Month: August 2020

This is a series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

Covered by wet things after a rain

and it survives as a fierce floating

phenomenon that gathers above

our heads for later. I steer my collateral

out of the way and lead it down

into the dungeon where thoughts happen.

Or they occur, as words are simple

but their differences profound

since I’ve been trying to find a solution

to a problem I haven’t yet determined

can after all the ghostly trances

the coming clean under the light

of articulation, where wind blows

hope into wreaths of befuddlement.

I wrack my young head, since my other

is much older now, more willing

to conform to the position of the possible

because I idealize my self as some knotted

piece of wood, right for jamming doors

and muddling about during a flood.

The sensations of floating straiten

and unstraiten me, as I slowly fall

apart in particles free of the wretched

configuration drilled into me by education.

The sounds change and we are milling

about again in collateral of many

leaves and twigs, a mulch of missed

opportunities to lurch one or another

way into a void of mischance and jovial

expectation. The collateral redeems

as it dissipates and I am left screaming

my name at the sky in a soundless

tertiary code supposed to help me

gain my footing. There is no gasp

not even a murmur in the falling trees

as they assemble into hypotheses

of running events. The collateral

ceases to be and I am forced to give

up everything and the notion of

a self assumes a layer of incandescence

that prettifies it, leaving it seem

less real, but more desirable

to aspire to. Whatever this recurrence is

I keep feeling it as a nervous bundle

in a vast pond that can’t decide

where one thing ends and another begins.

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

This is just a simulation of a song

—John Langford, Mekon, late 80s, 90s

who knows? And this simulating

of knowledge or verse may end up

not recognizable at all, unworthy

of the magnitude any signifier

might bring, not quite laughing

at itself, but veering off

from any prescriptive medication

that would make it whole

aligned with a model of recommended

integrity or breadth, with necessary

sensory infusions like cute animals

or gardening apparatus. But come now

is the model really that which is

divine guide and authority to the good

and true, or simply a tyrant

demanding worship, falling to one’s knees

or to be led to the scrap heap

or slavers’ auctioneering keep?

Colonizers comparing what they knew

had believed, to seeing imperfections

not even of a copy, but something

trying to be a thing it’s not

never realizing that the unknown freak

that other, may itself be a model, a truth

newly discovered — a poetry of flesh.

Thanks for nothing, Plato, though

I understand you may have intended well

Misreading the Diablo of misreadings

People made out of stone and turned into

this soft jam (for reading and writing)

The desire to be clear and crystalline

rather than this pus of fundament

posing as a thing that hunts. Granite

sand, silt, muck and swamp weed

each in radiants along a chaotic curve

we name creativity as if it had a mind.

Each according to its own jurisdiction

rules about how each piece fits into

the other, without destroying either

ideally, so all may flourish, changing

into birds and insects, gelatinous

floaty things in the wet places where

stone has melted into water. We are

that water, innovated over durations

swallowed by larger and more monstrous

durations that seem to sing. I watch

myself freezing back into the stone slag

I was, where equality doesn’t mean

a thing except the end of this, a life

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

I’ve just seen a face but perhaps

that was my error, a fault in my perception

of space, a void that undoes itself

by consuming a confluence of unrelated

fuss and buzz, everything one might

think of stuffed into the cracks and crevasses

so that it becomes a foil for those who look

and those who design what’s looked upon.

It was my error to see in you my mother

or the cop who chased me barefoot

through the broken glass so that

faces cut into my callused soles

would stay a while and greet me sharply

when I walked. A postcard of Mount

Rushmore peers through the appetite

of the baby king who wants his visage there

never thinking they are dead things

collecting by association what he pretends

to be, while we wait patiently for his

form to become an inert geologic substance

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

Organizing a fable on your face
so sorcery can amble with dexterity
the way you choose it without
believing it so, but as selective
schizophrenia to see what it may bring
a body without organs as a haunt
though to imagine such a thing
to define what is by re-territoriality
in a radical sense, as if saying
this is how I choose to see, set up
the game board, for this specified
period of tense. And what new
solutions then arise determined by
what problems can be seen with
this set of eyes, lensed by play time feather-
heads, rattle-shaking or the tantra of
the internet; for instance what to do
about the police or the pandemic or
umbrella name for a tribe of sub-
events of similar or related phenomena.
What if I changed its name to Pazuzu –
not to deny science but to give
the science a different job one more
ur-toned, a form of sorcery that it was
before normalized via the politics
of education, that icy edge of
the enlightenment, way it pretended
to end all pagan mischief, for the sake
of Christianity, which it also upended
while holding seances in the back room
monks burned at the stake, laughing
heartily at the prosecution. Oh dear
science, daughter of alchemy and
metaphysics, how you disguise yourself
as something even the vulgate know.

Misreadings of Deleuze in part because he was so fond of misreading others, and also his work with Guattari

Inside the tailor is the sail always down opening itself into its world of choice and choosing to be done with what was done even if by the slightest of variations the world as it opens up and gets blown to smithereens while remaining whole and unchanged through an endless suite of dreams being built upon its face one hotel ripped down after another each gone as though never pre-existing with no trace except for the rubble except for the new ways of tinkering based on missteps of the past, constant folds upon folds of additional complexity by the hybridization of one thought upon another until all thought is decayed into a sap into which the present thinking sinks, gaining its nourishment from the sweet and sour of the disappeared now decomposed and congealed the many parts always moving in a fluid ever-primary destruction of the moment now and now into what appears in repetition of stages passing as one note never the same note because the passage has changed my hat being here right now instead of there where I left it before and thinking thought will not let me see will not see me as gone unchanged, those books on my shelf for instance, the buildings in the sky out my window for instance my family my friends the same way I saw them the moment before, though there may be the deception of resemblance but are displaced again increment by increment as I continue to think of them one thought sliding into another as if by an accident of floating particles whose motion never ceases and so I continue to exist as this flooding back and forth over the same ground but never as the same substance never quite arranged and ordered the way but my cold is of a different state than it was yesterday and my coughs take on a different rhythm, my body creeping with a different set of desires or similar desires reconfigured like those I may have experienced before but informed by other thoughts and the memory of actions and events that have fallen in between whose signature and arrangements have stirred the substance of the flood in ways that would be novel and even in its vanishing and ghostly in its way of explaining itself to me in its transforming itself into images of the past as they change and the words how they are always mutating to present themselves as what work they have today to be guessing a meaning and how they attempt to match and never matching change what was meant and what it was we had tried to mean by distortions of telling and always caught in the permutations of fear and desire as if looking through the glassy liquid of the self-non-self as it pours over and into a never purely separate within the glossy gel of all other continuing always to run together

This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos

It happens continually. That tree over there looks like the one that was there moments ago, but it is a mere simulacra of something that was in itself a simulacra, and so forth, back through an eternity of treeness (though it is possible that each simulacra is in itself an original, but we’ll get back to that later). And I keep changing while remaining the same. I have the memories of someone who once was, who never will be again, but I have come along to carry the torch, as someone — many by the end of this sentence — will come along to carry it for me. And not in any frame-by-frame sort of way, but in a blur of continuous repetition. This is only one way of looking at it of course, but just knowing that the continuity of me is always in flux, that a solid foundational me is more or less a fiction, and how mutable we all are, even in the midst of seeming stagnation (as in quarantine) — that stagnation itself a kind of change and becoming — changes everything, every relationship with people and things, beliefs and ideas. And in the same way difference may tend to look the same, or these words may be made to represent something, but are only a part of something else, a different series of events, something that interacts, but cannot cover (truly represent) the things that they refer to, as they are separately immediate, though transcendent, meaning immanent. The world is a creative act with no creator. At least not one you would invite to a dinner party.

It is always the beginning.