New Years Eve

A year? Its an administrative unit of measurement based on a consistent orbital period and climatic phenomena. To attribute significance as such to a year is tantamount to an astrology about units of time.

An anthropomorphism of time: we say it proceeds by ordered units of measurement, and turn that order into an absolute

Don't tell me that we do not take a year seriously - it is a fundamental and neccessary concept. The importance of the administrator, as artist.

Christmas Day Reflection on Kim Jong Il and Power

A Hitler, a Stalin, or a Kim Jong Il is NOT as pathological, in terms of drives, as we are usually led to think. Assuming a relative equality among persons, I'd like to think of us as repressed versions of them.

It is the relative order of significance to which we attribute certain aspects of our lives as they do to theirs which characterize the huge differences in consequences.

In fact, the inflation of the significance of the tiniest details and trivialities of our daily lives can be understood best as the same function acting out on a much smaller scale, but with no less absoluteness.

So it is the factors which affect the positing of significances to events which is the crucial difference here.

It is the capacity of the tyrant to overlook the factors that limit his desire for power that distinguishes him - and it is his interpretation of the world that crucially cannot be accomodated because of its real effects.

Ultimately, like us, he needs to sustain a view of the level of significance of the obstacles which lie in his path in order to locate his identity within the coordinates of control and power over significant things. But his approach differs: as we elevate the value of the smallest things, he consumes and destroys greater and greater amounts to sustain a level of said satisfaction.

Of course, the former approach is to be preferred to the latter, while 'successful people' are characterized by the enviable ability to cultivate and balance the two approaches.

Note to Self 5

The interpretation of becoming according to language, logical and narrative.

Utility as causative acknowledgement of role of praxis as inadequate because becoming cannot be reduced to notions derived from agency.

The Commercialisation of Development

Each society forges new paths through certain mediums of development searching continually for new forms, technes and technologies: gamechangers of the ways in which we perceive reality as it were in which to express our relation to the world and acts both real and perceived. New forms bring new possibilities and configurations of agency and its correspondent image of symbols. They can take on the forms of vertical product creation or facilitation of cross product exchanges. The question of the nature of evolution may be traced to the forces identifying and facilitating the creation of new forms and the consciousness that must attend it, both individual and social. Commercialisation has made it a question primarily of access with market as the dominant arbiter and referent of taste and development, although opinion leaders play major roles. Marketing has a reciprocally conditioning relation to the underlying forces, defining the imagic represented content based on the underlying forces, while modifying them also.

Note 16

I consider upon these carcass of days, of futile sunrises and dread filled mornings. Pursuing the darkness that lies beyond my curtains my eyes chance upon a golden glow of forgotten shadows brought into flesh once more. The rooms of walls fall away revealing gardens with paths we were to tread together to the sounds of the winds in the loosing trees.

Emerson

The point is not to choose to see all as divine but to be able to see in all particulars the representations that make them so. For Nietzsche the overriding narrative of development and growth celebrates the present as a necessary and grand organic element of becoming. Hence the Emersonian vision is defined as the ability to see the future in the present and thereby elevate it into what it truly is. Therefore the paradox of eternal recurrence takes its place as the final barrier within the Nietzschean project of affirmation by subverting the illusion of progressive growth, in individual or societial consciousness. It is Nietzsche's thought experiment for the creation of a post-historical philosophizing that succeeds his historical and genealogical project - one that again reorients the interpretation of the present, within, or built upon, the wider system of consciousness that developed from the irreversible incorporation of historical reality.

Culture 1

The nature of culture as an ordering device that relates a complete system of social science as the underlying presumption functioning as praxis through its solidification as initiations, as collective protocols of normalcy.

Note to Self 4

What Nietzsche hopes to do. Whether or not science is true is besides the point; what is the psychological function that a belief in the truthfulness of science plays? A psychological inquiry into the nature of beliefs and the act of believing, as revealing the cognitive assumptions that underlie the way we think, live, and react to the conditions in the present, in our lives.

So the psychological, historical revolution hopes to overturn the conception of truth as something that belongs within the first order relation of the world to itself. Instead, from a perspective of a second-order system of truth, where all perspectives are subjectively embedded, one criticizes one's experience, and therefore all its contents, as a contingent possibility, something where practical and pure reason each have to face problems and reconcile them in possibly conflicting ways. Nietzsche builds on a system of truth to critique its presumptions and to show them to be hollow, and posits a higher order truth pertaining to the nature of perception and experience, and how it must be, to show that these are themselves functions of practical reason, qualities in actual relation to life as a problem in its broadest sense.

This itself reflects a nominal philosophical realism as against the competing propositional realism. Or does/can it?

Note to Self 3

Given the role that mentality plays in defining the ways in which we conceive of and react to conditions, it may be posited that the character of intersubjective experience consists of interlocking webs of psychologically-based interpretations. This implies that facts, symbols and truths are positive expressions of negativity with regards to agency and possibility, and are reactions to limitations conceived within that realm of possibility. But they are contingently so because only experience reveals their limitations; and because they only take on meaning in relation to what is in fact possible. Therefore, truthfulness defined as what is the case, as opposed to what might be the case, returns with a vengeance.

Puzzle 1

How can we contextualise an understanding of the critique of modernity as such if one cannot even grasp the full import and depth, and not merely in simple descriptive terms and theroretical categories, the actualized totality of the ideas endlessly replayed, reinforced and reinterpreted in connection with the world in its dynamics? How is one to begin an understanding, within understandings, of the nature of a thought-act, their embededness, their emergent meanings and consequences? What is the content of all critique?

This conditions a reminder that any act of deproblematicizing, any sitting back in the chair of imported images with a self-satisfied smile is so much religion, a slip of the mind.

In this sense, the history of the world is so much the history of praxis - as always, negatively defined? To repeat, why is utility-evolution so popular nowadays? Because its conveniently true. But then, truth didn't matter so much in the past.

Quotes 2

"Theoretical resources are always already distorted (esp. social, ie psychologically-based), and something of them fails to represent or capture adequately the world they take root in. The question is not merely how some ideas come to be possible in certain social conditions as if we were then explaining them away, but how to develop an analysis of how certains sets of concepts are put to work to grasp conditions that have reached points of impossibility, breaking points. We are really outlining the conditions of impossibility for how the theories were put together."

Note to Self 2

You know the way an idea gets into you and activates a certain form of deep concentration and connection? What if the same means by which the idea catches hold of you and allows you to run along with it mirrors the way in which ideologies catch hold of collective society and animates it?

You know the way that one attains an ideational freedom from the limits of conventional thinking in a material-form-centric existence, that is, an ideological unconscious, when one dreams, and enters into a consciousness of a slightly more independent, yet more suggestively dependent, personal unconsious? What therefore, are the layers of the unconscious as it reacts among people in society - wherefore the phenomenologically-frameworked understanding of the nature of significance of all conscious objects?

Every present is infinitely dense in teleology, reality function, psychologically layered interpretation actualized into projected significances that characterizes the force of the moment - the external is an extension of the psychological spirit - external is substantiatively underground-interpreted as the negativity of agency- limitations of agency, limited by fact - just as cause extends truth to the unobservable, truth has meaning only insofar as it extends life into the unobservable as a means to the reinterpretation of agency. The significance of truth itself integrates into a set of underlying ideological principles undergoing dynamic change at every moment. Each thing affects it in some undefinable way.

What is the symbolic function of second-order explorations, descriptions, devoid of topic but the problem of relation itself?

Real inquiry takes the form of a wrestle with personal nihilism.

Self-promotion as failure, democratization of experience of knowing is itself a reflected image in a space bound mirror, an exhausted glance.

If reality is conjoined to fact in impersonal ways, so must the recognition of the terms by which things subsist be impersonal, and the best means through which they obtain that character is through the adoption of truth through a trivialisation of its process and the idealization of its image.

The image is itself all too easily fabricated, turned, bent.

Note 15

Culture is symbolic to the extent that the terms by which its complex of meanings and ideas are made alive and binding are actualized expressions of deeper functions, cathexis of deeper routes and organizations of the psychologically-based reality functions that seem to underlie language, mimesis, knowledge, orientation, understanding, meaning.

What the essential constitutive elements of these reality functions are, that is, creating phenomenologically, and hopefully physiologicaly grounded frameworks for specifying meaningful criteria for these reality functions, and to simply specify crude descriptions of the nature of their interactions: this remains the nearly impossible task for a sociological, psychoanalytic, phenomenology.

We bear in mind the assertion that actions and empirical reality are essentially unknowable - therefore progress has been, and must have been, to reshape the ways in which the unknowable revolve around a developing consciousness of consistency and order, and the descriptive apparatus that accompanies and secures this understanding - hence the

That is, we still hope to pursue new lines of inquiry through new kinds of second-order critiques that problematicizes:

a)

Note to Self 1

The next revolution in philosophy:

A transcendence of the superstitions of conceivable possibilities?

Note 14

To perceive the scientific, the causal, and the supernatural in everything at once: isn't that the goal?

Quotes 1

"The essence of the authoritarian character has been described as the simultaneous presence of sadistic and moschistic drives. Sadism was understood as aiming at unrestricted power over another person more or less mixed with destructiveness; masochism as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory. Both the sadistic and masochistic trends are caused by the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone and his need for a symbiotic relationship that overcomes this aloneness."

"Let us return now to the question which led us into this psychological analysis of selfishness. We found ourselves confronted with the contradiction that modern man believes himself to be motivated by self-interest and yet that actually his life is devoted to aims which are not his own; in the same way that Calvin felt that the only purpose of man's existence was to be not himself but God's glory. We tried to show that selfishness is rooted in the lack of affirmation and love for the real self, that is, for the whole concrete human being with all his potentialities. The “self” in the interest of which modern man acts is the social self, a self which is essentially constituted by the role the individual is supposed to play and which in reality is merely the subjective disguise for the objective social function for man in society. Modern selfishness is the greed that is rooted in the frustration of the real self and whose object is the social self. While modern man seems to be characterized by utmost assertion of the self, actually his self has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self – intellect and willpower – to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.

Even if this is true, has not the increasing mastery over nature resulted in an increased strength of the individual self? This is true to some extent, and inasmuch as it is true it concerns the positive side of the individual development which we do not want to lose track of . But although man has reached a remarkable degree of mastery over nature, society is not in control of the very forces it has created. The rationality of the system of production, in its technical aspects, is accompanied by the irrationality of our system of production in its social aspects. Economic crisis, unemployment, war, govern man's fate. Man has built his world; he has built factories and houses, he produces cars and clothes, he grows grain and fruit. But he has become estranged from the products of his own hands, he is not really the master any more of the world he has built; on the contrary, this man-made world has become his master, before whom he bows down, whom he tries to placate or manipulate as best he can. The work of his own hands has become his God. He seems to be driven by self-interest, but in reality his total self with all its concrete potentialities has become an instrument for the purposes of the very machine his hands have built. He keeps up the illusion of being the centre of the world, and yet he is pervaded by an intense sense of insignificance and powerlessness which his ancestors once consciously felt towards God."

Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom

Guttertalk

Inspiration,
a genie whose lamp
one rubs, hoping
for a spark,
a hiss of steam,
to allay the darkness,
the death of things.

A discombobulate fruit,
to yearn in despair,
to feel in vulnerability,
absolute, eternal:
A purgatory of insight,
a corridor of punishments,
where one breathes
your faith in light; your own.

Note 13

Enough! Already it flows into a yearless stream. We stand on fortress bricks: remnants that cage the world. The terraces frown like an urban moat, but cars, like dreams, elide into tar-sown rivers, leading nowhere, but moving to the beat of an urgent tune.

The collapse of days, bound by the thoughts of a faraway field, where children once stood. The threads of meaning that bind the tightropes to a web of dreams, hissing in the background, like a modern prayer.

I was electric against the fence, epistemic against the mud, metaphysic against the wind, representationalist against illusion, hedonistic against material form; my bloodless will flows out, flows into the last springs of untapped memory.

Note 12

We conceptualize ourselves as a function of our acts, therefore we are responsible to our acts.

We conceptualize ourselves as a function of our ability to act, therefore we are responsible for our acts.

Is function a means of retaining dependence on the continuity between interiority and the objective?

Note on Nietzsche Aphorism

I suppose that some readers may find my recent assignment on Nietzsche vaguely interesting, so here it is:

Exegesis on Aphorism 335 in “The Gay Science”

The aphorism can be split into four sections.

1) The attack on conscience and the moral affects
2) The attack on duty and the categorical imperative and the unknowability and uniqueness of human action and drives
3) The irrelevance of established morality to self-creators
4) The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'

Within this aphorism, several trajectories of Nietzschean thought converge, firstly, the refutation of the metaphysical account and justification of the grounds of morality and its replacement by a genealogical and psychological critique that emphasizes its conditioned and contingent nature, second, a project to democratize morality as a set of values that must be determined largely by the individual in accordance with the specific conditions of his personal psychology and physiology, and third, the role of the sciences, self-observation, and the sceptical mode of enquiry in this process of cultivation of the drives.

This note will address the main arguments and issues Nietzsche raises for and against each of the four points. In doing so, it will address the threads raised above and hopefully cohere them into a possible interpretation of the aphorism as a whole.

Attack on Conscience and the Moral Affects

Nietzsche begins the attack on the psychology of moral motivations with two questions: first, is the act of making a moral judgement itself moral, and secondly, why is the moral affect of conscience taken as a justification for moral acts uncritically? To this, he claims that understanding the origins and psychological nature of these affects will “spoil these grand words for you!”i

Here the critique of conscience exists on two levels: first, while the conscience exists as an affect based upon, and activated in correspondence to our abstract moral principles to compel us to act in accordance with them, the reasons for which the moral affect is taken up as the overriding guide to action as opposed to our other drives are based on egoism, self-preservation, hedonism or plain ignorance and blind faith. Here Nietzsche asks: “For this faith- is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience?”ii. In other words, he questions if we adhere to our conscience with morally justified reasons, and suggests we do not. Whether it is possible or not to have these reasons may be examined later.

Secondly, the abstract moral principles by which the conscience is conditioned are themselves products of tradition and social conditioning, which must be justified with reference to values different in nature from those which overtly motivate the conscience. As Nietzsche states in GS21:

“The praise of the selfless, the self-sacrificial, the virtuous...this praise certainly was not born from the spirit of selflessness. The neighbour praises selflessness because it brings him advantages. If the neighbour himself were “selfless” in his thinking, he would repudiate this diminution of strength, this mutilation for his benefit, he would work against the development of such inclinations, and above all he would manifest his selflessness by not calling it good! This indicates a fundamental contradiction in morality nowadays: the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle.”iii

However, we may raise an objection. Given that moral affects favour a certain moral value, and given that the justification for the moral affects and the reasons for following them are themselves either instrumental upon other values based on self-interest of the individual or group, does this therefore make the outcome of the moral affects immoral, or does this make the adoption of the moral affect inconsistent in some way, morally speaking? This would be the case only if the satisfaction of the underlying value is incompatible in principle with values involved in the satisfaction of the moral outcome. However, it is seen that the (decision) situations involved in choosing to privilege the moral affect of conscience over other drives (or in adopting a moral principle for egotistical ends), where one by definition chooses between different self serving ends, is contextually different from the point where one chooses between egotistical ends and ends that consider others when one acts, before the moral act. That the latter decision situation is psychologically motivated by the former, does not entail that the principles that inform the latter are incompatible with those of the former. That second-order self-interest motivates first-order altruism does not necessarily entail that the principle of altruism has been violated, or that the agent in acting morally, is inconsistent in his virtues. This would only be the case if the self-deception on the part of the agent were complete, which is an oversimplification of agents.

However what successfully Nietzsche sought to topple was the notion that morality was universally binding in all circumstances and occasions, and that we can make clear demarcations between good virtues and evil vices; in showing that they are reciprocally conditioningiv, with the good having dark roots and depending upon the amoral drives, Nietzsche does not claim that we cannot be good, but that we do not have to be.

Attack on Duty and the Categorical Imperative

Nietzsche states in parenthesis: “The voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral.”v However, one may consider a recourse from the moral affects to an ethics based on reasons.

Nietzsche attacks this dependence on the rational ethics:

“An original sin of philosophers. - Philosophers have at all times appropriated the propositions of examiners of humanity (moralists) and ruined them by taking the propositions unconditionally and wanting to demonstrate this as necessary...” [AOM 5]vi

Robert Guay, in an excellent article, interprets Nietzsche's attack on on morality as an attack on a “complex whose center is the search for a kind of normative stability” whose role is to generate “sound practical commitments”.vii The soundness of a code rests on its purity, where “morality is conceived as detached from any contingent concerns or features of the world”viii and its unconditionality; where “humanity must have something that it can obey unconditionally [D 207]ix, thereby preserving the stability and independence of its authority.x The comprehensiveness and universality of the claims of morality is explained in terms of its purity: independence of contingency ensured that no morally relevant differences between persons or suitably similar occasions obtained.xi

Nietzsche's attack on the purity, unconditionality and universality of morality takes several forms in GS335. Firstly, he cites the origins of morality, namely, its situatedness in cultural and political authorityxii and the conditional and revisable nature of the mores and traditions which they perpetuate which determine moralities [D9], secondly, the inability to specify “a universally recognized goal [which is a necessary condition before one could] propound such and such should be done” [D108], making any “unconditional feeling that here everyone must judge as I do” a “blind, petty and frugal selfishness” [GS335], third, the lack of independent and objective moral authority, given the conditionality and selfishness of the first order ethical principle of equality that underlies the “categorical imperative”, therefore opening up the danger of infinite regress when one questions the higher-order morality of morals, fourth, the uniqueness and unknowability of the psychological profile of the moral agent and his environment and therefore his act that debars any simplistic or universally meaningful application of second-order moral laws, or even any form of ethically-tinged judgement, upon acting agents, and fifth, the indemonstrability of the law of the mechanism by which our moral judgements cause our actions, thereby undermining the autonomy of the Kantian will.

The Irrelevance of Established Morality to Self-creators

Nietzsche dismisses the task of constructing a morality that lays claim to an objective ethical truth, for the reasons stated above. He proposes a more modest task: “Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the moral value of our actions!”xiii

There are two main thrusts in his argument. Firstly, for Nietzsche, morality “trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function”, for “valuations and orders of rank [of impulses] are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most- that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals.”[GS116] It turns men to creatures whose ideals do not necessarily correspond to the conditions of their individual flourishing[GS120]. In taking the individual to be an end-in-itself, “human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves”, he advocates the pursuit, or at least the equal legitimacy of the pursuit, of individually determined ends that require a freedom from the limits of morality as a contingent social construct.

Secondly, Nietzsche perceives the pervasiveness and insidiousness of moral valuations in ascribing significance and value-judgements, and therefore creating cohesive interpreted meanings, psychologically speaking, out of the contents of our experience. The pervasiveness and habituation of moral thinking, acting and evaluating [Dawn 9] is itself conditioned by existential and therefore superstitious fears - “fear of a higher intellect that commands through tradition, fear in the face of an inexplicable, indeterminate power, of something beyond the personal- there is superstition in this fear.” That is, the human fear of the essentially unknowable and therefore unconquerable aspects of becoming-as-such condition a flight to meaning based on established traditions, and propels the desire to turn oneself into a function, and creates the ascetic ideal, all of which becomes habitualized in thought and therefore renders life manageable and ordinary. However, these moral valuations “crowd out the significance of the smallest, everyday, matters [GS299]”xiv; things pertaining to lifestyle, diet and so on; in addition, adopted meanings organize life in a way over which the agent has little conscious control. Hence, for Nietzsche, self-critical observation and science plays a key role in allowing the free spirit to shape the terms by which he lives a purposive life.

The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'

The above section opens up several ways in which Nietzsche might have thought that the “intellectual conscience” and the development of scientific methods of inquiry, as well as scientific understanding of the self and the world contribute to the project of creation of ideals and self-creation.

First, the products of scientific development, broadly understood, allows us to better manage the natural and social conditions which affect our lives, through technology, social science, policy and management practices and so on.

Second, in exhorting us to become “the best learners and discovers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world”, that is, of ourselves, he advises us to know ourselves in order to create personal virtues. This can be neatly, if crudely, explained in the chart below:

The 'Herd'

Control (Experience of free will)
↓
Meaning (Metaphysics)
↓
Function (Morality)

The 'Free-Spirit'

Control (Amor Fati, Individual virtues)
↑
Meaning (Self-knowledge from psychology, sciences)
↑
Function (Honesty, will to truth, self-experimentation scientific method)

Hence Nietzsche interprets the freedom from the possibility of a metaphysical solution to the problem of becoming-as-such as an opportunity to overcome the pessimist view of life as suffering, or as a question mark, thereby paving the way for a physics that allows us to embrace and affirm life, and to “live in the present”.

i Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
ii Ibid, p.265
iii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 21, p.94
iv Thanks to my lecturer
v Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
vi Nietzsche, Friedrich (1880), trans. Hollingdale. Human, All Too Human: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Cambridge University Press, 5, p.215
vii Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 59
viii Ibid, p.59
ix Ibid, p.59
x Ibid, p.59
xi Ibid, p.60
xii Ibid, p.61
xiii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
xiv Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 78

Note 11

Where does this form turn in its boundless craving for the recreation of reality as a kind of erotic freedom? Encapsulated in functional cages and routed into the over worn paths that break into no living future, all is withdrawn into cynical understanding that functions to protect one from the shadow in the corner, the unmet desire, the object of the unattainable Real. Transcendence, being detached from illusion as its greatest symptom, rears its hungry head in the dark still ponds of modernity, striving with immense energy towards the retreating future, stumbling into things, into furniture, into alcohol, into the waste products of the ecstasies of the past that has exhausted itself and therefore, with implacable right, fail to generate the similar terms of of fulfilment to which its role and its creation was to perform. Is there a philosophic craving in the man of action, so that this disrreality and triviality is elevated into the immense symbol of his striving made objective and therefore responsive, interesting? In that sense, a diagnosis of creeping decay is possible, as in all other over-formed ages, but the terms of renewal have yet to be conceived: the longer the lack of vision draws the bow, the more dangerous the point of release.

Note 10

How does one explain the way one views the world if the very process of that explanation presupposes that the way in which you understand that explanation fits the nature of the world as I understand it?

The difference between the external and the internal is not one primarily of organs, of thing vs thought and so on. External is to be defined, un-metaphysically, as that whose nature of the thing is to be judged by that other than yourself; internal is to be defined as that whose nature is to be judged by you.

Objectivity presupposes other perspectives from which to allocate the nature of the subjective to the other: the external is just what it is to be judged based on a perspective that is a collection of subjectives; it is a subjective which I cannot see. In that respect objectivity is an anthropomorphism, and, in agreeing into objectivity, what we really do is to agree into intersubjectivity.

Note 9

The fundamental question is:

1) How do we subjectivize the world such that it can be responded to in agency, that it can be worked upon by the understanding, that it can be used as a supplement to our need?

2) The Western liberal cultural tradition has relocated the modality of this subjectification towards the starting point of representational individualism, where subjectivity and objectivity has been narrativised through a notion of the "man as observer", as the starting point of his "idea of his life" within a society organized around that belief system. Representationalism is a neccessary postulate for intersubjective notions of objectivity, and the paradox of subjectivised intersubjectivity remains the chief philosophical paradox within this account. Life regains apparent coherance around this account, but as always, breaks down through philosophical enquiry.

3) The individual is a factually verified superstition (of course, fact as usually applied is itself a superstition), based primarily on the agential instinct for self-preservation. More than the commonality of sense perceptions, it is the drives and perspectives that condition the instinct to self-preservation that patterns the world into objectivity, becoming the common forum as it were within which differences can thrive under the banner of the subjective, or the internal. However, insofar as the conditions of actions are unprimary and complex, superstition is required for the reproduction of social values- and not only social values- as the compass towards the equilibrium to which man seeks to maintain when he acts.

4) This deadlock of habit and the superstitious frame of mind is the primary veil to which it is the goal of individuals to pierce, therefore affording second-order insights into the nature of things as they function within the acting individual. This is why we have to catch ourselves in the act of thinking: thinking must precede the act, not the other way round.

Note 8

Self-consciousness means different things in different cultures and different people because the terms by which things are understood to be living are different. Organicisticity is intepreted, processed, culturally reinforced and revitalized through behaviors, ideas, beliefs, design, interactive space and so on.

The surface beliefs condition and re-engineer the habits by which order is maintained within the individual, who consciously navigates through the coordinates of those terms, which are ideational (moral, understanding), emotional-biological (drives, emotions, sensitivity, output), and external (environment, interaction).

Function may become a possible paradox in relation to this subjectification of the world. Each has to be reintergrated into an earlier system, and the evolution of the cultural system is determined largely by the product of power interactions between competing individual visions and systems, "individual" to be understood in the most comprehensive sense.

Therefore self consciousness as nightmare, as a psychological expersion, made in universal and irrepressible terms, absorbed by all, emanating from all, the defactualized expressibility of the underground dynamic, in a state of terrible recognition, layered over by the public consciousness, by effectuality, by empiricistic gravity, formed in arts, comedy, force-interaction, in habitualized understanding.

Note 7

Let me analyse the unawakened state. its a detachment made in horror you know.
a mode of failed justification, seperation in an unkindled morning.

lets burrow. into sleep and there will the flipping deception of an uncreated mind release some insight that lives above, away from the knowing mind, like ungraspable sunlight. Yes to yearn for the frame and borders of the window to fall away, for you to fall heedlessly, endlessly into the garden, as others, as others always fall into life. But there, the things have no meaning, they have no meaning, for they never had, and they never will.

Note 6

Should i have gone for the halloween party of deprived fun mongers, a series of forgotten rituals on a misnomed Saturday night, as you put on the paper knife and the fake blood that drips from foamless lips? No, we would enter, bemused at the stupidly faithful, at those who have failed to chase and caress their fading childhood memories before finding them hollow and shrifted, like hay in a forgotten barn, as they stumble into coats too deep for tiny ribcages, into myth too hollow for parody and mockery, into attempts too forced for genuine laughter. A social or a collaboration of drunkards? Are we more honest in an otherwordly suit? With mascara so thick it shuts distempered eyes? Remember, orientals - we begin another ritual, imitation upon imitation, mockery itself a device. And so what if the wasted vampires tether, dreaming of real blood?

Note 5

Nothing aids respite from alien forms better than the stillness of winter in a British bus. The experience is unbearable for many as it is sweet liberation for me. One eavesdrops on various forms of life: in the front, bespectacled asians bunched up and huddled in coats, twittering like sparrows, in the middle czech boys and black men, middle class university types expressive of melancholy roots sitting in odd positions, weirdly incongruous and emblematic, black coats against a gentrified landscape of neat blue seats, and elsewhere the whites who seem to perform a division of labour according to time of day: nerds in the day and drunkards at night, silence and contemplation in sunlight and morning, and freedom and matehood and cunthood against the dark, streetlighted panes, while the chill of damp evenings fall around us.

The bus ambles past the Sainsburys before turning into the highway. There the factories give way to a view of the full green countryside, bound by trees shaded in green, orange and yellow, planted in neat rows set against a gently sloping valley. The golden sunlight plays upon our faces, and the dews on the windowpanes glitter. Then the factories approach again, and so the University comes into view.

Note 4

Again you recollect that chill of unsupported desolation as you picked the land that was carved and divided by the strange sounding sea.

What was it I was attempting to do? Did something or someone get in the way? I caught your glances in oblique angles, across a shelful of handphones, of antiquated, forgotten communication devices, wired and meaningless, and something broke, and I awoke with your presence all about me.

Note 3

If one is rich in the passionate flow of ideas, one cannot read or listen, and the moment itself is twisted into a confusing mix of anxiety, elation, constantly tuned and strained in its rapt channelling of spontaneous thoughts. The airless, sterile landscape of the room changes and vistas slam open; life gasps with possibility, snaking its way into secret passageways of thought.

Here is the monumental alley, the tranfiguration of the massive dreamscape that makes one feel so small. Or there the structural overview, the map of the world flashing to reveal its dynamic organization, or its endless, trapping layers of contradictory functions. Perspectives come in waves, and so does growth, deceit and misery.

Note 2

Thoughts left unwritten or words left unsaid are like residue and waste left undischarged in the body; they remain to stain and damage the organs that depend on purity to sustain the possibilty of a renewed creative union with the present.

Perhaps part of the process of the constitution of the personality lies in this: a protest of the mind against an unresolved memory, a series of problems, felt with all the intuitive force and power of a sensitive soul, left unresolved by all the cognitive solutions and rationalizations of learning and thought, left unburied by all the sandy, worthless layers of the chattering, insistent present, thereby shaping, framing, deforming it, turning perception into a prisoner's art.

And so, the tension between the forgotten future and the wasted past mixes into the visions of a damned, hapless present.

Note 1

A surprise for me again, to look upon the world with lowered eyes, to plumb the endless pipes of your thoughts, and to discover how little the world thinks, how little it wants to think, with what difficulty it ellides the whirl of the senses, or how we are but broken boats floating on the surface of the deepest sea, riding the forceful currents of the present, tiding this way and that to the tune of the loneliest stars latched in the loftless dark.

We seem to be caught in an endless seasonal drift, the constant patterns, like the soft shedding evening lights that spill around the spines of cool shaded buildings in which children play, in shadowed ruins at once homey and familiar and hallowed with sacred memory, strengthening in fleshly perfomance, against the ghost of the receding present.

So the sand recedes from beach where the lighthouse once stood, and where the calm rocks brace the winds. Where was the peak to which we clamber, caught in some essential ectasy?

Is liberty intrinsically or only instrumentally valuable?

Two definitions of freedom will be examined in relation to the above question. Firstly, it may be loosely defined as a freedom from x to do y, where x is defined as external obstructions to fulfilment of a given intention. Second, it is defined as the state of a position which one is in, determined by the number and desirability of the choices he is given. A major part of this essay will attempt to clarify the role of intention in according value to the abovementioned state of freedom.

Here, two preliminary observations are in order. It is immediately clear that the presence of choice is taken to be valuable in itself. For example, most students in this University would not even consider the possibility of choosing to be dropouts; nevertheless, the freedom to leave the University if one chooses would be considered a right valuable in itself (which, if suspended, would create protests of greater violence than those at present). (The problem of prudentiality will be addressed later.) A more general form of the above example is, doing a while one could do b, but knowing that one would have chosen a anyway, is better than not having the option of b at all. In other words, the presence of intention is not a necessary ingredient in the valuation of the choice; potentiality of intention is sufficient. The perceived value accruing the individual therefore cannot derive solely from the positive consequences of a. Second, agency is an insufficient ground for which to cite an intrinsic value for liberty. Consider an example: a random number generator. While the number generator is able to choose numbers, and potentially other numbers than the ones it has chosen, we do not value the presence of choice in the same way; that is, we do not attach to its freedom a moral value as we would to that of a living creature. Therefore the inclination to choose must contain certain characteristics before value can be accorded to its fulfilment.

Now we ask ourselves: what is the model through which one can understand the value of the presence of choice (liberty)? Three models are possible. The first one is: because the actions we are compelled to do, or the options we are given, never correspond ideally to the best possible desired outcome, a range in the quality and quantity of choices naturally means an increased probability in reaching a satisfaction-maximising point. Any value in the presence of choice is derived solely from the consequence of the best choice, that is, choice understood as a means to that end.

A second model: the value of the presence of choice accrues to the prudential accommodation of the possibility of changing needs. For example, person A is allergic to oranges while B is not. While B may choose to buy apples on a specific occasion, he values the choice that the seller provides him to get oranges in the future in a way that A does not. Of course A may value that fact of choice in recognition of different subjective preferences; the point is that the valuation of choice is a prudential means of recognizing difference over time and in individual preferences, therefore it remains an instrumental means to an end, the fulfilment of intentions which are inherently subject-determined.

The third model locates the value of choice in its being an actualization of the free will to select the preferences by which ends are deemed as good or not so good. This means that the expression of intention is deemed as good in itself. Is this a tenable claim? Why should we value the expression of free will for its own sake if free will does not generate a priori intentions towards its own satisfaction; if it does not exist as need?

A possible reply is that one requires free will to determine one’s own ends before these ends are found to have value; it is precisely through the act of choosing ends that they acquire value, which, by definition, is a conscious-realmed addendum to the primary mode of desiring an object. Therefore the crucial characteristic that distinguishes the human being from the number generator is the free will; we value liberty intrinsically because it is a prerequisite of value.

Unfortunately, this reply does not necessarily entail that liberty is valuable in itself; the defence merely claims that liberty as a state is a pre-condition of value, what is really valued is the intention, and the consequence (and perhaps, the moral faculty) that is enabled by liberty.

Therefore the definition of liberty as a relational concept remains; however, it is an error to suppose that our moral values align themselves to logical necessities. It is reasonable to claim that we value liberty for its own sake alongside the view that, factually speaking, it exists only as a condition for consequences also valued in themselves.

Sigh 3

Where lies the pad on which truth scrawls? Search in the desert; for there I will begin.

So, the crane kid said: you are nothing, not even a drop, or a cliff edge that holds summer grass and sheds love-moistened tears as it falls, scratching the terrain of my thoughts, its jagged pinnacles of anxiety, in its gullied descent into despair, its furtive snowlike hope. What?

So, having to interrupt myself, as all do, to discover who I am, I lurch forward like a detuned automaton, uttering robot sounds, cremating life in an echoing auditorium without projectors, or worse, eyeballs.

Of course, a couple of mad scientists enter. They stare hard at their invention, the reincarnated Frankenstein, who pleats his hair into complexity, into Afro.

“I told you to decommission him”, the first scientist said, “look what he has done to our reputation, especially among the bioresonance researchers in the Academy of the Arts and Sciences.”

“The president has lost faith in our latest project”, the second added.

“Yes, that’s likely”, the third scientist said, “but we have use for another nightmare tester."

Somehow I felt myself tumbling off the stage.

Sigh 2

I was full of good cheer but the situation was not to be. Favourable as truth is
to the brave, it rewards men according to their ability to take the path that violates
it in a show of impenetrable strength. How one overcomes the massive arbitrary necessity
without a need for a single whimper as if one's brain ran on something else so dependable as food or petrol...
it is indeed an academician's silo,
to live in a book and to
look at an unpaged world of grimy delight
where the lights were somehow realer so you did not have to follow them as you bathe your worldly skin in its juicy poison.

British Riots

To argue with a history student.

Yes. The nature of a narrative as an ordering of significance of variables to create intertemporal and intervariable interpretations, based on causal and systemic analysis.

Does it therefore, by definition, require a ground up assessment of the means by which systems of intercausal effects interact with contingent agential causes?

Will the determination of the event be best served by judgement of the immediate, critical contingentialities interacting?

Events as a poor indicator of the state of society.

Or do we wish to create a probabilistic time-scale in which critical causes are clearly identifiable, while causes which act on conditions are themselves ascertained by larger social indicators that flesh out the 'state of normalcy'.

Differing causal interpretations find their common ground in their assessment of this state. This dynamic state is to be seen as a foci of future potentialities, given probabilistic representation through the impacts of individual and social interaction and of established constants with novel effects of disruptive social forces.

A problem of social science is to establish a framework in which to characterise the general issues that arise in any such state which can adequately address both the nature of the present as an effect and conversely, as construct, and to recreate the probabilistic modeling based on any change in variables. Psychology and perspective of the agents must be included in the calculation, if only to support normal distribution type events.

Oh yes. Judging, as always, through intuition, I doubt if the riots are an isolated event. It just confirms my view that there is a strong thuggish, almost facist, undercurrent in Britain. Its buried under civilisational mud, but, like radioactive waste, its there.

Mothman

Vacancies.
The tiled stairways seemed to survey their cooped delirium again, as he shuffled up its tunneling damp. This apartment. A strange impossibility made real by the uneven paved cement under his feet, and the smell of urine. It was surreal, to think that all this, these alleys, these shuddering lifts, existed, alongside that sheltered contruct through which he had strung great hopes, or seizured illusions, carried as it were, by the luck of circumstance in a great enabling machine that had now ceased to run, to pour its great lubricant syrup over the cog of days. Of course, he could trace the boundaries of the protective circles of his mind, like so many impenetrably arbitrary things. But a moth flew from the ceiling, and latched to the doorway. Who lives there? Perhaps some waitress, remembering salvation through strange forgettable bedfellows, like modern day priests? Perhaps some avuncular man, that hangs, and in age, reminds one of jolly life juxtaposed with a death-truth that sweeps one over deserting present, a kind of embalmed archetype, condemned to sincerity? The mothman stared, for it shouldered his wrists. Its eyes looked; wingtips brushing the tips of his armhairs. He kissed it, and it latched to his face, fluttering, trembling, shuddering across his face.

Movie Impressions 2

Having spent many hours travelling on Emirates, I enjoyed the Oscar contenders for 2011 from the enlarged, newly minted flightscreens of an A380, lofted above Dubai deserts, and floating in and out of sleep.

The Social Network
A docu-fictionalization of Zuckerburg's overgrown startup from the lens of a screenplay that essentializes and amplifies the overwhelming, yet emotionally hollow, intersection of parties, of entitlement, of authority, of impossible girls that characterizes the brew of college culture and beyond - this movie, like its subject matter, flips and darts across space, across individuals and times, as each progressively alienates and becomes alienating, each, accounted for, registered and then discarded, as quickly and surely as modern life itself, moored between the emptiness of an evening office space and the dreamlife of a keyboard that fails to play and to express adolescent truth any longer. It drives forward, still repressed, and finally hangs nowhere. No; craft is salvation. I slept till the motion sickness pills wore off.

The King's Speech

This movie is well made. Its crucial opposition, among many others, to the Social Network, lay in its created representation of the moment as an infinite carrier of emotional significance, thereby universalizing the particular in a manner reversed to the Social Network, which found its universal subject in an easily referenced contemporaneity and therefore particularized accordingly; which effect is to primarily engage us in different ways, and to arouse different sets of responses, namely, envy as against pity.

Here, one is enfurled into the arms of a more comforting tradition, and of real relationships, unconditional and genuine - clearly, it is institutions that corrupt human natures. Emotional turmoil is nested in the security of moral certainties: an affair is a great violation where responsibilities are largely ceremonial. This fantastically comforting portrayal is justified by the customary right of historical event-based movies to appeal to antiquarian romanticisms. We are never made uncomfortable throughout this slightly patronizing, and thoroughly bourgeosie entertainment: quiet satisfaction, supported by a beautiful consistency, reigns.

Never Let Me Go

The main complaint against The Social Network is its antipoetical substitution of images with scripted wit. The main complaint against Never Let Me Go is its sentimental insistence on the pain and suffering of life through distorted images and cardboard characters. The obvious intent of creating a mood piece that culminates in the twin ejaculations of simple anger and a wash of tears; that is, moods as intense yet trivial as the perpetual scowl of Ruth, unanchors the script from a believable potrayal of the interiority of its characters as the point of departure from which to create depth, or dilemma, or any serious invitation to the viewer to address himself to the themes which Ishiguro sought to uncover. This movie, like the sense of barren waste it often evokes, feels like a letdown. One was led to suspect that the original was written by Jodi Picoult.

Carey Mulligan played Kathy H wonderfully, given her unfortunate script. The brilliant yearning eyes projecting from a sensously melancholic face conveyed less of the agility of technique than of the naturalism of self-expression.

True Grit review here.

Release

How does one attain richness in acts?
In living differently,
or in turning away, to glance clearly
at life, its golden statutes
bled into words, flesh, thing.
In the wish of a still embalmed second
like the imprinted mesh of a recognized glance,
that remains, that frames into a moving picture.
Each sore-faced man, or the still-eyed burn,
or a memory, like an unearthed golden urn,
lays out beachlike, shored against the tidal seconds,
orbed within each raindrop
each dissipation trampling softly onto umbrellas
as we tread across the rich rose gardens.

Hmm

Cold ruffles and bed tossings,
in the rotting temporary prison,
stayed a week or a day,
quilted from loneliness
by Dickens; or a childhood souvenir.
Stepping into weedsprung alleys,
peopleless in the architectural trunks,
cobbled and lost in history:
the sounds of stories, meaningful and meaningless.
Staring, laced by the draped windows of empty streets,
into the faces of revellers,
a kind of liquid consequence dawns,
shadowed by pigeons herding, flocking.

Wallowage 1

If one pursues liberty to its limits like a hollow madman, or lets all beliefs fall away, or all attachments cease, then, one leaps into the abyss of days, into the rush of hollow mocking air, the exhilaration of suffering a kind of salvation balm for unsated pain, a palindromic schema that reverses the sight of staggering into absurdity, clownhood.

Moot 7

Faith like a dram of frothing beer seams over the nottinghill of hopes. Purdy, its undirected pies still drag the table over the gravelled pub floor. Cramming the ground with tabled garlands, or filling the balconies with sunbathers better attuned to the polar skin of winter, as the bumblebees crowd around honey plates, full of the summer of attraction and forgetting youth, spilling into the future like an ancient river. What? Can this balcony to the machinery of soul, I mean the consistency that swears better than it manueveurs, like a revision vehicle, actually breathe the continuity of sunshine without inner stagnation, in the way one enters the ownership of an overfamiliar thing like someone awaking from nothing to find himself a person again, loafed in a dungeon of present that reverses, as it were, into the future like a retreating rear view mirror of emotive occurences? Yes? I read that Merlin once fled to the forest in escape of irrational human fear, as the couch in the hidden Carribean balcony bends, but found the woods too enchanted for his dreams, too full of the criterias which determine the tightropes, the plans, the trapeze-tension, of the circus that amuse the nonexistent Muses that watch them. In that case, one might reason that spell-frames, or a toothbrush that cleanses more than material dirt, or even shelter that has reached further than the commanding hands of nature, will continue to pierce the air that fills the torched, uncrested running of highways that seem to bridge the strange crevasse that divides heaven and hell, or man and man, or past and future, or stairways and the sky, or clouds and candy, or fire and the vast sinking sea.

So. This strange landfill that holds up the attic of the earth on pencilled beams. Wallow my friend. For home is here, at least, in the strange choking motions of a concentrated second. For it is but gone, like a illusion that mimiked itself, prating in the garments of truth a second ago, exposed to its vanity and the stranger wind, deprived of the mirror of necessity which breaks and cracks with each passing second, only to rise again in an elevator of transcending hope, flapping its winged frame over the drowning forces that trembles and overwhelms. No, not a predictive instrument, a breakable, sure orb, or a telescope, to watch and to severe, lost in observation but saved, even recovered in an identity compass......

Incoherent 2

The heart beats like footsteps over endless dirt,
trodding where circumstance has etched out a path.
Lost in the cluster of darkwood pines,
where rotting logs ply the inheritance of human wealth.
Like a lining of pictures against the wall
of friends, of wishes petering into memory,
like a sewer, a blanketed sky, that curtains
the future from a weary gaze. Or that ladle of rewards,
that plate of contentment that breeds the automobile rhythms of happiness,
that extends the cliff of suspended days,
diving like seabirds into the waves, these frothing days.
Thronging with sounds,
spilling into ears like a mapped echo, but dissipating like the richest scents of flowers into the spring-duned air, trembling over
meads and brooks, with that withdrawing trickle,
unsated and content,
would this river be a doorway
to the depth-drowning sea.

Bathroom Soliloquay

This frozen white light, on the endless shore of the shower room. Witness the piped workings of the veins of industrial earth, while the docile toilet roll awaits its message, cast as the loyal scribe of our lives; its progress of days.

Moot 6

I am stoked to the bedframe, lilting on the unforgettable scent of English air. Evening falls away from the echoed yellow painting the sunlight makes on the windblown leaves. This glow of spring that has crowned the earth with its bluest garlands, now descends, like a retreating cloak of childhood furling away from a windowless sky, its purest reflected blue crafting a pathway in which to lose the world in, as we now tunnel into hopes in search of the lamps of truth.

Such is the regret of the present, that we preserve clarity and bad conscience for a later date.

Waltz

Agency as the contingency that deconditionalizes everything.

Incoherent 1

Opening, we tread into gateways of the future that descend to where no-one remembers to have gone, to have tried nor wanted, for they are tied like strings into a knot of normalcy, used to but a little trembling through the devil's torch itself. But to unravel, or to bring the knife to one's mind, to sever the conscious kitchen from necessity, from the streamlined factory of linear time, of constant order itself, like a man who left the faith of the church grounds to descend the cliff walls into the gully of his soul, where reflexivity - that curse that has yet to unravel itself, would pioneer the method of mad truth, turning to its gravity substance as he tumbles out of the nighmarish bed into the centre of everything, where no encirclement of time awaits, only a slow accumulation of wounds, covered cleverly with metaphysical masks, or a scepter, or a wand, or beauty.

Moot 5

One has to expect less with a smaller field of brain, if consciousness were a harvester of unplanted wheat, thronging, as it were, within nature's general perfume, lasting the breadth and intensity of noontime, before swiftly departing as night decks out its silent staggered arrays, seeped into the accumulated security of homes, pictures, as it were, framed by mold-breeding brick against the north north west wind.

Dream-surfing

A Koppaberg spirit catches the eye in the supermarket where mediocrity melts into boundless space. Can this strange bottle, filled with the hemlock of my old fading life, resurface some kind of genuine hope? It basks in the steady, overbright lights: drink me, it says, wordlessly, as my lips tiptoe to its frothing nothingness, promising sunlight in an unlamped room.

Dreamt:

Scene: I was in Oxford.
Friend: Everything is so business-like, as if it was made-to-order.
I looked out of the shop we were in. It seemed a half-Canley, half-Malaysian small town, with touches of course, but it certainly wasn't Oxford-Oxford.
I was somehow half-naked. There was a broken down bus across the street. I scanned the windows to see if anyone cared to look at me before the bus restarted and drove away. No one did.
I was in an online forum, and was impressed by Barnett's writings.

Scene: Bungalow
My dad had me wait for an hour in a large house as he ran on an errand to pass a friend a $75 handphone handset. I suppose we drove there, for the errand involved walking through a forest fronting the house. He appeared tired as he returned, and it seemed nonsensical to walk, when one could have taken a bus, or a cab. He was fully enthused and occupied in the fact that it was a $75 handset, even when my mother was there and expected more.

--

I sit in the maze of books.
One needs no compass here,
for she lies beyond the unstirred page,
approaching on a narrative tide,
smoothing a crease she ran across,
in the richness of her ocean-satin dress.

Moot 3

The loveliest feature of a laptop rests in its ability to transform the contextual limitations of your agency, turning one into the object that responds to the vast universe of facts hovering above the ground of a footed existence. The relations remain encumbered within the algebra of life, but for once, you succeed in self-expression, for you control the meaning through which the conditions of communication must be understood.

The Warwick boy beckons;
he places his shoulder on my lap.
I caress him, for he yawns,
and is bored, and wants life.
He gazes at the trade that tests the sturdiness of his knees.
Or the madness of vineyards.
But he rests on my bench,
hashed beneath a wintry bridge,
on which people cross, to a mythic, fading shore.

These eyes plague the darkness,
they sift the lighted windows,
piercing through the blinds that mask
the privacies concealed to oneself,
to stain the tablecloths,
that hid the devil's trademark.

Moot 2

this shanked pretension still lives on in the remains of single words and lines.
the keyboard grows dark, as the fingers that play over them move invisible.
the void of which my books have been a consolation, of which my thoughts have been proud scaffoldings upon, descends.
To rebuild, when memories lurk fresh, and guilt remains.

You see, its a strange thing to look at yourself. One has never had the steel for happiness, for water flows downwards. To perceive yourself in decline, however many pretentious cloaks one adopts in the process, still makes one feel the intimate waste of life. Yes, however lacking, my silences are more able than my actions.

What is it like to be aware of emptiness, to flow with innate fervour along the shallow river of the seconds? The earth is something which one still forgets constantly.

I feel the pang of excitability around me, in this oddly infertile environment.
Loneliness and freedom mix to an etheral cocktail.
Is it excitement or is it insecurity?
Is it fun or is it anaesthesia?
Is it hope or is it fear?
Is it love or is it loneliness?
Is it Zen or is it death?

10:10

Why does one have no sense of humour?
One is married to security as a sewer to its pipe.
Or a ghost to its whitish form, a wasp to its only sting.
What, this paranoia? Liquid hands, they shaft at keyholes that give no light.
This craft of acting, a fear of pretending, and yet seeming not so.
Display, reactivity as the form that almost solidified into false hope, limitation, that, gasping from the edges of its conscious perimeters, admires, loosely, idiotically, wedged on the field like a daytime cricket.
These flats again loom, the church of robot-men.

Moot

My emotional life is as a boat on the sea of your feelings, churning and swaying.
Where is land?
Where is the solidity of the hermit that lives in the cave-quilt of his playground autonomy?
That soppy misdirection, that thankless furrowing, unsated, a mockery of free will.
Childishness as expression:
all that follows, that is, life as failure.

Updates

I met an aspiring musician today, who wrote some songs for a pretty famous band. He complained about doing math in the library.

I am hardworking and responsible for the first fifteen minutes. I grind my way through the weird squiggly symbols that fill the page with the most boring words imaginable.
My mind fills with the locular voices of Rebecca Black as the pop music begins to play.
It whirls: these thudding beats throb with an unheard future of my songs, infecting boys and girls with the brilliance of my creativity, inevitably associated with the genius of my name.
Let me be the next
composer of the next
four-chord wonder,
the song that thrills the failing radio of our social lives, steeped in the refined garbage of a university environment, these prating fingers of boys and girls that curled their lips to a yet unforgotten song.

"I'm just too...creative";
he bounced on his heels as he pronounced this fair judgement:
as they say,
fame and money and
Jesse James coolness be damned,
I'm still cutting myself away from the steadiest rocks.


Sigh

Lighted doormen pass in dull stoned alleys, but the echo of festive morning wafts.
I don't understand what you are writing.
Do I understand what I am writing?
For once, I look at the scribe of meaning, meaning as act that is unnoticeable, unfanthomable, throwing its light upon the surface colour of words - not accounts, but deeds. Its life is not the finished product of the material past, but a combulation of acts, rising to the surface from the bottom of the heightless nothing.

Aargh 3

If i could perfect sadness and mis-strategy into a line,
if i could distill unhinged meaning into salvation truths,
if i could re-justify this barren sunlight,
these worthless trembling hands,
these unworn, rotting clothes,
into dream-frocked material, for a misjudged play,
padded within the starlit-night of the train-station isled in the prarie darkness,
an image-mongering tramp calling out to noone
for reciprocation, half-simulated, alcohol-mad,
as the rich train of forgetting experiences,
of lighted eaten dinners and speeding laughter
laps into the scenery of prescient, unduly life,
as it pours like sugar trucks into dessert that
spoils the tastebuds of grinning faces,
justified, growing, schooled in railways
and bustling interchanges, these pinpoints of fleeting life,
a hub of bulbed men, of plant life, of station pebbles, what then,
of this prating significance?

Filled in this broken otherworldly tower,
craning at the stars, and speaking,
the way wolves and moths did before man was invented,
where life still fell into the darkness of pines,
or the shell-shocked fingers of the heart still felt the movement of rivers,
where natures infinite tombs lay overgrown with life,
when trumpets still sounded as each morning arose casting the neck of woods,
where these carpets laced with salt once framed the floor of the sea,
oh i would grow like the prudent flower anticipating the flush of spring,
as the cycles lose their spirit, eroding.

II

Thirty trumpets girding the mead of
sighing rivers,
callousing the routed veins of
spring-drawn utopia.

The melting glaciers
expose large crags in the
dented rocks, slight against the sun,
gesturing with stillness,
yarned like twigs aginst the noon,
sharpened to the breath of winter evening.

This industrial sooth,
like a touristperson,
grading images for length and breadth
of intensity, that barren holdout
of the transparent, colourless soul,
the nonexistent scarecrow,
the binned up brooms,
the yore-flecked wavering of
disappearing lines.

Sand and sealife,
they burrow against the vast sweeping of the sea,
feeding with alacrity
on the melancholy dunes.
The wrecks of rusted ships
sit on the coarse pebbly sand,
like a hornless Poseidon,
reduced, reduced, reduced.

I am in my room again,
with the translucent curtains that pour
deceiving sunlight into the refuted
present. The wind still breathes its
tragedy tune, with the soreness of
codas, a chronicle of lavatory existences,
and incomplete plastic walls
as we face mirrors, defacating.

The statue of Liberty,
a kind of green embodied hope,
a disappearing miasma,
choked up Athens,
a ceilingless St Pauls,
that crumpled before everything, and nothing,
the captured sunlight of a certain skillful kind,
resovoirs of men,
fish-hope, like the promise of an edible breakfast of life.
And so the morning lasts,
the softness of time left untouched
or unheard by the throbbing madness
that seams at stilting, violated, happy glasswalls.

The pizza cooks in the oven.
The flatmates speak of studying as a means
to truer things.
The shutting out of avenues that pulse tar-stroked
thoughts that usher the sights and crows,
the lights, of unbottled time.
Disbarred. My cap. My cap.

Images 2

I

I do not live in the real world. I only exist in relation to it by means of distorting words and gestures.

II

I stood on the groupside,
wading the footsteps of voices
that drew deeper tides with every breath,
skimming the light of the sun,
unbeached in the fresh shallows of the sea.

It was the tuneless drum of spring or
the tremor of branched hands reaching
an unhidden face, as it called in pregnant tones,
to the deathless hearing.

What growth, like an expanding shrine,
uncreeked these pastured boundaries,
ploughing untilled forests of thought?
What life, ungiven,
yet praying, brought heart to fruition,
through the unripening present?

Fluting, the treeglade yearns for morning,
its shadows spilling into memories
of deep-set innocence, as the finger
leaves the empty pipe.

III

From my window, I can see the trashbins.
Enormous plastic tubs, they
squat in a curved row,
missionary brothers awaiting
gulps of empty bottles,
shattering in recycling bowels,
like digestive guardians of
nature's wasting laws.

The bottle says:
A gateway leads to an opening,
to which we travel through.
A tunnel-visioned version,
carved with cold statues.
Stairways shuffle the darkness,
full of karmic stench,
feeding the fruitbats overhead,
depleting the insects and the ratmen.

IV

I feel lyrical in the mornings, when the force of memories have yet to flood the sandbanks of my dreams.

The mind still contorts with self-appreciating delight, as it skips deftly across cloudy waters.

Lily-like, they spring, infusing solitude with intoxication of poppies.

No slumbering crocodiles here, or fear of bad weather, or mismatched circumstance,
just the pure delight of a slow-filling river,
draining away as I lap at its shores.

V

Am I happy with myself,
for suprising myself so?
What lovely satisfaction,
to live in a mirror.

VI: A seminar postscript

Fighting the urge to
breathe liberation in choking
suitcases packed into a room,
I observed those
keyboard lips parting with
wholesome words, from the
crochet of teeth, stained with tobacco
and wine, and filled with pomegranates of the brain:
they scatter, these blithe, yellow seeds,
as we pick them up, like birds,
as love scatters, fiery love.

To witness that desirable
Tory male, harting forth with rugby confidence,
all-consuming in the full possibility,
within the scope of his strong-armed body.
And theres that
supersensitive white-skinned boy,
who trembles with affectation,
the moment one speaks, as if
my life, my world, insulted his.

Yes, these irrepressible grand coats,
lent to the cloakroom,
these chess-pieced girls, streaming
smoothly down to all-consummation:
I watched, slumping chairlessly.

VII: Work

Work is a kind of anticipation,
the stair-steps with hollows
in between, in some flowing church
we happen to find ourselves.

An imposition, we
mount the spiral of days, impervious
to the windowless night,
wreathed in loads of labour.

What attends the imageless vision,
as legs smooth ancient marble carpets?
What greater promise keeps,
to poor eyes that suck at light?

Only sunlight,
uncaved by heavens,
or the silent stars,
loving, communicating.
Or the rhythmic breathing
of crisp garden evenings,
as you peer hopefully,
into nothing.

Lets see if this works

I have not been working, not remotely.
Resolution: to pursue active strategies to remain focused and to concentrate as far as possible for a chance to pass the upcoming exams.

Another note to self

If one instinctively projected one's dependencies not on the individuality, within time and space, of the organism, or the metaphysically significant fact of free will, or whatever, but on someone else, or a communal hope, or some kind of outward-searching tradeoff-sustaining equilibrium, then of course it becomes extremely uncomfortable to sustain any form of independent agency.

Practical reason MUST be directed inwards-out, not the other way round.

How one justifies the absurdity of one's agency - not in phenomenal terms, but in practical ones, within a kind of social vacuum, where only feelings prevail -
for all definitions, when undependent, uninvested, fail -
how then, to celebrate one own's particularity at every moment in terms both universal and inevitable (isn't ethics about inevitability?) -
THAT is the question.
Philosophy as the ethics of ideas.

II

Transferable loneliness.
Strange. You finally desire only what you can't get,
but still desire.
All want something greater than their ability to achieve,
even though, of course, it dosen't exist.

Question

Sometimes I wonder if the only way to live is to enmesh yourself in the modality of perceiving all things outward-in, and to burst forth in the grey matter of unhindered disagency.

Movie Impressions

A set of vague impressions on the movies I have remembered watching this year:

True Grit

The Coen Brothers wield the tools of cinematic narrative with understated and quirkily felt virtuosity. This movie again demonstrates a Coen-signature rhythmic command in the integration of the narrative canvas with the life of the characters. Self-audiencehood, or "keenly anticipating detachment", is crucial to the directorial charisma which draws the viewer into the story. Here, the detachment flowers into warmth - we are made to identify finally with the emotions of the characters, the situations, and the myths of the genre. Great acting from Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld temper down the potential risk of disunity when directors whose styles are wedded to unconventionality attempt a straight on genre-remake. There is slight dissastisfaction therefore in the abrasion of storyline and vision, but the sheer skill of all involved lifts the movie into a highly convincing revisit.


Le Notti Bianche

After finishing the movie, I had to look up Visconti. I think it shows a great director at the height of his powers. I cannot recall a more powerful command of the moment in any movie. This was the most fun I had watching the movies in a long time. It is ardent, ardently made, and full of unspeakable things, like all truly great movies. I love Visconti's visual style, a sort of grey area between neorealism and Fellini-esque projection that in a surrealist way, seeks to arrest one into the lived life of the characters. It is full with balance and the impossibility of balance, full of beauty and sadness, and is a kind of emotional statement about duality itself. Brilliant acting, complemented by a soundtrack by Nino Rota, seals this as an all-time favourite. For an example of Viscontian brilliance that sends many directors back to film school, watch the mini-climax in the opera-approach scene. One feels more in that one minute climax alone than one usually does in whole 2 hour movies.


The Silence

What a strange movie! It is a kind of Bergmanesque labyrinth, impossible to approach, and it masks precisely where it reveals. Two sisters, and the son of one, are on a trip, and the story surrounds their taking up lodgings in a hotel in Germany. The landscape is vaguely prewar, but it is impossible to tell. As one expects something along the lines of Winter Light, one gets confused quickly - nevertheless, all becomes clear in recognizing that the two sisters represent two portions of Bergman's psyche - the rational and the sensual, with Bergman as perhaps the boy himself, albeit a strangely silent, impenetrable, opaque one. This movie trades in dualities, and represents the death of "the rational one". But does it? A role reversal, and that of our sympathies certainly takes place - and the death of the over-rational mother brings about an even greater coldness in the dominance of the sensual, as if the sensual existed now only through the judging distance of the camera, a camera that itself rattles away from its previous balances, the debris of its confrontations with the sensual within itself, leaving the scruffy, unrevealed boy behind.

Aargh 2

Pleated footsteps drift
into furrowed corners,
pruned, with the showering
dryads, the lapping locus
of my limited time, its livelihood.
Yet unattained, sore from sated
greetings, unencumbered still.

You would shrift the seconds,
rend the curtains that
have broken my life,
its cotton prison. Yet,
unfleetingly, the seconds
gaze towards my troubled
tapping fingers,
for they grasp at air, still.

What crudeness lines the skin
of driftinghood, its tidal
morass, a pound of
empty salt living without
worth, breathing its
decomposed dryness?


He would storm
the rock of
mountains to
sink in caves.
Or task the
dreamer to sleep
better in the
garden of illusions,
to run, push, those
breathed up
hormones,
better.


Yet it drew,
like an artist,
rich in the whore-daemon
of its tar-stroked thoughts,
travelling the pavements
of insight, and
watching the silent eyes
of passersby, lovers
it never knew.


Still untaken.
Still untaken.
Still untaken.
Still bursting, still breathing,
still hoping, still re-filling,
this gas-tank of
my Being.

Unprovided, these thoughts rush
like little children, through
the twilight of my life,
oblivious to the
autumn, to the
staring trees, against the
deep blue sea-salt
broken sky.


These calculators! What freshness these numbers have brought to us. Like a strange inexhaustible crossword, it shines like luminous rocks, loving our embrace of the impossible labyrinth.

What a pusillanimous existence! To collapse into a garden bench, where benches have grown into tired men like gold-masks, hidden in the distractions, like soil, for example.


Yes, this bleeding of
grownup soles.
You'd thought they'd cracked,
by now. I tried to sever
my legs from my soul,
or at least,
to twist them out of
shape, so one
moved forwards,
instead. Yet the pen-strokes,
like the Satan-cane,
or that bloody
birthday cake, or
smiling and unpretending friends,
they still form, like
a landscape painting,
a noose,
a life I breathe,
suffocating.


I love being a hypocrite.
I love being a pretentious,
self-whistleblowing
scarecrow to my conscience.
But our acts are
the cleverest ravens.

- Terrible joke/lie.

The page is filled.
These lines-
they cut into life,
quartering it into dungeons.
God is always,
above all, a jailer by profession.

Aargh

How the hell does one defeat one's own brain?

Gibberish

Let us express some inexpressible thought,
bursting through the unrhythms of words and silences!
Disastrously banal, these seconds,
as they tear across the earth-drawn curtains
bound to the de-energized root of
my agential deanatomy!

Pouring fine-billed audiences out of
velvet cushioned halls in that darkest era
of man. A croaking sigh that wanes into the unnoticing
beach fair, tearing at teapot-quivering anticipations,
and a butterflies warmth, as it flutters over
into the lungs of pneumonic breathed men.

What poorly caught drift tempered the bawdy eyelids
or the cusp smoked silverware tunes, or the yarns, unspinnable
in a neuronic knot, as it tugs and pulls, tugs and pulls.
Wowee, the purple king chokes with delight
at the hideous, horrendous sight. Well, someone
had to go, if not dragged and kicking,
then stabbed, and thrown off the windows,
for gravity to lend a windy embrace.

How quickly time rots!
Yesterday's giftwrap has been turned to waste!
Recycled souls still ponder over trashbins,
Full of stale smell. They
love the smell and taste of urine.
Like connoisseurs.

Scotland

Scotland Images

In the Hostel

What loneliness, how it breeches!
The ear freezes from
this counterfactual screaming,
but the ear
listens, and cries.

See how it pokes this
Decoy, voyeurish, unmanly
Heart. Vanishing in this hearth
Of words, like firewood licked
Away by time, by words.

Deeper and deeper you
Dream away poverty.
For there attains the greatest
Purity, wealth, truth.

So the deepest soil conceals the darkest springs to seed the plant of life, for life is but soil in which the vineyards of fulfillment grow, above us, towards the sun.


In the twilight lowland highways

William Wallace
And Americanism as frothy pies.
“How turgid and disgusting!”
Hamlet heads cried.

As prating, syncopated dawn arrives,
And flushes towards needless noon.
It hangs its head in evening fog,
Evening – wounded and hollow,
Like life across an empty spoon.


Scotland in a paragraph

One begins travelling with several expectations: this is the starting point of a trip one takes when one travels, and its consummation with fact brings the conceptions of agent alongside the sensations of the aesthete, enhancing the novelty of the experience. I justifiably expected little from any landmass within a three hour train ride from England, and had the pleasure of having them smashed by landscapes comparable in muscular scale and sublime beauty to bolder alpine ranges, and a Moorish, otherworldly uniqueness that spoke of lower England expressing itself through someone else, perhaps - its unconscious.


Mounting Arthur's seat

This hill overlooking Edinburgh is indeed natural Scotland in miniature, a display of robust wildness that is well-tempered in the shade of its self-recognition, tussocked against the unclarity of its marine winds, expressing itself in a tone continuosly dry and fascinating, like a desert in possession of an unwilling inheritance of volcanic wealth, and rebelling in the inevitability of its nature. It overlooks Edinburgh, the city of intimate voyeurs, where display is meaningful still, still untainted in the purity of the rural-inflected heart. And what of the clamborous travellers, rich with the winds that continue against the hills in the sunshine bright? Our stares ascend to the endless air, but the life of the city, and its momentous history, wafts.

Aphorisms/Platitudes

Vision is always directed outwards: especially when one introspects.

Our lives are full of error: correction comes in the memory.

Ranting 2

Jarbrook

The stopped up muse reads:
The hidden hand, the gravestone
we struggle to read, to interpret into words. To translate
into the rhythms of the long slide.

I am lost in the confines of that spurious freedom
so charged with its unnatural gait,
dragging souls like sacks, on the wound-tilled floor.
Of that workshop, which remains when the dust has settled.

I see the dirt that lies before us. That sick playground,
when hopes are dead, and lies are spun.
Or was it desire alone that could breach all meaning?
Either way, its incredible.

Ranting 1

Turnstiles stilled into reaping stoneware. Crowds of sandfly men descend on God's failed infant vision. Despondent, we pace the pools of unflapping, irreplaceable clouds, arching fierce backs against endless valleys carved by the brazen mountains.
Heaps of sharpened clonkers fill the clog-wheels of deripening eyelids. We flash blind. No crowd in the cruel souls, or the seeming drum-cries. Tarpulin sails, I stand and sit and nowhere sit still.

Purblind, unfolding the courage-canvas of harpooned minds, fighting the prurient tide, but dearthy of creeper's dry, baked yore. Pounding at the prison shaft, at the draking foundling lane of lights, that hide, swiftly, concealing more curtains , dream after dream, forking truth in overcooked cries. Dreamt spiels in Devil's kitchen, pouring blood with no slime or grain of soundless trust. Petering forth sunlight, powerless in baptism, dream-frozen, streaking, sparking, across black skies, inexhaustible as Lethe bound truth.

Pertaining, referring, still sicker beyond chasms of time, chasms ground into brick-belief rock, that fall, from the flushing heights, in heightless, terrifying descent into the dead schools, into the schools of the dead, that breathing time of gushed up lungs.

Pie-like, we slice at youth, each content with his crusty, meatless share. But as midnight springs, the stroke of unopened truths, of unspoken circes, line the floorboards to darkness, while the red cloth will blindfold decoloured eyes.

Every future is inflamed with the violation of anticipation as every past is stained in the mudground of truth. One extinguishes in the deed or perishes in the noxiousness of its unfilled waste - to be frozen and rethawed like a self-regenerating birthday cake.

Another one

The ground is alive, and full of call
for the knees embrace, the flowering eyes.
Ineffable, as the earth-thrilling root,
or the time-spilling river,
it tills the purple-plumed evenings,
where the glancing of wind's soft face,
turns silence into shudders
at what was lost, lungly.

Receding shadows,
the rock-strewn marshes.
Green plaited pathways on which
harried footsteps turn, discern, the breadth
of life, the contemptuous
sole, inexhaustible crest. That awaits,
past the Coventried cries,
or the plainness of the autonomy
of solitude pain,
storing truths like a lie,
for winters that never come.

Coffee Induced Spiel

We do not dream of sanity
but we peer towards its
icy depths, its pools of
partied, encrockeried
fish, upturned, gaping towards that
emblazened sun, which
scorches us, duneless nomads.

I danced on the glass ceiling,
or the paved underground
but the taxies in their sliding
smiles, unthreaded, unwoundable,
would reverberate like plaintive
echoes into the glass ceiling
that cracks from above in
impossible hope, hopeless and
happiest where
there lay no hope but in the present.

So the Brooklyn tread,
or the Coventry constable,
would line in pillored graveyards,
to the ragged tunes of nursery
rhymes, pealing from the bells,
like music, tolling between our lives
to still the truths of silence.

Mind-Whirl

Tied, sherman clouds wander with leaf framed eyes
stealing apples from caterpillar's dunes and stately pies.

Dearthful, or rare, with crop coloured tourettes.
Dreamy, like arch-blithed angels, deheavened.

Spin, like a cocktail merry go round,
Trouble, in a secret town.

Purpose, a shining sword,
Bleeds air, makes cowboys clowns.

Turpentine, like Mark Twain's feuds,
leap like serpents into Loch Ness's hood.

Evenings, like overdrawn hues,
Extracts beetlejuice, like brewer's droop.

Sydney Shoemaker, the philosopher's don
eats mad men in Alcatron.

Wasted ink, like bating breath,
Peters out, as years undress.

Untitled

The four "horsemen" chatter in their teasets, roomed by ornate furnishings. One breathes an androgenous sigh lifted on a nasal tone, against the soft cackling of firelight in the background. He is the gangleader, the man with the soft white hardboiled hair, and the dogmatic eyes, fierce and knowing, like a robeless priest clutching to the scroll that refuses to unfurl.

One imagines that he must have stalked Conquest to boredom, or dimmed the tide of Death that foams around us as abandoned shells, through the use of a device at once hollow and useful and dependable and helpless. Of course, only the accursed nature of the present - that is the latent idea, the innate joke, that finds twisted celebration in the fact. Tough-mindedness - like a turtle that parades its scarred shell, to no less than children, weaned on demanding lies, and still captivated, as always, by the nature of the sick exhibition.

So the sordid gang crept along the pathways of its reptile truths, knocking, as it were, at the door of hermits, begging for assistance, and receiving none. It was as if yore responded to yore and found them merely sensate and severly lacking, as if they were repacked into ideas that lept into unkempt mailboxes, but fell out through the ages.

So, what of this impossibility then? We speak of inevitabilities here, such as the wingless crow, or the dirtface Ron. Well, believe it or not, it clatters like a wheelbarrow over diminished cobblestones, carrying earth, that unknown entity, too numerous to handle, yet convincingly amorphous, like water.

Coffee Coloured Moon

Blown dried teardrops lace the speedless ascent of the sun. Prithee, typing weeds still sprout like confections from burnt bakers hands. The intimate grimace of delights unfurling into diverging tracks, and the strange tremors as the boarded up railhouses collapse. Men pour out like wine on desert sand, escaping the inescapable dunes, but the Clint Eastwood figure already treads away with ghostly imminence on the magical beige-maned horse.

Turning to greater trivialities, and the profound mansion that lives off its moss and its cackling rough stone, we dance like jolly goblins around the rainforest grass, stretching over undefined heads and the ripping heat.

The moon is the remain of the coffee coloured stains, and still, and stark, like the ancient stone that could not turn to green cheese and lies in Merlin's suspension,
lifeless yet cratered, orbiting yet encaged, marbled yet uncooked, admired yet nonexistent, romanticized yet misundestood, feared yet dominated, appetizing yet uneaten, tide giving yet tide spurning.

The way it is

Every desperately independent thinker wishes to capture the spirit of the age, or rather, the spirit of the life of the society in which he hovers below, around, and above in an assuredly simplistic, graspable formula, that merely satisfies the need for self-justification, or a feeble self-satisfaction, in the attempt at his truth, at a digestible present.

Here is such a modest attempt, caused by a mania, induced as always, by reading the economics textbooks. Its an exaggeration, and a projection, but it nevertheless aims at truth. It is associated in my mind with "Born to Run" by Springsteen.

Bleed for the sun, suck from a fungal fountain.
Material Institutions!
Gyrating for the transcendental in the alcohol tunnel.
Life does not exist, raping, scrubbing the future.

The age of narratives.
The great man wedded to the great system,
like life to philosophy, love to smelters' waists,
where dreams are dissected to spill industrial broth.
And sin is the social reject boiling under a stately flame.

One will cry out for a transcendental public life - for Napoleon.
He is dead, but we will resurrect the dead, with the unborn youth as the unhappy audience of our various magic tricks.

Nothing

On the triumph of gleaming eyebeams
like soaked stains, grinding chills,
behold, a green tomb,
lies leafy and shrouded in mist.

Truth! What is this faery?
The faint lifeless fingers of this soft hand.
She leads me to this garden;
it shimmers like early spring.
The mist grows heavy here,
but the sounds seep into
twitching, enraptured ears.

The lifeless path is strewn.
Most drearily, the air is moist,
and sight cannot seize the roses,
it gazes forward, backwards,
at my own hands
in this strange wilderness.

Where is the goal?
Truth as the shining steed,
Where the footsteps slow and crouch
and the knees bend, and the heart beats content,
unturned by the gyre of scattering seeds.
I hear the fountain,
it replays, memory like, crisp and sore,
but it spouts, gurgling at its gargolyle lips.

What ancient lives
the house enshrined, what deaths
have planted this steady house
to the soil of a deepening past,
one cannot say,
for all questions and all answers,
unlike men and lusts,
live elsewhere.

Random Constructs

Visions

Light as impurity
schools the breams of closet tyrants.
Like prating elfin flowers
caught among the reeds groaning
alongside the roar of an impossible rapid.
Trellises.
A lesson for young children, still gearless,
still undetermined and inevitable.

Childhood Scenes

The fan windows, and the balcony
on which settled the sooty dirt,
the sand of an hourglass,
skin-like with perpetual grime.

Silence. The air is heavy;
it presses.
And the sunlight shafts and bends,
the golden morning turns to yellow,
and strides for the intensity
and the scorch of noontime.
Where the dread of noise begins,
and life unfolds its deep-rosed curtains
to the whispers of yearning,
through the wounds of words
for the untold seconds, the death-bound hours.

Images

Vesuvius

God erupted semen at Vesuvius.
The superheated steam
rushed over tangled olive plantations
enriching even the unfeminine earth.

Homer

I imagined Homer as that pretty schoolboy
in the black and white photograph.
His glance into the camera
reveals a sensitivity
but a sexuality of a sexuality
that doesn't recognize itself.

He plays football, that one.
He plays for the school team.
He lives like a normal idiot,
totally unaware.

There is a trash bin,
in the corner of the intersection where he lives.
It reminds him of his closeness to home,
every day as he walks past it.

Mountains

I will thank you gratefully, one day.
I am sorry for the distance.
Like the looming mountains in the distance
I will take a last long look at you
before the lonely highway of my life turns away.

Dog Food

My dog ate the textbook of life,
for it made good dog food.
I am left with human books
But the Bible is inedible.