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...

Talkin' Independence Day 2007 USA Blues Part 1

The United States of Black. - Red and White bars are all over town - host the immediacy of this American Empire. These Red and White, uneven rambling root- bars that writhe in the dust. There is no easy paralell - this ain't no Nike ad, the track ain't even, it's twisted in the rubble and the wreckage of a century and a half of greed in this nation. No thin white lines, sleek and emaciated lines of Liberty for the shining runner lady to run between. No certain red - no way, no folks neither. Rather the red like the brown-red man - Chicano laborer - brown pride, black pride... and as for white pride? Well, I have none! There is no white pride that isn't some epithet for the Ku Klux Clan. Brown pride and black pride, I hope you will do better! Well at least you can fight while the shadow of white pride creeps up like a vine that's strangling you. White pride has become a corporate cancer. This color line is still the power line is still the poverty line. This line, this power to life, held in the hands of wicked men, this power over life can never BE life... that's what one man has said, and I believe him. I've got no voice on this flag of pride. I've got no "Blue Angels" - I've got no bright stars and broad stripes! Singing: "Off we go into the wild blue yonder..." I dont have time for that! That kind of jingoism is the worst insult: "we go off into the wild blue yonder, leaving you behind!" What Independence is there on Independence day 2007? What independence is there when we have got troops over in Iraq, waiting to die defending the democracy that they really believe in, waiting to die defending my freedom of speech? Let me ask you this. Let me put you to this question: Are you willing to die defending the democracy that someone else told you to defend because you wanted to hold a legal gun in your hands? Did you ever think that the war was lost back at home? When the Robber Barons told you to die defending their democracy did you ever think of that? Did you ever decide to die defending their right to free speech? Maybe you wanted to die defending the American Empire? Did you ever think about that? Democracy or the American Empire, whichever comes first, give or take! ...When we have culled all the black nations for their terrorists--- terrorists, they hide in the mobs of the innocent and explode themselves, shoot marines with guns. And let's be frank, no matter how much some of these boys wanted to hold a gun in their hands, I don't think many of them want to shoot a nursing mother through the head. I don't think these marine boys want to use their grandmothers as decoys or as faulty body armor - now that is obscene! Brown pride - White pride - Gay pride - This country is no poem - Poems now are words that act as lies in the hearts of men - this country is no poem - written in fact by the poet, sitting in the Slum. Sitting in the slum, the poet Aj Dagga Tolar sits and writes his poem. He is sitting in Nigeria, in Lagos, in the slum of about 5-million, Ajungele, the jungle. He writes that this country is not a poem. Well, now, everywhere is a slum, not as desperate as Lagos, but everywhere is a slum: we are all slumming for the American "Standard of Living" - a living of life that has gone too far, that bought too many races, that kept its passions beating too strongly for the American whore. We might all go back to life, back on the farm, but we cannot resist the city, even the artists and the bohemian sculptors, forgive us a little for being seduced, we believed even just a little that she had some kindness. We cannot resist the city with its famous Americans: William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski - drunkards, lusches and letches, junkies, tricks with whores. America is not chaste and its heroes are neither. But that is not the only story in town. I cannot believe that that is the only story in town. Each man searching for liberty at the bottom of some addiction. The rebels and the revolutionaries search for an addiction other than our addiction to American pride and glory, the glut of technological Rome in an American empire. That is not the only story I heard you say, I heard that one must say! Not the only story in town, it circles down to its own rock bottom, as you try to avoid fundamentalism like pigs on the wing. It circles down, you follow it round, you give it size, you give it measure, you say "It gives me life, this American land!" You said a lot of things on the way down to try to find yourself, but there was no one there when you hit the bottom, just a predicament, just an empty American high school classroom where there are no students. I mean, who is really willing to learn? Are the robbers willing to learn? All the unruly teenage players have left the classroom, and now its just one big recess. They will come in again, but I will be there waiting to tell you that this is America! How do you hope to teach the Cholo-gangsters? How many speed bumps of education do you wish to put in the way of a life that is gone too fast? How many speed bumps of metaphor do you wish to put in the way, to say Life is but a metaphor, when we know that for them metaphor just gets in the way of their struggle and their suffering will to power. Life has gone too fast in the American inner city - the young man grows up his whole life round liquor and booze - how do you hope to teach them that this is some American wasteland where their fathers and their fathers' fathers have been forgotten and fogotten again and again, that we have made at each step a deliberate attempt to forget them? We live on eating each other: cheap Hispanic labor. I know, another hornet's nest: "to live outside the law you must be honest," but America? Outside the law? Never! Was there anything in America that was outside the law? America was the land ot the law - and it always promised religious freedom. Now we have Puritanical churches, or, what's worse, Satanic Junkies - Jerry Falwell getting fat and slick on your blood. Walt Whitman wrote a poem. Walt Whitman wrote that poem for the captain of his country... a poem for his captain. And maybe there, behind suspenders and a broad rimmed hat - maybe crossing Brooklyn Ferry - maybe there at dawn - you might find the American we desperately need. But what good is the dawn of our country when each passing day we become more of an empire? What is left is each man's private home. Each man steps into his abode like a fortress. Each abode is a fortress as distant as another nation. Here we hold the flag for our nation: No longer the stars and stripes, it reads with the number of our house in black and white. I painted it there. I added a star because stars stand for other places and other predicaments, I added a fertile valley of a crescent moon, or a Saracen sword, to cut a little deeper into the valley, to cut away the American Empire, to till the land a little deeper. It says that there is no American flag flying here. There is no red, white and blue. There is clay-red, and bone white and all-devouring black - inside our living room - that is all you will ever see: just bones, marrow and emptiness. You can cut through the emptiness with your thin white lines but you won't hit anything, not even a star to split in two with your scimitar.

Polemic on Pleasure as Subversion

Subversion is pleasurable. It involves in its essence a turning or coiling of experience. Each text should be subverted, which leads quickly to a double bind: how do we subvert this text? How might we subvert subversion? A bad infinity quickly ensues: a hall of mirrors of subversions of subversions of versions.

Verso and Recto: there is subversion and there is rectification, setting things to right, to the regulus or to the rule. And here we get to the ruler.

But our duty to the universe is to subvert any consensus/conception of it. There is the Concept (Be-griff) and there is the “Immaculate Conception”


(“The Groom is Still Waiting at the Altar”: Church of the Immaculate Concept(ion) in Mazatlan)


(Detailed City Map locating the "Church of the Immaculate Conception"
at the city of Spisská Nová Ves in Slovakia)(Web link as follows: http://www.ellen.sk/english/mapy.html )(The Church of the Immaculate Conception is listed on the outer labia as detail #5)

In The Use of Pleasure Foucault delineates the issues of sexual morality and fidelity. The rule or rectitude is set: the subtle use of discipline or asceticism to maintain one’s ethical composure under the laws of marriage.

Vitriol: Visita interiora terrae rectificando invenes occultum lapidem

Rosenkreuz's crypt, according to the description presented in the legend, seems to be located in the interior parts of the Earth, recalling the alchemical motto VITRIOL: "Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem ("Visit the Interior Parts of the Earth; by Rectification Thou Shalt Find the Hidden Stone.")



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Rosenkreuz
'Well of Initiation', into the interior of the earth; picture shows also the Rose of the Winds over the Templar Cross, the Rose Cross, in "Quinta da Regaleira", Sintra, Portugal (1892-1910)

If there is subversion then there is rectification. What is rectification? -We ...rectify (Indo-European roots: dhe- and reg-1):

ENTRY: dh-
DEFINITION: To set, put. Contracted from *dhe1-.
Derivatives include deed, doom, fashion, defeat, feckless, sacrifice, satisfy, face, and synthesis.
I. Basic form *dh-. 1. Suffixed form *dh-ti-, “thing laid down or done, law, deed.” deed; indeed, from Old English dd, doing, deed, from Germanic *ddiz. 2. Suffixed form *dh-k-. theca, tick3; amphithecium, apothecary, apothecium, bibliotheca, bodega, boutique, cleistothecium, endothecium, perithecium, from Greek thk, receptacle. 3. Basic form *dh-. bard2, purdah, from Old Persian d-, to place. 4. Suffixed form *dh-to-, set down, created, in Old Iranian compound *khvat-dta- (see s(w)e-).
II. O-grade form *dh-. 1. do1; fordo, from Old English dn, to do, from Germanic *dn. 2. Suffixed o-grade form *dh-men-. abdomen, from Latin abdmen, belly, abdomen, perhaps “part placed away, concealed part” (ab-, away; see apo). 3. Suffixed o-grade form *dh-mo-. a. doom, from Old English dm, judgment (< “thing set or put down”); b. –dom, from Old English -dm, abstract suffix indicating state, condition, or power; c. Old Norse -dmr, condition, in compound hrdmr (see k-); d. Duma, dumka, from Russian Duma, Duma, from a Germanic source akin to Gothic dms, judgment; e. deem, from Old English dman, to judge, from Germanic denominative dmjan. a–e all from Germanic dmaz. 4. Suffixed o-grade form *dh-t- in compound *sakro-dht- (see sak-).
III. Zero-grade form *dh-. 1a. Prefixed form *kom-dh-. abscond, incondite, recondite, sconce2, from Latin condere, to put together, establish, preserve (*kom, together; see kom); b. prefixed and suffixed form *kom-dh()-yo-. condiment, salmagundi, from Latin condre, to season, flavor; c. compound *kred-dh- (see kerd-); d. compound suffixed form *gw-dh()-o- (see gwer-2). 2. Suffixed zero-grade form dh-k-. a. –facient, fact, faction1, –faction, factitious, factitive, factor, factory, faena, fashion, feasible, feat1, feature, fetish, –fic, –fy, hacienda; affair, affect1, affect2, affection, amplify, artifact, artifice, beatific, benefaction, benefic, benefice, beneficence, benefit, chafe, comfit, confect, confetti, counterfeit, defeasance, defeat, defect, deficient, discomfit, edifice, edify, effect, efficacious, efficient, facsimile, factotum, feckless, forfeit, infect, justify, malefactor, malfeasance, manufacture, misfeasance, modify, mollify, nidify, notify, nullify, officinal, orifice, perfect, petrify, pluperfect, pontifex, prefect, proficient, profit, putrefy, qualify, rarefy, rectify, refect, refectory, rubefacient, sacrifice, satisfy, spinifex, suffice, sufficient, surfeit, tubifex, tumefacient, vivify, from Latin facere (< *fak-yo-), to do, make, and Latin combining form -fex (< *-fak-s), “maker”; b. façade, face, facet, facial, facies; deface, efface, surface, from Latin derivative facis, shape, face (< “form imposed on something”); c. office, from Latin compound officium (< *opi-fici-om), service, duty, business, performance of work (*opi-, work; see op-); d. further suffixed form *dh-k-li-. facile, facilitate, faculty, difficulty, from Latin facilis (< Archaic Latin facul), feasible, easy. 3. Suffixed zero-grade form *dh-s- (probably identical with zero-grade of dhs-). nefarious, from Latin fs, divine law, right. 4. multifarious, omnifarious, from Latin -friam, adverbial suffix, as in bifriam, in two places, parts, double, from *dwi-dh()-, “making two” (*dwi-, two; see dwo-). 5. Reduplicated form *dhi-dh-. thesis, thetic; anathema, antithesis, diathesis, epenthesis, epithet, hypothecate, hypothesis, metathesis, parenthesis, prosthesis, prothesis, synthesis, from Greek tithenai, to put, with zero-grade noun thesis (*dh-ti-), a placing, and verbal adjective thetos (*dh-to-), placed. 6. Suffixed zero-grade form *dh-m. thematic, theme, from Greek thema, “thing placed,” proposition. 7. Reduplicated form *dhe-dh-. samhita, sandhi, from Sanskrit dadhti, he places (past participle -hita-, from suffixed zero-grade *dh-to-). 8. Reduced form *dh- in compound *au-dh- (see au-). (Pokorny 2. dh- 235.)

ENTRY: reg-
DEFINITION: To move in a straight line, with derivatives meaning “to direct in a straight line, lead, rule.” Oldest form *3re-, becoming *3reg- in centum languages.
Derivatives include right, realm, anorexia, rich, rule, interrogate, and reckless.
I. Basic form *reg-. 1. Suffixed form *reg-to-. right, from Old English riht, right, just, correct, straight, from Germanic *rehtaz. 2. realm, rectitude, recto, rector, rectum, rectus, regent, regime, regimen, regiment, region; address, adroit, alert, correct, direct, erect, incorrigible, porrect, rectangle, rectify, rectilinear, resurge, Risorgimento, sord, source, surge, from Latin regere, to lead straight, guide, rule (past participle rctus, hence adjective rctus, right, straight). 3. anorectic, anorexia, from Greek oregein, to stretch out, reach out for (with o- from oldest root form *3re-).
II. Lengthened-grade form *rg-, Indo-European word for a tribal king. 1a. bishopric, eldritch, from Old English rce, realm; b. Riksmål, from Old Norse rki, realm; c. Reich; Reichsmark, from Old High German rchi, realm; d. rich, from Old English rce, strong, powerful, and Old French riche, wealthy. a–d all from Germanic *rkja-, from Celtic suffixed form *rg-yo-. 2. real2, regal, regulus, reign, rial1, riyal, royal; regicide, regius professor, vicereine, viceroy, from Latin rx, king (royal and priestly title). 3. Suffixed form *rg-en-. raj, rajah, rani, rye2; maharajah, maharani, from Sanskrit rj, rjan-, king, rajah (feminine rjñ, queen, rani), and rjati, he rules.
III. Suffixed lengthened-grade form *rg-ol-. rail1, reglet, regular, regulate, rule, from Latin rgula, straight piece of wood, rod.
IV. O-grade form *rog-. 1. rake1, from Old English raca, racu, rake (implement with straight pieces of wood), from Germanic *rak. 2. rack1, from Middle Dutch rec, framework, from Germanic *rak-. 3. Possibly Germanic *rankaz (with nasal infix). rank2, from Old English ranc, straight, strong, hence haughty, overbearing. 4. reckon, from Old English gerecenian, to arrange in order, recount (ge-, collective prefix; see kom), from Germanic *rakinaz, ready, straightforward. 5. Suffixed form *rog--. rogation, rogatory; abrogate, arrogate, corvée, derogate, interrogate, prerogative, prorogue, subrogate, supererogate, from Latin rogre, to ask (< “stretch out the hand”). 6. Suffixed form *rog-o-. ergo, from Latin erg, therefore, in consequence of, perhaps contracted from a Latin phrase * rog, “from the direction of” ( < ex, out of; see eghs), from a possible Latin noun *rogus, “extension, direction.”
V. Lengthened o-grade form *rg-. 1. reck, from Old English rec(c)an, to pay attention to, take care (formally influenced by Old English reccan, to extend, stretch out, from Germanic *rakjan), from Germanic *rkjan. 2. reckless, from Old English rcelas, careless (-las, lacking; see leu-), from Germanic rkja-.
VI. Suffixed zero-grade form *g-yo-. raita, from Sanskrit jyati, he stretches out. (Pokorny 1. re- 854.)

Oh God!!! What are we going to do with all this digging and digging and digging through the dense verbiage of the earth--- its enough to make one unconsious--- there is no way to exhaust this setting of words--- the setting of an extension "to right" the extension of a hand or an offering, a simple question: "what ails you sire?" Is thus the sum of rectification what we extend and venture into the world through this ex-isting of the extended offer. What do we offer (this is a question we can handle)?

I think that the question of "rectification" throws us into the hell of dust and darkness we call "research"--- Its a bunch of words that clutter and mean nothing. back to the realm of the mothers (Goethe) in the dusty realm of the womb-- dusty Hades, the unseen one. Rectification and the secret of wealth-- from what dark place do we gather our value? What is our value?

What is my value? (rectified from some dark place). This has been the course of several of my dreams--- even the young upstartish East-Indian men have more value than me--- even they earn a better salary! -Oh well, this life is such a place! But what soul shall all this make? Everything is perfect in the dream except the attitude of the Ego (Hillman...) Everything is perfect in this dense rock of definitions except for the gleaning of perception that I may call "me."

Shamus and Delius (More Idiotic Things)

Delius must have been the protector. I mean, who else would aver otherwise?


To whom do I write to here? Do I render here formal diatribes?

Oh yes I began this log as a form of self laceration-- can I get to my own indictments before these indictments come from you? I mean if I fess up before you make an indictment, then your words become a kind of joke:

One day you might come up to them, and lightly say:
"Oh, I only meant to say that we caught the lad jerking off behind the shed!"

-But he has already told us, and he made a fool out of you!



What is my own indictment? That I am some sort of a bigot? I mean, that's just about the worst thing one could say of anyone. But am I a bigot? Oh God! A question that will make me be honest. I don't like to think of myself as a bigot. Am I a bigot by association? White anglo-saxon european protestant, I mean W.T.F. cut the lad some slack! Maybe the best we can hope for is like one episode of Trailer Park Boys: "Who's the Microphone Assassin?" J-Roc gets beaten down in his whiteness, but finally the cool black rapper says to him something like "You ain't black, dude, but your shit is tight!"

OK, so my shit is tight, that's the best I could do.

I'm not saying that my shit is tight, but if my shit were tight that would be the best I could do! Jeeze!

I can't indict myself any further, but I am somehow standing trial (indicted for innane and rambling blog making).

(Unless you take the participation in blogs or blogging as a phenomenon as some sort of late capitalist bigotry. ...Unless you take some part of me that is not yet open to the suffering, that is blind, that cannot see the true suffeing in others.... and that could be... Unless there could be many parts of me, my brothers and sisters will agree, that did not choose to see the suffering of others.)

"Let me see then the suffering of others without blindness... "
Are you so certain that you want to ask for that? Its a noble thought but... bloody hell!

(my action would then be predicated on the direct wish not to create pain in others, because all pain would be fully experienced as my own...)



"Nay, I argue for peace among all men! (Nay! Neigh! Nigh!) I argue for peace among the workers and whippers! the bulkers and the biggots! (I mean what is worse than being a biggot? Is there anything worse than being a biggot?)
Let's have some peace among simple working men and among middle management alike, always saying:

"What would it avail my life were it not I among you!"

That is why I need you, my slave-men and my bigots!

(The mediocrity of evil)

Bigotry and Bigamy, always a "Bigger Man than You" provokes this attitude. With this attitude you will go far until you will reach the country of "Well-Jesus-said-my-Kingdom-is-not-of-this- kingdom." And you have got to go on looking with nothing but books in your eyes. Then you've got to see with the eyes of Tiresias,
cause aint no earthly eyes tied you.

And then you are already pretty far out on the road, far away from the profane provinces, far away from any provenance and profess: the districts and countries of men. -"But you barely stirred an inch," the old woman said! "You barely got even on your knees, let alone stood up and took a step!"

Words from the original disillusionist, they almost sound like a dirge now, the insane chanting of "Emo" children, who want to slip back into some womb:
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

(More words, and always already in a context which challenges our perception of a continuous hold: there is always something spilling out or away... and what is that? -Oh do not ask "what is it?" We must go and make our visit!")

Prufrock: Yes the old men, finally old having frittered their way out in so much useless speculation, but it is the fate of the old man to have fretted and to have wittered and to have whittled down the choices of his life.

Shamus and Delius are out. A brief hunting party. A minor indiscretion. The twin gods, yes, Thomas, I visited them long ago. Shamus is the shaman, the flaming lit candle, the tooth of fire. And Delius was just an after thought! Prometheus and Epimetheus... or later the Dioscuri, Pollux and Castor. Sons of Zeus know only their earthly mothers, but question the origin of their fathers... they say "my kingdom is not of this kingdom." We have had enough of them then, these sons of Zeus, who keep speaking of being spies in their own land.

I have said that the name of the god is "Awake!" And what is wakefulness but a separation: that fateful spilling forth of context, the froth of the chalice (read scheide or "sheath")". "Kurze brief zum Langen Abschied"

Abscheid is farewell, the essence of the feminine: separation and farewell. (Ra rides upon his little cosmic vessel into the galactic beauty of the stars.)

Delius seems to mean nothing. He was a composer who lived in the Nineteenth Century-- that is all! I am abashed, and poorly funded in trying to sort out this Delius thing. What do I have in the matter of funding? A matter of going out into the world and asking "What is my value?" Delius, poor in spirit! Delius, devious, Delia Elena San Marco (The Borges story, don't you remember?). Delius and Delicious: Di-Lectum: Dilectus, beloved. (Can I stand the portion of myself that rests voluptuous in all respects? -Only in that I can stand the part of me that is homeless and upon the road!).

And Lectus is the bloody conch or bier. (Let us not speak of the hero on his funeral pyre as the flaming tongs and teeth of flame rose higher!): He glimpsed her hand grasped around it, the bloody pink conch, sound the horn of wakefulness: Brrrrroooooaaar!

(And in comes the cat with a) "Meoowwwww!"(he has had a successful venture into cattiness.)


Thank you, Bastet! ...And now we continue:



Lectus is the elect and the illicit: choice: more precisely of the frame, given that the framer is enough of a lover and not a fighter, given that the frame is offered and not forced upon us. The framer is beautiful or beloved insofar as he makes certain beloved choices--- these choices make the genius into the beloved, the uncondemned, the rarer and more beautiful are his choices.



That is why I would say I love Werner Herzog or Thomas Beckett or maybe Addas Kiorastami... maybe Matthew Barney, but I know my friend would say he is just some young upstart (and I would say that my young upstarts are just getting started). I am a lover of these men who have made their frame so explicit. They could do no wrong, that is what they are, and that is what they are worth. Other men I will condemn for their poor choices, their lack of aesthetic acumen (aesthetic meaning not merely that which is perceptible by the senses, but also the blindness of the seer Tiresias, another great hermaphrodite). Blindness and sight: the sum of our aesthetic choices. I love the men that see visions with the eyes of Tiresias, because the other men are distracted, and become slave to a woman or to a landscape, or to some sentiment or sentimentality, which then becomes intolerable and suffocating: which is the source of every cliche.



Werner Herzog: the eye of Tiresias. The eye of a blind man who was forced into the blind, into the blackness, who offered up his sight to the void. Where no eye is round there the eye of Tiresias a metaphor based upon a ruined, crumpled organ ("my kingdom is not of this kingdom") (a dangerous, tricky thing to say). But so is it to say that the eye is not of this world and still it is not blind, still it has vision.



Shamus is light and vision and Delius is cavity in the shining tooth, a creche or a cave.



Shamus and Delius used to own a book publishing company. Out there on the edge of the wilderness, we keep pushing them out further to the Mongolian plane-- heard of only in Murakami tales of utter savagery, human skinning, out there on the Mongolian plane, where the dust collects on funny hats like colored parenthesis on human heads, the caravanseri have wandered and some have lingered, and some have been lost forever before they got to any other place.



At first we wondered it this was a children's book publishing company, but no longer have we lingered. Let the children be our children, but let them be children! Let them be not of us! Let the children make their own book publishing company, and let our book publishing company grow old and perish out here on the edges of some plane. (it was some plane we were traveling, with a crooked mark, it was some plane we were traveling when we got into some conversation, me and this other stranger, who became known as my closest male friend but still kept his alien distance.)



And what of women? What of this Deborah? I write this because, well, she is in some foreign land. Yes, I'm lost somewhere, she's in some foreign land!



Throw women into the mix, otherwise it is a stag-fest. Throw women into the fare, then you have rutting stags, each vying for one woman's attention: who is most pretty and who is most attractive?

And I am sitting home alone, I have my barrel of gin (I don't really like gin in reality but please stay with my metaphor!), the firey djinn, my spirits, ghosts, images, reflections like troubled water of spirit, like troubled glints of son on the water. That's what it's like to be alone here. Decaying Brit, yes, neither this nor that: that is my name. To sit home alone is to expose oneself to one's continual perception that one has had a bad mood. Things aren't perfect either. I wouldn't say that I am lonely. I have just turned toward the inner voluptuous that is the meaning of my woman. And for tonight this is OK. At home with my troubled spirits. Can the Anima have meaning? Meaning is the provenance of the old man, but that is the meaning of my bad mood. Meaning that the mood is my ligament, link.

Some men will write out their fiction, and will point to this or that possibility, but I will just point to my foul mood. There she sits like a dirty buzzard (buzzards are actually very clean). And what is this vulture but MAAT:

"In the medieval pack, the title card is Le Mat, adapted from the Italian Matto, madman or fool; the property of this title will be considered later. But there is another. or (one might say) a complementary, theory. If one assumes that the Tarot is of Egyptian origin, one may suppose that Mat (this card being the key card of the whole pack) really stands for Maut, the vulture goddess, who is an earlier and more sublime modification of the idea of Nuith than Isis.
"There are two legends connected with the vulture. It is supposed to have a spiral neck; this may possibly have reference to the theory (recently revived by Einstein, but mentioned by Zoroaster in his oracles) that the shape of the universe, the form of that energy which is called the universe, is spiral.
"The other legend is that the vulture was supposed to reproduce her species by the intervention of the wind; in other words, the element of air is considered as the father of all manifested experience. There is a parallel in Anaxamenes' school of Greek philosophy." (Crowley, A. The Book of Thoth; Equinox vol. III, no.v. p.53)

What is startling is this Air-Originariness. It is startling and unsettling, for the latter Christian interpretation was that this was the Church of the Air: the dream of the false god or Demi-ourge. And the Demi-ourge is not the vision in the eyes of Tyresias. The Church of the Air comes up only round the Mormon radio programs, and while the Church of the LDS is extremely weird in places, I do not think it constellates that much Satanic crap: Satan breeds from hate and fear and intolerance. Mormons can have a lot of hang-ups and devices, but I do not think that they prefer their fears of others to their rejoicing in song... (and what was it about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Cremaster 2: a chorus of hate? The most startling and horrid of all nightmares, The Executioner's tale. But this is clearly not the wind .) I don't think it really matters-- this church-of-the-air-diabolic-stuff is just rubbish. Look, I believe the Mormons are good and beautiful people, and aside from the times that they look down upon me (or anyone) because I (or anyone) choose(s) not to be Mormon they are, in this moment, at least for me, angels of divinity, compassion and truth. I really like that they will redeem me after I am dead (at least that is my hope) --- after I have had a life to struggle and to contend that in some manner I have my own path of religious development--- my own visions--- they will redeem some part of my ghost that loves the truth--- even if it is only their vision of the truth. I love truth...

But air is not exactly Aether either. Air is still an aesthetic element, but it does not belong either to the imaginal realm of Tiresias, or to the emptiness which must in some manner pre-exist the unfolding of all elements. Pneuma, Prana, Spiritus, Ruach all this is fine to breathe across the void, but it is not the space itself. It is not the Apeiron and it is not Ain Soph Aur. But extension itself-- perceptible quality of empty extendedness... well this rapidly becomes uninteresting! What about saying that "the emptiness is endless"? (That's a little better.) All this is nothing more than just casting about for words without the astounding force of Prana behind them.

I keep thinking of "Fake Sparkle or Golden Dust" (the Peter Murphy song). This comes much closer-- I think that has that rather amazing issuance of "breath" in it.

These are not intellectual things-- the intellect just fails when it tries to analyze them, or it gives up: Was soll das Alles? This is the guardianship of language, and never does it go beyond its own feeble joking quality. But to make Prana into some kind of struggle for force of discourse or power becomes rapidly absurd and somehow belicose and turgid, like trying to read Ayn Rand for any length of time, the weakened animus becomes inflated, rather than containing any real strength, which would require ...soul. (Soul: the one who sits and is judged, and whose measure is the gathering of all of the images --- and the turning of images--- their transformations---of their life.)

Air is elementally akin to intellect, but only in its denigrated form. But what is offered here is the tracing of currents, lines in a dust-storm. Perhaps out of this unquiet dust storm this unsettling darkness, in modest homes glows a little oil lamp light. The darkness is vast: as the shadow cast by Jung holding a candle in the Alps (and from then on the entirety of the work of the unconscious would carry in the shadow, since conscious life had already become fascinated with the archetypal, realm of symbols...).

And what is the point of all nightmares but to wake us? Waking, separation, and abscheid, here we go into the rhythm again.

Deeper than the buffets of the winds of fate, and deeper than the pulverizing force of our own prana... deeper still is emptiness.... "my kingdom is not of this kingdom."

I have seen others who wrote long and complex-ly like this. I asked for 13 Haiku, so here goes:

1. Haiku follows us
Blackbirds are winging away
Will I make heart break?

2. Chord progression tease
One octave a pretty flirt
The other heart sob.

3. Shamus Delius
Two twins in a bad play
After Fish and Chips

4. Poem Upstart Wind
Column, twister likes Culture
In end burries us.

5. Samples are undone
I never was example
Wind will carry us.

6. Stiff, stirring, on-edge
The verdant Chinese garden
Plunder and murder

7. The end, no secrets
I blow the horn and witness
Sweetest Heart awake!

8. Sweetheart Deborah
I have ate all the peaches.
For you I am true.

9. Absurd spectacle
Sexual fidelity
Gladly my heart breaks

10. But not my promise
To be alone for you and
Be alone for us.

11. Lone Ontology
Meditate the galaxy
Not like Captain Kirk

12. Friend, are you lonely?
The friend to the lonely
Hg-Tristmegistus

13. This last poem smile
In dying we clear the way
Waving of the reed

Here's To You Mrs. San Geronimo

A bell rings
In my left ear
It is Mrs. San Geronimo
She has taken up that stacatto singing.
She has come to discuss her property
And who is right to own it
Legal lessons
Lessen
Loosen the bilious billfold
They were not listening to him or to me

I own you Mrs. San Geronimo
You and your alphebetized sentences.
You are a bloody pain.
You own me, Mrs. San Geronimo.
Every day you write my paycheck.
So I can take it home and play with the cats.

One day Mrs. San Geronimo
Travels to the ocean
Far away, from her little house on the prarie
Out to the seaside,
Men wearing striped bathing costumes and straw hats
Wave their moustacios in the direction of the sun
Make incomprehensible prancing on the sea shore
She sells sea shells
To Mrs. Geronimo
Who takes them
Into her floral arrangement.
Alive alive, ho!
With candied hard sauce.

"I cannot bring this world quite round" spoke the attorney
Wally Stephens in a bathtub brushing his nails
Smoking a cheap cigar.

There goes yet another poet
With his straw hat
Waving his moustacio in the sun.

(P.S. the first photo of the male bathers was provided through web searching for http://www.gallimauphry.com/april_2005.html)

Seriously! Quicker Parrot Issues!

Quicker Parrots? There are such things?

These photos are not fair to lovely Deborah, but I had to include them because it included her nasty mean parrot Noka-oi.

Noka-oi is Hawaiian and it means the very best but she is the very very worst bird possible.

I had a certain enjoyment out of not being fair. I got her up early at my friend Jim's request and made her stand up with the parrot. I got her up at 7:40 AM and made her take the photo in her colorful bathrobe. It necessarily had to be her colored bathrobe, which I actually like very much.

I thought it important to include the second smaller image of Deborah with the bird that I took first because I had the image that had to include a usual gray day in San Pedro as a kind of backdrop. Behind her is one of the stinky-est points of pollution in the world: the port of Los Angeles!

HEGEL! KOOL!.....NO! HEIGL, COOL!

Back in the days when saying something mattered I was still finishing under-graduate school. In those days I loved to read Hegel, who was and is irreconcilably dense. I remain irreconcilably dense, but have not the perspicacity to publish anything even remotely academic.

While making this important sojourn into Academia I was fortunate enough to run into a peer, a young woman who also studied Hegel for some unknown reason. When she asked me whom I was studying and writing my bachelor's thesis on, I replied simply with the term: "Hegel." She responded enthusiastically, "Hegel! Cool!"

I think that the young, short, pert, pretty woman with a slightly poor complexion, and who wore too much make-up cosmetic base was actually genuinely enthusiastic about the whole affair of having anything to do with Hegel near her. I believe that, as much as I may have spent the subsequent 20 years lampooning her southern-drawl style voice, she was kind and intelligent. Nevertheless Jan (pronounced "Yan," as in the man's name) and I viciously lampooned her ever after as somewhat of a Philistine. The pronunciation became "Heigl! Cool!" I hope she would forgive me for being a stupid, boorish man. Maybe even join in and tell me about some idiotic turn of speech that made legend.

Actually I know a moment of sheer embarrassment for me: it was during the audition season for the one-act plays my senior year of college. I obtained a part in a play written by a student: it had a vaguely angst-filled air to it, set in some cafe. At the end, my abhorrent acting was lampooned (perhaps it wasn't abhorrent, or at least any more abhorrent than the meaningless play production itself). I was made to look like a jerky buffoon who anticipated the action of the play. (Who could blame me entirely? -It was a young actress kissing me savagely!)

Perhaps our friend, the young woman in the class of 1991 philosophy major at our college had some real beauty. It is probable that that beauty and yearning to study philosophy for some "meaning" was "more" beautiful than the "acute" attractive skin tone and shape of Katherine Heigl. Nonetheless the eye-popping, eye-catching sketch in today's yahoo web page inspired me to construct a full article on this post. Maybe Katherine Heigl has some soul spark beneath her perfect exterior. It's just too much, so forgive me, for, eventually another 20 years.