Should you have the time…and it requires a bit…I would love to hear responses to the following essay by E.M. Cioran from all you interesting minds I observe! Thanks –
-E.M. Cioran-
Tag: Life
The Unknown and Unnamed regains composure
The Unknown and Unnamed: the Conception
A few days naked and I’ve bewildered myself.
I was never good at math.
But I do love the rain (absorption, immersion, ambiguity).
There’s no accounting for taste.
I think I am a concept.
“a concept is a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more”
What’s in a name?
“the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and the validity of a concept consists in the impossibility of reducing the content…to unity, without the introduction of it…the conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content.”
I ran into a sign.
I was flooded, I saw and I seemed, I heard and replied, have been undone in my doing… I’m a roving mark, like a vessel constantly being filled and emptied, at once.
I can’t perceive without a concept, why not the simplest one – a single mark, a dash, say “/”?
/ fear it “plainly has no content.”
/’m confused.
“I am what surrounds me”
Advancing “empty,” a flesh-coated collection of organs replete with a coding of operational signs (we’ll call them ‘language’), I foundered. Considering no one in pursuit of no/w/here, I became wherever that was (is?).
“This conception of the present in general, or IT in general…is before any comparison or discrimination can be made between – what is present – must have been recognized as such, as IT without parts abstracted and attributed to it…”
-C.S. Peirce-
No/w/here – nothing – no one: “embracing thousands of distinct experiences (while attributable or identical to none of them) and ready to take in thousands more.” ALWAYS.
Every/w/here, everything, every/one: I conceptualize a concept, a mark to attribute an infinity of experiences toward : “/”.
Names changing by the millisecond.
A concept without content, or all conceivable content.
A baffle, a paradox, distinct and unidentifiable (in essence).
Here “/” come! (the unknown and unnamed) possibly sporting any knowledge, any name – perhaps heading your way even now! Beware! It’s conceivable, whether intended or not, that all of us are empty concepts, flooded concepts, without content, and all of us heading no/w/here at once!
“Here is where one seems to be”
“The place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now”
“’I’ can only be identified by the instance of speech which contains it, and by that alone”
(to read all the Unknown/Unnamed writings thusfar accumulated
visit my Experimenctes pages! Thanks)
Unknown and Unnamed Undoing: the swoon and the swarm (a kind of mathematics to be continued in rain)
Unknown and Unnamed experiences: the swoon and the swarm
I hadn’t remembered it like this (trying not to remember). That all of it got into you. That all of it came out!
Immersion. Enthrallment. Ecstasy – words that come, to mind.
That if en-joined, then out-sourced. Becoming indecipherable – like epistemology.
A moment’s rush, for example. I encounter – which encountering looks like insertion and abstraction on me. I move toward, feel it out, then back off and observe. Active, passive; a swing, a rocking boat.
This is different. Inundation, a flood. Unable to say what’s mine, what’s not; who’s me, who’s you. Unable, frankly, to say, at all. Only be.
Motion, reception; injunction and release.
Think sky-diving: that decision to jump, trusting something, someone will hold together as form in all that air. Like diving the deep blue sea, compression surround, that some element will remain intact without ground or solidity.
It works that way. Give and take, see and saw, this uncanny to and fro of body, perceptions, breath. Eyes contact then fog to some self between. Fleshes – distinct and specific – now con-fused. Who’s sweat? Who’s secretions? It’s sticky, yes, like that – a gluey bond.
Then the wave, the distended moment – incalculable clockwork – where all borders and boundaries seem lost, some extended and mutual sigh or moan within which the voice is other and the same without identity.
The swoon of it. The swarm.
Dizzying rush of blood as warmth or wind; eyes roll back, also in, but not to my darkness. As if limbless or prosthetically invented, my body grows – grows yours or ours or contracts to another covering, but inside-out.
As if leap or let go were no longer options, but instinct.
As if hot and cold – undifferentiated – some something that must define pleasure –
as in emptiness, fullness
the yin, the yang
a cellular entanglement
The swoon, the swarm
emerge
But what? Or whom?
And what occurs in the median?
Who were that? What was those?
The swoon, the swirl, the swarm.
No one effecting. Effected. What does that indicate?
Nothing, essential to event – if nothing, than an absence utterly imbued.
A radiance, evocation,
like a sleeping brain on dreams…
with-you, the unknown gets no/w/here.
Whatever the constants, coefficients and variables, given the operator as convergence, the equation = whole,
where the w stands for we,
without which none – (“hole”).
Affecting substance…no one gains currency…necessity (no 1, but at least 2)… and then – ?
No one, unknown, unnamed, no/w/here as 0+O
where O stands for other
in this case, you
O requiring as much as I
inferring – ?
you can’t have 1 without anOther
but where anOther occurs must be at least 1 (other)
even if unknown, unnamed
in order to be lost and found in the joining
the immersion and enthrallment
the ecstasy
I, in instances of jell-o
I, in instants, divested
Let me put it this way: I find mysterious pockets of habitual thinking functioning like cradles of jell-o.
Say couple’s therapy is called for: I consciously feel gung-ho, pro-choice, empowered by trust and intention and reciprocal hope. Our determination, our hope. But the rear half of my skull, the scape my subject lands in, I realize is slicky, silently and squishily snuggling into a jello-y bed of “there’s something wrong with me. I’ve got the problems. We’re really trying to figure out why I’m so hard to live with; how my moods impede relational success and happiness; my fears – intimacy. If the truth were told, my spouse is acting graciously and sacrificially in order to get me help.” It’s as natural as instinct for me to believe I’m a burden, a difficulty, a special case.
The endless desires of youth. Our adolescents seem never to be satisfied (perhaps aren’t even “meant” – biologically, psychologically, socially, developmentally – to be), rarely “up” for family events or participation in chores, games or outings. Seem preoccupied with themselves and their wants and preferences, shifts and swerves. Rationally – I sense the raging hormones; the violent ego-mania seeking a code, a reflection, its own DNA; the psychoses of self/other, boy/girl, love/lust and so forth – upheaval and growth! But my torso is wiggling and sliding itself into the slushy comfort of “I have no idea how to guide these kids! Who am I to parent and protect, encourage and inspire? I’m just as fragmented, uncertain, conflicted, aroused and cynical as these guys! No way I’m good enough, strong enough, wise enough, and so on… unqualified to father, even at directing myself!”
The list goes on – as reader, writer, artist. As male, friend, laborer. As handyman, citizen, spouse. As mind, as body, as conglomerate selves:
How does it come so natively to cuddle in, automatically, unself-consciously and familiarly into negative perceptions, fraught with inadequacy, victimhood and failure, with no perpetrator(s) to blame?
Ideologically, philosophically, linguistically, aesthetically, psychologically, and so on, I can adapt party lines and mottos of health, truth, justice, fallibility and courage; equality and imperfection; becoming and process,
but wherever this social solidarity is not called-for or aimed at, this prompting to blend toward community or “normalcy,” my actual mind-body-complex demonstrates an incredible proclivity to nestle and burrow into a gooey surround of personal suspicion and doubt, misgivings and cynicism…like a worm to mud, or a fossil its imprint.
What the I/eye prefers.
How we see what we see.
How something – something – (but what is it?!)
contradicts mind’s understanding and body’s sensation/perception/evidence and goes its own hellbent way in whatever direction it selects!?
I-cipher.
I-estrangement.
I-observer,
for instants,
for instance.
The Unknown and Unnamed Hears and Replies
Running into Melodies, Lyrically
(the unknown and unnamed hears and replies)
Or picture it this way: a runner yearning to the tape.
Arms flung back as if flagged by a gale, chin and neck making way for the shoulders – a pure strive.
And rushing against, past and around…force and flow. Learning the body by all that surrounds, through which it hums and throbs.
The air is full of waves. The waves are full of particles – particles agitating, dancing. Or the fragments are waving, threading this way and that – streaming and winding – I feel it.
Over the curves of my shoulders, the chorus. Deep in my belly – the bass and the drum – caverns of mind. The ticking, the singing, the whispers and thrums. Brass flowers into blooming curlicues, echoing labyrinths – my ears.
In such a wind the eyes will close, and the legs will strive and stride. No matter my position, in the medium of music, I am always moving forward, setting forth – possibly sailing, possibly struggling with every ounce – but making progress.
It glances off the elbows, reverberates the bones. Fills the mouth, stuffs the nostrils – can make it hard to breathe. Sound. Shuddering loins and quaking knees, a tremor-massage, a tumbling. A sleep.
I lean in. Becoming a shaping of waves – reaching, aching and out of breath. Receiving the blast and caress. The force and the flow. I listen, I feel. I am drowning, aware of each inch of my skin. I am falling in flight, my organs engorged. I am musically shaped as a man.
The Unknown and Unnamed: Sees and Seems
Holly Suzanne
Welcome!
I venture to say this piece is unnamed and unfinished, but I tell you it’s alive and it dances!
I can touch it with my hands. The wax is smooth like flesh, the collage like scars or scabs – where the texture lies.
Up close – I am underwater on sand, watching the fluxing of weeds. Looking for retinal patterns.
At a distance it traces a woman, her dress kicking out, a-twirl and limning the lithe.
I’m entranced!
It’s Chinese scriptwork of wisdom and way, a beautiful nude languidly branding the air with her limbs – fertile signs and images prodding me – “move!”
Move myself.
Activate.
Address.
What looks like dark ink stands out, but in reality swims under the surface – blotting, inscribing and guiding the paths.
Emotion and gesture alike: drawn swiftly and sourced far beneath, or pressed on and affixed from outside. Each leave their marks – stark and prominent, – resonant emblems of what lies beneath, what responds.
I pretend I am calm, blank canvas to world – but when it brushes or cuts, smothers or slaps, what is bold in me reveals. The fears, the wounds, the anger and dream.
My vision scatters in rage. Vehement dashing and strike. I can promise you this: the world will reveal me.
I have told you: you are with the unknown of the unnamed – a nothing answering to nothing – a cooperative become.
At the end I will be named, will have accumulated and inscribed them. Surface, object, ground: our object.
Enaction.
Unknown and Unnamed, cropping up everywhere: Imagine Me
To all concerned, or the least bit interested, I am no one on the road to nowhere. It’s taken me a long time to set out, but I have begun! My path has been wily. Many joys and celebrations, discoveries and inventions mark the past. Wounds bored of enormous riggings and bits; injuries, damage and crime barbwire the road. Imprints of loss – great and unexpected gains pock my surface. Years of input and adventure, learning and error track me.
Now I am no one. Purposively, conscientiously and chaotically venturing into the everywhere that is nowhere. Now here.
Sure you can read the past’s path – identifying me, mind and body cropping up here and there, in and out of people’s lives – particular places, practicings and performings. Believe me – that’s not the point.
The point, or series of points, or scattered suggestions of borders, like shot smattering air…is where everything meets, interacts. A porous place, undefined, ever-defining. Unknowns cropping up everywhere.
I’m talking about the enormous field wherein which forms mingle, shaping and providing contents, ever on the verge of in-forming. This inchoate and omnidirectional process we name “becoming,” “coming-to-be,” we know so little about but strive so constantly for a sense of.
Image me then, if it helps. Outline a human, male, having endured four decades existing, of average height and weight, nondescript. (It doesn’t “matter” – the matter is shared commonly, specifics will rise in and out of clarity through encounters).
Here I am, essentially:
Pocket into this figure, wherever you like – an education in classics, advanced studies in music, theology and philosophy. Twenty years of retail labor in bookish culture; three wives, seven children. Smear that around with geographies – their weathers and landscapes, flora and fauna and politics – of the American Midwest, big-city Northeast, farmlands and Great Lakes, Germany, UK, Pacific NW and Israeli-controlled Palestine.
Inject strains of passions: fine arts, literature, music. Linguistics, semiology and phenomenology. Parenting, intimacy and artistic creativity. Psychology, biology, mythology.
Take and run an eraser randomly across, leaving trails for griefs, abandonments and disillusions. Separations, misunderstandings and woundings, coming and going both ways.
Scribble. I mean doodle maniacally in pencil or pen, any color or width. Scratch, wobble, circle, until the figure looks like an indecipherable tangle, a rough frenetic sketch, something built up and crossed out –
that represents the meld. The interlacing and cross-currents of all the things within, without; nurtured or native; learned or instinctual; native or chosen; perpetrated or inflicted.
Voila:
Alberto Giacometti
there is no one (or every)
moving nowhere (or every)
save this monumental caveat: that bungled mass of human has a goal. In keeping with appearances…he (I) purposes now/here…
I hear the feedback
“get on with it already!”
Here goes
(again)
I, for Instances of Assembled Appendices
“Unable to say ‘I’ in either past or future. Yesterday’s face, almost unrecognizable. Tomorrow’s face, barely thinkable.”
-Edmond Jabes –
“One evening, pulling photographs from his youth out of a drawer, he quoted a dialogue between a child and his grandmother, who was showing him a picture of a very pretty woman:
“Granny, who is this lady?”
“Why, it’s me, darling, when I was young.”
“And who is it now?”
“And he said to me: ‘You see, in this Who is it now? lies the riddle of a life.'”
-Edmond Jabes-
The Nothingness of Personality
All my Words are Silent 