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.

I can locate the reaction of my state education in one assignment

I go to school because I’m poor and because my father is poor. Of course, all of my friends would be poor if they didn’t have family money, which allows them to fall deeper into poverty with loans. They have the promise of being middle class, and they don’t have to feel a  thing… I should say, it’s harder for them to know the price they pay.

Like I said, the state pays for me. In this country, for some reason that’s where I should start thanking everyone, every fat asshole who doesn’t want to pay taxes, and the lazy students who have ruined public education, I should thank them for having parents who would so graciously fund my excursion. It is a world where the real divisions have been pasted over with loans, and where public universities are not public but fiefdoms on a sliding scale. I fall through the cracks.

I am sort of a lazy person, I started out that way. I started out as a lot of different things, depending on where you begin. But some aging man with some pull in either long-dead contintental politics or the last hold out department, might say that I could end up doing something worthwhile, if I managed to stop screwing around with my everyday constraints and break out of my false need for security. But this this a hard voice over to imagine, since all those people have mostly forgotten that they don’t need them, either.

To leave this school in the spring, I don’t have to have mastered French (I only need A marks), I don’t need to have read the Ilyad, I don’t need to know anything about economics or international finance. I don’t need to k now concrete facts about revolutionary movements of the last 300 years. I don’t need to do much else other than finish this fifteen page paper, for an online science class, in which I retrace international fiber optics and talk about the ocean and the economy like I have a fucking clue. I think it’s something like a thousand dollars for this class, and I haven’t learned a fucking thing. And I have to perform, and waste my time. I have to rush past joy until I’ve missed it.

The empirically aesthetic fiction of politics

so  many more things can go wrong on a computer than on a type-writer. and yet the typewriter has me stumped. The ribbon is twisted. It’s making me completely angry… not at the typewriter. It’s a different kind of technical problem. I think if I tried to survey all of the different kinds of “technical problems”, or the estrangement that I have with italicizing something, it makes me very uneasy.

I didn’t realize it until a little while ago. Here I am, staring out my window, but I’m writing, with as much confidence and fluidity as if I were laboring over the lines. And if I make an error, something will highlight it for me. If I need to imprint the words or shift a letter, all I have to do is push a button. It’s not about the typewriter, either. That is just the thing that came before this… they are made of the same sentiments. What I feel, though, is the separation of my thoughts and their production. Is this real? Cloud data somewhere, and as long as we have this, it will be around well after my youngest sister has her last grandchild. Of what I made in a cloud, it will be seen in the numbers that make the image of the cloud, and the final product is a virtual list, fluidity, production.

I was talking last night with some friends. One said that he feels pure theory is self-indulgent crap, and that there has to be some empirical use for it. I had a hard time understanding his comment. Of course, I see that theory can be self-indulgent, like that presenter at Cornell a few months ago who said that his theory only worked in theory. (He was talking about some post neo anti fascist babble about the blood and the earth relating to the Hobbsean myth of humanity. For this I can submit Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach.) But his own argument seemed to preclude itself from theory, full stop. If something only works in theory, it seems to me that it is a mere fiction. And that something is a fiction, it must be understood both empirically and theoretically. Which leads me to my second critique of my friend’s statement, that the aesthetic may or may not really be an empirical use of theory. But theory is not to be used empirically. At least, not in any pedestrian sort of way. Like the man who said that his theory works only in theory, I would say to him that he was writing fiction, and that it would best be left to the theorists to make sense of his fiction. And to determine that his fiction was in fact a fiction and not a theory, one must inhabit the uses and abuses of imagined theories and sorts of other fictions from the empirically theoretical, and not the theoretically empirical, which is always a fiction.

And so it seems that theory is not a theory unless it is used in such a way that allows us to see the “empirical” (which is a fiction, as well, for various reasons, not the least of which is the very need to “find” the empirical).

I wonder, though, about the uses of a theoretical standpoint in the empirical production of aesthetics (forgive me if I start to sound cute). In the last day of the Idealist Tradition, we were having a stupid man’s discussion of the intersection between aesthetics and ethics. I should say that my understanding of the whole thing is a little stupid, but all in all, I think that the class was useful, even if only negatively. Okay, so we were ending the Idealist Tradition on a bit of sour note with Nietzsche. I really do need to spend time finding out just why I hate him so much…

The Idealist tradition “dies” but for me, it only dies insofar as it is ignored. I can’t go much deeper into my analysis of N right now, aside from the fact that he can neither be an anarchist nor a fascist. His fascism is impossible because it demands a rejection of all structure, and he cannot function as an anarchist because his anarchism depends upon the hierarchical construction of a united society. So, forgive all of my childish antics and my trite tone and lack of style when I say that Nietzsche seems to me like the crystallization of modern hysteria. This idea is malformed though, and I’m sure that someone has already written on it.

Here, I’m pulling myself back in to the discussion of the aesthetic and the ethical. I do see that the Fascists could have been great modern artists, insofar as they have precluded themselves from the real implications of being a fascist. In short, they were never really fascists, and if they were fascists in the way that people love to categorize them as Nietzschians, they were just scaley-eyed followers from the get-go. They did not know or posses the theoretical knowledge of their own aesthetic kernel. They might as well have made boots in Berlin.

I don’t know if I’m saying what I mean to say, and that’s because I am really undecided about the matter. No, I am not saying that Nolde was not Nolde, rather that he did not posses the means, empirically, that made him great. In a sense, i do understand that the aesthetic seems to be subsumed in the political, since it best operates (on an empirically functional level) when the actant is not aware of his situation. At best, he is only partially aware. In literature, I am thinking of Flaubert.

So, if aesthetics are not the mediatory device, and are instead understood as the kernel within the political, at the very worst, as something half dismantled from the political, what can I have to say about the production of art?

The way we move beyond both the “aesthetic” and “the political” to the first degree, is t borrow Fredric Jameson’s mathematical metaphor and kick it to the next power: we enter the realm of theory to deal with the empirical realities of imagined theories and politics.

From the merely aesthetic, just as the merely political, it is impossible to see which one is the empirical application of what, and at what time. It is also impossible to see the break between artistic greatness and technical skill, whose inspiration lies elsewhere. Theory, then, is the positing of these competing “first valence” phenomena, and placing them against not only themselves but against history and their contingent places in “empirical” reality. If you would like to call the theoretical a vacant category of metaphysics, you’ve got to be kidding yourself.

For an entry on the proper designation of theory and its production as “aesthetic,” I might need to eat some lunch, first.

Causes are frames for the heartless

Poetics has no secondary note that illuminates its meaning. Philosophy has no subjective commentary to marginalize itself into an everyday comradery. Everyday comradery is the face that holds the fakeness of our eyes together. Talking to people, trying to find out where they are in their facebook-framed universe isn’t worth the trouble. I hate these fuckers who want to talk to  me about graduate school, people who love to throw names around to make themselves feel closer to the spirit of things. The drones of the universe desire most to be elevated and respected, the people who chew so fast they bite their tongue and swear. The pigs sniffing for more butter. They’re not even polluting, they’re just part of it, part of living. They’re everywhere and I’m one of them. Still hate it.

Maybe, instead of stumbling over nothing mumbles when a box-man talks to me, I should answer my own questions in the matter. Stop trying to translate myself with vigor and politeness into 2-d language. My language is already 2-d, I guess. Chalking it up to superiority is too easy. And it’s wrong.

Causes and commitments. Commitments don’t have causes and causes that solicit commitments are highly suspicious; one hundred years of the middle-mind.

Composition is contingent on its time period, but its meaning isn’t. I’d have to say that melody is mastered between the bookends of the twentieth century–the 20th century… doesn’t it read like the end of the universe to you, too? Anyway, the hardest translation is between music and language. Rachmaninoff composed with such lightness and comprehension for the penultimate climax that every tremendous thunder rush began with a hollow of silver light in the night time. Like Baudelaire’s moon woman, the gentleness of expression against a tumult of artificial passions and releases was held back until the very last moment. He teaches anticipation. The climax rushes over the strings of the piano and tumbles over the pianist’s hands like a cloud whose molecules are big enough to see. Ice and dust combinations colliding down to the floor like dry ice on speed.

For Elliott Smith, so many songs are built on a lyricism that begins backwards, I think. The core of his songs are equi-distant from start to finish. The flood gates have been open and run-over for decades and there’s no end in sight. Born under the black wave in the universe. You can’t talk writing method like it’s just a construction process. We’re not building a house. The method is even harder to understand than the actual song–but it’s not enough to say that it’s a miracle, either. The method is contingent on getting though the cause of being born in a land where the language is for selling everything with a time-stamp. You’re born into the language of your own oppressor. The epic and the banal cross over each other and they remind me of my own humanity. My own capacity to feel, a thought that slipped away when I was sitting alone somewhere in Copley after school–

Why is it that people believe more in the tradition than in the spirit of its attempts? Fight for standards that rely on a specific name-sake? It seems like the easy way out of understanding anything. Seems like nothing’s at stake from the inside of the house. I sit by the fire in agony, feeling the illusions of my own comfort.

killing time

i wonder if i’m just a studder step that someone hears when they fall. there is an absurdity between the aesthetic life and the ethical life. there are some people whose liminal rejection of the ethical life has manifested in aesthetic truth and solace. there’s an imaginary moment, the moment of the always-already lived that has to be ignored in the moment. but you’ve got to know, that there’s no moment that’s right now. how privileged you’d like to think yourself. we’re swarming away from the future, as slowly as possible, or rushing towards it, but always with some fading echo from somewhere else. sounds reach us from different moments, striking at us differently, and we hope it chips away the ice from our freezing hands fast enough.

faster than the wind of the empty now:

you’re not being clever, you want everyone to think you’ve succeeded. you want to recognize yourself in the face of others, and you don’t have the courage to forget yourself and your frontiers. you’d like very much to watch yourself from out someplace in the midwest, over the internet, after your death. you want to watch yourself after death. you imagine your movements are watched when you are alone, when you contemplate your carapice, against a noise of music that moves you out deep past your breaking point. and you can never bring it back to words, to an image, or anything. you can’t go there. you can imagine yourself like a shadowy power and an old story, you don’t have to see it.

you cry at night and know that it’s just a laugh. there’s something real felt, and then you dream. you’re fifty and you look at me because I’m still just me, and you smile. you smile and for once I can see through all your processing of data: in one way and then twisted and found again in some question you’d want to put to me. I only see you looking at me, smiling meekly and trailing out into the dark road, cracked and filled with trees. the blustering voices who brought you in, an introduction of an idiot’s happenstance, they trip off into the black lines on the sidewalk. you want to come closer. all you want to do is reach across twenty-five years and touch me. you come around all the time. all the time, following me with a watery smile, and you watch me like i’m something to be admired. and then i apologize, and i walk out from own room and i  know i’m still alone.

i can feel the whole lightness of your mind. it fades into the morning.

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.

 

A love letter

In life, longing has to remain love: that is its happiness and its tragedy. Great love is always ascetic, whether it raises the object of love to supreme heights and by so doing alienates it from itself and from the lover, or whether it merely uses that object as a springboard; whereas petty love abases love and causes mutilation, which is another form of asceticism. Great love is the natural, the real, the normal kind of love, but among living human beings it is the other kind that has become normal: love as silence and repose, love which cannot and will not lead to anything else… In life, longing has become love, and now love is struggling to be independent from longing, its lord and begetter.

Longing and Form, 115

No secret messages. Love is soul that is excited through human form, but this human form kills it. Longing is a bridge. The bridge that connects the two that cannot become the one. And these bridges, these are the constructions of madness, the forms that stretch out not to realized souls but merely towards their attempts. Longing was the very bridge destroyed for the lived life. One without the other is nothing. Love as silence and repose always gives something away. The self that has no divides cannot share secrets, it cannot play games or live externally. The innards are external. Love is teeth upon the ice-block, the excitement and the pleasure of immanent numbness: the realization of love is always the refusal to allow that silent, lying body to feel its own truth in another form, a reflection carved from the novice’s hand, an arbitrary use of pieces and parts.

“It is that feeling of being both near and far which comes with great understanding, that profound sense of union which yet is eternally a being-separate, a standing-outside,” (112). In life, that which takes human form, love cannot but be actualized as that aside from longing. Love is the unity and understanding, the acknowledged life that remains unwhole. Its unwholeness is not due to a non-realization. In fact, love and longing are most purely felt as the sublated unity in human isolation. In this life, they are felt in isolation but this conference of unity in difference is based on the dream of some great and true infinity. And how painfully that silent death, that maskless death must be. The soul evacuating its formal actualization- the final act of love.

For the kernel of love is an unbearable sentiment to life–in silence, in hardened, dusty soils, the body of what is or even what could ever be realized is the unbearable truth of humanity: that which predicates actualization is at its core the blistering and glittering beauty of the inexpressible.

I wonder if longing in life is yet another imagined duality which provokes man to discover true love–the cruel knife-twist in the heart from l’autre that reaches out, builds bridges, no matter how tentative, to the manifold sky yet without shape. There can never be love of the two–there is desire for the other and longing for the one. And this longing in its earthly shape has already foreclosed itself in our best interests so that we no longer desire, but ache.

Great love is the soul, the utopian heart of the matter, and is only realized insofar as it is located within earthly matter, or form. The question is of which form and for what end will this heart beat?

A heart that hardens
on the ice-block had better let its red
life-ribbons melt it;
unity of difference,
blood and water, better than
a frozen soul,
a shattered life.

your sorrow means nothing to me,

your sorrow is not pain. your sorrow is the empty hole you feed. You cannot become that greatness. Before we played with words like silly or great, let us begin with a lesson, a history lesson, perhaps.

A history of past actions that cannot be thought out on the emotional terrain, nor the private one. A history of time is open to me. Open to me in little cracked door-jambs. Whitman wanted to tear them off the hinges, let the birds fly free over the Hudson Bay. Those energies that we thought were human power, manifest in the flowing of the river, manifest in the flames of simple, sensual life–that was the moment where human desire for a circumstance turned ideology. The power of those flames, and the death of the red woods, what silent death was that? The silent death of the necessary.

No, I’m not turning back to form. Rather, I ask that you not delude yourself into thinking that you can even feel your soul in that straightjacket. Read the words before you search between them.

It was le Tartuffe himself who said that we might not sin if we sin in silence. If that were true, what offenses might be spared, but still, there is that silent razor that tears away at the simple everyday when you’re lying in bed. It tears when you forget the soothing story, when you see that the community isn’t Johnson talking in the bars, but just us, just us getting drunk in the bars. Scribbling on the paper, little notes and jokes; the Vineland technowave has crashed across the great 50. No, it built its way from the plastic wrap we’ve got over the soil. The dances we make in our cars, to get through the day.

It was a mistake, just a reverb too loud off the streets, the paved streets. It’s all concrete, everywhere. Even the gardens are stones.

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.

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?

flower chains

Is it really that much more difficult to refrain from feeling petty things? Is it a matter of soul or of situation that meetings, friendships, projects, take on the look of an a-political social club? At the fuzzy locus point, is the real belief and hope to get laid, get friends, get together, all masquerading under the equivocated “education of peers?” Or do we know why we’re here. Perhaps there has been some confusion. I used to think that feeling this way (which is less of a feeling than a confrontation), wanting things to be different in the world, and seeing them differently from others obliged me to make decisions that didn’t all together “register” in the liminal world. It was okay to break this or that “friendship;” I knew when to work and when something was performative and should be left behind. But slowly, and fearfully–and I should say–with regret enough to pass it by–that the world of thinking differently and writing and even of “being radical” has slipped under a twilight.

Projects written alone in an attic reached fewer people, were still the practice of a novice, sure. But it was there. And now, writing cover letters and personal statements and finding this or that writer “totally unintelligible” has become the norm. I can’t pretend to say that these more, oh I don’t know, middle class woes have highlighted the failing inability to really discuss politics, philosophy, ethic, spirit. Yes, on a very real level, I am behaving like a foolish child: but really, I can’t bear the thought of working this hard for entry into some tight-lipped institution with a bunch of self-loving hypocrites whose political affiliations from the get-go have already been dismantled. There is something to say for education; there’s quite a lot to say about it. On the other hand, real education is often held in the least aesthetically-appealing bits of town, on the back streets of New Brunswick, New Jersey; it’s drinking the dirty water and swimming in it, letting hair turn hard from the polluted swirl.

In spite of everyone’s (radical) best intentions, are we not living in the brain-dead day-to-day? We’re just boying this or that shirt for this or that event, driving late at night, mixing our contemplations of love and production within our veritable “inboxes.” If we–and here, I mean I–look deeply enough, it is perfectly legitimate to note the movement of the contemporary young person in search of radical vocation as:

1. Shocked, radicalized, bare, completely rejecting the opportunities and categories of this world
2. A slow concrete shadow, a fear of the tradition, a period of groping, of constant thought, isolation (in university context)
3. Friendships, company, respite from the depression of it all
4. An imagined agility; acceptance of context, of performance, of “system navigation”

But like those who say “you can be radical on facebook, it’s all about the system,” isn’t it high time we let ourselves in on the bad joke? That we have allowed ourselves, our impulses, our power, to be contained in the ideological? Perhaps this isn’t just facebook; it’s graduate school and the Friday night party, drinks after class… we have turned our company into a cycle of repeating consumption. Because what are we changing, versus what are we allowing to change us?

Marx said

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

I see lots of chains, lots of ironical statements from people who know better. And I feel them. We know what we’re looking at. We know that there’s “no radical break available.” But what are we moving towards? And how might we even say we know what we long for, anymore? To never feel that sparkling pain blazing in the skies above us as truth and not as a bleeding heart! We wear our commitments like good little boys and girls, writing the pamphlets, passing the papers, organizing the events. But our lives, and everything we see for ourselves, must once again reject this long-term melancholy of retreat. Love must be seen as a matter of course and not a highway exit (else we might miss it, forever!) in the way we live our lives, with the hope, clarity, and grit conferred upon our every day existence.

We have decorated our homes and hearts in a garland, and admire our great courage to bear it all in the face of such dismantled beauty. But we are still in our homes , as the fields of flowers outside our windows are paved away in gridded squares, our hearts closing in on themselves.

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.

It’s a funeral in here.

Even after he watched her die slowly in an old hospital bed, Mike jerked off to her during nights when he couldn’t sleep. Nights when he cried at the thought of her blue skin, soft and slightly wilted like a picked hydrangea.

There’s got to be a way

Just heard about another crushing budget cut here at the old RU. Who knows what’s going next. I’m going to read some Kant. I don’t know. $92 million dollars in one year. One year.