent feverishly works over the material or substance, attempting to expose its inner nature--- what we get in this society of chemistry is the apotheosis of quantity: the atomic bomb. If it is true that the ancient science of Alchemy resulted in a kind of labyrinthine manual of sex magic... what was written there was some endeavor or effort that amplified the intensity of experience... through magic, spell and curio, through both the most simple and heightened feats, amplified the acrobatic artistry of eros.
The ripping and rending of rupture and as wakefulness, the violence of a vow of abstinence to confront the death drive violence of living solely with any one consumptive idea provided through a powerful intoxicant that kills us... through this we drive to become one thing. Through a yoga of abstinence, holding one position, and becomming just one thing, we allow the fires to burn a little brighter from within, thus gathering intensity of experience....
It is always difficult to become this one thing--- to press one's figure into a single tortured shape-- into an ideogram of the self--- to make the body into a heiroglyph of its art--- this too is technology and this too is a nightmare in our epoch. We think we might be able to become one thing... but the world does not stop for a moment, it is too compassionate to stop for even a moment. And so through this effort to become one thing we become a mark--- a sun-spot on the surface of the sun, boiling collectivity. we remember, even if this memory is futile, even if it is washed away in the washing generativity of a solar moment.
The logos acts as a gathering, a memory, a sentimental attachment to what is to be remembered. But the logic of a text conceals (Heidegger). And text is textile, the "shroud-sail" (Dylan Thomas) of concealment, woven on the loom, the the web of a spider, or perhaps Helen's depiction of the Trojan War, the amniotic sac (and the medium of the fluid). Still we are born out of words into experience and from experience out into words (articulation) again. To become attached is to deny and reject the constant ensuing of life--- that always ensues and always is new, its blooming buzzing confusion... forgets itself endlessly, finds itself intoxicated... "though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its lovliness..." (Galway Kinnell) there comes a moment when one holds to being just one thing for so long: the act of memory becomes an oppressive sclerotic hardening of the heart and of experience.... then we must re-teach it to simply live in its abundance... "enough..." the movement between the suppleness and the forgetting, the unconsciousness of the nubile, the youth, its cruel lack of sensitivity to its own forgetting, the indifference and whimsy of youth.
The old ask to be whisked away, to allow the new to bloom again in its supple youth. This final act of forgetting is called death... and ultimately it comes to the consciousness that witnessed so many springs, summers, autumns and winters, after so long this consciousness too descends... and it was never too long, shorter than expected, just a slip, when so many moments we have been simply wasted...
