With the freedom and challenge of writing nothing, with nothing to write.
An assemblage without shape, a conditioned concoction…constrained by language, by individuality, by knowledge and finitude. Dependent on what it is that “I” am, the funds of culture, genes, society and cells “I” am able to access and “person-al” (!?) abilities or capacities to operate, utilize, actuate, participate in/with.
Writing veritable nothing(s) seems easy, suddenly. (When viewed from perspective of self-reference – envisioned this way it almost feels inevitable).
Perhaps I am incapable of writing SOMEthing, some THING. Perhaps I am unable to create a fact-of-artifice, an object, an artifact. Something-being-on. Perhaps I can neither begin work, nor complete it…perhaps “I” is always the EXCLUDED MIDDLE. The liminal divisor, the limit-of-being-this, the present/presence of this particular effort, happening, this action-in-its-taking-place…ALWAYS AFTER and ALWAYS BEFORE. Event? Never quite NOW, excepting AS the action, but EVER precipitate and EVER resulting.
I write. Neither conclusively nor originary. Verb-al.
Skirting this void (where there might have been nothing, no thing such as THIS – these letters) “I” scribble known (“shared?”) language…marks meaning…something…almost. Meaning SOME things to SOME persons, never unambiguous, never decisive or clear, not quite agreed. This is language, these letters, these symbols, these marks. May be scrambled, assembled, undone, recombined – but still marks – recognizable to SOME, and processed through “me,” significance is what is in question.
Understandability, inter-pretation, com-munication, con-course (of the stream of inking letters onto a page to in-scribe knowable triggers…to refer, to signify, to re-mind, to com-pose, to make happen, avail-able, IN-BE-TWEEN: to split BE-ing as shared or con-joined). To joinwith by posing, positing, offer-ing marks formed toward potentially recognizable inscriptions as con-constructed / – accepted words toward meaning. Con-fusing.
Yes it involves effort. Yes it depends on unlike-ness and emptiness or faith. Yes it seems un-like-ly (NOT like-able, not able-to-be-liked) and yet I give it, construct (co-construct) and offer up (sacrifice) what “I” com-pose (set out for sight – with) “YOU” (other) in order.
In order to…? for…?
Assembling identifiable language sets, verbal Lego blocks, so that…?
(an “I” might be posed? seen? heard? recognized? present-ed?)
Meaning, writing nothing – “having nothing to write, and lacking the means to write it, and the extreme compulsion to keep writing” (Beckett) and not to get in your way…
Perhaps this is near what I’ve done,
a waste
a con-fusion
a voiding an ab-sense
a disruption…
…getting it out of the way (my desire) perhaps I’ve writ nothing of note but a circling, a dawdling, an hesitation, dis-traction and trip-stumble-fall…
…a fragment and faltering, figment frustration.
Nothing of worth, of no value, sign-if-icance, just words.
Perhaps THIS is nothing of note.
What “I’ve” done with the freedom and challenge…the time, urge, and ability:
The map began as a scribble, a doodle. Begins as a failure to write, to “compose.”
In lieu of a word there’s a wiggle of pen wandering aimless in search. Cartography-graphology-psychology – a loitering for logos.
Begins this way – in hope of words, a sort of squiggle. A body desiring a mind. To show up, to take over, provoke or convince – to appear, make a meaning, disclose – to figure toward sign. Some unconcealing.
The signal’s not there, so it moves: the hand, the instrument, the breath and the heart – are they tools? And for what? A cartographer’s dream. Of no training, no knowledge, even reason is lacking.
A pen making marks on a page, mapping none. Tracing nonsense. It begins in this way, and it leads, so he hopes (it hopes, is hope, is desire).
The scrawl travels over the page – given borders and boundaries, arbitrary and set – 6”x9” and lined with a soft viscous grey. He (it) slows down. Just a hand and an arm and a shoulder – in motion – holding a technical device filled with fluid – black, yes, like bile, but less tacky, diluted – it flows, threading lines – it’s con-fusion – yet taking, biting, inscribed. Something happens. Drawings are locked to a medium stock. Incomprehensibles stained on a page.
It crawls on.
*
This mapping begins in a loss. He is lost. It is lost. Doesn’t “know.” Just beginning, because – with desire. It is driven, compelled, WRITER WANTS (for to write) with “nothing to write, and no means to write it” yet constrained to keep writing, to expunge merely SOMEthing, some THING. Which is NO thing, no THING, but to mark. It goes on.
Makes a map, a map-ping, tangled series of lines meaning nothing, no THING, but creating TO-WARD. Ward off absence, off void, ward off death, this is to – .
It (he) is tired. Is forlorn. Is an absence and loss, a re-mission, re-cursion, re-morse. And not even that clear.
Scribbles on. NOT a map. NOT directions. For NO where to go – NOW here, now HERE, no-where. Which begins all the longing, for “he’s” heard it said, found it written – in signs, in-scribed, sign-i-fied: but NOT HERE. Not in him or this body. NOT THIS. No sense. Non-sense. “It’s” not “working.”
Trail dwindles along cross the page. It’s a map. Just of being. NOW here. Now. HERE. Looks like this – some electrocardiomusculoskeletalpsycognilinguadigital-gram. From this angle, this tool, these techniques. As a Ouija. No meaning. Saussurating. Arbitrary. Mediate. Only markings.
It falters.
And so it begins – as a failure to write – as a scribble – an assay – a tribute to write – that cannot, that will not, that does not…quite occur.
“We enter into thought, and especially our own, only by questioning”
-Maurice Blanchot-
This then, an impossible object with possible beginnings. What says, what writes, what IS – all filled up with what is NOT.
Capture, mediation, confluence. The impossible attempts, the radical effort: I attempt to SAY, to INSCRIBE, that which is incapable of being said, inscribed, touched or revealed: experience, THIS-NOW-HERE, YouMe.
This is what, then, I will create / not-be-able-to-create.
the cat’s name is “Fractal” or “Luna,” a.k.a “Predicate Isabitch.”
His sorrow lay in the pace of things. Both what there is, and what there is not.
No matter the fortunate outcomes, or happy resolutions, his reckoning turns it to grief [perhaps in the manner of Werther] – a “bent,” a “perception,” or “filter.”
Turns to literature and texts of all kinds, from the dead – in near religious belief [nigh Fundamentalist fashion] that they bring joy or consistent melancholy satisfactions.
Alias Harlequin is sick and he’s dying – he knows it.
He lies at the end of his rope. STOP.
Impression alters there. Import and significances warp.
Some things that seem pressing, dissolve. Don’t matter the same, at the ends.
Will occur, and pass by, to negligible consequence. Comparatively.
Other happenings seem to reveal profound differance.
I feel somewhat apologetic, but here is one more selection from my archives. Another that when I re-read I am unable to see how I might do better, or how I ever got it done at all, yet all my work un-published or rejected, so I know it is not “good enough” per whatever the current cultural milieu would prefer. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Perhaps. In any case, it circles around for me like the tail-eating snake I am, in hopes it might engender something new, no, in hopes it might be put to rest. For any who read it, I would be hard pressed to metaphor my astonishment, humility, gratitude and begging-of-patience, including a sheer and sharp ache of deep appreciation for your life’s time and likely unwarranted, gracious, attention.
Finally incapable of mind over matter. The capacity of drunkenness. Full experience.
The body. The lust and wanting. The work to let it alone. To surpass or supersede.
Supplant desire with will.
Language works with, on and in the body. Larynx, lung, tongue and movement. Gut, brain and blood.
Without satiating muscle. Without exhausting the possibilities. Without terminating lust.
I think twice. I plan. You do these things.
Intention. Commitment. Decision.
“I will transcend the body. I will overcome desire. I will compensate and supplant urges with verbs. Consonants will become my flesh’s contact and content. Interoperation with world will equate to traversing its languages. To write will be my sexuality. Language my intimate other.”
I will compose my satiation. I will think my end. I will language my undoing and completion. I will create what I need.
Still the body rises. Erects itself. Rushes and longs. Aches.
I rub language all over it. Stroke it with breath and sounds. Caress every part with a term. Toy and pleasure each hollow and tense with tongued noise.
It wants. It desires. I want. I desire. I long for what it says without diction.
Be Drunk
Charles Baudelaire, 1821 – 1867
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
Language. Alcohol. Language. Alcohol. To void and satiate the body. To provide full experience. Pair satiating self. Ache and desire. Want and sensation. As a whole – the desire to be drunk – to fulfill – saturation of pleasure and knowledge – perception/sensation and abstraction/thought – TO RESPOND. Shower the body, challenge the mind. Work the muscles. Lingua the self. Tickle with letters and edges; heat, fill, temper and calm salve and sensitize the skin and organs – flood the whole: language and alcohol. Avoid depending on kind, species, occasion. Avoiding dependency.
How might an human organism satiate itself?
I dreamt language. I imagined correspondence, intelligence, sexuality, the wide-openness of commerce between one human and another. Particularity, difference, biology, culture, knowledge, capacity undoes this. Incapacitates convergence. Ruins union.
Intimacy with other = impossible.
Intimacy with self-system = ?
Language. Alcohol. Immaterial / Matter. Body-mind. Embodied mind. Enminded body. How solve desire? Lust, want, biology, sociology, anthropology (and so on) – the logoi of BEING HUMAN.
Be wild and crazy and drunk with Love,
if you are too careful, Love will not find you.
~Rumi
Love depends on Other. Love depends on converging, connection, call / response / return. Love is impossible. Cohesive mingling.
To say the unsayable. The reach beyond. The experiment, invention, imagine. Commerce with species and kind, taking it in (language), absorbing and transforming seeds, spewing it out (language). Giving / Giving Back. Receiving / Offering. Language – perfect intimacy seed. Perfect contact and context differentiating and responding each to each, body to body, mind to mind… sans orgasm, sans drunkenness, sans satiety… regardless of ecstatic fullness.
508 N. Belmont – Wichita, Kansas (son & daughter born)
???? (house) – Grand Rapids, Michigan
???? Cornell – Grand Rapids, Michigan
L—– Switzerland
Alt—- UK
1151(?) Hermitage – Grand Rapids, Michigan (son born)
350(?) S. Clifton – Wichita, Kansas (son born)
New Hope, Pennsylvania
3028 E 2nd N – Wichita, Kansas
In no particular order. Revisits. Can’t remember much. Side streets, neighborhoods – nothing is familiar. More apt to recall where friends or lovers lived than “self.” Makes a list:
-Baxtrom – Welch – Kremenak – Kruse – Evans – Lathrop – Keil – Allen – Erickson – Welch – Rose – Martha – Neel/Franklin – Krieger – Fall – Bond – Franz – Jones – Hartig – Russell – Griffin – O’Callahan – Farha – Goldbarth – Coleman – Harder – Reffner – calls them “foundational relations” – friends and lovers slewn together.
Dostoevsky, Giacometti, Kafka, Lispector, Cixous, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Jabes, Beckett, Wm. James, CS Peirce, Lorca, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Pessoa, Schiele, DF Wallace, Kozelek, Musil, Fernandez…and those lying in wait: This Will Destroy You, Vila-Matas, Marcus…Harlequin has inscribed in his flesh.
Might be useful to make a story.
The way things are – with everything falling apart, coming undone, wearing down or out, dwindling in function – calls for such measures – i.e. fitted to new purposes, given new life, repurposed, renamed, remixed, restored.
Making lists against memory. Visiting / revisit. Trying.
It’s coming apart.
He’s worked long in this manner.
Something breaks or dies, goes defunct…fix it with change.
Washing machine, body parts, relationships, parents. Tools or appliances, activities and paths… rather than forcing some obedience to its past or presence – alter the context (as large as it needs to be – micro to macro) round about it, until its usefulness is assuaged or established, regained or reconstructed. Until it makes sense – AS-IS-NOW.
“Presently” includes all of above. His body – losing ‘shape,’ gaining aches, kinks, and torsions; doorways and windows, paint and light fixtures; machines and vehicles grinding down – leaking, cracking, and broken; dwindling desires of his partner; increased independence and mystery of his offspring…nothing quite capable of ‘control.’ Employer threats of performance and reviews; family tensions of politicized faiths; stamina shot as both parent and friend; patient lover and male…
…all it requires a new mythology – some new scaffolding – structure and content and aim.
What story is. What languaging is for. Imagine – abstraction and dream. What neuroses. Subject and author and plot. Continuous revision – the edit and pulp and rewind. We cut and paste and press ‘new.’ File, document, folder, image: LIFE.
We rename.
There is story and language and code. Writing and saying and message. Harlequin’s not the first to say “I think by writing” and perhaps he will not be the last. Some perspective invented, some objective fabrication, some construction of a feeling of reflection, recount. Grappling after what is getting lost. A dream that a ruling, an external, can be seen or encountered, manipulated and tested. If an accounting exists, there is material (reality) AGENCY to work WITH, THROUGH and ON.
Harlequin forms words.
Yet there are none that he ‘makes’ – just borrows, revises. Uses, shapes, and arranges. Gives place. Inscribes in some ancient tradition – it’s “writing” – using marking or code in conventions. Absorbing idiosyncracies into generalities. Depending on a community that shares such signs – can lend, agree, and interpret. It’s fragile. Insecure and uncertain. There’s no meaning. Like the earth – writing just IS. To be taken and changed, charged and made and appropriated. Dis-card-ed.
What was a ‘card’ but token carrying message or code? In-formation – letters arranged. Who knew – and why – and how? Doesn’t matter. Undone. Broken and over and through. Electronic currency now – if this you can even decipher (decode).
Letters, stories, and language. Harlequin marks on a page – sets of signals. The cells, the emotions, the organs – signals and signs. Tired and old and afraid – always dying. Since day one, always dying – fearfully. How It Is. He remembers and prays (in a way) – a communication with the dead – mediated – to the Beckett, the Kafka, the Dostoevsky. David Foster Wallace, Hegel and Marx. Maybe Nietzsche, Deleuze or Blanchot. And the ladies: Lispector, Cixous and Dickinson. Doesn’t matter. For Harlequin, all a part of the same realization – it comes, it ages, it goes, and it’s gone. Human living. Human life. Just what is: How It Is.
Labor, relation, and trial. What is being? Labor, relation, and trial.
He succumbs. Is succumbing. Is tearing apart.
A story makes of it what it will.
You can have your knowledge – facts or theories, experiences and concepts – but the stories reason and resemble them. Lend them ambiguity and occasional senses. Possibilities.
Perchance they go together like this. Or like that. Or another way. Stories. Sanity. Something.
Something becoming – a linked set of symbols in an ecological order. Stories try experience on for fittings. Until it fits. Until it tatters, or is otherwise overused or outgrown.
Becomings and undoings. Compositions and deletes. All the edits (on the fly). Survival.
“machines alone have realized that sleep is no longer permitted”
– W. G. Sebald –
I haven’t slept.
Sometimes, in a dream, it feels like “it occurs to me.”
Trying to create a lesson plan for graduate students in the College of Education, I want to tell them why internet research / database searching / source evaluation seems so complex. I take a hammer, a wrench, a tomahawk. I bring a plow, a harness, a sewing machine. I show a steam engine, a telegraph. I think about them.
Hold them. Turn them about. Consider what you can do with them (if you know how). Surmise what you can do with them (if you don’t know how). Lots of things.
Humans devise stuff in concord with their environment. Stones to stumble on, to throw, to hunt with, to pound. Sticks to slap, clack, burn, poke. Maybe carve. Maybe paint. Maybe write.
What we devise have certain rules, operations, constraints. Remember the first time you wielded a hammer? Learned to turn a doorknob? Fitted a screwdriver to screw?
There’s a learning curve. Adaptation. Practice. Change.
Try archery. A piano. Knit something.
Simple tools. Fire. Rock. Wood.
Mud. Sand. Clay.
Try them.
So we figure out things that might be done with them. Things to do, make, say, or think. Certain things are more efficient. Certain ways. Certain hows.
We practice and experiment. Devise.
I am 45. Until I was in my teens, my fingers had not touched a lettered keyboard. In high school I had a class for typing (on manual typewriters). As a pianist I excelled. My homework depended on the legibility of my handwriting through graduate school. By 1993 there were computers in the “typing room.”
You don’t have to know how to write now.
I watch the pencil or pen move along lined paper. What do I have to know in order to do this? How can I make the marks turn out like this? Dexterity, control, care, effort.
Alphabetic literacy, knowledge, craft, semantics, semiotics, grammar and so forth…
Turn the hammer in your hand. Tighten the wrench. Use a pushpin. Take up a fork. Operate a knife with steak. Raise the glass.
“Tools,” perhaps, technologies – technics and techniques – with their own sets of rules for our cognizant bodies.
Pull out your phone. A swipe, some taps, a certain way of holding. Understanding icons, visual literacies, kinetic craft, operational knowledge. Know-how. Complex. Astounding. Dexterous. Intelligent. Think of all the things you need to know to work that small device.
We devise.
And then adapt.
Diagram the innards of a personal computer, a Smartphone, a tablet, a scanner. Imagine the adaptation required to operate that machine.
Think networked information. Big Data. If all our images, texts, conversations, correspondences, budgets, ledgers, laws, entertainments, plans, designs, models, experiments, applications, programs, art…(and so on) are DIGITAL / digitized… then algorithm’d and interfaced, softwared and connected… NONE OF US KNOW WHAT IS THERE.
The machines to which we dump, turn-over, DEVISE, inform, enTRUST – the artifacts of our living – because it is too much – no ONE (person or institution) catalogs, lists, calculates, organizes, arranges, assigns – THE MACHINES MUST DO IT BECAUSE OF THE SCALE and PACE…
NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IS THERE
Stacked algorithms and protocols select relevancy and value; similarity and related; significance and import; primacy and rank. We operate. And barely. How do we guess the coding of its imputing? How do we wrangle the keywords? Information coming from anywhere at anytime into any port…what are the techniques, dexterity, knowledge, grammars, semantics, decoding, crafts – analytics?? – (at least as complex as the machine we diagrammed – times powers of 10 for all the machines involved!!) in order to locate our NEED; QUALITY; ESSENTIAL…?
In other words – we turn over. We devise these concords of things – and revise ourselves according to them.
Internet map
You’re guess may be as good as mine. What is in there, where it is, and how to access it. We use a Smartphone for many more things (at once) than a hammer or pen – while we and it are being used by systems larger than any of us altogether.
Systems of devised systems – we have no hope of controlling. NONE of us. Nor all of us. We are entangled: mutually dependent – and subordinate. We DON’T KNOW. We DON’T KNOW. We don’t know. We’re IN the weather completely.
This is rough, when you also have a propensity, passion, or interest to know. Subordinating oneself to a system is hard with a developed desire for autonomy, freedom, liberty. As far as I know, at the mercy of was not a Sapient evolutionary goal. Yet here we are.
All my Words are Silent 