a fictive trinket

I can only speak in one tone. My voice, the texture and patterns of my words, are all likely to fall out of my brain in a stifling repetition. My writing has the sad affect of an undelivered speech—it echoes in the ears of a deaf listener as if it were infinitely paused in the down surge of a tirade. For my sister, Angeline, I am sorry that she could not hear me, and only saw my face that was filled with shallow expressions of nervous laughs, of a twisted face in tears, and of my gaping mouth full of silent noise.

Angeline was not born deaf. I remember sitting on the floor of our living room inBarberton,Ohiowith her, building a house with large cardboard blocks. I remember Mom as well. There is no use in calling her “mother” or “our mother,” since we never talked about her to anyone. Before my little sister was born it was my third birthday. There was a big snowstorm and the party was cancelled. Mom had gotten me a vast sea-cake, blue and green frosting swirled into a Laguna for the Little Mermaid. I don’t remember if she turned out the lights or if they were blacked out from the March wind. I remember the glow of the candle across the blue sugar. I felt her face shining into me. I remember that she had punished me for sneaking out of my nap to see the balloon delivery that morning.

Air bubbles fill the serum bottles of my earliest memories, wounds without words, shadows with colors that still hide themselves, the watching eye that never came. I have not been shattered. I have twisted up around an iron tree. I have a selfish and forgotten smile on my face that builds my bailey in and for the years, the circular bridges of time that leads me everywhere without a teacher or a friend.

I saw her facing the windows out to the backyard and asked her if she was laughing or crying. I never got a response. She filled our lives out in swings of love and rage. She would go to lengths to force us up in our bedroom to fix a birthday surprise for us and take away all the balloons, suspend the patent leather shoes, and threaten our rights to play in the quiet of a snow storm. She was never aware of herself; now that I am older, I realize that I feel I have lived a lifetime of unspoken and unasked-for forgiveness. I have lived a life in a mind that is so different from my own and I am writing to recognize myself for the shadow I had so long imitated.

If Angeline had ever heard the sounds from her first emerging moments of consciousness, I often wish that they would be the spare and warm popping of our fireplace, marked into memory like a soft knife-carving into wood. But the trembling of voices, Angeline once told me, shook through the walls and the floors of the little house. She said that she never heard the “human sound” of John’s voice. And with this, I never knew to confuse coincidence for luck, or hate her for never hearing his words. I told her this, before she died, and she said “but you never had to feel them.”

In the shadows between eyelids, there may be another thousand worlds of cities. Cities of memory for the writer and for he who can see immense, rich things that wind and twist around each other into diaphanous spires. They are filled with an expansive rush of sky and laced into form with slender grace. Then, there are minds who wander effortlessly to the outer helm of the winter walk, to the undercut of an ancient ruddy bridge, packed with soft blue slate and clay. Whose every exposure to the void, the terrifying and cold apartment complexes, only strengthen the deep and rolling snow clouds that muffle all the screaming. Soothing thunder strikes the bedrock of the universe. I am just stuck on the bus with kids and gummy worms. I am falling away from myself…Foot steps fall over one another in supple carelessness and these worlds, these dreams and outer pathways spin around a tiny silver sphere. Each valence is a pathway, a rotation around a silver bell; the tingling hum of metals bent and whistling to each other pulses underneath the eyelids, and then shakes the fingers. But my eyes are always open, and the pulse of time—my days and months and webs of time—are gone before I have them. Adventure in the mind is suicide. I remain with my eyes open, slipping in a dirty city, offering a crooked celebration to moments counting down to work time, to my false lives, my hated hours, living as a slave to them. No master of my dreams, no sunburned afternoon in August rest, no day gone by well and truly, but as planned. And even the brother in my dreams, or my loved one, or those friends who I have lost in the thousandth winter of my short life, look on as if pained, doing little to unbend their sympathetic grimace. Doing little in their cages.

aversion to diversion

I graduated college last week. I started working. Now that structure has largely evaporated from my life, I am left with political sentiments, goals, and fields of critical inquiry without much a mode of organizing them. Not to mention, I confront all new possibilities of reading, studying, technical refinement with an increased apprehension for plunging into diversions. I have too many choices, as it is. And one might as well highlight that methodology, clarity, and ubiquitous engagement are not my strong suits. I must learn to learn when there is no seeming end to it. All that is well and good, perhaps it is a mere trifle of this “transitional period.” I have not written seriously in about a month. I have serious grammatical issues to work out, I must learn and refine methods of critical analysis in my interpretations of books and in my responses to critical works. I must learn my own language of critical engagement, and am determined to let go of all the gratuitous and vapid sign-posts that I used for so long. Borrowed language is a fraud.

Perhaps language has no original–I imagine words and letters blowing softly on the ground in yellow sunlight, ruffled gently under trees and in intersections on the edges of cities, rolling over one another with intangible delicacy, and crushing all hope for reflection in the spectator. I do imagine the endless sorrow with which Werther walked in the rolling valleys and quivered with the leaves, and feel my arms tighten under the pressure of the empty word. Left only with the phrase; I must abandon Werther for Geothe.

There is so much that I need to do, and so much of it must happen, as always, very slowly, and better than I have had occasion to execute in the past. I must become a better writer. I must learn how to research properly; I cannot make broad and sweeping claims as I was so anxious to do. I must re-take standardized tests that I used to be good at, but have since lost the patience to interpret. I must remind myself of the political struggle that is almost always buried beneath the “ostensible goal.” So much reading, and responding, and preparing.

I imagine my life, from time to time, and wish that there could be periods of isolated inquiry. I would learn about music and history and philosophy with all of my being. I might forget about time. I would perfect my French, rub-out the little marred tendencies in my English writing. I might even run a half-marathon instead of huffing through three miles of hap-hazard exercise. But time–that consciousness of passing time–forces me under the waves of self-conscious reflection. And my fear of failure pulls me into the muddy waters of indecision.

And I am reminded of Frederic in L’education sentimentale, and become tolerably disgusted with myself, flitting from drawing to writing, to oration. The education of sentiments, the sentimental education is not an education but the wanting of it, and I must persevere in spite of threatening storms.

images and sounds

The images and sounds of grass. The power that doesn’t rush up over an under but that rejects anything but the spontaneous organization. Non -organization and non-being. Non-objective being; the sight of God. What is the sight of God, linguistically? and doesn’t this linguistic sight, after all, blind us from what we really mean to say? The sight of God–the subject, perhaps the only subject, without anything else around it, surrounding it… it cannot be an object. God is not an object; God isn’t a problem for Deuleuze and Guattari. But it is a problem for me. And they are a problem for me.

The sight of God: that which comes into God’s field of vision (God’s breath of life, materiality even,) that isn’t solid or static. Always moving and without a core. Without a root. A floating network of off-shoots. Can we say that it’s floating? Surrounded by non-matter. The non-objective being cannot even take into account it’s outside; it is shell. There is no language of language–there is an enumeration of language. Multiplicities, submerge and emerge.

I’m looking at too many access points. I’m not God. The work talks about…

What is the work? These questions… the images and sounds, arresting me. Arresting me. Nothing can be said to the non-being, to the being, to the mind; all out of time. My footsteps are hitting the stairs. Out of time. Arresting me and the world that I want to change. In crude terms, “change,” not a slogan but a promise. A big “fuck you” to access points. Little wars waged on the premise of language without wanting to say it. A war on words, we can have those now on equal footing with a war on poverty. Images images images. All access, no command. A line of flight, an abstract machine, a line of thought. The images and sounds, displacing m–, displacing God.

The leaves of grass are rats. The rats of grass. The rats, not the thought of love but the core of hatred. Of gray and black, of swarming. Swarming displacement–an abandonment of something that cannot be named, that denies naming, the non-being. The unnamed non-being. Us, we, not alive or dead but awash in machinery. Images and sounds, sentiments in the key of F: flight for F. Find the mystery and do not take it ashore. There is no shore, no outside.

The death of trees. The death of root, and ground. The ground; do branches reach out to one another? The different trees, the picture, the image, the sound. Meaning, meaning, meaning, schizophrenia and capitalism. The trick of the book.

The self that isn’t washed away, not an image or a sound at least in first belief. It is belief that kills. Kills and in so doing supposes an image, a life. The real: the hope, the work. The trick of the book, production without a referent, the inside of the machine. The lie of the machine that is not a belief but the negation of belief. It’s a string of dots, the mesh of music, the mesh of dots on a line. A graph, a heart on a graph. Two-dimensional. The swarming of rats. Fear, the fear of fear. The clever smile on a teacher’s face. The face that you wake up to: the non-being. Non-objective being. Be precise, even in your imprecision. You, you. Images and sounds, walk over and around, reread. Take it with a grain of salt. The rhizome; the figment of the morning. The figment of the afternoon, time slipping, emerging later on as something you’d need to tell yourself. Enumeration, immanence. Immanence, the fear of fear. The slippery slope, the head-aches, the broken eyes that do not close. The eyes sowed open. The toxins that can’t be flushed away. The becoming. The becoming. The becoming. The becoming. My too objective subjectivity. Fixed in a flux of over-spell. Disillusion.

Becoming unto disillusion, and all the while we search for, underwater of,

the images

and sounds

the images

and sounds

in flight from winter birds and frozen in the ice.

paper birds, launch away-

We can always pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but are our feet in the shoes?

I keep thinking about the opening pages of Aesthetics and Politics and Lukacs’ subsequent response. There’s something fundamentally missing from his response because he fails to fully see what Bloch is saying. Subjects and impulses come up and re-index themselves at seemingly random moments: Lukacs’ response seems to say “and what does it matter if the topic of conversation isn’t grounded in the Realist Tradition?” But just the opposite is true. At the very moment when fascism was on the rise in the thirties, a renewed interest and reemergence of the Expressionists makes the most sense. It was a movement, in so many words and over-simplifications, of a desire to break out of a social reality and a condition that was intolerable for the subjective participant. And yet, this artistic experience is only possible authentic (in the imagistic sense) for that singularity. What Bloch’s use of the Expressionists signals, is that utopian impulses exist in the most oppressive ideological conditions and enterprises. Whether or not Bloch, himself, had this unspecific appreciation for the Expressionists, I highly doubt, since he frequently queued up the need for greater material integration of specific works into his critique. But then I think that this might have only been one way of addressing a critique whose sole purpose was to show Realism on the first valence.

The recurrence of a “utopian” image, or rather, the image that carries the latent desires of utopia within a full veil of ideological and social constraints that it cannot see, is a theme that Adorno’s letters to Benjamin picks up. He says of the collective image, that it was always a commodity fabrication and that the real objective point of reality for the collective is in its systematic subjective alienation (Aesthetics and Politics p.119). And on this point, I was reminded exactly of the Expressionists, for their systematic alienation from the authentic core of their own aesthetic production. Whether or not Expressionist art is conscious of this, is secondary…less than secondary, it seems to be necessary in order to produce a meaningful “Real” conception of the movement. Additionally, Bloch’s instance on the Expressionists’ desire to spontaneously break out of the material confines of capital (surely not a notion that Adorno would encourage) is itself indicative of the mythological implications of the image. But the its true import is of the dialectical nature of The Myth’s exposition throughout history.

For Adorno, the mythological image is that which nullifies the ideological and the utopian elements of its translation/comprehension. In a short of short-hand way, I think that there is even a case to be made for the Kantian-idealist status of art in mythologies, since they can never be anything better than Either/Or, both and neither. As my professor once said, it really is the limit of the Kantian argument (insofar as Practical reason is concerned).

But of course, in the aesthetic realm there is always more than practical reason. There must also be judgement. And in the case of the mythical image’s insistence on its status in the ideological: in fact, it is the greatest key to the ideological. Considering Bloch’s short opening piece, it is theoretically sound that he would choose such a topic for “debate”. This debate launches into the core of the utopian desires in an impossible ideological climate: and whatever the implications of the conversations, they were neither submerged into a quasi-historical narrative on good and bad art, but had everything to do with the modes of historical excavation and interpretation of a given impulse.

Red moon, blue sea, empty house

the hopeless and interminable feeling of artistic surges over in an expressive force, like the desire to speak to the boy who was left alone too long. left alone far too long and without a letter. the impression that stifles every refined word that i could drum up but haven’t learned, any project or open-road is closed-off by my idea of tomorrow’s hours, all-accounted and necessary, obligations and seasonal rifts. i wonder if tonight, the copper moon will cast a crooked shadow on a buckled sidewalk crack and let me see the trees and tiny snow flakes, burning against the full highland sky, heath freezing over like a weaving of icicles. and i could see stones moving in ghostly shapes, and what would it mean if i saw a face? a human face? this heavy and blunt despair falls away into the absurd gray hues of this computer screen and the wall opposite me and the person across the room, even shadows have lost their mystery–they wear the weight of bored and hunched shoulders.

i can only think by what i cannot say, i have no words that are mine and i don’t have the practice or precision to form them against the uniformity of a shaping knife. blind, surging spirit and feeling have spilled me out somewhere from first high, and now i spin a rabble of trash into glass, inviting others inside.

i still swell up like a bloated fish against the pitfalls of a well conditioned routine. everyday commonality is a phrase that means banality and my community has poisoned itself with false, fleeting dreams that are always smoking off glowing embers somewhere over the horizon–the romantic volcano would burn us in the street if we came too close to it. and oh, how we love our feet and fingers.

we see that we are on the land above the sea. we walk on water not by faith but by stones, pavement poured over and into the water like shell mounds that will not die.

and i am polluted by agreeing to regurgitate words before i’ve understood them. i stand choking above a toilet just after the second course– gagging and nauseated but i signed up for more, more, more, for the promise of more.

it’s clear to me, the politics of continuing the meal: we fall away from praxis and push it further still by force, pointing out until we have become masters of self-deception, of proving lacksis. we reaffirm just what we tell ourselves we patiently wait to fight against. we sit weak and sick on our own acids, at the grand meal of tastefully selected paradise in the dumps of New Jersey, where even the tomatoes are grown in cement.

more, more, more;

it was perhaps the worst slogan–
“WE WANT EVERYTHING,”

of course you do.

please someone tell me yes no maybe…. rough thoughts

The missing subject

Hegel’s explication of the concept of the individual in the Preface to his essay Philosophy of Right correctively refocuses the Kantian position of the subject in relation to the concrete world. He says,

I leave out of account every particularity such s my character, my temperament, knowledge, and age. ‘I’ is totally empty; it is merely a point—simple yet active in this simplicity. The colourful canvas of the world is before me; I stand opposed to it and in this [theoretical] attitude I overcome its opposition and make its content my own. (PR, 328)

Here, Hegel effectively outlines the compressed Kantian point of subjectivity as a self-referential framework that works to exclude exterior objects and concepts in exchange for a self-fulfilling prophesy of interchangeable subjectivity. The movement is as follows: the transcendental subject is only capable of marrying the otherwise incommensurable categories of existence (the natural and the moral) only through imprinting his already-existing interior framework necessitated in a narrative myth of à priori wholeness from which the individual has emerged, but can only access from this point of inwardness. Hegel exposes the missing subject of ‘I’ that is ultimately responsible for overcoming these categories as the very ideology from which Kant attempted to free the individual. Essentially, the Kantian ‘I’ is the use and metaphysical belief in the à priori. The tentative state of the absolutely individual Transcendental Subject can only posses its infinite subjectivity against the hidden embers of a mass web and a denied sensuousness. Karl Marx puts it best in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach, when he explains that the soul of humanity is paved over by a dumb generality; the genus of humanity retroactively reunites the individual though a type of imagined origin. On myth that American schoolchildren and high school students learn about are those primordial scenes of brutish society in Hobbes and Locke. The viciousness of the purely natural life is taken as the horrible root—or true soul—of humanity lives within each individual, and was managed and preempted through the formal relegations of the united (self-destructive) sprit into the mechanistic whole that is only manifest as a herd of individuals. Here, it is more important to contemplate the significance of this narrative as a narrative, rather than excavate its architecture. If this core is the Essence of man that must not only be comprehended, but also, dumb after its comprehension, there is only one conclusion to make from Marx’s thesis. This myth has been impressed upon the real collective spirit only after it was arbitrarily splintered through social machinations whose reproduction is only possible through inherent and unbridgeable social agitations. Thus, the narrative of the silent and violent whole manifested in the individual is true insofar as this violent kernel is the entirety that feels inherent alienation between its spirit and its outward functions. In a diversion from material and class-based conflicts, the static individual might only believe himself to be absolutely transcendental if he believes in the closed-categories of his historical existence.

The subject seems to be evacuated of its particular qualities and cannot be put in relation to other subjects except in that relation the self paints on the other. It is simple yet active in its banality in that there are not direct any direct challenges to this individual in its universal incarnations because of its “simple” overwriting of the exterior world. Hegel’s corrective uses for Kant lie in his treatment and contextualization of the subject to the objects that surround him. The relationships that objects colorfully animate are only apprehended through the concrete, itself—but that this concrete meaning is not in for itself; rather, it is the concept which illuminates the form of the object, and in turn illuminates the subject who perceives this relation. So, where Kant’s framework (inadvertently) calls for a static revision of the concrete world through the self-referential category of ‘I’ (that comprises anything and everything it cares to, abandoning all the rest without consequence), Hegel instead shows the contextual relationship that the subject has with both subjects and objects. For Kant, the point of origin for the transcendental subject is rooted in an impossible transference of Absolute knowledge from a subjective perspective, a situation where the subject functions situationally as his own god. This situation is a practical impossibility once à priori categories are dissolved in the sense that the cohesiveness of the subject’s overwriting his surrounding objects exposes its tautological roots. This is the fatal error of Kant’s critique—its theoretical postulations are completely destroyed in the face of the concrete.

In Kant, the very mode by which the realm of the metaphysic is left behind is the very thing that instantiates it as a metaphysic in the last instance. Kant’s à priori categorization is conceptually seen in the lack of definite context—that is, the objective and the concrete. Kant’s model of the individual is only viable insofar as it does not come under attack of the determinate concrete sphere. For example, a modern subject lives in a nation-state and takes part in commercial processes. He does his business in the public, votes his piece in the elections, and holds property. In normal economic, social, and domestic circumstances, the subject can function at least nominally within the Kantian framework of the transcendental subject. In isolated, minor issues of business, he is able to rationally identify the proper components of his decision, and extract a seemingly legitimate result, for which he advances upon a “moral” framework. However, in the face of a systemic economic, political, or moral crisis, the subject is unable to advance any decision in a coherently rational way, since it has been severed à priori from the concrete, that is, the contextual. This is all to say that the transcendental nature of Kant’s theory of the subject is in a static state, and that Kant’s critiques are valid insofar as they occur within the normative bounds of the ideal, itself. The logic of the individual, then, is really thinking the thoughts of the normative order: in economics, it will follow the law of capital, in politics, it will follow the tide towards a democratic republic, and in morality it will do its best to place the crown of infinite rationality on its head. But in the non-normative, (the real) systemic problems of every kind throw this fragile framework into disarray because of the subject’s fundamental inability to situate himself concretely, or to situate the categories of his existence in concrete relations with each other.

In terms of the individual’s mythic narrative, the very moment that a high school student learns about their silent and violent origins in the tangled mass of human nature, is precisely the moment that highlights the fallibility of this myth. The contemporary individual cannot function as an isolated individual because is relation to others has been proven time and time again, the most recent and obvious example being the global financial crash that surfaced in October of 2008. And yet, the very most devastating possibility for the imaginary individual subject and the system in which he lives would be to discover a. the genuine unity of social humanity, b. its constituent antagonisms, and finally, c. that his “individual” identity is really a specific class situation at the basis of his own permanent suffering.  In contrast, the real self that emerges through this disintegration turn out to be closer to the individual’s spirit that transform his everyday life because those false forms of reality are shed in exchange for a larger identity that historically reaffirms not only his singularity, but also his singularity’s reality in a universal sense. This position of self-awareness has many valences that extend beyond the binary of singular and universal of the human and spiritual corpus, and into the historical and utopian incarnations of the real Mass and Spirit. Today’s “leftist” political discourse is fragmented along many of the twentieth century’s hangnails, each progressively cutting a deeper rift between the historical and the utopian. This rift is also understood between the political and the aesthetic: today, there are dogmatic Leninists who write in the old high-rhetoric of the Vanguard Party, composing thoughts that are based on a polemical mode of thought. The problem with this, most obviously, is that between the utopian truth and possibility that the Leninist position spoke to circa 1917, but also the impossibilities for a reoccurrence of those social conditions that led to it. In short, one on hand, there is a devastating inversion of theory and practice in today’s Left, where the rhetoric and historical unfolding of Marx-Leninism are taken for the universal theory of the revolutionary spirit. This misstep is easy enough to make, since the lines between historical fact and significance are easily trodden over without so much as a passing glance. But the real cause for this retroversion toward dogmatic Leninism is paralleled in the same type of contemporary hauntological cultural formations that conjure up the 1960’s as a radical origin of social change. These two moments are evidently and indisputably important moments in revolutionary theory and practice; but something happened to them. There is some imaginary scar that we suffer from; some invisible cross that we bear from both of these moments, and it is here that we should remember Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

This line is so often quoted from Marx’s corpus that it verges along the border of reified philosophy. Nevertheless, this phrase is the key to understanding the invisible trauma of our times and its significance as the imaginary genus of post-modernity. The cultural moment of the sixties is sometimes called the moment of rupture, that instant that history opened up and provided history with its own (and last) exit strategy for emancipation from formalized limits of human relationships. Likewise, there are certain factions of the Left that are organized around the political and economic anachronism of the Russian Revolution. These two groups point to a moment of legitimate social and political truth and trauma that have affected common political and social discourse to this day. But, I would suggest that these two moments in particular have stuck in our radical cultural memory as the genus to our own impossible identity. The contemporary imagination and project is scattered and weakly coordinated in political discourse precisely because it is a genus that we have adopted after-the-event, perhaps without even knowing it. These images, symbols, and lines of change have been flooded by the very apparatus in which it was to effect change. The Russian Revolution and subsequent political theory distilled in Lenin’s corpus highlight the (nominal) realization of the utopian imagination. It is a philosophical body that legitimates the communist project in the dominant and modern world’s own terms. It was the premier moment of political praxis, in which centuries of subaltern voices and resistance was recognized in the same sphere as the dominant capital discourse of hegemony. But, in every shining moment of the universal, there is also its contingent counterpart of the contextual: there is no one line to summarize the entire political, economic, and ideological history of the U.S.S.R. as a governing body. There is no need. What is important to recognize is the critical importance and meaning of the Russian Revolution as an event, both political and intellectual, that speaks to the spirit of possibility. In addition to universal potentiality, it is crucial to delineate the measure marks between political and theoretical manifestation and the point at which it was washed out by the waves of happenstance. Thus, we move from utopian event to the gray shores of the everyday. The only way that we might overcome the politically, economically, and socially impossibility of reincarnating the Soviet Revolt of 1917, is through a re-examination of the universal spirit of the revolution and its face.  We must name the real narrative myth in which radical politics has allowed itself to become an individual enterprise, as just one other choice in a world of limitless options. In order to do this, the other valence must re-emerge, that universal consciousness of the utopian.

The question of delineating a coherent line of thought between the spirit and form of the radical body and its imagination is complicated further when the possibilities of social engagement—both personal and formal—exists largely within the sphere of the sixties aesthetic determinations and social coincidence. For many contemporary activists and leftists, the everyday ethic, or lived relation to the revolutionary imagination, the sixties are regarded as the cloudy origin and missed exit of our epoch. Here, we must use the intellectual blue-print of the dialectic to free ourselves from our imaginary relationships to an imagined past, to an origin that does not exist in the utopian imagination save in the universal. Yet, this relationship is only viable and reachable in a concrete and achievable program of everyday living if we rigorously examine our deep cultural predication from a Marxist perspective. This is to say, in order to free the radical imagination and actualize its everyday appearance in this historical moment, we must break free of the happenstance of the twentieth century events.

This cannot be reached through a pseudo-science of exhaustive and extensive reading of the philosophical and political canon, but through an understanding of the “static” contemporary moment, full of contingencies and a thousand invisible shards of glass in relation to its trans-historical context. In short, we must return to Hegelian dialectics, and retrace our own contemporary “leftist” identity in a relentless exercise against the present. Too long has empancipatory discourse been designated by the faded possibility of the communist state. Perhaps it is time to announce that all hitherto existing incarnations of communism have “failed” insofar as the radical imagination has failed to see them as moments in a trans-historical project rather than the political state. In a word, the radical imagination has forgotten itself in the infinite negativity of self, without a care for its contextual and trans-historical meaning and relationships.

 

nichol avenue

I walk down the street. I can’t say that this November’s storminess hasn’t excited some hope for the gothic romance. But this is my first season of maturity, and so I hope for nothing, and resist that warm ache in my arms exacted by the cooling wind. I see a tree next to my old building. It’s an ugly building. It was an ugly time, there. But this tree had every manifest shade of red. I said to myself as I walked past it, that it was too red, held too much in its shaded depths to be real, and that it was just like all the best pictures of a tree that I had ever seen. I stopped, and remembered suddenly that this was not a moving picture. And that I was walking under this slowly ebbing sky which refused to relegate its heavy blueness to a pallid gray. I thought not that this tree in the falling moments of autumn was made for me. And that, like this tree, I might really shade over from the drab brick wall into real life. I walked toward someplace and the side streets cascaded down to the lower reaches of town. Leaves, rich with the color of dying, blotted the sky, one by one, until they hit the dirty street, the hedged grass of an old city. And it was in this promise of hard winter, when I was still afraid of only ever rotting away in the green of June, when I looked at the dirt in my fingernails and dove into that blue withering mist and thought perhaps I really was made in and for this world.

 

now the question is, where do i put my iced tea?

I haven’t written a decent thing in a few days. I suppose it’s only normal under soul-crushing pressure. And while Lukacs can write about the merely psychological, I think that it should be at least appreciated for all of its nice dismantling qualities. All you really need is a fragile psyche in order to render an otherwise productive person totally fucked. I wish that Elliott Smith were alive; but the more I’m learning and feeling and putting them in their proper places, I understand that the music is the only thing that can really teach me anything. Everything else is merely psychological; Elliott was broken psychology with purpose. Sometimes I think that there will be a way to make it so he could be undead, that my teachers might still be alive in some way. Yes, they are… but the problem with conversations that have not yet happened is that you never know what the first speaker will say back, nor can I anticipate what I will say when I am ready. I can’t even say “perhaps nothing” anymore. There is no time to drop out; there is just exhaustion and shitty thesis chapters–how do I know if I am saying what I should be saying? The real issue is not that they are dead but that I am not quite living.

so, the bridge is destroyed: unity cares nothing for ravines.

An episode in the lives of a few human beings, of no more than episodic significance for the world at large. Everywhere the earth resounds with battles, whole worlds are collapsing, but here, in a small German town, a few young people come together for the purpose of create a new, harmonious, all-embracing culture out of this chaos. They rush at it with that inconceivable, reckless naivety that is given only to people whose degree of consciousness is morbidly high, and to these only for a single cause in their lives and then again only for a few moments. It was a dance on a glowing volcano, it was a radiantly improbable dream; after many years the memory of it still lives on the observer’s soul as something bewilderingly paradoxical. For despite all the wealth of what they dreamed and scattered, “still there was something unhealthy about the whole thing.” A spiritual tower of Babel was to be erected, with nothing but air for its infrastructure; it had to collapse, but when it did this, its builders broke down too.

Gyorgy Lukacs, “On the Romantic Philosophy of Life”

Words that come to bear on the heart of a mind that cannot help but see transparency. And that these words conferred among something towards a real soul–a real soul of breaking; the form of faith which finds strength in petty whims, in shallow loves that cannot suffer. In the moment does soul dwell in the slow ebb of contingency. With every shake away from this contingency, such naive passion that was not love nor conference nor even friendship at its core. The word contingency itself reflects the absence of form, or of unity–it is the gentle shattering of this  shadow away from the heart of love. I’m wondering what’s the wandering arbitrariness of everything, of wanting all soul and an empty liife, a life that dreams of living. And where are the empty ravines in precious time, precious time for rambling, for madness and youth. The air, build a tower and break down, if you must, lose naivety, what’s all this for youth? But if, but if, the Romantics for love might have also let the rubble pile up into a new mountain, maybe not a city but still a whole.

And yet, perhaps this discussion is better served with the final word on fools versus the naive. For fools, love is a choice, a commitment–brilliance is sacrificed for comfort, sweet contingency. For the naive, oh how well we see shapes in that stillest wind.

He looked at my hand as he held it, as I held his arm. I turned and he held me in his arms. I saw his face and kissed him. He felt so thin. “You have to eat more. Please, you have to take care of yourself.” The wear on his face from exhaustion. The relief of being in his arms. I put my hand on his face, felt his soft beard. As I said I love you I thought of Badiou—and that here we were, trying to cross a bridge of our own. It was imaginary; our love is bigger than us. It was the rain and every tempered pulse, it was still knowing. “Love is more than me or you. We cannot change it or make it go anywhere. It is; and I’m not afraid. We have to do this,” I said. And he knew. He rested his head on my arm; I combed his wet hair with my hand. I looked out across the pond and the leaves on the trees stung out vibrantly against the heavy rain and the gray sky. I looked up at him; splotches of water hit our faces. We laughed. I took off his glasses and held his face close to mine. I held him. We must have been looking at each other, my eyes and his eyes. I felt his soul around me. The wind blew and leaves scattered through the air, haplessly to the water’s surface.

today’s edition of “is this normal?”

Goodness is madness, it is not mild, not refined, not quietistic; it is wild, terrible, blind, adventurous. The soul of the good man has become empty of all psychological content, of grounds and consequences; it has become a pure white slate upon which fate writes its absurd command, and this command will be followed blindly, rashly, and fiercely to the end. That this impossibility becomes fact, this blindness becomes clear-sightedness, this fierceness becomes Goodness–that is the miracle, the grace.

Gyorgy Lukacs “On Poverty of Spirit”

The psychological content of goodness is it’s divinity, but that is to say nothing of the real feeling of pain and torture that the soul feels as it does Good. Goodness, yes, is the breaking of everyday forms, it jumps from the bridges of formal postulations into what–? And that the soul might jump, might break away from form, is the first and strongest moment, precisely because it is not felt, but rather understood. The formally ethical, formally moral, inhuman constraints by which we attempt to define the human are in fact what deny its existence. It’s almost not worth mentioning the tattered constellation of the psychological soul that falls away into the unknown, other than the pain is uncontrollable.

But what was I thinking in the first place? The formal logic of love made it impossible–it foreclosed itself from me. And what does it mean that Goodness, for its divine incarnation in an utterly formal world fractures the tenderly aching soul? Has the soul been foreclosed from life, even if that life is unlived? Lukacs says that this is all psychology. No, no, not all, but merely psychological. But the human is marked for its ability to be good regardless of its psychology, it can touch the rashness of Goodness, the transhistorical reality of it. Oh that these forms might be broken, if at first they were the real life, or were they always forms? Can goodness be anything but usurped by form? If the life cannot be lived in them, in morality and duty, might goodness ever really be fulfilled? And at the end of this, are my arms only stretching into the blistering whiteness of it all, for some rope dangling?

the slow ache

The individual, however, find his liberation in duty. On the one hand, he is liberated from his dependence on mere natural drives, and from the burden he labours under as a particular subject in his moral reflections on obligation and desire; and on the other hand, he is liberated from that indeterminate subjectivity which does not attain existence or the objective determinacy of action, but remains within itself and has no actuality. In duty, the individual liberates himself so as to attain substantial freedom. (Thesis 149, Philosophy of Right: Ethical Life)

The individual liberates himself to attain substantial freedom; and what of those lesser drives under which so much might suffer, regardless of fortitude? Is the freedom that separation that Adorno suggested was the haunting of one’s self: the oscillation between the last separation and the objectification of self? That essence which cannot be distanced from, as much as Hegel would have liked to allow, without Right whispering quietly in the morning breeze, “say goodbye.” That distance between the most tenderly aching sores and the mind that used to understand it, cannot but feel its own pain twofold: in the dark shadows and the mind that knows its solution is not in any isolated patch-up. For Adorno, the personal life attempts to show itself as existing–whether as a foolish ruse in the face of philosophical perplexity or systemic political violence–I try to say to myself something personal, intimate, that is buried under mountains of casual sentimentality. Each time, there is desire and brutal force and emptiness, and with all of this there is still exposed feeling as nerves laid out into the cold air. But the self does not exist in the pleasant way we like to imagine suffering from our bruised egos and torn hearts, a dimly lit room at the beginning of a movie and a promise of return.

To Hegel’s due, we must remember there is no return and so we do not have to look to sell; but the inverse of this means that what we ache for, long for, is the unity based on the disjuncture, itself. We ache deeply and without insulation, for real love realized in the individual and the actual, as the only matter of course for our survival and not the arbitrary choice. It is in the ache for humanity that we might say we ever feel ourselves. This is cruelest when, in the last phases, we find out desires calling to us, in the name of freedom and bliss, all under the artful guise which crushes us further. In these middle regions, whether in weak minds or desperate times, pain seeps further due to our duty to hold out against all odds. And this task is brought to bear not on any petty whim or slowly bleeding individual desire, as much as we intuit it to be this way, but on the whole task of living; which is to say, of everything in common for the one.

the morning after-

I got a question mark
You got a need to always take some shot in the dark
I don’t have to make pretend the picture I’m in is totally clear
You think that all things have a way they ought to appear
‘Cos you know you know you know you know
You know you know you know you know
You know I don’t
I dream
Don’t know what you mean

Panic called you out and took you in
Giving you an easy game and letting you win
Giving back a little hatred now to the world
‘Cos it treated you bad
‘Cos you couldn’t keep the great unknown from making you mad
‘Cos you know you know you know you know
You know you know you know you know
You know I don’t
I dream
Don’t know what you mean

Said your final word, but honesty and love could have kept us together
One day you’ll see it’s worth it after all
If you ever want to say you’re sorry you can give me a call

on communist tendencies

Love is stronger than fear. It has no fear of its fear, but,  led by its fear, it cancels separation, apprehensive as it is of finding opposition which may resist it or be a fixed barrier against it. It is a mutual giving and taking; through shyness its gifts may be disdained; through shyness an opponent may not yield to its receiving; but it still tries whether hope has not deceived it, whether it still finds itself everywhere.

hegel, “Love”