“Will he clean the Augean stables?
Will he kill the Lernaean Hydra?
Will he tame the Mares of Diomedes?
Will he defeat the Amazons?
Will he conquer the giants?
Will he resist the Stymphalian birds?” (“Herakles” commentary on youtube.com)

The questions, posed like some Don King fight promotion, are answered with scenes of an indefatigable enemy. herzog’s film, “herakles,” stages a match between the ancient hero Herakles and the modern implements of technological power.

herakles, the ancient hero, was a paragon of strength and prowess (wiki “Herakles”). he represents the ideal man. herakles, the film’s muscle man, is also an idealization. while exercising, he looks alternately at a pin-up of his bodily dream adorning the wall and his mirror image. the man is not whole in the frame of the camera, only in his gaze-space of imagination. likewise, one is a partial object tricked to believe the purported holism of imago–reflected in the mirror and emblazoned in a photograph.

herakles was of the strongest men. what is strength? is it no longer muscle tone and movement?

the film unfolds in a series of juxtapositions that interrupt an otherwise repetitious continuity. we find the ancient myth of herakles’ 12 labors–which he is assigned as punishment for killing his sons–transformed into modern terrors. against abdomen/torso are juxtaposed the empty boxes towering over a landfill. how can one clean such a stable? we now tend to measure stability in accumulation, with garbage.

the hydra is a line of cars, with mile markers. the repetitions of weightlifting parallel the repetitious ride around the ring of motorcars. as wounded men are pulled from a moto-wreckage (as from man-eating steads), how is strength conceived in wake of man’s mechanical collision and incineration? in a modern era of mechanized brutality and brute force, is herakles’ strength reduced to vanity? is heroism irrelevant in our industrialized age?

we see the marching uniformed women of the “amazon” and wonder about the transfiguration of the mammary into national memory. while humans are working excavation of a bombed-out building, we take refuge in all manners of broken buildings–our myths of power in the weight/wait-room. this relates to a modernization of atrocity, of strength, of an epic battle to be waged against a monstrous worldwide industrialization.

the juxtaposition also implies a collusion, if not responsibility, with the tech-calamity, as though herakles insinuates these scenes of destruction cognitively. is he envisioning his enemy? is his enemy himself–he who can envision?

who will triumph in a match between the machinations of modern technology and a more ancient regime of physicality? like most professional (i.e. “staged”) sporting events, the answer is a foregone conclusion.

angelic lake placid

we miss the message embroiled in limited modes of messenging. in language we miss many things unsayable.

messengers carry the meaning. will they change the meaning. yes. be blamed for the meaning. yes.

what happens as we divest the messenger from his message?

–
“But who can endure the day of [the messenger's] coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap.” (malachi 3:2)

the messenger is bringing Word, which is too much to bear bare. the messenger implies distance, difference, deferral, all dissassociative processes between event and its mirroring. messenger, from malachi, and the arabic for “he sent” describes one who delivers in judeo-christian myth; indeed, the book of malachi is the last before the new testament. paul notes that we speak, we believe. and first, before we testify, we receive. the messengers are angels. angelos is an envoy. do we enjoi these envoys, do we listen to our angels…

we want to hear the messenger. we want to attempt to discern the message. and be close to the vacuole of its airing.

must the messenger speak? in the story of the annunciation, an angel speaks the impossible. how do we encounter the bearer of insensible news. whom do we entrust with this mission, to tell. have our messengers sold their messages to a mercenary practice, where to tell is to sell. the love in the holy family is really represented in joseph. who takes mary in to have the impossible child. and stand by them to all. could we likewise trust our messengers; does contemporary culture treat our messengers already with doubt. that is, as coming with commercial sponsorship.

is it fair to think our messengers distinct from the messages they carry? a message is through them and their annunciation, presaging how their messages with them lay buried. how do you tell your messages? even if our telling is verbatim, verbum is circa meaning. our expression belies an inexactitude; how can we then not hold the messenger responsible for messages she brings and thus in a sense has hand in creating?

the responsibility due our messengers sheds light on their beauty. rilke follows freud down a path to think beauty related to our hidden spaces some how gently, tangentially revealed. he writes, “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.” (rilke, “die erste elegie” //duino elegies//) he is describing the murderous character of beauty, and our admiration of it. the beautiful as un-revelation ultimately uncovers ego–this is murder, destruction of ego–as the hoax we purport it not to be (instead, we draft it as a surfeit surety). a beauty in messenging affords the vague grasp of the terrifying, as challenging, overwhelming. that our stories must be passed to behold. is the challenge of the messenger the impossible nothingness of what is brought, disconnective foreboding? our angels tell us things we cannot hear with out mediation. and so this mediator, instantiation of my superfluity to my relationship to you who sended, directly questions/problematizes my assurity. my connection to thee appears more tenuous; we often interpret contingency as the emptying of an intentionality. our weakness to control in light/dark of the event. (but, of course, being does not have to be concerned with control. nor does self/ego. i am pointing in this way to dominant cultural constructions.) insurance is not the game of the angel. but we in the land of mocking assurances, weep at such insecurity.

why, i dont want to be afraid. but fear is a response to distance and void, the void pulls at us like the air above and outward from a cliff. when we think only to hear our messages through the lungs of robotic secretaries, the void becomes filled-with. when i drink deep into your eyes, the void nudges me softly as though before turning in to bed.

if we depart from the derridian slip, which accounts for our knowing in language…then we are vulnerable to such misunderstandings. the fear of losing the message is great. and so we take shelter in all manner of broken down buildings and read the writings on their walls even if left in but flaking paint.

–*ence, *ance and other groans
we have a tendency to blame the messenger. our language is an imperfect messenger. we can dissect it, kill it. in fright of its abeyance…a quicksand. like slippage. derrida expertly considers how, in language, we are irreducibly different and deferred from presence. maybe better stated, the insistence of presence as a metaphysical requirement of authenticity creates a violent kantian impossible demand (and unbreachable divide to the in-itself). but there are presences a part from linguistics. epistemology does impact our ontological expressions qua being, but it is not-all. we are multiplicities that irrupt in multiplicitous communities. language is a primary mode of arborescent understanding. but we do not have to stand a top to feel. and as i feel you, you are present with an otherness that exceeds these faulty tracings.

we do not trace only. let us create new maps whose scales are not focused simply on rote reproductions. in free hand, we free our mind/thought from the trick of limit and embrace our indeliable and always mis under stand able emptiness. as rilke notes, “abiding is nowhere.” we cannot place our belief, our love.

language chain gang

what is the message? if linguistic, de- and re- territorialized. mot d’ordre. but not all words are order. better, the mot d’ordre militarily is also a passcode. using words we can unlock the mysteries.

we look upon our words as some kind of gift wrap. a cover tantalizingly obscuring, hiding the presence/presents in side. but this is a seduction of dividing lines. where are these enemy lines? let them instead be past the unknown, in the darkness. let us not find so many enemies among us who step and attempt to step into the light. and speak

segmentation provides respite in the dusking. but what i give in words is knot divested from them. nowhere dense, the limit and set be same.

–beyond, flying through air
how is it that the messenger runs through the lines of flight?

lot is ushered out of town by his angels, who shout, “Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.” (Gen.19:15–17) to escape, a message sent by g-d.

lot’s wife, deprived of a name, turns into a pillar of salt, her eyes longing to return to the event of annunciation. it is difficult to hold clear the messages once the messenger ceases to sound. the panic of escape is this unknowing. the pregnant space to each moment so long forgotten, again realized. Deleuze and Guattari call this the line of flight.

the line of flight is itself implicative of multiplicity as it leads away from any demarcation of it. In Mille Plateaux g-d write, “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities…There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.” (9). the line of flight still has a logic–as they write, “according to which”…these lines are leading the movement, guiding the way. this is how praxis is ontological. the very activity instantiates the concept. messenging shares this movement. it is an emanation, and a passage. the entities involved are no more gateways than stopping points. the whole process swells and intensifies. our borders are a mask. emit and send this way, that way, all ways. movement is part of each emission. the movement/this messenger is always potentially rupturous (even as we misconfigure potential). let our message running and message reading not close themselves to lines of flight.

for example, we must open our consciousness to nonlinguistic messages.

in telepathy, who is the messenger? who turns the lights on, though they shine bright are we blinded by the shining so much to forget how the jigger they turn on in the first place. i say forget only because we never knew, can we? and in this state of perpetual loss–unknowing–might we overcome our preoccupation with an originary that entails a linguistical difference and deferral? where time and space flow with us not against us, as part of us–that is, radically subjective–not simply slipping past beneath us? it is like the conceptual difference of between and in-between. when d/g note that we are always in the middle, they describe not a demarcated center, but a borderless continuity.

messenging, inside is outside is inside

telepathically, we are affecting others sensibly unconnected. in quantum mechanics this is called entanglement.

we cannot be disentangled. until you shut lights off. please keep flashing your lights.

–angelic nature as innocence/honesty

the ways these angelic stories characterize a position of innocence

unstained,

is how escape can be unstained, innocent. angelic.

but also bare. and this relates to innocence.

when the message becomes a game we lose the innocence. and so our angels pervade an honesty that transcends the trick of differance

as we are well aware in our epoch of endemic cynicism, disrespect and disbelief spread when annunciation involves its own disavowal.

it is like capitalism. a system that makes capital subject treat object as value x when capital subject does not value object as x. promulgates a system of disavowed valuations…but that are harbored underground

this disavowal is when the bad feelings are felt but lay dormant, seeping out into expression. passive aggression.

Ubertowska writes “the strategy of erasing the individual dimension of a violent event…is to interpret it as a construct of disembodied distance.”  (book review of  //The Trauma Controversy//)

we dis embody internetly. we dis embody shielding our self from honesty. sacrificing our innocence for self defense. under-stand, after violent encounter, one’s self may feel need of defense. but can we help take down our fence work? to remember that we are not communing in disembodied distance as long as we are messenging.

–a messenger unmotivated by desire
angels are sexless creatures. they are unmotivated by desire. the desire that lurks within the pointing of the signifier.

can we envision an expression, annunciation, that is freed from desire, disinterested? is each messenger marked by a specificity of target for delivery. (this is to suggest that our targeting is the play of desire, and we will always in fact miss our mark as i am not precisely here nor there.) our angels are revered as beautiful and innocent, thus purified of the to-be-disappointed drive of the message sender and the murderous rapture of the message hearer.

in usamerica, angels have big eyes and wings. there’s is a duty of protecting. but may be our tradition of messaging can better confront our dirty god, our dirty bodies. the messenger, the angel must too climb through the mud and mold it to say,

“In presenting itself it becomes effaced, in being sounded it dies away…[thus language] admit[s] a game where whoever loses wins and where one wins and loses each time.” (derrida, “differance”)

collision the crossing a simulation and sand

i am so broken hearted over simulation. you will come to know it if you listen to me. me, i sure do love to swim, but i tire so easily in the tumultuous sea. the ocean’s beauty to me is the laying together of pile and wave. the sand lies under the water but does not support it, in fact the sand is crushed in the relationship. in to bits. soft bits. these soft bits watch toss and lay with the ocean water, which crashes and slides, and even in places might float suspended on the sand. there is sand with out water and water with out sand, both nice. but their joining is beauty.

i take refuge on the sand from my thrashings handed me by the sea.

simulation is a sea. along the ontological shoreline of existence, our axes of sand and those of water, i wander. take off my cover, to take swim.

–
a good reader acts
is feeling an act?

when reading especially aloud i feel it and then express it more clearly. less like an automaton. can feeling be harnessed so easily?

is it all a pretense? might very well all be this set of set of electrical pulses. baudrillard’s //simulation// in //the matrix//. a film which predicts our tech-turn pretty well. walk down a street, sit in a room, live in a love life with person who exist through the screen. i mean sounds like a “residual self image, mental perception of digital self” what morpheus speaks from. the revolution now must use the segmentary lines of the regime to hack it, to phreak it, to scramble the symbol. to re-territorialise the digital pretense.

but is pretense a part of the reterritorialization? of course. keanu reeves THE ONE, is not a signal to honesty, an orientation sans pretense. but he wants to touch ground back on the sand from the sea. we need firm ground from which to leap. else we would experience constant free fall. …is vertigo the fear of constant free fall, the leap…

is feeling an act? devotion always bears with it doubt. the doubt confronts our anxiety over pretense…the illusion that is ever-present. one cannot be bothered by our acting. but how is it that we act?
what ethics of jouissance will propagate a society of these actors? what is at stake is not the way we desire things–always doubt and devotion, ocean and sand, simulation and baring…
what is at stake is what we take joy in.

–

our deserted apparition and suspended architecture

when we take joi in the veil, simulation.

from baudrillard’s, “simulations simulacra,” we find language and concepts:

-desert of the real, that we value the map over against its origination. follows a fable, so let’s agree the starting place is in borges. his “exactitude in science” tells when the cartographers perfected geography to eliminate the scale. no longer must you read a map by first translating your map, through its scale, to the experience it sought to explain and dissect. e.g. enplace mile markers and inform you like a scout what’s behind the bend beyond where your eyes cannot see out ahead. they created a map that matched the coordinates, the where of their living point for point. life-sized. difficult to fold,

in borges’ fable, the succeeding generations are not seduced, they find this map cumbersome to carry. they dismiss it “for the rigors of sun and rain”

but in baudrillard’s representation, it is reality (avant map) that crumbles. the authentic loses conceptual ground. our world-space becomes a process of resignification. gps mapping devices, personal profiles, let me google that for you, –the accedence of the map, marks a slide

-this sliding is consumption, “a manipulation of signs”

which can be beautiful. it is the recreative ability, the fertility of our being, transfigured through language. it is a fundamental aspect of language, to evolve. but there is more than our ability to simply regenerate a sign. our ontology is not language alone. but what in language we are attempting to signify.

in the minefield, where there is no obligation for our utterances, expressions to reference any thing practicable, beyond the next moment–except of course on a server’s amass of cached sites–human relations are replaced almost hysterically with a relation to objets. i say hysterical in the way that a commodity’s concrete appearance, its tangibility, serves as a temporary (and always inadequate) stand in for the solid human connection that is gone. our expression of what we want is hiding some thing.

hiding some thing, though, often works if we do not care to probe deeper. like the cover up of guernica. when colin powell spoke the the u.n. attempting to convince them to aid a new u.s.-iraqi war, the decision was made to place a sheet over picasso’s anti-way mural which initially hung in the television frame of his speech. in our culture of consumption, to cover up an objet that is known to be there in effect does cancel out its existence–if we cease to see it, touch it, sense it–that is, to know that it is there without investing effort in its interpretation/revelation/analysis. so, unless it is there only per routinized modes of expression and interpretation–it ceases to be there.
better to let the news story of its cover-up get out; “cover up” doesnt matter in the ethos that asserts and encourages all, that all is a cover-up…for nothing exists but our covers.

this is the victory of consumption logic.
that we are only our covers.

but i know we are more than our covers.

–

i am quite weak for the question. to question asserts at least a temporary position. i am intrigued as in attracted to your position. may be this is narcissism. to wish for glimpses of the material. chew on the side of your cheek to know it is there. pinch your self, this is real.

the pressure of the hypermodern is to deny the material irruption of our selves (i.e. our position) that challenges the capital vision of somnambulent living

in that consumption no longer places any obligation for our language/actions to reference any thing, we swim unendingly. our waves crashing against the sand, deterritorialization-cum-reterritorialization never comes to be. suspended in the sea, all waters turn eternally. without end. what is never de- and not re- is but an undetermined (certainly un self-determined) entity

the intensification of our voidal vacuum on one virtual hand and the vertiginous comportment from such rapid re-spinning… gives one fever. the pressure builds and as hughes warns in “harlem” about the dream deferred, we set our selves to explode.

–

the serpentine slippage

my dream goes beyond differance…

differance, derrida’s, with an “a”.

his new word creates this concept. he is deconstructing the structure that de saussure built for our successive studiers of linguistics. he blasts metaphysics for its violent demanding of us a presence. presence, here and now, has just left the building. in language, presence is impossible.

this is due to differ a nce. which he explains as constitutive of two processes, time and space. he highlights how language manipulates time and space.

let us start with space. there is difference in language. this is de saussure’s principle that language is valued through negation. we know clearer in language when we know not. this is our k-n-o-t. we signal better with a word to a hearer who sees clearly how this word is not an other word; when i hear you say love i might understand you closer if i know love in relational difference to lust, for example. our signalling itself, is most effective the more we recognize a difference between the signal and the concept it signifies. for example, ever talk to a child in early language development? the point is key to expression–that is, the child needs a material, physical connection (the finger point) to the objet/concept which she is expressing (the breast). both speaker and hearer in this relationship are often challenged in frustration; the speaker does not yet perceive most clearly a difference between signal and concept, the hearer is unable to interpret the objet signalled in the speaker’s pointing with out their spatial proximity.

we lose spatial proximity in language. when we speak here is displaced.

differ -ance affects time and space. and so on to time, there is deferral in language. our understanding, from speaking to hearer, takes a linearity to unfold. this linerarity is the passage of moments in succession. this is de saussure’s second principle of linguistics. unlike the nautical flags on a ship, which must not be read in any particular order to get it, our language requires left to right, right to left, order, our phonemes are heard in their unsounding. the sounds all at once we could not comprehend. thus, when i speak “now,” it has always already passed.

–

let not this virtuality trick us to yearn for an ever-present moment.

BUT also let us not instantiate a lack, a cut, to cruelly set our incompleteness into a rehearsal.

AND what if difference is a simulation. and so it is present in presence. presence is also distance.

AND
what if deferral is a lie. we seem to wait. to understand. but may be this is our reluctance to embrace a wisdom that does not stand on top (understand), that cannot be proved. we seem to wait, but tralfalmodorians don’t think so. instead of our procession of beginnings and endings, these moments, they can see moments all at once, forming giant collage. in //slaughterhouse 5// vonnegut writes of the tralfalmadorians,
“It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever….When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”

might eternal recurrence lead us to vigor and not a tralfalmodorian, ‘So it goes.’

i can open my self to the beautiful indifference of the world. unlike camus says, this indifference is not gentle. if i let it master me, i will be taken for quite a ride. if i try to master it, i will lead a life of constant consumption in my simulation. i want instead to walk hand in hand along the shoreline.
–

some might think that when the sight of the world dims, we reach to the spark of dream

n’est pas tout pres, mais loin… veux dire, que on voit est imaginaire,
like derrida writes, “In presenting itself it becomes effaced, in being sounded it dies away.”
with out you, things are different now,
but as now as i can make it said

a sight before drowning

–
i am looking for some thing. where is it. i will search until i find thee. this is the lack that propels endless desire. endless until it ends. you hold it, have stolen it. must i chase you across the world and beyond.

it’s not you unless it is you. who long to pretend that it is until the simulation becomes all that we do.

can’t suspend the disbelief that the coincidences mean some thing. can’t stop doubting the simulation, the pretense is present. (derrida’s whole insight with differance is that the present, presence, is a simulation of objet petit a in our language–that is, presence is impossible in language, yet we chase it in our history of metaphysics. this chase is violent.)

that the coincidences mean some thing. well, they do. they mean you are thinking. you are there, observing. it is your concept, your dunes which note the space of one moment to an other–to demarcate a measure to be an incident, an event is told, past tense, an object dead; it is your concept of time, your marking of beginning and end, to think duration is a parade of men.

but this meaning, even if it is moored-yours, is there. affects and effects. the world is dialectical. own your meaning, your simulations. else, untethered, simulation is dangerous. it apes and plays the villain in a nihilistic drive to destroy and depress.

now yours, you, are not some transcendental principle of unity. unshifting, nor god; you are a phantom. better, the sand castle. you easily wash away when meeting ocean. precisely, in order to be built, the sand needs water to be applied. simulation is a part of me. you. but too much water and you and me fall away indistinguishably into the sea.

that the coincidences mean some thing. they do, they mean we connect in accidental and willful ways. their complex intertwining is impossible to be untwined.

pour pincer au rayons festonnant les arbres aux abois.
to pluck at the rays festooning the baying trees
the sound is subtle and soft
like wind in the leaves that it lost

in their loss they can’t rustle or whip
the wind’s fickleness misses its chime
and the light sits eluding your grip,
the wood a warm fabric too brittle to untwine.

that the coincidences mean some thing. so why do i doubt that they do? well, i don’t know. but the point is that i’m broken hearted. and this is not from doubt, which is beautifully terrifying. devotion will always bear with it doubt. but true love does not mean a broken heart. i am broken hearted that you leave me on the sand to jump into the sea. stay with me.

may be this seems a preposterous offense. well, i am not judging you for any crime. i am a weak fearful creature. under the sand, i will be unable to rescue you from the waves, goodbye.

ward me with words, my evergreen

wordplay

words create concepts. de saussure warns us of this. in his //course on gen. linguistics//. he opines that linguistics and language is not simply a master to slave relationship–between we namers and our world which we name–but instead a more symbiotic relationship. this word symbiotic is not right, as masters and slave too “live with” (sym – bio) each other in mutuality (just this mutuality is not perceived, understood). we live with our world in a consciously and unconsciously transformational social activity. a terminal loop. so terminal, in fact, that the me formally dies in a process that constantly remolds it. it is also not quite right to speak in terms of we as though distinct from our world. this duality is unfortunate, and i use it as a cognitive tool to think one step forward and two steps back. that is, i wish to deconstruct language, which is two steps back from the particular so-called me and we. “me” and “we” as particular entities, are fashioned by language. our words are our buildings and borders.

without belief, the words are abandoned buildings, but their borders are more heavily patrolled for fear–the atheism–of crossing.

i want to play in them. but it is generally considered dangerous for children who play in broken down buildings and guarded borders.
–
temporary
temporarius “of seasonal character, lasting a short time,” from tempus (gen. temporis) “time, season.” time is ours, seasons are our world of change. is this to mean that one exists within us and one exists with out? the so-conceived march of time is but our guess, the way we perceive our moments to progress. but seasons–i do not guess at this chill…

temporary is in passing, short, not permanent–but how do we feel this? that our moment k/now cannot last? it is our propensity toward prem o nition that is permanent.
–
anger is the ire at thinking to understand an other…and failing, and we always and in all ways fail to understand. must we meet our indelible mark blind and angry?

but how can you love me when you treat me this way? this question is again, struggling with the failure to understand.

understanding is different from love.
understanding might even be different than wisdom–for if wisdom is empty, the most wise is one who knows to know nothing, we can understand this truth; but, understanding is our handle on what is, i mean in our hands. tellingly dictionaryreference peaks “understanding”‘s pinnacle at “personal interpretation”. additionally, we find the concept of perception. this is sensory, as in particular subjective sense. is there universal perception? maybe (kant, e.g. time, space–but this is preposterous oversimplification, privileged hegemon). but there is certainly a particular sensing as well–i feel cold, you warm; i hear this, she don’t; i want this, they won’t. i am a particular sensing difference from you. this difference can bring us closer and farther a part. but my understanding lives in my head. or may be in my soul, i mean the sole of my shoe. under-stand, below where we stand, beneath our very feet. we on top.

but wisdom–that is, the sophia of philosophia–marks movement. a movement in swaying dance with all every thing. definitions get tricky. words littered like, right, true, judgment, power, having, showing…
-right is correct. this is a quagmire, can be. right like the answer is. how do we know answers? oh, like in math–that game. but not even in language is there a right–it’s always moving faster than and beyond any perceivable end. in language out of the ashes of right r-i-g-h-t comes write. and it is much closer to wrong. in my humble opinion, the wise can be wrong. wisdom is in words; wisdom is wrong. if this be the opposite of right (which it is not necessarily, as in writing, right becomes write), one must reconsider including right as conceptually linked with wisdom, like dictionary reference does.

-true, from long time ago we find true as, loyal, trusty, honest. yes,this choice in denotative focus is arbitrary, but we must find a foothold or else suffocate in water or quicksand…let’s focus on “loyal, trusty, honest” in describing true.
* loyal is our intimacy–”being in accordance with the actual,” “conforming, consistent with,” and even “exact, precise.” when i say intimacy (down the rabbit hole) i invoke intimus–the inmost. intimatus, get so close. no scales to our mappings; the exactitude is point for point.
* trusty is our risk, an ability–to be worthy of trust. well, our accounting in terms of an other is always a gamble. when we rely on an other it requires some kind of calculation of risk. the risk is real, not imaginary, like our tabulation of ability and worth.
* honest is our leap. it is when we dispense with covers and bare our selves. make no mistake, we are always covered…in skin. but our honesty is not teleological (that i speak what is true), but instead processual via negativa (that i speak what is not false). may be sincerity and franknessss are impossible, especially in language which is a fraud. but there is some thing too easily folded into this critique, about the difference between me pouring heart into ink and an other’s interest as fink. the honesty is our leap towards one an other. this move can be fabricated, trumped up, tricked out, only until others who jumped fall to the ground and are recovered.

truth involves intimacy, risk, and our leap. this is a fundamental aspect of wisdom.

- let us forget about judgment and power;

honesty begets liberty: free fall

wisdom expresses a relationship with the universal. understanding, with the particular. understanding is different from love.
love is undulating,
–
science is the study of can. (how can you?) philosophy is the study of cannot.
in can we understand, we stand atop. but love gives with out a ground to stop.
ours is not to understand, ours is to love.

the scientific perspective is that the world makes sense, and we must find it; my love of wisdom instills a slight perspectival shift that moves mountains: the world makes no sense, and we must found it. instead of the first, an order of burlesque, let us revel in the second approach, which encourages me to invest my self, my meaning, my play in the world to make it world.

we can appreciate the word play. we root around in the mire, like a pig and a hog. eat it all as much as you can. the longer you keep your self so-fed, an other will find an other. and an other. and an other. then stuffed, which is not full, but only temporary, we lay belly up to gaze at the stars and dream.

your experience is also mine as much as yours in the exigencies of speaking.

heimlich, the nest

what do our preferences signal? let us trace it in signs: preference, pre – fer, to set before, give some thing more than others. so stand before me, and play here-> preference

some questions, why attempt to cultivate the uneven glades, are there not already differences in shade, why shy from naming them thusly, do we condition a worldview of warring estimations,

is our will misconstrued? who am i to use? to peruse? to prefer? to place before me one and not an other?

preference might be impelled by our connection to our uncanny. the unprobed places of and in us that lead us to worry. and these places are both particular and shared, as interpretation is both personal and part of a community of sound.

evaluation changes the objet/other observed and the subject observing. for example, evaluation presumes a staticity to otherness–as there is an objet under inspection–and to subjectivity–as there is a watch-position occupied. but neither these lives nor their characters are static. the evaluation ensues an illusion. that we control the frame leads us to imagine we control the life depicted in our picture. watching is never seeing every thing; it is viewing some thing through a relatively small window. what we glimpse–and fail to glimpse–is not simply related to my level of vigilance: what we see we see accidentally. hemmed by will and hawed by accident, these already tricky/tricked observations feed our judgments, which grow into formidable traditions. as we often tend to forget the radical void of otherness in face (literally) of our objet of inspection, we also forget the accident in favor of our will. this will, the story of mistake, becomes our divide.

but it can also be our harmonizing drive.

–
if i am so resolutely sad is it that i prefer to be so? are emotions different from logos, such that my reason it bends, it is the most willing slave, but the passion depression love disdain these are sages with no yoke to enplace. passion makes agental mastery impossible. for example, the realization that your seduction by an image is reliant/related to some hidden source–some how out side of your logical mind–questions the ability of logo-mind to control our preferences. if our preferences as taste reflect our selves then we must also note how our preferences are out of control, as part of our selves is a quagmire impossible to be fully uncovered. when i say uncovered, i mean traced. that is, put back precisely in one place. we instead can succinctly only mis-place. what i prefer from one moment to the next is an accident. and you can convince me other wise…

there seems a process to the preferences of one. over time, the process attunes itself to each particular life. it is forming and formed out of the moments and mire of event, myth, mirth and madness wrought on and of one’s thought. the community of timing and happenstance on one is grown of shared seeds, and they fruit only within the limits of controllable thought. for the unconscious bears no fruit; it be the hydroponic chemical concoction that reacts to feed the stalk of man. we fruit in the language we can use to tell an other so. be with me and farm my possibilities.

of preference we establish our grounds of judgment. this is not the same as establishing our selves, even if preference in an other way reflects our selves. remember, the preference is a mirror not a mason. one judges–that is, decides by determining one as not an other, namely, you as not the world. in judgment we step out of time and claim vainly to be ahistorically set free from the continual unwoven weaving. one judges from a position–a position suspended in time and in space–that is nonetheless on some ground. it is a ground not terra firma, but a ground very particularly located, some times only in one’s own temples.

mind the madness in the temples

preference is accidental, preference is one’s process of telling the self, preference is a rocky island. but an island is only a mountain. we swim to cross.
–

taste is notional beauty. but is beauty more universal? what is the nature of beauty, let us explore our aesthetics. with in mind the preference that signals an opening that is always present in all every thing.

the fleshing out of preference brings to mind an analogous example of determining how to drive a vehicle on a highway. in order to determine how to drive, one might look at the sign of the law to learn what is demanded from her; also, one might look at the ground–that is, the flow of traffic, the conditions of the road, the constraints on visibility and so on.

these consultations are not necessarily totally distinct (the law is part of the terrain). the judgment of beauty corralled by taste is a testimony to ones interaction with this objet out side and in side . the terrain. we are persuaded by the signs designating the beautiful in kind. but we can tell our relationship with the beautiful without such guidance. the interpretation of your heart and whims are yours not an outliers’. but this window lets in much light which conditions our vision of the spaces in side.

the uncanniness, the hiddenness of the hidden, is where the secret to the beautiful (our notion of the beautiful, our taste) is revealed. and this bespeaks the relation of beauty to a universalizable concept, as what is truly hidden is neither yours nor mine.

–
the love i know is always limited. the love is my sense and so limited. by this form, love it is both limit and exceeding of limit. it is both, in between either/or.

and this is not the love that i know, but the love i believe.

but it is beautiful to know. this is a space of stirrings of the heart. passion. the muse, the spark.
the limit is beautiful. we must relish the limit. this knowing is part of love as it is BOTH LIMIT AND EXCEEDING ITS LIMIT. know me, knowing there is no me but the me that inhabits my body

why do we love the limit? because we must? because it hurts me when you do not wish to love mine? it is more…

who and how are these limits? i do not know who. i know never whom. the target is missed, misappropriated before i begin to strike at it. this is not in-itself, the target is mis-itself. how is the flesh and the form. the enplace-ment of space. how is the time that i see tick until i see it stop. (it can stop)

so then love is not based on the target. the strike will never reach it precisely. love forgives the hidden spaces where its objet hides.

we overflow the me-and-you we know

-the process of penetration-

in //critique of judgment// kant describes the sublime as “found in a formless object”, represented by a “boundlessness” (§ 23). ironically, the body is sublime. the body–configured as figure and thus limited–is in reality unending and beyond; and love–eternal and without bound–is bounded en frame (love is always political).

is ideology necessarily hidden? i don’t think so. but this is why i am skeptical that analysis helps. it indulges. it is a strip tease with your ideology. but the awareness that it conditions does not subvert it simply in its revelation.

is the body a fetish-objet? can one love the body, can the body be a part of love–is it necessarily an illusion, a fantasy. and what when we find fantasy as an indelible part of love.

if our social practice effects as, that is, we treat the body as holy, how do we know we are not tricking ourselves? in //the sublime object of ideology//, the nefarious thing for zizek, it seems, is the mistake that is willfully re-committed nonetheless. but zizek does not know love–he is worried about being tricked. and though fantasy is a part of love, the suspicion of the fantasy’s trick is not.

it is not that we are only concerned with the way that things are hidden, but more so wherefore this occurs in the first place. the beautiful is hiddenness becoming revealed. but revelation is a construction remade at each moment; it takes constant vigilance to realize its opening.

and this position, the hidden, is sacred. love protects our hidden spaces.

zizek reads an almost omnipresent ideological illusion, “which is structuring our real  effective relationship to reality” (322). and so we are always dreaming–in language, in dance, and in flesh. we are getting it wrong.

zizek writes “”reality” is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire.” (323…cfLacan’s //sem xi//). are we always to wear masks? if so we better start to like the masks. he continues, “an ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favor” ( 325). in this case, then, in faith and belief we are always relaxing in some cozy ideological blanket.

can we resist ideology? can we step outside of it? zizek notes an escheresque knot: two hands drawing each other. so if fundamentalism is ideology, and cynicism is ideology–these various comportments toward interpretation and analysis, and further zizek reminds us “there are no facts only ideology”…    does our search for the beautiful and the good then return humbly–and may be a bit too eagerly–simply to the play of preference? are we isolates in our accidental singularity, an immanence that renders judgments of any kind including beauty impossibly futile and naive toward universal application and, therefore in a sense, understanding. is this not selling out (like zizek does) our concept of the community of the beautiful to the caustic wasteland of the sublime? we find our selves then again with sartre, who, in //nausea// begins picking over his face to ask how it is that such a clod of clay is beautiful and not. does true immanence make all judgments of beauty untenable? may be instead of untenable, the designation of beauty describes a process of openness in unfolding. when we might see an other as always excess of its map, we are ready to behold the beautiful. further, we are best confronted by this excess en flesh a flesh.

how do get get out side of ideology? we do not side-step it, we en-body.” why do i do this” instead becomes, “i do this.”
but if it be all a praxis of illusion may it be a beautiful illusion that is me…

the de-horrorification, when taste is mass produced

-in the flesh we find the uncanny-

freud writes on //the uncanny// as being related to aesthetic judgment. he calls this uncanniness, heimlich, that is, what is hidden. he traces our resonance with art–the beautiful–with that which reminds us of our hidden spaces, e.g. oedipal drives and guilt, castration and our fear of it, the id–which is interestingly homologous to I. D. and etymologically linked to idea.

an example, even guy de maupassant’s, and later, magritte’s, is of a hu-man who sees the back of her body in a mirror. an eyeful of the back of the head! this vision is strange until it is contextualized as her own. it is uncanny; like the halloween sentiment. jarring.

now, in mass production culture–the logic of making the unseen, seen–we witness the widespread penetration and thus de-sacrilization of our hidden experiences. the louvre exhibition is a google images search. the bedroom fantasy is digitized and labeled via common search terms…the back of our heads are now visible by all manner of constant surveillance and imaging software. the vision loses its uncanniness as we are (empowered)–it is a power–by an omnipresent identification as…___

thus we lose sight of the beautiful.

magritte paints “not to be reproduced” and it is a warning. do not loose/lose our hidden frights and surprises that have us reevaluate what and how we know.

what if beauty is always a question of epistemology?

-a virtual conclusion-
we virtualize when we trick our self into thinking self as mediating preferences when it is just all phantasy. do we virtualize all?

since we construct the world (zizek’s kantianism) then the kernal of the world–the world that we can only know as illusion–is found inside the deconstruction of this phantasmic illusion. i make the world and the process of making it reveals my desire. but, does this not simply mistake the making of art–that is, genius at play? art creates a beauty not simply to aid the narcissistic goal of my desire. it is an expression of being with otherness. zizek instead thinks us to be scientists on behalf of our construction, of our desire…and not poets. but we are poets. the poet welcomes the accident without reducing it to the fold. in the scape of our poetry, the accident of articulation and audition remains a rim, a hole.

but, when we share a space, the ministrations of time and order melt away and at least join together in a rhythm that protext against their oft-debilitating noise. by noise i mean distraction. it is in sharing this space where we can confront the holes of our experiences. together.

happiness is not suspension, remaining hidden, detente. lacanian psychoanalysis misconstrues happiness as detente. upon revelation, i am elated. even as i know there will always be hiding. and the illusion of not hiding.

ready or not, here i come

the body is part of the love-process. being-with breaks the illusion. no, it toys with it

there is a catch 22 to enbodying. objetification is initially a mastery. let this move to its own dissolve.

is uncanniness related to ideology? if uncanniness is the hiddenness of hiding, and so too is the ideological fantasy at work (that in seeing the hiding, we out-step the hiddenness of the hidden)… what is left hiding is beautiful. and the most hidden thing is the me at the very point i am the me who inhabits this body.
–

“If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for i shall already have forgotten you…
my love feeds on your love, beloved,”
-neruda, “if you forget me”

these texts are wagering intimacy.
who do you love? who do you speak to?
do you forget me, who do you forget, when you love me and when you speak to me?

the breath is the vibration of waves. we think in breathe
but words are my enemy

they are some thing i just can not believe

faith is speech less. you speak, liar;
symmetry wings dare he aspire

in fear isolde love-death down river

we are not unique in the ways we enjoi. the drive is duplicitous, duplicative
e.g., no. i walked right past it. i wasnot even looking at it.

instead of all this endless searching and fasting, feed my love.

intimacy is not a knowing. we must wager the intimacy for it to be. we are always wagering blind.

come in side. you let me think to bring you in when instead you remain out side.

//fear of being lied to v. acceptance of the split drive//

we are not to be harmed in our lying. instead, we move in different directions at once.

in his preface to //time driven//, johnston explains, “Even if every external impediment were eliminated, the drives would spontaneously fabricate their own repression in order to preserve their fantasmatic forms of jouissance. Obtaining this jouissance would be the ultimate trauma for Trieb” (xxiv).

our drives are self-sabotaging. johnston relates this implicit double-cross to the two axes of the drive, iteration and alteration. one claims the same, and the other, absolute difference. johnston observes that our process of desiring is the same, whereas our fixation of desire is alternating always. the split of the drive is synonymous to our split in time. time is the precise psychoanalytic insight for johnston, as it relays the tension of subjectivization when the subject is always both constituted by history and also is becoming. dehisence is the reality of trieb–the drive. we are split, to move in contradictory directions, and we do not wish to achieve satisfaction.

trembling in facing the impossibility within possible is transfigured into a worship through self-limitation. we rely on external obstacles to protect us from realizing jouissance does not exist. we then, thru “libidinal cunning”…”transform externally imposed necesseties into internalized psychical virtues”…”the libindal econcomy comes to acquire a stake in its own inhibition” (johnston, //splitting the drive// xxxv). but let this inherent self-inhibition not make us fear intimacy, nor our trembling lead us to perpetual hesitation. we step in side and get ready for the confusing drive.

nightshade, ruby grape of proserpine

//intimacy is illegal//

there is a federal charge that carries great sentencing weight called conspiracy. it casts one as guilty if one knows crime to be construed with out reporting the knowledge. miller correctly observes in //the crucible// that “without confidences there could be no conspiracy.” the monstrosity of conspiracy is that among one and her others, conspiracy as criminality seeks to make us confidence-less.

the effect of the conspiracy charge is that it makes interpersonal intimacy illicit in the face of government allegiance. allegiance is from liege, a king; it instantiates a frame of mastery and slavery on the relationship of one to an other. the chilling message of the execution of the rosenbergs, charged for conspiracy to commit espionage (the first peace time espionage charge, for actions involving our political recent-ally-turned-enemy, which sent them to state-sponsored death): is there a problem when one’s political affiliation on face is declared to provide evidence of one’s guilt of conspiracy to overthrow the government? yes, but more nefariously, it is the chill that we’ve aestheticized politics to the extent that words do carry more weight than actions. the intimacy, not the extamacy, is the threat. what lies beneath the machine, which to all appearances, runs fine.

in esthétique-politique, we experience fascism. and the level at which conformity is demanded in fascism renders an intimacy–which is theoretically always at odds with univocal conformity–illegal.

//fidelity is truth//
truth is closed. the process of truth-telling, finding, creating, is love; love is open. we are loving and truth grows.

truth is our fidelity. it is wagered and leapt into in vain. it is unknowable–yet known. courting forgiving the impossibility of thought not to think it self and yet doubting it does.

love is opening more and more. it is dis-closure. not, like for heidegger, some thing hidden now tantalizingly revealed; we are reversing the closure.

in fidelity, we abide truth in a process of love. this is not the same as obedience/allegiance. allegiance is to a liege, a king. fidelity is action on behalf of faith, which is wholly unsubstantiatable, unlike allegiance, which must be rededicated through many rituals of consecration. faith is what is developed in intimacy.

fed up and dying

//come closer//

we need to develop a politics of people. not of the state. the politics of people works toward this truth of accident. in dis and en-closure.

bensaid describes the truth as an “event…characterized by the unpredictability of what might just as well not have occurred. This is what lends it an aura of ‘laicized grace’ (SP, 89). It comes about retroactively through the sovereign naming of its existence and the fidelity to the truth which comes to light in it.” in the very accident of its occurrence, we find the truth event to bear an interminable not/knot that demands us to relish the accident and forgive the arrogance of ego’s insistent prescriptive organizations.

knowledge and truth differ as truth is lived. we must wager to live into a truth that is evidently to be misnamed.

this risk is our subjectivization as struggle. bensaid quotes badiou to note: “[F]or Pascal, the world does not necessarily lead to God without the rigorously aleatory decision of the gambler who brings it into existence” (PP, 87). god only becomes god through our gamble, and likewise, man only becomes man in his wager to be so-called. we must relish in our gambling disorders! besaid continues, “For Badiou…man only attains genuine humanity, albeit an ephemeral one, through the event of his revolt.” in this “politics as pure will”
we need to beware the misgivings of our will to power. that our “majestic sovereignty” of subjet, whereby nothing “commands the whole,” not be side-tracked into arguments of an untenable position–of agency. yes, truth is situated; the event is lived not known. our determination of when are we ripe to live our truth helps us celebrate our gambling disorders. but i fear another “discourse of mastery” even if it be the preferred mastery of the subject to that of the fascistic state; must we speak only in terms of command? the risk is beautiful in itself, and it cannot be authorized nor celebrated as a purported substantiation of the ego-ideal it in fact renders superfluous.

oyster shells

//difference and distance//

the preoccupation with command figures in to an addiction to difference. it encourages all intimacy to be deemed conspiracy. it is an addiction to difference–which means obedience–what makes intimacy a conspiracy against mastery and slavery.

the love that connects does not threaten, unless it be that which bars freedom. and love behind bars is tortured.

do you wish to be different from an other, from your students, from your children, from your patients, from your lovers.

let not our analysis be a victory of manipulation–asserted through distance and difference.
what is the absolute difference sought by the analyst. is this not indifference? and unless we, machine men, this objective stasis be a lie.

//to forgiveness//

forgive the liar. i hope to reach a place where one does not feel compelled to lie. in this way, imagination and creativity diverge from the mask of the lie. for our intentions are not clear concrete objets, but objets a; we thus to them reinvent and reshape always. let us not obscure what is significant to get right–this is truth, which is “wrong” some times but not false. we can treat our jokes seriously.

—
feed love to move beyond allegiance, an obedience…toward an intimacy, a conspiracy–when we are all double agents to the split drive.

we develop our expectations of otherness always in a sense incorrectly…to miss the mark. to induce disappointment? can we dispense with expectation in true embrace of the real impossible? is this but a new expectation (to expect the impossible)? accept me as i am, how is one to find this, am. is am always also its expectation and demand…
expect me here in sound, as in sand, slipping past. the audio is here———-> impossible
–
i am interested in how judgment is different from evaluation. their difference relates to the possible and impossible relation…
and we will see that judgment leads us to disappoint, and evaluation to a frustrated expectation.

it might be that the gaze complicates this difference…
the gaze is without and after. the gaze is inside and holding. it incorporates both subject and others.
as it is, like with am, that the gaze is also its mark. that is, the am and the gaze and all is what it is and what it is not. even judgment, but judgment only is as it forgets this negativity within it.
and so the gaze marks us as it is us. this is expectation in a sense (in the sense). in space-sense.

"have the focal points of gray matter start their motion every time their feel and vision of them inside you starts moving." artaud

but the inevitable frustration of this expectation of spaced-sense of otherness first of all occurs. as otherness is always reaching beyond me and my sense. as they are mine; and even though i might think of otherness as “one” and particularly mine, it is grander than titles can demarcate. some times an other will dance with me, and lead me to symmetrical moves–moves that are not mine but a mirror of me and mine. this similitude can last long and disappear in a moment. some times an other works to mark herself to battle me. we find each other across enemy lines. but the white flag is waved and the illusion is changed at a breath in time. these findings, plottings, ploddings of otherness are approximate. estimations to help us in sense, so that we may see some thing to lend the scenery to our leap out of the plane. the way otherness exists is within and after space. it is an energy more invisible than the gaze. in potential, it is pure multiplicity.

the very multiplicitous nature of otherness is our freedom. echoed by sartre, nietzsche, many, this freedom anew creates a significant difference to unhinge the death-drive implication of expectation and disappointment. we can see the difference arise in wordplay of traces, in comparing the words that we use for the swing that misses (i.e. frustration and disappointment). in vain, the etymology of frustration, and for disappointment, to un-settle. frustration is ontological, while disappointment is teleological–a finality amidst other finalities. but there is a tension, as between ontology and epistemology there might be. we do not know how to begin often without the scenery lent.

we are frustrated but let this not always be a disappointment. we can wish sisyphus as smile in his work up the hill. to disturb order is good; to disappoint is a form of resistance to the regime of should. but the toil that is undertaken in all respects in vain does not withhold from us a feeling of calm and love. this is the very point that cannot be disrupted. when we open ourselves to the impossible, we cannot be disappointed. we are in flux.

and so our evaluation need not involve disappointment at all. disappointment will always follow judgment. but in evaluation, nothing is settled at the start. there is an intensity that swells for no one and yet brightly still. the judgment presumes, indeed requires a universal evidentiary system of pointing; whereas evaluation is mine without relying on justification outside of it.

"my reason must surely honor the undefined forces besieging me" artaud

the living flesh as the ultimate instantiation of an evaluation with out a judgment.

artaud writes in “situation of the flesh,” “i don’t separate my thought from my life. with each vibration of my tongue i return over the paths of my thought to my flesh.” flesh is “above all is the essence of the nerve.” we do expect in/as ultimate immanence. deleuze and guattari define immanence in //what is philosophy?// as “that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought” (59). it is a plane in which our structures fail us. the way our mathemes abut our movement. let us feel closer to the pulse of movement itself than to fixate on the limits of control. if we treat flesh as otherwise, we are dead.

//to be disappointed//

the law calls us to judge. the judgment must always lie to itself–that it is separating the subject (judge) and other. the epistemological insistence of separation unfolds ultimately always to a disappointment. our system of pointing fails us. in //paul’s new moment// davis reads the law as lack and fragmentation. under it, we are always already guilty. before the law, the presumption of our guilt justifies the creation of the law in order to protect; after the law, we are induced to transgress the law, our presumed guilt justifies the creation of the law we serve. the law conditions subjectivization and otherness as caught in a sickened drive to a death by continual mortification. this is how the irruption and welcome of love is political. to give the key that “arises in the very grip of death” (//paul’s new moment// 104).

there is a pain of decentering on the front lines, when against the judgment we seek its overturning. this is the struggle of the first part of our revolution. minds change easily, but the battlements of law are fierce and pervasive and neither they nor their scars turn quickly to dust. the best recovery follows the breath. our salve for wounds is the love-process. we do not love for its health benefits alone, but it is a nice side effect. to invoke an alternate stage: in masada, the defensive line shatters once the offense kills itself. love is, in ontologic sense, a suicide. davis writes this requiem aeternam d/seo, “love is the very process of jettisoning a secure place of power…In sum, love is made love by risking the very possibility of subjectivity” (ibid, 116). the subject metes her demise in face of otherness. the judgment that sought to keep her separate shall not pass.

we can think of the truth event to call us to process our freedom, to usher in disappointment. but the disappointment is not the truth. zizek writes, a “true event emerges out of the “void”…BUT event “dies” with the very exterior gaze (//paul’s new moment// MS 154). But let this dying not presume a Kantian in-itself that is untouched. Through its witness, our testimony and martyrdom, the event is subjectivization–a continual death and resurrection. our truth is in movement.

disappointment is a question of effability, our cosmic game of telephone. “i can never truly express my thought” does not neccessarily lead to “you will never understand what i mean.” we operate in systems of shared space (this is physical and metaphysical). that our epistemology must needs be decentered does not 1) fold to new imposition of right, nor 2) cloak interrelation with defeatism (as though we contend with an unreachable in-itself to communication). it is not an illusion that “like minds” share more intimate space. we can reach and be reached. persisting to decenter, resisting the totem is how we keep the revolutionary moment (our life of grace and resurrection) alive. in spite of disappointment, we are beautifully free. let us awaken to the frustration that is free and in reach.

is rupture like rapture? qua eschatology, zizek asserts, “The naming of the truth-event is “empty” precisely insofar as it refers to the fullness yet to come” (//pnm// MS 147). but this too implies an in-itself, when we really lie beyond.  naming fails, as the yet to come is always our emptying. yet kenosis lets impossibility in with a smile.  this impossibility, congenially, is in davis’ terms, an “ontology that is always incomplete and yet never nonexistent” (ibid, 33). to let it in is risk, but not from lack; we risk together an inevitably reoccurring process of frustration in regards to our naming in the unfolding impossible. let our smiles be like furrowed brows

"the bodies of live men do not behave the same way" artaud

//our comimplication//
how can time be ontological, in the sense that the time afforded/accorded one being distinguishes it from an other,
if becoming is time less?

is it possible that our life-force is not one to be explained? like faith, unable to be couched in universals. but i suppose you think this to be avoidance.

an epistemological agency-aphilia is not the only humanism. there is a humanism that relishes the dischordant eruptions and ever-flowing impossibly mapped exigencies of life. of a life that crashes in upon the so-called agent; the agent is in flux always. like the humanism of the poets, who use/intend language it is true, but they are not masters of language (nor dominated by it). the ontological implication of their devilish power is in its interchange with its audience, the verberation and resonance which is always more than an echo. there is accident in craft and interpretation, which can rupture the isolate placidity of narcissus’ pool–i.e. autonomy, intentionality, self-awareness. exigency is from exigere–to drive out, demand. the ontologically exigent aspect of our living demands more than our stories of forethought and hindsight…in other words, our self-authorship. it drives these island-epistemes (even granted island-ontologies) out at the delimitation of debate and decision and act, which ironically are the sites of both radical singularity and complex unification. this is how subjects constitute subjects. impossibly,

agency is epistemic, and enforces the division between decision and act, telling and living. and when is agency not sutured on to existence, when–as sartre argues in //nausea//, “Existence is not something which lets itself be thought from a distance: it must invade you suddenly…”

this is how performance is a tricky play on agency. in the will there is no rehearsal.  for examples, consumption, control–these are two sides to the same coin (presumption of given set of options as staging the demonstration of our will, which forces our agency–whatever this be–to atrophy in a post-modern suspicion that overshadows the act itself as ever intentional. intention is a reflection of the master’s discourse, qua moored ego.) far from the manifestation of agency it is often conceived to be, consumerism is instead the cancellation–through deferment–of agency itself. this is how thoughts of agents and their sea lose cogency in the ironical frame of the postmodern outlook–that is, once agency itself is under suspicion as agents subjectivize only by prostituting themselves/turning themselves into slaves with no and limited choice. but, again, let us not confuse the inundation of the lie with the nonexistence of the truth.

meanings, motives are “attached” but not implicit to our behavior. they are an after-thought (post-ontological). now these things bear ontological significance, as they mark us and our living…but are not self-constiutive, autochthonous. we are not born like athena, out of the head of the father-king. beyond hierarchy, (that is, questions about which came first), we can think toward coimplication. true coimplication, intersubjectivity can incorporate the ontological status of both agents and structures separately instantiated, but also ever-woven together in a way that obliterates their delimitation. interpersonal relations are anything but mundane. in this way, interpersonal relations is our key. and they imbibe much more than our auspices of agency (ie otherness in a lawless real).

steadily vanishing

but agency resists the story as will. our will to act is divergent from our concept of this will’s intention. From Hegel’s discussion of notion and force in //the phenomenology of spirit// para 136., we find that notion sustains difference in thought only, as “vanishing moments” of the universal medium of force. this flow exists unmapped and thus it is our inevitable cartography that bears the cross, the paradoxical selftransformation and selflimitation as moments in flow. that is why we must embrace a wholly/holy relational ontology of structure and agent. together we are not trapped, but vanishing. to a humanism of vanishing moments.

the embrace of impossibility is not an irony. for with irony, one still holds fast to some frame of referential mastery. the deconstructionist presumption that one is denied now what is not present…this furthers the either/or. with complementarity, we get both at the same time. evaluation and discernability–that is, our interpretation of meaning via difference, that one word/concept is NOT another–does not imply space from one to another, but an inbetween. we must muddy the borders. disarm the artillery of the barrage. i perpetually frustrate my desire for me to share “here” with another. but our touching is the very inbetween that throws us past irony and into the fundamentally impossible. bill hicks notes, “fundamentalism is a loss of irony.” i want to treat living and loving fundamentally. without a structure delimiting for me the possible and im-possible. this is the risk to subject if such is only the possibly controlled. for resurrection is not a myth for the self. as in, i resurrect the self. “self’ is already a criminal hung dead upon some cross.

and it is you who is impossible. but this evaluation is not hiding a disappointment.

find the audio programme at this feinted spot of place —-> psycho

–
we are in a crisis point. waiting for godot. until he comes, he never comes. like in kafka’s doorkeeper parable, astride the door we dream to enter, waiting for permission to cross the threshold. this door is for us; permission will never come. we are looking for a release of the burden of subjectivity, “condemned to live diminished lives,” as small men. here, the analyst is the key to this closure and its opening.

as subjects, we are the effects of signification. laurent notes that the subject is “beyond forgiveness” with nothing more to say. where the subject cannot re-present, in the hole, the rim, beyond forgiveness, there she is. this reminds me of sk’s abraham, a knight who should be tried for murder but suspends himself beyond the ethical matters of forgiveness; abraham is rendered silent in his faith. might analysis take us to a place of faith.

a blown mind,

the dreamer, dreamed

–unconscious–
- the dreamer is the dream. but psychoanalysis is to take us beyond the politics of the dream to the politics of desire. there is no world beyond the word; no outside of speech. but linguistics has a slight grip on unconscious; AND but we find unconscious through discourse. the unconscious appears when the subject re-presents representation of what/where it lacks. the unconscious is not equivalent to meaning; it is impossible to say.

what does it mean to speak? especially when the world in its real is impossible to know. how do we use a grammar of what cannot be written? let us take heart recalling the arguments of wittgenstein and russell, witt highlighting–through poetry and passion–the failure of mathematics and mappings, the lack reasserted by positivism. how do we hear the unconscious? we are not listening for meaning; no, the unconscious appears as though coming sideways, through repetition. in listening, we cannot nurture the meaning that arrogantly strides to greet us at the front.

psychoanalysis seems to espouse that human life is a struggle…we live as a divided subject and subjectivity is opaque to itself. using the vocabulary of lalangue–our shared community of an uncodified “language” that is also radically particular to the relationship of analyst-analysand, a lovers’ discourse prior to the dogma and rite of saussurian linguistics–this is how we hope to speak the same language.

–process– (gaze, voice)
- laurent critiques the father of his father. in freudian analysis, the analysand already knew what they were supposed to say–the tropes were there, these universal axioms of interpretation. there was no break-through effect. it is through the lacanian orientation, the resistance of the analyst, from the subject, whereby one learns better from failures than successes. to topple a rigid and idealist position, make interpretation transparent. the knowledge of psychoanalysis is not an exposed knowledge; it arises out of treatment (via the gaze, the voice). brousse urges that you must be upside-down during the session saying, this treatment concerns flesh and bones, not hermeneutics. but hermeneutics could be sartrean, not simply gadamer. that is, is this dismissal of hermeneutics a fear–asserted as the Big Other–of the public language that orients speech always (for gadamer, i.e horizons and embeddedness). we might instead think of a hermeneutics of private language, that is, expression as a radical singularity.

in analysis, the analysand invents his own solution. soleim notes that the process of self-authorization is the same structure of suicide. there is a good to anxiety, as you wake and and are marked; but also a bad anxiety that is still waiting for the void to speak. all the analysts i spoke with argued that one needs orientation. a priest. they expressed a fear of dilution. but what of the way in which all expression (though a failure) is revelatory…in its asymptotic function. may we celebrate the failure that is the incapacity of linking knowledge to a mastery. to further topple the totem to hierarchy, a knowledge that is earned, might we reconfigure the analyst-analysand relationship as any and all of a subject and her others? might a true subversion of master’s discourse lie outside of the order of credentialism and capital?

the hole of the play

the analyst is resisting identification; in a sense, she is withholding the object and not substantiating the analysands’s identification with her (analyst) as the subject who is supposed to know. though analysis might begin with questions like, who is the controller, it moves toward a “point of passage.” the pass occurs when the analysand, the subject, no longer believes in his analyst…he has some thing to say and do. self-authorized. the desire of the analyst brings her to try to transmit some thing. the subject supposed to know disappears; is this aufhebung, whereby we move beyond the threshold?

price calls the analyst the lecton to position of unconscious. this word, lecton, is what can be said. the third term (o holy triptych) of the signifer-signified relation. it is almost signified, but more accessible. in this capable, easy expression, the analyst conveys interpretation and construction. this interpretation never ends at the level of meaning. but i do not yet understand what it is that the analyst offers. in short, she works to de-nurture meaning. often using the cut, the short session, a surprise in order to subvert the master’s order.

it was repeated to me by many analysand’s almost hysterically, that is, to reveal its own untruth in its insistence, that the analyst cannot be in love with the analysand. is the analyst then a pervert: one who looks, but does not touch? isn’t this kind of renunciation a resignation? (i am not clear on the level of renunciation proffered by lacan. he ends his seminar eleven to call for the liquidation of transference (267).) certainly an ethics of joi is present, to be developed. and it is from within the anxiety, this is how we must find the space to invent…to break the domineering and purportedly objective–objet-ifying–signifying chain. thus psychoanalysis unfolds to thwart the logic of capitalism!

–symptom– (drive, other)
-laurent describes the symptom as reduced to that which cannot be changed; incurable, that which is escaping you. the symptom is at times difficult to ascertain, always constituted by a formal envelope. like “the purloined letter,” it is related to a hiddenness that is in full view. symptoms are obstacles which impede the transmission of a message; obstacles that create loopholes. similar to poe’s letter, we have an awareness of the symptom due to the queen hiding it. after this revelation, it is its visibility that keeps it hidden. this is like the holes that are present in our language which reveals. the symptom was explained variously as a signifier without meaning, and the frame of the analytical experience. the curriculum chair of the nyc psychoanalytic institute exhorted our audience to conceive of a copernican/kantian turn: we must fit the world to our symptom, not the symptom to our world. psychoanalysis might offer the treatment…to expose that it is through the object that your partner becomes your symptom.

"wonderful images" cf ayerza

–semblance–
- lacan teaches, there is no sexual rapport. gender is a semblance. “one receives from the other a mask of skin,” the paper tyger that highlights the empty place that the objet fills. sexuality is the result of a primary substitution…is gender just once of many semblant ids? does it have a more fundamental implication? given an unrelationality among subjects, our relation (if socalled incorrectly) is a relation of substitution, of subject with objet (a void wherein object-partner–actually, an impossibly singular subject–is en placed). but this objet is not always concrete; enter, objet petit a.

the subject is related to objet a; psychoanalysis is to investigate how the partner comes up as the substitute (objet). herein lies the importance of blending the subsitute! cf my “sugar on the tongue”. so that this does not dampen the timbre of loving, make it less romantic, un-enjoyable. we instead recognize the subject-partner as objet a as excess; that is, the objet a is the real partner of the subject. we awaken beyond forgiveness as we confront our connectedness as excess.

–jouissance–
- for lacan, jouissance seems to be a mixture of enjoiment and discontent. it is the grasping, trapping of semblance. and he assembles joi into two:
- female jouissance (is it abuse?)
one wants to make of partner an object of a mad, intense love. it is erotomaniacal. it is process which laurent relates to how de beauvoir characterizes woman at the conclusion of //second sex//. this is almost more hazardous, calling female jouissance a historical symptom…which of course maps genitalia onto joi…(whereby the forced conditions of history are incorporated into subjectivization)…). in his brilliant summary he might confuse the lacanian project to sever the semblance from physiology–as there is no sexual relation, there is no inducement by genitalia to strive for a female, male jouissance. at the conclusion of //the second sex// we find that women must induce men to speak of them. women actualize as void, mystique; they want their lover to speak the right spot. laurent calls this a defamation (dit-fama –reputation) et (dit-femme)). this joi is not narcissistic, but echoing. feminine jouissance is after the other. and, so, is it also a paradigm of abuse: the other is unknown, misspoken, a phantasy; this joi is in love with failure.

- male jouissance (is it prison?)
the masculine/phallic jouissance is fetishistic. it describes the narcissitic position, an identification with the phallus that one “knows” to have. this joi is after the drive (an asymptote of object while desiring its (w)hole). is this not the logic of capitalism? the intensity that is never resolved, self-perpetuating loss? this joi seems to me an inscription, a jail, as though incarcerated.

some asked me if i wished for a neologism. i question, if lacan does not mean strictly female, male to map to the joys, why are we using these words? if phallus has nothing to do with genitalia, then why not call it the conch? do we not tend to replicate oppressive reactionary associations, the illusion, with our language? to what extent must we maintain a relation to the master’s discourse to subvert it? our signifiers have to catch up with what society is doing. and i wish for identity of lack to be un sexed.

androgynous nude

laurent argues, “it is impossible not to define two positions of jouissance.” but may this two lead a way to open, to “help subjects to find their way in more subtle construction.” he explains the joy-dyad as the divide between signifiers// no signifiers. if this is the divide, why not change the prison/paradigm of male/female…which tricks toward a mapping en flesh?

–transference–
- of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanlaysis that lacan enumerates, transference–this relationship that develops between the analyst and analysand–is the most confusing. is it love? brousse tells me that it is the love that i silence always. what a horrible play on loving.

in psychoanalysis we subvert the master’s discourse in the cut-the silence, to let the analysand hear her unconscious via echo. may be i am wrong to read such a disymmetrical position of analyst-analysand. laurent argues that the relationship is, in fact, egalitarian in the sense that both others and big Others are on the same side of the unconscious. but i fear that analysis is the method of unrequited love.

–love–
- love addresses itself to an other; it is at rest with the semblance. we hope to move toward a dignified love, which includes jouissance and fidelity. a dignified love is the articulation of the madness at stake in my relation to you, other. love escapes incarceration. recall de beauvoir’s staging in //the ethics of ambiguity//, love is loving the freedom in and of an other. may we strive to find a partner to shift from a fixation on false holes (the discourse of mastery that silences) to real holes.

what is the relationship between drive and symptom (if there is no total sexual drive, it is a symptom)? what are our ethics of jouissance? they are there to be developed.

is there some thing to the avowal? like a confession to a priest? how does realization and its expression not simply reify mein ego? let psychoanalysis not simply be this resurgence of ego. (is it coincidence that the analysts loved to chew gum–a ritual for a renewed mastery over a dead signifiying chain?)

is aufhebung the utopia that psychoanalysis is not? does it find itself instantiating two, a dual, a duel, to maintain a process of subversion (that is, that which requires opposition to overcome)?

in analysis we find the love that i silence always. what kind of silence is this? laurent offers that science also establishes a silence in the heavens. but, we do not seek this stillness. our real is lawless.

notes in undertaking an analysis that is willing to risk love. on both sides.

–
prior to attending this pulsation, i met with a friend in a studio to discuss some things, including technology and its entrance/intrusion into education. to listen, click here —-> education  this is passed/past due.

densely pulse

transform your sight into sound, after a click –> anew

“A singularity, according to the general theory of relativity, is an infinitely small, infinitely dense and hot point where the curvature of space-time and gravitational forces become infinite.

I imagined this singularity to be a small, black orb. Shortly, before the Big Bang occurred, I imagined the orb to cycle through what I call pulsations: a process in which the singularity would begin to grow in size but, due to its immense gravity, would eventually return to its initial state. With each successive pulsation the singularity becomes larger and larger and the process takes longer and longer. I imagined this singularity to have reached a critical mass at which point its gravitational force becomes too weak to keep itself together which in turn, results in the Big Bang.”
-alvarez, on his composition, “in the beginning”

renew, to do again, a-new. to dredge
so that we might not set ourselves to secure faustian commission.
to trade it for a-

hegel writes that we find “abstract form ready-made” (Phenom 19). we draw away from our grounds. let this movement lead us at times away from our selves, but not trouble to take us away from our others. along with hegel’s //phenomenology//, may our life’s work, activity unfold to reclaim fullness and fervor from arresting doubt. between the hammers of repetition and accident–that is what seems to be a plan and no plan at all–our sense loses sense. may we seek it out still. without sense we lose each other, a silence settles the resignation of human expression to utter failure. we cannot fear failure (make it utterly); else we lose what is truly divine in our living–the relation between. against defeat, even in humility and humor!, we are charged to renew. in our anewing, we honor the plasticity of the speculative, to actualize. to create anew of the ready-made because “the power of Spirit is only as great as its expression” (Phenom, 6).

modernist's still/stijl

we may follow modernism so far, ultimately toward its own dissolution. but the lovers of structure, they were makers anew, and their at times egregious rite can still highlight for us the (dis)juncture of transcendence and immanence, when life, love abuts law, when plan embraces and at least does not fear accident. like apollinaire’s “il pleut,” we hear the maddening pitterpatter and are torn–the play of o so many shadows–may we “listen to the fall of all the perpendiculars of your existence.” and we begin anew.

-the trial of socrates-
philosophy is a quest. a love of wisdom, which is never closed. it is a some times difficult path–in plato’s allegory…republic bk 7…we are trapped, chained below to watch the shadows on the wall. we think these shadows to be real. we are chained, we know nothing else. and then one frees. to see anew, in light, is difficult. even painful. but then glorious. we wish to share our vision and movement. we descend again to go back for our others…
-in his allegory, plato warns us that the enlightened–who has broken his chains–must descend again into the cave of shadows to help his fellows still chained. and that they will not necessarily welcome the new arrival with open arms. instead of an invitation to anew life, the broken chain might appear to be a burden/demand. the chained gang judges foolishness, error harshly; and so they must not be foolish. can not error.
-from the republic: another thought: “remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are…from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh”
-well, let us be ready to laugh, but not exercise such exactitude in our system of pointing that we poke a body to death

and socrates, in his (un) apology, argues for his own death sentence.
…basics, oracle notes socrates to be wisest person. incredulous, he travels to so-called wise people, finds they are not wise, gets them angry while he presents this truth…realizes the oracle to mean that wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.
- he says of his conviction, “I have been convicted for a lack–not of arguments…but of bold-faced shamelessness and for being unwilling to say the sorts of things to you you’d have been pleased to hear” (apology, 38d)
- what is the nature of his lack?
- wisdom is for socrates a knowing that we don’t know.
- he is convicted for a lack, so why does he die with knowledge? despite many efforts to break him out, socrates stays to drink to his death.

the law wins when we accept our punishment without violence. this is not to suggest physical violence; theoretical violence is our movement, our protest of death, our renewal. as though our act of sense–like socrates staying in his jail cell–could be interpreted by the foul conscience with its weight to move the chains…the death that plato’s //republic// allegory warns of is not to encourage us to rush headlong into it…our quest is contingent upon us living to breathe truth with others!
-i know that i don’t know. if i die for knowing that i don’t know, i will be good. and should i be convicted for a lack, i hope to continue, unknowing, for as long as i can, even at the expense of the unjust order whose judgment saw fit to punish me for lacking.
let us see our escape not as cowardly, but as our gift, a renewal.
i don’t want to die but in vain.

the search for meaning might lead us from truth

why does socrates stay to die?
is it a problem with his grasp on living, its form?
- from timaeus, we find form to affix a category to a raw experience: “the accounts we give of things have the same character as the subjects they set forth” (sect 29b). our very articulation deepens the shades of subjective materiality…what we interpret is real. our designations matter (e.g duchamp and art). and these designations are locked in a tense dance with what is unformed. let these tents, this tension not lead us to a bad dealmaking–to supplant tension with the salve of organization, categorization, difference and structure–these are yokes that at first glimpse appear to be helpful tools.

socrates will stay to face death for his beliefs–he will die knowing that he knows…that, for example, that the city/state would topple if he were to disobey his father, who cared for him, and whom he agreed to live with… (cf Crito)
- let us not treat life so cruelly. we are here and we get it wrong! your end will come, mortal; let it be in vain!

socrates’ death casts a pall over the tradition of western philosophy: it is a haunting reminder. that love is cruxcified.

when we love, love truly, depossessively, uninterestedly, openly, we lose fear.

socrates suggests the fear of death to be a marker of a wisdom that is misconceived.
- “You see, fearing death…is nothing other than thinking one is wise when one isn’t.” (Apology, 29 a)
- i tend to fear death most when i am unhappy. sadness is related to fear; i suppose sadness, too, is related to a false sense of wisdom…melancholy is o so fixed upon her pursuits, her attention unwavering, smothering, despotic.

might it be a sadness that excites fear? when i feel the ache, anxiety increases…
and this implies that in love there is no sadness…can this be so? in true love–not these false ads to loving, mis-in-formed…via law, empty ritual, should/ought pre- and proscription…
in true loving there is no “wronging” an other. and lack changes phase to emit its beautiful corona…as the undetermined

-the dream dared-

how dreaming and abstract art pull us out of a routinized lockstep of expression and interpretation, to rekindle life anew.
-we forget and we recreate/recount; we might see these modes as mistakes…challenges to an exactitude, but they are significant to the real…the interplay of real and imaginary, of our belief and the symbols we enplace to worship.
-we are what we dream. our dreaming mind is not a separate mind from my waking one, it is a collage work of what we live. the idea of collage maintains difference…for there is no collage without juxtaposition. we feel the pressure from inevitable irrational juxtaposition which results from the spreading contagion of difference. which is only a disease if we can no longer see how there is also a sameness, no border.
- “what is real” depends on our belief and interpretation. this is real and imaginary.
- the way that our experience–which is not just empirical, but also mystical and ineffable–transforms what is; for, if the real is not changed/impacted from our belief in the real, than our lives are futile. we essentially live in a motion picture–simply existing to be presented with a separate moving show. this is a problem…a resignation to the dream machine. to the fetish.
- this is the way that there are hiding spaces in our looking

"glimpses" a ghostly presence

-real v unreal is pervert’s view from the fence-
we often associate perversion with the gaze, as one is stuck to look and not live one’s imaginings. look but do not touch. (this is a perpendicular of another sort.) and recall apollinaire asks we let them fall.

there is a discourse that treats abstract art and dreams as the unreal (the difference that spreads between real and unreal; between un re solved space and figuration, dreams and waking life). In //Interpretation of Dreams// freud argues that dreams are not meaningless; they bear on our waking moments; dreams are complex; dreams are wish fulfillments. we forget dreams, they are “mutilated by the untrustworthiness of our memory” (550). we also recreate our dreams, we have a tendency to find to ascribe meaning, complete the incomplete sign…
-non-freudian practitioners take this reconstruction (forgetting, recreating) to be arbitrary and misleading. but freud argues that this reconstruction, this forgetting is part of the revelatory unfolding of our unconscious, through consciousness.
-to lie, reconstruct…is not necessarily a nefarious manipulation, for we lie at each and every telling of event. we may never put in words what just happened, exactly. we may simply offer a (re)semblance. our editing is indicative of our mind at work, at play. freud quotes heine in a footnote to say, “Rarely have you understood me, and rarely too have I understood you. Not until we both found ourselves in the mud did we promptly understand each other.” (552, quoted from Heine in //Interpretation of Dreams//).

our gait is clumsy, we make mistakes. this is the case even without some one to tell me. wrong exists, and some times i am its cohort. we are in the mire. we lift ourselves toward brilliant heights, we root around in pleasant tactility. it is all a part.

one corinth 6:19-20

“Isn’t it time that we lovingly free ourselves
from the beloved and stand it, although we tremble.
as the arrow stands the bowstring, tense to be more than itself?
for abiding is nowhere…

could we exist without them? [earthly things] is the legend in vain?
that once in the lamentation for linos, the daring
first music pierced the barren numbness, and only
then in frigtened space, which an almost godlike youth
suddenly forsook forever, the void began to feel
that vibration which now enraptures, consoles, and helps us?”

rilke, “first elegy,” duino elegies

–
“the shadow
of the objet rearing up became
the object”

cocteau, “crucifixion”

–

our bodies are a strange limit that is not always limit but a condition for possibility in sense. ever-changing (even in death) our bodies expand and decay in a sensible space which provides ground for our immateriality and infinitude to manifest. as in all dangerous liaisons, including this bodily material and immaterial expression, its intensity peaks mediating our relationship inbetween–which at times appears to only fallaciously persist in contradiction. at once the site of the formal unfolding of self and consciousness and will that is ever-exceeding its identification as a being unthinkably accidental and unprecedented. and the tenuous grasp of the breath that it needs to continue working. it is unwitting and weak. and we underestimate our strength in our beautiful dance on the tight rope. dangling without steady footing, our bodies lead us into our meetings with the divine. it is through our bodies that we puncture the illusion of an uninterrupted ego-ideal, an otherness not coimplicated but rooted in me. it is through our touch and material connection that we find the life that resists a death by objectification. this temple, the body, is our worship space for love.

shall we gather at the river? click —>  temple   <—- for a two-hour audio service.

–

our temple is not a marketplace.*

how do we purify our worship space?
we must break the ideal vision of otherness and probe deeper than the simple surface of flesh. we will find divinity in our connectedness.

a brok -en/ered temple

-faust’s body-

accustoming to any ritual…creates a community of expression a pattern of signification of that expression. through our ritual subjectivization through commodity exchange, we have become used to treating the body as saleable merchandise. how dangerously the words of men, misunderstood, create ontological traps that trick us into treachery against our selves and our gods (our others).

faust’s body is the body for sale. wagered.
faust is in love. what is the significance of his deal?

in a contract he sanctions his restlessness, “for restless activity proves a man.” (ll 1759)

faust is in love, this striving without satisfaction, a seat close enough to infinitude–configured incorrectly as a stopping–eludes him. and he is tired. he laments failure and sets to drink. enter mephisto. faust is weak. he wants strength to face failure. he signs a contract to to sanction his curse of love’s consummations (ll.1604). a pact to let him loose his passions. this deal consecrates his bad luck to criticize until the derided die. he bets his life that he will never find a moment that he wishes will abide.

faust is confused. his strivings are unending. the wish for each moment to abide is not a failure when the moment does not. this is the lack and abundance that finds us following our breath. he wishes to lose himself, calling “let my own self grow into theirs unfettered, till as they are, at last i, too, am shattered.” (11 1774-1775). he is confused as to his power. to transform and continue, to loose his passions. he seeks instead a sensible power in knowledge, sciens, via contract. he wants authorization for his inability to be satisfied. to impel him beyond stagnation. he fears the peak will prove his master.

his bet belies his cynicism for joy. as “the word dies when we seize the pen” (ll.1728). faust’s worship is true, he believes in infinite love; but his temple is prostituted, sold, in cynicism. failure is so pervasive. the bet is that he won’t feel awe, excstasy. but then he approaches the coffin.

“apparently we were bored with consciousness. well, we won’t be bored any longer!” (celine, //journey to the end of the night//). do we create conflict in order to stave off inactivity?

with whom do we wager?

faust offers “as i grow stagnant I shall be a slave whether or not to any one indebted.” (ll1710-1711). faust is afraid of slowing down. so he asks the devil to tempt him to slow down. he is an ardent believer, he does not think that the devil will tempt him adequately; he bets his life. he expresses his hatred of his life, but this is part of the critical move–that negates, like mephisto…”the spirit that negates” (ll. 1338). he wishes to reach peace. but he does not wish to be a slave. it is when he realizes that his position of mastery is in fact enslavement that he is saved.

in light of our certain death, are our ethics meaningful? faust is saved regardless of his contract. the future is always unknown and undefined. the truth does not need proof and cannot be disproven. “whether or not,” our debt is inconsequential…

let us NOT construe the terms of this wager to validate eternal return.
faust wagers he will never be content to take this moment now for every moment, his striving to cease. (//faust// l. 1700) to say, “verweile,” abide, is not to call come back. his bet is to love as though it is our last moment. it is eschatological not Wiederkehr/recurrence. to think it could eternally return is to swell in the justificatory scheme of transcendent meaning…that i might experience this very moment again and bear it and love it…
instead, as eschatological, this moment is accidental and you will never live it again. and so you wish for it to stay within your grasp.

we pawn off this difficult grasp–that is, the beauty and weakness of our moments–for a simple sensible one.

we are lost to each other in our surface immersion.

doin time for money?

-diotima’s body-

we share a faustian confusion with value.

how we value things in relation to a third term is not necessarily metaphysically harmful unless this relation is forced. any durress casts suspicion on the entire enterprise of valuation–it verily induces a culture of non-belief! when all is forcibly reduced to the same…law, value ($), time/pace of speed…this ignores the variation of life.

ours is a culture that conditions a fairness as treating every one the same. but we honor this truly by treating all with freedom to find treatment as they like. any prescription of justice that relies on a forcible reduction to a third term of meaning in order for it to be coherent wagers that otherness is a position that can in some sets be resolved entirely. for example, even the teleologically quixotic rawlsian liberals who say that justice is helping the least well off, assume a universalizable determination–a universal set of definitions–of “worse off.”

but love is not reduction, it is an opening, a gift not a regulation. the problem with our value and flesh…is it reduced to one flat surface.

diotima’s body is full of various concavities and espouses a love in between. a loving of the beautiful in all bodies. make contact. all is more and less than what you have imagined.

we find the temple wanting. how do we find the lack that has us need? in plenitude of belovedness, how do we leap again into the wager of loving? it is through the body, our contact, when i realize my limit. when i look at your face i see my death. but that is real. i need you to be real.

why do we share immortality in connectedness? why does the body demand this?

it is the irruption of the reflection in the pool, and the wake that carries on. beyond the stone thrown. so for once throw the first stone.

diotima notes that we achieve immortality in mortality through our contact. which breaks the surface. disturbs it like waves ransacking the solid serenity of any pond. diotima’s body is shared. jump in!

it is a shame not to love the beauty in all bodies. all bodies that can help create some waves in the pool.
we are ashamed as culture assails the culmination of our loving.

-uninterested love and the boundless body-

how to resist the particularization of love, the hierarchized schema, and other unknown terms the ordering, the hegemon. how do i love all the same when facing a body which is limited in space?

and how with this body facing this body can i love at all, if love is depossessive. am i to forget that you and i are in possession of material?

the body is paradoxical. two beliefs in one form, that i live beyond my frame, that my frame will perish with me to certain extents trapped inside.

it is in this paradox we find the blur of multiplicity, the movement that brings our love beyond frame, en frame. we need our bodies to live beyond our bodies. elsewise we lose our bodies to hegemon, figured as ground, as principle, as hole, as whole, as any one and many of things figured, that is, to death.

we lose sight of the double vision which is perfect sight.

your body, this wholly, holy, hole-y material is the resistance to tyranny and oppression! to a solitary petit mort!

warning, in our bodies we tend to forget that we play multiple games with an other.

“this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing” and so says diotima, we despise it.

and so we share immortality in our connectedness..that is we can give birth to beauty and the good together…yet we must surpass the impossible demand of our bodies, to stay grounded located particular.

flesh pollutes our idea of beauty only if we treat this flesh as the closure that it is not. if we collapse you to your (sur)face. but, flesh is more than an at times bedazzling cover. it is the material in which our otherness asserts itself.

are we to fear the material that irrupts our mathemes?

hegel writes that lovers seek to annul the distinction, the separable element, our flesh, in “love”

thus, “shame” or “the raging of love against [exclusive] individuality”…”enters only through the recollection of the body.” (love fragment). but i am forced to remember/recollect, that is to collect again! your body as it is lost in this culture of surface worship. can we cast the money changers out of our temple?

the prison from which i am afraid to reach

whereas our flesh itself, our divine material, lets us alight beyond it as mere barrier/difference, to the instantiation of lack itself…that which is not us and propels us to search for us.

this implication, that the body is a corruption, leads us to an inordinate feeling of guilt and dismay. our immanence is a difficulty, a cross of the transcendent, but it IS. and in it is beauty and good. “the ultimate goal of the activity of Eros is a transcendent “possession” of the eidos of Beauty but the means toward this involves an engendering upon the visible modes of beauty.” (cavalier, on //symposium//) love must root upon the ground. i do not believe that we are all united in struggle, like some. we only struggle when we deny love.

do we struggle in/out of love?
real love is happiness, but what when real love abuts a structure bent on its (love’s) destruction? Hegel notes we do feel ashamed…

beyond the other, what of the burdens that are impositions of the big other?

(that you enplace a demand when there is none)

as pure love is not common, our others will often see pure love as though it is not…through abused/ing eyes.

does the invitation imply that its refusal is something that rejects an attempt to obtain some thing? thereby the offer itself is impure love? e.g. why’d you have to offer?

i do not think so, but why

and an other easily interprets invitation in this way. in light of duty at play.

how does one welcome and open not create the burdensome demand on others to come and share? that is, how does the posture/process of pure love (openness, welcoming) not in itself tend to lead an other–so skilled in the perspectives of duty and law–this is impure love–to feel threatened? the lover appears to then present an infinite demand

but let us remember the possibility that the demand itself is not real, it is rooted in an other’s disbelief, doubt, displacement–

that a gift does not need sacrifice.

we all want too much from each other. but this wanting need not be possessive, but a part of striving itself. too much, too much. but this excess is our very living breath. we must learn not to fear excess. and to do what we think good in spite of failure and shame.

let us pray

-temple persistence-
our flesh is the persistent separable element, which causes a difficulty to loving. and so how do we triumph the flesh? an unfleshed love is too dematerial, i am in love with imago, ideal; and a love en flesh is often too material, i am infatuated with a dead object.

if we let flesh exist as it is, that is in constant motion (we are decaying, every breath is closer to death)…then flesh could be our temple.

hyperion, in love with diotima, predicts their trial, “I see how it must end. the rudder has dropped into the tide and the ship, like a child caught by the feet, is seized and flung against the cliffs.”

-holderlin, //hyperion//

what a trying temple. our goal is that it be plastic.**

love is believing in spite of all the evidence.
the proof that contradicts itself.
when i confront you in an immersion,

i slip into the pool past your reflection. i lose weight. though underwater i hold my breath, i am lost. and i remember the surface.

from underneath, immersed in a sea, recollection is a mercy. not a limit.

let us pray.
–
* cf john 2: 13-16, for the biblical denouncement of commercializing the temple
** cf para. 64, p.39 in hegel, //phenomenology of spirit//.