Ideogram for the Future

Prologue to the Ideogram

The photograph of the ocean becomes itself an ideogram for the future archaeologists to contemplate as they work through our suffering of expression: that this civilization was based upon a need to survive.

The need to survive is a simple almost unobserved truth: like the use of the word "is" in a simple phrase of description: the world is good, the world is evil, the night is elegant, John is good, John is evil, the night is nice, John is nice.

But as we make our web-logs of this most unassuming fact that lingers in the back of each of us, waiting to corrupt any story we could tell could be answered with: "well, you needed to survive." It's really pitiful, it is a masterpiece how blunt and brilliant it all is, like a punch to the nose, and we hope to survive. What is this? Bare life? Just barely living? What is bare life if it forgets some long history or vale of tears, some lasting sentimental lament, some epic ode to our civilization? We carried this all up with us not to just be some shades coming to drink of the blood of Odysseus' sacrifice, shades in harrowing black shroud sails. What is this, bare life? Can I trust myself to you, bare life (whom I now address), that your next move in your innocence will not destroy me completely, irrevocably, utterly!

Epigram for a soliloquy: what is left when you sift these out: the lone speaker on the stage, feeling alone, the lone speaker speaks and augments himself, speak on lone speaker! Speak because you are tired and you suffering from all those who speak in this abyss: speak because you are tired of all the lying, weave the lie yourself for a while: speak as those lips or hands or eyes break into a song because they have not sung in a great while and finally you should burst forth with an ideogram, between your hurried web-logs of survival, survival, survival.

Part I: Prana

They almost reached that. The breath, I mean, transient and yet fleeting. As with the first Allegro of Schubert's 14th quartet.
Just enough of Walser to make a brilliance, just enough of a madman, just enough of a kind man sitting behind his trowsers, suspenders and clean white shirt. There on the edge of sensibility he traveled.
Traveling is like this, in the rolling conversation of green landscape.
But look we are in the big city now, and all around us department stores echo shiver and sheathe, the cry of a million dead laments, the ghosts of our once flourishing conversation languish beneath friendly signs of salesmen and the aching ceaseless unrest of the laboring sodium light.

"That hauls my shuddering shroud sail"

The moon breaks its course of existence, for a moment of pure pleasure and diversion, yes, let us see and maybe in that great maintenance....

I have been among the mountains of the moon when it is full, it is an uncanny sentiment, this Artemis who guides the winds that haul my shivering shroud sail,
Man in a dense black coat turns his back away, the five of swords in the Rider-Waite tarot, defeat and loss, one man impish, made of fire, master of his field holds three of them, two upon the ground. The point in fact the other two could pick up their swords and defeat him, maybe at the pyrric loss of one, that being the one sword remaining, the sword of strength: there is a chance if two of the three hold their swords and defeat this impish smile of knowing too well, of being the commander of the field.

That hauls my burgeoning shroud sail.

I imagine a blackness, a black flag of one's self, pure piracy, pure idiocy, pure wisdom
Upon those winds one sets out upon a voyage
Take to your ships, ye gentlemen
If the devil rules us here
Fight the bastard, fight and lose and win
Or haul out your echoing shroud-sail
And take voyage like the black wing of crow
Over the dim and tarnished vision of a vale
In a brass doorknob
The valley of sentimentality
The valley of anima attachment
The valley of the shadow of death
The valley of sorrows
Take wing on the clear wind that sails above the valley of smoke and toil,
And all your sorrows-
Take flight as a black winging thing
Black wing of yourself, O sing, with your blackened voice
Take flight over that valley, over the sea
To Helen of Troy
To fight another fight with good countrymen there
Aischros! Now there is the pity!
Causing shame, ill favored, abusive, disgraceful...
Ah but is this not what I would say
Traveling here
When I say I adore the party inside my head
And the threat of a madman to knock it all down
Is less possible than the party that's inside your head
You actually have a madman at that party
And he is coming in with a candle to light them to bed
And he is coming with a chopper to chop off your head!
No. Not me, I'm cool, calm, and collected
Laughing over here with a bunch of chimpanzees
It's the only way that will save me.

Part II: Animals

Be kind to animals
In the end that is all I could say
"you have only to let the small, soft animal of your body
love what it loves."
And everyone speaks and just about groans
About how these are easy words
But hard to follow
And it takes another twenty years to follow them
And during that time you forgot
That you were once a precious one,
That you once knew your way
Oh precious one, O babe!

The man in the eight of cups turns away
His shroud sail of red, the color of blood
The color of, well, menstrual blood
These ships sails a warning and a wounding
The blood of a circumcision,
Of more than one hymen-sail
Of more than one uterine lining
Has stained these sheets
And the purity of thought that stood behind them
The purity of thought is lost behind the red sails
Liars call liars liars
In the abyss of cynicism
The philosopher in hell is this, let us be clear
The philosopher falling without a ground
All because of the red sail
And all this fucking compromise!
The philosopher seeking desperately to be a good and honest man
But the honest man is long behind him,
Eradicated in the experience of human tormenting human being
Blown away by the howling cyclone of a wind
From the philosopher's falling
Such descent could last forever
But even in this descent of words
There is still a swerve
There is me looking up at you saying
I don't believe it is you that sees us in this life
But there you are anyway!

Part III: Comedy

All things can be comic with a swerve
And this comedy still saves us from the abyss. Der Abgrund.
Fathers abyss contains a lot of space and simply exceeds our limited mortality
But I am not yet ready to join the comic
I am not yet ready to just sit there and poke fun at it all
Maybe this is why I write, because some of me still takes this seriously

Part IV: The Impossible is just the Beginning

Yes, well you write until you expire
And then you will write no more.
Isn't that what ghosts are about?
These things in our being that make traces
Mists and ghosts
The mists of Avalon
Arthur rode on those mists
And that is how we begin our tale
Woven of the colloidal stuff of weeping regret and remorse
And he found the one sword.
Must have picked up his weapon
And defeated quite a bad man.
One part of him died, to be sure, there were two on one
One died and one lived to survive the battle of the good and evil side of he
One part hot, one part cold
One of them died in order to set him in this place
One of them did battle with a horrible opponent and lost
Another did battle with a horrible opponent
The master of his field
And won.
And that is Arthur.

Oh Arthur, hold your one sword: the sword of the king
Don't be shy, don't be timid Arthur!
Ride upon those mists!
Ride upon that impossibility, real suicide,
And the chance that out of our stories
Out of our dreams
Out of our fervent desires
You arrived on the other shore

Part V: Merlin, the Healer and the Abuser: The Cloak of Ouranos

Fox, beloved fox, you are there, aren't you
Tricky Merlin, force of goodness
Son of a fucking incubus!
How could such light come from such evil?
Merlin the magician, who called forth the mists for Arthur to ride upon!
The healing power of the universe
Is to listen and to receive through your magical ears
Indeed I love you, Merlin.
If in the end
You can turn your magick cloak
Of the moons and the planets, and all the stars
Turn it over to an aching emptiness that is so kind
Some of them call it "God."
I will love you, Merlin
If you will not abuse me with the Ouranos shroud
The shroud sail finally that is the cloak of all stars and the various nebulae of the heavens
Black holes and whirling gravity pools of negative matter
This scintillating and pulsating shroud

Part VI: Lament for the Terrible Hurricane of Abuse

I have seen too many boys abused in the process
Forced to copulate with the father
They become his bitch, somehow feminized toward him
And then they spend the rest of their lives on some macho trip
And then they do the same to their children
Thus the force of the abusive wind of Ouranos' shroud

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul

"Go not gently into that good night"
All the words of all the poets tell us to linger
"Rage against the dying of the light"
But that the storm is coming

I have a feeling that there is a whole storm of ignorance and knowing that is about to wash over me. And I can only hang on and pray that there is solidity in a friendship, that we will stick it out for the longer ride. Isn't that what we do? We stick it out for the longer ride.

Part VII: Friends

Friends stay with the other friend in the boat, called onward, by the harrowing shroud-sail
By Artemis breeze.
OK, so innocence, drive me onward
After I propitiated thee with my own daughter
("the man is fucked! the man is fucked!" we, the Greek chorus all say half laughing and half crying with our faces in our hands, Agamemnon the master of all these people: "the man is fucked!")

Nobody will read this far in the insane web-log of my soul, of what i am saying because somehow I must write anew all that is me on some kind of electronic page, and burst forth with energy and intensity into a universe of half-empty bars and dingy pinball and cigarette machines. Cigarettes cost five dollars! I'll bet in five years they will cost us ten!"
Inflation will leave us a sad and sorry debtor nation, more than we already are.

Oh, maybe someone will read this far. As I come on thinking of all the anthropologists and the archaeologists of the future: five or ten thousand years from now... after five-thousand years more of people writing and seeking for some truth, and digging and narrowing out and hauling out five-thousand years more of this earth. Then will we say finally that we have given up digging? Will we in five thousand years finally give up the ability to dream? Of course it is a prison! Of course it is a perfect prison, as much of a punch in the nose as any close experience of reality can get. Reality is a punch in the nose. And you are lucky if you can walk away without it broken. No, reality is a breaking punch in the nose, one you see in the movies where the one man sends his fist all the way through the other man's head... Reality is like this. And that is a pretty dangerous place to have to at least consider and still live in a place where one even tries to be kind to his fellow man.

Part VIII: The Archaeologists of the Future

Will this be all we can truly say to the archaeologists of the future? That reality was a bloody punch in the nose, and we are lucky if we don't get our face caved in by this impact? All the churches, Notre Dame and Chartres... all the mysteries, all the symbols of all time in bronze in magical fire light, the magical fire which is the source of all our listening, that consumes us: the magical fire that consumes us.

All cultivation of civilization, of vitality beyond cynicism
All the final most beautiful verses of the Upanishads:
And enlightenment comes as a bloody punch in the nose?
The fop gets his nose bloodied
That's all there is
Raskolnikov waiting to deal another bloody blow
Now what a fucking idiot!
He gets to give me a punch and then run away and hide
Well so be it
I will take my punishment
And when he is trough
If I am still there, if I abide, if I survive,
Right there

This was not done in Jesus lifetime
To be able to see that humankind is filled
With so much good and so much evil
We focused on the compassionate man
We left the devil in the dust, we trampled him!
And in point of fact we flourished
We created greater and greater wars after this idea:
"the one holy and roman catholic faith"
"the one holy Islamic religion"
Our religions still were one, and so we had to take all others as the crushed souls
At the bottom of Shiva's toes: the vanquished one
And some of us still say "I am the vanquished one"
The impossible is just the beginning
And Arthur sets out upon pure mists of the old dragon?
And the fishermen set out in the middle of a storm on the red sea
And the impossible happened and we were awoken to the power of faith
That we could walk on water, that we could be still on the empty waters of oblivion and absorption
That we could ride over the bleakness of mortal suicide.
All this, this is at the threshold of our writing: that we must write to tell the story of how somehow we survived and lived to tell the tale of our existence.
That is all in writing: a survivor's tale:
From the empty books written in psychiatric clinics
To the stock market ticker-tape
To the poems set up to the terrible angels
All these just a part of the poem of our survival, that we survived a moment longer?

Part IX: The Magical Box: Beyond Survival

And what will these archaeologists say five-thousand years from now? When they read the obsessive logging of our survival: web-logs on cooking and puppy dog training, web-logs on how to do your taxes, web logs for dating services, web logs for philosophic contemplation of all these web-logs including (self-reflectively) even themselves. Web logs of ancient Chinese secrets: of gardens with forking paths: of red lacquered boxes with pages of manuscripts, with drawers that open and close, one dependent on another, in a sequence determined by some obscure and tantric mechanism in the box itself. Our mandarin box, with our Miraculous Mandarin, a terrible and un-dieing machine that keeps jerking out of it: Das Unheimliche, yes, well you know all that: this mandarin box, and yes the people who kept pulling the drawers open and writing their own sentences on all the lose pages that came floating down: some of the people, while in the midst of creating the web log of their survival encrypted the most beautiful ideograms of existence, a bold and brilliant calligraphy of everything and nothing.

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!