More Stories and texts for Nothing and No-one

(Edvard Munch's "Madonna" ... )

A new post. A post in time, stands up the flow of language. Who do I write to? There is only writing to no-one now. Niemand's Rose: Rose de Person. What speaks the writing of Paul Celan?

"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all." (Wikipedia on Paul Celan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Celan)

Celan writes after Auschwitz, after the unspeakable. Against Adorno saying there is no poetry after auschwitz ("we must").

But what is this real language that remains secure against loss? Surely it is not simply a system of signification--- not merely the signification and transfer of one meaning to another, from literal to metaphor and back again.

Surely what remains is something more solid and transcendental: for instance the gratitude we feel at living bare life, at being at all. "In gratitude we receive.... everything... including death." Or maybe like "love," now there love is a fine Christian thing, only please through some obfuscation not call this love pure love, call it "charity," "giving to the poor"-- is this not the meaning of "charity?" (I Corinthians: 13). Love was never satisfied at merely being charity: it is the example of Job at the beginning of his trial where he gave only out of charity, and pity and every other condescending and entitled gesture one could think of. Job LOVES at the end of his travail. He loves with the whole deformity of his abject body.... whether the lover in caustic erection thrown himself into the world... or through the open sores on Job's body, Job nears the grace of G-d through the ecstasy of his body.

It is not clear who I write to. I write to the amorphous absence of the future, which varies from the crumble and decay of the past. I do not write for the past but for the absence and vacuum of the future

"Nature abhors a vacuum."

And so we try to bring all of it to fill up our boredom, to avoid the sameness of our utterly prosaic lives: for the Das Man: itself becomes a vacuum of meaning. This much Heidegger did not consider: for the nature of being for him was to fall into forgetfulness:

Seinsvergessenheit.

This was the same as the Greek: Nature loves to hide. The corrolary of the two phrases: Nature abhors the vacuum because nature is a vacuum.

The Taoist sages wrote it this way: the way that can be spoken of is not the true way.

[What then of Celan's phrase when he speaks of the "remaining" or (derridean "reste") "remainders" of language?]

[Maybe Celan was just an idealist, a structuralist who posited and believed in the impersonal absolutivity of language-- a transcendental eidetic form (Husserl's Origins of Geometry), this posited that the law itself and at least the Jews as the people of the law had the law, which was irreducible goodness in the face of such annihilation: "ah but what dreams we had!"

The law obfuscates Being, but the people of the law committed the law and therefore their language to their hearts (Kaballa)

But in doing this hiding in the ordinary and the everyday

.... I write because though there is no one to write to there is still beauty in my heart and that that beauty must be written, in some way exclaimed:

"What I do is me for this I came!"

"Fair enough" she says, though she has always been somewhat of a judge, "though the line from 'Kingfishers catch fire' is a little overdone."

It is not for her, this ideal of beauty that "I must write" because there is nothing else and it is to no one else. A broad engorged elaboration of eros across the page. Eros without recipient? Eros without receipt? Receipts are for the dead. They belong to the land of the dead, of writs and accounts. To write in this manner, at least pre-figured in this "now" (which when read becomes an eternal "then" held in the decaying fullness of the past, full even because of the very decay or patina through which it is writ) is to write as an act of desire alone into void or abyss, and thereby designating and offering it to curious inspection. To write to the abyss is not the abyss itself, but the abyss is foreshadowed in the presence of writing, after all true unselfconscious emptiness escapes the hermeneutic touch of form.

Wherever Hermes goes there he exists. One may suggest that the task then is to get Hermes to shut down: thereby in emptiness meditation to quell the god of interpretation, negativity (in the Hegelian sense of "the negative" as the restlessness of the negative).

There are philosphers who rightly speak: "whereof one cannot speak one should remain silent" (Wittgenstein). Or maybe there is Bertrand Russell's "why I am an athiest." But they all seem "a peevish bunch, these athiests, with pinched noses" (the previous phrase makes sense when spoken with the accent of a "decaying Brit" as my friend calls me: such a form of understatement is our primary weapon against the intolerable bullshit of it all): from my personal experience of the disciple of Ashley Montagu the Anthropologist, Rod Gorney the psychiatrist.

I always thought of religion to be as Edvard Munch's "Madonna," This points to the promiscuous and degenerate part of my anima (Entartete) after all it is much more clean and definitely superior to remain a clinician wearing a white smock, denying the messyness of God to explain the messyness of life. Life for the athiest is still exceedingly messy, I will give them that much. But they seem to be more like the men with mops coming in and really giving things a good clean: "remove that false belief or inflated expectation! It was probably caused by childhood abuse!" "Well," she seems to say, "fuck that!" this portrait of Edvard Munch's "Madonna," acknowledges that life is messier because it is confused: nature loves to hide.

It is said that the anima is superior to all these men "struggling with their shadows" (another phrase threatening to fall into cliche), trying to get everything clean and transparent. Men with microscopes try to split the world apart with laser like analysis. Men with microphones try to record them, to get it all down with the highest fidelity. Whereas nature merely stands up and shrugs her shoulders: she will have another gig where she will try to complete the assignation of her beauty to the moment of her dance or song.

I could of course simply be another man beating upon his drum, calling it louder and far more superior than any of the others. Again, she says "what nonsense." The anima calls us to sit down to the feast and eat together, "In the presence of mine enemies;" David got that right.

But I have said I do not write but for this ideal, or belief that there is beauty in my soul that seeks merely to spill out into form.

The sages speak as the sages always speak: that the act of writing is a covenant, and it presupposes from the first the one who was written. Without this "writing to" there can be no real writing. But could I write for no one? Could I write because there is no one I could write to... and still there was the need to speak?

Still there is the need to speak. It is the same as "still there is the need to listen," but I leave that up to you! Even though this text was written for no one (analyze Samuel Becket's "Stories and Texts for nothing," still there may be the need to read it. And I intend to write it for no one because I do not have it in my heart to designate who or what my reader should be. This then is the flower or the text offered for nothing.

Such intention is not without the possibility that it is doomed to failure, yet it breathes brief life in the interum, "for the time being" as my friend is off to say (come to think of it this is also a phrase of Dogen:

An ancient buddha said:
For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.
For the time being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean.
For the time being three heads and eight arms.
For the time being an eight- or sixteen-foot body.
For the time being a staff or whisk.
For the time being a pillar or lantern.
For the time being the sons of Zhang and Li.
For the time being the earth and sky.
"For the time being" here means time itself is being, and all being istime. A golden sixteen-foot body is time; because it is time, there is theradiant illumination of time. Study it as the twelve hours of the present."Three heads and eight arms" is time; because it is time, it is not separatefrom the twelve hours of the present.
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Uji_Welch.htm

I am not prepared to go into Zen this evening, let this then be my za-zen, this:

I am not prepared
Clay feet on side of mountain
The fool is awake!

We have Zen (a thousand times better that one is unprepared!) which gets into the hands of useless woodcutters and athiests:

Being prepared for it is like writing a thousand good words on any decent topic: they are fine, but can they replace the taste of milk?

Knowing the taste of milk is knowing the taste of the food one needs to survive. When mother and milk are gone, one needs to re-negotiate. Even in the absence of all the tasty milk in the universe, one still has gratitude that "once indeed I remember there was milk." -even though one should not be too sentimental. The universe forces us from every act of entitlement: the taste of milk is not yours just yet! ... And then we may be writing for nothing. Perhaps in this writing one becomes the milk in a certain sense. One hastens to think that we should not poison our mother's milk, nor should be drink too much of it, lest we become timid "momma's boys" after the age of thirty.

Ok, back to woodcutters and athiests: Once again the clean-up crew arrives with its white garments and they come and clean and scrub and provide their disinfectant sprays to the whole area: "Hygea," they cry, "let us rid ourselves of all this unsightly anima attachment, all this messyness! Let us rid ourselves of this humbuggery you call 'alchemy' or 'mystical thought!'" All these clean-up crews may have come for various reasons. They always come. They keep coming. Generally one winds up in trouble with the Anima... maybe down some black hole of addiction and suicidal paranoia: then the clinicians come in to wrap things up. But if one doesn't get into trouble. The problem is that the clean up crew is always prepared and on call, and therefore always already a million miles away from the soul, writing some stupid report for a psychiatric clinic.

There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.
(Czeslaw Milosz: "Ars Poetica")

How does one avoid getting into trouble? Maybe trouble is the price agreed upon when you begin to play (Edmond Jabes writes "defeat is the price agreed upon," in his "Book of Questions." Bob Dylan iterates "There aint no limit to the ammount of trouble women bring." And I say this only to get one thing clear: I am trying to get as far as possible from the anima as the "Ewig Weibliche," which Goethe idealized as some kind of salvation or cure. And it is not because I hate women (not at least consciously at this moment), but rather because I love women (Oh my God, what a completely stupid thing to say if you are an intellectual!) and want to get close to them (this is pathetic!), and gladly work to laugh at my own ideal.

Laughing anyway (somewhat pathetic)
Writing anyway (more assuredly pathetic)

More proof that I have no qualms about being totally pathetic:

Dare I write "loving?" or does this risk just too much anima attachment? Sacrifice of the ideal is the means to obtain the immortal soul, and I am thinking of Jung's pages on "Sacrifice" in "Symbols of Transformation." Nominally such a text does not appear to be too clinical. It is messy. Life is messy. Love life anyway. But the "anyway" is the strongest part of the last sentence.

The story is the same the world over for human beings (in this case "men"): you take on your anima, and it is simply too exhaustive to project on your spouse/ mate/ domestic partner/ whatever. This runs the risk of being a cliche, but I would not be afraid of my own banal, prosaic cliche-dom. I must remember the comment Thomas Mann makes of Hans Castorp in "The Magic Mountain": a paraphrase to be certain: "He would have not stayed up here a moment longer than his two week visit were it not for the lack of meaning in Castorp's utterly prosaic young man life." We go places and get waylaid because it is our meaning to do so. My meaningless cliche, like Castorp's gets waylaid because it still seeks for some sort of meaning. It is true--it is the vacuum of prosaic life, the vacuum of meaninglessness.... and nature avaoids a vacuum... by filling it, obliterating it as much as possible. I wouldn't say that because there is extra erotic energy left that I am just writing with my "big" (forgive any misrepresentations here) erection with no place to put it, but what if I am? Doesn't art come from our moments of respite from the literal world around us?

Conversely we may point to two laws of physics: that of the equal distribution of energy, the attempt of all energetic regions to reach homeostasis.... and that of the force of gravity, which attracts and pulls these objects back in. To abhor a vacuum would be akin to solution or sublimation: one goes to a higher place where the blank is in balance with presence. Conversely the principal of gravity attracts all things - from infinite distance (!) toward itself. If it is irrefutable that gravity will contract all things... then will the entire sum of the universe be (0)-Zero? (Written between Alestair Crowley's theory of Ain Soph Aur and Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs" "the sum of whose intensity = zero... and the Chaos myth of Hun-Tun: who's body had no orifice.)

Chaos is Hun Tun, Emperor of the Center. One day the South Sea, Emperor Shu, & the North Sea, Emperor Hu (shu hu = lightning) paid a visit to Hun Tun, who always treated them well. Wishing to repay his kindness they said, "All beings have seven orifices for seeing, hearing, eating, shitting, etc.--but poor old Hun Tun has none! Let's drill some into him!" So they did--one orifice a day--till on the seventh day, Chaos died. (Hakim Bey paraphrasing Chuang Tzu, I believe) http://isp2.projects.v2.nl/freezone/ZoneText/Diversions/Broadsheets/ChaosMythsBS.html

We can try to act as a "clean up crew," but we wind up botching the whole body-without organs thing. We can clean up the text to make it make sense: a kind of Habermasian effort, or worse, we can become some some sort of Rawls or Davidsonian desperately trying to make sense. But we make sense only at the expense of our marvelous and somewhat savage wisdom: as Blake writes "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

My only advice is: Never mind your instruction! Come unprepared!

Logos, Pharmakon, Memory

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...