I have suffered the horrors of Lautremont
I have had the terrors of Kafka perpetrated on my body
I am changed
I am not the same
I am Phineas Gage
I am St. Francis no longer
Cosm0s
I cannot stand to find an unplumbed depth and inevitably found one without reserve, completely unconditioned, not at all made of what history made of it. Should we abstract away from the moment of creation a creator, to impose on the vision of cosmic unity all the certitude of a psychological make-up, all the trappings of desire, love and jealousy, it is no more than giving a form to something that cannot be defined against everything else. No matter how spectacular, stupefying, unbelievable, no matter how far it reaches, how much it encompasses, to some of us it is always the great One, the ultimate unity… all things converge on one point that is like the radiant eye of god, the prescient world soul, the penultimate consciousness, the end of all desire and the beginning of being…. For it is only when desire ends that one ceases to live in the wound of one’s own lack and begins to really live. It is only beyond the drunkenness of one’s own emotions that one find’s one’s best senses and really begins to think. It is only after the intractable split of paradox is dissolved that one ceases to question and really begins to understand. Understand not only answer and questions, but which questions are answers and which answers are questions. We should ask ourselves whether we have truly plumbed the depth that we rise from like some ragged weed, like some dogged choking plant growing in all directions… do even know our existence? Are the god’s looking pleased now that your blood has turned to nectar, now that your heart has softened to love, now that you are pliable material in their hands? Some of us wish to find some way to the sacredness of our own being, without the help or hindrance of gods identical with our being in the first and last place. Who are these gods, these saccharine saviors, these vengeful incendiary deities, lighting the world aflame with their anger…? I want to go beyond these few idealities, beyond these projections of myself into the great beyond to where only the eagle flies, to a place no god knows. I want to go to some terra incognita, where no one rules and no one punishes, where fruit falls from the trees and the water laps up at your feet. Where fish jump into your nets, and the sun always smiles yellow in a bright blue sky. No, even further, I want to lose my beard and my bones, and become the sky over a world where no mind flickers, where no heart is agitated, where no soul loses his way trying to find water. Let the clouds pass across me, and the stars shine through me. Let the planets find their courses and the sun live within me, and I never again will have to have eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, feet. Never again let me utter a word or turn a blind eye, never allow me to so much as sneeze at another man. I will be the formless blue, and cradle some unripened earth in my arms. This would be by far better than all the fates dreamed up by heaven or earth.
The Centerpiece of War
Food
Money
War The Forty Lashes
The Anti-Psychiatry Dumbells
Who rashly stood with Mars
And Captain Cosmic ridiculed the genius
Who spit when he was drunk
Insane, the guile with which he struck them down
His the dream, the lust for the slaughter
Cataclysm
Everyone said sit down
The right and wrongs of the past
Sixty wars I’m fighting and I have chosen to live
And the one was not one it was two
The choke hold of lust
Far away from the dust cast upon us for a parade
Factuality a Centerpiece of horizon unknown
Crass unbeing
The Genius of John Nash
There was a genius, a mad man, a mad genius who walked the halls of Princeton. Who worked himself to the bone for our country, and laid himself raw against the current of society around him: 1950’s, repressive implosion, the dark secrets that a culture hid like so many hangings placed before cracking walls, bright plastic smiles hiding dark secrets… this man, so tortured by his vast intellect, followed a trajectory that only the couragous would attempt. He risked madness in his mathematic, he threatened to breach the wall… for what? A greater understanding. John Nash is a truly profound man. one worthy of the Nobel Prize that he was awarded. To get to the meat of the matter, the marrow, when this man, this genius was granted an audience with Einstein, what did he choose to discuss? His rather obscure theory that light, like all matter, experiences friction. A bold kind of exculpation of theory: we no longer have to confine ourselves to obvious facts (light is not like sandpaper, thus it does not experience friction) that dominate our consciousness from birth, these “a priori truths” that riddle our lives… and are usually wholly false. In any case, the theory that Nash presented, against all common sense, was that photons might experience friction under certain conditions. Of course, all Einstein could do is tell poor, mad Nash that physics was not purely mathematical, and that what is logically sound is not necessarily physically possible.
As an apology for the madness of the mathematician, I will ask a single question: if it is not at all possible for light to have the characteristics of mundane matter, at what point could we say that light is not at all real, but ideal? At what point does the absolute speed of light propel it beyond any substance, into the world of space time, with its changing grades….
The question, though, takes on new dimension when it is viewed in light of his attempts at a solution for our greatest problems: a solution he indubitably saw and tasted, one that lingered before his senses, before it withdrew, leaving him only with mad ramblings and convoluted explanations.
Comedy Tragedy and “The Tin Drum”: Book vs Film
The superb novel The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass was made into a rather dark cinematic drama by Volker Shlondorff. The novel was a tragedy that plays out like a comedy: falls and reversals take the places of loss and failure. The film, though, is purely a tragedy, and the comic elements of the story play out as a form of dissonance, starkly opposed to their ironic resonance in the book.
Little Oskar is blissfully ignorant of the horrors around him, and yet he is a sign of those horrors as much as he is a product of them. Though he remains ambivalent, with his drum he can disrupt the lock tight fascist order. His voice, on the other hand, breaks glass, clearly symbolic of Kristallnacht, implicating him in the crime and violence around him.
While the drum infects and inspires others, and Oskar’s voice duly impresses them, he otherwise has no influence over people. When he is not performing, he is strictly a spectator to the crime. His impotence to act as the world goes on about him is only reinforced by his perpetual childhood. He is personally stunted, as well as physically.
These opposed elements and their ambiguity do not add up to the horror of the film. Shlondorff took every ounce of comic irony from the story. I do not recall it ever dawning upon the Oskar of the novel to experience terror at the world about him. Why these pitch black tones, these unbearable moments of tension in a story that by all means expressed the exuberance of life? Why this piercing and endless tone of fear? Grass’ story was a cacophony of sound, a veritable boiling cauldron with all the clatter of an orchestra and all the joy of a circus. Shlondorff misunderstood all the joyous clatter, giving us instead the terror of life.
Microcosm and Macrocosm: A Critical Reversal
In light of the clear signs that particle physics will yield more knowledge about the cosmos than astrophysics, allow me to make the somewhat audacious claim that modern science has defined their concepts of the microcosm and macrocosm entirely backwards. It is thought, quite naively, that the microcosm is naturally the particle level and the macrocosm is the level of planets and even galaxies. Yet, consider that the ancient Atom was always in flux; its nature was to flow. In quantum physics the level of particles can only be determined by selecting them out of the infinite possibilities of superposition, making the molecular movement an infinite, macrocosmic function. By contrast the classical macrocosmic level would in fact be the microcosmic because they all can be based on finite equations of a Newtonian nature.
If we understand the molecular level as macrocosmic flux, it is easier to understand the casting of the molecular and the molar in Plateau Three of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Ontogenesis for any given body begins by drawing a molecular matter from the universal flux. These molecular matters, which are always flowing and fluctuating, naturally sediment and form into molar compounds. Likewise, any particular event may be the result of a molecular outburst and not pool ball physics. In essence, then, the butterfly effect may be a top down effect, beginning with the infinite process of the molecular flux, and ending in finite events of molar bodies.
Just because each individual molecule is smaller than an individual planet, does not mean that the magnitude of the forces at play or the level on which one or the other exists is evidently smaller. In essence, one could use the old ton of brick and ton of feathers logic. Just because a planet is bigger than a molecule, doesn’t mean that an infinity of planets is bigger than an infinity of molecules. This, only under the restricted sense that the real of the microcosm and the macrocosm is not at all the size of the individual bodies which compose its type (planet, grain of sand, or atom) but, after all, the functional whole it belongs to, and which determines its movements. This is the level each persists at: the cosmic flux is the molecular level, the macrocosm; and the molar body (planet, baseball, or human) is the universal realized in the particular object, the Newtonian body whose forces are local and therefore persist at the level of the microcosm.
The Ecstasy of Nature
Truth, it falls like rain
The flowers sprout disdain
The rivers course with forgetfulness
The Sun, it shines a little less.
Reason comes up like weeds
Anger dies and goes to seed
Heart and Soul come in like tides
The Moon, it slips away to hide.
Happiness strikes like bolts of thunder
The Earth, it shakes the good asunder
The mind is as vast as a desert plain
The Stars all die, yet their light remains.
