…something that/what happens…
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Being something
This is how we see:
a set of brackets, dark,
moving across wires in the sky
(that we placed there)
because of the angle of light
and it’s changing
– perhaps –
and perhaps it’s the change
and the angling,
and perhaps it’s involved with the light
Self-reflection
It all seems like a coagulation of before now and ‘now’ you’ve been ‘given’ something to do something unknown with… an accident awaiting each happening… to be…
Writing
This is the path I take every day. I get lost. And name it “home.”
I am not a good father.
I am not a good son.
Nor…a good lover.
I do not know what it means to be a human.
I do not know if what I do is what is called ‘thinking.’
I assume (PRE-sume) I’m a-live.
This is what I do. Again and again and again… (ad infinitum)…
I try, errr, perhaps… I am.
She said.
I was working.
Things happen.
Perhaps.
Every day.
Tapping at Windows of Words
The bestial want
is it ever more?
Evermore.
.
Ache beauty
its terrible
hunger
.
The voyeur
at what is not
“mine.”
.
What can be taken?
What “had”?
In the seeking,
the peeping,
the glimpse
or the glance –
its desire?
.
Such beastly want,
evermore,
grasping
.
forth or out
I reach –
a solid pane.
.
I am limited
constrained
delimited –
.
it would seem
I see clearly
but it cannot be
touched.
.
‘I’ is alone
with-out.
With-in
comes from ‘you.’
.
So ‘I’ scopes –
a feral yearn –
and gazes…
.
tapping at windows
of words.
Autumn Reflections, their sound and fury
“Sometimes God, sometimes nothing”
-Franz Kafka –
“Blank page called a day.
God.”
– Dan Beachy-Quick –
The praxis of empty signifiers : words : full of sound and fury.
If you accept the ‘I’, or find a name to call yourself – like using a credit card received in the mail (illusion of invisible funds), what do you charge to it, and does it always end in debt?
Does it make of you a consumer to believe the ‘I’? To use self-reference as a token or coin?
How soon do “my” and “mine” follow after, even though each object, event, or transaction, is clearly only a loan?
What is charged to the ‘I’ must be paid back – to put it in legal or religious terms.
Be careful what you say.
Wittgenstein claimed that we mostly speak without giving full meaning to the terms we use – that we ought remain silent whereof we cannot speak with adequate comprehension. Where we sing beyond our knowing –
very few (if any) utterances comply.
But how learn anything (even the untrue) without not-knowing? Without composing walls to break apart or knock upon, to breach or to climb? Without making it up to unlearn and repent of?
A word changes direction.
It’s happening as I write or think or imagine this. As if.
As if it signified something. I write with sound and fury. Into silence.
It’s what ‘I’ do – so I should do it! (shouldn’t I?!)
I seem to know I’m alive by touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing – things other… feeling, sensing, perceiving… crafting empty signifiers like nostrils, like a tongue, a kind of eyesight and ear, my fingertips. My flesh on loan. To be paid back.
In debt to what then? ‘World’? To sing. To sound. To dance a little. Imagine.
If ‘I’.
If I am given the sound of leaves as they crisp and color the Autumn breeze, refracturing light; if I can smell the moisting decay (debts repaid by undoing what was charged), if I can gather them with my hands and roil about them with my body, if I can bake the seeds and chew, take them in…
…what does ‘I’ owe?
You sentence me: two I’s. I hear your melodious song. You whisper, close.
I say ‘I love.’ Terms lacking comprehension. Metaphysics. Their meanings beyond knowing. Unlearned. “We” are (whereof we cannot speak).
Charging invisible funds we become responsible for. Obligated.
Swiping our cards for contents.
What do we owe?
What do we know?
What can we?
Each their own set limits. Sometimes raised, sometimes lowered, depending on our fidelity to pay with interest.
We owe. We all of us owe.
Even for our silence.
Even cash-only – that empty signifier – words. Even simply action. ‘I move’ – is a statement on credit, like breath.
Sweet burst of being! To “is.” To “I.” To “we.” All so heavily borrowed, contingently. Imagine.
Imagine what it means. To owe.
Again I break the silence of what I do not know via signs of repentance. These words.
All the silence they require.
Distortion of the Perceiving Eye/I
“the turned-to-water book…
with all that has room in it,
even without
language.”
– Paul Celan –
Decide to write the book-that-turns-to-water, as speech-that-turns-to-air. All that rippling silence, even without language.
Someone asking: what is gesture? movement? expression-in-its-being?
Signification the silent razor.
Someone mentions music, which it claims “represents nothing at all,” (Michel Seuphor) and I doubt that: is there not expression? confession? some sonorous and vibratory friction or exhalation? A “constant inscription of birth in innumerable ways…language is metaphor and metonymy, one cannot avoid it.” (Helene Cixous)
[“where trace becomes existence” (Seuphor)]
I am tracing letters without a model, refusing to hub any wheel…
.
Out of its mouth: communication sounds. The body moved likewise. Undulant, suggesting. only sounds, no discernible words.
Signification, perception, emotion, feeling, sensation… and then translations: prefrontal cortex: “meaning”?
A blockage. Refusal.
Andre Malraux: “You are human when you can say no.” Remembers Bartleby.
What is called ‘agency’? Only negation?
This is how the story goes?
Prefers not to.
.
“Pleasures,” “pains.” Pain wakes. Pleasure lull(abie)s?
.
And when is the “system of nonknowledge” (and unknowing) not “unfinished” (Bataille) posthumous. Post-humorous. Generations.
What was it? Ah, yes, the Book-that-turns-to-water. Speech-to-air bubbles, balloons. Hot air, as they say. They? We.
“even
without
language”
(someone wrote, silently saying).
.
“all that has room in it”
(same).
.
Of truth and genesis – constant inscriptions of birth. Unthinking the point and the line.
“Not to worry about the rest of us. Love you.” (someone said).
.
This is the shaping of chaos, this hell of stories.
Unthinkable.
.
Unbearable lightness of being, this breath or stream of life.
Mismaking is an art (or so we hope, we think, desire, demand).
.
Men and apparitions.
[everything I letter down is plagiarism]
These – the margins of philosophy, a way of life.
Saying I no more. Interior distance.
.
This is the writing of disaster: the book-that-turns-to-water.
Speaking turned to air.
Philosophy, the posthumous. Dust.
.
Listening.
Abolishing freedom.
.
Text (from textare: to weave).
My documents.
My notes in the fog.
The trouble with pleasure.
.
Myopia. My opium.
What Words Do
“language cannot cope with its relation with the world”
– Giorgio Agamben –
“language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein –
Sometimes it seems that words might do anything! Connecting things and people; defining, describing, explaining and exclaiming; naming, inventing, questioning… arguing, fomenting, discovering; seducing, displacing, and singing. Very little experiencing of the human kind comes unaccompanied by terms. – Is that so?
There are dreams – like signs and billboards of liqueous or exaggerated perceivings… “the sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” (A. Dragomoshchenko)… and slit it does. We bleed.
And breathing, heart’s-pulse, sleeping along with the intake of food, its output as waste, our birthing and walking, working and running… and dying. All our play. Intercourse, of course. Do moans and groans, grunts and cries and sighs, lisps and complaints (our myriad utterances) – mean words? mean language? What of our relative silence? The thrumming body of the speechless and deaf? Eye-gaze dumb, its blindness?
The skin has been rubbed off my fingers.
Wordlessly, soundlessly, lust and desire screech on…shrill in body and bone – both where the starving exudes and toward its petulant prey.
What of the growth of grasses? Is language there? In rhythmic patterning of rain? A sense of sunlight?
Sometimes wind whispers.
A cat moves. Silently.
And a “sign – is the quietest razor of darkness” – darkness visible, darkness speaks – (it has been claimed – via words, the verbal).
Sweet and troubling confluence: activity and languaging (the same): the “verbal.” Of sound and motion. Our noise. Moving sound around in and with our bodies – in speech or dance, in strain and the clamor of being.
What falls (or grows, blooms, disappears) outside the devouring knife – that which segments and shrivels the fluid songs of experience and reverie? Of presence. The Slicer-Dicer we’ve composed, posing together to cut from faultless fabric?
As utterance, inscription fondles its way, brushingly and blade-like, sensually surreptitious. Caressing and crafty, rapaciously blessing its praying and braying of names – who can counter its reduction, repression, its blame or silvery shame?
Ye without words, cast the first stone.
As if genesis were language and time: space to create with.
Comprehensively unknown.
Fog and Birds
In swarms.
The littlest pieces –
– form clouds.
Droplets, ions, atoms.
What is called “molecules”?
.
Faiths. Belief.
.
Trees standing,
apparently strong,
lost to view,
in dense fog.
.
Molecules…accumulated,
accumulating, gathered
toward some clearing.
Same differences,
at large scales.
.
“For Nathan…with love”
someone writes.
“Nathan” signifies me,
“love” signifies…?
.
Imagination and dream…
a fog and a swarm of birds,
an hypothesis
into the unknown
.
a thing humans are prone to
do by “nature”
– ? –
who or what evaluates “nature”?
what “human”?
if “nature”?
for SummerMLee
Thickets
The world overgrown. At least any accessible sector. I’ve heard tale of open, of empty, of spacious, of dearth. Not where I approach. Even my own body – its in- or out-sides, its wherewithal. Always where-with-all.
Tangled, almost briny, in some instances. If able to determine a surround wherewith or whenwith to take a stance in. Even thinking, even breath, even a pulse of bloodbeat. Any sound we form toward music. Any making-sensible. For us. Our kind. Those within the overgrown – the untamable, reckless warp and weft.
To hunch there, immediately becomes here. How different – if imagined? To gather, to pre-tend. To suppose a disposition, a presence somehow differentiated. How-some? To curl in, therefore (perchance? per theory?) “to find,” to be able to, to call, to be-in-g? Yet how? Or why? Where is the for? And what might the hole be suspected to fill?
Where is the gap between this and the other? Between you and me, he or she, this-that-the-other, between…any/thing? Something wishes to know, apparently… and this wishing/motion/decision/desire/activity/drive (whatever “ “) begins by implicating violence… bi-lining a world with borders, invented barriers, perceived traces, intuited splits, cuts and hacks that are not there until. How un-till this supposed “soil” from which to distinguish, fabricate, or function? From which to “operate.” Surgeon-species.
What knowledge is expected by destroying? Deconstructing (or constructing) – both requiring joints? By suture and slice? By taking life? Prone to decompose. What a trajectory.
What options? Compelled…to con-fuse…confess…to communicate, express, enjoy, enjoin (what we find ourselves joined to) still even to de-scribe, in-scribe, in-voke, ex-tol, inter-act or en-gage provokes difference, demands separations, dismemberment. To cleave.
To try to body. To try to mind. Attend. Acknowledge. Distortion. To twist and torture an other, as the one or…alteration. De-pict.
Impossible connection already seems to be. Each, every add-ition a disconnecting, a cutting, a stitching seam according to a pattern. Whose? Whats?
Over, under, whelmed. Where is the open, the undifferentiated, the is? Always already be-fore. All ways, all ready, be-for. In other words…not possibly worded. Prior to word. Involving act (including language) but unincorporated (already corporal), defying design-ation (surprisingly? one would think ‘it’ [not] is at the end of de- or un-signing/signifying), erasure of description, all palimpsests equaling… perhaps (per-happening) – infinite, certainly uncountable, incalculable, without ordination, order, ordaining, without with-in or –out. Only WITH, inconceivable, imperceptible (perception cuts), irretrievable (the rejection of any re-), disabused, disturbed perturb, a dreaming dreamed turbulence = a happen to be.
Still this thinks with. Language. Lost already, displaced and falsified by a tiny thread, an whole fabric, a world-veil at least whilst continuing as world…
Think again. Dream. Confuse. Imagine. Invent. Art ducts (vents) for breath… further re-moves, com-pli-cations, furthering within, for fun? A dance, a play, a re-morse (cryptic codification, surreptitious and additional) some native complicity to immeasurable complexity. As is. As if. And so on…
